The Fisher Boy (31 page)

“It was an accident, Mark,” Sallie said. “It was really Ian’s fault. He’d been drinking at the beach then back at his house. Ian was so jealous by nature. Jealous that I was getting engaged. Jealous of Alexander’s success.”

All along, I’d assumed Ian had been killed returning from the beach, returning from his hollow in the dunes in Herring Cove. But he’d gone home first, to his house on the hill, to that spaceship of a house overlooking the breakwater. If he had been killed returning directly from the beach, from meeting me, from our sex in the dunes, he would have been found.

“They went for a walk on the breakwater, after dark, Ian and Alexander, after dinner,” Sallie said. “Ian got mad and pulled a knife on Alexander. They scuffled and lost their balance—the rocks were very loose. They fell and Ian accidentally got stabbed.”

“That is a lie,” I told Sallie. “Ian didn’t pull a knife on Alexander—Alexander pulled a knife on
him.
The only knife Ian carried was his Swiss Army knife, with the little collapsible blades. That was much too small to slit Ian’s throat—ear-to-ear,
almost to the bone.”
I shouted at Sallie, “I know because I saw him,
I saw Ian dead on the breakwater that night!”

“What?!” Sallie again began crying.

“He’s lying,” Alexander said.

“I was at the beach, all day,” I said. “I saw Ian there, at Herring Cove. We shared a bottle of vodka. We talked in the dunes.”

The boat was rocking. The waves had swollen and the whitecaps sent spray that occasionally wet our faces. Sallie, lost in the immensity of a sweater that was obviously his, was sobbing.

“Why did you take Chloe?” I yelled at Alexander.

“Take your clothes off, you prick,” Alexander ordered me. “You’re going overboard, naked, with no identifying clothing, no wounds, no marks—” To Sallie, he said, “He knows about Chloe, so he’s got to go.”

“He’ll kill Chloe too, if he hasn’t already,” I said. “He cut your brother’s throat, he cut his throat!”

“He was wounded in the chest, honey,” Alexander stated. “Just like the newspapers said. And that was an accident.”

Alexander advanced toward me, readying the knife.

I had always thought of the sea as my ally; I’d grown up in Gloucester, which drew its living from the sea. I saw myself at five on Good Harbor Beach, by the rust-colored rocks in the eelgrass of the estuary, and I saw myself with Ian, off Ten Pound Island, in a sea that seemed eager to claim my life. It might do that today, I thought.

Unless I decided to fight.

I could fight only by remaining calm, calm as on stage. I was doing a scene, I told myself. And fighting for Chloe and my life.

Unlike the Master’s Enforcer, Alexander wasn’t armed with a gun. He couldn’t kill me from a distance, he had to get close enough to stab me, and, unlike Ian, I couldn’t be taken by surprise. This time, I wouldn’t let fear shut me down, freeze me the way it froze me in Truro at the steam bath, when we’d filed in, obedient as schoolchildren during fire drills.

“A Swiss Army knife isn’t something you use suddenly, it’s too slow. You have to take it out, choose the right blade, unfold the blade…” I pointed to the divers’ knife Alexander had the bravado, the gall, to use again. “Look at that knife closely, Sallie, that’s the knife he used to kill your brother, our brother—”

“He’s right, the papers said—”

“The part about the throat wound wasn’t published in the papers. Sometimes the police withhold details of a crime, it helps them to weed out false confessions! Remember, Ian’s casket was closed. That was because of the wounds to his throat. That wouldn’t have been necessary if he’d only sustained chest wounds.”

“It’s all lies,” Alexander said. “He’d fought with Ian, he’d assaulted him in public. Ian told us all about it, remember, Sallie? He didn’t speak with Ian the day Ian died because he and Ian weren’t on speaking terms!”

“
Sallie
,
please, I’m your brother!”

Sallie’s crying seemed to provoke the seagulls, which were circling the boat like a Greek chorus. That passing simile, that theater cliché, called to mind a detail of my encounter with Ian that might convince Sallie I was telling the truth, about seeing Ian dead and alive.

I said,
“Chorus Against Fascism: The Greek Resistance.”

