The Fisher Boy (30 page)

I was happier to see her than I’d ever been in my life, happy to see someone from my Gloucester past. I hugged her, gathered her in my arms; I could tell she’d lost weight. “How are you doing?” I asked—and it was more than just a casual phrase.

“I guess it’s just beginning to sink in,” Sallie said, “that my brother is really gone, and that my father is…fading away too.” As she spoke, she began slowly walking toward downtown. “I don’t think my father even knows who I am,” Sallie sighed.

Though still dazed from the news from Truro, from our day with the Master, I felt compelled to walk with Sallie, just for a few minutes, to confirm or deny the bizarre things Barton and the Master had told me about Ian—about the rumors of his dealings with the Truro community, about lymphoma and his spiritual quests. Of course, I had to broach the subject of his murder gently, gradually, so I began with its origins on Cape Ann: “Your father…sometimes went to Rockport, didn’t he?”

Sallie nodded.

We rounded the corner by the old Coast Guard station, with its white buildings and weedy parking lot. I would walk with her just a minute.

“…Did he ever visit a shop called Doll World?”

“Doll World? He visited them all.”

Beyond Provincetown Harbor, an orange glow interrupted the smoke above the Truro hills. I thought of Chloe now as lost, as lost as Royall’s youths, whose ghosts swam through Provincetown Harbor.

“Did he ever mention a Mrs. Mikkonen?”

The chill Sallie returned. “My father has advanced Alzheimer’s disease. His short-term memory has been shot for years. He doesn’t mention much of anything that makes sense.”

We were reaching the part of town where Commercial Street begins living up to its name. The old houses with their gardens and colors varying like salt water taffy were yielding to shops, hair salons, and restaurants. This part of Commercial Street was clogged with traffic. I knew Roberto and the others would be wondering where I’d gone, but I had to question Sallie and thought asking her to stop might irritate her ever-volatile temper. I asked, “Do you remember Ian visiting a shop in Rockport to return a doll your father took by mistake?”

Before Sallie could answer, a giant gold scallop shell, the size of a satellite dish dispensing limitless channels, came rolling onto Commercial Street from the hill below the monument. Spilling from it, among ropes of blue tinsel seaweed, were mermaids with five-o’clock shadows, with fishtails of vivid sea-green sequins. King Neptune, in a conch-shell crown and a loincloth of plaster starfish, was asking, “Are we sure we have enough beads to throw?” and “Are we sure the parade isn’t cancelled because of the fires?” King Neptune was sipping a margarita, blue as automobile windshield fluid, its rim glittering with salt.

“What on earth is that?” Sallie asked.

“It’s a float for Carnival. See? The name of the bar sponsoring it is written on its side.”

Carnival was happening, in spite of Chloe, in spite of Truro. The liquor, the sex, the costumes, it all continued. To some degree grief was always private.

Further down Commercial Street another float was stalled in the traffic, a flatbed truck bearing cages of men in chaps and chains, grinding their hips to a stereo system that kept catching and going silent, making everyone feel embarrassed.

“This is still such a culture shock, but if my brother was happy here…” Sallie hooked her arm into mine.

“Was…Ian in good health this past year?” I asked her.

“My brother was not HIV-positive,” Sallie said.

“He’d built himself up—”

“Through a lot of hard work. He worked hard at everything he did.”

Some Christian Soldiers were watching the parade, standing outside their office. The men wore half-bewildered smiles. One of their female companions had caught a string of beads thrown from one of the floats; she was holding it her hand, unsure what to do with it. I thought of Edward, their former colleague, dead, no doubt, in the Truro inferno…

“Did Ian have lymphoma, or any kind of cancer?”

“
Of course not!” Sallie acted furious, but kept her arm hooked in mine.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, he would’ve told his family! My God, Mark, you don’t keep a thing like that secret!” She seemed genuinely stunned. “Where did you hear such nonsense?”

“Just a rumor. Bar talk.”

As we neared the town hall, the crowds became thicker, louder and more agitated. A greater number of people were in costume, mostly men, in finery mocking their masculinity, like the boy in a hoop skirt busy with ruffles and bows, like a flirtatious Confederate spy. Men wore iridescent wings like dragonflies, the miters of Renaissance popes, the tights of pages from the court of Lorenzo de Medici. The twins from Arthur’s party were dressed as sisters, with tanks of Siamese fighting fish secured by wicker daisies to their hats.

Other men favored hyper-masculine attire, promenading as football players and as the police who’d harassed them at rest stops. One man posed as the Czar, in a uniform with epaulets and medals from some production of
The King and I.

