Ahoy!

by Maggie Seacroft

  I considered telling him that I had an opening in my schedule June 31st but backspaced most of my reply and left it in my Drafts folder for the time being. A few more emails and phone calls later, I received a text from Aggie. Can you come over please?

  When I arrived back at Aggie’s store, she was on some kind of cleaning and rearranging jag. The order to paint the exterior of the place seemed to have been the impetus for other changes, and the woman was a whirling dervish of reorganization. The text she sent was her way of requesting my brutally honest opinion — which I am always happy to provide — regarding her rearrangement of the clothing display — mostly windbreakers, hats, and t-shirts. I was offering my two cents when Dr. Kennedy came into the store. She stood at the entrance and shook the rain from her umbrella before she pulled the door closed behind her.

  “Hiya, Marcy,” I said as I swiveled playfully on my stool at the counter, where I surveyed for more things to critique.

  “Ladies. Quite the weather out there.” Marcy huffed and she leaned her umbrella against the doorframe.

  Marcy Kennedy is the owner of the Marysville Vet Clinic. She’s notorious for taking in more cats and dogs than the local bylaw permits, a little issue she can sidestep because she’s a vet and president of the Chamber of Commerce. She is in her mid-thirties, married, and lives on a farm just outside of town with a hubby, two daughters, and more cats and dogs than she’ll ever truthfully admit.

  “Nat around?” she asked as she continued to drip on the welcome mat at the store entrance.

  “Oh, I was just looking for him myself. I think he’s down with a bad knee,” I said and gave Ags a shrug as she looked back at me for my opinion on the display of sun hats she’d rejigged.

  “Well, I’ve got Pepper in my van. I’ve been trying to reach him, but I keep getting voicemail.”

  “Oh, I’ll take him off your hands. Maybe take him for a walk. He’ll be the best date I’ve had in weeks.” I smiled.

  “There’s an app for that,” Aggie chirped, her back toward me as she crouched to tidy a shelf of sunscreen she’d moved on to.

  “An app.” I shook my head.

  She looked over her shoulder at me. “Yeah, an app. DateMe. You scroll through pictures and decide if you like someone. Then you—"

  “Based on a picture? And that’s it?” I shook my head again. “So, this person could totally be a serial killer or horrendous speller and you pick them because they’re pretty? I put more time into picking a brand of cat food. No thanks!” I said, happier to be single than to correct spelling and grammar the rest of my life.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” Ags sang back and smiled big. “You’re such a throwback.”

  “Yeah, well then throw me back,” I said and rolled my eyes. Sometimes I swear I’m going to roll them so hard they’ll never get back to where they’re supposed to be.

  Marcy dismissed the app chat with the expression of someone who looked happy she had been pulled from the dating pool. “Ok. So, tell Nat to keep Pepper out of the garbage and that should keep him out of my office,” she said as she picked up her umbrella and then walked me to her SUV that sported the vanity plate PET LVR.

  When Pepper hopped down from the vehicle, he greeted me like I was the long-lost pal he hadn’t seen in years, though it had only been two, maybe three, days. He was so ecstatic to be back on home turf that he had to smell, inspect, and then whizz on most of it as I walked him around the marina grounds and then back to Aggie’s where we sat until Carlos arrived.

  I was right; the practice had been called due to rain. Leaving Ags in Carlos’ capable hands… and everything else, which reportedly was also capable, Pepper and I and an umbrella on loan from Ags headed up Main Street for more inspecting and whizzing — done exclusively by the dog — before we headed back over to Nat’s slip.

  Still no lights on and no word from him. My mind wandered, and I thought for a second that maybe he’d taken a spill and just couldn’t get up to answer the door. It brought to mind the greatest fear of anyone who lives alone — how long will I just lie here, and why didn’t I buy one of those godforsaken “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” pendants. You know, the ones they sell in those hokey commercials on the Game Show Network or retro TV stations.

