Death in Rough Water

by Francine Mathews

  A child’s three-wheeler lay overturned in the gravel drive, and the pots of geraniums on the front stoop looked parched and neglected, their dead f lower heads left to wither and straggle above the riotous petunias. Merry walked up the slate path, wondering if anyone was home. But as she mounted the steps, there came from somewhere inside a high-pitched wail, followed by the distinct sound of a slap. Good thing Peter’s sister had found another baby-sitter.

  Lisa Davis was a younger woman than Merry had expected, perhaps all of twenty-eight. Mitch had been a good two decades older. His wife carried a little girl who looked to be about two, and a boy of perhaps three clung to one leg. It was the latter who had been crying; the track of tears still trailed from his wounded eyes.

  “I’m Meredith Folger, Mrs. Davis,” Merry said. “With the Nantucket police. Would you have a few minutes to talk?”

  “Would I?” she said, her eyes widening. “I’ve been trying to talk to somebody for days. Ever since Mitch—” Her eyes welled with tears. “Ever since Mitch—” She stood back and held open the door. “Please come in.”

  Merry followed her to a spare living room, furnished with the sort of furniture newlyweds consider necessary—a careful dining-room table and chairs, from their appearance hardly ever used—mixed with the odds and ends of a bachelor’s existence.

  “You’re Peter Mason’s friend,” Lisa Davis said, leading Merry through the dining area to the small kitchen. She slid the two-year-old into a high chair and pulled out a stool for the older boy. Two peanut butter sandwiches cut in fours sat on plates beside small glasses of milk. “We were just having lunch. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It was such a relief to run into Peter yesterday. He’s so comforting, isn’t he? I always feel things are okay when I talk to him. Even when they’re really bad. I suppose it’s because he’s the closest thing to family I have on the island.”

  Merry looked sympathetic.

  “He thought you might know something,” Lisa said, recovering her train of thought. “I can’t get any information out of that Carmichael guy.”

  “What is it you wanted to know, Mrs. Davis?”

  She slumped down in a chair opposite her son and leaned her head against one hand. “Why no one wants to believe Mitch was killed for a reason,” she said. “The same reason the wharf was burned. I mean, come on.” Lisa grimaced at Merry in exasperation. “You think the whole thing was random? All that destruction? If they want to f ind out who torched my husband’s pier, they’d better f ind out why somebody thought they had to shoot him. Chalking it up to some faceless boater doesn’t work. At least, it doesn’t work for me.”

  “You think Mitch’s murder and the arson were linked,” Merry said.

  “Of course they were linked.”

  Merry pulled out the remaining chair, slid her purse to the f loor, and sat down. “Tell me about Mitch’s work.”

  “That’s what’s so sad,” Lisa Davis said. “It was going so well. He was so proud of it, you know? All the changes he’d made.”

  “How long had he been marine superintendent?”

  “Almost f ive years. Ever since he left the Coast Guard, right after we got married.”

  “You met here?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, surprised. “I’m from Providence. That’s where Mitch was stationed. We met when I worked at the Coast Guard head­quarters as a secretary, right out of college.”

  “And when he got out of the service, he took the marine superin­tendent’s job here.”

  “He liked the idea of living on an island, and staying close to boats, that whole harbor sort of life. I understood it. I thought Nantucket was beautiful. Of course, I had no idea what it was going to be like in the winter months.” She smiled ruefully. “But winters were good in another way—Mitch had so much free time. Other than issuing scal­loping permits and making sure the catch quotas were kept, there wasn’t a lot to do. He was able to be much more of a parent to Tod and Whitney than most men ever are.” At this, her eyes f illed with tears again.

  “Daddy,” said the boy faintly, and dropped his sandwich. He pushed his plate away and put his head down on the table, arms hanging slack at his sides.

  “You can be excused, Tod,” Lisa said f irmly, and turned toward her daughter, attempting to force a corner of bread into an unwilling mouth. “They eat next to nothing since it happened,” she said to Merry. “And they’re so quiet. It breaks my heart. Not that I’m Little Mary Sunshine myself. It’s been hard on all of us.”

