We pulled away from the marina—not to be confused with Liberty Harbor which inhabited another bay—after the sun was well on its way to California for the night. We were aboard the Amy Denise, a forty-two-foot trawler that Ted Sullivan had lent us for the weekend. It wasn’t that Geof or I couldn’t afford boats, of our own; we both came from families whose trust funds provided sufficient income to purchase fleets for small South American countries. No, we had the boat for the night because, as Geof said when he brought home Ted’s invitation, “Over the years, I’ll bet Ted and I have exchanged just about everything with a motor or an engine. Cars, lawn mowers, motorcycles. Last winter, I lent him my snow blower, so now we get his boat.”
“Nice going,” I’d replied, “do you think he’s got a week on a schooner he’d trade for a day with my Cuisinart?”
Actually, I thought we were doing Ted the favor by taking his boat out for a good run to warm the winter out of her. As the whole town knew, the realtor had not been able to bring himself to use the Amy Denise since his wife for whom it was named had left him, as they say, for another. Local wisdom had it that the boat represented especially painful memories because Amy Denise had given it to Ted as an anniversary present.
As I lounged on a bench beside Geof who had the helm on the bridge, I raised my vodka-and-tonic in a silent toast to our absent host.
“It’s nice of Ted to let other people get some pleasure from his boat,” I said aloud, “even if he can’t. Or won’t. I wonder why he doesn’t just sell her, memories and all.”
“Maybe he hopes Amy will come back aboard one day.” Geof shook his head; his thick shock of brown hair ruffled in the wind. “He’s more patient than I am.” He glanced back over his bare shoulder at me. “Maybe we should make him an offer, eh, mate?”
Mate.
I searched his face to see if he’d intended the double meaning, but the handsome features only looked tired, neutral. When I only smiled in reply, he turned back to the open sea.
We were mates of a sort, and had been ever since tragedy had brought us together a half year ago. He was twice married and divorced; at thirty, I was single by choice and circumstance. The attraction between us had been immediate and compelling, and we had not hesitated to live together in that never-never land, for which there is no name, between dating and marriage. We were the odd couple: the former bad boy from a good family and the girl from a good family that had gone bad. My background was well known around town. His was not, partly because his family had moved away the year he’d graduated from high school, four years before me—and partly because when he returned to his hometown to fulfill his teenage dream of being a cop, he had not encouraged people to connect the tall, serious policeman with the wild kid of fifteen years earlier, Most of his former juvenile-delinquent buddies had long since drifted away to lesser fates; only a few old pals, like Ted Sullivan, were still around to connect the cop with Bushware, Inc., plumbing and hardware supply companies in the Northeast. So he remained fairly anonymous. Until he began dating me. Now we were a delicious source of local gossip.
“Geof?”
Again, a turn of his head. And this time, a quick, warm smile. “Jenny?”
I leaned back against the rail that was wet with cool ocean spray. “Nothing,” I said.
Together, we stared into the silent darkness ahead. Behind and to the sides of us, lights flickered cozily on the shore. It was like our relationship, I thought; the safety of conventionality lay all around us, winking and beckoning like an old friend of the family with whom we might feel comfortable—while ahead lay territory that held more risk by virtue of being less well charted. Though not noticeably successful at it, Geof liked being married. But I had no family model upon which to base any hope for marital bliss. And while I certainly had faith in him as a person, I wasn’t sure I’d bet the rent on his prospects as a husband. Still, we could not drift forever, like teenagers, in that foggy, foolish world of not-quite-committed. It was fish-or-cut-bait time, and I was scared. I didn’t want to lose him.
And yet . . .
A stomach rumbled.
“Was that yours or mine?” he asked.
“Yours.” I laughed. Leave it to the human body to pull the mind back down to ground level. Or sea level, as it were. I said, “I’ll go below and start dinner. I can take a hint.”
He had us securely anchored in a quiet cove by the time I had dinner on the table across from the galley. It had not taken much searching to find Amy Sullivan’s cache of plastic plates, rust-proof pans, washable placemats and paper napkins. They were immaculate and neatly stacked in the cupboards, as if Amy had just left for home, instead of having left home entirely. It had been a standing joke among Ted’s friends that he and Amy Denise would retire on this boat in another few years, thus living out Ted’s teenage dream of retiring when he reached Jack Benny’s age. But while Ted dreamed of the South Seas, Amy had stood in this galley, peeling carrots and dreaming of her lover. Maybe she was in Tahiti with him now; that would be an ironic and unkind twist of fate. But I smiled, thinking it wasn’t likely. Above her sink a small wooden plaque read, “A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money.” On the refrigerator, a magnet said, “Frankly, I’d rather drive.” And, stitched onto a teatowel was the motto, “If the Good Lord had meant man to swim, He’d have furnished fins.” Wherever Amy was, it wasn’t on a boat! I felt sorry for Ted, and I didn’t admire the cowardly way she left him; but part of me was cheered by the sheer audacity of her departure. If sweet, neat little Amy Denise, that archetypal housewife, could up and leave with a lover, there was hope for other conventional, predictable people. Feeling optimistic, I hollered up the ladder for Geof to come to supper.
