Death in a Cold Hard Light

by Francine Mathews

  “I wonder,” he replied, amused. “Do you know why the scallops are declining?”

  “No,” Merry admitted, somewhat chastened. “But fish populations have always run in cycles. Some years are good, some are bad.”

  Harley snorted. “Well, that explains a hell of a lot.”

  “Okay. You’re the biologist. You tell me.”

  “Nitrogen,” he said flatly. He sat down again on the sofa. “Woods Hole did a big study of the harbor in ‘95, and another report is due out next spring. According to their findings, the harbor water is polluted from two main sources—decomposing sewage leaching from the island’s septic systems into the groundwater, and fertilizer runoff from the summer people’s lawns.”

  “And the scallops are poisoned by it?”

  “Not exactly. Nitrogen causes a bloom of phytoplankton in the water itself. The phytoplankton block sunlight from the harbor floor and decrease the oxygen supply in the water. Vegetation on the bottom dies and rots, sending even more nitrogen into the water. Which spurs all the phytoplankton, that take all the oxygen…”

  “… that live in the house that Jack built,” Merry finished impulsively. “So the scallops are suffocating?”

  Harley shook his head. “Not exactly. But their habitat is. Scallops set—or affix their young shells—to eelgrass growing on the harbor floor.”

  “And it’s the eelgrass that is dying.”

  “Exactly. So the scallop spawn has nowhere to go. Worse, the septic seepage has encouraged a particular type of phytoplankton, known as brown tide, that fouls the feeding systems of shellfish. It literally chokes them. You don’t dive, by any chance?”

  Merry shook her head.

  “If you did, you’d be appalled at the state of the harbor bottom. There’s a creeping mat of brown algae, most of it trapped in the bends over on Coatue.” This was the barrier beach that formed the upper hook of Nantucket harbor, once a breeding ground for the great scallop beds of old. “We’re bringing it up all over the scallop shells.”

  “How bad is the die-off?”

  “Pretty devastating.” Harley rose, crossed to one of the bookshelves, and pulled out a file folder. The remoteness was gone from his light-colored eyes; they were intent and focused. “In the early eighties, Nantucket averaged close to forty-four thousand bushels of scallops per year. In 1995, the harvest plummeted to just under thirty-four hundred. God knows how bad it’ll be this winter. It’s looking thinner every day.”

  “But that’s terrible! If the scallops are dying, so is everything else!”

  “Naturally. Or unnaturally, I suppose.”

  “Do people know?” she asked, groping.

  “It was in the paper last May,” Harley said grimly, “but I’m never convinced that people read the newspaper, or believe it, if they do.”

  Last May, Merry had been able to spare very little time from Elizabeth Osborne’s skeleton. An article on leaky septic tanks would hardly have caught her eye.

  “The Shellfish and Harbor Advisory Board is trying to discourage the use of lawn fertilizer on properties surrounding the harbor—Pocomo, Monomoy, Shawkemo. But most of the problem is due to septic fields, and they’re difficult to police. So many of the properties are seasonal, with high use four months of the year and complete disuse the remainder. Most septic problems go undetected.”

  “This makes me ill,” Merry said. “I swim off Jetties all the time. Am I swimming in sewage?”

  “Not really.” Harley shrugged. “It’s the harbor—the more contained water—that’s at risk. There’s a plan under consideration to dredge it, and improve the tidal flow. The Sound near Jetties is less affected. I wouldn’t worry about swimming. This is nitrogen we’re talking about, not feces.”

  “Still,” Merry argued, “I’m never going to feel quite the same about eating a scallop.”

  “Enjoy them while you can. Your children may never see them.” He smiled sadly. “Hey, I understand how you feel. I grew up here. My dad owned a trawler, back in the fifties.”

  “When it was still possible to fish out of an island port. Did you ever know the Duartes? Captain Joe, and his daughter Del?”

  Owen Harley frowned. “I can’t say that I did. But we moved to Gloucester when I was ten. If I remember anyone, it’s, the men who crewed for my father. The Duartes were friends of yours?”

