Sing It to Her Bones (12 page)

The wind caught both sails with an audible snap that caused
Sea Song
to surge forward. Connie turned the wheel and squinted up toward the billowing mainsail, adjusting her course until the bits of colored string that were attached to the sail, called telltales, began streaming straight back.
Sea Song
cut through the water, a craft perfectly balanced between the natural forces of wind and sea. Smiling in satisfaction, Connie shut off the engine.

As I stepped back into the cockpit, I thought,
This is the part about sailing I like the best. When the only sound you hear is the wind, the snapping of the sails, and the clean sloosh of water as it curls up, foaming and hissing, along the sides of the hull
.

Several hundred yards off Holly Point, Connie tacked toward the Eastern Shore, trimmed the sails in tight, and
Sea Song
heeled to starboard. The cooler slid sideways in the cockpit, reminding me I was thirsty. I reached inside for a Coke. “Connie, Dennis, what’s your pleasure?”

While I dug around in the icy water, Dennis drained
the remaining drops of beer from a bottle he had opened not five minutes before. I produced a can of Heineken and waved it in his direction; he eagerly made the trade. I watched him pop the top and made a quick calculation. Three glasses of wine at the reception, two beers already: It should turn out to be a relaxing day on the water for our friendly neighborhood policeman. Earlier he had stonewalled when I asked him, casually, about how it went in his interviews with the Wildcats. I decided to forget the direct approach and keep the beer coming in hopes it would loosen his tongue.

Before long Dennis went below, to use the bathroom, I thought, until I heard him call, “Hey, Con! Where’d you put Craig’s old tackle box?”

“It’s in the V berth, on the port side. The poles are on the shelf opposite.”

In a few minutes two long fishing poles emerged from the main hatch, followed by Dennis’s arm, then the rest of his lanky body. The trailing arm held a gray plastic toolbox, which he placed on the floor of the cockpit before returning to his seat next to me. Hal had already relieved Dennis of the fishing poles and had set them into rod holders attached to the chrome-plated stanchions on the stern.

Dennis lifted the tackle box to his lap and opened it, revealing a fascinating assortment of lures. I leaned over and selected an iridescent fish made out of a gooey plastic material that reminded me of the jelly shoes Emily made me buy for her when she was
twelve, but it felt so creepy I put it right back. Plastic squids shared a compartment with wiggle jigs like big-eyed minnows in hula skirts, and in the next compartment lay something blue with flecks of gold still clipped to a cardboard card labeled “crippled crab.” “Yuck,” I said. In spite of all the decorative foliage, the one thing they all had in common was a nasty-looking hook hidden underneath somewhere.

“Craig used to enjoy making these.” Dennis lifted out the top tray to reveal rolls of monofilament line, plastic boxes containing metal swivels, packages of wire leaders, feathers and bucktail “teasers,” paint, brushes and nylon thread, and miscellaneous hooks and lead sinkers. He held up a particularly large fishhook. “They call this a number nineteen Tony. There’s some smaller sixteen, seventeen, and eighteens in here, too.”

I watched while Dennis selected a bright red “eel” fashioned of surgical rubber tubing and a large silver “spoon.” Looking not at all like an eating utensil, the spoon consisted of a six-inch fish-shaped piece of bright chrome with yellow tail feathers covering a wicked-looking hook. “Maybe we’ll catch some bluefish today. They say they’re running.” He attached a lure to the lines at the end of each pole, then swung the lures in turn out over the stern. I figured we could eat for weeks on any bluefish big enough to clamp its mouth around that spoon.

“Anything I can do to help?” Hal asked.

Dennis regarded him coolly. “Thanks. I think it’s under control.” Slowly he played out the fishing lines
until the lures were trailing well behind the boat, held by lead sinkers at a depth of three or four feet under the surface of the water. At the leisurely speed we were sailing, they’d bob and weave, looking like tempting snacks to any hungry blues that might venture into the neighborhood.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“We troll. We wait. And have another beer. How about it, Hannah?”

I handed him a fresh Heineken.
This was going to be easy
.

