The Weight of Water (25 page)

“Do you know what was in that trunk?”

“She had clothes, some she wore in the winter time, and she put them in the trunk in the summer, and summer clothes she did
not use she put in the trunk, and she had a feather-bed that she had at the time she came over in the steamer.”

“Was that in the trunk?”

“Yes, the bed was in the trunk, the big chest.”

“While he boarded with you, was Karen a member of the family?”

“She came out visiting me some days.”

“Did she sleep there?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. Yeaton then asked Maren whether she knew if Karen had a piece of silver money. Maren answered that yes, she had seen the
piece of silver money in October or November, and that Karen had said she had gotten the money from boarders at Appledore,
and that it was kept in her purse. Mr. Tapley then asked her if she knew if Karen kept anything else in that purse or if Maren
had seen Karen on the day of the murders put something in the purse.

“Yes,” Maren answered.

“What was it?”

“A button, white button like.”

“Have you any articles of clothing, with similar buttons upon?”

“Yes, have got some.”

“Where was the button taken from, if you know?”

“From my sewing basket.”

“State what was done with the button, how did it come there.”

“She took the sewing basket and looked for a button, and took a button there and handed it to Karen.”

“Who took it from the basket?”

“Anethe, and handed it to Karen, and Karen put it in her purse.”

“Have you any buttons similar to that?”

“Yes, have them with me.”

Maren then produced the buttons.

“Where did you get these buttons?” Mr. Yeaton asked.

“Got them in my sewing basket, found one in the basket and two in my box that I have always kept in my sewing basket. I have
a nightdress with similar buttons upon it.”

Maren produced the nightdress, and the Court said to Mr. Yeaton that it did not see how the buttons and the nightdress were
relevant.

“We will connect them hereafter and offer them again,” Yeaton answered.

Rich stands at the chart table, a microphone uncoiled and in his hand. Staticky sounds — a man’s even, unemotional voice -drone
from the radio over the quarter berth, but I cannot understand what the man is saying. Rich seems to, however, and I watch
as he bends closer to the charts, sweeping one away onto the floor altogether and examining another. I am looking for a sweater
for Billie.

Rich puts the microphone back into its holder and makes markings on a chart with a ruler and a pencil. “We’ve got a front
coming in faster than they thought,” he says with his back to Thomas and me. “They’re reporting gusts of up to fifty miles
an hour. Thunderstorms and lightning as well.” A wave hits the sail-boat side to and floods the deck. Seawater sprays into
the cabin through the open companionway. Rich reaches up with one hand and snaps the hatch shut.

“The wind alone could put us up on the rocks,” he says. “I’m going to motor in towards Little Harbor, the same as the other
boat, but even if we get caught out in the open, we’ll be better off than we’d be here. There’s not enough swinging room.”
He turns and looks from Thomas to me and back to Thomas, and seems to be making lists in his mind. He is still in his wet
T-shirt and shorts, though this is a different Rich from the one I saw earlier, organized and in charge. Alarmed, but not
panicked.

“Thomas, I need you to put sail ties on the main. Jean, I want you to heat some soup and hot coffee and put it into thermoses,
and put dry matches, bread, toilet paper, socks, and so on — you decide — into Ziploc bags. We need to lock down everything
in the cabin — drawers, your cameras, the binoculars, anything in the galley that could shift. There are cargo straps in that
drawer over there if you need them. Get Adaline to help you. We want all the hatches tightly closed.” Rich turns around to
the chart table. “And you’ll need these.”

He opens the slanted desk top and pulls out a vial of pills, which he tosses to Thomas. “Seasickness pills,” he says. “Each
of you take one — even you, Thomas — and give a half of one to Billie. It could be a little uncomfortable today. And Thomas,
there are diving masks under the cushions in the cockpit. Those are sometimes useful in the rain for visibility. Where
is
Adaline?”

Thomas gestures toward the forward cabin.

“She’s sick?”

Thomas nods.

I look at my daughter, struggling with the jacket of the foul-weather gear. I open a drawer to retrieve the plastic bags.
Beside the drawer, the stove is swinging. I realize that it is not the stove that is swinging, but rather the sloop itself.
Seeing this, I feel, for the first time, an almost instantaneous queasiness. Is seasickness in the mind? I wonder. Or have
I simply been too busy to notice it before?

