Still Water (6 page)

In fact Paulie’s death had consumed him for a long time. He found himself opening up to Ella, admitting that he’d buried himself in zealous, maybe obsessive, pursuit of his work, to the exclusion of almost everything else. He’d been on a mission to put the bad guys away and throw away the key. To avenge Paulie. In the end though, he lost his family, and one day he woke up and thought he hadn’t achieved anything with his life that was worthwhile.

“I wanted to do some good,” he explained, ‘but I felt like I was banging my head against a wall sometimes. The system got to me. Lawyers cutting deals to get their clients a reduced charge on a plea bargain, or else they’d go to trial and convince a jury to believe whatever story they came up with: it was an accident, or self-defence or else the defendant had a lousy childhood so that was supposed to make it okay that he pushed his wife in front of a car. That happened by the way. The guy who did it was having an affair, but his wife had a drug problem and the defence claimed she was turning tricks to pay for her habit. The jury bought it and accepted the guy’s plea that it was temporary insanity because his mother was a hooker and had abandoned him as a kid, and that was why he went nuts and accidentally pushed his wife under a car. He walked.”

Matt shook his head, aware that he’d started to sound bitter. He looked at his knuckles clenched tightly around his coffee cup and he put it down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get into this.”

“No, it’s okay. Is that what happened to the man who shot your brother? Did he get off?”

“They never caught him.”

Ella was silent for a moment, contemplative. “Can I ask you something?” she said hesitantly. “I know what happened to your brother was terrible, but don’t you ever think that sometimes people do things that might seem awful, but if you knew everything about them, maybe things aren’t always the way they look? It doesn’t always mean they’re bad people does it?”

“I suppose I’ve seen too many guilty people escape their responsibilities. People forget about the victims.”

He’d seen himself as some kind of white knight, chasing down the bad guys. At first Kirstin hadn’t complained that he could’ve made more money working in some other branch of the law, even though when her car sometimes wouldn’t start in the supermarket parking lot she had to cope with a baby and bags of frozen groceries melting in the trunk. But she resented the fact that he was never home. There were fights, Alex crying in the background. When Alex had taken his first steps, it had taken

Matt six days to notice. He remembered the stony silence when he had, and Kirstin’s accusing stare that had pierced him far more deeply than words of anger might have.

“But don’t you think the facts can’t always tell the full story?” Ella insisted, leaning towards him, her gaze intent on his.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to answer a hypothetical question like that without getting into specifics. I’m probably not the best person to ask. I screwed up my marriage and I have a son I barely know over this.”

Ella fell quiet, reflective, and once again he had the same feeling he’d had outside his office earlier, that there was something on her mind.

“Is there some particular issue you’re thinking of Ella?”

“No. I was just interested to know why you came here to live, that’s all.”

“The answer is to start again. To get away from a life that almost destroyed me. And you know what, right now I’m glad that I did. I’m glad I’m here with you.”

Ella smiled, but there was a distant quality in her eyes he couldn’t fathom.

“More coffee?” she asked.

Thanks.”

She went to the kitchen and when she came back with a fresh pot they changed the subject, and talked about other things, but it seemed to Matt as if their conversation had robbed the evening of some of its lightness. Ella appeared quiet and a little withdrawn and in the end when he eventually saw that it was getting late, he took his cue to leave. Ella showed him to the door.

“Thanks for inviting me,” he said. “You’re a great cook.”

Thanks.”

“I’d like to return the favour. Maybe cook you a meal at my house one night. Though I can’t promise the same quality. I can just about manage spaghetti.”

“I’d like that, sometime.”

He’d been about to suggest a day, maybe towards the weekend, but there had been the faintest suggestion of hesitation in her response which made him think he should leave it for now, and ask her another time. He remembered her comment about having had poor luck with men in her life, and he had the feeling Ella wasn’t somebody who could be rushed. Something in her manner made him decide not to try and repeat the kiss of the night before, appealing as the idea might be.

“Goodnight,” she said.

“Goodnight Ella.” As he walked to the gate he heard the door close softly behind him.

