Musseled Out Read online

  Maybe we’d catch a break. I hoped so. If we didn’t, if Thwing got all his permits and built his restaurant, my options might melt away. I’d feel duty bound to run the clambake next summer as we competed with him.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m looking at some promising properties today.” He pulled his phone from his suit pocket and glanced at the display. “Will you look at the time? If I don’t get going, I’ll be late.”

  Then he charged off in his weird, stalking pace in the direction of the back harbor.

  Chapter 2

  My business in town concluded, I steered our Boston Whaler back into the navy-blue water of Busman’s inner harbor. Most of the pleasure boat moorings were empty. The sailboats and cabin cruisers had been hauled out and stored in one of the harbor boatyards, or loaded onto trailers for the long drive to warmer winter waters. Only a few stalwarts remained, hoping to grab one last day.

  I tried to shake off my strange encounter with the unpleasant David Thwing. I’d put Sonny’s personal animosity toward him down to the natural human impulse to vilify someone who posed a threat. But now that I’d met Thwing in person, I wasn’t so sure. With his not-so-veiled insults and oily smile, there was a lot not to like about him.

  As I reached the outer harbor, the chop increased and I held tightly to the wheel of the Whaler. There were six islands in the outer harbor, three of them inhabited. The largest was Chipmunk, home to a summer colony with a hundred homes. Ferry service had ended on the first of October, so only the hardiest of summer residents remained. Next week, the town of Busman’s Harbor would turn off the great conduits that took fresh drinking water and electricity to the island and it would be abandoned for the winter.

  Though the day was unseasonably warm, it was cold on the water, and got colder still when I passed Dinkum’s Light and exited through the narrow mouth of the harbor into the North Atlantic. I shivered in the heavy flannel shirt I wore over a Snowden Family Clambake T-shirt, wishing I’d shrugged into a sweatshirt before I’d started the boat. Fortunately, the trip to Morrow Island, two miles down the coast, was a short one and I was soon tying up at our dock.

  I’d been living in the little house by the dock on Morrow Island for five weeks. My sister Livvie, her husband Sonny, and their nine-year-old daughter, Page, had lived there all summer, but moved back to their home on the mainland after Labor Day so Page could more easily attend school and swim team practice. I’d happily moved from my mother’s house in town where I’d been living since March out to the island. Fall was my favorite time of year to be there.

  Le Roi, the island’s Maine coon cat, ran down the dock to greet me. Like many of his breed, he often behaved like a dog—loving a good swim, playing fetch, and welcoming the human inhabitants home. Though he behaved like a dog, Le Roi thought like a cat, which is to say he believed he owned me and not the other way around. I bent down, gave him a good scratch around his magnificent ruff, and wondered what the owners of the apartment over Gleason’s Hardware thought about pets. Until this year, Le Roi had spent his winters with the island’s former caretakers, but that was no longer an option. My niece, Page, had loved living with Le Roi for the summer, but my sister, Livvie, exhausted by the early months of pregnancy, had announced the cat wasn’t coming home with them.

  “What am I going to do with you?” I asked Le Roi. What was I going to do with me?

  I looked up at Morrow Island, a thirteen-and-a-half-acre hunk of rock in the North Atlantic. The old great lawn led up from the dock to its first plateau, which had been home to the formal gardens in my great-grandparents’ time. Now it held the croquet, badminton, and bocce courts the clambake guests played on while they waited for their meals. It also held the pavilion where we served chowder, twin lobsters, steamed clams, and the rest of the food at long picnic tables. The attached bar, souvenir shop, and small commercial kitchen waited for the last surge of guests before their long winter’s rest.

  Farther up the lawn, at the top of the island, stood Windsholme, the stone “cottage” built by my mother’s ancestors. Half-burned in a fire in the spring, it too awaited a decision. Fix it up, or tear it down? Either would be breathtakingly expensive. I softened the focus of my gaze to blur the orange hazard fence surrounding it. A slight breeze rippled through the colorful leaves and the island seemed to sigh with contentment. I sighed, too. I was home.