Dennis stretched his legs across the cockpit, leaned back against the seat cushions, and sipped his beer in contentment. Every once in a while in a quiet voice Connie would ask Hal, who was seated in the cockpit to her right, to make some adjustment to the sails. I had nearly mustered up enough nerve to ask Dennis a question about Chip when Connie inquired about Dennis’s father-in-law’s health. I listened to their conversation for a while, hoping to get a word in edgewise, but after a few minutes the topic shifted to his daughter Maggie’s current state of mind. I was annoyed at Connie for making me feel like an intruder, but I didn’t feel like horning in on their private tête-à-tête, so I excused myself and took a fresh Coke to the bow of the boat, where I lay down on the warm deck with my head resting against the bump of the forward hatch. I was nearly asleep, the sun full on my face, when everything went dark under my eyelids. I opened my eyes to find Hal sitting next to me. I was lying in his shadow.

“I thought you might like a sandwich.” He passed me a sub, still wrapped in white paper with “veggie” penciled on the side in black grease pencil.

I elbowed my way into a sitting position. “Thanks, Hal. Looks good.” We unwrapped our subs and ate in silence. I donated some limp lettuce and a surfeit of onions to the fish.

“I was wondering, Hal. How do you know those guys on the basketball team so well? Not that you look all that old”—I smiled at him—“but they must be at least fifteen years younger than you.”

“Sorry, Hannah. I thought Connie might have told you. Before Dad became too frail to run the day-to-day business of the marina, I was the high school basketball coach.”

“Really? For how long?”

“From the time I got out of the army until 1990. About ten years, I guess.” Hal took a sip of his beer and looked over my shoulder toward the Eastern Shore, still a blueish smudge on the horizon. “That last year was the best. We won the state championship.” He raised his bottle. “Here’s to the 1990 Wildcats!”

“You must have hated to give it all up.”

“Yes, but it was time to go. Move on. Quit while you’re ahead, my papa always said.”

That didn’t make sense. A coach with a string of losing seasons might see the handwriting on the wall and hang up his Nikes, but with a championship season under his belt, Hal should have been able to name his price. Maybe there was a woman involved?

“Have you ever married?” I asked.

“Came close to it once. After Vietnam.” He looked at me and beamed. “Other than that, never met anyone I particularly wanted to marry.”

He stared at me so long with that charismatic grin on his face that I began to feel uncomfortable. His hand reached out, touched, and lingered briefly over mine before closing over my empty Coke can. “Want another drink?”

“No, thanks, Hal. Not just yet. But I’ll bet Dennis does.” Hal disappeared aft but returned almost immediately with another beer, before I, heart racing, had had time to fully recover from whatever it was that had just happened.

As Hal stretched out on the deck close beside me, I searched through my database for some discouraging words. “Paul and I were married just out of college, in ’73.”

“Lucky guy.”

Maybe it was something in the way he said it or maybe it was the casual way he lay next to me, oozing testosterone and hops from every pore, that made me flash back to high school. I suddenly felt like the girl who prayed to God every night for a week that the sore spot on her nose wouldn’t erupt into a full-blown zit before Ron Belanger had the chance to ask her to the prom.

I floundered on. “We’ve been quite happy, but I sometimes think I’m more than he bargained for.”

Hal had been lying on his back but now turned on his side and propped himself on one elbow to look at me. “You seem perfect to me.”

“Hardly. Hasn’t Connie told you? I’ve recently had cancer. And a mastectomy. Under these clothes and this ridiculous wig, I look like an anorexic Yul Brynner.”

His face turned serious. He turned on his back and rested the beer bottle, half full, on his chest. “My mother died of breast cancer, Hannah, when I was seven. But that was a long time ago. Medical science has come a long way since then.”

“That’s what I’ve been told, but I’ve read that the ancient Egyptians treated breast cancer about the same as we do today—slash and burn—although I will give medical science points for Taxol, tamoxifen, and Herceptin.”

“You crack me up, Hannah!” He adjusted the bill of his cap to shade his eyes better and was silent for a moment. “You ever worry about dying?”

“Every day. That’s why I find myself wanting to spend time with my family and friends, doing things I love. I want to make memories, Hal. Not only for me but for them. Maybe that’s what immortality is all about.”

“No one could forget you, Hannah. You could be anywhere in the world right now. Instead you’ve chosen to be here in Podunk, U.S.A.”

I decided not to mention that my choice to come to this forgotten little corner of the world was triggered by the possibility that my husband had been unfaithful.

