Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  BLACK SWAN

  OTHER TITLES BY CHRIS KNOPF

  A SAM ACQUILLO HAMPTONS MYSTERY

  CHRIS KNOPF BLACK SWAN

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to any person, living or dead, is merely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Knopf, Chris-

  Black swan / Chris Knopf.

  2. Sailing Fiction. 3. Hotels Fiction. 4. Fishers Island

  (N.Y.: Island)-Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3611.N66B57 2011

  813'.6-dc22 2011003132

  Printed in the United States of America.

  J

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In the "without whom this would not be possible" category, thanks to Tim Hannon, my friend of fifty-five years and colorful native guide to Fishers Island. Thanks to Kip Wiley for nautical knowledge and Cindy Courtney for legal language and general counsel. Special thanks to the software development demons at Mintz & Hoke: John Yeager, Don Ross, Michael Perry, Andy Turon and Mark Bonet. High fives to keen-eyed and thoughtful readers Bob Willemin, Sean Cronin and Randy Costello. Eternal gratitude to Judy Shepard, with the best editorial mind in the land (along with Marty, her co-conspirator).

  As always, Anne-Marie Regish for logistical support and Mary Farrell, who has come to regard her husband's conversations with imaginary people as perfectly natural.

  (

  I tell myself the same thing when I climb a tall ladder. Don't look down.

  But I did anyway, looking over the starboard side of the sailboat as we sped up the side of a particularly steep wave. The distance from the cockpit to the bottom of the trough looked impossibly vast and untraversable. I jerked the wheel up into the incline of the wave and held on. The bow shot into the air, then drifted almost languidly down the other side, mocking my initial alarm, until the force of the next wave snatched up the stern and shoved the Carpe Mariana into another furious wall of water.

  Only an immediate spin of the wheel to port saved us from broaching, though we hit the wave hard enough to cover the boat from bow to dodger-the canvas and plastic windscreen protecting the cockpit-in foamy green water.

  With typical understatement, the nautical term for this kind of wave action is 'confused.' I'd have called it enraged, or maybe psychotic.

  "That was interesting," Amanda yelled up from below.

  'qbat's nothing," I yelled back. 'We're just getting started."

  She hoisted herself up the stairs that led down to the boat's living quarters. She wore brilliant orange foul-weather clothing that did nothing for her slim, winsome figure.

  I reached around the wheel and clipped a tether to her inflatable harness, then gently shoved her down into the cockpit.

  "So this is a milk run," said Amanda, as she wedged herself against the bulkhead. "What's a storm like?"

  "Okay, NOAA got it wrong. Sometimes they do," I shouted through a spray of saltwater. "October's a tricky time of year."

  NOAA, short for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

  Administration (as if you could administer the oceans and atmosphere), the source of all weather forecasting, had a dirty little secret: it rarely had a clue what was happening on Long Island Sound until it was already happening, and not always then, which meant a lot less prediction than reportage.

  "You've become a NOAA apologist."

  "If we live through this, I'll write a disappointed letter," I said.

  "I thought you said sailboats can't sink."

  "Hold that thought."

  I'd told her it's really hard to sink a sailboat, but not impossible. You need just the right combination of circumstances-lots of wind, sharp wave angle, a lousy boat and a lousier helmsman. The boat felt solid and responsive, which didn't surprise me, handpicked as it was by my friend Burton Lewis, who knew boats like mothers knew their kids. The helmsman was the only unconfirmed variable, and though I'd had my share of sloppy water and crappy weather, this was something different.

  Amanda snatched the handheld two-way VHF radio out of its cradle and started working the controls. I adjusted my purchase on the molded teak slats that secured my butt and turned through another set of nasty waves.

  The NOAA marine weather station reported, without apology, a revised forecast. The mechanized female voice said the wind had shifted to the northeast and was building to a steady thirty-five to forty knots, with gusts to sixty. Wave heights were now expected to be six to eight feet, which in my experience meant eight feet and up. The small craft advisory of the morning, when we'd set out well before dawn from Point Judith, Rhode Island, was now a somber gale force warning, insisting that whatever idiot small craft were still out on the water get the hell to the nearest port, as if we weren't desperately trying to do just that.

  For the next several hours we concentrated on our individual responsibilities. Amanda was charged with staying in the boat and trying not to shriek when the boat leaned over enough to drop the rail in the water, or when a gush of sea spray hit the dodger with the force of a fire hose.

  I was supposed to keep us from drowning. They say in a bad storm the people on board will wear out long before the boat, and I think that's true. It's hard to believe in the durability of your craft while a real storm is fully underway.

  As I put all my strength and weight into the wheel one second, and then let it whirl between my gloved hands the next, it seemed impossible that any useful end was being served by human agency, that the boat was in some conspiracy with the sea and wanted to give me only the illusion of control.

  And the water, it was everywhere: washing across the bow, blasting into the dodger, sloshing in over the transom to swirl around my feet until it drained out the scuppers on the cockpit floor. Which would have been far more bearable if it wasn't for the rain, driving in from the port bow, stinging my face and ruining my vision.

