Jaws

ONE

The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills. There was little other motion: an occasional correction of the apparently aimless course by the slight raising or lowering of a pectoral fin — as a bird changes direction by dipping one wing and lifting the other. The eyes were sightless in the black, and the other senses transmitted nothing extraordinary to the small, primitive brain. The fish might have been asleep, save for the movement dictated by countless millions of years of instinctive continuity: lacking the flotation bladder common to other fish and the fluttering flaps to push oxygen-bearing water through its gills, it survived only by moving. Once stopped, it would sink to the bottom and die of anoxia.

The land seemed almost as dark as the water, for there was no moon. All that separated sea from shore was a long, straight stretch of beach — so white that it shone. From a house behind the grass-splotched dunes, lights cast yellow glimmers on the sand.

The front door to the house opened, and a man and a woman stepped out onto the wooden porch. They stood for a moment staring at the sea, embraced quickly, and scampered down the few steps onto the sand. The man was drunk, and he stumbled on the bottom step. The woman laughed and took his hand, and together they ran to the beach.

“First a swim,” said the woman, “to clear your head.”

“Forget my head,” said the man. Giggling, he fell backward onto the sand, pulling the woman down with him. They fumbled with each other’s clothing, twined limbs around limbs, and thrashed with urgent ardor on the cold sand.

Afterward, the man lay back and closed his eyes. The woman looked at him and smiled. “Now, how about that swim?” she said.

“You go ahead. I’ll wait for you here.”

The woman rose and walked to where the gentle surf washed over her ankles. The water was colder than the night air, for it was only mid-June. The woman called back, “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” But there was no answer from the sleeping man.

She backed up a few steps, then ran at the water. At first her strides were long and graceful, but then a small wave crashed into her knees. She faltered, regained her footing, and flung herself over the next waist-high wave. The water was only up to her hips, so she stood, pushed the hair out of her eyes, and continued walking until the water covered her shoulders. There she began to swim — with the jerky, head-above-water stroke of the untutored.

A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm. It did not see the woman, nor yet did it smell her. Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibrations and signaled the brain. The fish turned towards shore.

The woman continued to swim away from the beach, stopping now and then to check her position by the lights shining from the house. The tide was slack, so she had not moved up or down the beach. But she was tiring, so she rested for a moment, treading water, and then started for shore.

The vibrations were stronger now, and the fish recognized prey. The sweeps of its tail quickened, thrusting the giant body forward with a speed that agitated the tiny phosphorescent animals in the water and caused them to glow, casting a mantle of sparks over the fish.

The fish closed on the woman and hurtled past, a dozen feet to the side and six feet below the surface. The woman felt only a wave of pressure that seemed to lift her up in the water and ease her down again. She stopped swimming and held her breath. Feeling nothing further, she resumed her lurching stroke.

The fish smelled her now, and the vibrations — erratic and sharp — signaled distress. The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss. A series of tremors shook its body.

For the first time, the woman felt fear, though she did not know why. Adrenaline shot through her trunk and her limbs, generating a tingling heat and urging her to swim faster. She guessed that she was fifty yards from shore. She could see the line of white foam where the waves broke on the beach. She saw the lights in the house, and for a comforting moment she thought she saw someone pass by one of the windows.

The fish was about forty feet from the woman, off to the side, when it turned suddenly to the left, dropped entirely below the surface, and, with two quick thrusts of its tail, was upon her.

At first, the woman thought she had snagged her leg on a rock or a piece of floating wood. There was no initial pain, only one violent tug on her right leg. She reached down to touch her foot, treading water with her left leg to keep her head up, feeling in the blackness with her left hand. She could not find her foot. She reached higher on her leg, and then she was overcome by a rush of nausea and dizziness. Her groping fingers had found a nub of bone and tattered flesh. She knew that the warm, pulsing flow over her fingers in the chill water was her own blood.

Pain and panic struck together. The woman threw her head back and screamed a guttural cry of terror.

The fish had moved away. It swallowed the woman’s limb without chewing. Bones and meat passed down the massive gullet in a single spasm. Now the fish turned again, homing on the stream of blood flushing from the woman’s femoral artery, a beacon as clear and true as a lighthouse on a cloudless night. This time the fish attacked from below. It hurtled up under the woman, jaws agape. The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water. The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly. The fish, with the woman’s body in its mouth, smashed down on the water with a thunderous splash, spewing foam and blood and phosphorescence in a gaudy shower.