Anyone here, I realized abruptly, could be a refugee from the Master’s scorched kingdom,
if
they’d been away at the time of the fire…

“Did Ian even mention a Lucas Mikkonen?” I asked, noting that all the public telephones next to the Unitarian/Universalist meetinghouse were taken, so I couldn’t call the others to tell them I was walking with Sallie. Then again, they weren’t answering the telephone.

“That name is so odd,” Sallie said. “McEwan.”

We were distracted by an argument in the street, between one man dressed as Icarus and another dressed as an angel. Icarus, in a Porsche, had rear-ended the angel’s vintage Cadillac. “I can smell your breath from here, you’re drunk!” the angel was shouting.

“Mikkonen is his name,” I said, knowing I should speak of him in the past tense. “His family is Finnish, from Rockport.”

Sallie brightened. “Lucas from MIT? An engineer? Heavy-set?”

We were almost to MacMillan Wharf. There were public phones there, but none was free. “I’ve got to make a call,” I said. “I’ve got to tell my friends where I am.”

“You can use the phone on our boat,” Sallie said. “Alexander is docked at the wharf.”

Chapter Forty-one

His boat was a fiberglass dream, forty feet long, vivid with chrome and sunlight, like the fin of a fish Thomas Royall might have painted in this very harbor eighty years ago. Sallie’s fiancé shouted from the boat’s bridge, as he saw us.
“
Heeey!” He elongated the word, scrambling down to pump my hand.

Alexander certainly had the looks to fit his boat. He could’ve been a model in some haughty clothing ad, on the porch of a white-columned plantation, on the lawn of a house in the Hamptons, some place where everyone oozes breeding and ease. Today, his eyes were a blue so dark they could be mistaken for chips of lapis lazuli. He wore a rugby shirt striped red and black, its collar open to display the hair on his chest.

“Hey, bro’!” he said, jabbing my shoulder. “Great to see you!” He had the boundless confidence of a jock so secure he has no need to bully. He seemed at home on a boat; he was, after all, a marine biologist.

“You know,” Sallie remembered, “that Mikkonen came to our house once, in Gloucester. He drove a horrible old van, like something left over from Woodstock. His weight gave him problems, trouble with his back, so he used one of those seat rests made from wooden beads. It looked about as comfortable as a bed of nails…He was very overbearing.”

She’d mentioned the seat rest, the clue that linked Jason and the Enforcer and Mikkonen. I wondered, had she seen the coverage of today’s catastrophe in Truro, the news about the shootings and conflagration? A pall of smoke from the fires in Truro was metastasizing into the sky above Provincetown Harbor, like the warning Mt. Vesuvius gave Pompeii.

“Sallie,” I said, “I’d like to talk more, but I’ve got to find a phone to tell my friends where I am.”

“Look no further,” Alexander said. “Honey, where did you put our cell phone?” He rifled through some things on the deck, a poncho, a jumble of paperbacks, some glass jars that made Sallie scowl.

“You promised you’d dump those specimens overboard!” Sallie complained. To me, she said, “Most people put fish on the grill or in a pan. Alexander puts them in formaldehyde.”

“Honey,” Alexander said, “you’ve got to be a tad more organized. The cell phone must be down in the cabin.”

“In the cabin?” Sallie sounded a little surprised.

“In your cabin,” Alexander said.

“Come on, Mark,” Sallie said, “you can make your call from our boat.”

Climbing aboard, I’d concentrated on acting as comfortable with nautical matters as possible. I’d grown up in Gloucester, but my boating experience was certainly less extensive than the Drummonds’; we’d never owned anything like this. And Sallie—half-sister or not—still made me self-conscious, and she was watching me intently.

“Excuse the turmoil.” Sallie stepped over a Seattle Mariners sweatshirt. “Follow me, Mark.”

She led me into the salon, which was paneled in beige laminated wood that a salesman might describe as “champagne.” Built into the starboard wall were a sink, stove, refrigerator, microwave, and television, and a counter of bright aqua faux stone. To port, were a table topped with the same faux stone, benches, and a couch of fine-grained cream vinyl.

Toward the bow, stairs descended to two cabins and the head. The first cabin Sallie tried was locked. “He said my room, didn’t he?” Sallie said. It was odd, I thought, their having separate cabins. For a large boat, the cabins were cramped; hers was mostly bed. Curtains covered the slits of windows, compounding the sense of claustrophobia.

Sallie rummaged through some books among the chaotic bedding—books about sea vents and plankton and the bleaching of Caribbean coral reefs—but she kept shaking her head in frustration. Inside some sour sweatpants, too big to be hers, she found something that made her say “Eureka!”

She handed me the black cell phone and stood staring in the doorway while I fumbled with the instrument in search of the “on” button. The phone’s surface was sticky with some sort of gruel, and the boat, I thought, was somewhat messy to belong to a scientist, but that was stereotyping.

