Musseled Out

by Barbara Ross

  I moved down the hall, entered my childhood bedroom, and threw myself on the bed. I’d slept in that room all spring and summer, but the twin bed and rose-covered wallpaper still made me feel like a child.

  “What a total mess,” I said out loud. Over the course of our relationship, Chris and I had had disagreements. We’d had miscommunications, too, more than our share. But we’d never had a fight like this one. Up to now, one of us had always backed away or given in, accepted a “compromise.” I’d accepted the compromise that I wouldn’t ask Chris where he’d disappeared to during his absences over the summer, and he wouldn’t do whatever it was anymore. I could no longer live with my choice.

  “Brr-rup.” Le Roi landed heavily on the bed next to me, purring loudly. He always knew when the humans around him needed comforting. He kneaded my rib cage with his immense paws, still vocalizing. I got up and found a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt in a dresser drawer. Le Roi, still on the bed, regarded me as I changed.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll find us a place to live.” When I returned from the bathroom, he hadn’t moved. Evidently, his plan was to spend the night with me in the twin bed. “Shove over,” I said, getting under the covers.

  I stared at the familiar ceiling, trying to work out what I’d learned.

  David Thwing was a major drug dealer. Though I never would have guessed, it made sense. My own experience had taught me that even in the age of ubiquitous credit cards, an eating establishment generated enough cash to provide efficient money laundering. His locations and cuisine provided excellent excuses for meeting boats and unloading goods.

  Perhaps his desire to compete with the Snowden Family Clambake had nothing to do with a moneymaking “dining experience,” and everything to do with an excuse to own a remote island or piece of shoreline with a deepwater dock. It both cheered me and depressed me to think David Thwing might not have made a study of our clambake business and identified a boundless business opportunity.

  And what about Genevieve? Did she know about Thwing’s real business? If my trip to Round Pond had proved anything, it was that she was an ambitious and ruthless businessperson. Could she really be unaware of the source of her partner’s seemingly unlimited funds? Was she in it herself, or simply the beneficiary of Thwing’s illegal and predatory trade? If she was in it, that would explain Sergeant Flynn’s keen interest in her whereabouts. Why he kept her so close.

  Were Mrs. Gus’s troubles a coincidence of timing, or related? Try as I might, I couldn’t connect the wholesale import of oxycodone with the fulfillment of an elderly woman’s prescription. And if Peter Murray and David Thwing had gone out to pick up Mrs. Gus’s drugs, how had the pills wound up in her house on Tuesday morning? Neither Thwing nor Peter had made it home.

  The more I thought, the more confused I became. I knew only two things. Someone had made sure my brother-in-law hadn’t gone out on the El Ay. Whoever it was didn’t care how cruel they had to be to achieve their goal. The other was Sonny was lying, still, about where he’d been and what he’d been doing the day of Thwing’s murder, and the police knew it, too.

  I rolled over. Le Roi was sacked out beside me. I reached over him and set my alarm for 6:00 AM. If Sonny wouldn’t tell the police where he’d been, I’d have to force it out of him myself.

  Chapter 23

  When my alarm went off, my eyes flew open, adrenaline surging through my body. 6:00 AM? What the—? Oh, yeah, Sonny. For my plan to work, I had to be on the Abby before he got there. I dressed warmly and hurried out of the house.

  A line of sunlight appeared on the horizon as I jogged to the marina and climbed aboard the Ramseys’ boat. The Abby was large, a forty-foot fiberglass body with an inboard diesel engine, embodying Bard’s status as a highliner. High rails encircled its bow, offering a little protection to the crew from rough seas. The side rails sloped downward as they embraced the wider stern to make hauling traps up onto them easier. There was an open shelter housing the helm, where all the electronics hung from the ceiling or sat on the bulkhead—Fathometer, depth sounder, LORAN navigational locator, GPS, and a VHF marine radio. The roof of the shelter supported the antennas for the equipment. It was not your grandfather’s little wooden lobster boat. Or at least it wasn’t mine.

