'She finally let it go after I was there about twenty minutes,' I told Mary. 'It was like a seizure. She screamed and clung to me, digging her nails in. She, rolled her eyes and seemed to talk in tongues.'
'I've seen it many, many times, Charlie. I can never get used to it. It kills people you know. The grief and depression can kill, sending people rushing after those who've died. And she's a widow too.'
'She told me Allan was a very good diver. There's no reason to think he'd get into trouble, especially in the harbor.'
'Does she have any relatives?' '
'Yes. She's flying to Pasadena day after tomorrow to visit her sister for a week or two.'
'Thank heaven for that at least.'
I grabbed a hiking staff and walked out onto the flats, following the ebbing tide. It can be an unsettling feeling going out there with nothing with you. It's hard to explain. It's being too alone. I feel much better with other people, or just an object like a cane or staff to take with me. Far out there I looked back toward shore. Squinting, I could just barely see the tiny gray square speck of The Breakers that jutted up over the low horizon. Squinting still more, I could see a very faint motion above it. The American flag. Then I pictured myself on the deck of the grounded trawler with 7x50 marine binoculars a mile and a half farther out, on Billingsgate. I could see plenty of The Breakers then. Plenty. Especially if the owner happened to be prancing around on deck waving a gaudy beach umbrella trying to get my attention. I could see him just fine. Had they seen me? Did they remember me? Did it matter? There were a lot of unanswered questions, and I didn't like any of them. I walked around awhile, then went back to the beach at a slow jog. I took a sauna with Mary and then a cold shower. During all these maneuvers it was a constant hassle trying to keep my cast dry. We changed into beachy things and ambled out onto the deck and watched the tide move out, slow puddles of water-sheen beginning to leave the lower pockets of the flats.
Distant gulls cried, a faint plaintive eeeyonk, eyonk, yonk-yank-yank. The groaner buoy bleeped. The dune grass hissed, gray-green as it bent to the wind. It would have been a lovely evening under ordinary circumstances.
'Charlie, the water's ready. Time to put them in.'
She had stopped at the lobster pool and bought two gigantic specimens for dinner, no doubt to cheer me up. But it didn't.
The thought of the two big crustaceans scurrying and crawling their way into oblivion in the scalding water did not appeal to me at all. As one who worked on people's teeth and I mouths I was acutely aware of pain. If death must be done, then best do it quickly, cleanly, with the proper equipment. I fetched an ice pick from the back entry and then took the lobsters from the refrigerator. I grabbed them by their middles; they flung their arms out and backward in a futile attempt to take my hands off. Their big claws were immobilized by the pegs and thick rubber bands, and I was glad. I inserted the steel point quickly and forcefully down between each animal's head and thorax. It made a noise like a stapler. They didn't say or do a damn thing; when I picked them up their bodies dangled like latex. I dropped the limp corpses into the boiling water and put the butter on to melt. The dinner helped some; we sat outside and watched the sun go down. It hit bottom just when the bottle of chablis did.
The next morning at eleven they buried Allan Hart. The funeral was bad enough, but to watch Jack and five other young men carry the casket down the church aisle and out of the hearse to the grave was unbearable. It was that first shovelful of dirt that got me, and his mother. She wept openly, I silently, with little convulsive shudders and throat squeals.
My fault… my fault…
We had Sarah and the rest over to the cottage afterward. Extremely glum. Boy was I glad when it was over. Then I sat and stared out across the water for the rest of the day. Life is boring and death is terrifying. And here we are dangling on spider silk, caught right in the middle.
The next day Mary went to a local art fair. When she returned we sat at the kitchen table eating two small chef salads. She had brought a copy of the Globe with her that somebody had left behind at the fair. She flipped through it absently, and I saw a picture flash by that I wanted to retrieve. I found it. It was a picture of a boat. White and low-slung with a small cabin, it was a lobster boat. I read the story. The boat, out of Marblehead, had disappeared almost two weeks ago. It did not look good for the skipper, a certain Andrew D'Corzo.
The article had set me to thinking. I had planned to make contact with Daniel Murdock, the boatbuilder who had signed the carpenter's certificate, as soon as I returned to Concord. But I remembered what Lieutenant Ruggles had told me in his office about vessels appearing and disappearing. Perhaps I should look for a boat that had recently disappeared and would roughly fit the dimensions of Penelope. If indeed the boat I saw wasn't new, then she had to have a previous life: What better way to discover it than to check on boats recently lost?
'How's the wrist?' asked Mary.
'Still hurts. And I can't drive golf balls. I can't beat you at tennis. I can't swim. I can't practice my trade except to remove stitches from previous extractions?
'What makes you so sure you'd beat me at tennis? And anyway it's your left wrist.'
'How could I serve?'
'Oh. That brat. Did you ever decide on an appropriate torture, by the way?'
'Yes, I have in mind a dual program for the lad: the Agony of the Thousand Cuts to be followed by Impalement. Well?'
She nodded approvingly as she popped the last forkful into her mouth.
I got the number of Murdock's boatyard in Gloucester and called all day without an answer. Then I called the Boston office of the Coast Guard. At the Department of Marine Safety, they informed me that the USCG kept a case log-a file-on all recently missing boats, regardless of size or purpose. They had various investigative procedures to track them down too, like phoning likely harbors and boatyards. If the errant skipper left a float plan, or indicated even vaguely his plans of destination, the Coast Guard cutters would traverse the probable routes, looking for the vessel or wreckage of same. After a 'reasonable time,' the files were closed, with the vessel and crew presumed lost. I asked what a reasonable time was, and was told it varied. If a vessel disappeared during a violent gale, the reasonable time was not as long as under other conditions. This seemed to make sense.
'Where can I get a list of vessels lost during the last month or two?'
'From where, sir?'
'From the entire New England region, but especially from the Cape and the Islands northward to, say, Portsmouth.'
'We have that information here. It's available to the public.'
I thanked him and hung up. Mary was in the hallway in front of the mirror trying on a new straw hat. She canted it at various angles and spun on her toe.
'Honey, I'm going to put my unexpected vacation to use. I'm going to locate the Penelope.'
'That's good. How?'
'Tomorrow I'm going up to Boston and through some files. Then I'm going to track down some boatbuilders and reporters.'
'You could work on the gutters and repair the broken window in the garage.'
'Can't. Are you forgetting the wrist?'
I was at the outskirts of the city in a little over an hour, and shortly thereafter was pulling Mary's car into the lot behind the Boston Garden. I turned left on Causeway Street and went right past the regional Coast Guard headquarters to the smaller building next door that housed the Boston station.
There I was shown the files that contained the case logs. I began to scan them, starting with cases that occurred in May. Some of these were already marked for abandonment; the CG was assuming the boat lost, the crew dead. Two of these were draggers that disappeared in heavy weather over Georges Bank. I went through all the files. As might be suspected, the recent cases were more numerous. Presumably these would be whittled down as people gave up hope and as boats were found. I imagined they found quite a few of them tucked away in small coves and in big marinas, the owner with his case of whiskey and his girlfriend explaining lamely that geez, they
