B000FC1MHI EBOK (29 page)

“Oh, boy,” he finally muttered.

She nodded. “Bad timing.”

“My son, your husband.”

“The accident.”

“Gear war.”

“Maybe that’s all it is?” she asked. “A reaction?”

He shook his head and folded his arms on his chest. She did the same, and all the while good sense was telling her to get in her car and drive away. Had she been willing to listen, good sense would have had her on her way back to New York the next morning.

“So maybe,” he said quietly, “this is what the accident was for.”

“You and me?”

“Yes. What’s your marriage like?”

“Don’t ask that,” she whispered.

“If it’s good, I’ll back off.”

“Noah.”

“Is it?”

She unfolded her arms and dropped her chin to her chest. In the next instant, though, she turned into him, and he was there. His arms went around her, drawing her close. Cheek settling on his chest, she closed her eyes and breathed in far more than the paint on his shirt. He was beneath it—Noah Prine—heart pounding loudly, limbs trembling slightly, body smelling of man and exuding a penetrating heat. If she wanted to be wanted, the proof was here. He made no attempt to hide it—all the less so when, shifting, he pressed her against the car.

She sighed at the sheer pleasure of it.

“You can say
that
again,” he muttered hoarsely.

She repeated the sigh.

He chuckled. His breath was warm by her ear. “Can I kiss you?”

She shook her head, but her arms were around him now, too.

“Not even if I keep my mouth closed and my tongue inside?” he asked.

She laughed. “What fun would that be?”

“None. I’m good with my tongue.”

“I’m sure you are,” she managed, though her knees had gone soft. Without his body propping hers up, she might have slipped to the ground and melted away.

Taking her face in his hands, he turned it up. His eyes were serious. “I messed up my marriage because my priorities were wrong, and they’ve probably been wrong in the ten years since, because the only thing that’s mattered to me is work. Mattered? That’s a relative word. All I’ve done is go through the motions—wake up in the morning, work all day, come home exhausted and go to bed. Since the accident, I’ve been thinking about missed opportunities. I blew it with my parents and now they’re gone. But Ian isn’t. So I’m working on that. And now there’s you. Tell me what you want, Julia.”

Unable to do that, with so much else in her life up in the air, Julia pressed a hand to his mouth. His lips were firm and lean. Her fingers lingered there a minute, then withdrew. Slipping out from under him, she rounded the car and slid behind the wheel. After nearly closing the door on Lucas, she eased his head out of the way and started the car.

Noah stood several feet away. She backed around and drove off, alternately watching the road and her rearview mirror. All too soon, the mirror was dark, but his image remained in her mind, a glow that reminded her what it was like to be wanted. Coming off a long emotional night filled with insecurity and hurt, she was elated. She could love him for that alone.

On impulse, driven by a combination of strength and guilt, she walked into the hill house and phoned Monte. It wasn’t the first time she had tried him; they were playing phone tag, leaving messages for each other every few days. She heard her own voice ask the caller to leave a message. This time, though, she hung up before the beep.

She might have reached him on his cell phone. Where would he be at ten o’clock at night? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

That wasn’t true. She did want to know. She
badly
wanted to know.

But would he tell the truth? She doubted it. Monte had an answer for everything. She was so convinced of
that,
that even if he did tell the truth, she probably wouldn’t believe it.

What’s your marriage like?
Noah had asked.

Sad, she thought. Very sad.

N
oah was up before dawn, shaking Ian awake, then monitoring the NOAA weather broadcast while he fried a package of bacon and half a dozen eggs, toasted six slices of bread, and poured large glasses of juice.

Entering the kitchen when everything was on the table, Ian looked at the food and shook his head. “I hope none of that’s for me. I can’t eat this early.”

“You’re going to be working this early. You’ll need energy.”

“Just coffee,” Ian said, and helped himself to a mugful.