“What?” Alexander laughed.

“By Stavros Zarefes,” I said. I repeated the title and author as the gulls kept squawking in their chorus. “That was the book Ian was reading the day he died. He showed it to me when we talked in the dunes. He left, then I fell asleep on the beach. I found him coming back, on the breakwater, dead. With his throat slit open, ear-to-ear.”

“It’s true, Alexander.” Sallie was speaking as softly as I’d ever heard her. “I remember us talking about that book that evening. You mentioned being in Greece, in Symi, at the sponge diving museum—”

He lunged toward me, grappling my shoulders, the knife in his right hand. The shoulder I’d injured in Truro, throwing myself against the steam room door, sent a current of pain coursing through my system that made me buckle and drag us both down. He’d been clutching the segments of Sallie’s broken diamond bracelet, and, as we struggled, these dropped to the deck.

He was readying the knife, his plan about a body with no wounds now abandoned. With desperate effort, I punched at his face and pushed him so that he stumbled and I stood.

It was strange that at that moment that time did not stop but seemed to stretch, like the endless seconds before an inevitable collision. I saw, on the deck, between the segments of the bracelet, three possible weapons to save my life—some rope, a bait bucket, and a jar of something dead from the sea, floating in something murky, in formaldehyde.

I seized the jar of marine specimens and struck the crown of his head so that the jar broke and glass, fish entrails, and poison went streaming down into his eyes. “My God!” he gasped. “I can’t see!”

Blood from his scalp went running down his face. Blindly, he bumped against the bait bucket, still clutching his knife. “Sallie!” he screamed. “Get me water to rinse—”

Would she help him? Would she switch sides at last?

She pushed me aside, crunching through the broken glass as she stepped toward Alexander to place her hands against his chest—her dark hands with the diamond ring sparkling against the blood-red stripes of his rugby shirt. She picked shards of glass from his rugby shirt as he bellowed, “Get me water to rinse my eyes,
Sallie. NOW!”

Then she shoved him.

“
Cunt!” The blood from his scalp in his eyes went streaming down his face to his neck so that it mimicked Ian’s wounds. He raised his knife to slash at her, but missed. She shoved him and he fell against the low side of the boat, slipped in the fish entrails, then righted himself. Then she shoved him again and he lost his balance, and, flailing his arms, he fell overboard.

He screamed. A wave, gray and massive as the side of a whale, washed over him. He seemed dazed by his wound, unable to swim. I saw his hand, then the top of his bleeding scalp.

There was a life preserver within easy reach, but neither of us made any move to throw it.

Alexander’s face rose briefly above the water before he sank for the last time, and the only sounds were the heaving of the waves and the chorus of gulls arguing and arguing…

Sallie began sobbing, staring at Atlantic.

“Where are the keys to the cabin that’s locked? Chloe’s in there, isn’t she?” I shouted.

“…Above the sink,” she said. “…Marked ‘1.’”

I found them, suspended from a small brass rack shaped like an octopus. I had to coax the lock, wiggling the key in and out, but finally it gave.

They were side by side on the bed, bound with plastic restraints on their wrists and ankles—the little girl and the old man—Chloe and Duncan Drummond.

“Chloe!” I hugged her.

There was no acknowledgement in her eyes, only fright. Her mouth was smeared with that gruel that had stuck to the cell phone.

She seemed exhausted, stunned. Duncan Drummond stared out from his ruined mind.

“You’ll be fine,” I told Chloe, almost believing it.

Chapter Forty-two

“Ian Drummond was killed by Alexander Nash to inherit the Drummond family fortune. Alexander had the perfect opportunity to commit the murder and be fairly confident it would be pinned on someone else. Given the craziness that was happening here this summer.” So said Sergeant Almeida, at breakfast with Roberto and me, on the back porch of the White Gull. The summer-long drought had at last broken. Dumpling-like clouds monopolized the sky, and a hard rain was drilling down onto the guest house garden, and, beyond, onto the water of Provincetown Harbor, which looked pitted, like metal.

Almeida would explain what he’d learned from the various investigations, from the West Coast authorities, from the survivors of the Truro inferno—and from Sallie, my pitiful and treacherous half-sister.

