Sing It to Her Bones (22 page)

Connie looked as if she wanted to rap my knuckles. “Hannah, you are trouble on wheels. Leave it be. I want to live to fifty, dah-link. Hanging around with you could be dangerous.”

“But Bill was so insistent, so … triumphant! It made me wonder what kind of ax he has to grind with Hal.”

“Can’t imagine, unless … Bill used to work for the Calverts as a ship’s carpenter until Hal laid him off and started doing the repair work himself.”

“I thought Bill had gone to work for the army.”

“He did, but not until after he’d been laid off. There was a six-month period in there when he had to take a succession of odd jobs just to eat while he waited for the government paperwork to go through.”

I could sympathize with that, but as much as I despised Coop for laying me off, I doubt I’d have turned him over to the cops. Then I remembered the way
he didn’t even look at me when he ushered me out of that conference room in Washington, D.C., all those months ago. On second thought, maybe Leavenworth was too good for the miserable worm.

“C’mon, Con. Dinner can wait.”

“No, Hannah. It’s a complete waste of time. Hal and I go way back. Bill is totally off base.” She ripped a piece of plastic wrap off a roll, stretched it over the bowl, turned it, and smoothed the edges down all around before putting it in the refrigerator.

I picked Connie’s car keys up from the kitchen table where I had laid them not five minutes before.

Connie opened a jar of spaghetti sauce, threw the lid into the trash, and turned to scowl at me. “And you can forget about taking my car.”

I tossed her keys back on the table and scowled back.

“Grow up, Hannah. You should see yourself. Pouting like a three-year-old.”

I didn’t feel like a three-year-old. I felt like a teenager who’d just been told she couldn’t go to a party because her mother knew there would be boys and booze there.

Connie stood at the sink, arms folded, the cleft in her chin deepening and becoming more prominent by the second. Emily had inherited that chin from her father. How many times had she glared at me the way Connie was glaring at me now? Hundreds probably. When I’d grounded her for lying about attending a mixed-sex slumber party, I got the full sulk treatment;
we didn’t speak for days. But we Alexanders can be stubborn, too. I was now doubly determined to check out Hal’s boat.

I stomped over to the kitchen door and grabbed a key ring off its hook. “If you don’t go with me, I’m going to take that old truck out of the barn and drive over there myself.”

Connie snatched the truck keys out of my hand. “What the
hell
are you doing? You should be doing everything you can to get out of here and go home to Paul. He needs you, Hannah!”

“I told you. I don’t have his number.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to me that you’re trying very hard to find it. You seem less interested in patching up your marriage than you do in running around Pearson’s Corner trying to clear the name of some potential lover!”

“Lover! And how about you and Dennis? Don’t think I haven’t noticed what’s going on between the two of you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not? It’s not as if either of you are married.”

Connie stared at me with wide eyes, looking as surprised as if I’d slapped her. She opened her mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it. “If you’re that determined,” she said at last, “then let’s go. Let’s get it over with.”

Connie stooped to pick up Colonel’s water dish, then thrust it in my direction. “Here. Fill this up while I lock up the house.”

I stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, holding
Colonel’s dish in both hands. As I ran water into the bowl with Colonel frisking about my legs, I was determined that it would take more than a few dead bolt locks and an unreasonable sister-in-law to keep me away from the truth.

chapter

16

I slouched in the passenger seat of Connie’s
car, uncomfortably strapped in, with the seat belt webbing chafing my neck. As we passed Ellie’s Country Store, I checked the porch, but there was no sign of Bill. I was glad. He’d have recognized the car at once and would have known exactly where we were going. I didn’t want him to think I’d paid the least bit of attention to all that garbage he’d told me about Hal.

Where High Street dead-ends at Ferry Point Road, Connie turned left. She pointed out the condo where Frank Chase lived, an attractively landscaped end unit, but his car wasn’t in the drive. I assumed he was still at his office, struggling to manage the workload alone. In spite of the lies he had told me, I felt a little bit sorry for the guy.

