‘Now,’ said the Basque, pulling hard on the oars.
Hollis pushed off, hooking both elbows over the side. And that’s where he stayed. Each time he tried to swing his leg up over
the side a wave would drive it back under. His strength fading, it was all he could do to hold on in the face of the relentless onslaught.
When they were clear of the breakers, he found he was too exhausted to haul himself aboard. The Basque abandoned the oars, seized the back of his pants and plucked him out of the water. He lay limp and drained in the bottom of the boat, his heart racing, as much from fear as exertion.
‘Not bad,’ said the Basque. ‘For your first time.’
‘You mean my last time.’
The Basque smiled, rowing them out to sea.
It was unexpectedly quiet, just the slap of the oars, the dull thump of the breaking waves receding with each stroke. It struck Hollis that he’d never seen the land from the ocean before. He’d taken a ferry once from Sag Harbor over to Shelter Island with Lydia—a Sunday jaunt when they were still poking at the carcass of their relationship—but that had been more familiar, more welcoming, with its bays and inlets and islands and little sailboats. Here on the ocean side you were left with an altogether different feeling. It was as if God in a fit of pique had used a ruler to divide two of His elements—a clean, stark battle line stretching from one horizon to the other, the conflict to roll on for all eternity. It wasn’t something that could be fully appreciated when viewed from the land.
‘First time off the back side?’
Hollis turned. ‘The back side?’
‘That’s what we call it out here,’ said the Basque, releasing the oars.
‘What are we doing here?’
The Basque pulled a tin pail from beneath his feet and tied a length of rope to the handle.
‘Fishing,’ he said.
He tossed the pail over the side. It slowly filled with water and sank from view. The Basque reeled it in and handed it to Hollis.
‘What do you see?’
‘Water?’
‘Look again.’
Hollis peered into the pail. ‘Sand,’ he said quietly. Sprinklings of silver in suspension.
He looked up at the Basque. ‘What are you saying?’
‘You tell me. They won’t release the autopsy yet.’
Dr Cornelius Hobbs was out on a call, and wasn’t due back at the County Morgue till two o’clock.
He appeared at one-thirty, which was why he found Hollis in his office, going over the autopsy report on Lillian Wallace.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said, with as much indignation as he could summon up.
‘Sit down,’ said Hollis.
‘You’re in my chair.’
‘Sit down,’ repeated Hollis firmly, indicating the seat across the desk from him. Hobbs hesitated, to press home his point, then did as he was told.
‘There better be a damn good reason for this.’
‘Let’s find out, shall we?’ said Hollis. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s common in cases of drowning to find foreign material in the airways and lungs, material that’s in the water.’
He knew this to be the case. Before driving out to Hauppauge he had phoned Paul Kenilworth, an old friend from police pathology back in New York.
‘That depends,’ said Hobbs guardedly. ‘What kind of material are you talking about?’
‘Sand, for example. Sand thrown up by heavy surf.’
Hobbs smiled, the smile of an adult indulging a child. ‘Oh dear, Deputy Hollis, I can see where you’re going with this.’ He leaned forward. ‘As it happens, I did find traces of sand in her airways. I might not have recorded them, though.’
‘I can tell you, you didn’t.’
‘Believe me, they were there.’
The news was a blow, and if Hollis hadn’t discussed the matter at some length with Paul, it might well have ended right there, as Hobbs evidently thought it was about to, judging from his self-satisfied grin.
‘Where exactly was this sand?’
‘Her pharynx and trachea.’
‘The larger airways, then.’
‘Yes,’ said Hobbs, a distinct note of annoyance creeping into his voice.
‘It’s possible, isn’t it, for debris to enter the larger airways after death has occurred, while the body’s underwater?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘In fact, the sand you found in Lillian Wallace’s airways proves nothing about the exact circumstances of her death, only that she was submerged in the ocean.’
This was the moment Hobbs lost his temper. ‘Are you questioning my expertise? Read the report, man. She drowned. Everything points to it. Everything.’
‘I can see that.’
‘She drowned in the ocean.’