They’d met in a wine bar, Sallie and Alexander, amid the exposed brick and easy-listening music. She claimed she’d gone west to experience the mountains, but the lure of the Cascades hadn’t brought her to Seattle; her family had driven her from the east, that nonstop drive for competition, chasing the blue ribbon, being number one, in sports, in business, in life.

“She was a vulnerable girl,” Sergeant Almeida said, “beneath the image of the steely equestrienne. Alexander knew an easy mark when he saw one. He wasn’t a marine biologist, by the way. That’s why he brought those props onto that boat, the books on oceanography, the jars of specimens in formaldehyde. He wasn’t in the east doing research at Woods Hole, the story he’d sold Sallie and the Drummonds. The closest he came to being a marine biologist was working one summer in a salmon cannery. In Alaska.

“That’s where he came from, from a military family. He grew up on the big air base at Caribou Bight. He moved to San Diego, Coronado, when he was ten. He tried junior college for a couple of years, taking courses in economics and political science.”

“No acting?” I asked.

“He hardly needed instruction in that. Alexander had joined the Army but got booted out during basic training, for injuring another soldier during a fistfight. That ticked his old man off once and for all. The old man cut Alexander out of his will and told him to get lost, which he certainly did. In more ways than one.

“That was very traumatic for Alexander. He’d been raised to think of family as very important, with his Mormon roots and so on. The old man was an ancestry nut; he’d traced his family back to Norman lords, or so he told his kids and anyone who’d listen. He made all of his kids carve their coat of arms as soon as they turned twelve as a kind of rite of passage. Alexander was one of nine children in a litter that included an Annapolis graduate and the mayor of San Clemente, so he probably felt like a spare tire at best even before his first real bad screw-ups.

“After breaking with his family, Alexander bounced from scam to scam, in everything from a chain of steakhouses to a greyhound racetrack. He was a first-class con man, great at pitching an idea, closing the deal, then bailing with the cash just before it all went sour. Not the way to win many friends. By the time he showed up at the Potlatch, the wine bar where he zeroed in on Sallie, he’d burned his bridges throughout the west coast.

“The image he presented was a house of cards. A house of credit cards, to be precise. He seemed prosperous, even prominent. He had a loft full of Native American art. He knew vintages of wine and hot tips on stocks. He was active in libertarian politics and the right-to-life movement, of all things. But the veneer was beginning to crack. He’d beaten up a couple of girlfriends, fractured a woman’s skull in Portland. His chief attraction to Sallie was, ironically, her family. Her traditional, moneyed family from the east—the exact life Sallie yearned to escape.

“Alexander was after Sallie’s family’s money. Which was all the more tempting since so few heirs were on hand to inherit it. Sallie and Ian were change-of-life babies, so their brothers, Fulton and George, were much older—and sterile, unable to father children. They’d caught mumps in their late teens at Exeter. Prep schools were bad news for that family.

“So Alexander, with his outsized ego and big family hang-ups, decides he and Sallie will found their own dynasty. He’ll become an instant Boston Brahmin, to thumb his nose at his old man in Coronado.

“Alexander moves east with Sallie. And right away, Ian gets on his case. Unlike Fulton or George, he’s local, in Massachusetts. And he’s got an inquiring mind and a combative personality. He’s very curious about his sister’s fiancé.

“He catches some BS in Alexander’s marine biology and figures his whole story is bogus. He phones the Woods Hole lab where Alexander allegedly works and asks for his title for correspondence. And of course the lab people say he hasn’t ever worked there, not fishing, not cutting bait, nothing. —Sallie admits Ian told her all this, but love is blind, right?”

I hadn’t seen Sallie since she’d lured me onto that boat, into that cruise to nowhere, and I didn’t want to ever see her again, or any of that sorry, sordid family, whose blood in my veins now felt like some kind of infection.

“So Ian keeps needling Alexander, who gets madder and madder. Who is this rich lout to sabotage his plans, his pipedream of the good life?

