Secrets Haunt the Lobsters' Sea

by Charlene D'Avanzo

  “Thanks for the lesson, Malicite. You’re a great teacher.”

  Given the extent of his grin, it was clear the lobsterman appreciated my compliment.

  On our way back to shore, I was leaning over the dinghy to watch a jellyfish pulse by when Malicite said, “I met anothah ocean scientist in Spruce Habah couple months ago. Guy named Ted. We had couple beers an’ played darts at the Lee Side.”

  I jerked up so quickly the boat rocked. “Oh, um, Ted. Yes, he’s a colleague of mine.”

  “Thought so. When I asked if there was any good-lookin’ lady scientists where he worked he laughed. Said there was one he ’specially liked. She was athletic lookin’, had reddish-brown hair, an’  was smart an’  funny. Kind of sounds like you.”

  To change the subject, I said the first thing that came to mind. “Ah, where do you live, Malicite?’

  He gestured with his chin. “Jus’ a quartah mile that way. Hey, my wife an’ little girl’d love to meet you. Why don’t you come by in a couple minutes just to say hello.”

  I did a quick assessment and decided he really did want me to visit. “Sure, that would be nice. But just for few minutes like you said.”

  I climbed back up the rickety ladder, called down, “Thanks!” to Malicite, stepped up onto dry land, and vowed not to think about Ted. Of course, I did just that. The dart game must’ve happened soon after Ted and I got serious about each other. Damn, we had a great time back then. We did everything together—worked, ran, kayaked, cooked, drank wine, and had fun in bed.

  Reliving the later a little too graphically, I picked my way around a couple of damaged lobster pots and nearly walked into a guy who could have been a trainer with the Marines. Calvin Ives.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “No problem. I’m guessing you’re Abby’s cousin.” The slightest twitch in his cheek suggested he’d guessed I wasn’t related to Abby at all. He probably respected her too much to say so.

  “Er, I was just visiting with Malicite. That ELobster program sounds amazing.”

  He waved a hand. “Dupris, he’s a good lobstahman, but that eLobstah’s not gonna make ’im bettah.”

  I had to ask. “Why’s that?”

  “This climate thing’s a scam that gets scientists more cash from taxpayers.”

  This was not a conversation I wanted to have at the moment. “Calvin, I’m going over Malicite’s house to meet his wife and little girl. What’s the easiest way for me to get there?”

  He pointed to the north. See that path comin’ off the main road theah? Follow that, and you’ll end up at his house. He pulled at his baseball cap, said, “Well, I got work to do,” and strode past me toward the harbor.

  I watched until he disappeared behind a lobster shack. Calvin’s comment about climate scientists’ motivation was nothing new. After all, Gordy had said the same many times. But Irish to his core, Gordy’s strong convictions about politics, sports, the environment, and most everything else were often based on emotion, not careful reasoning. From what I’d heard, Ives was intelligent, ambitious, someone people were willing to follow—traits I usually associated with nuanced thinking. Of course, people were always more complicated than I could imagine.

  I followed Calvin’s directions and quickly came upon a shingled bungalow at the crest of a small hill. A woman wearing jeans and a red flannel shirt was pulling white sheets off a clothesline in the back yard. The strong wind made the maneuver a challenge.

  I hurried over. “Please, let me help you.”

  She shaded her eyes from the sun. “Great. You grab one end and I’ll get the othah.”

  I followed her instructions and introduced myself. “I’m Mara and was just with Malicite. He was telling me about the eLobster project.”

  She walked toward me, rolling the sheets into a big ball as she went. “Got it, thanks, deah. I’m Elizabeth; people call me Liz. Malicite tol’ me he was doin’ that. Speak of the devil, here he is.”

  Malicite strode up and put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Hah. So I’m the devil. I invited Mara over to meet you and Sybil.”

  “Just for a few minutes,” I added.

  She smiled. “You stay long as you like, deah.”