  I did the quick math. No lights on plus no word from Nat, multiplied by the fact that he’d apparently forgotten about Pepper, in my mind equalled a problem. The force with which I pounded on the stern door of his boat no doubt conveyed my feeling. I pressed my ear to the side of the cabin and strained to hear any sound of movement.

  “Looking for your friend again?” came the familiar baritone from the dock.

  “Oh, nothing gets passed you,” I said as I tilted back the umbrella to look up at Bugsy. A part of me wondered why this man was keeping such an eye on me. Did I come across as a suspicious lurker type? I decided to try the “get more flies with honey” approach and keep my snotty comments to myself for the time being, or for as long as I could. “I’m worried about my friend—”

  “And you want to break into the boat.” Bugsy completed the sentence like he was reading my mind.

  “It’s not breaking in if you have a key.” I smiled, and I hoped it’d been persuasively.

  “Do you have a key?” He looked at me through squinty blue eyes and a curtain of drizzle.

  “Do you think I’d be banging on the door like this if I had a key?” I asked, working hard not to end that sentence with “duh”. “I mean, no, I do not have a key, but I think Chris did.”

  “Would you like me to check?” Bugsy asked in a tone usually reserved for speaking to five-year-olds.

  “Yes,” I said. Again, working like a sonofagun not to end the request with “duh”.

  Bugsy stared back at me, quiet and still as a statue, unfazed by the drizzle that had caused a few strands of his hair to fall in an irksomely charming fashion onto his forehead.

  “It’s not really that hard. Just try it,” he said, and he looked at me with expectation.

  My eyes darted from side to side searching for the right answer until I finally realized the dope was standing on ceremony for politeness. “Please,” I said, trying not to sound as annoyed as I was.

  “What kind of lock is it?”

  I looked through the waning light and strained to see the make of the lock. “Schlage. Slip 73.”

  “Ok,” Bugsy said and nodded to himself, taking a mental note.

  “Why do you always seem to be around?” I asked, following him up the dock.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” he replied, plodding ahead of me.

  “You think you’re lucky?” My voice trickled up with surprise.

  “No, I mean you are,” he said over his shoulder and tossed me a crooked smile before we stopped at his truck where he opened the back door of the crew cab to reveal the lockbox that contained the keys to all the vessels in the marina.

  Giving the manager a key to your boat is in our lease contract, though the only time he really needs to use it is if the boat owner is away and the vessel needs to be moved because the dock requires emergency repairs. The key box is one of those nifty items made specifically for one purpose and one purpose only. Inside the lid of the small cabinet, there are two hundred pegs on which keys would, in a perfect world, be placed.

  In the case of this case, the keys looked to have been tossed in haphazardly. A few had made it onto pegs but probably only by accident. Most were in a jumble of silver and brass. I guess Chris had been in too much of a hurry to reconcile things with the wifey-poo once she’d found cause to request his relocation. Bugsy made idle chit chat while he flipped through the mass of key fobs with decidedly less haste than I would have.

  “Have you lived here long?” he asked, flipping.

  “About a year and a half.”

  “Where’d you live before you moved here?” he asked, flipping some more.

  “San Francisco.”

  “Do you like it here?” he asked, havi
ng flipped to the bottom of the pile.

  I could have said anything. These were standard “I really don’t give a crap” type questions, and they were asked with an apathetic tone that revealed more to me about him than my answers would to him.

  “Yes, I like it a lot. By the way, I hope my key isn’t in there.”

  “Oh, and why’s that?” He craned his neck and looked over at me curiously.

  “Because someone could very easily break into your truck, take that box, and have instant access to a couple hundred boats. Chris used to keep it in Aggie’s.”

  “Oh.” He seemed a little chagrined by what I was hoping didn’t come across as full-blown admonishment. “Well, the way I hear it, that’s not all he did at Aggie’s.”

  Touché, I thought, and I flitted my eyebrows. Bugsy had certainly been quick to get the lay of the land, so to speak.

  “If it makes you feel better, I’ll keep the box in the cottage,” he said. “Here it is.”