  Exhausted by her efforts to sustain both emotional balance and solid handholds, Amanda turned quiet, her beautiful face a mask of taut misery.

  I began to realize much of our forward momentum involved surfing down breaking ten foot waves. I'm not much of a swimmer, but I'd done my share of bodysurfing as a kid, so a sense of how to finesse the build-up to the break, and then the turbulent, barely-controllable ride down the other side of the wave was encrypted in my memory.

  My back ached from standing and my arms complained with every spin of the wheel, but there was nothing to be done about it. All the while, I expected things to improve, but they kept getting worse. This is Fishers Island Sound, for God's sake, I said to myself. It's not the Southern Ocean. I wanted to check in with NOAA again, but knew it would mean nothing. Confirming that we were in a freak shit storm wouldn't help get us out of it.

  I threw the boat up into another sharp rise to port, only to pull her back to starboard on the way down, barely in time to avoid a boiling mass of seawater from joining us in the cockpit.

  "I guess you can't just make it go in a nice straight line," said Amanda, pulling herself up off the cockpit floor where the last set of waves had tossed her.

  "If only I were a better sailor."

  "You have other qualities," said Amanda. "Give me a moment and I'll come up with a few."

  "It's that hard?"

  "You have an unusual dog."

  She meant Eddie, the midsized, shepherd-based mutt who was still below, blissfully knocked out with a hit of Benadryl and secured in a crew
berth by a heavy piece of acrylic canvas called a lee cloth. It was a precaution brought on not by his fearing the storm, but of loving it too much. He was the same way in the car. The faster I went and more erratically I drove, the more he liked it. I felt a little bad depriving him of the fun, but I couldn't bear the constant barking demand that he come topside just to get washed overboard.

  Another complication was the ongoing need to check our position on the GPS. It only took a few moments in that kind of weather to lose our course, costing vital time to port, or worse, putting ourselves in even more dangerous conditions.

  In what amounted to a literal saving grace, the best angle on the wind also put us on a straight line directly into West Harbor on Fishers Island, a destination I'd hoped to reach at some point under less desperate circumstances. Any deviation to the north, where I'd planned to go that day, would expose our starboard bow to breaking waves, any to the south would send us into the rocks at the eastern end of Fishers, or out to sea, with only Block Island between us and a very irritable ocean.

  An hour later, as I negotiated the various rocks, buoys and shoals of Fishers Island Sound, I felt a slight sense of deliverance-with the island's land mass on our port and West Harbor on our bow, it was only a matter of enduring the nearly unendurable before we reached safety.

  That feeling lasted until the cable that connected the helm to the rudder decided to snap. Then all bets were off.

  As I spun the impotent wheel in stunned disbelief, the boat responded as engineered, by driving up into the wind. In gentler conditions, this would be welcomed, since it would stall forward momentum and settle things into a manageable drift until help arrived. Now it meant we were brainlessly turning into the fury of the following seas, offering the broad length of the boat to whatever vindictive forces lay in wait.

  As the boat pitched sideways, I went flying. Amanda screamed and grabbed at my foulies, both of us at the extreme lengths of our tethers. I hit the coaming that surrounded the cockpit hard enough to knock the wind out of me for a moment, but nothing broke. As the boat slapped over on its side, we held on to each other and strained to stay above the water pouring into the cockpit.

  Then, as if by magic, the Carpe Mariana righted herself, as all good sailboats are trained to do, and we had a few seconds reprieve.

  As the boarding seas slowly drained out the scuppers, I wrenched open a compartment in the cockpit called a lazarette and yanked out the emergency tiller, which through some bit of divine luck I'd noticed on my own during the otherwise thorough check-out of the boat when we picked her up in Maine. The next trick was to get it lodged in the fitting below the helmsman's seat. The fitting was covered by a tidy little fiberglass cap removable by unscrewing two big Phillips head screws. This would be a difficult task in the rough weather, so I chose a more expedient route and punched out the cap with a sharp snap of my right fist.

  A regular person, one who hadn't had a brief career as a professional boxer, would have broken his hand with a stunt like that, and done nothing to remove the cap. I, however, obliterated the cap. And broke my hand.

  Not the whole hand. Just the bone behind the knuckle of my middle finger. It hurt like hell, but I could still work my fingers, which would have to do until things improved.

  Seconds before another wave had a chance to shove the boat under water, I fixed the emergency rudder to the fitting and pulled as hard as I could to port. This had the effect of shoving us to starboard and getting the bow facing the direction it needed to be if we were going to arrive at West Harbor as something more than a tangled mass of irredeemable salvage.

  As we rode the hurtling seas, I felt almost airborne. I stole a glance at the GPS, which showed a speed over ground of nine-and-a-half knots, with a fleeting moment at ten point two. That the boat's maximum theoretical hull speed was eight point five told me something.

  The handle of the emergency tiller was about half the length it should have been to provide the necessary leverage to steer a 46' custom sloop in ideal conditions. Based on the tidy, elegant way it was stowed inside the lazarette, the boat designer had probably seen it as a cute accessory that would look good in the brochure under the heading: STANDARD SAFETY EQUIPMENT.

