Reprisal (26 page)

Lowell smiled. "Your husband didn't tell you any of this, did he?"

"No. ... No, he didn't."

"Good man. ... So, you see, we weren't concerned about your husband, Mrs.

Reed. He was a person who minded his own business.--Good sailor, too, except he held her a little close on the wind."

"A "good man"? Then you tell me how Frank died out there."

Lowell seemed surprised by the question. "Why, he drowned, Mrs. Reed. Not the first and not the last going to do it, either."

"And what about my father?"

"What about him?"

"My father was burned to death a few days ago. Killed in his cabin in Chaumette."

Lowell stared at her. "Listen ... listen, we wouldn't do anything like that.

We didn't even know your dad was on the boat!"

"No, of course not. You people are smuggling and making money smuggling. And my husband caught you at it--and he's dead. And my father saw you--and he's dead. And I would like to know why I should believe your bullshit!"

"Tell you one good reason," Lowell said, pushed his chair back and stood up.

"You can damn well believe us, because you're still standing there, talking.

We decided up front we weren't going to do anybody over this venture. ...

Decided after some argument, I will say." He stood, cradling his injured arm.

"--ally think, in the old days out here, captains wouldn't have wrapped some anchor chain around you and put you in the sea?"

Manning leaned over to shake Bobby Moffit awake. "Bobby ... you get up and come out of here."

Bobby sat up, yawning. "I didn' do nothin'."

"You're goin' to do something," Manning said. "You're goin' to be cleanin'

holdin' tanks off Gloucester. An' you don't keep your mouth shut, you'll stay doin' them tanks till you rot. ... Where're your clothes?"

"In the other room--the clean things," Joanna said, and Manning scraped his chair back and heaved to his feet to get them.

"Real serious mistake, Mr. Lowell," the young fisherman said. "You're takin' a shitload of responsibility here."

"That's right," Lowell said. "Get on your horse, George, let's leave the lady's house." He came over to Joanna, standing near and not much taller. He smelled of tobacco and fish. "Up to you, now," he said to her. "You wanted to know something--and now you do."

"Mistake. ..." The young man, George, went out the kitchen door. Joanna heard his heavy seaboots down the back steps. Odd to think he'd have killed her.

Perhaps the catching and killing of tens of thousands of swift silver fish had prepared him for it.

Manning came back with the clothes. "Bobby, you come on out of here." He took Moffit by the arm, lifted him out of his chair, and marched him to the door.

"You can change outside."

"... Am not goin' out from Gloucester."

"Yes, you are." Manning pushed him outside and down the steps.

"Am not. ..."

"It really wasn't his fault," Joanna said. "I gave him the liquor."

"So you said. We're not going to hurt him." Lowell's eyes were a very light gray, the mercy in them invisible. "--ationow, if you want, Mrs. Reed, in the morning you can go and talk to Carl Early. Up to you, and we won't stop you.

Old Carl will have to come after us, then. ... Or you can call over to the mainland and talk to the Coast Guard, tell 'em what's down in Manning's place.

That was two nights unloading off three boats, so no way we could get that cargo out of there and stowed before daylight--and we won't even try."

Something about these forthright confessionals made Joanna angry. Now that she was going to live, she felt she could afford anger. "--And I'm supposed to believe that you've told me the truth, told me everything ... and you're just an honest smuggler who saved me from bad young George, and has nothing to hide."

"That's ... that's right." Lowell seemed to regret the "saving" part. He looked pale; the arm was hurting him.

"Blanket." Manning opened the kitchen door, stepped in, and put the folded blanket on the table.

"Thank you."

"Okay." Manning went out again, and down the steps.

"--And of course," Joanna said, "such honest smugglers would never have murdered a man just to protect themselves and their friends."

"If we had, you'd be out at sea right now, weighted down and going under--instead of us giving you every chance to hurt our people, put some of us in prison. ... Now, you do whatever the hell you want."

Lowell went out the kitchen door, and closed it behind him. ... He'd left several bright spots of blood on the linoleum.

