Secrets Haunt the Lobsters' Sea

by Charlene D'Avanzo

  Just beyond the tip of my bow, something out of place bobbed in the water. Squinting, I tried to make out what it was. An errant lobster buoy? Cast-off bucket? The bulky object didn’t belong in the middle of a mussel farm, that’s for sure. Gordy would want it out of there. I reached out and tapped the object with the tip of the paddle. It felt bulky, big. I pushed harder. The thing submerged out of sight. Peering into the murk, I scanned the spot where it had been. Where was the goddamned thing?

  Suddenly, like a sea monster rising from the depths, the sunken object bobbed straight up out of the water. Its eyes held mine for a moment before the head slipped back down into the black.

  My scream ricocheted off the platform into an uncaring sea.

  2

  The maritime police responded to my 911 faster than I could have imagined. I was still fumbling with the phone’s waterproof case when a good-sized motorboat rocketed out of Spruce Harbor and headed right for me. The twenty-five-foot Hydrosport sidled alongside the raft, her dual 200 hp outboards gurgling. A square-built, sturdy guy with a buzz cut stepped out of the cabin and pulled a pair of Ray-Bans from his chest pocket. I back-paddled a few strokes to get a better look at him. The label above the left pocket of his khaki shirt said “Marine Patrol.” The one on the right announced his name as “LeClair.”

  “You the lady made the emergency call?”

  “Yes. I can’t believe how fast you got here.”

  “Officer Larry LeClair. We were pulling away from the town pier when you called. Please, ma’am, tell me your name and restate the problem here.”

  “Mara Tusconi.” I tipped my head toward shore. “Dr. Tusconi. I’m a scientist at MOI. I found…that is, there’s, um, a body under this aquaculture raft.”

  Suddenly, the horror of what I’d seen hit home. LeClair and his boat tipped sideways. I balanced my paddle crossways and leaned on it. Bile bubbled up. I spit it out.

  Voice from above. “You all right?”

  I blinked. “Give me a minute.” I sucked in a few breaths of cold sea air. Blew them out. Coughed. “Okay. A little while ago I was under the raft’s platform looking around. I saw something. Could’ve been a lobster buoy. I tapped it with my paddle. The thing went under.” Deep breath, exhale. “When it came up, I saw, um, the head and shoulders.”

  “Take your time, ma’am.”

  I met LeClair’s gaze. Navy-blue eyes, kind and patient. This was a man who’d seen too much.

  “You okay to keep goin’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said you were under the raft looking around?”

  “In my kayak. It’s small, you know. I’m a marine ecologist and wanted to see the mussels up close.”

  Beat. I guessed LeClair was processing the image of me and my kayak beneath Gordy’s raft.

  He pointed toward the raft. “There’s no head space under there. Why would you do that?”

  I sighed. It was hard for some people to comprehend that a person could get a kick out of seeing the natural world up close and personal, even under a sloshing, rocking platform. “Later when we have time, I can describe what mussels look like underwater.”

  LeClair let it go. As a Marine Patrol officer he’d probably dealt with scientists’ eccentricities before.

  “Okay,” he said. “How long ago were you under the raft?”

  “Ten minutes or so.”

  LeClair rubbed his nonexistent beard. “About ten minutes ago in your kayak you were under this mussel raft. You thought you saw a dead body.”

  I shook my head. “No. I saw a dead body.”

  He wet his lips. “You saw a dead body.”

  I nodded and glanced at the raft. “Yes.”

  “If what you say is true, we’ll have to get our dive team over here.” He tipped his head to the side. “You’re sure, ah, Dr. Tusconi, about this?”

  I lifted my chin. “Yes, Officer LeClair, I’m sure. Why in the world would I make this up?”

  He scratched his forehead. “I don’t suppose you would.”

  A woman in a spiffy khaki uniform with jet-black hair in a ponytail emerged from the cabin. LeClair said, “Dr. Tusconi, this is my colleague Officer Bernadette DelBarco.”

  DelBarco gave me a quick nod. “Please call me Bernie.”

  “I’m Mara.”