Twenty gluttonous minutes later, he said, “There’s butter on your chin. No, don’t wipe it off. It’s sexy.” He leered. “I’ll lick it off later.”
“Actually, it’s margarine.”
“Oh.” He handed me a napkin. “Not so sexy.”
We were having lobsters, as planned, as well as steamed clams, although steamers always reminded me of my father. And that always left a bitter aftertaste that had nothing to do with clams. It took me a year to be able to eat clams again after my father, in his amiable way, ran three generations of Cain Clams into bankruptcy during my junior year in college. Even now, it was hard to choke them down over the memory of the employees he put out of work, and the memory of my mother and younger sister whose familial guilt nearly destroyed them. I was made of tougher—or less sensitive—stuff, I guess. The shame merely drove me into work of a charitable nature. And away from clams.
“Jenny,” Geof said suddenly, “I want to ask you something.”
He looked unusually serious, uncharacteristically hesitant.
No! I thought in a panic. Please don’t ask me!
“Which Reich did you believe?”
I breathed again.
“He was very convincing, Geof.”
“So you think he did kill himself out of grief?”
I dunked a hunk of Italian bread in the drawn butter. Er, margarine. “Well,” I conceded, “he might not have intended to kill himself. But what was his reason for attacking the rest of us, if not grief or revenge or guilt?”
“But why would she lie about him?” he insisted. He was pushing me into the position of devil’s advocate, as he did with Ailey Mason when they were on a case.
“Maybe she didn’t lie,” I extemporized. “Maybe she only perceived him differently, through the bitter lens of their marriage.”
He smiled, but whether at my conclusion or my imagery, I couldn’t tell.
“Anyway,” I said impatiently, “what difference does it make, Geof? The man is dead, whether by accident or by his own design. Nobody else was hurt. It’s over and done. Right?”
“I don’t like the unfinished feel of it,” he said slowly. “And I especially don’t like contradictory explanations of violent death.”
“Violent?” I scoffed. “All things considered, he really went fairly quietly into the bay, Geof. I mean, nobody pushed him.”
“Neither did he die in his sleep, Jenny.”
“The problem with you,” I said then, “is that you’re a detective with nothing to detect.”
He laughed, then ate the last bites of lobster. A few minutes later he said, “Well, we’re having the truck raised, so maybe we’ll find out if it was an accident or if it was suicide. If it looks as if the brakes failed, for instance, we’ll know it was accidental death, and that his wife was right, after all.”
A thought occurred to me.
“It could be important for her to be right,” I said.
He refilled my glass of wine. We sipped in compatible silence. When I finally broke it, any thoughts of Ansen Reich were far away.
“I’ll wash,” I said, “if you’ll dry.”
“You’d think we were married,” he said blandly.
I suddenly’ discovered a lobster claw that demanded my full and immediate attention.
Later, in the aft stateroom, we shed our swimsuits and looked ironically at each other in the romantic light of the moon that shone down through the open hatch above the bed.
“The mind is willing,” Geof said with, a crooked smile that should have been devastatingly irresistible, “but the body is failing.”
“I know,” I agreed, wearily.
We stood so close together in the cramped space that it was impossible not to hug, so we did at least take advantage of that opportunity. It was, however, more of a mutual propping up than an embrace.
I sighed against his chest. “Tonight I feel the hot breath of middle age upon my neck.”
“That’s not middle age,” he said, “that’s me.”
We snickered, I into the hair on his chest, he into the hair on top of my head. Our subsequent good-night kiss was more fond than fervid. We collapsed onto opposite sides of the double bed and pulled a single sheet over us.
His voice roused me from near-sleep.
“Jenny, do you remember at dinner tonight when I told you I wanted to ask you something?”
“Sure, hon.”
“And you know the talk we were going to have this weekend?”
“Yes.” I hoped he didn’t want to have it now. Our plans had not included this extraordinary day which had drained and exhausted both of us.
“We probably don’t need to have that talk,” he said. “The look on your face at that moment told me everything I need to know.”
“Geof . . .”
“Go to sleep, darling Jenny.”
“I do love you.”
But he had turned to the wall. In the dark, his breathing was slow and even.