The Lobster Kings (31 page)

Kenny’s eyes widened. “It’s not his,” he said, and then he straightened his arm out, holding the finger away from him like it was a rotten fish. “Whose fucking finger is this?”

“Oh, shit.” Stephanie covered her mouth and jerked forward, gagging.

“Just checking in, Timmy,” I said. I double-clicked the mic but didn’t say anything else.

“Cordelia?” Daddy’s voice was terribly clear through the radio. I wished that he really was standing beside me, instead of running somewhere out there in the fog. The whiteness had started to lift some. There was a wind, finally, and with the wetness of the fog, I realized I was chilled and goose-bumped. Later
on, I expected it to be a hot day, with the sun burning off the moisture that hovered around us, but right then I would have liked to have had Kenny put his arms around me, to pull me close and warm me with his body.

“Daddy,” I said, “you and George out on the water here?”

“Yep. Coming home early. George decided to skip his appointment. Long story. Well, short story, actually, but I’ll tell you when I see you. No worries. We’ll be docked in ten minutes. You should come on in, too, honey. No point being out here in this kind of weather. The bugs can wait another day.”

“Daddy,” I said, “we could use a hand out here, if you’re near us.”

“Like I said, Cordelia, with the fog, wasn’t planning on working. Besides, I need to drop George off first.”

I rested my head against the console. It felt cold and wonderful against my skin. I put the mic up against my mouth. “Daddy, I could use you out here. It’s important.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if he and George were having a few words, and then Daddy’s voice came back. “Why don’t you give me your coordinates?”

I read him the numbers from the GPS, and then almost as an afterthought I said, “Hey, Daddy? You remember that painting I like, the one we look at when we go to Halifax? It’s something like that.”

“Yeah,” he said, and I could hear his motor revving up, knew that he understood, knew that he’d already slammed the throttle all the way forward, that Daddy was coming to me as fast as the
Queen Jane
could take him, “I remember it.”

T
he painting was
The Ghost Ship
. I’d been to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, in the midst of Halifax, often enough with Daddy that he knew exactly what I was talking about. About half of Brumfitt’s paintings were titled. The ones that weren’t titled by Brumfitt himself have been saddled with the kind of names you might expect:
Sunrise on North Shore, Sunset on North Shore, Sunset on South Shore, Sunset by Rocks
. Imaginative stuff. Some of Brumfitt’s titles are curious, however. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia has a room devoted to five Brumfitt paintings. The one that always intrigues me, because Brumfitt named it, and because the tone of the painting seems to belie the actual title, is called
The Ghost Ship
. It belongs to Brumfitt’s so-called “light” school of painting.

The painting is a shoreline scene, on the windward side of the island, in a large cove of deep water. It’s a popular picnic location. Brumfitt captures the beach with a sense of smoothness that almost makes me want to believe that the rounded rocks are sand, and the colour he’s chosen for the sky and the light on the water would lead me in for a swim if I didn’t know just how goddamned cold the water is in that cove. Nobody swims in that cove. Even in the
height of summer you can often find sea ice rimming the rocks. There is a ship, of course, the titular ghost ship, broadside and hooked on the tip of the rock that is only available at low tide. The ship is rolled several degrees on its side, and every time I look at it, the hole in the boat makes me think of the gash in Christ’s side in crucifixion paintings. The stern of the boat is weighted from water taken on, and it doesn’t seem like it will keep floating for very much longer. The name of the ship is visible:
The Visitation
. What’s creepy to me is the absence of life in the painting. Creepier still is that
The Visitation
was a real ship, a freighter headed to Boston, loaded up with the latest women’s fashions, goods for market, a crew, passengers, nearly eighty men and women bound for lives as indentured servants, but when it was found, on the rocks off Loosewood Island, there was not a trace of a single soul aboard.

I
n the five minutes it took for Daddy and George to show up, the fog thinned out enough that we could see them coming from a couple of boat lengths away. As Daddy came along the port side, Kenny and I grabbed the
Queen Jane’s
rails to tie her off. Daddy and George both came on board packing heat.

“You can holster up, Daddy. We’ve already been on there, and there isn’t anyone aboard,” I said. “Uh, I guess I mean there isn’t anyone aboard who’s still breathing. We got a dead guy and an empty boat and, honestly, I’m glad you’re here.”