  We walked around to the front of the house. The weathered, dark grey shingles had clearly seen decades of storms and sun. Between two multi-paned windows, the faded turquoise front door slowly opened. A blue-eyed towhead with bangs and braids stood on the threshold and wrinkled her nose at me.

  “I’m Sybie. Who are you?”

  Malicite stepped forward, swept up the child, and hoisted her onto his shoulders. She whooped with delight.

  Elizabeth looked up at her daughter and tried not to laugh. “This is Mara, Sybie. She’s here for a little visit. How about you introduce yourself properly to her.”

  Malicite put Sybie down in front of me. She extended her hand. “How do you do? I’m Sybil Dupris.”

  I knelt and took the little hand. “Very nice to meet you.”

  Sybie led us into a tiny house with a living room–kitchen that constituted most of the first floor. Smelling of biscuits, it was the kind of home where children grew up with dogs, and adults traded the day’s stories after the kids went to bed.

  The four of us sat around a small, square, wooden table, the only one in the room. Elizabeth put a plate with two hot biscuits in front of me and moved the homemade blueberry jam within reach. Sipping tea made a little less strong with milk, I listened to stories about cousins, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters who lived on the mainland. Between Malicite and Elizabeth, the number of relatives was mindboggling.

  “So none of them live out here?” I asked.

  Malicite said, “A couple of my brothers tried, but they couldn’t take the remoteness. Kept goin’ back to the mainland an’  finally stayed.”

  “How about you, Mara?” Elizabeth asked. “Your family?”

  “Um, well, it’s a lot different for me. My parents died when I was nineteen, and I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

  Elizabeth blinked, opened her mouth, and closed it. She cleared her throat and said, “No brothers or sisters?”

  Sybie blurted out, “You mommy and daddy died. How did they die?”

  Malicite jumped in. “Sybil, where are you manners?”

  The child pursed her lips and looked down. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s all right. Sybie, my parents were scientists who studied the ocean like I do. They were under the water in a little submarine that got stuck.”

  Big eyed, she said, “They died in a submarine. Wow. But if you don’t have brothers and sisters, what do you do at Christmas?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a godfather and lots of friends.”

  I walked back to the harbor feeling melancholy. Generous and kind, Malicite and Elizabeth had no idea that stories about their huge families kindled a desperate longing I’d tried so hard to suppress. Hardly anyone they knew lacked parents or siblings. That I was so different wasn’t my fault, but I sure felt like a freak.

  “Not a freak,” I said aloud. “A deviation from normal.”

  My little joke didn’t help a bit.

  Halfway to the harbor, I noticed a path that looked like it headed toward a part of the island I hadn’t seen. In need of distraction, I took it and soon found a tiny sand beach which the sun told me faced west toward the mainland. I could imagine the island’s would-be residents—people who tried and eventually rejected Macomek as a place they could live—standing there, eyes fixed straight ahead, thoughts on what they’d left behind. They might miss movie theaters, decent cars, grocery stores. Or maybe they were desperate for family and friends. Whatever it was, the longing was a sore they couldn’t ignore. Funny. The ones who stayed might stand beside them, consider all the same things, and quickly turn away, glad to be free of all of it.

  Back on the main path I passed the lobster shacks and was startled by several men’s voices I didn’t recognize. I knelt down, pretende
d to tie my shoelace, and listened.

  “Look Richie, we agreed on it an’ did what we had ta. What’re you, soft as a shed lobstah?”

  “Talkin’  ’bout it, that’s one thing. But doin’ it? Don’t tell me it ain’t gettin’ undah your skin. I saw that whiskey bottle.…”

  The rumble of a boat motor overrode the sound of the argument. If the guys continued talking, I couldn’t hear them.

  I stood and walked quickly away. Whatever Richie and the other guy were discussing sounded pretty unsavory. Could “it” be getting rid of Buddy? Maybe, but they could also be talking about putting down a beloved dog or worse, letting doctors pull the plug on their dying mother. All I could do was report the conversation to Marine Patrol and let them deal with it.

