On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

  The Cape Herald occupied a modern two-storey building on the edge of Barnstaple Municipal airport and a fiveminute drive from Route 6, which bisects the Cape from Provincetown to the Sagamore Bridge.

  The new owner who had bought the paper a few years ago had moved its offices out of Main Street in Falmouth, on the grounds that the journalists spent too much time in bars and cafés talking to each other, and not enough out and about gathering news.

  The journalists claimed to have discovered that their new offices were sited in an area that had originally been called ITMON, a corruption of a Native American word meaning ‘the place to bury the dead’. One wag even got this put up on the paper’s website, and it was some weeks before the editor realised that the name was an acronym for In the Middle of Nowhere.

  The paper’s new home did have the advantage of the nearby airfield; the disadvantage was that there was never a story big enough to justify hiring a plane, and there was no budget to do so even if there had been.

  Sandy’s pitch for a two-hour charter to fly along the coast looking for the missing scientist met with a predictable response from his editor. The Herald had already covered the fact that Kemp was missing, including an interview with the Institute’s chief executive and a brief statement from Kemp’s wife praising the rescue effort. The students had been banned by the Institute from talking to the press. They had all been offered counselling, but most had opted to get drunk instead. Buck had refused to talk to anyone. There was not a lot left to say until a body turned up.

  ‘And suppose he’s still alive?’ asked Sandy. ‘Suppose he’s out there somewhere, unconscious, injured, and unable to move? He’s only been gone twenty-four hours. It’s possible. They haven’t found a body yet, have they? Why not? The sea brings our bodies in on the next tide – always. You know that. You did enough of those stories when you were a reporter.

  The editor tried not to look interested. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Think of the story if we find him, if we bring him back.’

  The editor knew Sandy was right about the body. In the old days, when there were plenty of summer drownings, the bodies always came back, usually on the next tide. The sea was punctilious about delivering up its dead. There should have been a body by now. Kemp had gone overboard only a few hundred yards from the beach. ‘Make sure you don’t pay the tourist rate,’ the editor growled.

  The quoted tourist rate for a Cessna 172 was $325 an hour. Sandy got it for $250 with the promise of a mention for the charter company in the article.

  The trip made no sense to the woman in the office of Fairchild Charters at the airport, and not much to Sandy. He told her instead that he wanted to find concentrations of seals. She had raised an eyebrow at that. ‘You’d be better off in a boat,’ she said, ‘but it’s your money.’

  They took off and swung south-west to start a run up the coast from Martha’s Vineyard. The pilot pointed out the spot where John Kennedy, Jr had gone into the sea with his wife and sister-in-law seven miles from the coast on a misty evening in July 1999.

  ‘Tell you something,’ he said. ‘It was like a mini 9/11 on the Vineyard the next day. People couldn’t believe it had happened again. They walked around in a daze. I know, I was there. I spent the next two days flying over the ocean looking for wreckage, on charter to the coastguard.’

  Sandy let him talk, but he wasn’t interested. He had written enough about the Kennedys to fill an encyclopaedia. He told the pilot he was doing a feature article on seals and their attraction to tourists. It seemed easier than trying to explain that he hoped to see a missing man on a deserted beach, exhausted, dehydrated, semi-conscious, perhaps lying beside an ‘SOS’ scrawled in the sand.

  That was the hope. A million-to-one miracle that would bring a friend back to life and give him a great story. Sandy peered through the window as the pilot dipped to the lowest permitted level of 500 feet.

  They flew up the coast for twenty minutes, and passed low over Monomoy Island. Out to sea Sandy could see the lifeboats and smaller craft belonging to local fishermen still working the grid patterns. The chopper had gone back after a few hours, deemed too expensive when all that anyone expected to find was a body.

  The seals were there, clusters of black dots lining the foreshore in several rookeries. ‘Rookeries’ of seals, thought Sandy. When did the naturalists decide to apply the collective noun for fierce, scrawny, squawking birds to sleek, lovable, blubbery sea mammals? He made a note to check it and slide in a reference in the piece. Except that he wasn’t writing a piece, he reminded himself.

