Soundkeeper (15 page)

Hall looked at the old man and nodded his head in agreement.

“I wish I could have been here then. How many bass you think there will be for my kids to catch if poachers keep netting them all?” Hall asked.

The old man grunted at the game warden and puttered down the dock with his cane keeping cadence. He shoved some fresh tobacco in his mouth and quietly muttered a promise to make his son in-law pay for the tickets and reimburse him for the money he had to pay the tow truck driver.

Hall waited a few more minutes before starting his own journey home. The tide was full now, and he could cut across the Parris Island spit without worry. When he was in Port Royal Sound proper he could see the red lights on the one hundred-foot radio tower that was on the mainland behind Pinckney Island. The tower stood so that when he left the Beaufort River it guided him right to the narrow channel that led to his dock. Exhausted, but like a good mariner, he checked and rechecked his lines and hosed down his boat before heading inside.

Chapter Twenty-Four

This evening seemed to be the coolest since she had been kidnapped. The sweat suit Arnold bought her kept her fairly warm but she still felt chilly. She had sores on her ankle from the handcuff and she craved a hot shower. Even when she had been aboard the hospital ship, where freshwater was rationed, she had been able to take a hot shower every day. She cleaned the wound on her ankle with some of the bottled water and a sanitary napkin from the supplies she had been given. The pain in her jaw was flaring up again, and she was afraid that her jaw had been knocked out of alignment. Every time she spoke or chewed her jaw made a disturbing popping sound and she’d had a headache ever since she had been knocked unconscious.

On the floor next to her bedroll were four small vertical lines she had scratched in the old wood. Tomorrow she would draw a horizontal slash across them, marking her fifth day of captivity. Arnold was yelling at the television for someone to buy a vowel and failing to decipher the simplest puzzle. He glanced over at her only occasionally and would always smile at her.

As Gale listened to Pat quiz his contestants she considered a question that she had forced herself to ignore. Why hadn’t Arnold tried to force himself on her yet, if that was his intention? Gale had already decided that if that terrible moment ever came she would fight him with every ounce of strength she had. Was he telling her the truth when he said that he would let her go when he was finished with his job? Arnold had not tried to hurt her. Blondie had knocked her unconscious and thought she was dead. She had no illusions about him, but Arnold seemed different. She wondered if she could trust Arnold to keep his word. Would he let her go?

“Thanks for the clothes,” she called across the building.

Arnold jumped up so quickly that he got caught up in his lawn chair and tripped and fell. Her body tensed with fear when she saw him move so fast.

“You’re welcome,” Arnold said as he stood back up.

She remembered a boy she had known in high school, a classmate who was so shy that he seldom ever spoke to anyone and never talked to her or any of the other girls. He was easily led and always hung around the troublemakers at school and was so anonymous she couldn’t even remember his name, even though there were only thirty people in her graduating class. She wondered how much Arnold had in common with that fellow. Gale grabbed the edge of her blanket and pulled it around her shoulders. She needed to test her theory about Arnold.

“Are you from around here?” She knew from his accent that he wasn’t a local boy but she had to start somewhere.

“No, uh, I’m from Pittsburgh, a neighborhood called Brushton,” Arnold stammered.

“I’ve never been there. Is it nice?” Gale asked.

“It sucks. No jobs, a decent apartment costs an arm and a leg, and it snows too damn much. I ain’t been back in twenty years,” Arnold said. He dragged the lawn chair from in front of the television closer to where Gale was sitting on the floor. The sunlight outside was fading and the light from the television made shadows dance around the room.

“How did you ever get caught up with someone awful like your partner? You seem like a nice guy, but he scares me,” Gale said and hoped she wasn’t going too far.

“I’ve got to eat, just like you. Nobody is going to hire a felon on parole. I can’t vote, I can’t own a gun and I don’t even have a high school diploma. I’m just trying to get by like everybody else.”

Gale let the silence hang between them while she thought about what he said. He was right, she knew. Every job application she had ever seen asked about arrests and convictions, education and work experience. She didn’t think it was fair for someone to have to pay for their mistakes forever.

“What about family? Don’t you have anyone that could help you make a fresh start?”

Arnold shook his head, “I never met my father. I don’t even know if my mom knows who he is. My grandma looked after me until she got tired of all my crap. The last time I got picked up as a juvenile nobody came to pick me up when I was released. I ran away from a group home, went back to our apartment, and everyone was gone. Nobody was there.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

Gale thought about what her life was like when she was that age. She saw mountains for the first time in her life at fourteen when she went camping with her aunt and uncle. She babysat her young cousins for them and earned spending money for the arcade at the campground. She kissed a boy for the first time on that trip. Her grandfather had given her a little Sunfish sailboat for her fourteenth birthday and by the end of the summer she had a shelf full of racing trophies. Alone at fourteen was difficult for her to imagine.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Arnold shrugged his shoulders and took his lawn chair back to the television.

Chapter Twenty Five

Hall woke at five a.m., his usual time, and listened to the marine weather forecast on the VHF radio while he fried an egg and ate it out of the skillet. He took his morning cup of coffee to his kitchen table/work desk and started going through his mail. Belker was pleased to have some company, and Hall played with him for a bit while he drank his coffee. He guessed the pup was no more than three or four months old and was surprised by the young dog’s instinctive urge to retrieve. He held Belker by his collar when he threw a tennis ball across the room and made the dog wait until he whispered ‘get it’.

After a dozen tosses and retrievals the pup grew bored and was content to sit and gnaw on a plastic duck decoy Hall had given him. Hall began reading a fax that he had found earlier on the machine. It was from Cliff Anderson at the Waddell Center. The report was several pages long and would have been difficult for a layman to decipher. The clipped language and short sentences were not unlike criminal offense reports he’d read and written himself.