  The unsavory pair also reminded me that I’d focused on someone like Tyler working alone. But Buddy could have been murdered, if that’s what happened, by two people or more. Maybe a group of Macomek lobstermen had taken care of business as the islanders were known to do.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  Farther down the road toward Abby’s house, I spotted a deer walking among low shrubs a couple hundred feet away. The doe stood statue-still, her huge ears at attention. Even though she looked right at me, her big chocolate eyes were better designed for distant movement than details. She stomped a foot to get a reaction, and I tipped my head to the side. A quiver rippled across her chest before she bounded through the bushes and was swallowed by the pine forest. A big deer like that was the last thing I expected to see on Macomek. How did it get all the way out here? Besides that, the animal was a sitting duck for hunters, so to speak. But maybe they saw her as a source of future deer meat.

  I recognized the unusually uniform vegetation as a low-bush blueberry field the islanders probably burned every other year. Just beyond the blueberries, off-white flat stones tilted this way and that. An old graveyard.

  Like many New England hikers, I’d stumbled across small cemeteries in the middle of the woods—relics of abandoned family members.

  In the fourteenth century, Giovanni Verrazzano described Maine’s coast as “full of very dense forests.” The European explorer would have been amazed by the industry of those who came after him. By the seventeen hundreds, our forefathers had cut down an astounding number of trees, mostly for firewood, and cleared about eighty percent of the land. Every single year, they needed at least forty cords to keep a drafty house marginally warm during the winter. Cutting, hauling, and chopping all that wood—each cord four feet high by four feet wide by eight feet long—was a hell of a lot of work. When railroads made travel west easier, farmers left their poor-soil, rocky, hilly, treeless New England farms for flat Midwest land with ten feet of rich topsoil.

  And, of course, they left their dead behind.

  Since these cemeteries offer a glimpse into the lives of people who came before us, I never missed the opportunity to stare at the headstones and try to imagine their lives and their deaths—so many of them infants, children, and women of childbearing age. In Maine, lots of men died young too, and on the coast they often died at sea.

  A path through the blueberry field took me to a small plot with twenty-odd stones. As usual, Maine’s acidic rainwater had partly dissolved the limestone, which made most inscriptions unreadable. I squatted in front of a few before finding one I could read. Below the floating head with wings, the caption for Captain Thomas Exeter, born 1790 and died 1841, read: “he is done catching cod and gone to meet his God. drowned in the deep, deep sea.” Beside his father, a tiny stone for infant William Exeter read: “to my parents I was briefly lent, one smile to them I gave before I descended to the grave.”

  I wandered among the stones, running my finger along the engravings, imagining the pain of husbands whose wives died so very young, parents who lost child after child, wives who looked to out sea for a husband who never returned.

  At the edge of the mowed grass, a cluster of mostly dried flowers leaned against a small granite boulder. Someone on the island had visited the spot fairly recently.

  “Makes ya wonder what that’s about, them flowers.”

  I spun around to face the forest as a skinny, unkempt man stepped into the light. His beady porcine eyes darted between my face and our shared surroundings like a pinpoint light searching for the enemy. Given the location, my first thought was that he was an extra in a Stephen King horror movie set on a Maine island.

  11

  “Damn, you nearly scared me to death.” The guy reminded me of a prehistoric bird—skinny and darkly tan with those squinting restless eyes that flitted around like someone or something was about to grab him. He didn’t respond to my complaint, so I tried a different tack.

  “Would you mind telling me who you are?”

  “Name’s Tyler.”

  Given Gordy’s claims made against the man, I should have felt scared. But somehow he didn’t strike me as malevolent. More dotty than dangerous. What came next confirmed that opinion.

  He flapped an arm toward the blueberry field. “Did ya know Maine grows more blueberries than any other state?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, but it wasn’t an issue because he didn’t give me a chance to respond.

  “Besides that, there’s only four fruits we eat heah that’re native. Wild blueberries are one of  ’em.”

  I was trying to come up with an effective “See you later” line, but his next remark stopped my synapses cold.

  “Gordy wants ta know who kilt Buddy, but he’s got ya lookin’  in the wrong place.”