“I know I should be back home in Annapolis right now, but I can’t get Katie Dunbar out of my mind.”

“She was a likable kid.” Hal turned his head and
stared off toward the horizon, where the water met the sky in a seamless wash of blue and gray.

“Did you know Katie well, Hal?”

When he didn’t answer right away, I figured he hadn’t heard me over the wind. Or maybe he’d nodded off. “Hal?” I poked him with my finger.

“Huh?”

“I was wondering if you knew Katie Dunbar?”

“Not really. Saw her around, is all.”

“But you just said she was likable.”

“Everybody liked Katie. Most popular girl in the high school.”

“It’s hard to imagine anybody wanting to murder a sweet girl like that.” I recalled her sudden academic problems and fickle behavior. “Maybe she had a dark side that nobody knew about.”

Hal struggled to his feet and poured his remaining beer, now warm, overboard. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

I stood up, too, suddenly thirsty for a Coke. “I wonder if Dennis has made any progress on the case?”

Hal grinned at me. “I’m here to report that the good lieutenant has finished off the Heineken and has started on the Bud Light. When last seen, he was rubbing sunblock number eight into your attractive sister-in-law’s shoulders. I’d say there’s no time like the present to ask.”

Hal followed me along the leeward side of the boat, holding on to the lifelines that circled the deck like a double clothesline, then stepped into the cockpit. “Hi, you guys.”

Connie raised a lazy arm. “Hi, yourselves. Have some chips.” She had removed her shorts and top. Dressed in her bathing suit, she was sprawled on her stomach on one of the seat cushions. Dennis, looking a little looped, stood behind the wheel, piloting the boat. I wondered if it was such a good idea. All we’d need was for the coast guard to pick up a cop on a drunken boating charge.

Hal and I arranged ourselves on the cushion opposite Connie and munched on chips we took from an opened bag that had been rolled down and secured with a clothespin. Connie’s work, no doubt.

No one was saying anything at the moment, so I leaped right in. “Dennis, when I talked with Chip at the funeral this morning, he seemed the farthest thing from a murderer than anyone I could imagine. I know you interviewed him. I figured if he were guilty, you would probably have arrested him by now.”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but to my thanks, the beer had wrought magic on its journey from stomach to brain to tongue.

Dennis eyed the compass and adjusted his course slightly. “We brought him in yesterday for a couple of hours, and at first he recited, almost word for word, the same story he did in ’90. I still think he might be hiding something, but I couldn’t trip him up. He never denied leaving with Katie after the dance or tried to cover up the fact that witnesses had seen them in the car arguing. So I asked him what the argument was about, and he said it wasn’t important. I told him I’d keep him there, in a cell if I had to, until
he told me what they fought about. After about fifteen minutes he gave up. ‘Over sex,’ he says.”

“So what else is new?” Hal chuckled and opened another Bud Light for each of them.

“My first thought,” Dennis continued, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the fresh beer. “Then he claims that they drove to the parking lot behind Hamilton’s Restaurant and that Katie put the moves on
him
. He goes with the flow for five minutes or so until it gets so hot and heavy that they’re steaming up the windows and he pushes her off. Buttons up his shirt and tells her to put her dress back on, he’s taking her home. She cries and wails that he must not really love her and he explains that
au contraire
, he loves her too much to violate her chastity. That if he slept with her, she wouldn’t be the kind of girl he would want to marry.”

Connie squinted at her watch and sat up. “That sounds so wacko it almost has to be true.” She pulled on her shirt and took the wheel back from Dennis. “Time to head home, crew. Ready about!”

“Sounds like born-again logic to me!” I shouted above squealing winches and the noise of the sails swinging and flapping to the other side of the boat.

Once
Sea Song
was heading confidently back in a homeward direction, Dennis chose to sit next to Connie behind the wheel, where he calmly reeled in each fishing line. “I’m beginning to believe his story myself. Besides, we’ve turned up absolutely no physical evidence linking Chip Lambert to the crime. It’s been a frustrating week.” He handed the rods to Hal, who
disappeared below with them. “Can’t catch a damn fish, either.” He leaned back and breathed in deeply. “But what a fabulous day! Someone gave me a mug that says, ‘A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work,’ and ain’t it the truth!”