THE MORNING AFTER THE SHOOTING, BEFORE I went home, I stopped by the McKenzies’ house.
Dawn was just breaking when I got there. I’d hitched a ride out of Newport on a milk truck heading for one of the big dairies on our side of the bay, then walked the rest of the way into town. My clothes had dried, but I knew I probably looked as bad as I felt. I stayed off the main street, hoping no one would see me.
I didn’t knock. The kitchen door was open as I knew it would be. I hadn’t been there for months, but everything looked the same. The kitchen table was in its place under the lightbulb, already set for breakfast. The counters were neat, and Mrs. McKenzie’s china was put away carefully in its corner cupboard. I went by her portrait in the front hall and felt her eyes follow me as I turned up the stairs. I went slowly, on my toes, avoiding a creaky board I knew at the top.
Nobody was up. Chief McKenzie was snoring in his bedroom down the hall. Jeddy’s door was open a crack. I peeked in and saw him buried in his blankets.
I slipped by to Marina’s bedroom, went inside and closed the door behind me. She was sound asleep, her hair tossed across the pillow. I was afraid to wake her. I wished I could keep the news I had to tell her to myself. I wished she’d never have to hear it.
After only a minute, she knew I was in the room. Sleep is porous that way. There’s usually a window raised somewhere in the unconscious mind. Her eyes opened and she looked straight at me.
“Ruben? What is it?” She sat up.
“Something’s happened.”
“That’s Billy’s hat,” she said.
“Yes.” I still had it in my hands.
“The Black Duck’s in trouble?”
I nodded. “We ran into the Coast Guard.”
“Billy’s in jail?”
“No.”
“In the hospital?”
“No.”
“Well, where is he?” she asked. Then she looked at me and knew.
It was the worst thing I’d ever had to see in my life, to watch her face cave in the way it did. I couldn’t think of what else to do, so I went over and sat on her bed and put my arms around her. I started to tell her what had happened. Halfway through she began to cry. When I got to the place where we came on the Coast Guard cutter tied to the bell buoy, where the machine gun went off and the Duck veered away, she covered her face and told me to stop.
So we sat together listening to the morning sounds outside the window. A rooster’s plain-and-ordinary cock-a-doodle-doo. A car’s motor starting up. Someone whistling a church tune out on the road.
Footsteps sounded in the hall.
“My father’s up,” Marina said.
“Don’t let him know I’m here.”
She went across to the door and turned the lock. When she came back, she asked in a whisper:
“Was it Roger Campbell’s cutter tied up to the bell buoy?”
I said it was.
“He’s the man who fired on Billy’s dad. Everybody knows he’s loose with his guns. Billy thought he was crazy, and maybe he is. He was after the Black Duck, ever since they led him on that wild chase up the bay onto a sandbar.”
I said I remembered that.
“If he was tied up to the bell, that means he was expecting somebody.”
“It seems like it,” I said. “No one would be out there otherwise. The fog was too thick. You couldn’t see ten feet.”
“I think he was tipped off,” Marina said. “Somebody knew the Duck would be coming that way.”
“Who?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “Everyone around the bay was rooting for them. They kept clear of the syndicates and they didn’t carry guns. I know Billy was on the wrong side of the law, but who would want to set a man like Roger Campbell on him?”
We looked at each other and didn’t know. It would be a few days before Marina read, along with the whole town, the newspaper story about a local police chief who’d called up the Coast Guard and done just that.