Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  Bella had other memories of him in this room, but none she wanted to recall. He’d died three weeks later. Lips pursed, she bent to gather up the bedspread and linens into her arms. Then, turning with them, she glanced once more into the mirror on the dresser, and her arms tightened reflexively around the bundle she held.

  Bella. That voice, that cologne whiff, that face …

  Not a dust cloth this time, or anything else she could blame it on, either. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tightened her fists, shook her head in mute rejection and denial, mingled with bone-deep fright. Please. Go away, she thought.

  Just go away, and—

  And when she opened her eyes again, he had.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Hurry,” said the young man anxiously pacing the launching ramp at the boatyard, a mile outside Eastport on Deep Cove Road.

  The young man’s name was Richard Stedman, and at his panicky phone call a couple of hours earlier Sam Tiptree had gotten there as fast as he could, unfazed by the crack-of-dawn summons or the short notice. Both were part of the job; after working on and off at the boatyard for nearly a dozen years, he’d long since become the go-to guy for all kinds of problems among boat owners.

  Not that Sam himself was impressed by that fact; boats always had some new challenge to throw at you, and past successes were no protection from future failure where they were concerned. All a guy could do was pay attention to what a vessel was telling him, he reminded himself as Richard Stedman gazed beseechingly at him, then be ready to try answering in some way that was at least halfway useful.

  “Okay, let’s just see what the trouble is,” he told Richard, now hurrying ahead down the boat ramp.

  “I already know what the trouble is.” Richard’s rubber flip-flops slap-slapped the ramp’s grooved granite-slab surface. “Damn thing’s capsizing.”

  “Yeah, well,” Sam replied, unwilling to commit himself any further than that without more information, and not about to take Richard’s word for anything, either. Because on the one hand, Richard Stedman so far had been good-humored, a hard worker, and most important, willing to listen, a trio of qualities that in Sam’s experience was uncommon among boatyard customers.

  On the other hand, though, here Richard was, running around practically barefoot in the middle of October. So we’ll see, Sam thought, still keeping an open mind about the fellow trotting ahead of him between the dock pilings.

  Here on the windy side of the island, the water bounced with a light chop, the greenish froth-topped waves still racing in the aftermath of the storm the night before. But the sky overhead was blue, only the dark gray mounds of the low-pressure system’s trailing cloud bank showing like foothills of a mountain range, to the east.

  “Just take it easy,” Sam told the worried boat owner. “So far, we don’t know anything.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Richard groused, but amicably enough under the circumstances. “You mean you don’t know.”

  Fair comment; Courtesan was tied up outside the farthest corner of the long T-shaped dock. Sam hadn’t seen her since the last time Richard had dragged him down here, four hours earlier.

  What he did know, though, was that it made him happy to be here at all: on or near the water, among the boats and even among their beleaguered owners. It was a knowledge he’d gone through a lot to obtain, trying and failing at college, trade schools, even online correspondence courses.

  But none of them had worked, and he’d drifted aimlessly and unhappily for a while before realizing: he could do this. And not only could he do it, but he was good at it. The only thing wrong with living and working right here in Eastport, in fact, was the lack of female companionship; most of the women his age were taken, and of the ones who weren’t, either they didn’t want him or he didn’t want them.

  “See?” Richard said, pointing. “She’s going down.”

  “Huh,” Sam replied, understanding now as he caught fresh sight of Richard’s recently purchased vessel at last. The way she moved in the water, sluggish and tubby looking, contrasted sharply with her bright, jaunty attitude of earlier in the day. And her rail, riding a foot or so closer to the waves than it had been …

  “Oh, yeah, that’s …” Bad. His voice trailed off as he sized up the situation and realized that it was dire.

  “Going down,” Richard repeated gloomily. “Isn’t she?”

  In his late twenties, he was about five-eight and compactly built, with small but solid-looking muscles, thick, curly yellow hair, and the deeply tanned complexion of a man with the freedom to have spent much of the previous summer outdoors.

