The Whiskey Tide (2 page)

     
She jumped at the nearby voice. The window to her left turned yellow as a light went on in her father's study. It had been her Uncle Phinneas who spoke, but with a belligerence she'd never heard.

     
"I'm only asking that you repay half right now," her father reasoned.

     
Kate cocked her head, vaguely guilty at eavesdropping but too interested to do otherwise.

     
"Half of fifteen thousand dollars is still an unreasonable request!" Uncle Finney sputtered. "I'd have to sell stocks. I'd take a terrible loss."

     
"You made quite a profit when I lent you the money, as I recall." Her father sighed. "I do hate to press the matter, Phinneas, but it's been three years. Frankly, I'm strapped. Woody's last round of medical bills were horrendous, and the ones before that had all but eaten our savings."

     
"You'd be in fine shape if you hadn't bought that damn boat."

     
Anger flickered in Kate at the comment.
Pa's Folly
was the only indulgence she could remember her father ever allowing himself. Her parents hadn't dragged the whole family through Europe like Uncle Finney and Aunt Helène had done before the war. Her parents didn't go to New York and stay in the best hotels and see all the new plays twice a year.

     
"As a matter of fact, I accepted the boat in settlement of a bill," her father said mildly.

     
She never had known the circumstances behind the two-masted topsail schooner, only that her father, who spent his days in courtrooms, hungered for such a craft when he watched them in the harbor. Six years ago he had simply sailed home in one and announced it was theirs.

     
"You see, you've always been a poor businessman. That's why you're in a pickle now," pronounced Uncle Finney.

     
"Please do be reasonable. When you asked to borrow money so you could take advantage of an opportunity, I said yes. All I'm asking is that you start to repay. How about five thousand for now, the rest when it's more convenient?"

     
Uncle Finney made an indignant sound. Kate pictured his fly-swatter jowls reddening.

     
"Never let it be said I don't repay debts," he sniffed. "I'll see my broker tomorrow."

     
"And not a word to Genevieve about the bills of course," Pa said. "I wouldn't want her to worry."

     
The light went out. Silence returned. Kate lay with heart thumping. She never had imagined her family having unpaid bills. It became a magnet for other disturbing thoughts: Theo's pleading looks. A man scared away with a bottle.

     
Around the shore at Salem Willows, the brassy music of the Flying Horses faded as the carousel stopped and the park closed its gates. Below the cliff, she could hear the soothing whisper of ocean. She yawned, wondering how it would be to ride waves in darkness. She'd hoisted and lowered sail and raised her face to the sea breeze only by day.

***

     
The light of the small fishing skiff flirted through the night like a barmaid with her skirt hitched up, daring anyone to ignore her. Joe Santayna, his hand on the tiller, grinned at the possibilities.

     
"You don't think this is crazy?" ventured the freckle-faced boy who rode in the bow seat.

     
"Oh, yeah. It's crazy all right," Joe answered.

     
He wasn't sure how old Billy McCarthy was. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Old enough to keep his wits about him. Joe tried to remember whether he'd have been scared at that age, or merely excited by an adventure like this. But that had been eleven years ago. Before the war. Another life.

     
"It's so crazy the cops'll never think it's anything but the truth if they happen to be there," he explained. "I'll tell my tale. You'll whine. I'll box your ears. And that's that." He'd feel bad if he had to hit the kid. But Barlow was paying Joe forty dollars and the kid ten to make this trip. "I'll see Barlow gives you another five if I have to clip you," he added.

     
Billy McCarthy lifted thin shoulders. "Don't matter. My pa punched me plenty for free before he left."

     
Joe shook a mass of dark curls. His own dad had been as gentle a man as ever walked. The Santaynas were a rough lot, dock hands and fishermen. They liked to curse as much as they liked to drink; liked to quarrel best of all. But though voices were often raised, fists seldom were, and never against kids.

     
"So what happens if the cops're there and the others can't bring the booze in?" Billy asked.

     
"Then they'll stow it under the Flying Horses out at the Willows."

     
It sounded so outlandish he knew the kid wouldn't believe it. Otherwise he'd never risk telling. He heard Billy snort.

     
"Don't tell me then."

     
Twin dimples that were the scourge of Joe Santayna's life — and the downfall of many a girl who'd caught his eye — made inch long creases in his cheeks.

     
"I won't. The less you can spill, the less risk to you."

     
He knew nothing about Billy McCarthy. Only that he swept up at Brennan's pub and kept to himself and wiped his nose on a handkerchief instead of his sleeve.

     
Joe felt his lips twitch in the dark. Wouldn't his Irish aunties be proud to know the manners they'd drummed into him had some effect? They'd helped him pick a kid for bootlegging.