  “Could you go back to the mainland for a while? See some family?”

  “I will,” she said, “just as soon as I f igure out what’s going on with the police. They haven’t released Mitch’s body yet. I can’t even plan a funeral.” She set down the rejected sandwich and wiped her daughter’s mouth. “Would you like some iced tea?”

  Merry shook her head. “How did Mitch feel about the job once he got into it?”

  “I think he saw it as a challenge,” Lisa said. “He had to work against a lot of attitudes. People in town tended to disregard the pier area—other than collecting the trash and whatnot. The selectmen, for instance, never want to part with a dime.”

  “Scottie Flanagan told me. He said Mitch ruff led some feathers.”

  “Oh, Scottie,” Lisa said, shrugging. “The selectmen just didn’t want to pay for stuff they thought most islanders wouldn’t use, so Mitch went to Visitor Services. Got tourist money to pay for a tourist facility. I think the selectmen were pleased. There really weren’t any hard feelings.”

  “Then why would someone want Mitch out of the way?”

  Lisa hesitated, assessing Merry’s face. Whatever she saw must have reassured her. “He was being pressured about something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was.” She glanced at her daughter, then reached over to pull her out of her high chair. “Go play with Tod, sweetie.”

  She waited until the child ran out of the kitchen, then turned back to Merry. “He told me it would be dangerous for me to know. Whatever it was clearly upset him. He’d meet with that Jerry Dundee, and afterward he’d be so angry he couldn’t speak.”

  “Jerry Dundee,” Merry said dully. “Jerry Dundee?” The SeaCon em­ployee Seitz had tried and failed to locate.

  “You know him?”

  “I wish I did. His name keeps turning up in the oddest places.”

  “He wasn’t an islander,” Lisa said. “But he used to show up at the marine super’s off ice and bother Mitch.”

  “Your husband told you this?”

  “Not at f irst. Dundee called here once and left a message. Mitch got really mad—that’s how I found out all about it. I heard him call the guy back and tell him he was never to bother his wife again, or come near his home, and that if he did, he’d have Mitch to reckon with.”

  “Wow.”

  “Mitch was very strange after that phone call. He went into the kids’ rooms and held them in the dark. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. He was threatened by that guy. And he wouldn’t tell me why, or how; he wouldn’t let me help.”

  Lisa looked down at her nails, bitten to the quick, and picked at a cuticle. “And then he was killed—”

  “Do you know when he last saw Dundee?” Merry asked.

  “The call to the house was a while ago—April, maybe. I didn’t always know when Mitch had a run-in with him. I used to be able to tell—he’d come home so mad. But then I think Mitch started covering up. So as not to worry me.”

  “Dundee had been harassing him for a while?”

  “At least a year.”

  Merry sat back and mulled this over. Jerry Dundee, insurance defrauder and sinker of boats, had been pressuring the marine superinten­dent for the past twelve months. Pressure that culminated in Mitch’s death and the destruction of his pride and joy. A warning to others, similar
ly ill-disposed to accommodate Mr. Dundee? Or a means to an end?

  “Mrs. Davis,” Merry said, “you mentioned that Dundee left a message in April, and that Mitch called him back. Is there any chance that you still have that number?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t leave it. Just his name and that Mitch should get in touch. Mitch must have known the number.”

  “Did your husband keep his contacts in his phone?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Normally he’d have had it on him when he was—” She paused, looked down, recovered. “But the night of the f ire he left it in his truck. I’ll go get it.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom, down a hallway off the kitchen, and reappeared almost immediately. “I already punched in his access code. You can pull up the contacts. He had his wallet with him, so if he kept the number there, we’re out of luck.”

  “They haven’t returned his things to you?” Merry said.

  “His wallet was stolen. I thought you knew.”

  Merry scrolled through the list of names. But there was no sign of a darker presence, no unexplained threat. Jerry Dundee’s was not among them. “Did he have anything else, like an actual address book or a calendar where he might have penciled in appointments?”