  Not exactly a veteran sailor, Sam had already decided, but Richard was definitely correct about one thing: from the look of her at the moment, his boat was about to become an underwater activity.

  “Yeah,” Sam conceded. “You’ve got problems, all right.”

  He strode farther along the dock, then knelt on it, peering over Courtesan’s rail and into her hatch. The twenty-four-foot fiberglass yawl Richard had bought used a few days before floated parallel to the dock—if you could call what she was doing floating.

  Even capsizing wasn’t the right word; sinking, actually, was more like it. Sam stood and thought for a moment, gazing back toward shore. Now at low tide, the storm-scoured beach extending a quarter mile on either side of the dock was a curving crescent of smooth, gleaming stones.

  But at high tide, the water had been twenty feet higher, leftover waves from last night’s big blow swamping the dock and tossing thick mats of seaweed and driftwood right up into the boatyard’s gravel parking lot. Which meant that now the water was getting deeper again as the tide came back in.

  Richard shot Sam a hopeful glance. “I figured you’d know what to do,” he ventured.

  Sam didn’t reply. Five years ago he’d have enjoyed the flattery, even milked Richard for more. But back then he’d been a twenty-year-old kid whose youthful energy and odd natural talent for boats were getting submerged in a sea of alcohol.

  Not that he’d lacked excuses: years before that, his mom had been a financial manager on Wall Street, with little time—or natural talent, either—for chasing after a small boy. Her own upbringing had been nightmare material, too, so had it been any wonder she’d had no idea how to raise her own kid?

  Meanwhile, his dad had been a well-respected brain surgeon, the kind you went to when all the other brain surgeons started talking to you about hospice. As a surgeon he was the equivalent of a tightly focused, freakishly accurate laser. But as a dad he’d been more like a brick through a plate-glass window, when he was around at all.

  In the end, Sam’s father had died of an octopus-shaped mass that he’d joked must have formed inside his skull as revenge for the many other tumors he’d killed—that is, before he became unable to joke at all. Sam sometimes wondered if he would ever be able to forgive his dad, or if instead he would carry the memory of Victor’s long-term neglect mingled with his own helpless love for the man, like an albatross around his neck forever.

  Today, he realized; today’s his deathiversary. “Sam?”

  The voice jerked Sam back to the present, and to Richard Stedman still standing there looking at him like a puppy hoping not to be kicked.

  “So what do you think?” Richard asked. His voice didn’t sound hopeful. Not that it should have, even if his boat hadn’t been on its way down to Davy Jones’s locker.

  Hope, Sam knew, was a feeling reserved for the boat-buying process and its immediate, euphoric aftermath. Once the deal was done, other emotions kicked in: rage, sorrow, despair. If a new boat-owner was lucky and had any skill, his feelings didn’t end up including the gut-twisting terror that accompanied drowning.

  “Not sure,” Sam temporized, reluctant to voice the bad news. Richard had hauled the boat down here to the slip he’d rented, he’d told Sam, to get her shipshape while enjoying the natural surroundings: granite cliffs, a thickly forested shore, and the rocky beaches that were all you could see from the dock, p
lus of course the water itself.

  Courtesan wasn’t quite ready to sail, Richard had admitted, but he’d thought that he could motor her around in calm weather, using the seven-and-a-half-horse Evinrude on her transom. Now, though …

  “Doomed, isn’t she?” Richard repeated.

  Sam had liked the look of Courtesan, even at first sight. A lot of used boats had sat unloved in someone’s backyard for too long, their decks showing the imprints of the autumn leaves left to pile up on them and their teak trim cracked with neglect.

  But Courtesan had been well kept, and she’d floated when she slid off the trailer Richard had bought for her; some preowned vessels didn’t. Sam had congratulated the new skipper on the deal he’d made, suggesting that if Richard needed any help getting her seaworthy, Sam and the boatyard equipment were available.

  Then he’d handed Richard his card, not expecting to hear any more about it. The urgent call this morning had been a surprise, but also a false alarm; bilges were supposed to have water in them, Sam had informed an embarrassed Richard.