‘Now that we don’t know for sure.’
Hobbs grabbed the autopsy report, turned to a page near the back and slapped it down in front of Hollis.
‘The results of the salinity test on the water in her lungs.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘So what more do you want?’
‘Just one thing: evidence of sand in the terminal bronchioles and alveoli. It would have been drawn deep into her lungs when she drowned.’
It was pleasing to see Hobbs stopped in his tracks, silenced.
‘You didn’t check, did you?’
‘The facts speak for themselves,’ stammered Hobbs, jabbing his finger at the report.
‘Did you check? Yes or no?’
Hobbs couldn’t bring himself to actually utter the word.
‘It would have been there.’
‘Speculation.’
‘Deduction. Based on sound scientific evidence and twentytwo years’ experience. There is no other explanation for her death.’
‘Try this on for size. She drowned in salt water and her body was placed in the ocean afterwards.’
Hobbs weighed his words. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘But it fits, right?’
‘That’s not the point. Where on earth is she going to drown in salt water, if not the ocean?’
From Hobbs’ expression, it was clear that the answer occurred to him as soon as the words had left his lips.
Both cars were gone within a minute or so of Hollis pulling up, his decision to turn on the flashing blue light no doubt precipitating their departure. He stepped from the patrol car as the taillights disappeared into the night. He could picture the occupants of the vehicles, panic giving way to relief, still adjusting their clothing.
He was alone in the silence, just the lazy pulse of the waves breaking against the shore. He glanced up at the night sky—an even dusting of cloud, enough to mute the glow of the moon; no need for a flashlight, though.
The most direct approach to the house from the beach landing was along the base of the bluff, but he opted for the long route round, down on to the beach, along the shore then back across the dunes. He needed time to marshal his thoughts.
As he walked he tried to persuade himself that the investigation would remain intact even if this trail turned cold on him. But he knew he was only preparing himself for the worst. He soon found himself at the spot where he had discovered Lillian Wallace’s bathrobe and towel neatly folded on the frontal dune some two weeks before. If she hadn’t placed them there, then someone else had—someone with a detailed knowledge of her routines and habits, someone close to her, someone who wanted her dead.
He was getting ahead of himself now. Even if she had drowned in the family swimming pool, it wasn’t necessarily evidence of foul play. This was the line he had fed Hobbs, anyway. In fact, he’d openly dismissed the idea of murder to Hobbs, suggesting that the body had been moved for more innocent reasons. There were, after all, no indications of physical violence on Lillian Wallace’s
corpse. Hobbs’ silence had been bought with the inducement that if anything came of Hollis’ investigation he would credit the Medical Examiner with first drawing his attention to the anomaly in the autopsy.
The tactic seemed to have worked. If Hobbs was going to spill the beans to Milligan, he would have done so by now.
He paused to catch his breath at the top of the bluff. The sound of a vehicle broke the silence. From his vantage point he could see headlights sweep the lot of the beach landing, passing over the patrol car, then accelerating away up Two Mile Hollow to Further Lane.
The sooner he was gone, the better.
Entering the garden through the gate in the rusted iron fence, he crept through the shadows and found himself poolside.
The pump suddenly kicked in, causing his own to skip a couple of beats. Dropping to one knee, he scooped up some water and raised the cupped hand to his mouth.
There was no mistaking the taste, the briny tang.
As he hurried away, there was no feeling of exhilaration, but a curious sense of inevitability. He hadn’t landed here by chance. Like a blind man guided across a road, he had been led by the elbow.
The beach near Fresh Pond was deserted. Conrad hauled the sharpie to the water’s edge and lashed the sail-bag to the foredeck. Drawing the stumpy little craft out into deeper water, he clambered awkwardly aboard and began to paddle.
The tide was on the ebb, the wind stiffening from the southwest as it always did at this time on summer afternoons, catspawing across Gardiner’s Bay, its invisible hand slapping the surface at intervals.