  “Yes,” Merry said heavily, “but they’re both gone now.” She thought of Del’s strong-featured face, the competence of her hands when they held a harpoon, and felt a surge of pain. At least Del’s daughter, Sarah, had escaped. She would be almost five now, Merry realized—starting kindergarten on the mainland next fall.

  “I never forgot Nantucket,” Harley was saying. “Everything—my work, my inclination—led me back here. But I wouldn’t want to depend on fishing for a living. There’s not much of a future in it.”

  With an effort, Merry turned her thoughts once more to Jay Santorski. “So your mate was studying the decline of the harbor.”

  “Ayeh.” Harley pored over his file folder once more, scanning and turning pages. “We were scalloping, of course, and selling the mature ones we found—but we never hit our limit. The limit, by the way, is five boxes a day, or about fifty pounds of shucked scallops, and nobody has hit it in weeks. Jay and I spent a lot of our time taking field observations and data. Charting the destruction of the eelgrass beds. And the data are pretty depressing.”

  Merry reached in her purse and withdrew a plastic bag. Inside was the piece of paper she had found in the dead man’s bedroom, unfolded so that its words were clearly visible. “Would this have anything to do with Jay’s work?”

  Owen took the bundle and squinted at the paper it contained “It’s his handwriting, certainly. Where did you find this?”

  “In the canvas carrier strapped on the back of his racing bike.”

  Harley looked bewildered.

  “The bike was in his room. Did Jay race, by the way, Mr. Harley?”

  “He liked to enter triathlons in the spring and summer, but lately he only used the bike to train. He didn’t have much time to ride, and the weather’s been pretty lousy.”

  “Would he have raced this past week? On the mainland?”

  “I doubt it. Why?”

  “I also found a stub for round-trip ferry passage to Hyannis, dated Wednesday.”

  “Hyannis? Jay went to Hyannis on Wednesday? I had no idea.”

  “He didn’t mention it?”

  “No. Although he asked for the day off from scalloping. I figured he had to work at the Mayhew House.”

  “You’ll notice that Wednesday is written on that paper, as well, in reference to something called the Albatross IV.”

  Harley glanced once more at the sheet of notebook paper. “The Albatross IV is a research vessel—operated by the Fisheries people out of Woods Hole.”

  “Woods Hole. That’s a fair piece from Hyannis.”

  He shrugged. “Fifteen, twenty miles, maybe. A good training run for Jay.”

  “You think he went to meet the boat?”

  “Or someone on it.” Harley’s brow furrowed. “Maybe Mel Taylor.”

  “He’s with—Fisheries, did you say? Is that part of the Oceanographic Institute?”

  “Institution,” Harley corrected. “No. Fisheries is under the Department of Commerce—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is private money—lots of it. The Rockefellers started WHOI, I think, and it’s always had a slightly elitist air.” He tapped the plastic-covered paper. “That’d be what Jay means, here, by Rinehart Coastal. The Rinehart Coastal Research Center falls under WHOI.”

  Jargon, like the paper itself. Merry shook her head. “You’ve lost me. What has that got to do with the Albatross IV?”

  Harley grinned apologetically, his first suggestion of good humor. “Woods Hole is confusing. Probably on purpose. There are four different organizations doing biology within a half mile of oceanfront,
all of them claiming to be the Woods Hole, and vying for grant attention. But I can clarify Jay’s interest at least. His senior thesis advisor, Mel Taylor, is on sabbatical from Harvard this semester—at the Rinehart Coastal Research Center. Taylor spent the last month at sea, on the Albatross IV, by special arrangement with Fisheries.”

  “A light breaks,” Merry replied, with an air of disappointment. “So this was just a reminder to meet Taylor’s boat. It’s not significant at all.”

  “But Jay must have had a reason for going to Woods Hole,” Harley objected. “Nobody spends four and a half hours, round-trip, on a ferry—and several more on the back of a bike—just to say, Welcome back.”

  “Does the rest of that paper mean anything to you?”

  Harley studied the cryptic lines again. “Larval tigers—that might refer to tigerback scallops. But as for the viral morph business, I’ve no idea what he means.”

  “Probably the senior thesis,” Merry mused, “and he needed to discuss it with this Mel Taylor.”