After finally finding the “on” button, I almost lost my balance when the boat shifted as the dull rumbling of its motor activated. “I can’t go out sailing,” I said. “I don’t have time.”

“This is a
motor
boat.” Sallie was ever-pedantic.

Did I feel anything for her? Any brotherly affection, any tenderness, any warmth, any sense of a shared family history, even shared DNA? No, nothing. I knew then and there that I would never be a Drummond, never feel for any of them what I felt for a close friend or lover, for, say, Chloe or Roberto or Arthur.

“Can’t you even turn on the phone?”

I’d tried, but it wasn’t working.

“Alexander is just getting fuel,” Sallie said, “on the other side of the wharf. When there’s a line at the pump, he just circles the harbor.”

I think I said it then to assert my power; I felt lost on this boat, with this quirky cell phone—and the Drummonds had always intimidated me, the whole family. I told her, there, in the messy cabin: “I know who did it, I know killed Ian.”

She was shocked, of course. Her jaw dropped open, then a strange kind of smile began then died on her lips. I thought her smile might be relief that justice at last was imminent.

“
What?!” she said.

“It was Lucas Mikkonen,” I said, “or his orders, anyway. A man called the Enforcer actually did the killing. He drives that junky old van you mentioned. The van with the backrest. A hustler named Edward Babineaux was somehow involved. It’s all connected to the land deal at St. Harold’s.”

I blurted out the story of my day at Truro. “Oh, my God,” Sallie kept saying. I kept pressing buttons, but the cell phone seemed dead. I was beginning to feel faint from lack of food and dizzy from the boat’s motion.

“Give me the phone, Mark.” Sallie was very calm. “I guess it needs re-charging.”

Sallie led me back onto the deck to discover, to my amazement, that Alexander had steered the boat away from MacMillan Wharf, far into Provincetown Harbor. “I thought he was getting fuel, damnit!” I said.

Sallie shouted to her fiancé at the helm, on the bridge. “Alexander! Mark has some amazing news! He says that Mikkonen creature—the cult leader—was responsible for Ian’s death!” She stripped off her sunglasses, and the skin around her eyes looked slack and discolored, bruised, as though she’d gone sleepless for days. “Alexander!” she shouted, but the wind and the argument of the seagulls absorbed her speech and the boat plowed seaward so that the spires and piers of Provincetown were becoming miniature.

The seas were slightly choppy. Hurricane Felix was churning through the mid-Atlantic, endangering the lily fields and pink stone cottages of Bermuda, and whipping up whitecaps even here. My stomach was developing its own private storm and my thoughts were whirling, bright but shapeless, like Carnival confetti.

“Damnit, Alexander, answer me!” yelled Sallie.

A whale watch boat was rounding the tip of Long Point, close to shore. The wake from our speeding craft sent it rocking gently so that its passengers, collectively, let out a thrilled “Ahhh!” But when its captain sounded his horn, there was anger in his series of short blasts.

Sallie bounded up the ladder to the bridge, with me behind her. Alexander sat in one of two chrome and vinyl chairs, his tanned hands gripping the wheel.

“Mark has proof Lucas Mikkonen killed my brother,” Sallie snapped.

Unlike Sallie, Alexander didn’t smile at this news. He said, “That’s extraordinary,” and kept staring straight ahead.

It was actually cold at sea. Sallie was now wiggling into a cinnamon-colored sweater she’d harvested from a tangle of clothing on the bridge. This looked like a party boat, I thought, like something chartered in Miami for spring break. My mother had always described the Drummonds as reckless, so perhaps they sought reckless people to marry, to continue their tradition, the way Lucas Mikkonen sought ways to preserve strains of lost Inca corn.

“My brother-in-law—brother-in-law-to-be—had a first-rate legal mind,” Alexander was saying, “he had the theory down pat…”

Long Point was now a blurry horizon of dunes, something Lawrence of Arabia might have seen in the Great War, the war that undid Royall and his artists’ utopia. In those very dunes, farther toward the bath house, I’d last seen Ian Drummond alive.
“Vaya con Dios,”
he’d called, then, later, he’d done just that—gone with God.

“…He had the theory down pat, old Ian did, but his execution was a major fuck-up. And people don’t like that. Not one bit.”

He was disparaging Ian, which didn’t seem to faze Sallie at all. Was that because she was used to it?

Sallie said, “It sounds perfectly reasonable to me. My brother made the mistake of befriending that monster. Things went bad about the land deal at the school, so people from the cult—”

“Are toast.” Alexander completed her sentence.

“In the fire,” I said.

“I’ll go re-charge the phone, Mark,” Sallie told me.

“
No you won’t,” Alexander commanded.

