Stay Hidden

by Paul Doiron

  I squared my pistol sights and squeezed the trigger as the dinghy fell suddenly away.

  It was as if the sea had reached up and pulled me underwater by the legs. For a split second I had no idea what had happened. Everything had gone green. My sinuses felt as if I’d snorted Drano. Worst of all was the full-body shock that came from being immersed in gelid water. When my head popped up, buoyed by the life jacket, my vision was out of focus, and my lungs were flooded.

  I have seen corpses brought up by warden divers from beneath the ice with expressions of horror frozen on their faces. I felt a piercing pain in my forehead as if someone had driven a marlinspike through my skull. Don’t let anyone tell you that drowning is a peaceful way to die.

  Even though the life jacket was keeping my head above the waves, I found myself breathing short, shivering breaths. I kicked my legs and swung myself around in time to see the Sea Hag bearing down on me again. Crowley, dumb kid that he was, had decided to try the same play. He would veer off at the last second, counting on the wash from his screws to engulf me and perhaps smash my skull like a pumpkin against the rocks.

  This time he would be turning to starboard. The wheel he used to steer the craft was on the port side. He would be exposed as he came around.

  Crowley spun the wheel. I saw his tanned face and his goat beard poking out from beneath his black hood. I raised my weapon from beneath the froth and fired.

  Did I hit him? At the moment, I had no idea.

  Later, the medical examiner would state he could find no bullet wounds on the corpse.

  Traveling at a speed of approximately forty knots, the Coast Guard said in its own report, the Sea Hag had failed to negotiate its turn. The port side of the keel collided with a basalt outcropping five feet below the waterline. The impact not only carved a gash along the hull from stem to stern. It also ejected the boat’s pilot from beneath the standing shelter. He struck his temple, most likely on the metal hauler he used to raise his traps, and was knocked unconscious. Having fallen senseless into the sea, Kenneth Crowley drowned in the waters off Calderwood Ledge.

  “Death by misadventure” was the conclusion jointly reached by the US Coast Guard and the State of Maine.

  At the time, I knew nothing of this. I was being tossed like a rag doll by the waves. I heard a horrible crash and thought I smelled smoke. I definitely smelled petroleum. Overhead, a great black-backed gull—the largest gull in the world—hovered like some pelagic carrion bird. Would it even wait for me to expire before it plucked out my eyes?

  I felt a sudden tug and flopped my neck in that direction. It was Ariel. She floated on her back in the survival suit, her head sustained by an air-filled pillow. But she was smiling. She looked as friendly as a sea otter.

  “Hang in there, Mike.”

  I could barely utter the words. “What happened?”

  “Crowley crashed his boat. It’s halfway up a rock. I think I can scramble onto it. I’ll try to pull you up after me. Can you kick your legs?”

  They were stiff, but I willed them to move. I doubt it helped much, but we made progress.

  “Where is he?”

  “He fell into the water when the boat hit. His body looked limp. I don’t know if he was unconscious or dead.”

  I remember lifting my right arm and finding to my surprise that I was still clutching my service weapon.

  “How did you manage to hang on to that?” Ariel asked in amazement.

  I tried to mumble out a joke: “Cadaveric spasm.”

  It must have sounded to her like gibberish.

  44

  Nat Pillsbury’s lobsterboat had come to rest on its side, balanced on one of the submerged rocks it had struck. It pitched violently beneath us every time a wave crashed against the now-vertical deck. We were stretched out along the slick hull of the boat, a few feet above the water.

  I was shivering and shaking so violently you might have thought I was being electrocuted.

  “Should I take off the suit and put it on you?” Ariel asked.

  My first attempt at speech turned into a coughing jag. “You need it.”

  “Being a hero is only going to get you killed.”

  The gun slipped from my hand and began to slide along the hull. I swatted at it with my frozen paw. Ariel trapped the pistol with her foot.

  “You need to fire three shots,” I said through chattering teeth. “Like I did. Before.”

  “Three?”

