Death in Rough Water

by Francine Mathews

  “This is terrible,” she said. “I’ve got to talk to her.”

  “Stay out of it, Meredith Abiah,” Ralph Waldo said. “No good ever comes from meddling. Tess is a big girl. Acting childish right now, maybe, but she doesn’t need anybody to tell her that.”

  “Is she jealous of you, or just mad that Rafe’s f ishing?”

  “I’m not sure,” Adelia said. “Maybe both. But I think if anybody talks to her, it should be me. I put a note in her mailbox today, asked her to lunch. All I need is another person out to get me.”

  Merry looked at Ralph Waldo. He lifted an eyebrow. “Are you talk­ing about Jackie?”

  Del shrugged. “I dunno. That’s what makes it so weird.” She stood up and reached for her purse, f ishing around in its depths. Her red-tipped f ingers extracted a folded sheet. “I got hate mail. Came under the door this morning.”

  Someone had glued letters cut from magazines onto a piece of lined notebook paper.

  “The oldest trick in the book.” Merry showed it to Ralph Waldo. The persistent whine of the sirens amplif ied, drifting up through the streets from the waterfront. That’s f ire, not police, Merry thought, and then studied the paper before her.

  adelia duarte new bedford was too hot to hold you, but nantucket isn’t your home anymore. get out of town and take your brat with you.

  It was signed The Avenging Angel—again in clipped magazine letters, but culled this time from f lowing italic script. An author with an egotis­tical streak, a desire for self-dramatization.

  “So should I be worried?”

  “Yes,” Merry said. “This isn’t exactly normal.” She looked up at her friend, her eyes sober. “You think this is from Tess?”

  “Could be,” Adelia said slowly. “It’s the same old stuff about Sara and my morals. The sort of crap a woman would care about.”

  “It just doesn’t sound like Tess Starbuck,” Ralph Waldo said. “Too self-righteous.”

  “Jealousy can turn the nicest person into a raving lunatic,” Merry said. “Particularly if she thinks she’s got a lot more to lose than just Rafe. Tess’s whole life, really, is at stake here—a father for Will, f inancial security, her happiness. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. That’s what makes it so disturbing.” She perused the letter again. “I’m not sure I want you to go talk to her, Del. She might not be very reasonable.”

  “If she sent the note,” Ralph Waldo reminded her.

  “Got any other likely candidates?”

  “Jack Alcantara comes to mind. Del, my dear, perhaps you should sleep here tonight,” Ralph Waldo said.

  “I’ll be okay, Ralph. I’m staying on Nan­tucket, and so is Sara, and no vicious creep is going to scare us away.”

  “Did Joe ever install a security system?” Ralph Waldo asked.

  “Yeah. They’re called dead bolts,” Del said.

  Merry was still examining the threatening note. “I wonder if the Avenging Angel wore gloves.”

  “Probably not,” Ralph said. “Most folks don’t think paper holds f ingerprints.”

  At that, Merry’s cell phone rang. She took the call, noting it was from her father. As she listened, her expression changed.

  “I’ll be there right away.”

  “What is it?” Ralph asked as she rose abruptly from the kitchen table.

  “The Town Pier’s on f ire. Everything within shouting distance—boats, sheds, you name it—is going up like a torch.”

  Chapter 8

  Merry Folger stood aghast on the shore of South Beach, overwhelmed by the orange f lames engulf ing the Town Pier. The roar and heat of the f ire rolled toward her like the onset of a hurricane, battering her face, assaulting her eardrums, drowning the curses and shouts of the men grappling with hoses on the blackened sand. The crackling light cast a distorted ref lection of boats rippling across the harbor, colored it red, and then tore it to pieces with ravenous jaws. As she watched, a blinding f lash detonated out past the pier—a ball of f lame spiraling upward from a boat’s gas tank—and then a concussive boom! that startled her out of her skin. Her heart racing, she took a deep breath. And bent double with coughing.