“What Mark found out changes everything!” Sallie insisted. She repeated my story about the community in Truro while the sun ricocheted on her engagement ring and the diamonds comprising her tennis bracelet. Clasping my hand, she said, “Come on, Mark, you can make your call now.”

“That phone is no good!” Alexander said.

Sallie said, “You promised—”

“I was mistaken,” he said.

“So was I!” Sallie shouted. She yanked the diamond tennis bracelet until it ripped from her wrist, fell in two segments onto the mats at our feet and down through the ladder to the lower deck.
“
If you don’t let him call, I’ll call the police, Alexander, I’ll call them, I swear it, damnit, I swear it!”

That was when I saw it, after first looking at Sallie, scarlet with frustration, then at the diamonds glittering on the mats at our feet. It was lying on the deck of the bridge, kicked into a corner by a pair of binoculars and a bottle of India pale ale. It was a mermaid stamped from plastic in some Asian factory, distributed as a promotion for a fast-food chain. Picking it up, I saw that it was missing one arm and was sticky with the gruel that had adhered to their cellular phone.

“Mark is perfectly comfortable reporting Mikkonen to the authorities, aren’t you, Mark?” Sallie’s voice was jagged with pain. “Those people in Truro did everything. Those fanatics who all died this morning.”

But she was wrong and she knew it. And
I
had been wrong.

Alexander eased the boat to a halt. We were far out at sea
.
A fog was gradually collecting around us, so that we were enveloped in a silvery grayness. The water was gray and there was a heaviness in the air, as if, after weeks of punishing drought, it might rain.

“The phone is dead, honey. I busted it this morning, remember?” He stooped to pick up a segment of the bracelet. “Women,” he said to me, laughing, “maybe you and—who is it, Antonio?—have the right idea.”

He smiled when he saw me with the broken mermaid. From a towel on the second vinyl chair, he drew a knife that shone even in the thickening fog, a
diver’s
knife with a thick serrated blade.

“This is nothing personal, Mark. Some things are done out of necessity.”

I had no understanding of the perverse equation governing his actions, but I knew that it somehow included kidnapping and murder.

“He’s seen the doll, honey, so it’s over, it’s history. I told you old Mark was the curious type.”

The knife had a rubber handle, strong enough to cut barnacles from rock or cut open abalone—or a man’s throat.

“Is Chloe safe?” I said. “Why did you take Chloe? What’s she to you? I don’t get the connection, Alexander.”

He was calm as a counselor. “That’s family business.”

“Well, I’m family, too!” I said, “I’m Sallie’s half-brother!”

“That,” he said, “is unfortunate.”

I found myself laughing a crazy, desperate laugh at ever wanting to belong to that family, at ever being in awe of their grandeur.

Neither of them said a thing. He rose, pointing the knife in my direction. With a sailor’s grace, he leapt down the ladder from the bridge to the main deck. “Follow me,” he told me.

I was alone on the bridge with Sallie. For an instant, I considered manning the controls but they baffled me, the compass in its bubble, the dozen gauges and dials, the switches for the bilge pumps, for the searchlight, the horn…

“Are you coming down or do I have to get you?”

“This is not going to happen, Alexander!” Sallie said.

I had to buy time, had to keep him talking. As I climbed down the ladder, he pressed the tip of the knife against the nape of my neck. I felt the sharpness that had ended Ian’s life. Facing him, all pulse and sweat, I asked, “Why did you do it, Alexander? Why did you kill Ian?”

“You too, honey,” Alexander said. “Come down.”

She said, “I’m sorry, Mark. I thought he just wanted to speak with you at the wharf. To make sure you weren’t on his trail.” Climbing down, she began crying.

“You’re still an accessory,” Alexander told her. “In this and in covering up your brother’s accident.”

“
Accident?” I said. I scanned the sea around us, but there was no one else in sight. The chaos in Provincetown and Truro—the fires, the gridlock—had reduced the number of recreational boaters. There was no one else to turn to—Sallie was my only hope, this half-sister who’d shunned me as family, this spoiled heiress complicit in her own brother’s death.

Alexander threw her some keys. “Sallie, go to my cabin and get a blue nylon jacket in the top drawer. Don’t be alarmed if it seems a bit heavy, I’ve sewn weights into the pockets. Mark, I’ve got to ask you to disrobe. You’re going for a swim, and I don’t want to leave the cops any clues.”

“How was Ian’s death an accident?” I asked him.

His expression was handsomeness untroubled. “I don’t owe you any explanations.”

“You owe it to her—to your fiancé!” I shouted. “You owe her an explanation why you killed her brother!”

Sallie’s eyes were bright, like the diamond ring that dominated her hand the way this psychopath dominated her life.