  Below deck, there was a small cabin, intended as a place to sleep on overnight fishing trips, but used by the Ramseys for storage. I wasn’t counting on Sonny not discovering me for long—just long enough. I squeezed into the jam-packed cabin to wait. The harbor was deadly quiet, though I knew it wouldn’t be for long.

  It was dark in the cabin, but soon I heard the good-natured shouts of the lobstermen and sternmen preparing to go out. Radios crackled and diesel engines revved. Boats leaving the marina created a wake that slapped the Abby’s stern.

  Then silence. Just when I’d begun to fear Sonny wasn’t coming, there was a thunk and a grunt on the dock, followed by heavy footfalls I would have recognized anywhere as Sonny’s. I listened for a second set of footsteps, indicating Kyle was aboard, but none came. He must again be “under the weather.” Sonny was going out alone. Exactly what I wanted.

  With all the trouble in the harbor, I was afraid he’d take time to search the boat, but he seemed more intent on getting out to sea quickly. I heard and felt the pulse of the motor, followed by the rustling of the lines. The Abby moved away from the dock.

  I thought we might stop at the lobster pound to pick up fuel and bait. Those necessities were put “on account” and later deducted from the value of the catch. But we kept chugging along, no stops.

  Sonny opened up the engine, pushing the Abby swiftly through the water of the outer harbor toward its mouth. I wasn’t sure where Bard set his traps. A highliner like Bard would know where the good bottom was, strewn with the medium-sized rocks called cobble that offered lobsters plenty of comfortable crevices for their homes.

  The engine was loud, my position in the crowded cabin uncomfortable. As we came out of the harbor into the North Atlantic, I felt the chop increase. When we’d gone farther than I expected, Sonny throttled down the engine. I hadn’t thought nearly enough about how I’d let him know I was aboard. The last thing I wanted was to startle him. He might react defensively before he realized who I was, punching me in the face or throwing me over the side. I crept to the cabin door and watched him lumber to the back of the boat to get the gaff he’d use to pull his dad’s orange and bright blue buoys out of the water. In a moment, he’d turn and see me.

  I stepped out from the cabin. “Sonny!” I called loudly so he could hear me over the idling engine.

  He dropped the gaff and stepped backward. For a moment I thought he’d go head-over-heels over the low stern wall.

  “Julia!” he sputtered. “What the hell?”

  “I’m sorry.” I stood on the deck, feet planted wide, getting my sea legs. “I wanted to see where you went.” I scanned the horizon. We were well out to sea, but not so far I couldn’t see the mouth of a harbor in the background, surrounded by a little village. “Which is where? Sonny, isn’t that—?”

  “Coldport.”

  “What’re you doing here?” I tried to sound calm, but my high-pitched voice betrayed me.

  “It’s not what you think. If what you think is that I came out here to vandalize some Coldport Islander’s traps.” With Sonny and me, arguments usually accelerated from zero to one hundred miles an hour in seconds, but his tone was even. He didn’t yell or react defensively, like he normally did.

  “What on earth are you doing in Coldport Island waters?” Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good, if it was worth lying to the police about.

  Sonny stared at me for a minute while he appeared to make a decision. “See for yourself.” Sonny shrugged and the suspenders on his orange oilpants rippled on his big shoulders. “You might as well help. We’ll get done faster and get out of here. There’s gear in the cabin.”

  Since he hadn’t thrown me overboard or turned around to take me home,
I figured helping him do whatever he’d come to do was my best course of action.

  I went back below deck and found an orange oilskin jacket, oilpants, black boots and gloves. They must have been Kyle’s and from when he was heavier. The jacket came down to my calves. I didn’t even try the boots.

  When I got back up on deck, Sonny looked at me and burst out in a hearty laugh that broke the tension. I held a droopy sleeve out to him and he rolled it up, securing it tightly with an elastic strap he pulled out of the pocket of the jacket. Then he did the other one. I pulled on the gloves.

  Sonny bent over the side rail and with one fluid motion, he hooked a orange and bright blue buoy, Bard’s colors, and found the line to his father’s traps. He attached the line to a pulley that hung from the boat’s roof on the starboard side, then started the mechanical hauler that powered the pulley. The first trap in the string of six churned to the surface. Sonny wrestled it onto the Abby’s side rail and bent to retrieve the next one. “Don’t just stand there,” he ordered.