  “He kept one last year,” Lisa Davis said. “The smartphone is brand new. He used to say that if one fell in the water while he was working, he’d lose everything. But even Mitch f inally forced himself to go digital.”

  “Would he have kept that calendar?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” She left the room once more and Merry heard the sound of rummaging in distant drawers. Lisa returned with a shabby black spiral-bound weekly calendar and handed it wordlessly to Merry.

  She leafed through it, starting with the previous January. Mitch Davis’s handwriting was surprisingly clear—as crisp and precise as he’d always kept his uniform. There were cryptic references to shellf ish permits, boats’ names, and what Merry took to be National Marine Fisheries Service regulations, the minutiae of the scalloping sea­son. He’d even noted the weather for various days. And on a Tuesday in July, nearly a year earlier, Merry discovered what she was looking for. In his precise hand Mitch had written the single word “Dundee.” The number had a Provi­dence area code.

  Merry studied the notation an instant, debating her next question. But there was no avoiding it, she would have to be brutal. “Why did your husband leave the Coast Guard?”

  There was an instant’s tense silence, short enough for someone less observant to ignore. Lisa’s eyes slid away for the f irst time, unable to hold Merry’s gaze. “He’d been in twenty years,” she said. “That was long enough.”

  On her way back to the station, Merry called Howie and gave him the Providence number. Then she called Terry Sam­son at the Coast Guard station. Maybe Mitch Davis had simply retired; but if not, Terry would f ind out. She was willing to bet that Jerry Dundee had something on the marine superintendent—an episode in Providence he was using to blackmail Davis. Unsuccessfully, it would seem. Mitch had faced him down, and Mitch had died. The f lam­ing pier rose vividly in Merry’s mind, the memory of choking smoke and horns blowing chaotically. The prize must be worth a hell of a lot.

  Chapter 27

  “Mitch Davis left Providence under something of a cloud.” Terry Samson closed his off ice door. “This is highly conf idential, you understand.”

  “I do,” Merry said. “I appreciate your telling me anything. I know it isn’t easy to talk about a colleague’s record, even a dead one.”

  “I spent four years in Providence,” he said, “and another three at Woods Hole. I don’t need to twist any arms back there or ask for any favors. I remember what happened to Mitch.”

  “Did you see him much once you were both working here?”

  “Not socially. But the Coast Guard has to deal with the marine superintendent all the time—he’s the harbormaster. He has jurisdiction within the harbor, we have it be­yond the jetties. And sometimes things overlap. If Mitch ever thought force would be necessary in apprehending a nasty boater, he didn’t hes­itate to call. We respected each other’s turf.”

  “So what happened in Rhode Island?”

  Terry hesitated. “I only know what the Coast Guard said happened. But I have to believe there was another story.”

  “Of course. There always is. But the Coast Guard’s version is what matters—if that’s why Mitch left.”

  “Oh, it’s why he left, all right. Though he’d had a clockwork career up to that point. He was a lifer—graduated from the Coast Guard Acad­emy, did tours in Hawaii, Miami, Woods Hole, Providence. That’s where he ran into the wrong end of a propeller, metaphorically speaking.”

  “Personal differences with a boss?”

  “I wish.” Terry looked over his shoulder, though they were com­pletely alone. “He was in charge of a mission to apprehend some heroin dealers—Dominicans, they run the stuff up from the islands and hand it off to relatives in the states—who were going to meet at a certain coordinate off Providence Harbor. He made the arrest, seized both boats, locked up the money and the drugs, and headed for port. Only when he got there, the money was gone.”

  “How much money?”

  “Close to a million.”

  “Whoops.”

  “Mitch couldn’t explain it. He’d had the only key to the evidence locker on the boat. The entire vessel was searched. So was every man jack of the crew. Nothing. The service undertook an intensive investi­gation of Mitch’s private life—found out he was recently married to a much younger woman, had signif icant credit-card debt, a mortgage on a new house, the whole nine yards. They concluded privately that he’d probably tossed the money overboard to a confederate and that it was in a numbered Caymans account by that time. But they couldn’t prove anything. They could only court-martial him for dereliction of duty. He resigned f irst.”

