But today was an exception, a special occasion. If the doctors were right, Uncle Moze’s aneurysm would kill him before the fish returned to the Piscataqua River in the spring on their northerly migration. That was if his heart didn’t get him first. Today might turn out to be his last voyage on Miss Lil.
Moze had left his aluminum walker back at the marina. A thick black cane rested against the side of his leg.
Evie was sitting on the lobster pot beside him. She was wearing cutoff jeans shorts and a skimpy white tank top. Today, she figured, would be her last chance of the year to catch some serious rays.
She was ragging on Moze about smoking. He was saying that he already knew what was going to kill him, and anyway, he’d be damned if he was going to give up the last pleasure he had left. Been doin’ it since he was eleven, he was saying, and for emphasis, he worked a speck of tobacco onto the tip of his tongue, turned his head, and spat it out.
Moze liked looking at Evie. It was hard to blame him. She looked awfully good. She flirted with him and laughed at his Down East colloquialisms and tried to imitate him, and that made him laugh.
It was pretty clear that there was at least one thing that still gave Uncle Moze pleasure besides unfiltered cigarettes.
His skin was white. It hung in wattles under his chin. Deep creases crisscrossed his face, and his forearms looked skinny and soft.
But enthusiasm and humor still glittered in those sharp blue eyes.
Cassie was at the wheel. She wore the same lobsterman’s outfit as Moze, from the long-billed cap to the folded-down hip boots, and she hunched forward and squinted out through Miss Lil’s salt-spattered windshield just the way I remembered Moze doing it back when I was a kid.
We’d hauled his string of pots. I’d used the boat hook to grab the line and loop it over the power winch and guide the heavy pots onto the platform on the gunwale. Cassie opened the trapdoor, plucked the lobsters from the pots, and measured them quickly with the steel ruler. She tossed the two-clawed keepers into one tub and the one-claws into the other. The shorts went overboard.
Evie had taken charge of rebaiting the pots. She seemed to get a kick out of handling the salted herring and jabbing them through their eye sockets onto the steel hook.
I learned new things about Evelyn Banyon every day.
I’d glanced at Moze a few times while the rest of us were tending his string of lobster pots. It was hard to miss the wistful smile that played on his lips. It was one thing to have your grown daughter living with you and cooking for you and helping you move from your chair to your walker to your bed. But having other people—even family—tend your lobster pots for you, well, that was damned near unacceptable.
Now Cassie was chugging slowly around the bay. Her curving route might have looked aimless, but Cassie knew the water and the tides and the way migrating striped bass behaved in the middle of September. She hadn’t done it for many years, but some things you just don’t forget.
I’d been sitting on the transom with the breeze in my face, looking for fish signs, watching Evie flirt with Moze, and thinking bittersweet thoughts about old age and mortality and the turning of the seasons.
I wasn’t seeing any signs of fish. If there were signs to be seen, Moze would spot them before I did anyway.
I moved up front and stood beside Cassie.
She glanced sideways at me. “So how’s it goin’, Cuz?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “How ’bout you?”
“Oh,” she said, “it’s good. Hard but good. I want to do more than I can, you know?”
“Moze seems pretty content.”
She shrugged. “He’s taking his days as they come, and he seems to be able to find something to enjoy in every one of them. He likes having me around, I know that.”
“That must make you feel good.”
“Oh, I’ve got my regrets.”
I’d visited Uncle Moze a couple of times when he was in rehab, and Cassie and I had talked on the phone several times in the days after Rebecca Hurley came to kill us at the trailer in West Canterbury. But except for the Tuesday afternoon in mid-August when Cassie dropped in at my law office to sign her divorce papers, I hadn’t seen either of them since they’d let Moze go home.
We watched the horizon for a few minutes. Then Cassie said, “Evie’s a cool lady. You gonna keep her?”
“Gonna try.”
“So what are you hearing about the case?”
“Rebecca Hurley, you mean?”
Cassie nodded. She kept her eyes on the water.
“I’m hearing nothing,” I said. “Nobody’ll say anything to me. I’ll have to be a witness if it goes to trial. They don’t talk to potential witnesses.”