  With that, he closed the lid on the little cabinet and we made our way back to the Splendored Thing — my umbrella, Pepper, and the glorified marina janitor. When we stepped down onto the deck and I heard the lock turn, I could feel something in my stomach tighten. I definitely need to stop watching so much Dateline.

  “You want me to go in first?” Bugsy asked.

  “You needn’t be so gallant.”

  “Hey, what’s the difference between being chivalrous and a chauvinist? I always get those two mixed up?” he asked, smirking at me.

  “I said gallant.” I huffed, not in the mood for semantic games, and as Bugsy stepped aside, I opened the door and hurriedly flicked on the light switch on my right and called out Nat’s name. The recessed lights in the glossily-varnished mahogany ceiling cast a warm glow on the shambles in the salon, and I could feel my mouth agape.

  “He’s not a very good housekeeper,” my sidekick piped up to say. His attempt at sarcasm was ill-received, and his smile dissolved on contact with the icy expression he looked over to find.

  “It’s not normally like this,” I scolded him.

  There were drawers pulled open, a lamp on the floor in pieces, and general disarray that pointed to something untoward. There was, however, no sign of Nat. I looked back in the direction of my accomplice. “You’d better call the police.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Well, don’t just stand there. Call the cops!” I spouted incredulously to the aggravatingly idle man standing beside me, and I searched his face for signs of life. From the couple times I’d given him the once over, I knew full well that the Wyatt Earp of the marina always had his cell phone holstered on his hip like a sidearm, and why he was so reluctant to use it when I needed him to was beyond me.

  “And say what? That your friend was a bad housekeeper?” Bugsy looked at me with a contorted expression that did nothing to detract from those maddeningly blue eyes staring back at me.

  I sighed hard and looked away. “No! That he’s missing!”

  “You can’t file a missing person’s report until someone’s been missing twenty-four hours. And, besides that, we don’t even know he is missing.”

  “I see, and just what is your current rank on the police force these days?” I handed him some sass with a side of eye roll.

  “Calm down. Let’s just see if something other than bad housekeeping is the problem here. Maybe all the mess is just here at the back,” he said.

  Calm down? Who was he to tell me to calm down? I paused and released a deep breath, hoping to compose myself.

  “Stern.” I uttered the word crisply. “The back of the boat is called the stern.”

  Bugsy nodded, Pepper’s nose was going crazy, and I was sure that if he were human, he’d have sided with me that something was very, very wrong.

  “There’s a rug missing from in here,” I said plainly after studying the room for a moment.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, I’m sure!” I was growing more indignant by the second. “I helped Nat pick it out and carry it down the street from Belmont’s. Grey and white argyle. It was sort of an impulse purchase. It was definitely here Sunday night when we watched a movie. I remember telling him again about how much I liked it,” I said then pursed my lips and studied the salon to see if anything else was missing.

  “You were here to watch a movie with that old guy?”

  I shut my eyes, dropped my head back a bit, and let out a sigh. I knew I was going to lose my temper at some point, and probably soon. What did he think, I was watching octogenarian porn with the man? The fact was, that Sunday had been a rough one for me. Hearing radio ads for Father’s Day when you no longer have one really burns, and I had done a poor job of hiding the sear marks. So, Nat and I spent the afternoon fishing and, in the evening, we dined on the catch of the day and watched one of our favourite movies. I gave Bugsy an expression meant to scold and provoke guilt.

  “If you must know, it was Bridge on the River Kwai, nothing salacious.”

  He paused and, while he continued his survey of the room, he muttered one word: “Madness.”

  Like a reflex, I snapped my head in Bugsy’s direction, surprised that he knew that madness is the very last word of the movie. How dare he defy the notions I had about him by becoming interesting? I felt suddenly conflicted by my interest in him and my concern for my friend.

  Taking a safer tact, my eyes resumed their journey around the room. The coffee table had been pushed to the side. I noticed that on top of it was the book I’d given Nat for Christmas that year, The Films of Hitchcock, the DVD case for the last movie we watched, and one of Pepper’s chew toys.

  “Look there. There’s a bottle of vodka and a glass.” I went to the sideboard, picked it up, and sniffed at the tumbler.