Noah didn’t argue. It wasn’t worth the breath. If Ian was hungry, he would eat lunch. If he was very hungry, he would know to have breakfast tomorrow. Here was one of the things he and Sandi had disagreed upon. Noah had never insisted that Ian eat, not when Ian was four, not when he was twelve. Nor had he insisted that the boy wear a winter jacket when the weather cooled. These were things a child could learn for himself. Not so homework or manners, which were musts, and alcohol and drugs, which were must-nots.

Noah chose his fights—another legacy of his parents, he realized now.

So he ate his own full breakfast while Ian drank his coffee. The boy sat at the table looking at anything but Noah, while Noah made four tuna sandwiches and packed them in a cooler along with canned soda and chips. He put his logbook beside the cooler. He cleaned up the kitchen.

Pulling on a sweatshirt, he suggested Ian do the same. Ian said he’d be fine without. So Noah said, “Take the cooler.” Logbook in hand, he opened the front door. There was fresh air here, all the more so, figuratively speaking, when Lucas bounded out of the deep purple dawn. Lucas was enthusiasm. He was energy and loyalty. He was unconditional love, and Noah was hungry for that.

Taking the dog’s head in both hands, he scrubbed his neck. “Hey, guy, how’re you doing?” Lucas’s tail wagged wildly. “Have a good night? The bed was lonely without you. Where you been?” Lucas’s tongue lolled in delight.

“The dog hates me,” Ian said.

Noah opened the truck door. Lucas scrambled into the extended cab. “Why do you say that?”

“He won’t come near me.”

Noah might have said that dogs, like young children, were drawn to warmth and to genuine affection, neither of which Ian had shown. More diplomatically, he said, “He doesn’t know you, so he’s cautious. That’s typical of this breed of dog.”

Ian didn’t say anything more, not when they stopped at the trap shed to load the truck up with buoys, nor when they backed onto the pier and transferred the buoys to the boat. To his credit, the boy was no weakling. Noah saw firm biceps under the sleeves of his T-shirt. He also saw goose bumps, lots of them.

There were sweatshirts on the boat, hanging in plain sight. He figured Ian would take one if he was cold. Same with a hat. Noah wore his Patriots cap. He half hoped Ian would ask about it, which would open up talk about both sports and Hutch, either subject being something they shared. But Hutch might never have existed, for the interest Ian had shown. There hadn’t been a word since he arrived—no offer of condolence, no question about the accident investigation or whether he was sleeping in Hutch’s bed.

Once the truck was unloaded, Noah parked it back at the pier. He stopped briefly at Rick’s for his thermos and found two there, along with a bag with a penciled note on the front:
Something special for the boy, in case he suffers withdrawal at ten.

Smiling, he tucked the thermoses under his arm, took the bag, and returned to the boat. He pulled on oilskin overalls and rubber boots, and was relieved when Ian followed suit. Hauling those few traps yesterday, they had only worn boots, but Ian would have had to be dimwitted not to realize that a full day’s work would be wetter.

Mickey Kling called over a weather update from the deck of the
Mickey ’n Mike
. Leslie Crane gave Noah a thumbs-up as
My Andrea
motored out of the harbor.

Whistling for Lucas, Noah directed Ian to untie the lines while he got the engine humming. He had to jiggle the wires connecting the VHF before the local channel sputtered out a sound, but that was nothing new. Backing out of the slip, he actually felt pretty good. Yes, Ian was a pill; yes, the gear war was escalating; yes, he was worried about Kimmie Colella and about his hankering for Julia Bechtel. But he was going out lobstering with his son, and that was special.

Fog remained, though it wasn’t nearly as thick as it had been the night before. With sunrise somewhere beyond it and the cottony world inside a pale gray, the
Leila Sue
motored to Foss’s for bait, then held to headway speed through the harbor. Once past the markers, Noah edged up the throttle. In no time, with his radar screen providing what the fog took away, they were headed for Main Mast rock at eighteen knots.