Today, it carried with it the playful shouts of children leaping from the end of the long jetty at the Devon Yacht Club, hurling themselves off the wooden rail, skinny brown limbs scything the air before impact. He could just make out the dim tock-tock of a tennis ball being struck on an unseen court behind the low clubhouse.
The Junior Yacht Club was out on the water, a flotilla of boxy little Knockabouts running dead before the wind. A motor launch was in attendance, an instructor barking orders through a loudhailer. As the dinghies came about, Conrad ranged alongside the cat-boat.
The
Demeter
had been his first purchase on his return from Europe—a twenty-five-foot Gil Smith from the turn of the century, a masterpiece of design, and a dream come true. The elegance of its sheer lines aside, the shallow, wide hull, almost eleven feet in beam, provided the perfect working platform for a bayman. It was
the first boat Conrad had ever crewed on, working the culling board with Antton, plucking out scallops from the eelgrass and the crabs and the culch dredged from the sea bed. Conrad had never concealed his interest in the craft, and when old Josaiah Fullard died in 1943 the
Demeter
had languished at her moorings in Accabonac Creek, awaiting Conrad’s return from Europe. Even when the news arrived that he’d been killed in action, Josaiah’s sons had held out a little longer, just in case.
Now the
Demeter
was his, more beautiful than ever—new running rig, new sail, new yellow pine hull. He always felt good when seated at the helm, teasing the great barn-door rudder, beating before the wind, the canvas snapping like a rifle-shot each time he tacked. Even now she seemed to understand him, responding with ease, compensating for his distraction.
With any luck, the last few pieces of the puzzle were waiting for him in Montauk; he’d have them by the end of the day.
Before he knew it, the buoy at the mouth of Napeague Harbor was bearing down on them. He thought about entering the channel and making for Lazy Point, but decided against it. He didn’t want to see Sam right now. It would only mean turning down his offer of assistance for a second time. Once had been hard enough. He was already regretting having shared the truth with him. The last thing he wanted was for Sam to get caught up in an affair that could only end badly.
He leaned on the tiller and came about on the port tack. That’s when he saw it, lying in the bilges—Lillian’s jadeite hair clip, a gift from her brother. She had mentioned to him that she’d misplaced it, and they had searched his bedroom and they had searched her bedroom, and then he had remembered that she’d been wearing it the last time they took the
Demeter
out, and they had laughed, remembering that night, then all the other nights they’d taken the
Demeter
out, right back to that very first night.
She had phoned as he was halfway to the truck, and although they hadn’t seen each other for a week, not since the evening of her birthday, he sensed it was her and he hurried back to the house.
‘Hello.’
‘It’s me,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘How was your surprise party?’
‘Oh, you know…’ said Lillian. ‘What are you up to?’
‘I was about to go firelighting for fluke.’
‘Firelighting for fluke?’
He explained.
‘Sounds to me like you could do with some help,’ she said.
He picked her up at her house and they drove to Promised Land. It was a warm night, with the lightest of breezes, perfect for the task in hand. Safely aboard, the gear loaded, he edged the
Demeter
away from the dock and out into Gardiner’s Bay, the five hundred square feet of canvas sucking up what little wind there was. Nearing Cartwright Shoals, he rigged the lantern from the stern of the boat and lit it.
‘Wow,’ said Lillian, peering over the side.
Beneath the glassy surface, the sea bed was laid bare.
‘Those are wild oysters,’ said Conrad, pointing. ‘They’re pretty much gone now.’
‘Why?’
‘Who knows? That’s a horseshoe crab.’
‘Where?’
‘There. And that’s a fluke, over there by the eelgrass, the flatfish.’
‘With the spots?’
‘With the spots.’
Taking up the spear, he slid the barbed head beneath the water and stuck the fluke. He tossed it to the far end of the cockpit, where it flapped wildly in the bilges.
‘A third of that’s yours,’ said Conrad.
‘Only a third?’
‘The boat gets a share.’
‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come.’
‘Okay, I’ll go fifty-fifty, but you’ll have to earn it,’ he said, handing over the spear.