  “So, maybe he went on a bender and took off for a bit. You probably drove him crazy.”

  I scowled at the turd in front of me. “No way, somebody’s been here. Nat’s been on the wagon since 1975. Besides, his truck’s still in the parking lot.” I’d seen it and pressed my nose against the windows of the classic pickup about a hundred and fifty times that day in my comings and goings and general nosiness. “Besides that, I’m a peach to hang out with.” I smiled half-heartedly.

  “I’ll bet.” Bugsy raised his eyebrows at me and smirked. “I’ll go look in the front,” he sighed and trod away.

  “Bow!” I called out after him.

  “Bow,” he repeated, mocking my tone, and sent another smirk sailing over his shoulder in my direction.

  As Pepper and I played follow the leader, I flitted my eyebrows at my own sense of surprise with how Bugsy was making me feel. Making our way toward the forward cabin, looking around for more signs of disarray but finding none, I spoke up. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Depends on what it is,” Bugsy grumbled back with a chuckle in his voice.

  “Have you been on a boat before?” There. I’d asked the question that had been nagging at me since I’d honed in on the spotless boots and complete lack of familiarity with all things maritime.

  “No. Have you been in a tank before?” he fired back at me.

  I supposed that was a hint that he was ex-military, as if speaking in hundreds of hours the previous day hadn’t been a big damn clue. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  Bugsy paused at the entrance to the main sleeping cabin. He did a quarter turn to half face me. “Tell me, are you always so nice to perfect strangers?”

  “You’re not so perfect,” I mumbled, hoping he couldn’t hear.

  “What’s that?” he quickly chirped back as though he hadn’t heard me, though his tone and expression belied that notion.

  “Nothing,” I muttered and tossed in a smile for good manners. He did, after all, have the only key to the boat.

  In Nat’s sleeping quarters, the curtains were drawn and the mahogany throughout made it feel like we had just stepped into a rich, woodsy cocoon. The surfaces were gleaming and glossy, and an inl
aid compass rose adorned the drawer fronts of the platform bed that was topped with a navy-blue cotton ensemble. There were vintage nautical oil paintings with thick gold frames and a built-in, blue curved settee that conformed to the lines of the boat. Pepper jumped up on one of the cushions and settled into a depression that looked like it belonged to him. It was probably where he slept when Nat was aboard.

  I forged ahead, expounding on my earlier failed attempt at getting to know the man with the key. “All I’m getting at is, what in heaven’s name qualifies you to run this place?”

  “It’s a long story,” Bugsy said and walked around the room aimlessly.

  “Well, apparently I’ve got twenty-four hours, so help me kill a little time here.”

  “My old man, he owns the place,” he said with an odd note of resignation then opened the wardrobe doors for a peek. I held my breath and hoped nothing would come flying out of the storage closet. Nothing did, and Bugsy turned to face me, shrugged his shoulders, and resumed his survey of the room.

  “Well, why you? Why… why here?” I asked. Maybe it was the odd feeling of being in Nat’s bedroom with a man I hardly knew, maybe it was the heat and humidity of the day, or maybe it was something about Bugsy himself, but I could feel my cheeks getting warm and I was growing increasingly flustered.

  “I don’t know. The job came up and Dad wanted me out of the head office, so here I am. It’s about as far away from him and my brother as I could get.” I noticed his ears turning red. “Plus…” His voice trailed off.

  “Plus what?”

  “Oh, never mind.” He smirked and threw his hands up. He didn’t know what he was looking for but he was smart enough to know that he hadn’t found it.

  The closets and drawers were chock full of Nat’s classic white tees and khaki shorts. There was an assortment of duffle bags stowed in the storage cubby, and there looked to be a full complement of toiletries in the head. Making our way through the rest of the boat, nothing in the other sleeping cabin was of any interest, and the galley was a bust as well, though Nat’s cell phone was sitting on the charging station beside the toaster. An indicator light flashed on the device, messages waiting to be returned. At least four of them mine.