The sun flamed in the blue vault of the sky. The Santorini rode a three-foot swell half a mile off the island. She was a thirty-eight-foot lobster boat, built in Portland nearly thirty years ago. She was painted light blue, a job Ella had done herself, and the wheel-house was at the stern, her deck wide and clear for carrying bait and traps. Behind the wheel-house a hatch led down to the engine compartment and a tiny galley and cabin. Ella had bought the boat when she was twenty-five years old, with her own hard-earned cash and a loan from the bank that had also covered her traps and a truck. When she’d started fishing the bays and coastal waters of the island, a lot of people had stood by waiting for her to fail. Some grumbled it wasn’t natural or right for a woman to work her own boat, even if her dad was one of the best fishermen on the island. She’d silenced them all by proving them wrong. In the winter she went shrimping, in the days when there had still been shrimp to be had, and for the rest of year she caught lobsters. For a few years she’d done well, better than most, which had caused some resentment, but then the government had started raising the legal size of lobsters that could be taken, and introduced other measures to protect declining stocks. In some areas of Maine the lobster population was just a fraction of what it had once been, and St. George was one of them. Times had gotten tough for a lot of people, and though Ella had hung on where others had gone under, the last couple of years hadn’t been easy.

She and Gordon were working a string of traps they’d set two days earlier. They’d left the harbour an hour before dawn after

Ella had managed just four hours’ sleep, and even during that short time her rest had been fitful. Whenever sleep pulled her down and she sank gratefully into its embrace, her personal demons emerged to haunt her. Her dreams were mixed-up images of her brother who had died as a baby, her father’s only son, and the storm in February, her mother’s frantic phone call in the middle of the night.

Gordon connected the surface line of a trap to the hauler, having already removed the buoy which the line had been attached to. Ella’s buoys were painted the same colour as the Santorini, but with alternating yellow and white hoops, a combination that identified them as belonging to her. Gordon was seventeen, and had been her stern man for a year now. They took turns to operate the hauler that brought the traps up from the seabed while manoeuvring the boat among the buoys on the surface, while the other emptied and re-baited each trap. He started the hydraulic motor, and the line came up, raising the trap from ten fathoms below.

They waited anxiously. Gordon glanced at her and attempted a smile. He resembled his father, with his red hair and slightly squashed features, though he had his mother’s eyes. Gordon sensed that the line was coming to an end and he peered over the side as the trap emerged from the sea, dripping streams of water. The bait was gone, but the pot was empty. He swung it on to the rail.

“How many is that now?” Ella said.

“Twenty-four.”

“Dammit!”

She turned away so that he wouldn’t see the tears of rage that pricked her eyes. She blinked them away, and her mouth set in a determined line.

“Okay, let’s re-set it.”

Gordon hesitated.

“What is it?”

“What if it happens again?”

“Then we’ll set them again. And we’ll keep on setting them.”

She spoke with more resolve than she felt. Every trap they’d hauled had been stripped. The loss of income from just one day would hurt her, but the same thing had happened on a string they’d hauled late the day before. If it went on, after a week, maybe a little longer, she’d be forced to lay Gordon off, and without his help she would struggle to continue alone. The payments on her truck and the boat, as well as the mortgage on her mother’s house, would soon mount to a debt she could never repay. It was frightening how susceptible she was to even a lit de bad fortune. Except that fortune had nothing to do with this.

Ella reached for bait. On these traps she was using dabs which cost seventy-five dollars for a barrel of frames, the filleted remains of the ground-fish. She punched the iron through the eyes of three frames and looped them onto the string in the trap, working quickly with short aggressive actions, then closed the hatch. Gordon stood watching her. She thrust the trap at him with enough force that he staggered off balance.

“We haven’t got all day. I’ll take the hauler,” she snapped, changing positions with him.

He looked surprised, and a little hurt, but he moved out of the way while she gunned the throttle and spun the wheel to manoeuvre the boat into position.

“Okay,” she said.

Gordon slid the trap along the rail and it hit the water with a splash and rapidly sank, the line snaking after it.

