Nervous Water (23 page)

“You're right,” he said. “I should've told you. I meant to. I knew it was the right thing. You deserved to know. It just—I never found the right time to do it.”

“Well,” she said, “it's okay. I've got my head around it now.”

Moze smiled. “Grudges are no good.”

“You gonna forgive me?”

He nodded. “Sure. Forget about it.” He cleared his throat. “It's awful good to see you, you know.”

She squeezed his hand. “You, too.”

He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Something I got to get off my chest, honey. Ever since I found out about my—that goddamn aneurysm—I been needing desperately to talk to you. I kept thinking, I can't die before I clear the air with Cassie.”

“Well,” she said, “now I know. You weren't my real father. You and Mum—you weren't my real parents. It's okay. You were the best parents in the world.”

“That ain't all of it.” Moze looked at me. “Come over here, sonnyboy. I want you to hear this, too.”

I found another chair, pulled it over, and sat beside Cassie.

Moze was looking at me. “You remember Norman?”

I remembered a white, bloated body floating in the Piscataqua River. I remembered how the flesh had flaked away when my old man stuck a boat hook into his leg.

I nodded. “I'll never forget it.”

He looked at Cassie, then back at me. “It was me and Jake,” he said. “We—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don't say anything. I'm going to leave the room.”

“No,” he said. “I want you to hear it, too.”

“Then you've got to hire me,” I said.

“Huh? Hire you for what?”

“I'm a lawyer.”

“Why the hell would I need a lawyer?”

“Moze,” I said, “just ask me if I'll be your lawyer, okay?”

“It's bullshit, ain't it?”

“No. If you're going to say what I think you're going to say, and if you want me to hear it, it's best if you're my client.”

He shrugged. “Okay. Will you be my lawyer?”

“Yes,” I said. “Now, what were you going to say?”

He closed his eyes for a minute. Then he opened them, looked at Cassie, and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Here it is.” He cleared his throat. “One night, it was back thirty-odd years ago, my baby sister Mary shows up at your grandmother's house all beat up and crying. She's pregnant out to here, and she's sayin' how her husband, Norman Dillman, punched her and busted her arm and kicked her out and called her a whore so all the neighbors could hear. So me and Jake, we went to Norman's trailer to have a little talk with the sonofabitch about the way a man is supposed to take care of his wife.” He looked at Cassie. “I'm sorry. I know he was your father. But he was a sonofabitch.”

Cassie nodded. Her eyes were wet.

“Talkin' to Norman didn't turn out to be all that satisfactory,” said Moze, “so me and Jake, we drug him outside and took him around back, and we talked to him some more, and then Jake said the hell with it and plugged him in the head with his old army forty-five. Then I backed up my truck and we loaded Norman in back. He was a big bastard. We drove down to the river, piled some rocks in my dinghy along with Norman's body, and rowed out to my boat. We piled everything—Norman and them rocks—into the boat, started up the engine, and drove out to that deep hole near the bridge, where the currents swirl around?”

He made it a question for Cassie. She knew the river as well as he did.

She nodded.

“So then,” he said, “me and Jake, we filled a lobster pot with them rocks, and Jake trussed Norman to the pot with the buoy line, and we dumped him in the river. I made Jake toss his pistol over, too. He didn't want to do it. He brought that thing home from Korea.” Moze shook his head. “Jake always did tie poor knots. Otherwise Norman would've stayed down there, been lobster food, done somebody some good for a change. I shoulda tied them damn knots myself.”

“You guys murdered Norman?” I said.

“Guess we did. Don't know what else you'd call it. I never regretted doin' it, I don't mind telling you. Not even for a minute. Oh, I worried about gettin' caught, and I worried about Mary and my mother learnin' about it. Worried plenty on them subjects. Otherwise…” He looked at Cassie and shrugged.

She was staring at him. I couldn't read her expression.

“Who else knows about this?” I said.

He shrugged. “Just me and Jake. I think Faith might've figured it out, the way she looked at me sometimes. She never said nothing, though, and maybe it was just my guilty conscience. I never regretted it, exactly, but it still weighed me down sometimes.”

“What about your wives?” I said. “You and Jake. Did they know?”

He smiled. “Tell a woman something like that? You know better.”

“What about neighbors, people who knew Norman, knew what he did to Mary, knew how you and Jake felt about it?”

“Folks had their suspicions, all right,” he said. “But as far as I know, nobody liked that sonofabitch except Mary, and she stopped liking him about the time he started hitting her. I reckon just about everybody figured the world was a better place without Norman Dillman in it.” He looked at Cassie. “Sorry, honey. But that's how it was. I never felt bad, you thinking I was your daddy. Because I knew your real daddy got what was coming to him.”

“I guess you did the right thing,” she said.

He looked at her. “You mean that?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Moze,” I said, “Jake was in here the other day. I ran into him when he was leaving. He seemed awful mad.”

