Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994

Virtual Fog by D. A. McGuire

“Herbert Sawyer, Jr., what in hell are you doing here?” Those were his first words to me, spoken in surprise and anger. I was alone, waiting as I’d been told to wait, just at the end of the little pier, sitting on a wooden bench, knapsack at my feet. I hadn’t expected him, and then again maybe I had. All the same, I don’t think my answer was quite good enough for Jake.

“I was doing somebody a favor.” I looked up at him. The tide was rolling out, leaving behind a thick, damp smell of marsh and marine debris, as well as here along the river (actually part of a marine estuary but all the locals called it the river), the rank odors of diesel fuel, gasoline, and dead fish. I wasn’t allowed to swim in the river; too many “diseases” you could catch, according to Mr. Hornton, the man responsible for my being there. My mother liked Mr. Hornton. She respected his judgment, and since she wasn’t a native Cape Codder, she took his word on a good many subjects. Like playing in the river: not very smart; you might come home with a funny rash or smell like oil for a few days.

Too bad she’d accepted Mr. Hornton’s judgment regarding my doing a favor for an old “war-buddy” friend of his, that being Mr. Neddie Hacker, the local lobster fisherman. If she’d had any idea where it would land me, sitting near the pier at eight on a Sunday morning confronting Sergeant Jacob Valari, she’d have had a stroke.

Funny how doing favors gets you in so much trouble sometimes.

Someone shouted to Jake from the dock at the end of the pier. A small crowd was forming out there, and one of the two Coast Guard patrol boats had just started its engines. Some of the Coast Guard people were leaving as well as the medical examiner. He came up the rickety wooden pier, tipping his baseball cap to Jake as he did. He barely noticed me.

“A favor?” barked Jake. “For Neddie Hacker? Damn, Herbie, you weren’t out there with Neddie when he found...” He scratched his head, looked at me, then looked out at the dock where about a dozen people, men and women, several in uniform — state police, local police, Coast Guard — seemed to be waiting for me. Then he looked back at me. “You were, weren’t you? You were out with Neddie pulling pots. Damn.” Then he said it again, with more emphasis: “Damn, Herbie, I don’t want you mixed up in this. Damn.” He turned and spit in the sand.

I’d never seen Jake do that before.

“Sorry” was all I could think to say. I kicked my knapsack and tried to look apologetic.

“I’m not kidding, boy,” he told me. “You’re staying out of this.” Then he went to join the others at the end of the pier. Another Coast Guard boat had just pulled up; people were moving equipment from Neddie’s boat, tied to the dock, onto the Coast Guard boat. They were moving pots, hooks, rope, back and forth, from one boat to the other, and then they’d move some of it back again, from the Coast Guard boat onto Neddie’s. It didn’t look like a very coordinated operation, but then what did I know? I was just a kid. It also locked as if the dock might tip at any moment; it was listing pretty badly to the right. I bet most of them out there didn’t know that this particular pier had been on a state list for repairs for over a year now, and with more than twenty people suddenly jammed onto it, well, you just never knew...

Still, it was pretty strange knowing they were all out there because Neddie Hacker, local lobster fisherman, and me, local thirteen-year-old kid, had pulled up a lobster pot without any lobsters in it. No lobster bait, either. No, there’d been just one thing in that old lobster pot — a human arm.

See what I mean about doing people favors?

My name is Herbie Sawyer. I live on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the small coastal town of Manamesset. It sits right on Manamesset Bay and is a cosy little community with a permanent population of about six thousand. I’d met Sergeant Jacob Valari about four months ago when I’d had the strange experience of helping him sort out what had looked like a case of accidental drowning. But that’s a whole other story. The best thing that came out of all that was that I got to meet Jake. And actually there’s more to it than that: Jake got to meet my mother, and to make a long story short, the two of them had been dating each other for about six weeks. Maybe that’s why Jake was none too thrilled to see me sitting at the end of the dock. I suppose it’s not an easy thing to tell your new girlfriend that her son is in the habit of uncovering dead bodies... or parts of them.

Anyhow, I wasn’t going anywhere, even when Jake came back and told me to. “Go on, get out of here. Go home and don’t tell your mother a thing. This isn’t your concern, Herbie. It’s got nothing to do with you; is that clear?”

“That officer over there told me to stay” was my response. I wasn’t about to disobey Jake. But I also wanted him to know that someone in authority had told me to stay put.

“What officer? Damn, he’s just a statie, what the hell...” Jake scratched his head again, then went back out to the dock. There was a lot of arguing going on out there — especially between Jake and this huge state cop — so I just sat tight and waited. People were still going back and forth from Neddie Hacker’s fishing boat to the dock, then onto one of the smaller patrol boats. One of the state cops was holding a small wooden box. Another man, in a Coast Guard uniform, was holding onto a trap, or lobster pot. The lobster pot.

I’d been through a similar situation before, so I thought at some point someone would come to take my statement. Boy, was I surprised when that didn’t happen. Because after about three minutes of arguing — I could see by Jake’s expression he wasn’t very happy — he came back. This time he bent over so he could stare me right in the eye.

“Herbert Sawyer, Jr., I have it on official word that you can go home. Now. If you have anything to tell me you can do so later. This has got nothing to do with you. There’s a sicko out there cutting up people, and I do not want you involved, got it?”

“The Coast Guard—” I nodded in the direction one of the boats was headed, up the river and out into the bay. “They’re going to start pulling everyone’s pots, aren’t they? To see if they can find the rest of the body?”

He gave a sigh, a kind of grunt actually, and looked at the ground. “Yes, I suppose that’s the next step. Listen, Herbie, I know you’re a sharp kid; damn, don’t I know it, but this has nothing to do with you. It’s just a coincidence you were with Neddie this morning.” He paused, looked puzzled, then asked, “You were doing Neddie Hacker a favor?”

“He needed help with his pots,” I answered, “so Mr. Hornton asked if I would lend a hand. He said I could make a few dollars.” I looked up unblinkingly into Jake’s beady brown eyes. He was a giant of a man, which I think appealed greatly to my mother. Jake Valari also had the uncanny knack of making you feel real safe. Size alone can sometimes do that. My father, who’s been dead for ten years, had been over six feet tall. My mother always said he had made her feel real safe.