Ella headed for the next buoy, turning in a tight circle against the current. The roar of the motor rose and fell as she expertly lined the boat up and they drifted past. Gordon leaned over the side and with one seamless action hooked the buoy with a gaff and dragged it aboard and wrapped the line around the hauler. He worked in stony silence and Ella wished she hadn’t taken her frustration out on him.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. Don’t mind me.”

“Why are we letting him get away with this?” he said suddenly.

“Who?”

He gave an impatient shake of his head. “Jake. You know this is his doing.”

“We don’t know that for certain.”

“Who else would it be?”

He was right. She knew it was Jake. It was four days since Bryan had gone missing and there was talk that the search was being called off. There were other rumours going around the docks. People were mentioning Bryan’s name and how she’d threatened him in the same breath. It was no secret that she hated the Rodericks. Especially Bryan, and nobody had seen him since.

They went back to work and hauled up the next trap. It too came up empty, and Gordon looked at her pointedly, but he didn’t say anything. He re-baited it and dropped it over the side. Ella gunned the motor, and spun the wheel to take them to the next buoy. She worked automatically, controlling speed and direction with practised ease and as each trap came up empty she tried not to let it get to her. She willed herself to think of other things, and as she worked her thoughts ranged backwards through her memory.

Ella would have been maybe twelve or thirteen when she saw Matt sitting on the beach in the cove, reading a book. He was lean and loose-limbed, tanned from the long summer. His brother and the other kids they hung out with were swimming or sailing. She never saw Matt swimming. When some kid shouted from the water as he turned turtle and dived beneath the surface, the look Matt wore made him appear strangely vulnerable.

As a kid she’d had little to do with the pointers who came to stay in their summer houses each year. St. Georgians were insular. Summer families were just people from away, like they belonged to another planet. It was ironic given that the island might yet vote Howard in as mayor, and his marina would be the beginning of a flood of newcomers who would ultimately change life on the island for good.

Matt was the first boy Ella had really noticed. He’d aroused feelings in her that previously had been foreign to her, and the result had been confusing. Sometimes when she saw him on the street she had wished she could just go up and talk to him, but she’d been unable to think of a word to say. He was older than her and barely noticed she existed. She had no idea what his life away from St. George was like, any more than he would have understood any thing about her daily existence. Sometimes she saw him talking to a girl his own age, another pointer who’d be wearing some pretty flouncy dress and lipstick, and Ella would want to puke out of jealousy and disdain. At that time she hadn’t even owned a dress and she wouldn’t have been seen dead wearing lipstick.

Then one summer, when she was almost sixteen she’d gone to a dance for the first time. She was wearing a dress her mother had helped her choose, and that year she’d started to grow her hair out. At the dance she felt out of place even though there were girls she knew there. She felt like candy on a stick, all prettily wrapped up and put out on display. Boys she knew looked at her, their surprise plain. Matt was there too and she’d waited for him to notice her, to come over and speak to her, but whenever she dared sneak a look he was looking at somebody else. Eventually a local boy had come and talked to her, and she had felt strange because he was acting differently around her than he ever had before and it made her feel uncomfortable. As soon as she could she escaped outside, into the comforting darkness and the cool air. That was the last time she’d seen Matt until he’d turned up back on the island a few months ago.

Now she found him intruding into her thoughts throughout the day. Whatever it was that had begun to develop between them had started slowly, layers of feeling building almost imperceptibly each time they met, and steadily the layers grew and formed a perceptible thickness. When he’d kissed her after the meeting Ella had experienced a stirring in her breast, a realization that she had developed feelings for him that almost caught her unaware. It had made her think. It had been a long time since she’d felt close to any man. It had been her mother’s idea to ask him to supper, perhaps sensing what she felt. She recalled how relaxed he’d seemed at first but a shadow had fallen over the evening after her mother had gone to bed, when he’d talked about how he felt about the career he’d left behind in Boston. It was clear that his brother’s death had affected him deeply, and that it had left a legacy of bitterness in him. He might have exchanged his career as a prosecutor for that of small town lawyer, but he still viewed the world through a narrow lens,