He sent Merry into the tower at the ship’s midsection to scan the blue-green sea, and took over the wheel. Adelia made her way to the bow and climbed into the pulpit, rolling her shoulders in anticipation. She lashed the steel harpoon horizontally across the bowsprit and fed the strong vinyl line aft, where it lay coiled in a barrel, one end tied to a bright yellow f loat. Peter glanced up at Merry and saw her puzzled look. He decided to join her.
“What exactly are you supposed to be looking for?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Rafe!” he shouted below. “What’re we looking for up here?”
“Dorsal f in breaking the surface, you ass. Or a bunch of gulls hovering over something in the water. That might mean the sword is f ishing himself. Lot of menhaden and blues in these waters, and swords love ’em. Or with all this sunlight, you should be able to see the body cruising below the surface. Shaped like a torpedo, or a shark—you remember Jaws. The sun’ll pick out the colors. Smaller ones’re blue, big ones look dark gray.”
“I see one!” Merry cried excitedly, pointing and jumping in the tower. “Over there, Peter! See it?”
He craned to look and registered something long and blue, almost ten feet it seemed, a few boat lengths away. The dorsal f in was breaking the surface.
Adelia was poised and craning from the pulpit as Rafe brought the boat in alongside the enormous f ish, f loating just under the surface of the waves like a submerged log. Merry had gone completely still, and Peter realized with a start that she had taken his hand and was holding it tightly.
“Forget it, Rafe!” Adelia yelled. “Shark.”
Merry dropped Peter’s hand, def lated and relieved at once, he thought, and let out a deep breath.
“Let’s keep looking,” he said. “You scan that side, I’ll scan this.”
An hour went by, with Rafe cruising f irst southeast, then northwest, along the thirty-fathom line. It was noon, the sun high and warm, the breeze cooling now instead of chill. Peter and Merry switched sides, then gave up and descended from the tower to eat some lunch and rest their eyes. They had seen nothing but unbroken ocean—not a tuna, not another shark, and certainly not a swordf ish.
It was only once they had torn into Rebecca’s cheese-and-tomato sandwiches that Adelia, glancing idly to starboard, caught the f irst roiling of the f in through the water. “Three o’clock!” she yelled, leaping to the pulpit and drawing the harpoon across her body, dart facing to starboard. “Three boat lengths.”
The f ish began to run, and Rafe brought the boat around quickly and steadily, down-sun from the f ish, a giant, gray-slick mass slicing rapidly toward the bow. Merry and Peter were poised on either side of the f ifteen-foot pulpit, tensed and wordless.
“Sword it is,” Adelia said, leaning far over the protective bar, harpoon poised. Her scarlet nails f lashed in the sunlight. “A nice little one. A marker.”
“What’s a marker?”
“Hunnerd ’n’ f ifty pounds or so.”
Peter’s gaze shifted from the woman to the f ish, watching as she led the broadbill with her dart, left hand gripping the shaft, right palm on the harpoon’s heel. The f ish came closer. Del’s shoulders moved. Strike.
She seemed poised like a gymnast on the shaft running straight down into the water, the f ish frozen by the pin thrust near its dorsal f in. Her shoulders heaved up and thrust downward a second time, almost falling over the pulpit’s side, driving the dart deeper into the f ish’s f lesh. Then she yanked the steel shaft of the harpoon upward, pulling it free from the dart and the vinyl line attached to it, just as the big f ish surged off into the water.
“There he goes,” she said, almost hoarsely, and slid down against the pulpit’s rails. Peter, mesmerized by the entire sight, only now came alive and climbed up into the pulpit to offer her a hand. Almost stumbling from relieved tension, Adelia ducked back into the boat and gave a war whoop of victory.
The sixty-fathom line was running out rapidly from its barrel, and in a few more seconds, the yellow f loater zipped over the side of the boat and skittered across the waves. The f ish was diving, diving, desperate for sanctuary; but the constant tugging against line and dart would eventually wear down its strength.
