Riptide (5 page)

“Perhaps,” came the reply. “In any case, it seems you’ve hit every spot on the globe over the last twenty-five years. Except
Stormhaven, Maine.”

Hatch froze. He felt a numbness begin in his fingers and move up his arms. Suddenly it all made sense: the roundabout questions,
the seafaring background, the intense look in the man’s eyes.

Neidelman stood very still, his eyes steady on Hatch, saying nothing.

“Ah,” Hatch said, fighting to recover his composure. “And you, Captain, have just the thing to cure my ennui.”

Neidelman inclined his head.

“Let me guess. Does this, by any freak of chance, have to do with Ragged Island?” A flicker in Neidelman’s face showed that
he had guessed right. “And you, Captain, are a treasure hunter. Am I right?”

The equanimity, the sense of quiet self-confidence, never left Neidelman’s face. “We prefer the term ‘recovery specialist.’”

“Everyone has a euphemism these days.
Recovery
specialist. Sort of like ‘sanitary engineer.’ You want to dig on Ragged Island. And let me guess: Now, you’re about to tell
me that you, and only you, hold the secret to the Water Pit.”

Neidelman stood quietly, saying nothing.

“No doubt you also have a high-tech gizmo that will show you the location of the treasure. Or perhaps you’ve enlisted the
help of Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant?”

Neidelman remained standing. “I know you’ve been approached before,” he said.

“Then you’ll know the common fate of those who’ve approached me. Dowsers, psychics, oil barons, engineers, everybody with
a foolproof scheme.”

“Their schemes may have been flawed,” Neidelman replied, “but their dreams were not. I know about the tragedies that befell
your family after your grandfather

bought the island. But his heart was in the right place. There
is
a vast treasure down there. I know it.”

“Of course you do. They all do. But if you think you’re the reincarnation of Red Ned himself, it’s only fair to warn you that
I’ve heard from several others who already claim that distinction. Or perhaps you purchased one of those old-looking treasure
maps that occasionally come up for sale in Portland. Captain Neidelman, faith won’t make it true. There never was, and there
never will be, any Ragged Island treasure. I feel sorry for you, I really do. Now, perhaps you should leave before I call
the guard—I beg your pardon, I mean the security specialist—to escort you to the door.”

Ignoring this, Neidelman shrugged, then leaned toward the desk. “I don’t ask you to take it on faith.”

There was something so self-confident, so utterly detached, about the Captain’s shrug that a fresh flood of anger swept Hatch.
“If you had any idea how many times I’ve heard this same story, you’d be ashamed for coming here. What makes you any different
from the rest?”

Reaching inside the leather portfolio, Neidelman withdrew a single sheet of paper and wordlessly pushed it across the desk.

Hatch looked at the document without touching it. It was a simplified financial report, notarized, indicating that a company
named Thalassa Holdings Ltd. had raised a sum of money to form the Ragged Island Reclamation Corporation. The sum was twenty-two
million dollars.

Hatch glanced from the paper back to Neidelman, then began to laugh. “You mean you actually had the nerve to raise this money
before even asking my permission? You must have some pretty pliant investors.”

Once again, Neidelman broke into what seemed to be his trademark smile: reserved, self-confident, remote without arrogance.
“Dr. Hatch, you’ve had every right to show treasure hunters the door for the last twenty years. I perfectly understand your
reaction. They were underfunded and under-prepared. But they weren’t the only problem. The problem was also
you.
” He leaned away again. “Obviously, I don’t know you well. But I sense that, after more than a quarter century of uncertainty,
maybe at last you’re ready to learn what really happened to your brother.”

Neidelman paused for a moment, his eyes still on Hatch. Then he began again, in a tone so low it was barely audible. “I know
that your interest is not the financial reward. And I understand how your grief has made you hate that island. That is why
I come to you with everything prepared. Thalassa is the best in the world at this kind of work. And we have equipment at our
disposal that your grandfather could only have dreamed of. We’ve chartered the ships. We have divers, archaeologists, engineers,
an expedition doctor, all ready to go at a moment’s notice. One word from you, and I promise you that within a month the Water
Pit will have yielded up its secrets. We will know
everything
about it.” He whispered the word “everything” with peculiar force.