  I opened the trap. It was large, four feet long, and made of bright yellow plastic-coated wire. Like all lobster traps, it consisted of two “rooms,” the kitchen with the bait bag and a telescoping entrance to let the lobsters in, and the parlor, where they moved after they’d eaten, to await their fate.

  With a practiced motion, Sonny picked the first of three lobsters out of the trap, measuring it with a metal gauge. Legal lobsters were between 3.25 and five inches on carapace, or from the eye socket to where the body met the tail. The first lobster was undersized. He was so close to legal, Sonny measured him on both sides.

  “Sometimes the sides are different lengths, short on one side, legal on the other.”

  This one was no dice. Sonny dropped him tail first back into the sea to grow for a few more seasons. The second lobster was quite large, maybe eight inches. Sonny didn’t bother measuring him, simply picked him up and dropped him over the side. “‘Bye, old man. Go off and make some babies.”

  The third one was a keeper. Like most lobsters, his shell was green, the same color as the suit David Thwing had worn the day he died. Though billboards and signs all over Maine, as well as our license plates, showed bright red lobsters, they only turned that color when they were cooked. Rarely, lobsters could be blue, yellow, calico, half one color, half another, and even albino, but most were green, like this fellow.

  Sonny put him in a compartment of a metal sorting tray. He handed me the pliers-like tool used to put rubber bands on the lobster’s claws. I nodded gamely. It had been fifteen years since I’d done it. Like most kids in town, I’d tended a couple of traps from a skiff as a teenager, but that was my last experience.

  I picked the lobster up awkwardly. The gloves made him hard to hold. Sonny wasn’t wearing any, but his hands were always a mass of little cuts. I was determined to keep the gloves on.

  I grasped the lobster in one hand as firmly as I could and blew on his claw to get him to close it. As I brought the bander to the claw, the Abby shifted, rising over a swell. I hit the claw with the tool. It detached from the lobster’s body and flew into the sea.

  Sonny looked up from hauling the next trap and grunted. “A cull.” The lobsterman’s name for a one-clawed lobster. “Band him anyway and put him in the tank.”

  I took the gloves off and tried again, muttering, “It’s all in the wrist.” By some miracle, I succeeded and dropped the lobster into the aluminum tank.

  “You know what to do,” Sonny said.

  Unfortunately, I did. I threw the flotsam and jetsam that remained in the first trap back into the sea—seaweed, snails, small fish, even a very annoyed crab. I hoped against hope there wouldn’t be an eel, because, frankly they were disgusting. Then I pulled the bait bag from the trap and prepared to refill it, the most disgusting job of all.

  Lobstermen used all kinds of bait, but the most common was herring. Old, ripe, herring. I opened the bait barrel and stepped back, as if I could dodge the horrible smell. I held my breath and scooped the bait into the bag and retied it to the trap, closing it up. I moved the trap to the rail on the back of the boat, ready to be re-submerged. By then, Sonny had taken the lobsters out of the second trap and I prepared to band the legal ones.

  We repeated the steps for all six traps on the line, then Sonny returned them to the water. As they thundered over the stern back into the sea, it was easy to imagine a person’s foot getting caught in the line and it dragging him under the boat, just as it at first appeared David Thwing had been.

  Sonny piloted us to the next line of traps and we started again. Eventually, we developed a rhythm. I pre-filled extra bait bags I found on board, while Sonny steered us along. At the next stop, he threw back two female lobsters covered with eggs after carefully notching their tails with a V symbol, so they would never be taken, not even when they were eggless. The lobstermen took good care of the fishery. They knew it was their future, and they’d seen so many other fish stocks collapse around them.

  We worked on, with only a short break when Sonny shared the lunch Livvie had packed for him. I felt badly taking one of his two sandwiches. I was sure he needed the fuel, but I was light-headed from hunger. We were always in sight of Coldport Island, surely in their traditional waters, yet no one had emptied Bard’s traps or messed with his buoys or gear. In all, we pulled two hundred traps, and got around a hundred and seventy-five pounds of lobster. Not a great haul, but respectable for this time of year. I was sore everywhere and my hands were a mess.