  The light green water of the shallows shaded into darker colours as the seabed dropped down to the deeper level. John Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga had gone down in 116 feet, a relatively shallow depth which enabled the US naval salvage ships to recover 75 per cent of the wreckage and the bodies of Kennedy, his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette. They buzzed low over Monomoy twice. Sandy tried his binoculars, but it was impossible to focus in a plane that was beginning to bump a little in the lumpy air as the day warmed up.

  ‘Going to be another warm day,’ said the pilot. ‘Where to now?’

  Good question. Below them the dune grass rolled out for miles like a thick mat, giving way inland to patches of scrub that could hide a body for years.

  They flew up over Nauset Beach, past the old Marconi towers at Wellfleet, dipped low over White Crest Beach with its surfers riding the Atlantic rollers, on up along the crescent-shaped coastline over beach after beach, occasionally swooping down over a scattering of seals on the sandbanks.

  At the Highland Lighthouse near Truro, Sandy decided they had gone far enough, and the plane made a low sweeping turn over a sea whose white crests lazily chased each other to the shore.

  ‘We could try Atlantic Island if you like,’ said the pilot. ‘Plenty of seals there. Whole island full of them. Seals and birds is all you’ll see on Atlantic.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Oh, fifteen miles or so. It’s beyond Nantucket.’

  Too far. If Kemp was anywhere, it would be here, somewhere along the coast. Sandy told the pilot to turn back, and settled into his seat. He closed his eyes, suddenly weary of the bumpy ride and let his mind drift. He’s dead, he thought, definitely dead by now. Let’s just find the body, and then, in the jargon of the age, we can get closure and move on. Just reveal yourself, Kemp. Throw your corpse up on the nearest beach like a good dead person, fling out your arms and lie on the sand, gazing sightless at the sky…and suddenly, there he was, walking on the beach, pale, emaciated, recognisably Kemp, and indisputably dead.

  ‘How about a drink?’ said Sandy.

  ‘Dead men don’t drink,’ said Kemp.

  Sandy woke with a start, and saw the runway looming through the cockpit window.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ said the pilot. ‘Didn’t want to wake you.’

  Sam Kemp pushed open the door to Mrs Gulliver’s studio just off Falmouth’s Main Street. An old cannonball, one of 3,000 fired into the town in January 1814 by the British sloop Nimrod, weighted a pulley attached to the handle and swung the door shut behind her. Gloria Gulliver was proud of her door weight. Two Gulliver ancestors had fought at Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the Revolutionary War, in 1775. And a Francis Gulliver had been second in command to the gallant Captain Weston Jenkins, commander of the Falmouth Battalion of Artillery which had successfully defended the town against British attack in 1814. The 18-gun British sloop had fired 32-pound balls from half a mile offshore that day, but Gloria told visitors that the only damage done by the bombardment had been to a pillowcase full of feathers.

  In the winter the gallery showed mainly watercolour landscapes of the Cape’s low hills and sandy shores. Like many artists, Mrs Gulliver found inspiration in old lighthouses and in the few remaining grey-shingled windmills that were once used to grind corn and pump up sea water to produce salt. Those and the lighthouses populated her paintings. To make ends meet during the winte
r months she also ran evening classes in watercolours.

  She was a good teacher, with the gift of making her students understand the simple technique of moving an image from the mind’s eye to the canvas with a few strokes of the brush. Her classes were always oversubscribed.

  With the season approaching she had switched to portraits in oil, charging $500, with guaranteed completion in a week. The purists sneered that she was little more than a beach photographer but she didn’t mind. Sometimes summer visitors came in for a sitting, paid their deposit and never returned to pick up the portrait. Sam looked at the rows of faces: children, mothers, fathers, family groups; character, mood and emotion captured by the colour and texture of paint.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Mrs Gulliver was dressed in tight jeans and a slim-fit checked shirt, with her hair tied back in a ponytail. Only a woman who knows that her figure and the allure of her earlier years have survived into middle age can dress like that.

