Bracing the steering wheel, I reached into my pocket for the mobile phone. I tapped in the old pilot’s number. It took me half a minute of utter silence to realize the cell was dead. Maybe the battery had gotten soaked while lying in the mud. For some reason, it reminded me of my visit with Erland Jefferts. Had he mentioned something significant about a mobile phone?
Or maybe I was misinterpreting the message that was trying to push its way through from my subconscious. Someone had used a nearby pay phone to report the deer/car collision. The identity of the unknown caller seemed to be the key to all this.
The man who had reported the crash had called from outside Smitty’s Garage, two miles down the road. I restarted my engine and pulled carefully back onto the pavement, headed south.
The garage was a drab little building assembled out of cinder blocks, asphalt shingles, and broken windows. Across the road, a lane led down to the fishermen’s wharf. Two antique gasoline pumps stood ready out front, but their tanks had run dry ages ago, back when gas sold for less than a dollar a gallon. The garage had been out of business for years, and the fading sign above the bays was the last remaining legacy of the late Mr. Smith.
For some reason, the local phone company kept a pay phone in operation here. It was just a hooded metal box bolted to the cinder blocks. Vandals had stolen the phone book-its snapped chain dangled to earth-but the phone itself was functional. I lifted the receiver to my ear and heard that distinctive hum a disconnected line makes. Seven nights ago, a man had used this phone to call the Knox County Dispatch to report a deer/car collision.
What had he been doing here? Smitty’s was pretty close to the end of the road, which suggested that the caller might live somewhere between the garage and the tip of the peninsula. At the very least, he must have known of the phone’s existence; this dark crossroads wasn’t a place you happened by.
Because of the mist, I could only see a short distance, but the briny smell of the sea was pungent here. The turnoff to the commercial fishing wharf beckoned from across the road. I decided to take a drive down to the water.
It was March, and with the exception of two fishing boats floating in the harbor, the local fleet was still in dry dock. At the edge of the parking lot, I passed the hulking shapes of lobsterboats balanced on cradles. Most were still cloaked against the elements in tight casings of white shrink-wrap. The sight of these ghost boats recalled the pale sheets the movers had thrown over the furniture in the Westergaard house.
The fishing wharf consisted of a steep boat launch beside a dock that teetered on piers above frigid gray waters. A shingled warehouse sat atop the pilings, which were slathered with black tar to keep marine worms from chewing through the wood. Towers of yellow-and-green lobster traps were arranged along the wharf, waiting to be returned to the bottom of the Mussel Shoals channel. On the far side of the dock was the lobster pound: a fenced-in rectangle of the cove where the fishermen dumped their daily catch. Lobsters could be kept alive in that saltwater corral for weeks before being hauled up for shipment.
The parking lot was empty of vehicles, but there was a glow in the upstairs window of the fisherman’s co-op. I pulled up to the garage door and got out. The smell hit me at once. Even after the long winter, the lobster traps stank of rotten bait.
I peered around me into the mist. The air was damp and very still. I could hear the waves slapping against the pilings and, in the distance, the repeated moans of a foghorn out in the channel.
I wandered over to the lobster pound’s gate. The enclosed area was about an acre in size and fenced against predators. At night, lobsters will creep into the shallows, where scavengers can pick them off one by one. Raccoons will crack open their shells to get at the green tomalley, leaving all that precious meat to waste. Many lobstermen topped their fences with razor wire and used dogs to scare away the little bandits.
But of course the wiliest predator is man. I knew of thefts along the Down East coast where robbers arrived in the night to steal thousands of dollars’ worth of lobsters from these pounds. In almost every case, the heist was an inside job.
I slid my left hand into my pocket to feel the reassurance of my pistol and glanced over my shoulder at the warehouse. The entire wharf seemed abandoned, but a sallow light burned in one window. I crossed to the building and tried the door. It was locked. I pounded on the wood with my fist, but there was no answer.
Smell is the sense closest to memory. The stench of decomposing herring sent me time traveling; I remembered my days as a lobsterboat sternman, stuffing mesh bags with alewives, trying not to vomit. That was the summer Erland Jefferts had abducted and tortured Nikki Donnatelli. Jefferts had been a sternman, too.
There were two lobsterboats riding at anchor in the harbor. My eyes had flitted over the blurry names painted on the transoms when I’d arrived. Now I squinted to read them. The first boat was the Hester. The second, farther out, was the Glory B -the very same boat Erland Jefferts had been been working on the summer Nikki Donnatelli was murdered.
38
Back at the pay phone outside Smitty’s Garage, I dialed information and asked for the number of Arthur Banks in Seal Cove. It was common knowledge around town that he was the owner of the Glory B. A computerized voice asked if I wanted to be connected directly with the Banks residence. Needless to say, I did.
A woman answered. The warble in her voice told me she was elderly. “Hello?”
“Is this Mrs. Banks?”
“Ye-es?”
“This is Mike Bowditch with the Maine Warden Service. May I speak with your husband, please?”
She paused, as if waiting for me to continue. “Arthur passed away last fall.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I usually read the obituaries in the local paper, but I had been so preoccupied by my father’s misdeeds over the autumn that I had missed a great many things during those months. “Maybe you can help me. Do you know who owns your husband’s old lobsterboat?”
“The Glory B? Why, Arthur left it to my nephew, Stanley.”
“Stanley Snow?”
“Ye-es.”
What were the odds the Westergaard’s caretaker would now own Jefferts’s old boat? Here was the connection I’d been searching for; I just needed to understand what it meant. “Mrs. Banks, what can you tell me about Erland Jefferts?”
When she spoke again, it was with audible caution. Jefferts’s name had that effect on a lot of the local people. “He just worked on Arthur’s boat that one year.”
“At the same time as your nephew?”
“The two boys were friends when they were little. Stanley’s mother is a Bates. He and Erland are second cousins.”
“They were friends,” I repeated quickly.
She must have sensed that my interest had unhappy implications for her nephew. “That was a long time ago! Stanley was just a boy.” The receiver seemed to be shaking now in her grip. “Excuse me. I have tea boiling.”
Before I could wish her good night, the phone clicked and went dead.
I pumped my last quarters into the slot. I keyed in Detective Menario’s cell-phone number and waited. My call went straight to voice mail.
“This is Bowditch,” I said. “I’m calling from that pay phone on Parker Point. I think Stanley Snow was the anonymous caller who reported Ashley Kim’s accident. He owns a lobsterboat at the fisherman’s co-op here. And he met with the Driskos at the Harpoon Bar before they died in that fire. Erland Jefferts is his cousin. They both worked on the same lobsterboat. There are way too many connections here for this to be a coincidence. You need to find Stanley Snow.”
I kept rambling until the last of my change ran out.
I didn’t trust Menario. It was easy to imagine him receiving my message and hanging up without even listening to it. In his mind, I was the man who cried wolf.
The tide was dropping in the harbor. I could smell seaweed through the gathering mist as the receding ocean