Jake made a low noise, like the start of a curse with a lot of sh’s in it, looked out at the dock, then at the water, then at me. There were people coming out of houses all around us now, the last of the summer crowd, here on one final, unseasonably warm, fall weekend. They were going off to church, or out jogging, some with dogs on leashes. I guessed the word would get around pretty quick that Neddie Hacker had come back to port with more than just lobsters in the hold.

“All right, Herbie,” he said in a low tone. Someone was calling out to him, “Hey, Jake, what’s up?” but he ignored him. “Tell me this: tell me why I shouldn’t kick your butt all the way home?”

“Because I am involved,” I said quite honestly. “I was there, Jake.” I didn’t plead. If I really had to leave, well, I would, and if I was told to be quiet, I’d do that, too. Not a word to my mother (who wasn’t home anyhow and had been chambermaiding over at the Eagle ’n’ Arms since six this morning) and not to my good old friend, Mr. Hornton, not if Jake said so.

“That’s not enough, Herbie,” he said. “You and Neddie, you found something real bad, boy.” A brief glance up at the crowd gathering on the street; somebody’s dog began to bark frantically and tug on its leash; doors were slamming as more people emptied into the streets. Jake scowled at one or two who were getting too close and said, “You’ve just got to put it out of your mind, Herbie.”

But how could anyone put something like this out of their mind? Me, as I watched Neddie Hacker pull the thing out of that pot? At first we didn’t recognize what it was. It had been all white and hairy, with bits of bone, tendon and flesh sticking out from where it had been cut — and none too neatly — at the elbow joint. It looked like a mangled, bleached piece of lobster bait. Then suddenly Neddie swore, “What the hell!” and dropped it on the deck between us. Was I supposed to put that out of my mind? As I looked down at it and realized what it had to be? A wave passed under us just then, and the boat lurched a little, making the thing roll slightly to one side, revealing as it did five mottled red and white fingers clenched in a half fist — with a green and blue tattoo etched across the back of the hand.

“Then how about this, Sergeant Valari?” I said, reverting to a more formal tone. “I know whose arm it is, and I also know who was supposed to find it in that pot.”

I looked over the roof of his car before I climbed in, trying to read him, maybe trying to get a reaction. We’d said nothing on our way to the doughnut shop, but after he’d sent me in with a few dollars for doughnuts, juice, and coffee, I’d stood in the store window, watching as he took something from his pocket, something like a little card. Then he stared at it and went to a pay phone and called a number. His conversation was brief, and when he hung up the phone, he slammed it down. In anger, maybe. I wondered about that; I also wondered why Jake hadn’t used the phone in his car. He had a new car, a fire engine red Firebird, a real nice car with a phone, CD player, air conditioning. Anyhow, when I came out of the shop he was standing by the car, rubbing his face, and looking off over the bay.

“So who was it?” he asked without looking at me. “Whose arm, Mr. Smart-guy?”

I didn’t expect that, but as coolly as I could, I said, “I don’t know his name, Jake, but he was the bartender over at Murphy’s Lobster Trap. He...” Jake was turning to look at me, his eyes as cold as stone. “He worked the take-out window sometimes. Mom and me, we get clams almost every Friday night. Mom likes clams and—”

“You recognized the tattoo.”

“Yes, sir, it’s what they call a claddagh symbol. It’s usually on a ring. I think it’s some kind of Irish wedding symbol or something like that.”

“You got a real good look, didn’t you?”

“Jake, are you mad at me?” Because I felt he was, or maybe mad at whoever he’d just spoken to on the phone.

He reached for the car door. “Get in the car, Herbie.”

“It was real foggy this morning, foggier than I’d seen in a long time, but you know, it happens, especially in the fall.” I gave Jake a quick look across the front seat. He was quiet, actually kind of moody. Something was really bugging him, something big, so I figured I’d just talk, not that I thought I could really help him. Jake usually drove his old car or an unmarked police car, so my being in his Firebird was also a little strange. Something was wrong, but even for me I would be slow in figuring out what it was.

Jake Valari was the only detective on our town’s small police force, and he hadn’t been assigned to this case. Someone had called him this morning, true, and pulled him out of bed to come down to the river, but none of it had been official. I saw resignation in Jake’s face and heard it in his sigh, and I knew he wouldn’t have been wasting time on me if he had more important things to do, like working on a new case.

Still, just because a case wasn’t yours didn’t mean you just put it aside. You still turned it around and around in your head. I know this because it had happened to me before and I was pretty sure it was happening to Jake right now.

“Anyhow,” I chattered on, “if Mom saw how foggy it was out, I thought she might tell me I couldn’t go with Mr. Hacker. According to Mr. Hornton, he’s been having a real hard time since his son got into trouble.”

Jake knew what I was alluding to, just grunted and continued driving. He wasn’t taking me home. I’d told him I had to meet my math tutor this morning over at the technical institute in neighboring Forrester. I’d fallen under a state program for “academically talented” but “financially disadvantaged” kids, which meant I could have my own tutor if I wanted. So I had applied to the program, been accepted, and now met with Oscar on the second and fourth Sundays of the month. Oscar was a college sophomore; he got a small fee for working with me, plus credit for an educational psychology course he was taking. Me, I qualified for advanced courses in high school even though I was still in junior high. Oscar had termed the whole arrangement a “symbiosis, of sorts,” since we both benefited from it.

Too bad Jake and I couldn’t have struck our own symbiosis. I knew he was feeling real sour about this thing with Mr. Hacker and me and the arm in the lobster pot. That phone call must have been to the state police barracks, checking on the dead guy’s I.D. He had friends over there who’d fill him in on what he was missing. I didn’t know whether Jake knew the bartender over at the Trap, but I did know I was right. That green and blue claddagh tattoo was as unmistakable as it was unusual; I’d seen it a dozen times as it handed me my bucket of clams and tartar sauce at the take-out window.

So I guess there were a lot of things eating Jake just then. I was probably just the smallest part of them.

“Neddie Hacker has been pulling traps as long as I can remember,” Jake said out of the blue. “Long, long time.” He shook his head back and forth. “The dead man’s name is Liam O’Reilly. You were right. He’s been tending bar over at the Trap about six months now, working for Gussie Murphy. Damn, Herbie, this is a tough one.”

