Black Tide

Kindle edition Copyright 2013 by Brendan DuBois.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors' imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

All Rights Reserved.

BLACK TIDE

A Lewis Cole Mystery

By

Brendan DuBois

For Mona Pinette

The successful completion of a book often depends on other people.  For this one, the author wishes to express his deep thanks to the members of his family, Ernie Connor of the N.H. Port Authority, Dan Chartrand, Tom Raynor, Ron Sher, and special thanks to Michele Slung and Kate Stine of OPB, editors extraordinaire.

Introduction

             
The first book that an author publishes is often his or her most memorable, but in many ways --- at least for me --- the second novel can be more terrifying and difficult.  And why’s that?

             
A number of things.  First and more importantly, all new authors face the possibility of a “sophomore slump,” where the second book does poorly compared to the second.   Second --- especially in a detective series with continuing tales ---- there’s the challenge of coming up with a new story that not only is a satisfying story, but brings in the same characters from book number one.  And more importantly, the third point:  of actually plotting the damn thing soon after wrapping up book number one.

             
That last point caused a humorous moment after my agent at the time, Jed Mattes, called me to let me know that he had concluded contract negotiations for two Lewis Cole novels.  At the time, I had only finished “Dead Sand”, and I can still remember to this day the shocked statement I made in reply:  “But I don’t have the idea for a second book!”

             
To which he gave me very good agent advice:  “That’s okay, don’t tell them that yet.”

             
Which next meant I had to come up with an outline to satisfy my editor, down there in Manhattan, and that took some work.  You see, all of my earlier novels --- including three that never got published --- meant that I never had to share my outline with everybody.  But now, in working with a sharp editor who knew her way around publishing, made me re-do my outline three or four times before she was satisfied.

             
That was one of the early signals I received that this writing gig was going to be a bit challenging.

             
Anyway, once the outline was approved, off to work I went on, with “Black Tide,” and I hope you enjoy it, and I also hope you don’t mind traveling back in time, to a world of no cellphones, VCRs, answering machines, where a computer modem was considered hi-tech, and where the Internet was just beginning to make its appearance.

             
But crime and mystery is timeless.

Chapter One

On this late July Sunday afternoon the great gray waters of the Atlantic Ocean were rolling gently onto the shores of Tyler, New Hampshire, not causing much surf or foam to break upon the rocks and sand. I was sitting on the rear deck of my two-story home, overlooking a private cove of mine that's probably one of the most inaccessible parts of the eighteen miles of this seacoast, which stretches from the Massachusetts border to the shores of Maine. The day was hot and the air was still, and to the north, beyond the woods of the Samson State Wildlife Preserve, a bank of thick gray and clouds was moving out to sea. Every now and then I would hear the distant rumble of the storm, sounding like some pile-driving machinery out there in the sky.

It was a muggy day and all I wore was a tattered pair of gym shorts from the University of New Hampshire. At my elbow was a round wooden table and a pair of binoculars, and an empty bottle of Molson Golden Ale. Another bottle was sweating cold ice in my hands, and as I watched the waves roll in, I thought some about the passage of time and its odd little mileposts. More than three hundred and fifty years ago some Englishmen in two leaky wooden boats – the
Beaver
and the
Resolute
---made their way from England to these shores, and the town and its beaches were named for their leader, the Reverend Bonus Tyler. Over a hundred years ago, fearful of a new Spanish Armada, the land on which I now lived was converted from a lifeboat station to a Coast Artillery installation, and the home in which I slept and drank and wrote once belonged to some junior officers in the US. Navy. Now the home is mine and the concrete bunkers to the near north are part of a wildlife preserve and belong to the woodchucks and rabbits.

I rubbed the cold bottle of beer against my forehead and looked down to my left side. A month ago I was in a hospital bed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now I was back in Tyler, and at my side, the angry red of the skin where the thirty-two stitches had gone in had now subsided to a bright pink. The healing of the flesh and the changing of its color was a process as dependable as the rising and setting of the sun, and it was a process I was intimately familiar with.

But that didn't mean I was happy about it.

