Death in Rough Water Read online

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  Copyright © 1995, 2016 by Francine Mathews

  All rights reserved.

  Published in 2016 by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mathews, Francine.

  Death in rough water / Francine Mathews.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-728-5

  eISBN 978-1-61695-729-2

  1. Folger, Merry (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women

  detectives—Massachusetts—Nantucket Island—Fiction. 3. Nantucket Island

  (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A8357 D42 2016 813.54—dc23 2016001860

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to Mark

  I don’t think we need feel guilty about the killing we do, we do it for life’s sake: our own. But I guess for that very reason the killing may put a scared and thoughtful f isherman in mind of his own span.

  —john hersey, blues

  Prologue

  The night wind was blowing unusually cold for late May, and the stars were blotted out by a bank of cloud. Captain Joe Duarte took the measure of the waters, felt the plunge of his deck, and knew he should head for port. The mounting weather made black sea and sky one, a pitching cocoon through which his trawler labored and rolled. The Lisboa Girl had just crossed over what Duarte knew as the Leg—part of the intricate underwater landscape of the Georges Bank he’d been f ishing since the age of f ifteen. He had turned sixty-eight three months past, and though much had changed in the f ifty-three years he’d been on the water, he still called the Bank’s bottoms, its gullies and peaks, by the old names made familiar from decades of studying charts in storm and sun: Cultivator Shoals, Billy Doyle’s Hole, Little Georges, Outer Hole.

  The younger men, using location indicators fed down from the stars, thought in signals instead of words. They moved over the crags of the seabed as a blind man feels Braille, sensing the humps and dips that clutched at their nets. Had they been told to head to the Leg instead of following a GPS, they’d have been lost.

  The captain knew the Georges Bank like the prof ile of a beloved woman, something no locator on a screen could ever replace. It was an ancient shelf of the North American continent, inundated by glacial ice melt twelve thousand years before. The Georges Bank sat more than sixty nautical miles off the present coastline and was larger than the entire state of Massachusetts. To Joe Duarte, it was home. The charted names of the bottoms remained with him like the Portuguese words of his childhood, artifacts of a vanished age. Like his boat. And himself, for that matter. He was among the last of Nantucket’s commercial f ishermen, and the last of the Duartes to go down to the sea, something they had been doing in Portugal and the New World for over f ive hundred years.

  The Lisboa Girl, three decades old and Joe’s second trawler, was one of only two remaining draggers to call Nantucket home. She was an Eastern-rigged wooden vessel, meaning that her pilothouse was aft and she launched her nets over the side rather than to the stern. A more dangerous and old-fashioned boat to f ish from than the steel-hulled Western-riggers—in heavy seas like this, she’d have to come to a stop and turn broadside to the wind to prevent the net from drifting under the hull and fouling the propeller.

  The captain pulled open the pilothouse porthole and stuck his head into the rising wind. It was time to quit f ishing and head for home. His rheumatic bones ached, and his eyelids stung with weariness. Maybe it was time to quit for good, like all the rest.

  Nobody his age worked a trawler anymore. The younger men skippered boats that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and carried insurance that drained them of thousands more. Fishing from an island port like Nan­tucket tacked a surcharge on everything they needed to survive. They weren’t fools. They had left long ago for the mainland ports of Hyannis and Provincetown, Gloucester and New Bedford, and the Nantucket f leet slowly died.

  Joe Duarte had watched the others go with a grim pride. His boat was paid off. He’d inherited his house on Milk Street. He could afford to stay in the town where he was born—where, at f ifteen, he learned his trade from his father and grandfather, and had the youth whipped out of him by the bitter cold of winter f ishing. He found the mainland ports too crowded and the towns too suburban. Returning to the harbor of a January night, past Great Point Light arcing its reassurance into the early dusk, he saw the glow from hundreds of Nantucket windows rising out of the midwinter Atlantic with a surging of the heart and a gladness born of deep love. He knew the value of what he had earned with his blood and his years.

  Only I’ve no one to give it to, he thought. So much for pride. All it buys is loneliness. I’ve got to call Del. Blood is blood, after all.

  “Holy Christ, would you look at that!”

  Jackie Alcantrara, his f irst mate, was bent over the gray face of the f ish-f inder, studying the shifting shapes of the schools twenty-f ive fath­oms below. The image rippled like a f ield of summer wheat. “It’s cod, Joe. A friggin’ f ish convention. Let’s go.” He moved to the door of the pilothouse impatiently, shouting orders to the two crewmen on the night watch.

  Joe Duarte squinted in the glare of the working lights. It was impossible to see much of the Atlantic beyond, but he could feel the pitch of the waves, grown sharper in the last few minutes, and the wind that was tugging at his sparse white hair. They were heading into f ifteen-foot seas, over sharp peaks on the sandy bottom, and the net would be torn to shreds. There were no other boats in sight. They were one hundred and f ifty miles from land.

  Loneliness is a kind of death. I gotta call Del.

  “Jackie!” he yelled over the din of the gantry winch, which was pay­ing out the net and the pair of half-ton steel doors that dragged it to the bottom. “Jackie!”