  “I don’t think so.” Owen ran his finger over the penciled scrawl at the paper’s lower edge. “That looks to me like a sketch of the Horseshed—that’s a bit of land across the harbor, where there used to be major scallop grounds. And tigerbacks—if that’s what Jay meant—are specific to Nantucket. They were bred here.”

  “Are tigerbacks found in the Horseshed?”

  “And elsewhere around the harbor.” Owen continued to stare at the paper, brows knit, his face wearing the same intent expression his scallop file had demanded.

  “Well—thanks. That’s some help.” Merry held out her hand, and after an instant, he returned the plastic bag. But she could see he did so only reluctantly. Half his mind was worrying at the puzzle.

  “You called the data about the harbor depressing, Mr. Harley. Was Jay depressed?”

  “Jay? Not at all. He was nursing a broken heart, of course—but what college kid isn’t?”

  “For someone here?”

  “Someone at Harvard, I think. He jumped at the chance to leave when I offered it to him. But here on Nantucket—he seemed pretty happy to me.”

  “Did he intend to go back to Harvard next year?”

  “Yes. And to graduate school at MIT after that. They have a joint program with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.”

  Merry considered this. “Any idea, then, why he might have turned to drugs?”

  The eyes slid away and the stiffness returned. “None whatsoever.”

  “One last question, Mr. Harley,” Merry said as she rose to leave. “How did you feel about Mr. Santorski?”

  He hesitated. “I respected him. He had a good brain. He was a hard worker.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “I must have. I asked him to come over here for the winter, didn’t I?”

  But even Owen Harley didn’t sound convinced.

  Chapter Eleven

  Howie was waiting for Merry in front of Old North Wharf. The patrolman was reducing a spherical bullet of ice cream to something like soft-serve through the consistent application of pressure from the back of a spoon. Merry shivered at the sight.

  “How can you eat that stuff today? Is it from Crazy Quinn’s?” This was her favorite ice cream place, conveniently located a few steps from the police station on Water Street. “Give me a bite.”

  He complied obediently, and she shivered again. “Thanks. Now tell me what you learned.”

  Howie set down the ice cream cup and pulled out his notebook. “Talked to five people, all told. Probably three more houses on the wharf are occupied—weekend renters spending freely on Main Street at the moment. Nobody heard anything, except one woman who lives all the way at the wharf’s end in the cute little cottage with the Dutch doors. Whirled Away, according to the quarterboard. Name’s Irene Curtis.” He paused, reached for his spoon, and took a gargantuan bite of ice cream.

  “And?” Merry prompted.

  “Didn’t hear a fight. Didn’t hear an accident. Heard a boat, though, at three o’clock in the morning. Says she sleeps with her window open, winter and summer, and the noise of the engine woke her. A boat engine being unusual at this time of year and that time of night.”

  “To say the least.”

  “She thought it must be morning, and the scallopers going out, because it sounded like that kind of boat—so she put her glasses on and looked at her bedside clock. Two fifty-three A.M. exactly.”

  “By which time,” Merry mused, “friend Jay was probably already dead, if we believe Dr. John.”

  “And friend Owen was presumably back from his practice session, leaving him without an alibi. I know I turned in by one-thirty that night, and I quit when Harley did.”

  She looked at Howie, one eyebrow raised. “Was he in bed—or at the scallop boat’s controls, dumping his dead mate’s body over the side?”

  “That might explain how the corpse got as far as the jetties,” the patrolman observed, “but it begs a question. If somebody went to the trouble of dumping Jay from a boat, why not take him well out into the Sound? With that nor’easter coming, he might not have been found for days. If ever.”

  Merry mulled this over in silence. “Could Irene Curtis identify the boat from the sound of the engine, Seitz?”

  “Wouldn’t want to bet on it,” Howie replied dryly. “But she did say it came right back. Only out about twenty minutes, if that. Irene thought it might be somebody getting dropped off at a vessel moored in the harbor.”

  “Or just… dropped off.”

  Glumly, Howie nodded.

  “Any hope that she might recognize the engine if she heard it again?”