  “It’s a signal. People will recognize. Five seconds.”

  “What?”

  “Between shots.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it in these gloves.” As she tried to force her thick neoprene-covered finger into the trigger guard, she unintentionally fired a round that ricocheted off the ledge fifty yards away. She dropped the gun as if it had scalded her. “Christ!”

  “Get it!”

  Once again she scrambled after my pistol.

  “Again. This time…”

  “I know, point away from the rocks.”

  “Five.”

  “Five seconds, I get it.”

  When she had finished, I patted one of the pockets of my life vest. “Put it here. Careful!”

  Ariel rubbed my arms and legs as if her intention was to chafe off the skin beneath my soaked clothes. What she didn’t understand about hypothermia was that my core temperature had fallen. Forcing rewarmed blood from the extremities back into a half-frozen heart can bring on cardiac arrest.

  “Stop.”

  “Mike, you’re not thinking clearly.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  The sea spray raining down upon us tasted of diesel fuel. I let my head loll in the direction of the ocean. The petroleum that had spilled from the engines had created a purplish-green slick around the boat.

  The flotsam and jetsam of the Sea Hag included a faded Red Sox baseball cap; an unopened bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips; another PFD, too far away to be of use; cigarette butts; empty aluminum cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Nothing that would improve our situation. The marine radio was underwater and had almost certainly short-circuited.

  I tucked my numb hands into the chest pockets of my peacoat. The wool was soaked, but it would keep me warm. My socks were made of wool, too. I tried flexing my toes with small success. It was my legs, clad in wet denim, that felt like frozen shanks of beef.

  It had been years since I’d been plunged into cold water, and now it had happened twice in two days.

  “How do you feel?” Ariel asked me.

  “Better.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  After three failed attempts, I managed to prop myself up on my elbow. The fog was continuing to break apart. Low clouds drifted above the waves, but overhead were uneven patches of blue sky. Suddenly the light began to change. I craned my neck and watched the sun emerge from the mist. Its rays touched our upraised faces.

  After a minute of basking in the warmth, Ariel said, “Is that a sailboat?”

  I opened my eyes to see light sparkling off waves. The fog was retreating before the relentless advance of the sun.

  “Where?”

  She began waving her orange arms. Then she climbed to her feet. The flooded boat wobbled, but she kept her balance. “Hey! Over here! Help!”

  A ketch was making its way toward us, its sails luffing and snapping in the breeze.

  “Who is it?” Ariel asked. “Do you know?”

  “Radcliffe.”

  The constable had remembered what I’d taught him about three shots being a distress signal.

  In that moment I forgave the son of a bitch everything.

  * * *

  Radcliffe’s boat was a beauty: mahogany on oak, bronze fastened, with a fresh coat of varnish. Its flapping sails were clean, crisp, and white. But the most beautiful thing about the Lucky Penny was that it had arrived in time to save us.

  The constable lowered his sails and engaged his motor to maneuver the ketch as close as he dared to the ledge. H
e tossed down an inflatable raft on a line, but it was too far away for Ariel to reach, and she was forced to swim out to it. She towed the raft over to the wreck of the Sea Hag. It took everything I had to belly flop into the bouncy rubber oval. I rolled over and lay on my back staring up at a sky of lapis lazuli as Andrew pulled the raft along the choppy tops of the waves.

  In no time I was beside the boat, looking up into his anxious face. “What happened? Where’s Kenneth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Once Andrew had pulled me aboard, I sat down on the side deck and began fumbling with the straps of the PFD while the constable hauled up Ariel. “Crowley tried to kill us,” she explained.

  “I don’t believe it. Why?”

  Ariel unzipped the survival suit and began shaking herself out of it. “We have no idea.”

  This wasn’t true. But I wasn’t prepared to take Radcliffe into my confidence yet, especially when I could barely form a sentence.

  The constable glanced around in the water where litter from the wrecked lobsterboat continued to float merrily along. There was no sign at all of Crowley. My buddies in the dive team had told me that a corpse will sink as soon as the residual air leaks from its lungs. It will stay submerged until it starts to decompose and its gut swells with gases.