  The hardwood for the clambake fire was piled beside the fire pit. The lengths were twice what I could fit into the wood stove in the house. The day was gorgeous, but by late afternoon I’d need the stove’s heat to be able to concentrate on anything beyond the cold in my toes and at the end of my nose. “No time like the present,” I said to Le Roi and went for the axe. Le Roi, sensing work, scattered.

  “Ahoy!” I straightened up from loading split logs into a wheelbarrow, grateful for the break. The Flittermouse, Quentin Tupper’s sleek racing sailboat, glided into our dock. “Give me a hand here?” he shouted.

  I ran over to take the lines. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “I was out sailing, thought I’d drop in.”

  In June, Quentin had saved the Snowden Family Clambake by paying off our bank loan and becoming an investor in our business. He owned a house on Westclaw Point, directly across the narrows from Morrow Island, and he knew if our business went under, our island would be sold and developed.

  As a classics major in college, Quentin had developed a tiny piece of computer code that was licensed and embedded in a ubiquitous operating system and every application it ran. The resulting royalties had made him rich beyond most people’s dreams. He spent his life studiously avoiding all connections and obligations. Unlike the other rich people I knew, he served on no boards of companies, schools, or charities. He didn’t collect art or stamps or celebrities. He answered to no one.

  True to his word, he’d been a completely silent partner in the clambake company during the long, busy days of the summer, but now that things had slowed down, he’d taken to “dropping by.”

  “Want lunch?” I asked.

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  I wheeled the firewood to the deck of the house, where Quentin helped me unload it. Inside the pine kitchen, I put bacon on to fry and took a juicy tomato off the windowsill. The last spoils of summer. My sister Livvie was the gardener, not me, and I was aware I was reaping the final rewards of her hard work.

  Quentin sat at the table. Through the big kitchen windows behind him, the Atlantic Ocean stretched to the horizon. Despite his carefully constructed life, I sensed he sometimes craved company. He’d accepted me as a peer from the beginning, and an odd friendship had developed. I’d been away from Busman’s Harbor since junior high myself and had no group of town friends to fall back on. If you’d didn’t count my boyfriend, Chris, and my extended family, Quentin was my closest friend in Busman’s Harbor.

  “I looked at the apartment over Gleason’s Hardware this morning,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “That’s not right for you.”

  Quentin had opinions about everything, and no inhibitions about expressing them. I wondered if he’d always been that way, or if he’d started losing his social skills when his ever-increasing fortune had allowed him to withdraw from other people.

  I assembled our BLTs and put one on a plate in front of him along with a glass of iced tea, another symbol of the now-gone summer. “Why ‘not right’?” I asked as I sat down.

  He waved me off. He’d taken a bite of sandwich and his mouth was full. Summer had been kind to Quentin. It had lightened his dark blond hair, and he was tanned as only the leisure class, or the most determined tanning booth bunny, could be. Today, as usual, he wore a cotton sweater, tailored denim shirt, khakis, and boat shoes, no socks. His tan made his bright blue eyes look even brighter. Sonny had told me Quentin was gay, but most of the rest of what Sonny had told me about Quentin had turned out not to be true. When I’d tried asking him once about his romantic history, former attachments, and so on,
in the way that friends do, a steel door had slammed shut, keeping me on the outside. My life was there for his dissection, but his was off limits to me. Whomever he might have longed or lusted for, Quentin was steadfastly alone.

  “The apartment over Gleason’s Hardware is not where you’re going to end up,” he said, with confidence, once he’d stopped chewing.

  “The HR director from my old job called this morning. They’ll hold my position open only until Friday. Maybe I’ll go back to New York.”

  Quentin shook his head. “Nope. That’s not right for you, either.”

  This was getting aggravating. Which reminded me. “I saw David Thwing on the pier today.” Speaking of aggravating.

  “That jerk,” Quentin said. “Did he give you a hard time?”