I picked up my binoculars --- which were just slightly younger than my scar, its predecessor currently resting on the bottom of Tyler Harbor --- and I looked south, to Weymouth's Point and the narrow stretch of beach that was called North Beach. To the near south was a pile of broken rocks and rubble that discouraged most sightseers and blocked the view of all but a tiny portion of the sands of North Beach. The main beach of Tyler --- which on this Sunday was no doubt filled with tens of thousands of sunbathers, tourists and assorted (and sordid) hangers-on --- was a couple of miles further to the south, but from the number of tiny figures visible in my binoculars, it looked as if North Beach was holding its own. It didn't have the arcades or fried-dough stands or bars or pizza joints or T-shirt emporiums that were crammed into the main beach, but it did have reasonably clean sand, which was pretty good, considering all that had gone on some weeks ago.

In moving around my fake-redwood chair, I took a deep breath, and the tug at my side was not as painful as it was last week. I was doing all right, just like the beaches. In taking that deep breath, I caught the faint stench of petroleum. Lifting up my binoculars again, I remembered how the beaches had muddled through that disastrous night a month ago, when I was flat on my back in another state and was wondering why hospital dietitians couldn't design a better way of serving scrambled eggs than from a scoop fashioned from an ice-cream spoon.

I scanned the ocean and stopped for a moment at the rocky islands of the Isles of Shoals, about eleven or so miles out on the ocean. On a moonless evening last month a small tanker carrying tens of thousands of gallons of home heating oil had run aground on a ledge near Star Island, one of the nine rocky outcroppings making up the Isles of Shoals. Despite the White Island lighthouse, the well-marked charts and the size of the islands themselves, the crew of the
Petro Star
--- those few who weren't sleeping or who weren't getting ready for a night ashore at Porter or who weren't drunk --- had put the tanker aground. And in the fine tradition of those ship captains who are ruled by budgeters rather than common sense, the master of the
Petro Star
had tried for a half hour to pull the vessel free before contacting the Foss Island Coast Guard station. In the space of those thirty minutes, he had torn out the hull of his ship.

Thousands of gallons of oil began washing ashore the next day on the beaches of Falconer, Tyler and North Tyler, New Hampshire, and there was I, far from home, watching the news on the television in my hospital room with my hands twisting the sheets in disgust and fury. In a while I stopped with the sheets and I scribbled some thoughts on a notepad a friendly nurse had given me. A couple of weeks ago, I had come home. By then the bulk of the
Petro Star's
cargo had been pumped into another tanker, and the vessel had been taken to Portland, Maine, while the inquiries had begun. And in my fine Puritan tradition ---- one I'm sure would have impressed the Reverend Bonus Tyler ---- I began work the day after I got home.

First I walked along my stretch of shoreline. Volunteer cleanup crews had been up and down the coast, no doubt ignoring my homemade and quite illegal "No Trespassing" signs, but the stink and remnants of what one writer has called "the devil's excrement" were still there on the rocks and the sand. I walked slowly, for the stitches were still in my side, covered by a gauze bandage. I used an oak walking stick to help me move along the rocks and boulders, and wore thigh-high rubber boots over my trembling and weak legs. And though the volunteers had done their best, there was still the stench of the oil, so thick that I could actually taste it, and I was slipping and sliding on the rocks as I walked, trying to convince myself that the tears in my eyes were from the smell.

In just a day I went through a half dozen trash bags, picking up dead seagulls, cormorants, plovers and terns, as well as cod and bluefish and perch, and oil-sopped masses of seaweed and chunks of driftwood. When I was through for the day the clothes and boots and gloves I wore went into another trash bag, and I washed myself down with a sponge, not wanting to get the bandage soaked by taking a shower.

In a few days I stopped the cleanup, since I had done about as much as I could. It was up to the waves and the storms and the weather to finish the job. And I went to work on other things, by using my phone, my computer and my modem. Some years ago I had been trained by people who received light green US. Treasury checks each pay period and who were the very best in ferreting out bits and pieces of information for the Department of Defense, and now I was using those wonderful skills to find some answers, about who owned the
Petro Star
and who had sent it out that evening to Porter, the state's only major port. It was a hunt that I knew was going to be long and difficult, and so far, my predictions had been painfully accurate.