I was quiet, which is often a wise move to make. You can learn a lot if you just keep your mouth shut.

“And that tattoo, damn it’s distinctive. Irish as Irish can get. Liam O’Reilly.” He shook his head again, angrily, wiping one hand over his mouth as he steered with the other.

“Personal friend, Jake?” I asked quickly.

“No. Why do you ask?” he snapped at me, his whole face reacting as though he’d been caught at something. But he had been caught — in an unusual burst of emotion.

“Nothing, Jake.” I said back just as swiftly, deciding to play stupid. I looked down, thrust a hand into the wax-paper bag between my legs.

“I barely knew him,” Jake went on, trying to shrug, act nonchalant. “Worked for Gussie. Neddie and Gussie used to run the Lobster Trap together, back in the sixties. Bet you didn’t know that, did you, Mr. Smart-guy?”

“Yes, sir, I did.” I tried not to look at him, failed. He was giving me a real strained, impatient look. “He told me, out on the boat. He said he and Gussie Murphy used to have traps together and when they split up Mr. Hacker took the boat and some property they owned out on the point, and Mr. Murphy, he kept the restaurant.”

“He told you all that?”

“He did.” I shrugged, doughnut in hand. I would have offered Jake one, but he didn’t look very hungry. “We were just talking... a little. He said they had a big fight and—”

“They sure did. Back in ’68 or ’69, had a regular feud. I was up in Boston then, just starting out, so I missed most of it. A regular brouhaha from what I heard. Gussie bought Neddie out, and they haven’t spoken since.” He shot me a quick but probing look across the front seat of the car. The coffee I’d bought Jake wobbled unsteadily in the plastic carrier that fitted in front of the stick shift. It hadn’t been touched. “So maybe, Mr. Herbert Sawyer, you know everything that I know... plus a little that I don’t know. What happened out on that boat this morning?”

I took a quick bite of doughnut, thought a moment, then said, “I got up early, like I said, and went down to the river. I met up with Mr. Hacker — his boat’s the Sister Mary Margaret — and we went out to check his pots. He’s got about thirty out in the bay. He does it for spare cash, according to Mr. Hornton.”

A sidelong glance at me. “So it was Elmer Hornton who put you up to this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because little Brucie Hacker’s got himself in jail again?”

“Yes, sir.” I paused, mouth open, full of doughnut. I swallowed, said, “Mr. Hornton told Mom that Neddie... that Mr. Hacker is okay, and just because his son’s in jail—”

“I’ve got Little Brucie Hacker, all two hundred sixty pounds of him, locked up in the county jail for assaulting his girlfriend.”

“Yes, I know that.” I took a quick bite, tried to ignore his expression, his reaction. I could almost see what was going to happen: a confrontation with my mother? And Mr. Hornton? How could you let a thirteen-year-old kid go out on a boat with a man whose son is always in trouble? For beating up his girlfriend? Or drunkenness and disorderly conduct in public? And wasn’t there a lewd and lascivious conduct in there somewhere, too?

“So I know what you were going to tell me, Herbie, back at the river.” He glanced at me as I pushed a button to lower my window, get a bit of fresh air. The car had suddenly grown stifling. How much of this would my mother find out? Probably all of it, eventually. That wasn’t good; my mother was the extremely sensitive — and easily frightened — type.

“The arm in the pot,” Jake went on, “Liam O’Reilly’s arm, maybe it was there for Brucie Hacker to discover. Maybe. I mean, if it’s not just some sicko getting his kicks by spreading Liam O’Reilly all over the bay. And Brucie Hacker would have found it, too, if he weren’t in jail. That’s what you were going to tell me, isn’t it? He usually helps his father pull those traps?”

“Yes, sir.” I guess it had been kind of obvious. I took another bite of doughnut.

“Brucie Hacker was brought in on Friday night. This is Sunday morning. When did Neddie put out those traps? Were you with him then?”

“No, but I think he baited them on Saturday morning. He baits them one morning, checks them the next, or sometimes skips a day, I think.”

“You think. So Neddie might have baited his traps on Friday morning?”

“You’re not suggesting Mr. Hacker, or his son, killed Mr. O’Reilly and put his arm in that pot, are you? For what reason, Jake?”

“Listen, Herbie, I’ve been doing this kind of work almost twenty years. Not everything’s got a reason to it, but I think you know that, too, don’t you?”

“They’re getting all this same information — the staties — from Mr. Hacker, aren’t they?”

“I suppose they are,” he said with that same deep frustration I’d detected earlier. But still, there was more to it, to his voice and expression. Was it pain? And if so, why would Jake feel pain? Anger, yes; resentment, even animosity, most certainty. But why did I continue to sense an emotional hurt from him?

He moved to turn on his car radio, changed his mind, unrolled his window instead, and leaning his left arm on the door, drove with his right.

“It’s not your case, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” he answered.

“Cripes.” I looked down into my lap, into the bag holding my other two doughnuts. One for later. One for Oscar, maybe. Then I looked up and watched as we sailed past the entrance to Upper Cape Technical Institute.

“When do you meet your tutor?” he asked me.

“Usually around—” I turned in my seat, watched as the gold and black sign with “Founded 1955” on it disappeared behind us. “Twelve. One. I told Oscar I might be late today, and anyhow, he’s got a couple of projects he’s working on. I usually go find him.”

“So we’ve got plenty of time. I want you...” he swung wide, leaving the main highway to turn onto the coast road, a long, fairly deserted stretch of road that ran along the bay for nearly twenty uninterrupted miles “...to tell me everything that happened this morning.”

“I like Mr. Hornton,” I began, “but Mr. Hacker, he’s different. He’s what you might call a colorful character.”

“Colorful? As in his language?” Jake said with a wry smile.

“Yeah, partly.” I was working on my second doughnut. “I think he was maybe expecting someone different from me because the first thing he said when he saw me was, you’re thirteen, boy? You don’t look more’n ten years old. But I ain’t got much choice, do I? Not with that worthless son of mine up in jail for what they call assault. Assault!” I stopped, chewed a moment, swallowed. “Then he kind of laughed and threw a coil of rope up onto his boat. It’s an old fishing galley he calls the Sister Mary Margaret, but about the only thing saintly about that boat are those words written right across the stern. Mr. Hornton did that work; he told me so.