Still alive in a silent and empty house, Joanna wandered at first enormously relieved, grateful she hadn't been taken away to drown. ... But after she'd washed both blankets, mopped the kitchen floor--and straightened the dining-room throw rug and chairs from Bobby's awkward rising--she felt an odd regret that the men were gone. Gone with their harsh voices, their boots and heavy odors, their disagreements and dangerous company. For a moment, she imagined herself making coffee for them so they would stay ... serving them sandwiches.

But in the entrance hall, she found the phone with its cord torn loose and neatly wrapped around it, a useful antidote to that fantasy of companionable men. ... Weary, her knees and elbows sore, raw where they'd been worn on the chimney's brick, she went up the stairs too full of things discovered, claimed, and explained to sort them out, consider them. She was sick of all of it ... all of her loss and rage and adventuring.

Joanna undressed, left her ruined jeans and work shirt on the closet floor, and went naked to the bathroom to take her shower. Her knees and right elbow were badly abraded, crusted with dried blood.

She sat sleepily to pee, then wiped and rose, flushed the toilet, and turned the shower on. She tested the water's temperature, then stepped into the tub and shifted within the spray as if it were a sliding, ever-falling translucent beaded garment, stinging her knees and elbow, but comforting. The soap burned more.

... Rinsed, she climbed from the shower dizzy, a little nauseated with fatigue. She dried herself, then walked into the bedroom, turned off the light, and went to bed.

Windborne rain tapped softly at the windows. Joanna's bones and muscles ached in relaxation between cool sheets as smooth as the chimney had been rough. She lay still, still as a dead woman. Not moving even slightly, as a dead woman--just drowned perhaps, wrapped in anchor chain and sunk fading into the sea--might slightly move, her long black hair shifting as the sea currents stirred it, even so far, far down. ...

When she woke in the morning, her period had come--as if it had been waiting to be certain of her future.

Joanna sat on the toilet with a Tampax, her right foot up on the rim of the tub, and enjoyed the minor masturbatory comfort-discomfort of insertion.

She thought of breakfast. She had the eggs and cheddar cheese, and could make a three-egg omelette. An omelette and two pieces of buttered toast--the bread buttered before it went into the toaster oven. And coffee.

She stood, and smelled her fingers before she washed her hands. Fish blood, an Asconsett odor.

Breakfast took some time ... cooking, then eating in a sun-flooded kitchen, breathing rain-rinsed air through open windows. She had a second cup of coffee, then washed the dishes, put them away, and never concerned herself with questions, judgments, decisions.--These seemed to slowly stream beneath her like a flooding basement spring that would have to be dealt with, but not quite yet. ...

Swinging her red canvas tote bag, Joanna started down Slope Street in summer-weight khaki slacks and a white silk long-sleeved shirt, the cobbles uneven beneath her sandals. Her knees and right elbow were sore, and scabbed.

The muscles at the small of her back ached a little. ... The ferry was in, lying miniature down at its dock. She saw it through dazzle as the morning sun flashed off the sea's smashed mirror, forced her to lower her eyes.

The ferry grew larger as she walked down ... then sank from sight behind the chandlery roof when she reached Strand. Tourists, only a few, were strolling the street, and she threaded through them to the public phones on the corner of Strand and Ropewalk. These old-fashioned phone booths --painted maroon, their narrow doors set with glass panes--seemed to demand a decision.

Joanna stood on the corner beside the booths as if waiting for a friend. ...

She held the island in her hand. For only several quarters and minutes of her time, she could set into motion the heavy machinery of law. Two calls to the mainland--to the state police and Coast Guard--then perhaps one more to the Drug Enforcement people. Three phone calls to bring them out in their helicopters and launches, eager to use federal money, anxious to demonstrate how serious the problems their budgets had to meet.

They would display for television the goods at Manning's, then sink their teeth into the men and women of Asconsett--a harder bite than Percy's ever was. And the island families would crumble under it, the fishing captains and their mortgaged boats fading away, gone for bail, for attorneys' fees. ... The island, under that grim pressure, would sicken, develop tumors of those informing, those indicted.

The quarters were in her purse, her purse in the red tote bag, and no one to stop her.