  Chapter 24

  At a little after one o’clock, Sonny flipped the radio on. The air was suddenly filled with the chatter of lobstermen. “Headed to the co-op,” one after another said, finishing up their day.

  A co-op was a lobster pound jointly owned by a group of lobstermen, usually from one harbor. It collected the catch, stored it temporarily, and sold it to the wholesalers. While Coldport Island had a co-op, Busman’s Harbor’s lobster pound was privately owned. Which meant the lobstermen from Coldport shared the profit from their catch and Busman’s lobstermen did not.

  Eventually, the radio went silent for a while. Sonny turned the Abby toward port. But not Busman’s Harbor. Coldport.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re selling the lobsters.”

  “In Coldport?”

  “Yup.”

  “All of them?”

  “All we got today.”

  “But why?”

  Sonny drew his red eyebrows together, squinting at me, like he knew I could figure it out if I thought hard enough.

  “That’s why Bard’s traps don’t get bothered,” I said. “Because he’s cutting the Coldporters in.” In return for lending his major highliner boost to their co-op’s profits, they tolerated Bard lobstering in their traditional waters.

  Sonny nodded. “As long as they get their piece, they keep quiet about it.”

  If there was a profit, all the owners of the co-op got a bonus at the end of the season. The more lobstermen, the more lobsters, the greater the profit.

  “Don’t the Busman’s Harbor lobstermen suspect something when you never sell lobsters to the pound there?”

  “Dad’s got eight hundred traps in all, the legal limit. Four hundred in Coldport waters. The other four hundred are in Busman’s. I haul those and take the lobsters to the Busman’s pound. Dad does so much better than the other lobstermen, they don’t notice. At least they haven’t so far.”

  The puzzle pieces fell into place. “You were here the day David Thwing died,” I said. “That’s why you turned off the GPS and the radio. You were working Bard’s traps near Coldport Island and selling at their co-op.”

  Sonny didn’t respond, which I took as a yes.

  “So being suspected of murder is better than having everyone in Busman’s Harbor know you’re selling to the Coldport co-op?”

  Sonny didn’t say anything. But maybe, in his mind at least, it was. Lobstermen prized loyalty above all other virtues. Being a traitor
might be regarded as worse than being a murderer, particularly if the victim was somebody “from away” nobody cared about anyway.

  I remembered Bard at Gus’s, arguing against retaliation against Coldport Island. His advice was compromised. If he were viewed as working against his own harbor for the other side, Bard would become a social pariah, as would Sonny and Kyle.

  We pulled up to the dock at the Coldport co-op. There were no boats around and I was sure Sonny had picked this time of the day for that reason, though I figured everyone on the island had to know Bard’s secret. But I could also believe no one in Busman’s knew. There wasn’t much reason for the insular, territorial lobster gangs to mix with others, and there were plenty of reasons not to, even socially. Highliners like Bard, on the other hand, did seek out equals from other harbors. They needed peers to talk to.

  A sinewy man with hooded eyes, his black hair worn in a ponytail, helped us unload the lobsters. He didn’t introduce himself to me, and he and Sonny skipped the hellos.

  “Surprised to see you here today,” the man observed. “Things are pretty tense.”

  “Doin’ my job and keepin’ my head low,” Sonny responded.

  “That’s worked up to now. But there were cops on the island yesterday asking about you.” Sonny stared at the man as he continued. “Not everybody likes it that you and your dad come and go as you please. A few of the dubs think you’re catching lobsters that would be theirs if not for the arrangement with your dad.”

  “Let ’em prove it,” Sonny said.

  When we were done, the man weighed our catch. As he did, he looked over Sonny’s shoulder at the harbor beyond. “What the . . . ?”

  I followed his gaze to a mooring where thick, black smoke rose from a lobster boat.

  “What the . . . ?” Sonny repeated the man’s words.

  The boat went up in a fireball. Flames shot thirty feet in the air as the wind spread the dark smoke. The guy from the co-op shouted something into his phone and then a siren wailed, calling volunteers to the fire station.