“But the rest of the boat? It’s just an old hulk, all peeling paint with a line of barnacles showing along the waterline. Still, Mr. Hornton said it was a safe boat, and he told Mom that Mr. Hacker’s a good man, if a bit short-tempered. Said maybe he’d teach me a thing or two. He’s got about thirty lobster pots, and he nurses them like a mother hen. Can’t make more than a few hundred a month, and probably has twice that in expenses, but Mr. Hornton said it gives him a reason, yes it does.” I took another bite, time enough for Jake to ask:

“A reason? Mr. Hornton said it gives him a reason?”

“A reason to go on. Mr. Hornton says when you get to be his age and you’ve got one good-for-nothing son, an old wreck of a lobster boat, and your best friend’s cheated you out of the only other thing you ever owned, you’ve got to have something to get up in the morning for. Once you lose that something, whatever it is, well...” I looked over at Jake, and he gave me a funny smile. We were coming up on the ridge behind Deadman’s Bluff, a popular “naturalists’ ” beach, and heading on towards Long Point Lighthouse.

“Well, I told him I thought I understood,” I went on, “just as I later understood Mr. Hacker’s impatience with me. I didn’t have the right gear, just my denim jacket and my knapsack with my breakfast and school stuff in it. So Mr. Hacker, he gave me a sweatshirt and some gloves and told me where to stow my stuff. Then he said I was to give him a hand when he pulled the pots in, steady them when they came up. He said he’d handle the lobsters — if there were any, and if Gussie Murphy wasn’t stealing from his traps again.” I gave Jake a meaningful look, waited for a reaction.

“Ned Hacker’s been complaining about Gussie for years. But there’s never been any proof of it.”

I shrugged. “Then he said he’d maybe show me how to peg their claws. Crushers and cutters, Mr. Hacker told me; crushers and cutters and do you know what a full-grown ten pound lobster can do to a boy’s hand? Snap his fingers like a pencil — right in two! Then he snapped his fingers in my face and made me jump.”

Jake gave me a quick frown. I ignored it.

“But me, I just kept cool. I jumped, sure, but I kept a steady look on my face. He was testing me, and I didn’t want him to think I was some kind of wimp.”

Jake’s attention returned to the road. We both looked as we passed Deadman’s Bluff, but it was too late in the season for any “naturalists”; what a shame.

“So I told him I’d do my best, helped him untie the boat from the mooring. It was rolling under my feet a little — the boat, I mean — and I realized I’d forgotten my seasickness pills. I figured if I put my mind off of it, I’d be okay. I told him I was going to do my best, and I called him sir. It made him laugh, and he clapped me on the shoulder so hard I jumped again.”

“You are one damned polite kid,” Jake interjected.

“Then we were off. I never saw fog so thick, Jake. Like they say in books, you could have cut it with a knife. It was real eerie, but kind of pretty, too. Mr. Hacker had his lights on, and you could hear foghorns and bells over on the point and out on Smiley’s Landing. There wasn’t anybody out but us, and we just kind of chugged along, like we weren’t in any hurry. Mr. Hacker was quiet for a while, just whistling to himself. I think he looked kind of sad; even when he grinned at me, he looked sad. I started to think about what Mr. Hornton said about needing something to get up in the morning for, and I wondered if... if lobster pots and an old boat could be enough. Do you know what I mean? I never thought about life like that. But when you’re in a boat and there’s fog all around you and the sea is black underneath you, you start to think — about the animals all around you and under you and if there’s going to be anything in those traps today.”

“You’re really a deep thinker, aren’t you?” Jake said.

“Guess I’m kind of off the subject, aren’t I?”

“You keep talking, Herbie. I like to listen to you.” And strangely enough, Jake seemed to be just like Mr. Hacker had been earlier that morning, quiet, almost wistful. “Go on. You and Neddie talk about anything?”

“After a while we did. He had one old wooden trap stacked with his metal ones, and I asked him about it. He told me it had been a ghost trap. He said that ghost traps are ones that get lost under the water; their lines have been cut or snapped, but they’re still down there catching and killing animals — lobsters, crabs, fish, whatever. Whenever he pulls one up he keeps it, or if it’s in real bad shape, he tosses it out.”

“Ghost traps,” Jake murmured, but his mind, and his attention, seemed to be somewhere else.

“Yeah. He told me there’s part of an old wharf over on the north side of Smiley’s Island. It hasn’t been used in over sixty years. He said he’d show it to me someday, said it was destroyed when they built the canal back in the thirties. You can even see some of the old pilings, at low tide. Some rich man had a house out there on the island, and he had a deep channel dug out so his friends could tie up their sailboats and yachts when they came to visit. He built the wharf, too, but when they dredged for the canal, they tore down most of it. I’ve never heard of it, have you, Jake?”

But Jake didn’t seem to be listening just then; he was in another world. I shrugged. “Mr. Hacker said the guy was a runner. Made a lot of money and then just up and disappeared. I guess we were just passing the time, not talking about very much. He said that’s where he found the wooden trap, right near where the old wharf used to be.”

Jake was still quiet, frowning just a little. I figured I might as well go on.

“So, that’s how it went for a while. Then he told me to be looking for his colors... of his buoys? He had some there on the deck, tied to his traps. Yellow and blue — top is yellow and bottom blue. He pointed out some other colors as we went by them: red and white, those were Miltie Sheer’s, and orange and white, those were Berry Brubaker’s. Then there’s Gussie Murphy’s; we didn’t see any of his, but Mr. Hacker said his were yellow and green. He spit over the side when he talked about him. Then he told me he’d found a good spot for his traps, a new place that hadn’t been over-fished yet. It was off a little shelf just south of Smiley’s Island. I didn’t bother to correct him.”

“Correct him?” So Jake was still with me.

“Isn’t any shelf off Smiley’s Island,” I explained. “The shelf is actually all around us. The whole bay sits right on the shelf. It goes out about a hundred miles, and we were barely half a mile off the island. Mr. Hacker must have meant a drop, or a little trough, maybe. Anyhow, he said it was good deep water and cool and quiet, full of dead things lobsters like to eat. I didn’t correct him on that either, tell him lobsters are only scavengers, but—” I shrugged. Actually I was getting tired of listening to myself talk. I looked into the bag, wondering if I should start on the third doughnut.