  The other challenge was to adjust to the ass-backwards logic of a tiller, wherein pulling to the right makes the boat go left. The boat flirted with another knockdown as I reconciled a few thousand new operational variables, but eventually I regained the mental state that had almost brought us to safety, back in the good old days before we lost the wheel.

  As the struggle continued, I was again haunted by the notion that a boat can always handle more abuse than its human cargo. I was feeling the evidence of that, in my arms, back and hands, which were steadily losing their grip. I was in fairly good shape for a fifty-seven-year-old, and working as a carpenter had actually improved my hand strength. But manhandling 32,000 pounds of displacement through the agitator cycle of a giant washing machine, for ten hours straight, would eventually take its toll on anybody.

  I was fading.

  My first thought was to have Amanda relieve me, but that wasn't a possibility. She was a strong girl, and ever willing to tackle whatever came her way, but this was technical sailing at its most extreme. Even I wasn't qualified to deal with conditions like this. She was just learning how to steer a sailboat, which every novice instantly learns is nothing like steering a car. And now we were running with an inadequate tiller that would have tested the patience and resolve of Bernard Moitessier. It wasn't going to happen. But there was something she could do.

  "Hey, good looking," I yelled to her.

  "Yeah?"

  "Come over here and cozy up to me."

  "Anytime, sailor."

  "Stay clipped."

  I switched over to the port side of the helmsman's seat and asked her to sit on the starboard. Then I explained the basic concept.

  "When I tell you, push like hell against the tiller. When I tell you to stop, stop. When I tell you to pull, pull. Etcetera."

  "I think I can follow that."

  "I apologize in advance for yelling," I said. "Timing is crucial here."

  "I won't hold it against you. As long as you don't yell, like, at me."

  "Never, darling," I yelled.

  This worked reasonably well, though I had to add a command, "Hands off," since she had the natural tendency to grip the tiller in anticipation of the next maneuver. The command was actually "Hands off, gorgeous" as a way of preserving civility, a prerequisite for our delicately maintained romantic entanglement.

  And thus we found an effective rhythm, and Amanda earned a priceless insight into the Zen of steering a sailboat through heavy weather, a matter defined more by instinct than conscious thought.

  There's no better proof that time can be slowed to a crawl. Time and space, as I watched the northern coast of Fishers Island seemingly fixed in place as we roared through the wrathful seas.

  "When do I get to ask 'Are we there yet?"' Amanda asked.

  "When we're there. Pull."

  Soon after that exchange, I realized the grey green hump I thought was a piece of the distant Connecticut shoreline was North Dumpling, a small island just past the mouth of West Harbor. I told Amanda to keep the tiller right in the middle no matter what happened, and checked the GPS.

  We were less than twenty feet from a cluster of rocks. I snatched the tiller back and shoved us hard to port. The Carpe Mariana groaned under the strain of the sudden course change, but then catching the thrust of the next wave, she shot off in the new direction like it was all her idea. I reminded myself that Fishers Island Sound was full of lethal obstructions, above and below water, and that God had given the world GPS so fools like me had an easy way to avoid catastrophe. All I had to do was check it once in a while.

  As we passed the rocky shoal, I saw the white buoy that under normal circumstances would have given even the unobservant fair warning. It was only visible for a few seconds at a time, helpless against th
e battering of the big water.

  Now thoroughly oriented, I looked for the giant red bell buoy that marked the beginning of the channel into West Harbor. That is, I looked when we were at the top of a wave, with a quarter-mile view across the white and grey chop. Seconds later we'd be down in a trough, facing a wall of water that any rational person would presume was within an instant of smashing us into oblivion. But then the next second we'd be aloft again, on top of a world gone mad.

  I checked the GPS again, wondering if I was seeing things clearly through my exhaustion and the spray of saltwater and pelting rain.

  "Where is that goddamned buoy?"

  "Don't goddamned know, Captain," said Amanda. "I don't goddamn know where any goddamn thing is anymore."

  So often on the water you come to doubt the evidence of your own eyes, or the accuracy of your electronics, or the reckoning of your navigation. It's not like the reality of hard ground, where things are usually where they're supposed to be, and the surface isn't a sickening mass of unpredictable undulations.

  "No," I said to my senses. "It's there ahead. It has to be."

  "Maybe somebody moved it," said Amanda, trying to help.

  "Impossible," I said, and to prove the point, there it was, suddenly directly in front of our boat, rising up through the foam like a watery red demon, having been knocked over and drowned momentarily in the churning waves.

  This time I chose to go to starboard, for no other reason than I was afraid the opposite thrust of the tiller would crush Amanda. Either way, it didn't seem possible that we could avoid crashing into the buoy. I started to make a silent accounting of life preservers, what clothing would have to come off to maintain buoyancy and how I'd keep Eddie's snout above the water. Also, calculating the odds that any of us could swim in the cold, lunatic waters to Flat Hammock, another island that helped define West Harbor, and once there, manage our way through the rocky shore to terra firma.