  ‘I want to commission a portrait of my dad,’ said Sam.

  Mrs Gulliver sat down, and motioned Sam to do likewise.

  ‘Aren’t you Leo Kemp’s girl?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry, really sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right. I mean, it’s not, but we don’t know for sure, and anyway…’ She fell silent, looked at the floor and sniffed.

  ‘Here, let me get you a coffee.’

  ‘No, thanks. I just want the…’

  ‘…portrait of your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sam handed over an envelope. ‘These are recent photos; can you do it from them?’

  ‘Of course I can. But I knew your father, he came for classes here.’

  Sam looked down. ‘I know you knew him, Mrs Gulliver.’

  The addition of her name to that sentence gave it an

  ominous layer of meaning that Mrs Gulliver suspected she understood all too well.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me something, Sam?’

  Sam stared hard at her feet. ‘Dad kept a diary. I’ve seen it.’

  Mrs Gulliver coloured and stood up.

  Sam got to her feet quickly. ‘I’m not here for that, really. I’m sorry I said that. I – we – just want the portrait, and it would be so good because you know him, knew him…you can use the photos and paint him as he was from memory.’

  Leo had told Gloria he was keeping a diary. Nothing explicit, he reassured her, just jottings about the occasional, far too occasional, times when he would linger behind after the evening class and she would light some candles and get the wine out, and they would just drink and talk and laugh for an hour or so. She was witty, cruelly funny about the pomposity of Cape social life in the winter, and a wise counsellor about his adversarial relationship with the Institute management.

  It had begun when he had asked her about the cannonball door weight one evening after the other students had gone. She said it was a historical memento, a reminder that her family had fought in the Revolutionary War. After the opening battles one of her ancestors had gone on to lead the storming of the British schooner Diana outside Boston harbour, the first naval encounter of the war.

  Leo had made the mistake of telling her about the Kemp family’s slightly less glamorous antecedents. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had been convicted of sheep-stealing in the Scottish highlands and deported to Australia in the 1820s. So his family had fallen out with the British too. Mrs Gulliver laughed, checked herself, and then could not contain her giggles.

  She was still half laughing when she apologised. It was absurd, wasn’t it, she said, sending a man to the other side of the world for stealing a sheep. For some reason it irritated Kemp that she found this so funny, and the fact that it irritated him made it all the funnier to her.

  ‘So the Brits shackled your great-great-great-great-grandfather with a ball and chain and sent him to a convict colony, did they? Well, they tried to shackle us with cannonballs. They fired enough of them into this town that day. And that didn’t do them any good either. Anyway, we’re both from rebel stock. My ancestors fought them with muskets, while yours stole their sheep.’ And she laughed and suddenly kissed him, and that’s how it started.

  She turned back to Sam. ‘I can’t do this. I’m sorry. And I’m really sorry about your father.’

  ‘Mrs Gulliver, he loved you. He said you were his harbour, his safe haven.’

  Those were the very words he had used to her whenever they met. You are my harbour, my safe haven. Gloria Gulliver was shocked. ‘How do you know that?’ She had lowered her voice almost to whisper.

  ‘I know my father. I’m not here to condemn, or to cause a row, or anything like that. All I want is a portrait of my father, and I’ll pay for it.’

  ‘Has your mother seen the diary?’

  ‘No. I love my parents, Mrs Gulliver. I don’t want to hurt them.’

  ‘So it’s your secret?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a long pause. Mrs Gulliver turned to look at the portraits on the wall. She could remember the personalities that went with every one: good, bad, grumpy, sad, smiley, sexy. When you spend a few hours in a studio with a sitter the skin peels off and there they are, naked before you. She deliberately kept her back to Sam.

  ‘Your mother doesn’t know?’

  ‘No. And she won’t, I’ve told you.’

  ‘I mean does she know you’ve come here today?’

  ‘No.’

  Mrs Gulliver turned and faced Sam. ‘OK, I’ll do it. But I think we should wait. You’ve had no news, and it’s only been two days.’

