Float (18 page)

“Why should Cora care if I’m here?” She smiled broadly. “Why do
you
care so much?”

The party was closing in around them. The guests, stripped of their wet gear, had come to anchor in front of the fireplace to burn off the damp, so Duncan had to pretend civility until he could usher her out of the house.

“Syrie, why don’t you go to the kitchen and tell Slocum that people are arriving? Then you can leave by the back door.”

“Oh, Duncan, you’re too much.” She laughed in such an intimate manner that some of the party turned and smiled knowingly.

“I have to go see to my guests. The
invited
guests.”

“Your mother invited me,” she said.

He took off his glasses, put them back on, and then left Syrie without a word. He busied himself at the drinks table, helping to dispense rum, open beers, and pass the strange scallops, and as he did, he wondered why his mother was out to destroy his marriage. What with sending Nod out to sea, it was as if she were trying to rid herself of her children altogether. The sooner she was weaned off the wine, the better.

The room went hush as the ancient timbers of the house creaked like a boat and wind whistled through the window sash. The roar of the waves could be heard in the living room as clearly as if they were standing in the middle of the sea, causing the chatter of the group to resume louder than before. He switched on the floodlights in the backyard so they could watch the Atlantic dash itself upon the lawn, flinging green tons of seaweed torn from the bottom of the ocean. Then he called Josefa and asked her to stop in at the Boat Club on her way to see if Nod was trapped there.

“These storms get sketchier and sketchier,” said Marney. She wore an apron, as if she intended to go to the kitchen to help prep, but at the moment she was carrying around a drink with so much surface froth it looked polluted. “It’s global warming. We’ll all be underwater in a hundred years.”

“I thought global warming was going to cause another Ice Age,” said her boyfriend, Dirt, a local lumper on the docks.

“Nonsense,” Duncan’s mother said. “It’s just the perigean tide coinciding with the northeast winds. There’s a logical reason for everything.”

Duncan looked at his watch. Where was Cora?

An older, rather distinguished-looking man wearing a white dinner jacket cleared his throat. He was tall and unstooped, with military-cropped gray hair and a large beak of a nose that hung over a cultivated mustache. The sac under his chin wobbled when he talked. “The Montauk lighthouse at the end of Long Island was built in 1796, three hundred feet from the cliff edge.” He pressed out his bottom lip as he looked into his gin. “Today it is seventy-five. They don’t know whether to reinforce the cliff or move the lighthouse.”

“Who is that who just washed ashore?” Duncan whispered to Marney.

“Everard Blue,” she whispered back. “An admiralty lawyer from New York who just retired here. Wandered into Manavilins looking for a men’s room this morning, and Slocum invited him.”

“Do we hold the line, or do we retreat?” asked Everard of no one as he looked out the window. “We’ll all have to make that decision sooner or later.”

Duncan’s mother gave the man a sour look, then picked up her empty tray and walked over to Duncan. “What is that horrible man doing here?
Cet vieux carp.
”

“He’s not an old trout,” said Duncan, keeping his voice low. “Don’t blame him for pointing out that the edge of the cliff is getting closer. All you have to do is look at the backyard to see it’s true.”

“We need more wine,” she said, moving toward the library.

Duncan stopped her with a touch on her elbow. “No more wine. I think everyone is happy with what’s out there.”

“
I’m
not happy with what’s out there.” She turned to glare at Everard Blue, who, oddly, was staring back at her.

“Never mind him. I think it’s time to call the Coast Guard about Nod.”

She closed her eyes, then talked slowly, as if explaining the obvious to the impaired. “The path one makes in the water is invisible, Duncan, dear. They can’t find Nod there. Why, eighty-five percent of the planet is covered in salt water!” She turned to go, then stopped. “Did you try his cell phone?”

“Many times.”

“Did it ring?”

“Yes.”

“There. He’s fine. It wouldn’t ring if it was underwater. He probably blew a little off course and he’s waiting the storm out in some sheltered place and just doesn’t care to talk right now. I’m sure he’s enjoying himself immensely.” And then she continued to the library.

Duncan stepped into the empty dining room to look at his phone. He’d never heard back from Annuncia, and there was no message from Nod. He dialed the Coast Guard and listened to it ring. He heard Slocum in the kitchen, singing as he cooked. A soaking Densch walked through the room carrying the box of lobsters from the porch and nodded at him.