Five hundred yards ahead I could see the entrance to the marina which was marked by a sign,
CALVERT MARINA AND BOATYARD
, painted in bold blue letters on a white background. A pair of stout brick pillars flanked the entrance, from which a well-established boxwood hedge fanned out to form a fence, separating the marina grounds from the village of Pearson’s Corner. An anchor the size of a wheelbarrow, painted white, rested against one of the pillars.

Skirting the marina to our right, the road followed the water, snaking past the boat slips off docks A, B, and C and ending at a small parking lot. A large grassy area extended well beyond the edge of the parking lot, where boats of all types and sizes were stored, propped up by triangular wooden braces and paint-spattered metal tripods. To my surprise, Connie steered straight through the lot and onto the grass and began to weave cautiously between the boats.

“Where on earth are you going, Connie?”

“To park.”

“Excuse me, but wasn’t the parking lot back there?”

“When your boat’s out of the water and you’re working on it, it’s much more convenient to drive up and park right next to it.”

As we snaked through the land-locked fleet, I gazed out my window at a confusion of masts and rigging; some boats had been placed so close together that the bow pulpit of one vessel extended practically into the rigging of another. Beyond the boats, nearer the water, I thought I recognized the shed that Hal had pointed
out to us when we went sailing, where he said
Pegasus
had been hauled.

Connie parked between a small blue cabin cruiser from Wilmington, Delaware, named
My Mink
and a large, nameless wooden vessel being painted dark green. When we climbed out of the car, seagulls were circling the area. One of them settled near an empty paint can and pecked halfheartedly at a discarded sandwich wrapper. I thought Connie’d feel right at home here among the boats and the birds, the fresh, sharp odor of paint and new varnish. From somewhere nearby the familiar whine of a power sander momentarily drowned out the cries of two angry gulls fighting over the remains of a hamburger bun.

“Hal mentioned he’d been experiencing chronic blistering problems on
Pegasus,
” Connie said as we wound our way on foot through the maze of boats toward the shed. “He’s had to repair her several times.” The shed loomed before us, an enormous white Conestoga wagon top, open at both ends.

Inside, the heat intensified. I expected the air to be heavy with moisture, like a greenhouse, but way overhead plantation-style fans nudged any stagnant air gently downward, to be swept away by the cool breezes that passed through the open ends of the shed.

Pegasus
was a large boat, longer than
Sea Song
, I suspected, and it nearly filled the space, although there was room to work around her on all sides. I stood with my back resting against the vinyl-coated canvas wall of the shed and admired Hal’s boat. From
the varnished teakwood trim to the six-inch-wide blue stripe that circled her bright white hull, she was a perfectly proportioned beauty.

“Nice racing stripe,” I commented.

“It’s called a boot top,” she snapped. Connie was still mad at me.

“Why?”

Connie stood at the stern, considering the rudder. “I don’t have the foggiest.”

“What kind of boat is it, Connie?”

“A Cal 40. Lovely old thing. They don’t make them anymore.” She took the rudder in both hands and wiggled it from side to side. “They’re great cruising and racing boats. Hal loves to race.”

I strolled around
Pegasus
, examining the hull. Like the other boats I’d seen,
Pegasus
stood upright, cradled between metal jack stands, curious V-shaped contraptions padded with carpet remnants. Below the white hull, the keel, painted brick red, extended down like an inverted shark fin, touching the ground.

Connie circled the boat twice, hands clasped behind her back, while I stood to one side, wondering what she was looking for. She started tapping on the hull with her knuckles.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“Remember when Hal said his hull was delaminated? I’m checking for that. You know how you tap the wall to find a stud when you’re going to hang a picture? Same thing, except I’m listening for the hollow sound you get when the layers of wood that form
the hull separate and get all mooshy.” Connie tapped her way all around the boat with one of her car keys, too, making sharp, bright cracking sounds. Nothing sounded hollow to me.

Then the tapping stopped. “Hmm, that’s odd.”

“What?”

“Come here, Hannah. Walk around the boat and tell me what you see.”

I circled
Pegasus
, looking at the hull and the keel, feeling like a total dummy. “What the hell am I looking for?”