  LeClair announced that he needed to make some calls and see if divers were available. I suspected one of his calls would be to MOI’s personnel department. The director there was a good friend and ardent feminist who would surely challenge LeClair if she detected skepticism about a female oceanographer. The man disappeared into the cabin.

  With more than a few grunts, I extricated myself inch by inch from the kayak’s snug cockpit, belly-crawled onto the raft’s platform, tied my boat to one of the cleats, and long-stepped onto the Marine Patrol boat.

  Bernie and I waited for LeClair on the patrol vessel’s spanking-clean afterdeck. Most boats in Spruce Harbor belonged to hardworking lobstermen who left at dawn, hauled aboard hundreds of dripping and fouled lobster traps, and spent the day amid rotting bait. On the way home after long days, a sternman would hose down the deck with seawater, but it wouldn’t be anything you’d want to, you know, eat off of.

  In contrast, the Maine Marine Patrol boat looked like it had just come from the factory, and I did eat off the deck, sort of. Bernie offered me a piece of stomach-soothing ginger candy to suck on which somehow flew out of my fingers.

  I snatched the sweet off the deck and popped it into my mouth. “Sorry about that. Ah, so you folks were in Spruce Harbor today?”

  She nodded. “We met with a group of lobstermen there to see if we could work better together. There’s been some especially nasty tit for tat going on.”

  I wanted to ask what “tit for tat” meant but guessed Bernie had said all she was going to. “I’ve never been on a Maine Marine Patrol boat before. You’re kind of like game wardens, is that right?”

  “Yes.” She patted the emblem on her chest. “The MMP’s the oldest law enforcement organization in the state. You could call us game wardens for Maine’s marine waters.”

  “I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know much about the kind of things you do.”

  “We’re law enforcement, search and rescue, and security for the state’s coastal waters.”

  I must have looked uncertain because Bernie added, “Last week, for instance, we arrested a man in Boothbay who was under the influence. He’d run his motorboat twenty feet out of the water. Got stopped by a tree.”

  The image was stunning. “So you’re in charge of everything from enforcing clam-flat closures, to locating missing people, answering distress calls, and monitoring lobstermen and drunk boaters.”

  “You got it,” she said.

  “What’s the hardest?”

  “Besides finding dead bodies, of course, lately it’s been dealing with lobstermen. You know, responding to poaching claims, investigating vengeance deeds.”

  “Vengeance deeds?”

  “Not an official name. What I call it.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “Last month a lobster boat in Stonington was sunk three different times over two weeks. You must’ve seen it in the newspaper. Guy would get his boat back in shape and find it under the water again. Had a good idea who’d done it, too. Arrogant kid who got pissed off when he was called out for messing with traps that weren’t his.”

  “Damn. Did you arrest the kid?”

  She ran a hand through her ponytail. “We couldn’t get any proof. Nobody was talking, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t.

  Her look suggested I lived a sheltered life. “The other lobstermen didn’t want to say anything because they were afraid their boats would be the next ones sunk. With lobstermen, sometimes it’s the wild, wild west out here.”

  In the cabin a squawking marine radio went silent. Running a hand through his buzz cut, LeClair joined us.

  “Dive team’s not available unti
l tomorrow,” he said. “Afraid I’m stayin’ right here tonight to secure the site.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “You’ll be here all night?”

  “Sure. Unless the victim got himself under that raft, this is a crime scene. Part of the job. The boat’s pretty comfortable. There’s plenty of food. I can arrange for Bernie to be picked up and brought back first thing in the morning.”

  Looking at me, Bernie said, “I’ve got a little girl who’ll need her mommy.”

  I gestured at the raft. “It’ll be a tricky dive with all those lines dangling down into the water. I sure wouldn’t want to do it.”

  LeClair nodded. “Got that right. There’ll be two teams in full gear. That way, if something happens to a diver in the first team, two guys will be ready to help out.”

  The gruesome image of a bloated, waterlogged corpse dragged underwater by two scuba divers floated through my mind. I blinked and said, “I assume it’s okay if I leave now?”