For f ifteen minutes the diving and the plunging continued. Then the yellow ball no longer jiggled on the surface. Somewhere in the depths the great f ish had fallen still. Rafe slowly brought the boat alongside the yellow f loater, and the rest of them moved to the stern, securing the ball on deck and beginning the arduous task of hauling the line back on board. They had nearly two hundred pounds of f ish to pull to the surface, hand over hand, and there was life in the great beast yet. Three times the line they collected was run out by the f ish’s dying throes, and four times they hauled it in.
“It’s a tug-of-war,” Merry said.
“Exactly.” Rafe was the anchorman behind the rest of them, muscles bulging against the force of the f ish, the taut line chaf ing his leathery palm. “This is where it comes down to us or him. He knows it, we know it. Come on, boy,” he said. “I ain’t gonna stand here forever.”
The dorsal f in and tail broke the surface; the f ish circled a few times off to starboard, and then f inally rolled on its side. The purplish, f luorescent scales glowed vividly in the sun. Merry gasped as she saw the great dark eye, alive and seemingly f ixed directly on her, and found to her dismay that she was crying. Despite her island childhood, she had known such creatures only by rumor, and to witness one f ight for its existence was profoundly moving. She glanced at Adelia. All she saw on the other woman’s face was weariness, excitement, exultation. She was truly her father’s daughter, then.
“Let’s bring him alongside,” Rafe said, leaving the tail of the rope in Peter’s hands. He towed the f ish against the side of the boat and lassoed the tail. Then it was a matter of block and tackle, winching the body into the air until it hung alongside, head alone remaining in the water. The purple scales had begun to fade to a silvery gray.
“Seven, eight feet. Two hundred pounds, easy,” Adelia said. She reached into her pocket for a knife, leaned over the side, and slit the f ish’s throat. The water darkened suddenly with blood. Merry turned her face into Peter’s shoulder, felt his arm come up around her, and closed her eyes.
They headed for home, the f ish soaked with buckets of seawater and shrouded in wet canvas to keep it fresh.
“I probably made a thousand bucks today,” Adelia said. “With the price of harpooned swordf ish right now, at least a thousand bucks.”
Peter whistled.
“Of course, I spent a couple hundred on fuel. And I’m splitting what’s left over with Rafe. But still. I could get by with one f ish a week. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll f ind two.”
Rafe snorted from his post at the wheel. “This could be the f irst and last f ish you see all season, Del. Don’t get cocky.”
Merry said nothing, staring out at the late-afternoon light as they rounded Great Point.
“Tired?” Peter asked.
“Just ridiculously sheltered. I’m actually struggling with the idea that my friend plans to kill things for a living.”
“That’s because you get up every morning trying to save them. Don’t you?”
“Not f ish,” she countered. “People. I’m just being stupid.”
“Soft-hearted, maybe.” His body was shielding her from the gusting wind. “I, on the other hand, frequently kill baby sheep I raise myself. And cook them for my friends.”
Adelia reached past Rafe for a soda in his cooler. “So that’s the famous Peter Mason,” she muttered.
“I don’t know about famous.” Rafe was navigating the channel into Nantucket Harbor. “Rich, yeah. But that just happened. An accident of birth.”
“And he likes it that way.”
Rafe shot her a glance. “What do you want to know, Del?”
“Merry emailed a few times during that murder case last year,” she said. “He gave her some trouble, didn’t he?”
“It wasn’t an easy time. He lost his brother and he got shot himself. Merry thought he might have run Rusty over and left him to drown in the bog. That doesn’t make for a good relationship.”
“Que pena.”
“Whaddya mean, too bad?”
“He’s fallen for her.”
Rafe hawked and spit into the sea by way of answer.
“How long you lived with this guy?” Del demanded. “You tellin’ me you can’t see it?”
“That makes two of us,” Rafe said. “Merry doesn’t have a clue.”
Chapter 6
“Name?”
“Joshua Field.”
“Spell it.”