Had the fishermen lied? Had they been clever enough to see that one more killing might be one too many ... and so presented their case, then let her live to prove it? That might be so--though George, the young one, had certainly wanted her gone, and been eager to see to it.

Perhaps the fishermen had been clever enough to lie about murdering Frank--but they'd been genuinely startled to hear of her father's death in fire, to be accused of that. That had not been acting.--And there was the fisherman they'd said had mentioned the matter to Frank at the Hatch, when he'd walked down for his evening beer. Supposedly the fisherman had spoken to Frank there, under the noise of bad music and men's voices, and Frank had said he'd seen nothing--had sailed south, not north, and didn't know what the hell the man was talking about. ...

And that sounded so like him, and like him to keep only that sort of secret from her. Men's risky business.--It was a question why men's business so often caused women pain. ... But given that conversation had happened, would Frank have wanted her to inform on these fishermen for their pot-smuggling? He'd been very Irish on the subject of informers.

It came down to belief--and Joanna found she no longer believed they'd murdered anyone. She didn't believe Tom Lowell had planned and carried out the drowning of a decent man, a man who would never have betrayed them.

Joanna paused beside the phones for a while longer. Then, an accessory to a crime, certainly at least a person with guilty knowledge--and possibly a credulous fool as well--she walked away down Strand Street to Barkley's, for salad greens, apples, and lean ground beef.

She crossed the street, and as she passed the chandlery, noticed the boater supplies stacked in the display windows and remembered the raw wood of Bobby's window frame. ... Poor Bobby, gone on his way to exile off Massachusetts, hosing out fish-holding tanks in some friend-of-a-friend's trawler.

She turned back, went into the store--its generous two-story space, painted bright white, had been one of Frank's pleasure places--and was surrounded by gallons of marine paint, coils of saltwater line, inflated yellow rubber boat tenders and more formidable Zodiacs. There were ranks of bins and wall shelves of fishermen's heavy tools and equipment, and boaters' less sturdy gear--decorative chronometers, navigation electronics, gaudy pennants, and anchor-engraved glassware.

The odors were linseed oil, new rope, machine oil, and fresh-sawn wood, though little woodwork was visible except for prelacquered stern counters, rudders, and dinghy paddles gleaming dull gold.

"Yes, ma'am." A tall long-faced boy in white T-shirt and jeans, looking just out of high school. BOAT BUSINESS was printed across his T-shirt in ocean green.

"I need some paint. Just a little ... for a window frame."

"Busted window?"

"That's right."

The boy held out his hand. "Hi. I'm Jerry Peterson. Jack Spruel--deputy?-called my mom about your door ... window in your door."

"Oh, yes. I remember." Joanna shook the boy's hand. Strong wiry hand.

"Did Bobby do okay with fixing that?"

"Yes, I think he did a good job, but he didn't paint it."

Joanna watched the boy withdraw into that masculine reverie so familiar from watching Frank consider some material problem. It touched her, a bittersweetness, as men and boys, she supposed, would now always touch her in reminiscence.

"White door?"

"Yes."

"Lots of whites. ..."

"I think the same white paint they used on the cottage trim."

"Evanson's," the boy said.

"Yes."

"Then you'll want Cargill's Satin Cream-white. That's what that paint was. Lot of people out here use it; takes weather real good, and it'll do fine on the frame, front and back."

"That sounds all right, but I only need a little."

The boy drifted toward an open double door, and Joanna trailed after. "You're going to want a half pint, and a number-two brush ... real small brush.

Paint's self-priming, supposedly. Wouldn't trust it self-priming on siding, but I guess for just a window sash, it'll do." He led her into another, even larger room, the hardware side.--Passing by when they'd first come out to the island, she and Frank had seen a plaque by the store's front door commemorating the businesses joining, in 1865. The two brothers owning the hardware store had been killed on the Kearsarge the previous year, when it fought the Alabama off Cherbourg. Their widows had sold to the chandlery.

... A stroll down the shelves, the boy reached up for a small white can, then turned and selected a slender brush from a jar on the store counter. "--Cheap brush, but it'll do the job. Be sure and stir that paint real good."

"Thank you." Joanna followed him to the register, paid a total of $6.43.