  But a little while ago when Sam’s cellphone rang again up at the boatyard office, Richard had sounded like the world was ending, and now his face sagged with dismay. And this time the alarm was well founded. Sam turned to gauge how difficult it might be to get Courtesan out of here, if she could be rescued at all.

  Set on poured concrete pilings, the dock stuck out from the boat ramp a hundred yards into Deep Cove, another pair of floating T-sections extending left and right from the end of the main pier. The floating sections were tied to the main structure by a series of heavy chains secured around steel posts, so the floats could rise and fall with the tide.

  Metal gangs led down to the weathered wooden decking on the floats, all bouncing rhythmically with a soft musical clanking of their chains and creak of wood rubbing against wet wood. For boats that were operating properly, the whole setup worked conveniently and well. But when they weren’t, obstacles posed by the dock’s various elements got problematic.

  Like now; Sam stepped aboard the distressed sailboat, unable to help seeing a cartoon dialogue balloon floating over her.

  Glub, glub, the dialogue in the balloon said. “Except for my little bilge-water scare, she was okay when I got down here this morning. But now …” Richard spread his hands.

  Yeah, now was the problem. The bad feeling Sam already had got worse once he was aboard. Even if she hadn’t been riding so low—wallowing like a sow, as the older guys at the boatyard would’ve put it—the way she felt under his feet would’ve told him at once that she was ailing.

  A boat this size ought to have a brisk, lively feel to her, the sense that she could lift up and skim, almost like a kite, if given the opportunity in the form of wind. But this one felt duly reluctant, as if she had a bad headache.

  Or was filling up with seawater. Sam wondered if the rain squalls embedded in the recent storm had flooded Courtesan—say, if her hatch had leaked via a bad seal, or hadn’t been secured properly. Or, alternatively, if just possibly her new owner had damaged her somehow while trying to work on her.

  It happened. “Pump?” Sam asked. He carefully kept any hint of criticism out of his voice.

  Richard looked away. Out on the water a barge chugged toward the Canadian island of Campobello, loaded with fish-food pellets for the salmon-farming operation over there.

  “I think the pump’s okay. Battery’s dead, though. It was all right last night when I left, but …”

  No need for comment; Richard’s face said he already knew that if the pump had been hooked to a working battery, it would not have mattered how much water Courtesan took on. The pump’s motor would’ve switched on automatically when the flooding rose enough to activate it, and pumped the boat out.

  “Yeah, well. It happens.” Pumps had a way of failing just when you needed them. “Water under the bridge now,” Sam said. Or in this case, in the boat. He peered down through the hatch into the boat’s tiny cabin, which, like her exterior, was in need of some cosmetics: patching and painting, mostly. Then from the new life vest, foam cooler, and gas can that Richard had left aboard overnight, Sam got a clue, especially as he thought about what he would want to do if he were Richard and he had just put Courtesan in the water.

  “So you were going to take her out? Motor around the cove a little, maybe?”

  “If I could get the engine running,” Richard agreed glumly. “But as it turned out, I never even got that far. Couldn’t get the centerboard down.”

  In the floor of the cabin gaped an opening, awash with oily water. Down in the hole, hung on a sort of hinge and not visible from above, was Courtesan’s centerboard, like a big fin that stuck down from the bottom of the hull. The centerboard gave the craft stability by lowering her center of gravity; it kept the boat on course when she was headed upwind.

  But sometimes you wanted to raise the centerboard; when, for instance, you were motoring into some shallow harbor, sailing downwind, or pulling her on a trailer as Richard had, to get her here. The centerboard would’ve been up then, and although you could motor around fine without it, Richard hadn’t known that.

  “So you haven’t had the centerboard down at all?” A stuck centerboard was a common occurrence in a boat that had sat for a while. The board itself could warp or swell, and bind inside its housing, or the lever it moved on could get jammed.

  “No. Couldn’t budge it,” Richard said.