The kid in the Birkenstocks, Greenpeace T-shirt, and two-hundred-dollar faux-nineteenth-century horn-rimmed spectacles complied, albeit with disdain. Perhaps she still smelled of f ish, Merry thought; she couldn’t tell. Her olfactory threshold had long since been passed. For reasons she was about to learn, Joshua Field had thrown f ish guts and blood over her head as she debarked from Del’s boat. A quick dousing under the Town Pier’s hot-water shower hadn’t done much to cleanse her. Her gorge rose at the memory of the slimy mess, and she glowered at Field. He stared back def iantly.
Never mind. He’d still be sitting in a holding cell when she was warm in her bath.
“Age?”
“Twenty.”
“Occupation?”
“Student. At BU.”
“Address?”
“Three-twenty Commonwealth Avenue, Apartment Three-A, Boston.”
She leaned back in her desk chair and glanced out her off ice door at the station’s upstairs conference area. Only one other guy was in on this late Saturday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend; the rest were either off-duty or out pounding the streets as the f irst wave of summer residents landed on Nantucket. She’d hoped to have dinner with Peter after Rafe had docked the Brownell, but in the midst of unloading the swordf ish and f iguring out how to get it to the scales and the wholesalers, Joshua Field attacked. After a moment’s stunned silence, Peter punched him f lat on his back, an act that galvanized Merry into action; she arrested Field for assaulting a police off icer and told Peter to go home.
“So tell me, Field, why’s a kid like you pouring f ish guts over a police off icer’s head?”
“I didn’t know you were a cop.”
“I f igured that. Let me rephrase the question. Why f ish guts at all?”
“Spawning stocks of Atlantic swordf ish are at an all-time low,” he said. “NOAA’s in the pockets of the commercial f ishing industry. So it’s the industry that has to pay. Otherwise, swordf ish will go extinct.”
“So this was a protest. I still don’t see where the f ish guts come in.”
He sighed and thrust his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. His right eye, Merry noticed, was starting to purple. “National action, pressure on political organs, and the mobilization of the press are important, of course,” he said, “but the f ish are being slaughtered here in New England. We have to take the f ight to the killers themselves. If blood and guts hit them in the face, maybe they’ll start to listen.”
“Are you a marine biology major or something?”
“Political science.”
“That explains your problem.” Merry leaned toward him. “Fishermen rip guts out of f ish every day. They’re not going to be moved by a cup of slime and blood. I admit it had an effect on me—but as I’ve explained, I don’t f ish for a living. Try that on one of the commercial guys in New Bed and you’ll f ind your head in a toilet.”
“Are we done?”
“As soon as I get your prints,” she said.
Peter called while she was wrapping herself in a terry robe an hour later, hair fragrant and skin softened.
“What was with that little creep?” he asked.
“Protesting the near-extinction of swordf ish.”
“Jesus.”
“Are you telling me that you never protested in college, Peter?”
“Well—” He had the grace to sound embarrassed. “I did throw chicken blood on Nassau Hall once. To protest the university’s investment portfolio.”
“Its investment portfolio? How like a Mason.”
“They still owned stock in oil companies,” he said patiently. “It was a global warming thing. You kept the kid overnight?”
“Yes. And now he’s a martyr.”
“At least he couldn’t follow you home.”
“You can’t be serious. He was completely harmless, Peter.”
“I’m not so sure.” He hesitated, as if weighing his next words. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. Be careful, okay?”
Simple phrases. But they kept her distracted and silent over her dinner that night, and twice she had to ask Ralph to repeat what he had said.
She was on duty the next day, Sunday. She released Joshua Field, took an address and phone number where he could be reached, and watched him hoist his backpack onto one shoulder and head off toward town. Then she set about tidying the f ile of a case she’d closed a few weeks back—a fairly simple burglary investigation. She’d been assigned nothing major since, and it was time her brain was put to use. The station was pretty quiet, and Merry felt restless. She glanced at her father’s darkened off ice, considered the hour—one o’clock—and picked up the phone.