  Ash and the acrid odor of burning plastic sifted through the air. Merry narrowed her eyes to slits, pulled the tail of her T-shirt out of her jeans, and held it to her mouth. Ninety-f ive percent of the craft moored off South Beach—some nine hundred boats even this early in the sea­son—had f iberglass hulls. Fiberglass was toxic when burned. She could pass out just from breathing.

  The Town Pier was really two structures—the original wooden one built in the Seventies, and a newer steel addition with a man-made breakwater at the far end. The wooden pier, soaked in tar and oil from generations of vessels, was burn­ing as though designed for the purpose. One glance told Merry it could not be saved. Shadowy f igures up and down the half-moon of beach were leaping the protective police barricades, wading out into the water, and swimming to their boats in the hope of saving them. Her throat constricted at the sight. Patches of oil f lamed on the water, unmoored boats drifted in all directions, and any swimmer in the night harbor could be injured or killed. She should jump into crowd control. But where was her dad?

  It was almost impossible to pick out one person from the many battling the f ire. South Beach was only about twenty feet deep at its widest point, and the scorched sand was a bewildering morass of bodies, hoses, trucks, spotlights, and debris. Access to the pier was blocked by the airport crash truck, one of the few island vehicles designed to approach intense heat without its windshield cracking. Inside the cab, the operator was outlined against the f lames and the sweeping arc of foam the truck was spraying desperately at the burning boats.

  The f ire chief, Walt Munn, had reacted quickly, Merry thought. Only four men at a time out of the department’s staff of eighteen worked each ten-hour shift at the f irehouse, but tonight there were at least thirty battling the f lames in front of her. Fire department vessels equipped with water cannons divided their spray between the docks and the buildings immediately bordering the beach—the houses on Washington Street, the marina sheds, the harbormaster’s off ice and public showers. Between the guys on the shore and the ones on the boats, Munn must have called in volunteers as well as full-time crews, and still it was not enough. In the hellish glow off the water, Merry saw despair and exhaustion on the men’s sooty faces.

  But the chaos of South Beach was nothing compared to what was happening beyond the waterline. The Coast Guard was trying, and fail­ing, to maintain order. As far as the eye could see in the f ire-lit night, boats were heading for the jetties and Nantucket Sound, almost ramming one another in the mad scramble to put danger behind them.

  It was, from any point of view, a disaster.

  “Meredith!”

  It took an instant to recognize her father beneath a layer of sweat and soot. His regulation blue Nantucket police uniform was a mess. A gas mask dangled from his chin; he’d removed it to call her.

  “Dad!” She dropped her shirt and sucked a lungful of air; big mistake. Coughing, she closed her streaming eyes and breathed into the hand­kerchief John Folger shoved in her hand. He was one of the few men she knew who still carried one. She made a mental note to start carrying one herself, and tied it thankfully over her nose and mouth. “What can I do?” she shouted over the din of the f lames.

  Her father rubbed a hand across his face, leaving wet black marks on his nose and cheeks. “It’s like a steam bath inside this mask,” he said. Merry held her breath and passed him the handkerchief. He mopped his forehead and mouth and handed it back to her, damp and smoke-laden. She tied it over her face anyway.

  “Keep these idiots back from the wharf area,” John Folger said, ges­turing toward the crowds of sightseers who had walked down from town for a better view of disaster. “All we need is some summer kid blown up while he’s taking a self ie.”
He handed her a bullhorn and made as if to move on.

  “How’d it start?”

  He stopped and f ixed her in his vivid blue gaze. “That’s what I want you and Hank Burrows to f ind out,” he said. “A fortune in boats went up in smoke tonight, and somebody’s going to be sued. We have to establish cause, and establish it well.”

  Hank Burrows was the deputy f ire chief. He was also the island’s trained arson expert. A disaster at one of the piers in high season was the town’s worst nightmare. The f ire department staged annual drills with the police and Coast Guard, in the grim hope that if they prepped for disaster, it would never come.

  “You don’t think it was an accident,” Merry said.