Rich goes to the forward cabin and leaves the door open. Adaline is still lying motionless on the berth; she has thrown her
arm across her eyes. I watch Rich peel off his wet clothes. How casual we are being with our nakedness, I think.

Rich dresses quickly in jeans and a sweatshirt. I can hear his voice, murmuring to Adaline, but I cannot hear the precise
words. I want to know the precise words. He comes out and pulls on a pair of foul-weather pants and a jacket. He slips his
feet back into his wet boat shoes. I can see that he is still thinking about the storm, making mental lists, but when he walks
past me to go up on deck, he stops at the bottom of the ladder and looks at me.

It is strange enough that just a half hour before I was willing — no, trying — to make love with my brother-in-law. But it
seems almost impossibly strange with my daughter in the berth and my husband at the sink. I feel an odd dissonance, a vibration,
as though my foot had hit a loose board, set something in motion.

Thomas turns just then from the faucet, where he has been pouring water into a paper cup. In one hand, he holds the cup; in
the other, a pill. I believe he is about to say to me, “Drink this,” when he sees his brother’s face, and then before I can
pull away, my own.

Thomas’s eyes move briefly from Rich’s face to mine. Rich glances away, over toward the radio. I can see images forming in
Thomas’s mind. He still holds the cup of water with his hand. The other hand with the pill floats in front of me.

“What?” he asks then, almost inaudibly, as if he cannot formulate a whole question. I take the pill and the cup of water.
I shake my head quickly, back and forth, small motions.

I hand the cup to Thomas. Rich goes immediately up to the cockpit. Billie calls to me: “Mommy, help me, please. I can’t do
the snaps.”

With the exception of Maren Hontvedt’s testimony as an eye-witness to the murders, the prosecution’s case was based on circumstantial
evidence and a lack of an alibi. It had been a bloody murder, and blood was found on clothing (left in the privy behind his
landlady’s house) belonging to Louis Wagner. Mrs. Johnson, the landlady in question, identified a shirt as belonging to Wagner
by the buttonhole she had once mended. Money had been stolen from the Hontvedt house, and the next morning Wagner had enough
money to go to Boston and to buy a suit of clothes. Any man who made the row to Smuttynose and back would have put a lot of
wear and tear on a dory; the brand new thole pins in James Burke’s dory were worn down. Wagner had talked to John Hontvedt
and know that the women would be alone on Smutty-nose. In the weeks prior to the murders, Wagner had said repeatedly that
he would have money if he had to murder for it. Wagner could not produce a single witness who had seen him in the city of
Portsmouth from seven P.M. on the night of the murders until after seven o’clock the next morning. His landlady testified
that Wagner did not sleep in his room that night.

The chief bit of evidence for the prosecution, however, was the white button that was found in Wagner’s pocket when he was
arrested. The button, the prosecution claimed, had been stolen, along with several coins, from a pocketbook belonging to Karen
Christensen the night of the murders. The button matched those of Mary S. Hontvet’s nightdress — the one she produced in court.

I slip Maren Hontvedt’s document and its translation into a plastic bag and seal it. Into other plastic bags, I put my film
and my cameras, my log, Thomas’s notebooks, other books, and the provisions Rich has asked for. Rich and Thomas are above;
Billie is beside me. I keep her close, throwing my arm in front of her or behind her like a railroad barrier whenever I feel
the boat tip or catch a gust of wind. Rich and Thomas have unfastened the boat from the mooring and have turned on the motor.
I can hear the cough and kick of the engine, and then a reassuring hum. We leave the Isles of Shoals and head for open water.

“Mommy, is Adaline coming to live with us?”

Billie and I are folding charts and sliding them into Ziploc bags. My daughter likes running her fingers along the seal, the
satisfaction of feeling it snap shut.

I crouch down in front of her and sit back on my heels.

“She’s not coming to live with us,” I say. It is meant to be an answer, but it sounds like a question.

“Oh,” Billie says. She looks down at the floor. I notice that water is sloshing over the teak planking.

“Why do you ask?” I put my finger under her chin and lift it just a fraction. There is a note that isn’t entirely parental
in my voice, and I think she must hear it. She sticks her tongue out the gap made by her two missing front teeth and stares
up at the ceiling.

“I forget,” she says.

“Billie.”