“Alexander gets obsessed with shutting him up at all costs, and soon. The cult dumps the dead dog on Arthur Hilliard’s doorstep and Alexander, ever the entrepreneur, sees a golden opportunity, pardon the pun. Provincetown is in turmoil—between the Christian Soldiers and the street people’s invasion, so when Alexander kills Ian, everyone assumes it’s a hate crime. All should be well. Another young Drummond heir is dead. Alexander can establish his dynasty in peace, funded, in the long-term, by Sallie’s family.” Then Almeida smiled, savoring the moment like a replay of a Red Sox home run in Fenway Park. “But there was just one catch—the issue of Ian.”

“But Ian was dead,” Roberto said.

Almeida cracked his knuckles, pausing. His timing was good, good enough for improv. “Ian was dead, but he hadn’t been sterile.
He was the father of a three-year-old daughter, Chloe Hilliard.
”

Roberto and I sat stunned. There was nothing Drummond in Chloe’s features, not the line of her jaw or the color of her hair, not her eyes or her ears or her smile. There was no more Drummond in Chloe than in me; Miriam’s genes had prevailed completely. And Chloe being Ian’s daughter made her my blood relation, my niece, in fact. I had saved my own niece from death in the Atlantic.

Miriam had confessed to the police. She’d been truthful about her Peruvian tragedy, about the diplomat’s son and the car crash in Lima. And she’d been truthful about Martin, the stranger from the sketching class she’d seduced in hopes of fathering her child. She had indeed gotten pregnant, but miscarried during her first trimester.

“So she asked an old friend to be a sperm donor, and he was willing and able. He’d been an equal-opportunity Casanova in his youth. Ian Drummond fathered Chloe, and then ruined his relationship with Miriam by scorning the child once she was born. Ian had told Sallie about Chloe just before Sallie moved west. He felt safe confiding in her because she was leaving Boston, less likely to tell the family whom she was hell-bent on avoiding.

“Now remember, with Alexander we’re dealing with a whacko obsessed on founding his own blueblood dynasty. And he’s almost there, things are humming along. Then you come waltzing into the picture. And call on the happy couple at Ian’s house.”

“Because Sallie asked me to,” I said, a bit defensive. “She tried to pawn off this junk Ian collected at St. Harold’s.”

“Right, and that’s all she really wanted at that point,” Almeida said. “But you tried to talk family, you claimed you were Duncan Drummond’s son. Sallie, ironically, didn’t believe you. Duncan hadn’t told his kids he was your dad: he’d told his wife and their lawyer, that was it. Sallie thought you were nuts, but she told Alexander. And he believed you, with every paranoid brain cell in his head. And you repeated the story to Alexander in Gloucester, so Sallie claims he told her. You were the last thing Alexander needed—another young Drummond heir—and investigating Ian’s murder to boot.”

I remembered Sallie, half naked in her bikini bottom and diamond tennis bracelet, the one that came undone on that awful boat. “How could Sallie…how could she stay with that psychopath after she knew he’d butchered her brother?”

“Her equestrian training may have come in handy. That concentration, that way of focusing. Alexander admitted he’d caused Ian’s death, so she willed herself to believe it was an accident, to believe his story. That Ian was jealous of her relationship with Alexander, so Alexander suggested a private talk. Then they’d gone for a walk on the breakwater after dinner, Ian and Alexander together, and Ian pulled a knife then got stabbed when they’d struggled.

“It was a risk for Alexander to sell Sallie that story because the wounds to Ian’s throat could have been mentioned by the media. But Alexander was lucky—the throat wounds were known only to us—and to you. We told the funeral home not to mention them to the family, that they were part of the murder investigation.

“Once Sallie helped Alexander cover all that up, she became a kind of accessory after the fact. As he was helpful enough to remind her, day in and day out. Sallie can, legitimately, claim she feared for her life, feared Alexander’s physical violence. He’d beaten her badly after Ian’s murder.”

Of course, I remembered her bruised face when I’d met her at Adams Pharmacy. She’d claimed her father, in his dementia, had hit her.