  “He said he didn’t think the clambake company could handle the competition—that we’d last less than a season.”

  “Jerk,” Quentin repeated. He sat back in his chair, his tanned forehead furrowed. “If he does get his business up and running, I’d feel better if you ran the clambake next season.”

  “Is that your intuition about what’s ‘right’ for me?”

  “No. That’s my intuition about what’s right for my investment.”

  When Quentin put his money into the clambake to save us from the bank, I’d agreed to stay on for only one summer, the one just past. Technically, he had no way to hold me, though he knew me well enough to know that if the clambake was threatened, I’d feel I had to stay to protect my family and the employees along with his investment.

  “If he continues to be a jerk, let me know,” Quentin said, twirling a nonexistent mustache. “We haf vays of dealing with pepple like hem.”

  He drank the last of his iced tea and stood up. I walked him back toward the Flittermouse. On the lawn, he stopped and looked up at the ruin of Windsholme. “What are you going to do about that?” he asked.

  Another decision. “I don’t know.”

  “You should at least get it fully secured to protect what’s left from the winter weather, so you have the option of restoring it, if that’s what you decide to do.”

  My family hadn’t lived in the old mansion for three generations. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where restoring it made sense.

  “It’s an architectural gem,” Quentin said, as if he felt my pessimism. “And it’s in better shape than you think it is.”

  “Let me get through the last clambake this weekend.”

  When we reached the Flittermouse, Quentin climbed aboard.

  “What are those?” I pointed to three lobster buoys sitting on the deck. They had a thick neon-green stripe with thin navy-blue rings above and below it.

  “I found them floating free out by Coldport Island when I was on my sail,” Quentin said. “I figured I’d try to return them to their owner.”

  Quentin had built his granite mansion on land where his ancestors had kept a shack in order to preserve their rights to lobster in the narrows between Westclaw Point and Morrow Island. He was rich, but he still understood what lost gear meant to a working lobsterman.

  “Any idea who?” Every lobsterman had a distinct set of colors and design for the buoys that marked his lobster traps.

  “No idea,” Quentin said. All buoys were marked with the owner’s lobstering license number, so Quentin would have to track the owner down that way.

  “Do you think they were cut loose?”

  If the buoys were cut, it marked an escalation in the dispute between Busman’s Harbor’s lobstermen and Coldport Island’s. When lobstermen from one harbor put their traps in an area traditionally belonging to another, the first response was usually to turn the encroaching buoys upside down as a warning. If that didn’t work, the next step was to pull up the offending traps and take the lobsters. This could be done subtly by removing only part of the catch or as an outright provocation, taking it all. If the traps weren’t moved as a result, the next step was dropping your own traps over top of the outsider’s traps, creating a tangled mess.

  The next stage of this “gear war” was cutting the line from the traps to the buoy, leaving “ghost traps” on the ocean floor. The owner lost the expensive traps and the lobsters in them. Then, like as not, he would retaliate. In some rare cases, if it kept going, the gear war became a full-fledged lobster war, with vandalized boats and shots fired. Even murder wasn’t unheard of.

  “It’s a bad business,” Quentin said, using the same words Vee Snugg had.

  Chapter 3

  I waved good-bye to Quentin as he sailed off on the Flittermouse and contemplated what to do with the rest of my day. There was clambake-related office work to be done, but how many warm afternoons did we have left?

  I went upstairs, put on a sweatshirt, pulled my blond hair back in a ponytail and grabbed a book. Normally, I would have sat out on our dock, enjoying the endless view on the Atlantic side of Morrow Island, but despite the unseasonably warm day, it was fall and slightly breezy. I wanted a more protected spot.

  I followed the path alongside the great lawn to the top of the island. Beyond Windsholme, the path wound downhill to our little beach. Rock outcroppings on either side of the cove would protect me from the breeze, and in fall, the view from the beach was arguably even more spectacular than the Atlantic side. Less than a mile across the deep channel that separated it from Morrow Island, Westclaw Point rose in front of me. The leaves of the deciduous trees had turned a riot of reds, yellows, and golds. I positioned an Adirondack chair in the sun, plopped down, and pushed aside my worries—the tension in the town, David Thwing’s threat of competition, and all the urgent decisions about my own life. I opened my book and was promptly pulled into its story.

