It was a waste of time, and I knew it; worse, it would distract me from my far more important goal which was the clearing of my father of all suspicion. Nevertheless, I wanted to find out if my midnight hunch about the life preserver was correct. Besides, I was getting nowhere in my own investigations; everybody I suspected seemed to be innocent of truly murderous motives. Maybe if I took my mind off my own problems for a while something brilliant would come to me.
In the morning, after a breakfast that was cordial, if quiet, I rowed back to shore and my car. By midmorning, I stood at the reception desk of the Port Frederick Times, hoping to God that nobody would recognize me as Jimmy Cain’s daughter.
“Do you keep a morgue?” I inquired of the young man on duty. He wore thick glasses of the type that contacts have almost rendered obsolete; I was probably only a dim figure to him. I said, “I want to look up some articles from a few years back.”
“Well, not what you’d call a morgue like at a big city paper,” he admitted. “I mean, you’d have to go through stacks and stacks of papers, ’cause we don’t have anything on microfilm yet. The fire department says we’re a fire hazard, but I doubt it. None of our stories are hot enough to catch fire.
I peered into his glasses to see if he was joking. A squinting twinkle said he was. I grinned at him and he grinned back. “That way,” he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “All the way to the back, down the steps to the basement. Ask Hilda to help you.”
“What does Hilda look like?”
“She looks like the only person in the basement,” he said.
“Thank you.” Keeping my head down and hiding my face by pretending to scratch my nose, I followed his directions, walking as quickly as if the floor were, indeed, afire.
“What year you want, honey?” asked Hilda, the only person in the basement. She was old and yellowed like the papers that surrounded her. They were piled thickly, but neatly, to the ceiling. She added, in a smoker’s voice, “I can get to the last five years pretty easy, but anything before that is a bitch.”
“Just two years ago,” I told her. “February. I don’t know the exact date.”
She drew deeply on a cigarette, then flipped her ashes to the floor. No wonder the fire department thought the place was a hazard. Hilda caught me staring at the dead butts that littered the floor around her desk. Like the receptionist, she had a twinkle. “When you’re my age, honey,” she said in a voice that crackled like old leaves, “you tend to nod off when you least expect it. That’s why I don’t keep an ashtray. Keeps me awake, wondering if I’m gonna cremate myself.” She drew on the cigarette again, so it glowed live and fiery at its tip.
“It’s got me feeling pretty wide awake,” I told her, and she grinned behind the smoke. Maybe the boy upstairs was her son; maybe he wore those thick glasses so he wouldn’t have to see his mother set the house on fire.
She rose slowly by placing her palms on her desk and pushing herself up. Then she led me back into the paper jungle.
“Here,” she said, pausing before a stack that looked identical to every other stack. Hilda, evidently, filed by the intuitive system. She said, “This here’s what you want. This whole pile is your year, just start at the top—that’s December—and work on down. I’ll get you a step stool. Just throw ’em down on the floor here ’til you get to February. Ought to be down there near the bottom if it still comes after January.”
She wheeled a step stool toward me, then started to walk away.
“Hilda,” I said, “you won’t nod off, will you?”
“Ain’t my day to die,” she said.
“From your mouth to God’s ears.”
By the time I reached February, I was black with newsprint. My hands were stained and the newsprint had rubbed off on my shorts and shirt; even my legs were streaked. By this time, I was down from the ladder and seated on the basement floor. One by one, I skimmed the headlines of all the pages of all the papers starting with February 28, and going backward.