  The mate turned to him impatiently, bullet head thrust forward in resentment. He had been a captain himself until last year, and taking orders from Joe was something he fought every day.

  “Get the net outta the water, now!”

  “What the hell are you talking about, old man?”

  “I won’t have a couple thousand dollars’ worth of new net torn apart in a gale, you understand? Get it up!”

  Jackie stood stock-still, his jaw working f iercely, his overdeveloped upper body emphasizing all that was squat and Cro-Magnon about him; then he turned and drove a hand f lat against the pilothouse wall with a shuddering violence.

  “Christ Almighty,” he said. “When are you gonna go home and die, old man? Tell me that! There’s ten tons of cod down there, more than we’ve seen in months, more than anybody’s seen at one tim
e in more trips out than we can count. We’re making money here, and you talk about a net!”

  The bastard. I’d never have spoken to my captain like that. No respect, these days. No gratitude. I’d better call Felix Harper, too.

  On the one hand, everything Jackie said was true. For years, cod on the Bank had steadily dwindled. During the day, they hung around in the mid-depths where only the huge factory ships could reach them; but at night, they dropped back to the bottom, and the Lisboa Girl dropped her nets after them through all the hours of darkness. Joe was turning his back on money. But he could sense the weather’s gathering menace, and no amount of f ish was worth the safety of his boat and men. Jackie was young. He would learn from the weather, from the ones who didn’t come home, from the sudden silences on the radio frequencies in the midst of an unexpected gale.

  “First Mate Alcantrara,” the captain shouted into the wind, “for the last time, bring in the net, or I will do it for you.” He ducked back into the pilothouse and counted to f ive. Then he looked through the porthole for Jackie. The mate had gone over to the crewmen and was shouting and gesturing; but still the net was being paid out. Bullheaded young cuss. A huge wave broke over the bow as the Lisboa Girl dove into a trough, spraying the men standing midships by the gantry.

  Joe abandoned the pilothouse and reeled his way across the heaving deck, his hair instantly wet from the blown seas, his face turning red with suppressed rage.

  “Tell me what I have to do to get an order obeyed here,” he said to Jackie. The mate shrugged and looked away, muttering into the storm. Joe turned to a younger man working the winch. “Get that net back on deck, Lars, double-time, you understand?”

  “Sure, Cap’n, if you say so.” The blond crewman glanced at the f irst mate. “But there’s an awful lot of f ish down there.”

  “There’s a lot of bones, too,” Joe said through his teeth, “and not all of them ancient. Bring it up.”

  Lars, a Norwegian incorrectly known around Nantucket as the Swede, turned back to the controls and eased the lever through neutral into reverse. The winch gave a groan audible even over the force of the wind, and the net started to wind wetly out of the water.

  “That’s it,” Jackie burst out beside him. “I’m through. There’s nothing worse than a man who’s too afraid to make money. Why don’t you stay home and leave the cod to people who know what they’re doing?”

  Joe Duarte’s rage hiccupped inside of him as he shot a look at Jackie’s ugly face, but it was quickly replaced by a terrible weariness. He was old, too old to be walking a sea-slick deck in the pitching dead of night, too old to slam an obnoxious twenty-eight-year-old on the jaw, too old to weigh whether the catch or his life was more important.

  “You think you know what you’re doing, huh?” he said. “You think you know how to run a boat?”

  “Damn sight better’n you do, old man,” Jackie retorted.

  “At least I’ve got a boat to skipper,” Joe said, with satisfaction, “in­stead of a wreck at the bottom of Cape Cod Bay. You didn’t learn from that bit of trouble, did you, Jackie boy? You never learn anything. Your skull’s too hard and your brain’s too small. You can get off my boat, and good riddance.”

  He had expected the first mate’s scowl of rage and the words bub­bling at his lips, had expected him to take a swing at him, even, sealing the fate of their sundering after a year of strained partnership. But he hadn’t expected the look of horror that washed over the man as he stared at something behind Joe himself, over his head, or the cry of warning that was torn from him too late.

  Oh no. God, no. Del.

  The full force of the net’s steel otter door, rising much too fast from the roiling sea, caught the captain in the back of the skull. It was a massive blow that knocked sense from him with the swiftness of a snuffed candle. He crumpled at his crewmen’s feet, at the base of the gantry, the otter door swinging wildly overhead as the Swede struggled to secure it. Jackie reached for Joe Duarte just as the boat heeled over, wallowing in a trough and pitched sideways by the weight of the swinging door. But the stunned man slid out of the mate’s reach, into the water, his white head another bit of froth on the surging waves.

  “Joe!” Jackie cried, the howling of the wind drowning his voice. “Joe!”

  But the old man was gone.

  Chapter 1

  “It comes as no surprise to any of us, dear friends,” Father Acevedo was saying, “that Joe Duarte stayed in the water rather than attend his own funeral. He used to say that if the Lord wanted him at Mass instead of on the Georges Bank on Sunday, He’d have sent the f ish to church.” He paused for the anticipated laughter. “I think we know where the f ish are today, dear friends, and we know that Joe Duarte is right where he’d want to be.”