“Alexander kidnapped Chloe without thinking his plan through. Sallie, meanwhile, was desperate—”

“But not desperate enough to call the police,” I said. “She lured me onto that boat—”

“Correct. It was Sallie who’d phoned Arthur’s to be sure you were there, after trying your apartment and the White Gull. Sallie was the hang-up call you got while watching the news, the fire at the Truro compound, the police raid. Sallie knew it might be necessary for you to be silenced, if you got suspicious of Alexander—he’d hinted this might mean roughing you up at most. Then, out at sea, when you blamed Lucas Mikkonen for Ian’s death, that was music to Sallie’s ears. She wanted to drop you back at the wharf, but Alexander wanted something a bit more permanent. He was probably bent on killing you both, you and Chloe, the last Drummond heirs in his way. So when you saw her toy, when you saw Chloe’s mermaid, you played right into his hands, it was perfect. That was just the excuse to pitch both of you overboard.

“If you hadn’t come along, I think Sallie might’ve snapped. She might’ve fought Alexander over harming the little girl. Chloe was the last link to her brother, after all. Ian had told Sallie—and Sallie alone—that he was the little girl’s father. And she foolishly told Alexander.”

He would explain Ian’s ties with Lucas Mikkonen, the Master. I’d been right, Ian and Mikkonen had met at the doll shop when Ian’s father, Duncan, in his dementia, took a doll without paying. When Ian returned the doll to Mrs. Mikkonen’s shop, her son was there, visiting Rockport with his entourage to bully a printer about a bill, the printer I’d questioned in my “inquiry,” as Almeida put it.

“They were kindred spirits, Ian and Mikkonen, both seekers with the need to know what lies beyond. And now, presumably, their questions have been answered.”

So, amid the blackened buildings and dead Tree of Life, a body had been identified as Lucas Mikkonen’s.

“Ian was ill with lymphoma,” Almedia said.

“Ill or dying?” I said.

“Very ill. Which was probably tied to steroid abuse. Fuelled, of course, by the Drummond family mania in sports.”

Roberto said, “So if Alexander had just bided his time…”

“Alexander wasn’t good at biding,” Almeida said. “And he didn’t know Ian was sick because Ian never mentioned his cancer to his family. In the Drummond household, physical weakness was a disgrace. So Ian shared his illness with only two people in the world—the Episcopal priest at the family church in Gloucester and his other spiritual advisor, Lucas Mikkonen.”

“What will happen to Sallie?”

“Well, shoving Alexander overboard was perfectly within the realm of self-defense. He was wielding a knife and ready to use it on anyone thwarting his plans.”

I hesitated, but curiosity got the better of me. “I’d heard the killer left something behind. On the breakwater.” That I’d worried was the broken vodka bottle, covered with my incriminating fingerprints.

“Oh, that was a false lead,” Almeida said, “a wallet we traced to a tourist from North Carolina.”

“How did you first suspect Alexander was Ian’s killer?” Roberto said.

“Mrs. Drummond tipped us off, Ian’s mother. He’d lied to her about playing varsity tennis in college. She could tell he was new to the game, so that got her suspicious.”

Then he arrived—he blurted his name and title in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but, for me, he would always be Jason. His hair was shorn, but he’d retained his Italian suit and tart manner. “I don’t have much time.” He checked his onyx-faced watch with no numbers. He pulled up a wicker chair, blocking our view of Sergeant Almeida as naturally as the moon eclipses the sun. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not at all.” Almeida rose so fast that he almost grazed a hanging pot of fuschia. “I was just going to leave.”

Jason called the Truro community “a biotech firm turned hit squad.” If a god was involved, it was surely Mars; theirs was a religion based on war. There was little being accomplished involving farming and genetic research. They were successful at growing one crop, tobacco, which they gave to certain children to stunt their appetites, to save on groceries for the lower castes. But the dazzling produce the community hawked, including the jams Jason supplied to Scents of Being, was a mere cover. Jason said, “Their produce was grown through the inordinate use of fertilizers and pesticides, some illegal, actually. But their biological dabbling was even worse. We found outer buildings, not burnt, thank God, with stocks of biological weaponry. Plague, botulism, even some rare tropical pathogens.”

“What happened to Edward,” I asked. “Edward Babineaux?”