“Why wouldn’t it go to trial? I mean, there’s no question she killed Grannie, is there?”
“No question about that, as far as I know,” I said. “But Becca is a seriously disturbed woman. If she’s really been having an incestuous relationship with her father all these years—”
Cassie’s head snapped around. “Whaddya mean, if?”
I shrugged. “It could all be in her head. A delusion.”
“You think she just made all that up?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “I doubt that she’s lying, in the sense that it’s her perception of the truth and she surely believes it. But that doesn’t make it true. She was the one who found her mother’s suicide. That kind of thing can have profound psychological effects on a person. Like post-traumatic stress disorder. Either way, Becca’s a mess, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t find her fit to stand trial.”
Cassie was shaking her head. “I’ve been thinking about Becca. I mean, I was friends with her. I liked her. She seemed…ordinary, you know? Normal. Normal and nice.”
“Well,” I said, “she was pretty intent on killing you.”
“To get rid of her…her lover’s wife? Or her imaginary lover’s wife? Like she did to Ellen?”
I nodded. “So it seems.”
“She hated me that much,” said Cassie softly. “And dumb me, I didn’t have a clue.”
Cassie and I watched the water through Miss Lil’s windshield. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
Suddenly she leaned forward. “O-kay,” she said. “Here we go.”
She pointed at the smooth water close to the shore.
I didn’t see anything. “What is it?” I had the weird thought that she might’ve spotted a dead body.
“Nervous water,” she said. “Look.”
I squinted where Cassie was pointing, and after a minute I saw it—the subtle agitation of calm water made by a large school of fish traveling just under the surface. It’s no more than a quiet shimmering. The water seems to be twitching and quivering. Nervous water is barely noticeable, but it signifies that under the seemingly calm, quiet surface something serious and important is happening. Unless you’re trained to look for nervous water, and to recognize it, and to understand what it means, you’d never even notice it.
As I watched, a swarm of seabirds materialized over the ripply surface. At first, there were just a couple of terns, but in a minute there were dozens of birds, a mixture of gulls and terns, squawking and diving and wheeling low over the water. Underneath the birds I began to see the spurts and swirls and splashes of dozens of big fish crashing and slashing at frantic schools of baitfish.
Cassie goosed the throttle, and the clunky old boat cut a turn and surged forward. She looked back over her shoulder and grinned at Moze, and above the roar of the big diesel engine she yelled, “Hey, Daddy. What’re you waitin’ for? Grab yourself a rod and git a plug into the water. It’s time to go fishin’.”
Also by William G. Tapply
The Brady Coyne Novels
Death at Charity’s Point
The Dutch Blue Error
Follow the Sharks
The Marine Corpse
Dead Meat
The Vulgar Boatman
A Void in Hearts
<
br /> Dead Winter
Client Privilege
The Spotted Cats
Tight Lines
The Snake Eater
The Seventh Enemy
Close to the Bone
Cutter’s Run
Muscle Memory
Scar Tissue
Past Tense
A Fine Line
Shadow of Death
Nonfiction
Those Hours Spent Outdoors
Opening Day and Other Neuroses
Home Water: Near and Far
Sportsman’s Legacy
The Elements of Mystery Fiction
A Fly-Fishing Life
Bass Bug Fishing
Upland Days
Pocket Water
The Orvis Pocket Guide to Fly Fishing for Bass
Gone Fishin’
Other Fiction
Thicker Than Water (with Linda Barlow)
First Light (with Philip R. Craig)
Bitch Creek
Second Sight (with Philip R. Craig)
NERVOUS WATER. Copyright © 2005 by William G. Tapply. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tapply, William G.
Nervous water: a Brady Coyne novel / by William G. Tapply.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4668-0187-5
1. Coyne, Brady (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Murder victims’ families—Fiction. 3. Conflict of generations—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Missing persons—Fiction. 6. Terminally ill—Fiction. 7. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.A568N47 2005
813′.54—dc22
2005046086
Nervous Water Page 25