Julia was less than an hour behind. In stark contrast to Ian Prine, she wore jeans, a T-shirt, a light sweater, a sweatshirt, and a jacket, plus wool socks and sneakers, plus a hat. She packed her camera, along with warm corn muffins fresh from the oven, a pair of thick turkey sandwiches, and a thermos of hot tea. At the last minute, she even added an extra pair of socks to serve as gloves.

By the time she reached the dock, Matthew was idling beside it in an elegant boat. He wore his usual khakis, but now with a navy blue jacket and a captain’s hat. He looked pleased with himself.

“She’s a twenty-nine-footer with six hundred horses, GPS, real leather wheel, wood dash, heating, AC, you name it. I wasn’t sure how a gem like this’d run,” he said as he helped her aboard, “but she’s easy. They have to make ’em easy. Folks who can afford craft like this don’t know much about the sea. Me, I cut my teeth running lobster boats. I may not be up on the latest with trim tabs and thrusters and all on this thing, but I brought her over here just fine. It’s the knowledge of wind and waves that counts. Store your stuff in the cuddy while I tie us off.”

But Julia didn’t want to be chauffered. At times she felt she had spent the better part of the last twenty years in the backseat of a cab. Here, she wanted to
do
.

So she said, “I have a better idea,” and dropped her things out of the way. “I’ll tie off. You drive.”

Noah knew the waters around Big Sawyer like the back of his hand. Barely checking the radar, he navigated the boat through the deeper channel before heading for the shoals. With Lucas close by his leg, he stood at the wheel, absently monitoring the VHF and the intermittent chatter of his friends, as he drank coffee from the cap of his thermos. Ian was behind him, attaching fresh-painted buoys to the warp of the traps stacked in the stern.

“We’ll set those first,” he said when the boy was done. “See how low the stern rides under their weight? Not good if the chop rises. Once they’re gone, we’ll have room to work.”

Ian stood beside him, peering into the fog. “How do you know where they go?”

“They go where I want them to go.”

“Where do you
want
them to go?” the boy asked, his tone snooty and vaguely mocking.

“I want them to go where the lobsters are,” Noah shot back. Snootiness rubbed him the wrong way. It smacked of superiority, which roused the old inferiority complex in Noah. Sandi said it was in his mind, but he knew he wasn’t alone in his reaction. Condescension from mainlanders, and the defensiveness it spawned, was something islanders fought all their lives.

Defensiveness wasn’t the best approach now, though. More constructively, he said, “This time of year, I want my traps in the shallows. Lobsters are molting right about now. Once they shed those old shells, they hide in the rocks until the new ones harden and give them protection from predators. We pulled these traps yesterday from five fathoms. We’ll set them in three fathoms today. Even without the buoy problem, I’d have moved them soon anyway. You can’t leave traps in the same place all summer, not if you want a decent catch. You have to follow the lobsters.” He brought the engine down to a putter and pointed at one of his screens. “Eighteen, twenty feet. Let’s go.”

Taking traps from the stern, he showed Ian how to balance a pair on the starboard rail, slide the first overboard, then the second, then the buoy. Doubling back, they laid a second string and a third. Farther north, they laid another two strings, then another two farther north again. When the stern was free of traps and the boat rode higher, Noah headed for others of the gray buoys he had seen the day before.

Today, though, there was lobstering to do. Approaching a gray buoy, he threw the boat out of gear, gaffed the buoy, and pulled it aboard. While Ian exchanged the bad buoy for a newly painted one, Noah threw the line over the hydraulic winch, started the hauler, and pulled each of the two traps aboard as they shot up from the depths. Water came up with each, splashed across the deck and out the scuppers. It was North Atlantic cold even at the turn of July.

“You’re my sternman,” he told Ian. “Your job is to empty the trap, measure what’s inside, band keepers, and rebait.” He handed him a pair of thick cotton gloves. “Wear these. And don’t get your fingers in the way of a claw. They don’t call those things cutters and crushers for nothing.”