“Why not just leave it be?” Hatch murmured. “Why not let it keep its secrets?”

“That, Dr. Hatch, is not within my nature. Is it within yours?”

In the ensuing silence, the distant bells of Trinity Church tolled five o’clock. The silence stretched on into a minute, then
two, and then five.

At last, Neidelman removed the paper from the desk and placed it back in his portfolio. “Your silence is sufficiently eloquent,”
he said quietly, no trace of rancor in his voice. “I’ve taken enough of your time. Tomorrow, I’ll inform our partners that
you have declined our offer. Good day, Dr. Hatch.” He rose to go, and then just before the door he stopped, half turning.
“There is one other thing. To answer your question, there
is
something that makes us different from all the rest. We’ve uncovered a small piece of information about the Water Pit that
nobody else knows. Not even you.”

Hatch’s chuckle died in his throat when he saw Neidel-man’s face.

“We know who designed it,” the Captain said quietly.

Involuntarily, Hatch felt his fingers stiffen and curl in toward his palms. “What?” he croaked.

“Yes. And there’s something more. We have the journal he kept during its construction.”

In the sudden silence, Hatch fetched a deep breath, then another. He looked down at his desk and shook his head. “That’s beautiful,”
he managed to say. “Just beautiful. I guess I underestimated you. After all these years, I’ve heard something original. You’ve
made my day, Captain Neidelman.”

But Neidelman had gone, and Hatch realized he was talking to an empty room.

It was several minutes before he could bring himself to rise from the desk. As he shoved the last of his papers into his briefcase,
hands still trembling a little, he noticed that Neidelman had left his card behind. A telephone number had been scribbled
across the top, presumably the hotel he was staying in. Hatch brushed the card into the wastebasket, picked up his briefcase,
left the lab, and briskly walked back to his town house through the dusky summer streets.

At two o’clock that morning, he found himself back in the laboratory, pacing before the darkened window, Neidelman’s card
grasped in one hand. It was three before he finally picked up the phone.

H
atch parked in the dirt lot above the pier and stepped slowly from the rented car. He closed the door, then paused to look
over the harbor, hand still grasping the handle. His eyes took in the long, narrow cove, bound by a granite shore, dotted
with lobster boats and draggers, bathed in a cold silver light. Even twenty-five years later, Hatch recognized many of the
names: the
Lola B,
the
Maybelle W.

The little town of Stormhaven struggled up the hill, narrow clapboard houses following a zigzag of cobblestone lanes. Toward
the top the houses thinned out, replaced by stands of black spruce and small meadows enclosed by stone walls. At the very
top of the hill stood the Congregational church, its severe white steeple rising into the gray sky. On the far side of the
cove he glimpsed his own boyhood home, its four gables and widow’s walk poking above the treeline, the long meadow sloping
to the shore and a small dock. He quickly turned away, feeling almost as if some stranger was standing in his shoes, and that
he was seeing everything through that stranger’s eyes.

He headed for the pier, slipping on a pair of sunglasses as he did so. The sunglasses, and his own inner turmoil, made him
feel a little foolish. Yet he felt more apprehension now than he’d felt even in a Raruana village, piled with corpses infected
with dengue fever, or during the outbreak of bubonic plague in the Sierra Madre Occidental.

The pier was one of two commercial wharfs that projected into the harbor. One side of the wharf was lined with small wooden
shacks: the Lobsterman’s Co-op, a snack bar called Red Ned’s Eats, a bait shack, and an equipment shed. At the end of the
pier stood a rusting gas pump, loading winches, and stacks of drying lobster pots. Beyond the harbor mouth there was a low
fog bank, where the sea merged imperceptibly with sky. It was almost as if the world ended a hundred yards offshore.