     
Not that Joe himself was a regular practitioner. But when someone you trusted came along with an offer of money, why say no? It relieved the restlessness he'd felt more and more since he'd come home from France. Odd how in those flat, distant fields with no sight of a shoreline he'd kept himself alive by summoning memories of the smells and sounds of Salem. Yet now he'd been back going on two years, his uncles' fishing boat sometimes seemed as stifling to him as the rat-filled trenches.

     
Drawing a breath of the salt tang which always made problems seem smaller, he admired the shapes of houses revealed here and there by late-lighted windows on cliffs above the rocky shoreline they were approaching. He couldn't see details, but their mere size, and their privacy, spoke of an ordered existence unlike any he knew.

     
"There's where money lives for sure," he said.

     
It was an easy thing, adjusting your eyes to darkness. He saw Billy's nod.

     
"I work up at one of those houses we just passed. Running errands and such," the boy said shyly.

     
"Yeah?" Joe felt the same curiosity he'd felt when he saw a castle, or
chateau
as they called them there, on a hill in France. "What's it like?"

     
Billy shrugged. "The house next to where I work, there's two crazy old women. Peg — she's the cook — says one of 'em dresses up like a Chinaman. Where I work they're just regular folks, though, except they dress up every day. Have a little sick boy what's in a wheelchair."

     
"Money enough for doctors, though," Joe said under his breath. He thought of his cousin Opal, whose toddler had weakened and died because there was no way to pay for the operation that could have saved him.

     
He was starting to speak again when he felt a prickling between his shoulder blades. It had warned him a time or two in the Argonne. There was someone there on the beach.

     
"Time to pay attention," he murmured to Billy. He raised his voice. "Dan! Hey, Danny! You there?" He gave it a minute, then bellowed again. "Put some light on, for Christ’s sake! I found the little bugger."

     
From behind a boulder the sudden spotlight of a police launch blinded him.

     
"Cut your motor and float to shore. Keep your hands on your head," a voice ordered over a megaphone.

     
Joe grinned. That burst of light would be all it took to warn Barlow to take his cargo of rye a bit farther up coast. If there was a welcoming party here, they almost certainly wouldn't have men a mile away.

     
"Hey! I got a kid with me. Don't do anything crazy!"

     
He'd obeyed the megaphone order. Now, squinting past the spotlight, he could make out a circle of faces. Five or more boys in blue keeping the precinct safe from rum runners while the Coast Guard laid in wait at the three mile limit and half the local citizens nipped at smuggled bottles behind closed curtains. As he nosed to shore the police launch swung behind to block his escape by water. At the head of the group of cops he recognized Colin O'Malley, newly promoted to sergeant and rumored to have his hands in a couple of tills.

     
"Evening, boys." Joe leaped lightly into the sand with hands raised.

     
"Well, well. Might have known you'd turn up in the net sooner or later," O'Malley sneered.

     
"If you're thinking I'm bringing in bottles, look in the boat. Only cargo I've got is this punk who busted Danny Murphy's window and took off to keep from paying."

     
"It ain't true!" Billy whined as a cop collared him.

     
"Nothing in the boat — or out waiting to land, either," another reported.

     
Barlow's boatful of rye was running dark, and well out of the range of the searchlight on shore. A fresh-faced rookie who didn't look much older than Billy snickered nervously. O'Malley, deprived of the prize he'd expected, raised his fist to cuff his younger captive on the side of the head.

     
"I wouldn't," Joe warned, his voice going hard.

     
O'Malley's arm jerked to a halt. The puffy features that looked mismatched with his sharp little speck of a nose flattened with anger.

     
"You interfering with the law, bean-eater?"

     
"Just concerned you might stumble into a wall some night."

     
Though he couldn't see the policeman's face redden, Joe knew it was happening. They'd been on the same troop ship back. He'd seen men spit when O'Malley walked past. He'd heard how on two occasions O'Malley's cowardice had cost other men their lives and how one night a blanket had been tossed over his head and his nose and some teeth rearranged. "Must've stumbled into a wall," someone told the top sergeant next morning.

     
Forgetting Billy, O'Malley took a step toward Joe. He was six inches shorter but puffed up by his uniform.

     
"If I do, your cousin Pete'll go upstate for assault before you can spit, Santayna."

     
Joe stiffened. Pete had thrown a few more punches than he should have before he was married. But he'd straightened out now; had a kid; hardly so much as drank a beer after work, even when it was legal. O'Malley was son-of-a-bitch enough to go after him to get back at Joe.

     
"Menace to the public safety being out in a boat with a busted light" O'Malley hefted his billy club and swung it against the bow light on the skiff.

***

     
Unable to sleep, Zenaide Cole sat wrapped in the shadows of ivory statues and velvet furniture, running parchment hands through the mountain of pearls overflowing her lap. Their company nudged back her loneliness. It was not their value, but the memory they held; the air of the rare and exotic; the taste of unseen distant shores. They enchanted her as much now as they had when she was ten years old and Grandfather presented them.