“I’m listening, Herbie,” Jake said. “This trough, is that where you found the pot with the arm in it?”

“But, Jake, what does it matter? Maybe somebody had it in for Mr. O’Reilly and was just trying to get rid of the body.”

“As lobster bait?”

“Mr. Hacker uses whelk for lobster bait,” I said with a sigh. “He had a couple of buckets of them in the hold. They stink something awful.” Then I shrugged. I figured I’d taken this “investigation” about as far as I could. It seemed both Jake and I had no jurisdiction in this one. What I really wanted to say was this: what’s the point? Take me back to the institute, and I’ll hunt down Oscar and get on with my math. Instead I wearily went on.

“Neddie... Mr. Hacker... told me to start looking for his colors. The fog was letting up, but just a little. You could feel the sun more than you could see it. Then we found the first buoy marking some of his pots. Even in that fog he knew right where to go. He was real excited, too, and so was I, but the traps were all empty. Six traps and nothing in them, not even bait. Mr. Hacker got real quiet again and we rebaited them, lowered them back in. But he was different, not sad really, not any more. He was mad, and I remembered what Mr. Horn-ton said about his temper.”

“Six traps empty, Herbie, could be pretty important to Neddie. The price of lobster keeps going down, and he needs every one of them pots to be full. The bay’s just about fished out. He’s probably lucky if he finds something in one of every four or five pots.”

“But that wasn’t it,” I insisted. “He wasn’t disappointed — he was mad. And he spit over the side of the boat again. Then he looked at me and said, ‘That Gussie Murphy, he’s been at my traps again, and if I weren’t a good Catholic I’d be telling God and all the saints what they can do with the likes of him.’ ”

“Neddie said that?”

“Or something like it. He said he knew it was Mr. Murphy who’d been raiding his traps and that you people, I mean the police, aren’t doing anything about it.”

“Herbie, he’s been complaining about Gus Murphy for twenty years.”

I shrugged. “Anyhow, we went out a little farther. There was a real thick fog coming right off the canal. Mr. Hacker knew the way, though, and I kept checking for his colors. He’s a real good seaman, Jake, he knew every marker and rock along the way. But as he steered the boat I could hear him cursing Mr. Murphy, calling him some real bad names. Funny how politics can do that, right, Jake?”

“Politics?”

The doughnuts had made me thirsty; I had the juice box to my lips. “Mr. Hacker said it was politics, or maybe I just got the feeling it was. He kept saying...” I glanced over carefully at Jake. Another change had come over him: suddenly he had this strange, confused look on his face. “Damn that man and his bloody politics.”

“He said that?” Jake didn’t look at me. He was tapping his hand on the car door now, almost nervously, and frowning as we drove through the thick scrub pine woods that stretched from there to the point. The road was private from here on, but Jake, being a cop, probably didn’t care.

“He did.”

“He said that? He said bloody politics.”

“It’s just an expression, isn’t it? Mr. Hacker and Mr. Murphy, they’re both Irishmen, aren’t they?”

“Finish your story,” Jake said in a sort of cold, detached way.

“It was hard to find anybody’s buoys in that fog, but finally we did. We came up with six more empty traps and no lobsters. It was in the seventh pot, the last one, that we found the arm. Mr. Hacker thought it was bait at first, then he swore and dropped it on the deck.”

“What did he do then?” Jake asked, but he was like an automaton speaking. His mind was definitely somewhere else.

“Called the Coast Guard on his radio, then the state police, I guess.”

“You guess.” That elicited a small laugh, but it was cold, too. “Yeah, guess my department’s not high on Neddie’s list of people to call.”

“I haven’t been much help, have I?” I asked as I dropped the juice box and the third, half-eaten doughnut back in the wax-paper bag.

“I don’t know, Herbie.” And that sounded oddly enigmatic, coming from Jake. “Maybe you have.”

“Who was that?”

I paused too long, my answer not quick enough. “Jake... he’s my mother’s boyfriend.”

But Oscar was sharp, nearly as sharp as my old friend Mr. Hornton. With a shake of his pony-tailed head and a glare of his piercing blue eyes, he replied, “He’s a cop.”

“Yeah, but he’s my mother’s boyfriend, too.” I sighed and dumped my knapsack onto a chair.

“Hell, Herbie, are you digging up dead bodies again?” was Oscar’s response as he walked away from me to the work table in the middle of the room. On it sat what looked like an extremely sophisticated batter’s helmet, one with a gridwork of wires around the base. He smiled at me, picked up the thing, then plopped it on his head and sat down at a computer console.

But I was sharp, too; I knew what it was he was playing around with, something he’d been bragging about for weeks, something his older brother at M.I.T. had been working on. Oscar liked to talk about his brother Tony, and how every big electronics outfit from Boston to Tokyo was anxious to “pick his brain.” Now here was Oscar, with a virtual reality helmet on his head, probably stolen or “borrowed” from Tony.

“What are you doing with that?” I asked, hoping to deflect his attention from Jake and the fact that he had walked me in to the science building. I was also hoping to forget some of it myself, if only for a little while. I hadn’t liked the way Jake had grabbed my shoulder in the hall outside, said, “Seriously, Herbie, you’ve got to keep quiet about this. If the media got hold of this, it would ruin months of important police work.”

“You can count on me, Jake,” I had told him with all sincerity. It wasn’t until Jake had nodded at me, then at Oscar in the doorway to the lab, and turned to go that I had a funny feeling, a feeling that Jake had been talking in the past tense.

Past tense? It would ruin months of important police work? Like the investigation that someone — but not Jake — was starting on now? Or some other important police work? Some important police work done in the past?

“Isn’t all this stuff top secret or something?” I asked Oscar as my mind ticked away to this morning. Neddie Hacker and Gussie Murphy’s feud. Little Brucie Hacker, built like a small sumo wrestler, tucked away in county jail for beating up his girlfriend. Liam O’Reilly and his arm, and just where was the rest of him? And why had that part of him, a part that was so readily identifiable, been stuck in a lobster pot? Belonging to Neddie? But which was usually hauled up by Little Brucie?