  It would be a while before anyone saw Kenneth Crowley again.

  “He swamped the dinghy I was rowing,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s the truth,” Ariel said, standing with the orange suit around her ankles like a newly shed skin. She was remarkably dry. But you could see the stark contrast between her sea-pruned face and her tan hands. “He would have rammed us if we hadn’t taken refuge against the rocks.”

  Radcliffe ran a hand through his dark curls. “But how did he crash the boat?”

  I bent over and pulled my handgun from the pocket of the life vest. When I straightened up, I was nearly overcome by dizziness. “I distracted him.”

  “You wouldn’t have a blanket or some hot coffee would you?” Ariel said.

  “Of course. Sorry!”

  He ducked down the stairs to the cabin. Ariel sat beside me and took hold of my free hand.

  “Careful,” I said. “My fingers are starting to burn. But that’s a good thing.”

  Andrew returned with two expensive-looking wool blankets woven in a Southwestern motif. He handed one to Ariel, who, instead of taking it for herself, wrapped it around my shoulders. She tousled my damp hair and gave Radcliffe the side-eye. “What about a towel?”

  “Right!”

  Less than a minute later he returned with towels and a thermos. It contained tea, he said. All I cared about was that it was hot.

  The constable tried asking a couple more times what had precipitated Crowley’s attack on us, but Ariel was unable to offer him a satisfying answer.

  “Thank God you heard our signal,” she said, trying to move him off the subject.

  His chest swelled visibly now that she’d given him the chance to recount his heroism. “Yes, well. I was at home—we live out on John’s Point, my family and I—and I heard sort of a sharp crack, and I said to Penny, ‘Gee, that sounds like a gunshot. Doesn’t it? I wonder if someone is out at Calderwood Ledge shooting gulls. Or maybe they’re hunting sea ducks.’ It wasn’t much later that I heard Mike’s signal. I knew it was you because you’d just taught it to me. Plus I’d been looking for you earlier because…”

  His cheeks flushed apple red again.

  I blew on the steaming cup of tea. “Because what?”

  “Here, I thought you’d missed all the excitement today. The hermit came to town!”

  “Blake Markman rowed over to Maquoit?” Ariel said.

  “I know! It was a real shock. I’d glimpsed him over on Stormalong with his sheep, of course, and he’d always looked like a deranged character. So I was surprised that he was dressed in normal clothes and clean and well-spoken. He still had that rat’s nest of a beard but—”

  “Andrew,” I said, urging him to the point.

  “He was looking for Ariel. He said he’d been waiting all morning at her house. He had something he wanted to give her, he said.”

  “What was it?”

  “He wouldn’t tell us. Anyway, I thought you should know, Mike, so I asked if anyone had seen you since you came back from Dennettsville, and Sam Graffam said you’d come in the store. Chum was there, and he said you seemed agitated when he told you Ariel had gone out with Kenneth in the Sea Hag. Long story short—”

  “Too late for that,” I breathed into my mug.

  “Long story short, when I heard the signal, I put it all together—or partly together—and decided I should take the Penny out here ASAP. I’m glad now I hadn’t put it up for the winter like I’d been planning.”

  “We’re glad, too,” said Ariel. “We owe you our lives, Andrew.”

  He blushed again. “Gee.”

  I unlaced my Bean boots and dumped out the water, then wrung out my woolen socks. After I’d put my damp footwear back on, I made a show of dropping the blanket and rising to my feet.

  Ariel glowered at me. “Mike, you need to sit down.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What is it about men needing to prove how tough they are?”

  I borrowed Radcliffe’s binoculars to scan the surface of the ocean, but there was no sign of Crowley, alive or dead.

  Radcliffe raised a hand to an ear. “Do you hear that?”

  I became aware of a distant hum.

  “It sounds like a big boat,” said Radcliffe. “Not the ferry. Not the Star of the Sea either. It could be the Coast Guard.”