  He correctly interpreted my open mouth.

  “Killer’s off island.”

  “Um, Tyler, I don’t understand.”

  “Buddy, he was a real good lobstahman. Was gonna give Calvin Ives a run fer his money. But las’ yeah Buddy bought some real  ’spensive stuff. New boat, all rigged up. Best ya could buy. Thing is, he wasn’t bringin’  in more lobstahs. You gotta ask, where’d all that cash come from? And, assummin’ it’s drugs, his supplier is who you should be lookin’ for.”

  As he spoke, Tyler became a new person. He stood straighter, looked right at me, and his voice deepened. Maybe the weird wacko was an act. I decided to take him seriously.

  “How do you know how many lobsters Buddy caught?”

  “We set our strings in the same area an’  I watched  ’im. We’d go out an’ come back ’bout the same time. Had the same numbah traps, give or take. It’s like, ya know, a big family out theah. All of us from the island, we’re always talkin’  on the VHF.”

  I didn’t want to insult the guy but had to ask. “I still don’t get it. You said Buddy was a very good lobsterman. That meant he could afford a new boat.”

  At that moment, anyway, there was nothing wrong with the circuits in Tyler’s brain. He understood what I was getting at right away. “If you’re askin’ if he was bettah than me, you’re not lis’nin’. He was always good, but bang, he’s got all this dough? Somethin’ else was goin’ on. Look fer his drug lord or whatevah you call it.”

  I extracted myself from Tyler’s company with a promise that I’d give Gordy this information, didn’t turn my back on the man until I reached the blueberry clearing, and speed-walked to the road. Once there I scanned the forest, saw nothing, and set off again for Abby’s house.

  It was hard to know what to make of Tyler’s declaration about Buddy’s wealth. On the one hand, Tyler might have heard Patty’s claims about his own guilt and invented the story as a distraction. One the other, it was true that lobstermen working the same waters were like siblings in a big family. They competed, bantered, sometimes fought, watched each other’s backs, and knew one another’s business. And the bottom line for their bread and butter was lobster landings and price. They’d have a pretty good idea who was making what.

  So Tyler might well have information that should not be dismissed.

  Through the woods, I’d just glimpsed the shingles on Abby’s roof when a sole flower demanded my at
tention. I strolled over and knelt beside an abandoned stonewall to take a look. Flowers in clusters on a single stem, five rose-pink petals the length of my thumb. I pulled off a leaf and rolled it between my palms. The pungent, spicy aroma announced the plant’s name—Musk Mallow. It was a bright, happy flower you would notice, and I had seen it a few times in abandoned fields along the coast. But all the way out on the island it was an unexpected find. I scanned the wall. No other mallows graced its length or the fields on either side. I craned my neck to one side, then the other. Dappled light exposed no bits of pink on the forest floor, and there were no mallows along the side of the road. I scanned my botanical memory. I’d not seen any musk mallows on Macomek.

  The plant I knelt before had no companions.

  Cradling the delicate, lovely flower in the late afternoon sun, I was overcome with a sudden, terrible melancholy. Tears ran down my cheeks as sorrow flowed through me in waves. Of course, I knew why.

  Family was everything to everyone on the island. To a person they talked about siblings, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces. But I had none of those. Like the mallow, I was utterly alone.

  My mother and father had been taken by the sea, the very entity they’d worked so hard to bring to life for others. I’d lost so very much—years of birthdays, their discoveries and mine, vacations in Ireland and Italy, sailing expeditions, the ritual of watching the full moon rise over expanse of sea. None of it had happened.

  Gone. The saddest word I knew.

  I’d armored myself against that pain and buried myself in work until Ted got a job at MOI the previous spring. He was smart, kind, funny, and good-looking in a Boy-Scout kind of way. After I finally realized he was Harvey’s half-brother, not her boyfriend, we’d hooked up. And we had a great time until he mentioned the M-word. I backed off like a lobster facing a dog shark—not one of my most generous moves—and lost the closest thing I’d had to a soul mate.