  A sudden roar from a slip at the far end of the dock cut through the morning calm; steady boatyard client Bud Underwood was out there, starting up the nifty little Cessna 150 two-seater he’d recently converted to a floatplane. As the aircraft pulled away from the dock pilings she’d been tethered to, Sam had a moment to wish very hard that he was on it; this day was going downhill even faster than Bud took off, soaring over the cove.

  Then Sam noticed more stuff lying on the dock. While Sam had been examining the deck and cabin, Richard had apparently run all the way up to his car, where it was parked in the boatyard lot, and returned with a wet suit, swim fins, and a snorkel mask.

  “I was thinking that I’d go down and check the hull,” Richard explained. Underwater, he meant, and at this time of year the water here was about fifty-five degrees, a bone-chilling temperature that even the wet suit wouldn’t do a lot to temper.

  Sam eyed Richard with new respect. The unhappy would-be sailor might be new at this, but he had game and he’d definitely brought it with him today. So Sam hated to disappoint him.

  But he had no choice. “Listen, when you were trying to get the centerboard free, did you poke anything down there? A pole, a stick, anything?”

  People did. A frozen centerboard could be so infuriating, it was tempting to drop a stick of dynamite down there, sometimes. Sam thought that might end up being the cheapest solution to the difficulty, in the present case; just not right here by the dock.

  Richard’s pale skin flushed. “Yeah. An iron rod. I thought if I smacked the centerboard mechanism hard enough, I could—” His face changed, sudden understanding flooding it. “I did it, didn’t I? I poked a hole through. Right through the—”

  “Through the hull, yeah.” An expression of such misery washed over Richard’s face that Sam had to add, “Look, you didn’t know.”

  Richard’s shoulders sagged under his U. Michigan T-shirt. He looked for a moment as if he might cry. But then, to his credit, he straightened. “Okay, so what do I do about it?”

  Again, he hadn’t asked Sam what he was going to do; instead he’d taken it on himself. But his rough-and-ready attitude wasn’t going to keep the boat afloat unless they both took fast action.

  And maybe not even then. Sam guessed that Courtesan, her mast up but her sails at least hauled and stowed, had about an hour before the water she was taking on sank her.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. “We need to get her back up on land right away,” he said.

  Because the tide was still rising, twenty feet of it at its highes
t point. Which meant that Courtesan could end up submerged completely, only her mast jutting up through the waves to mark where she’d sunk. “Like, pulled out of here.”

  Richard gave him a look: No kidding. “How?” he asked, not to Sam but to the rising sea, the dark stones gleaming on the beach, and the sky arcing over their heads like a blue bowl.

  Now you’re getting it, Sam thought, because owning a boat meant being at the mercy of those things.

  “I’m still not sure. What you should do now, though, is go up to the boatyard office, tell them we have a bit of trouble down here.”

  Which, Sam thought, was probably the kind of understatement his dad used to come out with when some poor guy he was operating on started bleeding or having seizures or some other complication that was almost surely catastrophic: a bit of trouble.

  Richard didn’t know it yet, but he was in serious danger of spending a whole lot of money in a very short time, in the very immediate future, because a water-filled sailboat was not a cheap thing to drag up out of the drink. The crane alone ran a hundred and fifty an hour.

  “You go, will you?” Richard was pulling on his dive gear. “I still just want to have a look.”

  Sam understood. Richard hoped that below Courtesan’s steadily lowering waterline, he might find something less disastrous than a breached hull. Given the history Richard had described, that was unlikely, but Sam supposed that if it were his boat he’d want to go down there, too, just to see for himself what was what.

  He also supposed that most of Richard’s previous diving had been in warmer water. But at least he wasn’t being a crybaby about it, and anyway, Sam had no business trying to stop him.

  Thinking this, Sam sprinted away up the dock toward the parking lot. Straight ahead lay the whole boat school campus, a sprawling collection of low metal Quonsets housing classrooms interspersed with gigantic garage-like structures where all kinds of vessels were built and repaired, plus a wide paved parking lot. To his right stretched the big evergreen-forested peninsula of Shackford Head State Park.