  LeClair explained that I could sign my statement at the Rockland MMP office up the coast from Spruce Harbor. I shook his hand and Bernie’s, straddled the Hydrocraft’s gunwale, and stepped onto the raft. “Thanks, both of you for all your work. Um, what about the raft owner?”

  LeClair said, “Bernie can look into that in Spruce Harbor.” He gestured at the platform. “After all, this is his mussel aquaculture enterprise.”

  “But you can’t possibly think…?”

  “I’ve got some calls to make. Thanks for your help, Dr. Tusconi.”

  On the way back I sprint-paddled and counted strokes in an attempt to block out the appalling image of the corpse rising up from the depths. I thought about stopping alongside an exposed rock to call Gordy and tell him what was going on. But the idea of my cousin listening to a message about a dead body under his raft was ghastly. I’d look for him in Spruce Harbor.

  In town, I checked the usual places—the Lee Side bar, Neap Tide Café, town pier. No Gordy. I even checked the town library, which was closed. My discomfort grew as I lumbered back to the public boat ramp to get my kayak. What if Bernie found Gordy before I did? Did he have anything to do with the corpse under his raft? Could he possibly be so foolish as to hide a body among the ropes dancing below his platform? If he didn’t, who did and why? Did the body explain why Gordy had been so anxious for me to check out his project? If this was a horrible accident, what was the guy—I assumed the body was male—doing beneath the raft?

  By the time I’d secured my kayak on top of the car, the knots in my stomach would have made a sailor proud.

  Alise’s proposal to study how increasing acidity could impact Maine’s nascent mussel aquaculture industry didn’t need much work. In precise, understated prose she had explained that the Gulf of Maine’s cold water readily absorbed carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning. That dissolved carbon dioxide could make Maine’s water too acidic for mussels struggling to build shells from dissolved calcium carbonate in seawater. Alise proposed to work with growers to monitor water chemistry in the Gulf and in mussel hatcheries. I added my comments to the manuscript, changed a word here and there, tacked it to my door, and emailed Alise that the revision of her terrific proposal was on my door.

  Usually, something catches my eye along the windy, pine-bordered dirt road down to my house on the ocean’s edge—the flash of crimson on a red-tailed hawk overhead or the white rump of a deer scampering into the woods. Today, if a she-bear and her cub had sauntered alongside I wouldn’t have noticed.

  I parked in the driveway, trudged up the deck stairs, pulled open the kitchen door—and stopped dead. Beer in hand, Gordy was just closing the door of the fridge.

  “Damn, Cousin,” I said. “You scared the bejesus out of me.”

  “Sorry.” He took a slug. “Wish this was strongah.”

  My antennae stood at attention. “Ah, why?”

  “Somethin’ bad is goin’ on at my mussel raft. The VHF’s abuzz with it. Marine Patrol. Somethin’ about a sea kayak?” He eyed me.

  “You had to know it was my kayak.”

  “Damnation. I gotta sit down for this.” He fell into a chair on one side of the kitchen table. I took the facing chair and recounted the story from my arrival at the raft to my futile search for him in town.

  When I’d finished, my cousin leaned forward, put both large, square hands on the table, and stared at them. A long minute later, he looked up and shook his head. “It’s a horrah—and a pissah it was you who found the thing.”

  “Have to say I agree with you, Gordy. I’ll be okay. But it’s your raft. Why aren’t you out there talking to the Marine Patrol people?”

  Gordy pulled off his Maine Fisherman’s League baseball cap with one hand, smoothed his hair with the other, yanked the cap back down, and took another slug of beer. “Figured they’d be lookin’ ta find me, so I stashed my truck in the woods a ways down your road an’ walked ovah.”

  Not what I wanted to hear.

  Deciding I could use something wet myself, I pulled a bottle of club soda out of the fridge, half-filled a glass from the cupboard, joined Gordy at the table, and leaned forward. “Gordy, what the hell is going on? Why hide? You’ve got to talk to the police sometime.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, Mara.”

  “So tell me.”

  “There’s been some real bad stuff goin’ on with lobstamen out on Macomek Island.”