“Did you notice that one side of the keel has barnacles on it? On the other side the bottom paint is fresh.” I could see what she was talking about. The side of the keel nearest me was pockmarked by circular shells the size of my thumbnail. The other side was smooth as a baby’s cheek.

“But Hal said it needed repair.”

“I know, but you’d expect to see blistering on both sides of the keel, not just one. And another strange thing … see that scum line?” She pointed to a brownish green ring that circled the boat several inches below the boot top, like the ring around the inside of a bathtub.

“What’s so odd about that?”

“Cal ’40s are heavy cruising boats. She ought to be riding lower in the water. This boat’s riding high.”

“Does that mean she’s lighter than she should be?”

“Exactly! Hand me that rag, will you?” Connie indicated a tattered, paint-stained undershirt that had been draped over a nearby sawhorse. I snatched it
up with two fingers and tossed it to her. Connie began to rub vigorously on the freshly painted keel until the rag was red with paint particles. After a bit she stopped rubbing and bent over, her face close to the surface of the keel, then stepped back and surveyed the spot from several angles. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“What?”

“There’s fresh fiberglass here, right in the middle of what should be a solid lead keel.” I looked where she pointed and saw the hint of a rectangle, just a shadow about the size of a suitcase beneath the brick red bottom paint. “See, it’s duller than the rest of the keel. I suspect someone was in a hurry, and it wasn’t primed first.”

Connie looked at me with wide, startled eyes. “Shit, Hannah. Bill was right. Somebody’s taken a chunk out of the keel and then tried to cover it over. Someone
could
be stashing drugs in there.”

Somebody. Someone
. Why were we pussyfooting around the issue? Who else could it be but Hal? I didn’t want to believe it. “But why go to all that trouble, Connie? Couldn’t you just hide drugs somewhere inside the boat? You could build a false bottom in one of the hatches. Hell, you could hide tons of illegal substances in the bilge.”

Connie shook her head. “The coast guard is trained to look for things like that. Lockers shorter than they should be. Fake water tanks. But this compartment would be under the water and almost impossible to detect.”

“Maybe Hal doesn’t know about it.” I recalled his gentle manner, his smile, the touch of his hand.

“Not a chance. He does all the work on
Pegasus
himself.”

Perhaps it was a reaction to breathing the chemicals in the bottom paint, but I doubted it. I hadn’t felt so sick to my stomach since my last chemotherapy session. It nauseated me that I’d actually entertained the idea, however briefly, of cheating on my husband with a man who could well turn out to be a drug lord.

Leaving Connie on her own with
Pegasus
, I ran from the shed, my stomach churning. Gulping air, I located a grassy spot under a tree and knelt down, resting my forehead against the smooth bark. When I judged that the danger of throwing up was past, I raised my head and looked around. Dozens of masts cast long shadows across the boatyard, and I watched a whole row of shadows disappear, one by one, as the sun dipped behind a patch of woods that bordered the boat yard.

A few minutes later Connie joined me. “C’mon, Hannah.” She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and gave me a sympathetic squeeze. “Let’s go find a telephone.”

I climbed wearily into the car, and as Connie backed around
My Mink
and headed toward the parking lot, I slumped in my seat, repeating, “I don’t believe it.”

She shifted into drive and the car lurched forward. “
You
can’t believe it! How about me? I’ve been working
with Hal for years. If what we suspect is true, he’s been dealing drugs for at least eight of those years, with no one the wiser.”

Connie nosed into one of three parking spaces directly in front of the Ships Store, a neat wooden structure painted gray with white trim to match its neighbors. A sign in the window was flipped from Open to Closed. I was almost relieved.

“Never mind,” Connie told me. “The phones are outside anyway, around back, on the side facing the river.”

I was inclined to wait in the car, but Connie insisted I come with her. We circled the store to the spot where a wooden pier began, extended across the length of the building, and stretched off in the direction of the gas dock about one hundred feet away. Dock D, where
Sea Song
floated quietly in her slip, was just beyond.