They talked while they fished, drifting across the shoals. Conrad explained that he’d learned the technique from Billy, who had learned it from Sam, who in turn had learned it from his father—a family tradition reaching back to well before the arrival of the first white faces on the South Fork.
‘Billy’s an Indian?’
‘He’s dead. But yes, a Montaukett.’
‘I didn’t know…I mean…’
‘There aren’t many of them left,’ said Conrad.
He told her how, within living memory, the Montauketts had been lured off their tribal lands with promises of payments which had never materialized; how they had been chased away at gunpoint, shot at, killed in some cases, by the same men who had assured them they could return to fish and hunt on Montauk whenever they wished; and how the Suffolk County Court had then dismissed their suit against these blatant injustices on the grounds that the tribe had ceased to exist, that it was now extinct.
He told her how Sam had been present in the courtroom when Judge Abel Blackmar handed down his ludicrous verdict, declaring that he saw ‘no Indians there’, apparently blind to the fifty or so Montauketts cramming the public gallery that day, clad in full tribal regalia.
He described how he had stood with Sam and Billy on Signal Hill in Montauk one blustery summer’s day in 1926. The community was in the firm grip of construction fever, with hundreds of workers bulldozing, blasting and building away, racing to bring to life Carl Fisher’s dream of turning Montauk into ‘the Miami Beach of the North’. The centerpiece of his vision was Montauk Manor, an enormous mock-Tudor hotel perched high on the hill above Fort Pond. The location offered unrivaled views to the west, and it was no coincidence that the site was already occupied by an ancient Indian burial ground. The Montauketts always buried their dead on high ground, in a seated position, facing west—the direction of their journey into the afterlife.
Fisher had given his word that the burial ground wouldn’t be
disturbed by the construction work. But that brisk summer’s day, with the clouds whipping by overhead and the rush of the wind drowning out the sound of the earthmovers, it became clear that Sam’s advice, and that of the other Montauketts who knew the precise compass of the sacred site, had been ignored.
There were scraps of rough-woven cloth, dank and dirty, in the mounds of earth. And there were bones.
‘That’s terrible,’ said Lillian.
Conrad shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’ He explained how two months later, a hurricane had ripped through Miami Beach, devastating Carl Fisher’s greatest creation; how later that year the headquarters of Fisher’s Montauk Beach Development Company had burned to the ground, blueprints and all; and how the stock market crash in 1929 had then killed off Fisher’s Montauk dream for good.
‘He died poor and unhappy,’ said Conrad. ‘But Sam still said a prayer for his soul when he heard.’
They were heading back to the dock now, the
Demeter
gliding across the surface.
‘You think there’s a connection?’ asked Lillian.
‘I don’t know. I like to think so. If Fisher hadn’t desecrated the ground, if he’d pulled it off, everything out here would have changed for the worse.’
‘Yes,’ said Lillian, smiling, ‘it’s a pleasing irony.’
Back at the dock, they unloaded the fluke into crates then he ran her back to her house on Further Lane.
‘When do I get my cut?’ she asked as they pulled up.
‘Couple of days, week at the most. I’ll ship them down to Fulton tomorrow.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’ll be the first money I’ve ever earned.’ She glanced across at him. ‘I’m not proud of it.’
‘No, I can see.’
‘But I do think it calls for a celebration.’
They took their drinks to the end of the garden and they sat on the bluff overlooking the ocean.
‘This is my favorite spot in the world,’ she said.
They never finished the drinks.
A little while later, she placed her hand on his, the charge of her touch shorting out all other thoughts, smiling at him with a mixture of tenderness and certainty that left no room for doubt or maneuver. Not that he was considering either. He leaned across to meet her lips, and she drew him down on to the ground.
Later, when it was over and they were lying entwined in the grass, she pressed her face to his neck and inhaled.
‘You have a very particular smell.’
‘It goes with the job.’
‘I like it,’ she said. ‘Eau de fish.’
Conrad laughed.
Lillian’s fingers sought out the long ridge of scar tissue in his side, tracing its smooth contours.
Maybe she felt him tense under her touch, or maybe she just knew him well enough already, but she didn’t give voice to her curiosity.