Ian was staring at the first trap. “What’s that?” he asked uneasily.

“Dogfish,” Noah said. Wearing gloves of his own, he lifted the fish from the trap. “Dogfish is a small shark. This one’s just a baby, but the teeth are sharp and there’s poison back here near the dorsal fins.” He pitched the dogfish back into the sea, and did the same with a hermit crab and several pieces of seaweed. Three lobsters were left in the trap.

He dumped them onto the banding table, where they waved their claws and slapped their tails. “These two are shorts,” he said, tossing the two smallest back into the ocean. “Here’s a maybe.” He took up a small measuring tool. “The carapace is the body as measured from the eye socket to where the tail starts. We can’t keep anything smaller than three and a quarter inches or larger than five—the small ones so they can grow and hopefully breed, the large ones because if they’ve survived this long, they’re among the fittest, and we always want the fittest to breed. See? This one’s nearly three and a half. It’s a keeper. Likely a one-pounder. That’s a chick.”

Taking the banding tool, he showed Ian how to fit a small, wide elastic band onto the end and stretch it enough to fit it over the claw. “Come on, bud,” he murmured when the lobster refused to close its claw. He finally blew on the claw, and the lobster complied.

“Cool,” Ian remarked in his first show of animation.

Thinking of Hutch and the myriad things he had taught Noah in his noncommunicative way, Noah tossed the lobster into a tank. “Now for the bait. See the bag inside the trap? Reach in and take it out.”

Ian got the bag out. It contained nothing but fish bones and small bits of flesh. “This is gross.”

Noah ignored the remark. “Bait like this has become part of the ecological system. The smallest of the lobsters walk in and out of the traps feeding on it.” He pointed to a small rectangular opening at the bottom of one side of the trap. “This escape is for them. As they molt and grow, they become food for other marine species.”

Ian continued to stare at the bait bag, now with his upper lip curled. “What’re we supposed to do with this?”

Noah reached in, scooped out what remained of the bait, and tossed it overboard. The pieces had no sooner hit the waves when a seagull swooped down, caught one up, and carried it off. A second seagull followed suit.

“Now, restuff the bag,” he instructed. When Ian had done it—albeit with a pinched look that decried the smell—he showed him how to retie the bag in the trap. Setting that trap aside, he turned to the second one. It contained more seaweed, a starfish, and a lobster with one claw. The seaweed and the starfish went overboard; the lobster remained. Noah didn’t have to measure it to know it was a keeper, but he had Ian do it anyway. “A one-clawed lobster is called a cull. It won’t command as large a price, but it’s worth something.”

“How’d it lose the claw?”

“A fight, maybe. Lobsters can spontaneously drop a claw if it’s that or death. Once in a while they grab on to the wire of the trap when you’re trying to pull them out, and lose a claw that way. If they were still in the ocean, they’d grow another. It won’t be as big, but it’ll work.”

He let Ian struggle with the bander, which was what he remembered his father doing when he was young and had been learning. He had been seven at the time and lacked the strength in his hand to properly do the job, but he could stuff bait bags. He was paid a nickel a bag.

Ian eventually had the lobster banded and the trap baited, at which point Noah put the boat in gear and the traps went back over the transom, one by one. As soon as a newly painted buoy was bobbing in the waves, they moved on. They had hauled twenty pairs of traps and were about to gaff the last of the vandalized buoys when the sound of a motor came out of the mist.

Noah straightened. He knew the local fleet well enough to tell the
Mickey ’n Mike
from
My Andrea
or
Long Haul
or the
Nora Fritz
sight unseen. This was none of those. It was too smooth, too oiled, too content. He was feeling a sense of anticipation even before the Cobalt materialized, and smiled helplessly when he saw the cockpit. Julia stood there with Matthew Crane. She broke into a grin and waved.