Jackie Alcantrara had gone down to the Town Pier to work on the Lisboa Girl, his wife told Merry. The lawyer wouldn’t let him operate it until it was off icially his—meaning after the will had been probated and he’d paid some form of inheritance tax to the state, and God alone knew where that money would come from, with Jackie unable to f ish—but he wasn’t a man to sit at home when there was work that could be done, and one of the things that needed doing was mending net. Merry thanked her, picked up her enormous shoulder bag, and headed for the Town Pier.
The sixty-f ive-foot Lisboa Girl was about thirty years old, Merry guessed—pushing the limit of her intended life span, but kept, through careful dry-docking every few springs, in the sort of shape that allowed her to survive the following January’s weather. She was moored not at a slip but at the far end of the dock, one of the few spots that accommodated her size; near her sat the dark blue Ruthie B., Nantucket’s only other dragger. The Lisboa Girl’s hull was of cypress, painted white with racing stripes in the colors of the Portuguese f lag; but the steel frame of the gantry bolted amidships was frightful with rust, as were the otter doors that lay at its feet, detached from the net. It was clear to all eyes that this was a boat with a commercial purpose, a workhorse sharply distinct from the thousand-odd other boats moored off South Beach. Industrial or no, Merry found her a cheerier sort of craft than the newer million-dollar steel-hulled draggers that commonly f ished out of New Bedford and other mainland ports. And most important, she was an unmortgaged boat, free of the necessity of insurance that could cost an owner tens of thousands of dollars a year.
The perfect boat for Jackie, in other words.
To her right, the beach curved sharply out into the water and ended in Monomoy, where splendid old houses and private docks ran down to the harbor; to her left, the two-hundred-foot yacht Athena, a dark green corporate cruiser, rocked gently at her mooring on the backside of Old South Wharf. Merry could see the crowds of day-trippers from the Hy-Line ferry tours milling like brightly colored ants among the f ishing-shack boutiques that lined the wharf; but a breathless quiet still held where she stood on the Town Pier. It was almost empty this Sunday afternoon, with just the occasional thunk, thunk of a f lip-f lop on the wooden planking or the guttural interruption of a boat engine to break the peace.
She scanned the Lisboa Girl’s deck for Jackie
, and saw only a heap of net unrolled from its drum. He had been mending, but wasn’t now. Lunch, maybe? She called his name.
A close-cropped head popped into view through the pilothouse door. He gave her a long look, not unfriendly, but not welcoming either. For an instant she thought he’d pretend she was a stranger, and duck back inside. But Jackie wasn’t entirely stupid. He’d grown up with Merry, though they’d never had much reason to chat.
“You here to see me?” he f inally said.
“Yeah. How are you, Jackie?”
“What’s it about?”
“I’d like to come aboard.”
He shrugged. “If you want. It’s kind of a mess.”
The dragger was crafted low to the water, wide-girthed and rounded as a dory. Merry stretched a foot to the side, grabbed a rail, and hoisted herself on deck. Jackie was slow in moving to help her.
“I understand congratulations are in order,” she said. “Hear you’re captain now.”
A wariness in his eyes. “Who told you that?”
“Felix Harper. Joe’s lawyer. And your wife mentioned it when I talked to her just now. Cap’n Joe certainly was a generous man.”
“There’s a lot’ll say I earned it,” Jackie said. “The old man was slipping these past few months. His crew was all that stood between him and retirement, and he knew it. I f igure I got what I was due.”
Merry walked in front of the pilothouse and across the deck, to the side where the steel gantry rose. She imagined the net hauled out of the air, taut and straining overhead; thought of the added weight of swinging steel doors tipping the ship seaward in heavy weather; and felt how suddenly Joe Duarte must have slid off the canted deck. The knowledge of it came over her like vertigo, a mingling of dizziness and fear. She reached down to steady herself against the boat’s side.
“This isn’t a social call, is it?” Jackie said. His muscular bulk loomed over her.
“Yes and no,” she said. “I realized at Joe’s funeral how little I know about f ishing, even though I grew up here. I decided I’d like to know more.” She touched the rough surface of the detached otter doors. “What do these things do, anyway?”
Death in Rough Water Page 6