Hall resisted the impulse to skip ahead to the end of the report and read the conclusion. Instead he enjoyed digesting the results of the individual tests and hoped he would reach the same hypothesis. It had been a while since he had used his scientific knowledge and it was good exercise for his brain. The report didn’t detail the actual testing procedures, but Hall knew what they were. During the last two years of college and in graduate school Hall had become familiar with the processes involved in determining the causes of vertebrate finfish mortality.

After a thorough physical examination, several individual scales were removed from each specimen. In addition, the otiliths or “earbones” of the fish were removed. These were used to determine the age of the fish, as it was necessary to differentiate whether juvenile or adult fish were affected. When Hall worked in the lab he had collected data for over a dozen on-going studies on everything from fish population levels to annual growth rate rankings to local water quality.

When a few scales and the otiliths were removed, the remainder of the carcass was ground into a pulp and submitted to a spectrometer for analysis. This machine provided the scientists with a highly detailed accounting of every element that was present and the amount of that element, no matter how small. The scientists checked the numbers on everything because even substances that occurred naturally in fish could prove lethal if too much were present.

But hydrocarbons were not naturally present in finfish. The level of hydrocarbons present in the fish that Hall had submitted showed a mean average of eight parts per million. Benzine and Naphthalene were the primary toxins detected.

Hall surmised that the fish kill was the result of a gasoline spill and Cliff made the same suggestion at the end of his report. It was not uncommon in urbanized coastal areas for small-scale fish kills to occur due to a gasoline or diesel spill. Hall knew for a fact it happened so frequently it was common practice for pleasure boaters to have an “ecological damage” rider on their insurance policies. Some marinas required the insurance before they would allow boaters to tie up for the night.

Hall put the fax down and referred to his notes from the day he collected the fish. He did not remember a slick being on the water, and his notes confirmed that. That meant the pollutant had been spilled quite some time before the fish had been discovered, or the wind and the tide had dispersed the slick.

At the end of the report was a handwritten note from his friend. He suggested that Hall return to the area where the fish were discovered and take bottom sediment samples. Another biologist at the center was conducting a study to determine how long hydrocarbon pollutants remained in the environment after a spill occurred. If significant hydrocarbon levels were present he would like for Hall, or someone, to collect sediment samples from the same area four times a year for as many years as possible.

Hall was thrilled to be able to mix some scientific research with his current duties. The request from Cliff was a small one, and Hall hoped it assured that he would be able to monitor the progress of the study. It couldn’t hurt to keep his name in front of the staff at the Waddell Center. If they weren’t hiring any biologists they might give him a good recommendation to someone who was. Hall wished Gale knew what he had discovered. She had been on the front line of the conservation effort in the Port Royal watershed and had done many things that had made a difference. Perhaps this study would lead to stricter penalties for polluters, or maybe scientists would discover a faster way to restore an area after a spill had occurred. She would have been pleased.

In his mail was a post card from Jimmy and Rebecca Barnwell. On the front was an aerial photograph of the massive naval shipyard at Norfolk. On the back Jimmy had written that their voyage had gone well so far, with the exception of a minor electrical problem that had kept them in Wilmington for a few days. He asked if there was any news, and Hall assumed he wondered if Gale’s body was ever recovered. Tonight he would write a letter to his friend.

In the storage shed behind the caretaker’s cottage Hall found the boxes he was looking for. The one he needed was on the bottom of the stack, and he remembered when he stored the boxes he had believed the items in this box were the least likely to be needed any time soon.

Inside were a small core-sampler and other dusty tools of a marine biologist. Some were well used from his fieldwork as a student and some were brand new, having been bought when his future seemed very certain. He grabbed a brand new lab book for his notes. If he was going to take scientific readings he might as well record them in the proper format.

He locked Belker inside the back yard. The pup managed a full-fledged bark for the first time, and Hall wasn’t sure who was more surprised, him or the dog. The first fingers of the April sun were clearing the eastern horizon when he cast off from his dock, and when he passed Dawes Island he smelled smoke but could not see it. It had been over a week since any significant rainfall, and he was concerned. Jimmy had shown him areas that had been damaged by wildfires. Controlled burning was a valuable tool in wildlife management, but an uncontrolled marsh fire could be disastrous. Even after slowing the boat he could not tell where the smoke originated from, so he shut the engine down and drifted to a stop. Soon he was able to gauge the direction of the wind and slowly motored into the breeze. The smell of wood smoke grew stronger, but still he could not separate it from the morning fog and haze that had not yet burned off. Then he saw a wispy gray column of smoke rising into the sky.

The fire looked like it was coming from a group of trees several hundred yards back from the western bank of the Chechessee River. He saw a small creek that cut into the marsh and motored cautiously ahead, aware that the tide was quickly falling.

After idling along for more than fifteen minutes he came to a place that struck him as being unique for the lowcountry. On his left, the marsh suddenly gave way to solid ground that rose fifteen feet above the high water mark, which was unusual topography for this area. Where the marsh grass ended, palmettos, live oaks, and magnolia trees stood tall. Spanish moss draped heavily from the tree limbs. At the waterline was a small sandy beach, and on the sand was a small camouflaged jon boat.

Hall beached his boat, checked the jon boat closely and determined it was not the same vessel he had impounded yesterday. He knew he was not on refuge land but felt a duty to investigate the source of the smoke. He unconsciously adjusted his gunbelt across his hips. When the smell of bacon reached his nostrils he relaxed a bit, and when he found the campsite he was relieved. Four young teenagers were cooking over a small open fire, laughing and making a lot of noise. He called out before he got close to keep from surprising them.