  John Folger laughed brusquely, at the arsonist, not her. “A cigarette may take out Yellowstone, but for this, you’d need a drum of lighter f luid and a plenty long fuse. The f ire was reported half an hour ago, just after it got dark. I got here in f ive minutes, maybe less. And it was already beyond saving.”

  Merry swallowed. That someone could have set this was diff icult to believe. Nantucketers had a terrif ied respect for f ire—the legacy of the Great Fire of 1846, which had raged for an entire night and consumed f ifteen square blocks of the town’s heart. For more than a year, the islanders had gone homeless. No native could forget that, despite a century and a half’s passage.

  She pushed aside the handkerchief and lifted the bullhorn to her lips. “Clear the area,” she bellowed, her voice transformed and falling away from her, one more inhuman sound in the general cacophony. “Stand away from the police line. You are in extreme danger . . .”

  A boat exploded f ive hundred yards away from her, sending plastic and metal and sheets of f ire sky high with a deafening boom. The crowd gasped. A few people cheered. In the slight illusion of silence that followed the concussion, Merry and the thrill seekers watched the scattered pieces of what had been a Boston Whaler rain down like a fountain in the roiling, angry harbor. She had instinctively ducked and clapped her hands over her ears when the boom fell upon her; and now, recovered, felt incredibly stupid. She raised the bullhorn back to her lips.

  It was three in the morning before the f ire was under control, but the sightseers had left hours earlier. In the dead watches of the night only the islanders remained—the exhausted f iremen, the owners of houses threatened on Washington Street, the police struggling for order and the Coast Guard. Daylight would show that over a thousand feet of pier and three hundred boats had been destroyed—a cold and objective statistic. But the ruins were still warm and smoking at dawn, and there was nothing objective about the anger Merry saw on the faces around her, the frus­trated rage of those forced to clean up after someone else’s devastating mess.

  It was after Merry left, on the 5:00 a.m. turn of the tide, that the body drifted to shore.

  Chapter 9

  Merry woke at seven, only a few hours after she had stumbled into bed, and forced her smoked-seared eyelids open. The shower had done little to erase the rank smell that permeated her hair and skin; now her bed would reek of it, though her closet had escaped. She had shed her clothes in the backyard.

  The sound of Ralph whistling from the kitchen drifted up the stairs, and she fell back into her smoky pillow with a sigh. If God were just, her grandfather would skip the bacon and eggs today in favor of oatmeal. She didn’t think her stomach could take the combined odors of melted f iberglass, tar, and pork belly grease.

  When she appeared in the kitchen a half hour later, her blonde waves falling damply helter-skelter to her chin, Ralph Waldo paused by her chair and thrust his nose in the general direction of her scalp.

  “I’m going to have to shave it off,” she said. Her voice was hoarsened by smoke inhalation, despite the gas mask she’d eventually managed to f ind. When she coughed she tasted smoke.

  “Takes me back a century or two to the f irst days of whaling,” he said. “The smell of a tryworks melting down blub­ber must have been about like this. Wear it proudly.”

  “And wear it somewhere else, right?”

  “It’ll pass off. Another few days, you’ll be right as rain.”

  “Or would be, if Dad hadn’t made the f ire my summer project.”

  “I think it’s becoming the entire town’s,” Ralph said soberly. “Your dad’s set up a crisis center at the station.”

  “For boat owners reporting lost vessels?”

  Ralph Waldo set warm cranberry muff ins and a bowl of blueberries in cream before her, the two freshest scents in the world. “The station phones have been ringing all night. Your father never made it home.”

  Merry took a bite of muff in and closed her eyes appreciatively. “We’ll be dredging for rudders and somebody’s boat-rail barbecue all summer long.”

  “There’s something else,” Ralph Waldo said. “They’ve found a body.”

  Merry’s spoonful of blueberries stopped in mid-ascent. She stared at him, her face expressionless. “Just one?”

  “So far.”

  “There ought to be dozens, the way people panicked last night,” Merry said bitterly. “We train and train for a disaster like this, and when it happens, we realize we should have trained more. There has to be some way to keep people out of the water.” She raked her hands across her face, trying to force the bone-deep weariness to recede. “Was it a man or a woman, Ralph?”