The shingle-sided Co-op was the first building on the pier. A merry plume of steam, issuing from a tin pipe, hinted at the
lobsters that were boiling within. Hatch stopped at the chalkboard, scanning the prices for the various grades of lobster:
shedders, hard-shelled, chickens, selects, and culls. He peered through the rippled glass of the window at the row of tanks,
teeming with indignant lobsters only hours removed from the deep. In a separate tank was a single blue lobster, very rare,
put up for show.

Malin stepped away from the window as a lobsterman in high boots and a slicker rumbled a barrel of rotten bait down the pier.
He brought it to rest under a quayside winch, strapped it on, and swung it out to a boat waiting below, in an action that
Malin had watched countless times in his childhood. There were shouts and the sudden throb of a diesel, and the boat pulled
away, heading out to sea, followed by a raucous crowd of seagulls. He watched the boat dissolve, spectrally, into the lifting
fog. Soon, the inner islands would be visible. Already, Burnt Head was emerging from the mists, a great brow of granite rock
that leaned into the sea south of town. Surf snarled and worried about its base, carrying to Hatch the faint whisper of waves.
On the crown of the bluff, a lighthouse of dressed stone stood among the gorse and low bush blueberries, its red and white
stripes and copper cupola adding a cheerful note of color to the monochromatic fog.

As Malin stood at the end of the pier, smelling the mixture of redfish bait, salt air, and diesel fumes, his defenses—carefully
shored up for a quarter of a century—began to crumble. The years dropped away and a powerful bittersweet feeling constricted
his chest. Here he was, back in a place he had never expected to see again. So much had changed in him, and so little had
changed here. It was all he could do to hold back tears.

A car door slammed behind him, and he glanced back to see Gerard Neidelman emerge from an International Scout and stride down
the pier, erect, brimming with high spirits, a spring of steel in his step. Smoke wafted from a briar pipe clamped between
his teeth, and his eyes glimmered with a carefully guarded but unmistakable excitement.

“Good of you to meet me here,” he said, removing the pipe and grasping Hatch’s hand. “I hope this hasn’t been too much trouble.”

He hesitated slightly before saying the last word, and Hatch wondered if the Captain had guessed his own private reasons for
wanting to see the town—and the island—before making any commitment. “No trouble,” Hatch replied coolly, accepting the brisk
handshake.

“And where is our good boat?” Neidelman said, squinting out at the harbor, sweeping it appraisingly with his eyes.

“It’s the
Plain Jane,
over there.”

Neidelman looked. “Ah. A stout lobster boat.” Then he frowned. “I don’t see a dinghy in tow. How will we land on Ragged Island?”

“The dinghy’s at the dock,” Hatch said. “But we’re not going to land. There’s no natural harbor. Most of the island is ringed
with high bluffs, so we wouldn’t be able to see much from the rocks anyway. And the bulk of the island is too dangerous to
walk on. You’ll get a better sense of the place from the water.”
Besides,
he thought,
I for one am not ready to set foot on that island.

“Understood,” said Neidelman, placing the pipe back in his mouth. He gazed up at the sky. “The fog will lift shortly. Wind
quartering to the southwest, a light sea. The worst we can expect is some rain. Excellent. I’m looking forward to this first
look, Dr. Hatch.”

Hatch glanced at him sharply. “You mean you’ve never seen it before?”

“I’ve restricted myself to maps and surveys.”

“I’d have thought a man like you would make the pilgrimage long ago. In days past, we used to get crackpots sightseeing around
the island, even some attempts to land. I’m sure that hasn’t changed.”

Neidelman turned his cool gaze back to Hatch. “I didn’t want to see it unless we’d have the chance to dig it.” A quiet force
lay beneath his words.

At the end of the pier, a wobbly gangplank led down to a floating dock. Hatch untied the
Plain Jane’s
dinghy and grabbed the starter.