And why was Jake acting so funny about all this? Why had he reacted so strangely to parts of my story?

“This junk?” Oscar said, answering my question. “Nah, this is just kid stuff, an early version of the real thing my brother’s working on. He let me take this to kick around with. It’s just a toy.”

I doubted that. It was no toy, and probably Oscar had just helped himself — as he’d been known to do before when he visited the amazing Tony. The institute probably didn’t even know he had it with him, or that he’d “borrowed” a couple of their computers and, from the look of it, had jury-rigged them together in order to make the helmet run or work or function, or whatever the right verb was when talking about virtual reality helmets.

“What does it do?” I asked Oscar, trying like heck to get my mind on something else for a little while.

“What does it do? Most people would ask how does it work,” Oscar laughed.

“How does it work?”

He laughed again. “If I can run this program right, I’ll be mountain climbing, Herb my man! Imagine that? Mountain climbing, but without any of the dangers. Oh, I’ll fall, all right, or feel a sense of falling, or dangling off a catchwire, but I’ll never hit the bottom or get scraped or bruised, and best of all, I’ll never get hurt or killed.”

“Then what’s the point?” I asked.

“What?”

I guess I asked the wrong — or right — question because Oscar pulled off the helmet, set it down, and spun all the way around in his chair to look at me.

“Don’t you see, Herbie? Don’t you understand? This is the future! The ultimate experience! In the future all of us — anyone at all — will be able to, say, go skin-diving and never have to worry about drowning, or... or...” Oscar was a terrible stammerer when he got excited, “or spelunking and not worry about a cave-in or getting lost, or... or this one, the program I got from Tony. If I can get the bloody thing to work.” He turned away, frowning, hand falling on a manual of some sort.

Bloody?

Bloody politics?

“There’ll be no danger, Herbie,” Oscar went on. “No sport or experience that can be denied anyone. Hey? Won’t that be great?”

“Then what’s the point?” I murmured, but I wasn’t listening to Oscar any more, not really. I was back on the Sister Mary Margaret, hearing Neddie Hacker say:

“Damn that man and his bloody politics.”

“Try to think of this as another reality, Herbie, not virtual reality, but an other reality, because what is reality anyhow but the way each individual perceives his or her place in the world? Can’t each of us visualize the same place differently? According to the artist, M. C. Escher, we are each the focus of our own world. I read that from a lecture he never gave, but anyhow, if I can make this—” he tapped the helmet as he scanned through the manual “—my world, then when I’m mountain climbing I’ll be in an other reality, one as real to me as the one you and I are inhabiting right now.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I was still lost, caught in the eerie reality of this morning. I didn’t need a virtual reality helmet, though, to see the fog drifting around me, to feel the damp chill in the wind off the canal, or to hear the slap of the waves against the sides of the boat.

“No maybe about it, Herb my man. This is the real thing,” Oscar said.

“M. C. Escher,” I said absently. “The Regular Division of the Plane.”

“Herbie?” That jerked his head up. “You know his book? You’ve read Escher?”

“Teacher of mine had a copy of his book on her desk.” I shrugged uneasily. “Full of pictures. I looked at it once or twice.”

“Pictures? Prints! Herbie! The man was a graphic artist! And a genius! What would he have done with virtual reality programming? Can you imagine?”

“No,” I replied softly, “I can’t.” But I could. Just as easily as I could imagine the arm sliding back and forth on the deck, tattoo revealed. Something was bothering me, eating me from the inside out. Pulling up the pots, the clanging of bells, the clapping of the water, the distant bray of a foghorn. There off Smiley’s Island, a few miles south of the head of the canal, in a little trough, a little deep spot full of cold, clean water, rested a group of pots. Neddie’s pots, meant to catch lobsters but catching something else instead. Who? How? Why?

“Here you go, Herb,” Oscar said, plunking down an algebra workbook in front of me. “Pages 110 to 116, all laid out for you. You got your calculator? I’ve got one if you need to borrow it.”

“No.” I rose, went to where I’d dumped my knapsack. But as I did, I felt wrapped in that fog again, could almost smell it, taste it, touch it. Fog so dense it diffused the light, making everything appear muted, dull, gray. Except the water around it. The water was always so intensely, so painfully, black.

“So you’re interested in Escher, are you?” Oscar had gone back to his previous interest, was fiddling with the helmet now. “We’ll have to talk about it someday. Have you ever seen his print, ‘Bond of Union’? If that isn’t virtual reality material, nothing is.”

“I think I like ‘Drawing Hands’ better,” I said, still caught in that fog and on that boat as I opened my knapsack. Immediately I was assaulted by the odors of lobster bait, fish, and diesel fuel.

“Whew, Herbie, what the hell is that?” Oscar said from across the room.

But that paled beside what I saw in the knapsack, and for a moment I had a flashing sensation that this wasn’t my knapsack, that somehow I had picked up a different one off Neddie Hacker’s boat. But it was mine, the old worn denim bag I carried books to school in, had put my breakfast in this morning, and that held my notebooks and calculator for my tutoring session. They were all still there... underneath the sweatshirt Neddie had tossed me. Then I remembered. After seeing the arm I’d gotten a little hot, a little sick at my stomach, and I’d pulled off the sweatshirt and stuffed it in there, not thinking. But the shirt Neddie had given me, one of Little Brucie’s, had been gray, an ordinary gray sweatshirt with a drawstring and hood. This sweatshirt, however, wasn’t gray, it was red.

“It’s red,” I said aloud, mind ticking back. Had I not noticed its color? No, it wasn’t like me not to see, not to take notice of even the smallest detail. This had been a gray sweatshirt this morning. This afternoon it was dull brick red.

I looked up at Oscar, who was looking at me, a funny expression on his face.

“Herbie? Are you all right? You look a little green, pal. Hey, what’s going on?”

I thrust the sweatshirt out at him. “It’s red.”

“So?” Oscar looked like he wanted to laugh but didn’t know what to laugh at.

“This morning it was gray.”

“Sure it was.”