“Um.” She stretches her arms high above her head. Her toes are pointed inward. “Well…,” she says, drawing out the words.
“I think Daddy said.”

“Said what?”

She flaps her arms at her sides. “I don’t know, do I?”

Shockingly, tears appear at the lower lids of her eyes.

“Billie, what’s the matter?” I pull her to me and hold her close. I can feel the oilskin, the damp curl of her hair, the plumpness
of her legs.

“Why is the boat moving around like this?” she asks. “It doesn’t feel good.”

Louis Wagner’s defense consisted primarily of attempts to answer prosecution questions in order to convince the jury of a
reasonable doubt. Why were his hands blistered and the knuckles bruised the day after the murders? He had helped a man lay
crates on a fish cart. Where had he been all night? He had had a glass of ale, then had baited nine hundred hooks for a fisherman
whose name he didn’t know and who could not be produced at the trial. After that, he had two more mugs of ale and then began
to feel poorly. He was sick to his stomach in the street and fell down near a pump. He went back to the Johnsons’ at three
o’clock to go to sleep, but went in the back door instead of the front, and did not go up to his bed, but slept in the lounge.
Later in the morning, he decided to have his beard shaved, then heard the train whistle and thought to go to Boston. There
he bought a new suit of clothes and went to stay at his old boardinghouse in North Street, a place he had lived at several
times before. How did he happen to have blood on articles of clothing that he had on the night of the murders? It was fish
blood, he said, and also he had stabbed himself with a fish-net needle several days earlier. How did he come by the money
to go to Boston and to buy a suit of clothes? He had earned twelve dollars earlier in the week baiting trawls for a fisherman,
whose name he did not remember, and the night of the murders had earned a further dollar.

Wagner took the stand in his own defense. Mr. Tapley, counsel for the defense, asked Louis Wagner what had happened to him
when he was arrested in Boston.

“When I was standing in the door of the boarding master where I boarded five years,” Wagner answered, “he came along, shook
hands with me and said, halloo, where did you come from. Before I had time to answer him, policeman stepped along to the door.
He dropped me by the arm. I ask them what they want. They answered me they want me. I asked him what for. I told him to let
me go up-stairs and put my boots on. They answered me the slippers are good enough. They then dragged me along the streets
and asked me how long I had been in Boston. I was so scared I understand they asked me how long I had been in Boston altogether.
I answered him five days, making a mistake to say five years.”

“Did you intend to say five years?”

“Yes, sir. Then they asked me if I could read the English newspapers. I told them no. Well, he says, if you could you would
have seen what was in it. You would have been in New York at this time.”

“Would what?”

“I would have been in New York at this time if I knowed what was in the newspapers. I asked him what was in the newspapers.
He asked me if I was not on the Isle of Shoals and killed two women; I answered him that I had not done such a thing. He brought
me into station-house, Number One. I found there a man named Johnson, city marshal at Portsmouth.”

Mr. Tapley then asked him what happened to him when he was brought to the station house.

Wagner said that City Marshall Johnson had asked him the whereabouts of the tall hat he was supposed to have worn the night
before on the Isles of Shoals.

Wagner continued. “I told him I had not been on the Isle of Shoals; had not wore no tall hat in my life. He says the woman
on the Isle of Shoals has seen you with a tall hat that night. I asked him what woman. He told me Mrs. Hontvet. He told me
that he had the whiskers, that was shaved off my face, in his pocket, that it was shaved off in Portsmouth by such a barber.
I told him to show me them whiskers. He told me that he had found the baker where I had been that night and bought bread;
that I told the baker that I was going to the Isle of Shoals that night. I asked him to put me before the baker, or put the
baker before me that said so. He answered that I soon would see him. When the new clothes was taken from my body I was taken
into another room. The city marshal Johnson stripped me bare naked; asked me where I changed them underclothes. I told him
that I had them underclothes on my body nearly eight days. He says you changed them this morning when you went to Boston;
he says there was no gentleman in the city of Boston could wear underclothes for eight days so clean as them was. I told him
I was poor, but I was a gentleman and I could wear clean underclothes just as well as any gentleman in the city of Boston.
After my underclothes was overhauled they was put on me and I was brought into the cell; stayed in the cell until the next
morning; when I was taken out again from two policemen, and dragged along the street.”