Lake News (57 page)

He took two bags and a large box from Jeannie Walsh and stowed them under a bench while she stepped over the gunwale. Her husband, Evan, handed over several more bags and their one-year-old daughter, before climbing aboard himself. Jeannie and Evan were sculptors; their bags held clay, glazes, and tools, and the box a new wheel, all purchased in Portland that day.

Grady Bartz and Dar Hutter, both in their late twenties, boarded with the ease of men bred on the water. Grady worked as dockman for Foss Fish and Lobster, the island's buyer and dealer, and was returning from a day off, looking only slightly cleaner than usual. Dar clerked at the tackle and gear store; once in the boat, he reached back to haul in a crate filled with stock, set it by the wheelhouse wall, and moved down to the stern for a seat.

It was a wise move, because Todd Slokum was the next to board. Thin and pale, Todd was the antithesis of a sea-faring man. Even after three years on the island, he still turned green on the ferry to and from. Local gossip had never quite gotten a handle on why he had come to Big Sawyer in the first place. The best anyone could say was that Zoe Ballard was a saint to employ him.

Now he stumbled over the gunwale, hit the deck on rubbery legs, and tripped toward the nearest bench as he darted awkward glances at the others already there.

Hutchinson Prine was only a tad more steady. A lifelong lobsterman, his aversion to talk hid a wealth of knowledge. Nearing seventy, he still fished every day,
though as sternman now, with his son at the helm. Hutch wasn't well. He had been in Portland seeing doctors. The scowl on his face said he didn't like what they had told him.

“How's it goin'?” Greg asked, and got no answer. He reached for Hutch's elbow, but the older man batted his hand away and boarded the
Amelia Celeste
on his own. His son Noah followed him aboard. Though Noah was taller, and even smarter and better looking than his father, he was just as silent. His face, at that moment, was equally stony. But he did reach to untie the lines.

The
Amelia Celeste
was seconds shy of pulling away from the dock when a pleading cry came from the shore. “Wait! Please, wait!” A slender woman ran down the dock, struggling under the bulk of heavy bags that bounced against her body. “Don't leave!” she cried beseechingly. “I'm coming! Please wait!”

She wasn't a local. Her jeans were very dark, her blouse very white, her blazer stylishly quilted. The sandals she wore wedged her higher than any islander in her right mind would be wedged, and as if that weren't odd enough for the setting, fingernails and toenails were painted pale pink. Her hair was a dozen shades of blond, fine and straight, blowing gently as she ran. She was simply made-up, strikingly attractive, and married, to judge from the ring on her left hand. The large leather pouch that hung from her shoulder was of an ilk far softer than that worked by local artisans; same with a bulging backpack.

Big Sawyer often saw women like her, but not in early June, and rarely were they alone.

“I have to get out to Big Sawyer,” she begged, breathing hard, addressing Noah first, before realizing her error and turning to Greg. “I had my car reserved on the five o'clock ferry, but obviously I missed that. They said I could park
back there at the end of the pier for a day or two. Can you take me to the island?”

“That depends on whether you have a place to stay,” Greg said, because he knew it was what everyone on board was wondering. “We don't have resorts. Don't even have a B&B.”

“Zoe Ballard's my aunt. She's expecting me.”

The words were magical. Noah took her bags and tossed them into the pilothouse. She passed him the backpack, then climbed aboard on her own, but when Evan Walsh rose to give her a seat, she shook her head, and, holding the rail that Matthew had installed when he had turned the
Amelia Celeste
into a ferry, worked her way along the narrow path to the bow.

Noah released the stern line and pushed against the piling of the pier. He said something short to his father, but if there was an answer, Greg didn't catch it. As he edged up the throttle, Noah stalked past the wheelhouse. Stationing himself on the far side of the bow from Zoe Ballard's niece, he folded his arms and stared into the fog.

Quiet and graceful for a boat that was broad in the stern, the
Amelia Celeste
slipped through the harbor at headway speed. Although two hours remained yet of daylight, the thick fog had drained the world of color. Only the occasional shadow of a boat at its mooring altered the pale gray, as did the clink of a hook the silence, but these were quickly absorbed by the mist. Once past the granite breakwater, the waves picked up and the radar came on, little green dots marking the spot where a boat, rock, or channel marker would be. Painted buoys bobbed under the fog, signalling traps on the ocean floor. The
Amelia Celeste
gave these as wide a berth as possible, throttling up to speed only when she was safely in the channel.

The chop was fair to middlin', not overly taxing to the boat, even riding low as she was. In turn, she elicited little noise
beyond the soft thrum of her engine, the steady rush of water as the point of the bow cut through the waves, and an occasional exchange of words in the stern. Nothing echoed. The fog had a muting effect, swallowing resonance with an open throat.