  Ariel said, “It’s getting louder.”

  “I know who it is,” I said. “It’s reinforcements.”

  45

  Once we had gotten clear of the ledge, Radcliffe raised his sails. Ariel assisted him. My only goal was to warm up and conserve energy. The slow rising of my core temperature had brought on all sorts of aches and pains, and my thoughts were as dull as butter knives.

  Using Andrew’s binoculars, I saw that one of the Maine Marine Patrol’s high-speed Protectors had docked at the end of the wharf where the ferry and the Star of the Sea usually tied up. I spotted two marine wardens, a man and a woman, in their green coats, khaki shirts and olive pants, hanging out on the boat. The other officers who had come with them must have hurried off into town.

  “We need to radio them,” I said. “We need to let them know about the Sea Hag.”

  “Crowley can’t possibly be alive,” said Ariel.

  “We can’t presume anything.”

  Andrew handed me his radio. I hailed the Protector and got its captain on the horn.

  Her name was Jankowski, and we had worked a few cases together when we’d both been stationed on the Midcoast. Her rank, marine patrol specialist, was an odd designation for the commanding officer of the vessel, in my opinion.

  “Fancy sailboat, Bowditch! Were you out on a Maquoit Island sunrise cruise?”

  “I wish. Do you see that ledge out there in the outer harbor?”

  “Calderwood? What about it?”

  “There’s a lobsterboat wrecked against the west side. It’s the Sea Hag.”

  “Nat Pillsbury’s boat?”

  “Nat wasn’t on board. His sternman, Kenneth Crowley, was at the helm. He misjudged his position relative to the rocks. We saw him go into the water without a PFD. We searched for him, but his body never resurfaced.”

  “Fuck.”

  I trained the binoculars on the dock as Jankowski started her boat’s twin 225-horsepower engines. Even from a distance, I could feel the roar inside the ribbed vault of my chest. It took less than a minute for the wardens to swing the craft around and accelerate off across the harbor, leaving a wake that had us all staggering like drunks when it hit the side of the Lucky Penny.

  The sailboat passed the breakwater and e
ntered the inner harbor.

  As we got near enough to the wharf to see the starfish stuck to the pilings, Andrew engaged his cruising motor. He brought the Lucky Penny alongside one of the slips that visiting boats used to tie up at the dock.

  A plane came buzzing in overhead from the southwest. “Is that your friend?” Ariel asked.

  I squinted up at the gleaming white underbelly. “That’s a Beechcraft. Charley Stevens flies a Cessna.”

  She peered at the airplane from beneath her flattened palm. “Looks like they’re coming around for a landing. Who do you think it is?”

  “Your competitors. It looks you’re not the only journalist on Maquoit anymore.”

  “And you’re not the only law enforcement officer.”

  I had to use the handrail to drag my sorry self up to the main wharf. No pickups or utility vehicles were parked on the wooden boards or in the gravel lot. I wondered whom DeFord had recruited to provide transportation.

  I would need to pass along the drugs and drug paraphernalia I’d found in Hiram’s house to Klesko, presuming the detective was on the island. But I doubted that the state police would recommend the DA prosecute Reed for possession. The district attorney would be better off pursuing the Washburns, who had dealt Hiram the dose that nearly killed him—perhaps had been intended to kill him.

  Ariel’s previously waterlogged face had regained its usual healthy glow. “Now what?”

  We were both without phones. I could have borrowed Andrew’s, but I had wanted to delay my moment of reckoning with Captain DeFord as long as I could.

  I said, “The whole island is going to hear the Sea Hag was wrecked over the VHF radio. People are going to want to help out with the search.”

  “I mean what do we do?”

  “I could use some dry clothes and a gallon of coffee.”

  “I was thinking brandy.”

  “The only brandy you’re going to find on this island is Allen’s coffee brandy.”

  “I’ve never tried it.”

  I took her arm, as much for physical support as out of friendliness. “We’ll need to remedy that. You won’t understand Maine until you’ve given it a taste.”