“Escher played with reality. He made us see things differently. Your helmet, if you can get it to work, does the same thing. It makes an other reality. But, Oscar, the fog this morning, it changed reality, too. The dullness, the way the fog... obscures the light. No color. No bright colors. Not enough light. Or just enough light to make things look different, and seem different. Enough maybe, to make a red shirt look gray, or a blue buoy look green. That’s it. And that probably explains why Neddie complains about Gussie Murphy raiding his traps. Gussie probably does, but if it’s foggy, he doesn’t know he is, he can’t see the difference between... yes, just like someone couldn’t tell the difference when he put Liam—” I stopped; how much was I telling Oscar? Enough to make him stare at me in confusion. This had happened before, I wanted to tell him, that I had seen where others couldn’t see. Where I had understood what should have been so obvious; but wasn’t. And what I saw was this:

There were two possibilities. One, we had pulled the wrong pot, the wrong buoys. We’d mistaken Gussie Murphy’s colors for our own. But that was doubtful — Neddie knows right where to go and even in the fog, and after forty years of this kind of work — I was sure he knew his traps and buoys better than anyone. No, the second possibility was more likely.

That being that someone else had put the arm in the wrong trap. Yes. And why would someone, anyone, go to the trouble of putting an arm with a tattooed hand in a lobster pot? As a warning? As a threat? Or as a means to terrify someone into doing something or into not doing something?

Like putting a horse’s head in somebody’s bed, I said to myself. To terrify. Suddenly I pulled myself together, said quickly, “Look, Oscar, I’ve got to go, I, um, remembered something I have to do. I’ll see you later, okay?” I scooped up my things, was out of there.

And out of the fog.

I didn’t get home in time. They had already come and gone, and Mom was in bed with a headache and a heart full of fear. I had to play stupid, lie, and was finally able to convince her it had to be some other kid the two men in dark suits had come to ask about. They had been agents, she told me. They’d shown her their identification right away. No, she wasn’t sure whether they’d been state or federal agents.

I guessed the second. And even though Mom was real upset, she was able to tell me most of the questions the two men had asked her. I promised her I’d get in touch with Jake and he’d straighten the whole thing out. She went back to bed, and I made two phone calls. The first confirmed what I already suspected; the second was to Jake at the station. I just told him squarely that Mom had had “some visitors,” and we needed to talk, now.

He was there in less than twenty minutes, inquired politely about my mother (I told him she was sleeping, and she was), and we went out onto the porch of the house we were renting. I closed the door behind us — Mom’s bedroom was right off the living room — and pulled up a wicker chair, waiting for Jake to sit down and this time tell me everything. He wasn’t getting away with anything less.

“Liam O’Reilly was either a snitch or a cop, wasn’t he?” I finally broke the ice. I was watching Jake’s face carefully but saw nothing there, absolutely nothing, so I took a wild guess, the more probable one: “He was a cop. Undercover? Special agent? How about drug task force?”

“I told you, Herbie, you’re not involved in this.” He was completely straight-faced, cool, revealing nothing.

“Was that what he was working on? Drugs? Is Gussie Murphy involved in some kind of drug-smuggling ring? Cocaine? Marijuana? Or something else? Are they unloading drugs off the coast? And transferring them to the mainland through lobster pots? Am I right? They put the stuff in the lobster pots, then Gussie goes out later and gets it? Takes it to his restaurant or wherever their distribution point is? Is that what this is all about?”

Finally a reaction: he frowned, started to hunt for a cigarette in his sports jacket.

“And Mr. O’Reilly? What did he do? Find out too much? Or not enough? Was he a plant, or just a guy trying to make a deal with the Feds? Was Gussie going to betray the others — his gang — or whatever they call it? Then someone found out and killed Mr. O’Reilly and stuck his arm in one of Gussie’s traps to show him what would happen if he doublecrossed them? I guess Gussie and his traps would be pretty useful in an operation like that, wouldn’t they? Plenty of traffic in and out of the canal. Barges, freighters, fishing boats. But whoever killed Mr. O’Reilly, they got the wrong trap, Jake. They put the arm in Neddie’s trap because out in the fog they couldn’t tell green from blue. And it’s a mistake I bet they’ve made before except that Neddie hasn’t found out about it. I bet Brucie Hacker’s in on the whole deal, or at least he’s been making out from it, right? I bet he helps himself to whatever gets mistakenly dropped into his dad’s traps. Am I right, Jake, am I?”

“You think you’re a real bright fellow, don’t you, Herbie?”

“Two plainclothes policemen, agents, whatever, they came to see me this afternoon, except I wasn’t home. They must have got my name from Mr. Hacker, and they came and asked my mother if I ever got in trouble at school. They wanted to know if I hung around the Lobster Trap much, if I’d ever worked for Mr. Murphy, or run errands for him, stuff like that. They wanted to know if I ever behaved strangely, got secretive, or hid stuff in my room. Mom’s not stupid, Jake. She knew what they were asking, and now she’s in bed scared stiff that I’m mixed up with some drug gang. So you’d better tell me the truth this time. All of it. Mom’s so afraid she’s made herself sick.”

But Jake was just quiet, thoughtful. He studied me, studied the cigarette he was yet to light.

“Come on, Jake. You’ve already moved Neddie Hacker. He’s gone. His boat is gone. I called the harbormaster down the river, and he said the Coast Guard escorted him out this afternoon. He told all his friends that he was going off on a ‘little vacation.’ You didn’t arrest Mr. Hacker, but you took him off to a safe place, didn’t you?”

“You ever hear of the word lagan, Herbie?”

“No, but—”

“During Prohibition bootleggers would sometimes hide their booze in barrels or containers under the water, marked with a buoy so they could retrieve it later. It was called lagan. I suppose the word is equally relevant here.” He lit his cigarette, studying me intently as he did. “But why is this happening to you again, Herbie? Can you answer me that? No, forget it. I’m sorry your mother’s upset by all of this. I’ll talk to her later. And those two men, they won’t bother her again. I didn’t have time to get to them earlier.” He sighed. “But what I’m getting at is this: you haven’t stumbled onto some drug ring, though it might have been easier if you had. No, what you stumbled onto is a ring of arms smugglers, Herbie, IRA sympathizers, Gussie Murphy among them. They transfer guns and ammunition into Northern Ireland.”

“Jake?” It was as if he’d slapped me across the face.