“Oh, he was.” Moze smiled. “Me and Jake, we made a pact that night after we shoved Norman and his lobster pot over the transom of my boat. We promised each other we'd never say a word about it to anybody. Police or relatives or anybody. I never trusted Jake, though. He talks too goddamn much. Always shooting off his mouth. And I suppose Jake never trusted me. Hard to blame him. Brother or not, that's a damn big secret to be sharing. So after that night, me and Jake, we pretty much avoided each other. We lived in the same town, couldn't help running into each other now and then. But we pretty much decided we didn't like each other very much.” Moze paused and looked from Cassie to me, then back at Cassie.

She nodded.

“Anyway,” said Moze, “the other day when Jake come in here, I told him that if I caught up with Cassie, I was going to tell her about it, because sonofabitch or no sonofabitch, Norman was Cassie's real father. And I also told Jake that if it looked like I was gonna croak before I saw Cassie, I was gonna tell you, sonnyboy, give you the job of finding Cassie and telling her.” He looked at Cassie. “That's why I been so damned desperate to see you, honey. That's why I asked Brady here to help me out. You had the right to know this, and I knew Jake'd never tell you.”

Cassie bent over and kissed his leathery cheek. “I'm glad you told me,” she whispered.

“So you gonna forgive me?”

“Anybody would've done the same thing,” she said.

“That don't make it right.”

“You made it right today,” said Cassie. “Now your job is to get better.”

Uncle Moze was sitting on the old lobster pot that Cassie and I had wrestled aboard
Miss Lil
for him. He was wearing his long-billed fisherman's cap, a blue denim shirt rolled up over his elbows, a pair of worn and faded blue jeans, and black hip boots folded down to his knees. A half-smoked unfiltered Camel stuck out of the corner of his mouth, and he was squinting into the midday September sunlight that blazed down from a cloudless sky and ricocheted off the riffled surface of the Piscataqua River. He kept one hand on top of his head so that the salty breeze from the moving boat wouldn't catch under the bill of his cap and lift it off. His alert pale eyes kept scanning the horizon. He was looking for a flock of diving gulls and wheeling terns that would signal feeding striped bass.

The boat rods were lined up in their holders, all rigged with trolling plugs and ready to be grabbed the instant we spotted fish. The stripers, Cassie said, had been swarming into the river on the incoming tide, hungry, aggressive gangs of them. The big predators, responding to the changing angle of the sun and falling water temperatures and other signals beyond our understanding, had started their southward migration from the Atlantic waters off the coasts of northern Maine and Nova Scotia. They chased the thick schools of peanut bunker that in places darkened the water. They corraled them against the bank and slashed and swirled at them, vicious and mindless and lethal.

Pretty soon they'd be gone. Then it would be winter.

I'd promised Evie that if we landed a keeper striped bass, we'd actually keep it, and I'd bake it with lemon slices and Ritz cracker crumbs and fresh-ground pepper the way Gram Crandall used to cook them. The fillets from a twenty-eight-inch striper would feed four people amply.

I generally put back the fish I caught, regardless of what the regulations allowed. I didn't disapprove of people who killed a fish or two for the table. It was a personal thing with me. I just liked the idea of giving big fish another chance to pass on whatever gene they had that enabled them to grow big.

But today was an exception, a special occasion. If the doctors were right, Uncle Moze's aneurysm would kill him before the fish returned to the Piscataqua River in the spring on their northerly migration. That was if his heart didn't get him first. Today might turn out to be his last voyage on
Miss Lil
.

Moze had left his aluminum walker back at the marina. A thick black cane rested against the side of his leg.

Evie was sitting on the lobster pot beside him. She was wearing cutoff jeans shorts and a skimpy white tank top. Today, she figured, would be her last chance of the year to catch some serious rays.

She was ragging on Moze about smoking. He was saying that he already knew what was going to kill him, and anyway, he'd be damned if he was going to give up the last pleasure he had left. Been doin' it since he was eleven, he was saying, and for emphasis, he worked a speck of tobacco onto the tip of his tongue, turned his head, and spat it out.

Moze liked looking at Evie. It was hard to blame him. She looked awfully good. She flirted with him and laughed at his Down East colloquialisms and tried to imitate him, and that made him laugh.

It was pretty clear that there was at least one thing that still gave Uncle Moze pleasure besides unfiltered cigarettes.

His skin was white. It hung in wattles under his chin. Deep creases crisscrossed his face, and his forearms looked skinny and soft.

But enthusiasm and humor still glittered in those sharp blue eyes.

Cassie was at the wheel. She wore the same lobsterman's outfit as Moze, from the long-billed cap to the folded-down hip boots, and she hunched forward and squinted out through
Miss Lil
's salt-spattered windshield just the way I remembered Moze doing it back when I was a kid.

We'd hauled his string of pots. I'd used the boat hook to grab the line and loop it over the power winch and guide the heavy pots onto the platform on the gunwale. Cassie opened the trapdoor, plucked the lobsters from the pots, and measured them quickly with the steel ruler. She tossed the two-clawed keepers into one tub and the one-claws into the other. The shorts went overboard.