  “They think it was a man.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Must’ve been caught in a burning boat.”

  “Jesus.” She pushed away the bowl of blueberries, nauseated by her own smokiness and the images it conjured up. Blackened, unrecognizable skeletons, the skin shrink-wrapped by heat over the bones, the teeth gaping. Bodies caught in seaweed and stinking masses of f ish gone belly up from so many hours of heat on the water.

  “I can’t face it, Ralph.”

  “Try to eat something, Meredith Abiah,” he said gently. He was the only person who used her middle name—from Ben Franklin’s mother, a Nantucket Folger—usually when he felt tender or indignant. She was thankful it was the for­mer this morning. Though she never allowed her father to see her weaknesses if she could help it, Ralph saw everything.

  “I was just getting interested in Joe Duarte’s death,” Merry said, lifting her head and meeting his bright blue eyes. “That threatening letter Del got only makes her doubts more justif ied. But all that seems irrelevant now, doesn’t it?”

  “That reminds me,” Ralph said. “In the craziness over the f ire, she left her cell phone here. You’ll want to drop it off, I expect.” He pulled up a chair and teased an edge from one of her muff ins. “I thought we’d agreed Joe Duarte’s death was an accident.”

  “We had. But then I talked to the Swede—one of Joe’s crew—after I talked to Jackie Alcantrara. Their stories didn’t match up.”

  “Funny. I don’t remember that from the newspaper accounts.”

  “The Swede wasn’t interviewed. He was off-island at the time—I checked. And since he was technically responsible for the accident, I suppose it’s always been his word against the others’.”

  “He worked the winch?”

  She nodded. “Jackie says he was careless and brought the metal doors in too wild and too fast. That’s why Joe jumped in to lend a hand; then he got hit and went over.”

  “It’s happened often enough before.”

  “That’s what Jackie said. Only the Swede doesn’t agree. He says the winch couldn’t be stopped—that it had to be jammed. Something had gone wrong with it.”

  “Something that didn’t show up in the rest of the trip?” Ralph said skeptically. “It wasn’t the f irst haul they’d pulled. They’d been out two days, or so the newspaper said.”

  “That’s true. But things can break down, can’t they? Or be tampered with?”

  “Maybe.” Ralph reached one long arm to the stove a
nd pulled his percolator toward her cup. “Maybe this Swede is feeling too responsible, and thinks he’ll shift the blame. Remember, Meredith, nobody else on the crew mentioned jamming the winch. Everybody said it was human error.”

  She spent the morning down on South Beach with the Nantucket Fire Department. Hank Burrows had requested the help of an arson expert from Boston, who was arriving that afternoon. Until then the scarred wreckage of pilings and hulls was cordoned off from all but the tide. What threatened to drift out to sea was dragged ashore in pieces by volunteers working with the exhausted Coast Guard crews. Uncertain what might be relevant, they saved everything they could. All police personnel were on call, including the summer interns. John Folger had pulled them off foot patrol and set them to the task of labeling debris as the f ire department’s divers retrieved it from the water.

  The banality of the morning after, Merry thought, when even disaster can be handled with logistics and a smartphone.

  She was given the job of debrief ing witnesses among the boat owners and residents of Washington Street. It wasn’t hard to do; most of them were on the beach that morning, scavenging among the detritus for signs of a familiar vessel, gone past recalling. There were insurance forms to f ill out, and dreams to be mourned; but most of all, there was anger to vent, and the wide-open beach was the place to do it.

  On her third canvass she found Marty Bremen. He was a weather-beaten guy of f ifty, a New Yorker by birth, who spent each summer in a house on Union Street his family had owned for two generations. He installed his wife and kids every Memorial Day weekend, put the boat in the water, and f lew back to the city for the work week.

  “This year,” he said, “I should have waited a day to take the Gemini off its trailer. But yesterday was perfect f ishing weather—”