“So it’s the other way around, isn’t it? Reverse your story, and substitute guns for drugs. There’s a group that’s been buying guns down south, some in Virginia, some in other states. They bring them up here in crates of produce: onions, squash, even watermelon, all things a man like Gussie Murphy might be buying for a restaurant, right? Anyhow, the guns are brought in on produce trucks, wrapped up in watertight plastic bags, and then taken out on lobster boats and from there transferred to traps marked with certain colors, in this case, Gussie’s colors. Someone in a fishing boat, passing through the canal, lowers a dinghy off the side and quickly checks out a few traps — in the early morning maybe, or maybe when it’s foggy. It’s got to be done fast, Herbie. Then the guns make their way up the coast, from boat to boat, and across the ocean to Belfast. It’s the IRA you’re mixed up with this time. The bloody IRA.”

“Bloody politics,” I muttered. “And the reason for Neddie Hacker and Gussie Murphy’s feud?”

“Everything I just told you I learned from Liam O’Reilly ten days ago. He’s been watching Gussie and his whole operation for six months now. I’m the local contact, the guy who’s supposed to help—” He stopped, bit his bottom lip. “Anyhow, it looks like Liam got too close, or he learned too much. Maybe Gussie was thinking of cooperating with us, who knows? The point is that you’re probably right, that arm was meant for Gussie to see, not you and Neddie.” He killed his cigarette in an old metal coaster sitting on the windowsill. “It confused us at first, being in Neddie’s trap.” He looked at me meaningfully as if to say if you hadn’t explained it to us, we would have figured it out... eventually. “Now Gussie’s gone dumb. Won’t talk. Protested rather strongly this afternoon when we showed him our warrants and searched everything he owns: restaurant, warehouse, boats, his house. But we came up with nothing. Zilch. Zero. No guns. Not a single blasted bullet. And according to the last message I got from Liam there were forty cases being moved this weekend.”

It was then I finally swore, looking quickly into the house hoping my mother hadn’t awoken and heard.

“So we think they’re lying low. If Gussie had pulled that trap — if the arm had been put in the right trap — Liam O’Reilly would be just another missing person. And this just another dead-end investigation.”

“That phone call you made this morning. It was to the FBI, or the ATF, and—”

“Let’s just call them an important federal agency.” He managed a weak smile.

“So he got real close, didn’t he? Mr. O’Reilly?” I paused, seeing another angle to this. “And you got to know him pretty well, didn’t you, Jake?”

“Yeah.” He started fishing for another cigarette.

“But now you can’t get them, the people who did this to him.”

“According to Liam there’s got to be forty cases of guns somewhere.” He shook his head. “Maybe they found someplace else to hide them, someplace we haven’t thought of. And maybe he was wrong, maybe they did get them out and they’re halfway to Belfast on a fishing boat right now.”

“And maybe they’re out there, Jake. Maybe the guns are out there now.”

“Out where?”

“In the water! Isn’t it the best place to hide something? Like you said — lagan?”

“Herbie, don’t you think we’ve checked every pot in the bay? Pulled every buoy from here to West Doversport and back? Plus found excuses to go aboard half a dozen boats we’ve been suspicious of. Nothing.” Another weak smile. “And we certainly can’t drag the whole bay, though we’ve thought about it.”

“Runners,” I said. “That’s what the guy who built that wharf was, who had the big house on the island back in the twenties. Mr. Hacker called him a runner, a bootlegger, Jake! The wharf got torn down when they built the canal. They probably had to widen and dredge that whole area north of Smiley’s Island.”

“Herbie, that’s real interesting, but I don’t think it’s got much to do with—”

I interrupted, not a very polite thing to do but sometimes it doesn’t pay to be polite. “I told you, Jake, some of the wharf pilings are still there. They’re underwater, but Neddie said you can still see them if you know where to look. He and Gussie Murphy were partners once, weren’t they? And the water’s deep there. You could drop forty pots or forty crates of guns in watertight containers and no one’d find them. No one’d know they’re there. You could even mark them with an underwater buoy, attach it to one of the pilings that’s still standing, and unless you looked straight down, and knew where to look, you’d never find them.”

“I’m not sure, Herbie, the current’s pretty swift that side of the island.”

“Mr. Hacker told me he pulled a ghost trap out of there, or he called it that, a ghost trap. But I bet it was being used to hold guns.”

“I suppose it’s worth a look. But you are staying here. I’ve just finished convincing two—” he stopped short, was a breath away from telling me whom he’d been working with, but smiled instead “—colleagues, that you’re a harmless little kid — a stupid little kid — who just happened to be with Neddie when he made his discovery. So you are staying put. Right here, my boy. Besides, your mother’s going to need you later.”

It was only with great reluctance that I had to agree. I wished him luck before he left.

I don’t get satisfaction from knowing things others don’t. I don’t enjoy the fact that I sometimes appear smarter than a good many of the adults around me. Because I do realize there are an awful lot of people smarter than me. It’s just that it sometimes happens that the adults who are supposed to know certain things too often just don’t. And I really think that if you’re part of a federal task force and your assignment is to infiltrate some Irish-American gun-running gang it might help to have more than twenty years’ experience working undercover and an Irish name.

It might just help to know the area, too, and the fact that this particular gang was merely borrowing on a history that, having proved effective in the past, was proving to be similarly so in the present. Because if Mr. Liam O’Reilly had known that seventy years ago Joe “Smiley” Corrigan, known as one of the biggest bootleggers along the whole Eastern seaboard, had smuggled liquor into the country by way of fishing boats and lobster traps, and had even set up a complex network of buoys and nets strung out across what would be in the future the entrance to the Cape Cod Canal, well then, maybe he wouldn’t have gone out that night, wouldn’t have trusted the two men who claimed to have “some information” for him. Not that he could have known what would happen to him, that he would be tied up, body weighted down, minus one arm — an arm that would subsequently be used to “insure” Gussie Murphy’s further cooperation except they put it in the wrong trap — then anchored to the bottom of a piling on a wharf most people never even knew had existed, just north of Smiley’s Island...

Alongside a cache of forty crates of guns, ammunition, and explosives, destined for Northern Ireland.

No, maybe if he’d known a few more things, Mr. O’Reilly might have changed his plans for that night. Just maybe he might have.