  I took a sip. Put down the glass. “Stuff?”

  “More than the usual trap poachin’. Lots of buoy lines cut. Guys dumpin’ bleach in motors. Things like that. Puts guys on edge so they say an’ do dumb stuff.”

  I cringed. Cut lines meant expensive lobster traps stuck on the bottom and no way to find them. Bleach in a motor sounded pretty nasty as well. “That’s terrible, Gordy. But you don’t trap near Macomek. And what does the island have to do with the body I found?”

  Gordy got another beer and returned to his chair. He slid the bottle back and forth between his palms so many times I was afraid he wasn’t going to answer.

  Finally, he said, “I’ve been goin’ out there lots lately. You know, ta see someone.”

  “Really? Who?”

  He shrugged. I knew that maneuver too well and didn’t bother to press him.

  He popped the lid and took a swallow. “I’ve a bad feelin’ about who you found undah my mussel raft.”

  My hand tightened around the glass. “You do?”

  He shook his head.

  I regarded my cousin. Always joking and teasing, Gordy was one of the most upbeat people I knew. The man across from me could have just lost his brother. The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention.

  I pushed my drink to the side, leaned across the table, and put my hand on his. “Gordy, something is going on with you and Macomek Island that you don’t want to talk about. I get that. We’ve all got personal stuff. But I really need you to tell me if you had anything to do with the pour soul trapped under your mussel raft—and if you knew the body was out there.”

  He slipped his hand from under mine, put it on his heart, and held my gaze. “You’ve my word. I knew nothin’ ’bout anybody. Whatevah happened to that person, it wasn’t me that did it.”

  3

  There was every reason not to believe Gordy. Like many fishermen, when describing his haul he could be economical about the truth (“So-so” if he pulls up lots of lobsters, “Doin’ okay” if he hardly catches a thing). Besides that, he’s through-and-though Irish, a nation notorious for tall tales about wee folk and wide-ranging bull in general.

  On the other hand, Gordy was the most loyal, just, generous man I knew. He simply would not lie about something as consequential as a dead body.

  I leaned back in my chair and studied my cousin. He was my only close blood relative, and for that reason alone I had to stand by him. Besides that, my intuition told me he was telling the truth. “All right. I believe you. Tell me what you’re up to now and how I can help.”

  Gordy pa
tted his heart. “I ’ppreciate that, Mara. I truly do. My plan is ta lay low a couple days an’ find out what’s what. Then I’ll go find Marine Patrol. Promise.”

  “Gordy, that doesn’t make sense. How can you learn anything if you’re hiding out?”

  “That, Cousin, is where you come in—and anothah reason why I’m here.”

  I leaned back against the chair and crossed my arms over my chest. “You want me to snoop around for you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Out on Macomek.”

  I shook my head. “Oh sure. I’ll take off work a few days and hang out on a tiny island twenty-five miles offshore which just happens to be the tightest, most infamous lobster community in the state Maine. And where I don’t know a soul. Nobody will tell me squat. They probably won’t even talk to me.”

  “I got answers for all that.”

  Gordy chose to ignore my whopping eye roll.

  “I know you’re super busy with work,” he said. “But you’ve been sayin’ for months you oughta visit Macomek ta meet with that guy who puts monitors on his lobstah traps.”

  Gordy was right about this. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association—NOAA—ran a program called eLobster. To monitor warming waters, lobstermen along the New England coast attached sensors to lobster traps that recorded temperature and other variables over days, weeks, even months. Since Macomek Island was home to some of the fiercest climate-change deniers in the state of Maine, I really wanted to meet the one guy willing to risk ridicule to join the program.

  I wanted Gordy’s take on the eLobster program. “That’s correct. I’d love to meet, um, can’t remember his name. I’m really curious to learn whether access to that temperature data could make a difference in how many lobsters end up in his traps.”

  “He’s called Dupris. Malicite Dupris. Odd name. And fer god sakes, Mara, take some time fer yourself. You’ve been working seven days a week since you got back from that island off Vancouvah. You got vacation time comin’.”