In the evening paper of Feb. 13, I found what I was looking for: LOBSTERMAN MISSING; PRESUMED DROWNED. The Coast Guard, it said, had come upon Lobster McGee’s boat just that morning, shortly after it was seen motoring out to where everybody knew that Lobster strung his traps. Somebody on board the Coast Guard cutter had noticed that nobody waved back when they waved at Lobster McGee’s boat, and that was odd; even crochety old Lobster would spare a wave for passing mariners. Sensing something out of the ordinary, the Coast Guard had approached, only to find the boat full of lobsters but empty of Lobster. They knew he’d taken the boat out that morning, because he’d been seen by other lobstermen on their way out to their territories. And they knew it was pretty rough water that morning, the kind that requires an experienced lobsterman to hook and winch his pots without tumbling overboard. Lobster had, nonetheless, gone over, that was clear to the Coast Guard. His gaff was still hooked in the nearest pot, so he’d probably gone in while he was in an awkward position of trying to pull the pot in toward the boat. Then most likely he’d knocked his head against the side of the boat, and in that rough water, that was all she wrote. It could happen; it had happened to Lobster. Lobstering was never easy; and sometimes it wasn’t even safe. It was a bad morning for going out, but lobstermen have to go out, and Lobster had paid for the tough dedication of his trade.
It took me another half hour to pile the newspapers back up into their original neat stack. On my way out I thanked Hilda for staying awake. She grinned beyond her veil of smoke and flipped an inch of ash to the floor.
“Are you related to the boy at the reception desk, Hilda?”
“That’s my kid all right.” She shook her head. “Got eyes like a mole, but he’s a nice kid. Listen, you might want to hose yourself off in the bathroom right across there.” She pointed the cigarette toward a door in the opposite wall. “It’s my private John,” she said with that familial grin. “’Cause ain’t nobody here but little old Hilda.”
I thanked her again, then took her suggestion. Her bathroom was as tidy as her morgue, and I carefully rinsed the sink when I was through.
On the first floor again, I ducked my head as I walked quickly across the hardwood floor, between desks and file cabinets.
But not quickly enough.
“Jenny?” A male voice behind me sounded excited. “Is that you, Jenny? Where’s your father? We need to talk to him! Jenny Cain!”
I was even with the reception desk.
“Run!” whispered Hilda’s boy. As I did, he stood up and started to walk around his desk, but stumbled right in the path of the reporter who was bearing down on me. I turned back long enough to hear the reporter curse and to see Hilda’s boy lying sprawled on the floor, his face turned toward the door, that grin plastered across it. His glasses remained safely on his desk where he’d laid them. “Go!” he mouthed at me.
I went, making it to my car, then off and away before Clark Kent could turn into Superman and fly after me. Hilda’s boy might be wrong about one thing, if I was right about another: the Times did indeed have a hot story that might set the joint briefly aflame. And it didn’t have anything to do with their current quarry, James D. Cain III.
I stepped on the gas and drove above the speed limit to Liberty Harbor. Now I knew how Geof must feel just before closing a case. Only I was going to close this one by opening it again.
I parked behind Lobster McGee’s old house, out of sight of Goose Shattuck and his construction crew.
The house was deserted, having not, as yet, fallen prey to the reconstructionists and the decorators and the historians. It stood this morning in all its decrepit glory, more a Halloween spookhouse than a future center of culture and nostalgia.
It was a dingy gray, but then every house along the coast is dingy gray unless you paint it regularly. The porch sagged; the windowsills looked as if they could hardly support the weight of what little glass was left in them; old newspapers hung around the bottom of the balustrades like pets clinging to the legs of their master; the front-door screen hung on one hinge like a drunk on a lamppost.
The front door itself was locked, but that posed no problem because most of the glass was broken out of the wide windows beside it. All I had to do was remove one shoe and tap out the remaining glass in one of the windows. It fell lightly to the wood floor within the house.
I took the jacket I had carried from my car and stretched it over the bottom of the window to protect my legs and rear from glass, and I climbed through, pulling the jacket in with me. I let it drop out of sight on the floor.
The place was a wreck, but probably not much worse than when Lobster had lived there. Because of the broken windows, sand and salt had blown in along with some leaves and miscellaneous trash; but it all looked right at home with the basic layer of filth the old man had laid down before he died. Had he ever cleaned up after himself? Or was this the dust of years of not giving a damn for anything but Big Macs and lobsters? It would take someone with a finer eye than mine to see the potential here, and then to pore through the dirt for the golden architectural nugget that was said to lurk in the bones of this old house. I didn’t like the house, and hurried through the downstairs rooms to find what I was looking for. I only hoped it was still there and had not been stolen, as had many of the so-called artifacts before the preservationists persuaded Goose to have his guards include this relic in their nightly rounds.