The Coast Guard dispatcher was calm in the face of what was obviously chaos out in the harbor. “Dozens of vessels broke loose from their moorings tonight, sir,” he said. “You sure your brother just didn’t take his vessel out to sea to ride it out?”

“It’s not a yacht, it’s an inflatable,” said Duncan, feeling a flush of sweat under his clothes.

“An inflatable?”

“He was just going around the corner … ” Duncan heard the crackle of ship-to-shore communications in the background. The officer cut him off.

“We’ll alert the crews. They might already have him. We’ll let you know when we know.”

After the dispatcher hung up, Duncan tried Cora again. Nothing. He stood feeling a little lost. The chandelier swayed ever so slightly with the wind-blown house, making the room shimmer like a lagoon. The table was set for a buffet-style dinner, with stacks of porcelain plates and piles of silver utensils like pirate plunder, all faintly rattling. He wandered back into the living room to join the crowd gathered around the drinks table. Slocum put down a plate of slightly charred sliced sea slug, surrounded by other assorted nibbles. Clover, who was in Maine for the week for Harley’s birthday, picked up a skewer of mango and periwinkle. “Dude, does a snail really need fruit?”

“Fruit is the centerpiece of the primate diet.” Slocum spotted the bottle of wine behind the sofa and picked it up. “It’s why we like wine! Nothing broadcasts the presence of ripe fruit better than the smell of fermentation.” He poured a glass. “Water’s a dangerous, nasty thing, full of cholera and bacteria. Ancestors who drank fermented and sterile liquids like this lived long enough to reproduce. Survival of the fittest!”

“I kind of like it,” said Bear Petersen, slowly chewing the mango and periwinkle combo. “Different.”

“Bear is sailing under false colors tonight,” Syrie said softly, inching closer to Duncan.

Duncan looked at Bear, whose thin face and dry lips were chapped beyond repair by the salt and wind, but on his feet, peeking out from mustard Carhartt work pants, he wore pointy red heels.

“Bear,” said Duncan. “I just talked to the Coast Guard. Boats are bouncing around all over the harbor. Not just the light-weight yachts but the fishing fleet, too.”

“Damn,” he said. “Thought the fun wouldn’t start until high tide. Come on, boys, party’s over. Got a head count to do.”

Bear popped another periwinkle in his mouth and grabbed a bottle of rum from the table, then turned in his heels toward the door. He was followed by his yard manager and crane operator, both raw men with deckhand knuckles and windburned faces, tough as iron but loyal to their boss no matter what he wore on his feet. Here they were, following him into the gnashing teeth of a storm, while Duncan doubted his own employees would follow him to the movies. Annuncia wouldn’t even return his calls. Josefa arrived just then and helped the men gather their rain gear and got them out the door. Wind whipped through the living room until a few volunteers pushed the door shut again.

“No Nod,” she told Duncan, after shedding her wet things. “The manager’s there … hasn’t seen him. Says it’s a mess. Lots of boats gone.
L’ark
broke from her mooring hours ago, and no one can even find Judson to tell him.”

Duncan groaned and looked out the window, as if the harbor could be seen through the wall of rain.
L’ark
would get tossed up on the beach or get swept against the submerged breakwater. Either way, she’d end up in splinters, if she wasn’t already. He thought of Nod. If he wasn’t at the Boat Club, where was he? There weren’t many options left on the table.

“Doesn’t surprise me about
L’ark
,” said Estrella Campion, a close friend of Judson’s ex-wife. “Judson has been carrying too much sail for his wind for a long time. He’s in debt up to his gunwales and couldn’t even afford the haul-out and winterizing for
L’Ark
. Not to mention that he’s a year behind in Boat Club fees. I wouldn’t be surprised if he left
L’ark
out there on purpose to collect the insurance.”

“Insurance won’t cover an act of God,” said Josefa.

“It’s all an act of God,” said Everard. “Yacht insurance usually doesn’t cover much more than liability—if a guest drowns on your boat, say.”

They all looked out the windows at the raging storm and fell silent. There wasn’t anyone in the room who hadn’t lost a friend or family member to the sea.