  ‘The coastguard say men don’t come back from the Atlantic alive after two days.’

  ‘I know.’ She put out a hand, but Sam stepped away and turned to leave.

  The door swung shut behind her, the felt-padded cannonball clunking softly against the door frame.

  Mrs Gulliver sat down, feeling slightly faint, and took a deep breath. The girl had been so calm, so single-minded, and apparently so discreet.

  Well, she would have her portrait. Her father was a good man, who cared deeply about his work and who wanted to make a difference, a lonely man who had stumbled into her life, and with whom she had found a little fun and laughter.

  That serious face of his when he was explaining the migration of the godwit, the ecosystem of the Stellwagen Bank or the radar capabilities of the harbour seal. Leo Kemp did not do small talk. She’d seen him at parties lost for words in the babble of conversation around him, shifting from foot to foot and nervously drinking too much white wine. She remembered him once repeating his latest lecture in the studio after a class, and her leaning over in mid-sentence and whispering a startling obscenity in his ear. He frowned and said, ‘Am I completely and utterly boring you?’ She undid one button of his shirt, slid a hand over his chest and pressed against his beating heart and said, ‘Not now, you’re not.’

  That was the irony, she told herself. She had given up a well-paid creative job in a New York ad agency to find peace and solitude here on the Cape. She had made an early, disastrous, marriage to one of the ad agency jerks who mistook line after line of coke for a lifestyle and had difficulty working out which should take pride of place in his trophy case: the wife or the Lamborghini.

  It was over too quickly for her to have had children, thank God. She got her revenge on him and his whole tribe with a career that took her to the top of the agency. She moved fast, and deliberately turned her back on the conventional marriage-and-kids route to middle age. Then, as if to punish herself – or reward herself; she could never work out which – she threw in the job, rented out the loft to the boyfriend, a copywriter for an ad agency with a face full of freckles and a passion for the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Then she moved to the Cape to begin again. The one man whose advice she trusted, probably the only man she had ever really loved, had thoroughly approved. ‘Do something in life you really enjoy,’ her father had said. ‘That’s the secret.’

 
And what she really enjoyed, and had always enjoyed, was painting with watercolours. She had always painted. Her father still kept the childish early paintings from her school days framed in his office: dark brown cats with brightly coloured rainbows behind them; horses with outsize bodies and stick-thin legs galloping through fields with more rainbows around them; and flowers, always of course with rainbows in the background. Had she ever thought of just painting the rainbows? her father had asked once.

  For a while, her freckled friend flew up at weekends to see her, but it had not felt right; it hadn’t fitted the plan, and she told herself she should have moved further away. In fact he stopped after a few visits.

  She loved the Cape. She liked the arty crowd up in Provincetown, and for all that she mocked the pretensions of the wealthy year-round residents, the fact was they bought her paintings. A small review in the weekend section of the New York Times had started it, and then suddenly everyone wanted her work. Cape Cod’s popular art-class teacher had become a successful artist.

  And now the peace and quiet had gone. Her sad, mixedup lover was missing, presumed dead, and she had been asked to paint his portrait by his daughter.

  JUNE

  FIVE

  The search for Leo Kemp was abandoned after three days. Monomoy Island and the surrounding coastline had been scoured by teams from the police and coastguard, aided by Institute students and staff. They had combed every inch of the island in case he had somehow dragged himself through the belt of dunes into the scrub of the interior. The sea search had also proved fruitless.

  The coastguard wrote a report for the police, who handed it to the coroner’s officer. The file was headed ‘Missing at Sea, Presumed Drowned’. The coroner opened and immediately adjourned an inquest, setting a date for a new hearing in a week’s time. News of Leo’s disappearance and presumed death had made a brief story in the Boston Globe, but no more, although the Scotsman carried a long obituary by Professor Melrose Stubbs. The Cape Herald had not carried an obituary. The paper had published a premature obituary of a prominent Boston lawyer who had retired to the Cape some years before and had been sued for libel as a result. These days the editor wanted to hear a body had been found before publication.