  The sentiment, however apt, failed to strike a note of cheer in the crowd. It missed, somehow, like the funeral conducted without a body, like the blowing gusts of frenzied rain that hammered the f irst summer f lowers into their muddy beds. Father Acevedo meant well. He was Por­tuguese himself, born and raised on the Cape, and his father had f ished with the Provincetown f leet. He’d known Joe Duarte for six years. But when a man was lost at sea, fear cut deep in the hearts of his confed­erates, a fear hard to laugh off. No one who f ished for a living wanted to die for it.

  Detective Meredith Folger scanned the faces lining the pews and aisles of St. Mary’s. A few shocked smiles met the priest’s sally, but most of the mourners simply looked uncomfortable. She caught the eye of Jackie Alcantrara—Joe Duarte’s f irst mate, the one who’d jumped into the Atlantic after him and come back empty-handed. He’d taken a knock on the head, and the hospital had shaved his skull; the man looked more like a bull than ever, she thought. His heavy-featured face had gone white under his tanned skin, and he wasn’t laughing. Merry dropped her eyes to her lap and wished the funeral Mass were done.

  Joe’s relatives had come from all over Massachusetts—the Ed Duartes from Gloucester, the Luis Duartes from Mattapoisett, and up front, be­hind the f irst pew, the Manny Duartes out of New Bedford, the ones his daughter, Del, had been living with. They were all f ishermen. A good number of townsfolk had also braved the rain to say goodbye to Cap’n Joe, though few among them still made their living from the sea. There were Portuguese names all over the island, but they tended to be printed on the sides of pickup trucks rather than boats. Not a family among them failed to f ish every summer, however—for pleasure or sport, or the occasional killing in the Japanese tuna auctions.

  Father Acevedo beamed all around and raised his hands, signaling the end of his homily, and the congregation rose for the Prayer of the Faithful. Merry craned for a look at Adelia Duarte as she stood in the f irst pew, her two-year-old, Sara, singing a quiet nonsense song to her doll, and marveled again at her calm dignity. She had been absent from the island almost three years, since the pregnancy that had alienated her father. To return under circumstances like these must be an unbearable strain. Yet she showed no signs of the gnawing guilt and regret that her neighbors probably hoped to see—none of the remorse of the prodigal daughter, eyes downcast and shoulders trembling, all hope of reconciliation lost. She had yet to endure the post-funeral reception, when the wives of her father’s friends would invade the house with their casseroles and sympathy, sincere or false, a suffocating f lock of femininity blessed with men safe and alive.

  Merry smiled, and just as swiftly smoothed her features back into anonymous solemnity. Everyone in the church was trying not to stare at Adelia and her baby, and failing miserably. She was too much her father’s child to care what Nantucketers said or thought about her life; she was probably looking forward to the struggle.

  She had, after all, chosen to wear red today.

  “A pretty enough little thing,” Jenny Baldwin was saying, her eye on Sara Duarte, who was wandering wide-eyed through the forest of adult legs f illing Joe Duarte’s living roo
m, “though rather small. But then she is illegitimate, and I always f ind that babies born out of wedlock are not robust, don’t you? And where did she get that red hair?” she continued, not waiting for Merry’s response. “Not from the Duartes, certainly.”

  “Agnes’s hair was auburn,” Merry said, recalling Adelia’s mother.

  “Was it?” Jenny said vaguely. “She died before my time, I’m afraid. Too bad. If she’d lived, perhaps Adelia wouldn’t have been quite so—unrestrained. But a girl raised as she was . . .” She clicked her tongue in mock sympathy and raised one eyebrow in the general direction of the red dress. She was the sort of woman who’d learned to click her tongue before she’d learned to form sentences. “Of course, Tom and I were always ready to do anything we could for her—”

  “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Baldwin,” Merry said, her own black brows lowering, “I’d like to talk to Del, and I haven’t much time before I’m due back at the station. You understand.”

  “You were great friends once, weren’t you?” Jenny Baldwin said, her bleached blue eyes awash with interest.

  She’s wondering if I know who the baby’s father is, Merry thought with distaste. “Yes,” she said, “but we’ve grown far closer since she left the island. Absence has a way of revealing your true friends.”

  She set down her club soda and crossed the room in search of the red dress, which seemed to have vanished into the kitchen. She had been less than frank with Jenny Baldwin, but anger brought out her contrary streak. Del Duarte was a childhood friend. They had grown apart during the past decade, some of which Merry had spent at Cape Cod Com­munity College, the Massachusetts Police Academy, and her f irst tour in New Bedford. By the time she’d come back to Nantucket six years ago, Del had her own life. Her pregnancy took her off-island three years later. Merry had no idea who’d fathered baby Sara.

  A wall of bodies obscured her view. She eased her shoulder past stocky, weathered Tom Baldwin, Jenny’s husband, raising her hand to the small of his back and hoping he’d ignore her. Instead, he turned his head and smiled.