“I keep a gun on the boat in case it sinks,” said Clyde Harmon, owner of the
Mary Celeste
, a dragger in town. He had violet beard stubble and burst blood vessels in his eyes from thirty years of wind in his face. “I’ll blow my head off before I drown.”

Clover gave him a thumbs up. “Amen to that.”

“Where’s Leigh?” Josefa asked. Clyde was almost always with Leigh Higgens, his girlfriend and captain of another boat in the fleet.

“She exceeded the monkfish tails limit last week,” said Clyde. “So she’s in Portland for court tomorrow morning.”

This news set off a loud grumble and cursing over regulations that were strangling the life out of the fishing industry. Over their noise, Syrie raised her voice as if singing an aria. “Speaking of court, late this afternoon the police went to arrest Slocum’s sister, Rheya, for the murder of her husband, Marsilio. But she was gone. So was her dory.”

“What?” Duncan looked around for Slocum, but he was back in the kitchen. He wondered if he knew. Then he wondered if he’d known for a long time.

Syrie smiled. “According to Chief Lovasco, that dog Marsilio had been anchoring in some other woman’s harbor. They think Rheya cut him up like bait, then sank his boat in the last storm to make it look like an accident. Went out rowing every day and dropped a piece here and there for the bluefish until the police put it and him all together.”

Duncan felt a strange sense of relief. Marsilio’s body parts in the harbor had nothing to do with Osbert; it was just another marriage gone bad.

The crowd broke up into smaller clusters, all excitedly discussing the murder. Clover separated herself from them and came up to Duncan. “Dude, your mom has such lovely skin.”

“I suppose,” said Duncan.

“She told me she adds a handful of seaweed to every bath,” said Syrie, joining them. “When I was in Thailand, I went to a hot spring where little tropical fish nibbled away at my dead skin cells.”

“Have you ever had a jellyfish facial?” asked Clover. “There’s a salon in Oregon where they stretch sheets of jellyfish over the face. They pull them out of the tanks live, like sheet of phlegm.”

“Where is Cora?” asked Duncan, looking toward the door. He felt the phone vibrate in his pocket and walked away from the two women to answer it. “Oh, no,” he said when he saw the number. He flipped it open. “Where are you?”

“I had to turn back,” said Cora. “It was too much. Trees are falling all over town.”

“Stay where you are. I’ll come get you.”

“No, I’m almost home.”

“Can I come to you? I don’t want you to be alone on a night like this.”

“You’ve got a party going on there.”

“It’s not my party. I don’t have a single thing to celebrate unless I have you. And I have wonderful news.”

“
You
have news? All news and no questions?” she said, and then there was more silence as the house pitched and yawed as if it were on anchor. “Come if you want. I’m curious to find out if you’re as dense as you seem.”

He hung up overjoyed. He was going to see Cora. Alone. Syrie took a step toward him, and the crowd seemed to step back to give them a little room, sensing something cooking.

“Duncan, did I hear you say you were leaving? I wonder if I can get a ride into town. The old Jaguar is too low to make it back out the causeway.” She smoothed down her dress and clutched her bag of dog. “Besides, might be nice to get a little time alone in case Cora takes you back tonight.”

“Syrie, I don’t want to be alone with you. My mother was just trying to pull you into her strange plan to mess up my life.”

“Are you still blaming your mother for everything? I don’t recall that she made you get into my car a couple of weeks ago.” She scratched her dog’s head. “Regardless of your virtue, I still need a ride into town. I’m not spending the night here.”

“No. I’m going, and I’m going alone.”

He turned away, and at that moment the lights flickered and everyone held still. They seemed to be counting the seconds, then gasped as a single body when the lights went out altogether. The fireplace cast shadows across the room. Slocum, dressed in chef whites, appeared like an apparition at the dining room entrance. He was holding a flashlight and the Crustastun.

“I think I blew a fuse,” he said.

“Everyone just stay put for a minute,” said Duncan. “I’ll go to the basement and fix it.”

The crowd edged closer to the fireplace, and the flames lit up their faces, some apprehensive, others clearly excited by the drama. His mother, already lit to the gills, climbed up on the sofa and held up a bottle of wine with cobwebs still clinging to it. “While we wait for the light, let’s give a toast to Slocum and his recipe for jellyfish plastic!
Ganbei
and good luck!”