The Montauk fishing fleet was back in, and Fort Pond Bay was a hive of activity. Sloops and draggers were making for the docks where others were already packing out, unloading their catches, separating, boxing and icing the fish, hammering the tags of their favored dealers to the sides of the cedar crates.
Conrad ranged alongside Duryea’s Dock and made fast. He checked that the
Demeter
was good there till the morning, pushed his way through the crowd and set off along the great scythe of beach.
Waves lapped at the pebbly sand. Out on the water two boys were floundering away in a little craft cobbled together from fish boxes and corrugated iron. The caulking at the seams had failed and they were shipping water fast, bailing furiously with their hands. As the gunwales dipped below the waves, they saluted, going down with their stricken vessel. Their shrieks of laughter carried clear across the water as they kicked for the shore.
Just back from the beach some young kids were playing baseball on the same sandy lot where Conrad had once swung a
bat with their fathers. The crude baseball diamond hadn’t changed, but Trail’s End restaurant and the Post Office which had once sandwiched the lot were gone, moved away on skids at the outbreak of the war.
The Navy had decided that the broad, clean sweep of Fort Pond Bay offered the perfect location for a torpedo-testing range, and had duly slapped a compulsory relocation order on every family in the fishing village. Some had rolled their houses down to vacant lots on Edgemere Road and Flamingo Avenue. Others had simply abandoned them, taking the $300 compensation on offer and buying or building anew.
The Navy succeeded where the hurricane of ‘38 had failed, delivering a blow from which the fishing village looked unlikely ever to recover. What buildings remained trailed around the shore like a broken line of walking wounded returning from battle, and only a handful of people had returned to the homes they’d been forced to leave.
Hendrik Morgan was one of them.
He was sitting out front of the two-room shack his father had first built, knitting a funnel for a lobster pot. More pots were stacked around him. Straggly shrubs demarcated the small patch of shingle that was the front garden, and a weather-beaten vine clung precariously to the side of the building. These few plaintive stabs at adornment were undermined by the rancid stench of bait fish setting in a barrel nearby.
‘
Goddag.
’
Hendrik looked up and smiled. ‘
Hej.
’
‘How’s it going, Hendrik?’
‘Good,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Good.’
He took Conrad’s hand warmly, clamping his other hand on top. He stood at least as tall, his lank blond hair flopping in front of his blue eyes.
‘You got time for a cold one?’ asked Hendrik.
‘Sure.’
Hendrik headed inside, returning a few moments later with another chair and a couple of bottles of beer. He popped the
tops and they settled down in the sunshine, looking out over the
bay.
‘How’s the lobstering?’ asked Conrad.
‘Easier now I got me a new boat.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The
Alice T,
a thirty-foot western-rig out of Stonington. Got a fair few miles on her keel, and trims a little heavy by the stern when loaded, but she’s a real beauty.’
‘How many pots you fishing?’
‘Hundred and fifty, more on the way.’ He nodded at the oak laths and other lobster-pot stock piled up nearby. ‘Two hundred and fifty should do it.’
‘And some.’
‘Yeah, first year back’s been good to me.’
‘You deserve it.’
Hendrik smiled. ‘Wish it worked like that, but we both know it don’t.’
Hendrik’s family had been plagued by a run of mud-luck for well over a decade. The Depression had been tough on everyone, but it had coincided with a sharp drop-off in the lobsters, obliging Hendrik and his father to abandon their operation for other work, chopping wood for the WPA and filling ruts for the Highway Department—anything to scrape together a few precious dollars a day. This was how Conrad and Hendrik had first got to meet, odd-jobbing in East Hampton one winter, thrown together in the gardens of city people, spreading manure on the flower borders, the heat rising up through their boots. Left to his own devices, Hendrik would take every opportunity to snoop around the summer homes. He claimed he never touched anything, though how he came across the selection of riding crops tucked beneath the bed of a well-known movie actress remained to be answered; and there was always a faint but distinct whiff of mothballs about him whenever he returned from his prowls.