  “His place doesn’t look like the house of a man with a numbered bank account,” Merry said thoughtfully. “What do you think of the story, Terry?”

  “I think somebody else had a copy of the key, and wasn’t telling,” he said. “I’d be interested to know which of the crew resigned once the mess blew over and Mitch faded away.”

  “I would, too,” Merry said, “but I haven’t got time for that. I imagine this was a big deal in Providence, f ive, six years ago.”

  “It was all over the news for a few days.”

  “So anybody looking for dirt on Mitch Davis would f ind a signif icant paper trail.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “How’d he manage to get the job here?”

  “He’d resigned, he wasn’t court-martialed. Enough people were sus­picious of the off icial story and close enough to Mitch to give him a good recommendation. If he didn’t want to talk about the past, I guess he didn’t have to.”

  “But if he’d deliberately kept the incident from the selectmen, he might be worried he’d lose his job if the past was dug up.”

  “He might. Was Mitch being blackmailed?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is this related to the other questions you were asking? About insurance fraud?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” Merry said.

  Tracking Jerry Dundee, Merry had mo­mentarily forgotten Del; but as she walked into the police station, her friend’s face rose before her with a painful urgency. Clarence was placing a package into the evidence locker, and through the clear plastic, Merry could plainly see beige clothing. Linen and silk beige cloth­ing, she had little doubt.

  “Jenny Baldwin’s?” she asked.

  Clarence looked at her and winked. “A-no,” he said. “Guess again.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Pawh spahrt.”

  “Come on, Clarence.”

  “Her husband’s.”

  “Tom’s? To
m’s f ibers were near Del’s body?”

  “Ayeh.”

  “You realize what this means.”

  “Don’t have time, Marradith,” he said, giving her some of her own medicine.

  “He framed her. Jenny, I mean. He killed Del and left his wife’s brace­let sitting by the body. He left her f ingerprints in the kitchen.”

  “I reckon that’s what young Bailey thinks, too. He just left to arrest the poor bahstahd. Fax arrived, by the way.”

  “From Boston?”

  “Ayeh. Yah got that ordah you were lookin’ fahr. I left it on yahr desk.”

  Merry dashed to her off ice. There it was, and in record time, too.

  “There is no Jerry Dundee at the number you gave me,” Howie said, leaning around her doorjamb.

  “Aw, shit,” Merry said. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. I called up and asked for him, and they said, ‘Mr. Dundee is no longer employed by Oceanside Resorts.’ Period. I asked for a for­warding number, I asked how long he’d been gone, I asked—”

  “Wait a minute. Did you say Oceanside Resorts?”

  Howie nodded. “The name you had me look for on the Plastech list. Was this guy sinking boats with explosive?”

  “Seitz, you’re marvelous,” Merry said. “Call Oceanside back. Tell them you’re an interested investor, tell them anything that comes to mind. Ask them to email their quarterly report. Then dig up everything you possibly can about who runs the operation. Go to the Providence police, if you have to. And plug Dundee’s name into the NCIC index, okay?”

  The National Crime Information Center database could tell Merry most of what she needed to know about a suspect in a matter of minutes.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Request an off icial copy of Sara Duarte’s birth certif icate,” she said, waving the court order. Though it hardly mattered. The only possible connection was staring her in the face.

  At Merry’s request, Tom Baldwin’s questioning was delayed until the following morning—Saturday. She and Howie spent the remainder of Friday researching the corporate history of Baldwin Builders, contacting incorporation off ices in Delaware, business off ices in Providence, and the Water Rights Insurance Company in Boston. Merry and Howie ordered pizza at f ive o’clock and spent the next three hours deciphering the trail of evidence. The f inal piece of in­formation they got was from the Registry of Vital Records and Statistics in Boston. Although she had known what it would say, Merry stared at it, unseeing, for a while.