Far to starboard, a hum simmered in the thick soup before growing into the growl of a motor. In no time, it had grown louder and more commanding, belying the soundproofing of the fog, just as its owner meant it to do. That owner was Artie Jones, and he called his boat
The Beast.
Infamous in an area dominated by the boats of working fishermen, it was a long, sleek racer of the alpha-male type, whose aerodynamic purple body shot over the surface of the water driven by twin engines putting out a whopping 1100 horses. It was capable of going seventy-five without effort, and from the rising thunder of those twin Mercs, it was approaching that now.

Noah shot Greg a
What the hell?
look.

Bewildered, Greg shrugged. The fog yielded no sign of another boat in the area, but his radar screen painted a different picture. It showed
The Beast
tracing a large arc, having sped from starboard to a point astern of them now, crossing through the last of the wake left by the
Amelia Celeste
and heading off to the north. The rumble of the racer's engines faded into the fog.

One hand on a bronze spoke of the wheel and one on the throttle, Greg kept the
Amelia Celeste
aimed at the island. Dreaming of ribs, he forgot about Artie Jones until the sound of
The Beast
rose again. No mistaking the deep chain saw growl that came from the monster engines in the tail. The racer was headed back their way. Radar confirmed it.

He picked up the handset of the VHF, which was preset to the channel the local boaters used. “What the hell are you doing, Artie?” he called, more in annoyance than
anything else, because he didn't care how macho it was, no man in his right mind would be playing chicken this way in the fog.

Artie didn't answer. The roar of those twin engines increased.

Greg sounded his horn, though he knew it didn't have a chance of being heard above the noise. His eyes went back and forth, from the radar screen, which pinpointed the racer, to the GPS screen, which pinpointed the
Amelia Celeste.
It occurred to him that if he didn't do something, the two boats would collide. For the life of him, though, he didn't know what to do. Artie wasn't behaving rationally. The radar screen showed him cutting through prime fishing grounds, plowing past buoys at a speed that was sure to be destroying the potwarp tied to hundreds of traps. If he was aiming at the
Amelia Celeste,
playing some kind of perverted game, he had the speed to follow wherever she turned.

“Artie, what the
hell
—throttle down and get out of the way!” he shouted, uncaring that he might alarm his passengers, because what with the way they were all staring wide-eyed into the fog in the direction of the oncoming howl, they were already highly alarmed.

He sounded the horn again and again, to no avail. What to do, with the island barely a mile away, the responsibility of nine people in his hands, and Artie Jones a loose canon in his muscle boat, capable of calling on all those horses, shooting off like a bullet with his bow in the air, propelled who knew where in the fog at a speed faster than the
Amelia Celeste
could ever hope to move?

Studying the radar screen for a final few seconds, Greg tried to guess where
The Beast
would go based on where it had been and what it could do. Then he made a judgment call. Unable to outrun the powerful boat, he yanked back on his own throttle to let
The Beast
pass.

It would have worked, had
The Beast
continued along its established arc. What Greg couldn't possibly have known, though, much less plugged into the equation, was that Artie had been hugging the wheel of his beloved machine at the moment his heart stopped, and was slumped against it, unconscious during much of the last arc—but that at the same moment the
Amelia Celeste
made her defensive move, his lifeless body began to slide sideways, pulling the wheel along with it.

Matthew Crane knew what had happened the instant he heard the explosion. He had been in his usual spot on the deck of the Harbor Grill, nursing a whiskey while he waited for the
Amelia Celeste
to emerge from the fog and glide to the pier. His ear was trained to catch the drone of her engine, distant as it was at the mile point, and he hadn't been able to miss
The Beast.
He had plotted its course in his mind's eye, had foreseen bisecting paths and felt the same sense of dread he had known when his flesh-and-blood Amelia Celeste had been admitted to the hospital that final time. The horrific boom had barely died when he was hurrying down the steps and across the beach. Scrambling onto the dock, he ran waving and shouting toward the handful of men who had just returned from hauling traps, and who were themselves staring into the fog in alarm.

Those men set off within minutes, reaching the scene quickly enough to fish the first two survivors from the water before they were overcome by smoke from the fire or cold from the sea. The third survivor was picked up by another boat. None of the three suffered more than minor bruises, a true miracle given the fate of the rest.

BOOKS BY BARBARA DELINSKY

Looking for Peyton Place

The Summer I Dared

Flirting with Pete

An Accidental Woman

The Woman Next Door

The Vineyard

Lake News

Coast Road

Three Wishes

A Woman's Place

Shades of Grace

Together Alone

For My Daughters

Suddenly

More Than Friends

The Passions of Chelsea Kane

A Woman Betrayed

SIMON & SCHUSTER

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Barbara Delinsky

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

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ISBN-13:978-1-4165-7957-1

ISBN-10: 1-4165-7957-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85379-6 (eBook)