Evie had taken charge of rebaiting the pots. She seemed to get a kick out of handling the salted herring and jabbing them through their eye sockets onto the steel hook.

I learned new things about Evelyn Banyon every day.

I'd glanced at Moze a few times while the rest of us were tending his string of lobster pots. It was hard to miss the wistful smile that played on his lips. It was one thing to have your grown daughter living with you and cooking for you and helping you move from your chair to your walker to your bed. But having other people—even family—tend your lobster pots for you, well, that was damned near unacceptable.

Now Cassie was chugging slowly around the bay. Her curving route might have looked aimless, but Cassie knew the water and the tides and the way migrating striped bass behaved in the middle of September. She hadn't done it for many years, but some things you just don't forget.

I'd been sitting on the transom with the breeze in my face, looking for fish signs, watching Evie flirt with Moze, and thinking bittersweet thoughts about old age and mortality and the turning of the seasons.

I wasn't seeing any signs of fish. If there were signs to be seen, Moze would spot them before I did anyway.

I moved up front and stood beside Cassie.

She glanced sideways at me. “So how's it goin', Cuz?”

“I'm fine,” I said. “How 'bout you?”

“Oh,” she said, “it's good. Hard but good. I want to do more than I can, you know?”

“Moze seems pretty content.”

She shrugged. “He's taking his days as they come, and he seems to be able to find something to enjoy in every one of them. He likes having me around, I know that.”

“That must make you feel good.”

“Oh, I've got my regrets.”

I'd visited Uncle Moze a couple of times when he was in rehab, and Cassie and I had talked on the phone several times in the days after Rebecca Hurley came to kill us at the trailer in West Canterbury. But except for the Tuesday afternoon in mid-August when Cassie dropped in at my law office to sign her divorce papers, I hadn't seen either of them since they'd let Moze go home.

We watched the horizon for a few minutes. Then Cassie said, “Evie's a cool lady. You gonna keep her?”

“Gonna try.”

“So what are you hearing about the case?”

“Rebecca Hurley, you mean?”

Cassie nodded. She kept her eyes on the water.

“I'm hearing nothing,” I said. “Nobody'll say anything to me. I'll have to be a witness if it goes to trial. They don't talk to potential witnesses.”

“Why wouldn't it go to trial? I mean, there's no question she killed Grannie, is there?”

“No question about that, as far as I know,” I said. “But Becca is a seriously disturbed woman. If she's really been having an incestuous relationship with her father all these years—”

Cassie's head snapped around. “Whaddya mean, if?”

I shrugged. “It could all be in her head. A delusion.”

“You think she just made all that up?”

“I don't know what to think,” I said. “I doubt that she's lying, in the sense that it's her perception of the truth and she surely believes it. But that doesn't make it true. She was the one who found her mother's suicide. That kind of thing can have profound psychological effects on a person. Like post-traumatic stress disorder. Either way, Becca's a mess, and it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't find her fit to stand trial.”

Cassie was shaking her head. “I've been thinking about Becca. I mean, I was friends with her. I liked her. She seemed…ordinary, you know? Normal. Normal and nice.”

“Well,” I said, “she was pretty intent on killing you.”

“To get rid of her…her lover's wife? Or her imaginary lover's wife? Like she did to Ellen?”

I nodded. “So it seems.”

“She hated me that much,” said Cassie softly. “And dumb me, I didn't have a clue.”

Cassie and I watched the water through
Miss Lil
's windshield. There didn't seem to be anything else to say.

Suddenly she leaned forward. “O-
kay
,” she said. “Here we go.”

She pointed at the smooth water close to the shore.

I didn't see anything. “What is it?” I had the weird thought that she might've spotted a dead body.

“Nervous water,” she said. “Look.”

I squinted where Cassie was pointing, and after a minute I saw it—the subtle agitation of calm water made by a large school of fish traveling just under the surface. It's no more than a quiet shimmering. The water seems to be twitching and quivering. Nervous water is barely noticeable, but it signifies that under the seemingly calm, quiet surface something serious and important is happening. Unless you're trained to look for nervous water, and to recognize it, and to understand what it means, you'd never even notice it.

As I watched, a swarm of seabirds materialized over the ripply surface. At first, there were just a couple of terns, but in a minute there were dozens of birds, a mixture of gulls and terns, squawking and diving and wheeling low over the water. Underneath the birds I began to see the spurts and swirls and splashes of dozens of big fish crashing and slashing at frantic schools of baitfish.

Cassie goosed the throttle, and the clunky old boat cut a turn and surged forward. She looked back over her shoulder and grinned at Moze, and above the roar of the big diesel engine she yelled, “Hey, Daddy. What're you waitin' for? Grab yourself a rod and git a plug into the water. It's time to go fishin'.”