It wasn’t downstairs, if it still existed at all.
I climbed the stairs, skipping three at a time in my rush to be gone.
Seven doors opened off the hallway upstairs. I looked in the two bathrooms just long enough to eliminate them as hiding places for the object I sought. Neither was it in the first two bedrooms I looked in. The last bedroom down the hall was locked with a small padlock. I figured it must be Lobster’s room, or else the preservationists wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of locking it, I tested the strength of the wood in the door with my hands, then a foot.
I went back downstairs for a log from the vast stone fireplace. Then I hauled the log back up the stairs and rammed it through the door. After that, it was easy to get in the room. I walked through the huge hole I’d made in the door and stared around.
“Breaking and entering,” I said to myself. “Assault on a door with a deadly weapon. You’re as crazy as your father, and twice as dangerous. If Geof ever finds out you did this, he will find you a room in a jail.”
The McDonald’s sacks had been removed. I don’t know who counted them. Lobster’s heavy walnut furniture remained—a massive double bed, matching chest of drawers, a dressing table with a yellowed mirror, and two straight-backed chairs, one of them drawn up to the window where the telescope looked out to sea. Old newspapers had blown into the corner.
I searched every inch of that crusty room and failed to find what I was looking for; a fat orange life jacket, the one that gave him the look of a stuffed sausage every lobstering season, the one he wore under his clothes to hide the truth about a proud, tough old sailor who couldn’t swim.
But was I wrong?
I stepped to the broken window to peer through Lobster’s telescope. I had to bend awkwardly to look toward the harbor where his old lobster boat was tied to one of the docks. The scope brought the boat into wonderful closeup, including the detail of the lifeline that Lobster had jerryrigged along the inside edge of the boat. At the bow, a metal hook dangled from, the line, waiting to join up with the metal eye on the life preserver that Lobster McGee would have worn every time he went out on that boat. And if the old man always wore a life jacket and hooked up to the lifeline when he was out in the boat, that meant that if he’d been knocked overboard accidentally or fallen out of the boat, the jacket would have kept him afloat for a good long time. At the least, the Coast Guard would have found his body, still hanging from the lifeline, soon after the accident happened.
The old man didn’t drown in an accident.
He was murdered.
Even without the proof of the well-worn jacket I should have found in that room, I felt I could convince Geof. But murdered by whom? Why? Exactly how?
My theory ended where those questions began.
I tried to swing the telescope to starboard, but found it locked in place. A quick fumble with the catch loosened it. Now I could see Goose down at the site, waving his arms at some of his men. And there was Webster Helms, strutting into his rebuilt shack. I swung the scope again, this time finding what was left of the old pier where my committee had dived into the bay. And then I swung it still further around and, in so doing, found myself dropping naturally into the chair beside the window. Now I realized that it was pulled up to the telescope so that a person using it could sit comfortably in this position, staring in this direction. And what I saw from this position was lover’s leap. I watched a young couple in a Datsun 210 drive up and park. She was a pretty brunette with a few dark hairs between her eyebrows. He turned off the ignition, took his hands off the wheel and put them on her blouse . . .
I looked away.
Sitting here, Lobster McGee might have observed any number of secret things that the people involved would not have wished anyone to see. Did he sit here night after night in lobstering season and day after day in off season, eating his hamburgers and peering through his telescope at other people’s private lives? Did he see something that somebody didn’t want him to? Something so private, so secret, so wrong that they killed him for his knowledge?
I stood up, pushed the telescope away, and stared sightlessly down at the old lobster pound. On this hot day its stench rose up to me through the broken window.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “I’m not much help to you, but I think I can help old Lobster McGee rest easier in his grave.”
The house was haunted to me now. I scrambled out of it, returned to my car and drove to the police station.