George lowered his guard, but I could see that Daddy wasn’t going to put his gun away until he’d sorted things out for himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me; he wasn’t the sort of father who double-checked everything I did. But this was different. It wasn’t about whether or not I’d baited a trap or tied a line or marked my bearings or any of the things that he trusted me to do, both implicitly and explicitly. This was about Daddy doing his job, which was to make sure I was safe. Didn’t matter how old he was or how old I was, he was my father and I was his daughter, and he kept his gun up to his shoulder as he stepped over the other
rail of my boat and onto the ghost ship. George glanced at me with a frown.

“Your dad had another one,” George said, his voice low enough that I was the only one who could hear him. “Got a long lecture from the doctor about taking all of his pills as prescribed. She was just finishing up when he fainted again. He doesn’t want to tell you. Figures you’ll just worry. They worked him over and cleared him, but we spent the night at the hospital. He complained enough that they finally let him out near four in the morning.” George rubbed at his eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding a gun. “Could use a little sleep. Woody slept, but I was up the whole time. Your daddy has an uncanny ability to sleep comfortably anywhere. He was that way when we were in Vietnam, and he’s that way still. Well,” he said, letting out a sigh, “suppose I better get on over there with Woody, check things out.” He went over the rail with an ease that belied his size, moving quickly enough that I didn’t have a chance to ask him to repeat himself. Daddy fainted again?

Neither Kenny, Stephanie, nor I said anything while we waited. Kenny took the cups of chai and dumped them overboard and then refilled them hot from the thermos, while I just watched Daddy and George make their way methodically down the boat. The way they moved together looked planned, rehearsed. Daddy didn’t spend much time on the body on his first pass, but once he’d made sure the ghost boat truly was devoid of life, sure that I hadn’t missed anything obvious, he bent over and reached into the pocket of the dead man and pulled out an overstuffed nylon wallet. Daddy broke the Velcro seal and extracted a driver’s licence.

He squinted at the licence, holding it farther from his face. “Got to get some reading glasses for this small type,” he said. “I can read the paper well enough, but this?” He handed the licence to George, who shrugged and walked it over to where the boats met.

The picture was enough for me. I didn’t need to read the name to know who it was: Oswald Cornwall. I remembered the
way he’d looked, lurking behind Eddie Glouster in the shadows of their campfire. I can’t say that I knew him, that I’d had much more interaction with him than I’d had that night we ran Eddie Glouster off the island, but I knew enough of him that I felt a jolt when I realized that he was the faceless man lying on the deck of the ghost ship.

The sun was burning through the fog with a purpose. I couldn’t see the island or the mainland yet, but it was clear between me and the ghost ship, clear between me and Daddy, and while I could see his lips moving when he said it, the words didn’t sound right to me.

“You heard me,” he said, and then repeated himself. “Call in the Coasties. The
Queen Jane
is clean, and you’re clean, right?” He waited until I nodded, and I wondered what he thought I might have gotten into without him so that he actually had to wait until I answered. “It’s one thing to handle a turf war on our own, but it’s another thing entirely when we’re finding dead bodies. Better to call them in and tell them what happened than to have them find the ship and maybe find something you left behind. No reason for you to be in trouble, but if we don’t call it in and report it, that opens up some doors. You were all over this boat, and I don’t want to have to worry that Kenny’s wallet fell out of his pocket or something. You and Kenny touch anything, take anything, anything I need to know about?”

All three of us, Kenny, Stephanie, and I, turned our heads to look at the severed finger sitting on the console.

A
fter we found the ghost ship, I had nightmares worthy of Brumfitt’s scariest paintings. There were the same nightmares I’d had around Scotty’s death, and then there were all sorts of new ones. I had a nightmare that I opened the locker on the ghost ship and it was Daddy’s body, Daddy with the hole in his face. There was one where I accidently dropped Momma’s pearls over the rail of the
Kings’ Ransom
, and when Kenny saw, he leapt into the water after the necklace, but never resurfaced. Another where I dreamt that I was in the water wearing Momma’s pearls, and a mermaid—the Brumfitt-style mermaid—used them to choke me and drag me beneath the surface. I woke from that one with my sheet wrapped around my neck. In another dream, Carly was the one holding me under the water, and all I could see were the pearls dangling under her chin. Probably half of the dreams included that fucking necklace, and there was a part of me that wanted to take the pearls out on the
Kings’ Ransom
and gently slip them over the side, returning them to the water from whence they came. I tried keeping them in the dresser drawer, but it was like I could hear them rattling in there. I kept taking them
out and wearing them around the house. They looked cold and clean around my neck, but I never wore them for long.