  “I wouldn’t call Irene mechanically minded.” Seitz sounded almost apologetic, as though it were a personal failing. “She makes lightship baskets for a living. Carves the ivory plaques, too, with little tiny drill bits, worn down from drilling teeth.”

  “Teeth?”

  “She has a dentist friend in Minnesota who sends them to her. Nothing else carves a delicate bit of ivory half so well, Irene says. And man! What she can make with those bits! An entire whaling ship, Mere—sails and masts and everything!”

  “How long did you spend with this woman, Seitz?”

  “What I mean is,” he supplied hastily, “Irene’s a real nineteenth-century type. She doesn’t know engines. But she thinks the boat could have been Owen Harley’s.”

  “Harley’s boat must go past her cottage twice a day,” Merry observed.

  “And has for years. Right. That’s why I asked about it.”

  Merry sighed. “Harley never suggested he’d taken the boat out in the middle of the night, Seitz. That has to look bad.” She glanced at her watch and frowned. “I can’t go back in there today. Do me a favor, would you? Ask a couple of follow-up questions later this afternoon. Phone ‘em in, if you have to.”

  “Like whether Harley went for an early morning jaunt, and what he saw if he did?”

  “And where the boat keys are kept. Whether someone else might have access to them.” Merry stole the last of Howie’s ice cream. “So does Irene know the woman who’s camping out on Harley’s couch?”

  Howie stared. “I have no idea. We’re not that good friends.”

  “Harley said that whoever she is, she was out with you guys, practicing, the night Santorski drowned.”

  “Margot was the only woman around. We were at Bill Johnson’s, our trumpet player. He’s house-sitting out in Sconset. Margot lives a few streets away from him, and walked over.”

  “Why? Is she a friend of his?”

  “She’s our singer. Sort of a white Billie Holiday.”

  “I thought you guys played swing.”

  “We do. Margot’s very… versatile.”

  Merry’s eyes drifted over to Paul Winslow, who was still busy dredging the Easy Street Basin in his scallop boat; he was well out in the channel now, almost to Brant Point. “What was this Margot wearing that night?”

  Howie shrugged. “Same a
s usual. A long flowered silk dress. Doc Martens. An old army jacket.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “Oh, she is.” There was a note of something like regret in his voice.

  Merry studied Howie. “Tell me about her, Seitz. Harley didn’t want to, and I find that interesting.”

  “Harley didn’t want to talk about Margot because he’s obsessed with her. And she was more interested in Jay.” Howie crumpled the ice cream cup and looked around for a trash can. Finding none, he stuffed cup and plastic spoon into the pocket of his slicker. “Can we discuss this while we walk back to the station? I’m freezing out here.”

  “Sure.” Merry shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “So Margot was interested in Jay. He interested in her?”

  Howie nodded. “They were sort of an item these last few weeks.”

  Merry whistled. “That does make my heart beat faster, I’m afraid. How does this sound, Seitz? Your friend Mr. Harley and his Margot show up at Old North together Thursday night after your jam session, and run smack into Jay. There’s a fight, and Jay ends up in the boat basin.”

  “At which point, Margot goes happily to sleep on Owen’s pull-out couch?” Howie protested. “Even she isn’t that heartless. Besides, your scenario doesn’t explain the bike chain.”

  “We don’t even know if the bike chain belonged to Jay. But let’s say it does. That’s dealt with quite simply. Jay had already locked his bike somewhere on Old North, and once Harley killed him, he made it look like an accident by cutting the lock and throwing bike and chain into the basin.”

  “He should have thrown the chain into a restaurant dumpster,” Howie argued.

  “Admittedly.”

  “And what was Margot doing all this time? Cheering from the upstairs window?”

  “Okay,” Merry said in exasperation, “how’s this? Jay and Margot have a lovers’ quarrel. She runs to Owen Harley for sympathy and the loan of his couch. He gives her both, and she’s in bed by two A.M., snoring soundly. Jay shows up at Owen’s already high on heroin, and his mood is a little volatile. He hammers on the door, Owen comes down into the street, and we have the fight and drowning as before. Owen drops the body well out in the harbor and cuts Jay’s bicycle chain to fake the accident.”