  By the time I looked up, it was after three o’clock. I shivered a bit, realizing a chill had brought me out of my reading trance.

  A lobster boat floated lazily in the narrows between my beach and Westclaw Point. I didn’t recognize it. I hadn’t been back in town long enough to know the players.

  Across from me, Quentin Tupper’s towering, modern edifice of polished granite and glass rose from the boulders on which it stood. Most people referred to the house as a monstrosity, but I thought it fit perfectly—like it was thrust out of the rough landscape. The Flittermouse rested at its dock out front.

  The lobster boat continued to float, apparently aimlessly. It turned its stern toward me and I read its name, El Ay. I said it aloud. L.A. Who in Busman’s Harbor, or on Coldport Island for that matter, had close enough ties to Los Angeles to name their boat for that city?

  I walked to the edge of the water to get a closer look. For the most part, lobstermen weren’t aimless. They went about the business of hauling, emptying, baiting, and releasing their traps with machine-like efficiency. Even more worrying, I couldn’t see anyone on the boat. Not the lobsterman, or his frequent assistant, the sternman.

  “Ahoy!” I called, trying to get someone to wave back to me. “Ahoy!”

  The sound of my voice carried across the water, but no one responded. Seconds ticked by. I pondered. Was this a real emergency, or was it a lobsterman grabbing some time away from his family to take a nap, or sleep it off?

  “Ahoy!”

  The water echoed the sound back at me. The boat turned again and began to drift sideways with the current. It wasn’t anchored. Something was wrong.

  I jogged up the path away from the beach and walked carefully out onto one of the big outcroppings that surrounded it, hoping the extra height would allow me to see into the boat. “Ahoy!”

  No sound. No motion. No one. I ran to my house to call the Coast Guard on the radio.

  When I got back to the beach with my binoculars, a small Coast Guard boat was already approaching the El Ay. A voice boomed through a loudspeaker. “Vessel El Ay, United States Coast Guard. Are you in distress? Repeat. Are you okay?”

  The Maine Marine Patrol, no doubt alerted by the Coast Guard, approached from the opposite direction. On a signal from the Coast Guard, the M
arine Patrol boat pulled alongside the lobster boat. Through the binoculars, I saw the officer shake his head. My stomach dropped. No one was aboard.

  Across the water, I saw Quentin, out at the end of his dock, drawn by the commotion.

  The Coast Guard boat approached and the three boats floated in tandem. Two Coast Guardsmen, a tall man and a trim woman, boarded the El Ay. I held my breath.

  They, too, emerged, shaking their heads. My stomach, already in a knot, clenched tighter.

  As the Coast Guard prepared to tow the lobster boat to town, I sprinted up the path toward our Boston Whaler.

  Chapter 4

  By the time I got to town, word had spread and a crowd had gathered at the marina. The Coast Guard and Marine Patrol boats were tied up, as was the El Ay. More Coast Guardsmen had materialized and so had Busman’s four on-duty town cops, who seemed most interested in keeping the crowd away from the boats. I joined the group at the back and caught snippets of conversation.

  “—Coldport Island—”

  “This has gone too far.”

  “—knew it would end in tragedy.”

  The crowd, at least, had decided the empty lobster boat was a result of the war with Coldport Island. I wasn’t so sure. It could have been an accident. Lobstering was a dangerous job, especially if you were doing it alone.

  The greatest danger was being caught in the line that held the traps together, and then hauled into the water as they were released over the stern. This far north you wouldn’t last long in any season. Even if you could break free of the line before you were pulled to the bottom, it would be five minutes to hypothermia, as little as fifteen until death. If the line became tangled in the propeller, and you were hauled under the boat, you were a goner for sure.