Below the surface, the fish shook its head from side to side, its serrated triangular teeth sawing through what little sinew still resisted. The corpse fell apart. The fish swallowed, then turned to continue feeding. Its brain still registered the signals of nearby prey. The water was laced with blood and shreds of flesh, and the fish could not sort signal from substance. It cut back and forth through the dissipating cloud of blood, opening and closing its mouth, seining for a random morsel. But by now, most of the pieces of the corpse had dispersed. A few sank slowly, coming to rest on the sandy bottom, where they moved lazily in the current. A few drifted away just below the surface, floating in the surge that ended in the surf.

The man awoke, shivering in the early morning cold. His mouth was sticky and dry, and his wakening belch tasted of Bourbon and corn. The sun had not yet risen, but a line of pink on the eastern horizon told him that daybreak was near. The stars still hung faintly in the lightening sky. The man stood and began to dress. He was annoyed that the woman had not woken him when she went back to the house, and he found it curious that she had left her clothes on the beach. He picked them up and walked to the house.

He tiptoed across the porch and gently opened the screen door, remembering that it screeched when yanked. The living room was dark and empty, littered with half-empty glasses, ashtrays, and dirty plates. He walked across the living room, turned right down a hall, past two closed doors. The door to the room he shared with the woman was open, and a bedside light was on. Both beds were made. He tossed the woman’s clothes on one of the beds, then returned to the living room and switched on a light. Both couches were empty.

There were two more bedrooms in the house. The owners slept in one. Two other house guests occupied the other. As quietly as possible, the man opened the door to the first bedroom. There were two beds, each obviously containing only one person. He closed the door and moved to the next room. The host and hostess were asleep on each side of a king-size bed. The man closed the door and went back to his room to find his watch. It was nearly five.

He sat on one bed and stared at the bundle of clothes on the other. He was certain the woman wasn’t in the house. There had been no other guests for dinner, so unless she had met someone on the beach while he slept, she couldn’t have gone off with anyone. And even if she had, he thought, she probably would have taken at least some of her clothes.

Only then did he permit his mind to consider the possibility of an accident. Very quickly the possibility became a certainty. He returned to the host’s bedroom, hesitated for a moment beside the bed, and then softly placed his hand on a shoulder.

“Jack,” he said, patting the shoulder. “Hey, Jack.”

The man sighed and opened his eyes. “What?”

“It’s me. Tom. I hate like hell to wake you up, but I think we may have a problem.”

“What problem?”

“Have you seen Chrissie?”

“What do you mean, have I seen Chrissie? She’s with you.”

“No, she isn’t. I mean, I can’t find her.”

Jack sat up and turned on a light. His wife stirred and covered her head with a sheet. Jack looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ. It’s five in the morning. And you can’t find your date.”

“I know,” said Tom. “I’m sorry. Do you remember when you saw her last?”

“Sure I remember. She said you were going for a swim, and you both went out on the porch. When did you see her last?”

“On the beach. Then I fell asleep. You mean she didn’t come back?”

“Not that I saw. At least not before we went to bed, and that was around one.”

“I found her clothes.”

“Where? On the beach?”

“Yes.”

“You looked in the living room?”

Tom nodded. “And in the Henkels’ room.”

“The Henkels’ room!”

Tom blushed. “I haven’t known her that long. For all I know she could be a little weird. So could the Henkels. I mean, I’m not suggesting anything. I just wanted to check the whole house before I woke you up.”

“So what do you think?”

“What I’m beginning to think,” said Tom, “is that maybe she had an accident. Maybe she drowned.”

Jack looked at him for a moment, then glanced again at his watch. “I don’t know what time the police in this town go to work,” he said, “but I guess this is as good a time as any to find out.”

TWO

Patrolman Len Hendricks sat at his desk in the Amity police station, reading a detective novel called Deadly, I’m Yours. At the moment the phone rang the heroine, a girl named Whistling Dixie, was about to be raped by a motorcycle club. Hendricks let the phone ring until Miss Dixie castrated the first of her attackers with a linoleum knife she had secreted in her hair.

He picked up the phone. “Amity Police, Patrolman Hendricks,” he said. “Can I help you?”

“This is Jack Foote, over on Old Mill Road. I want to report a missing person. Or at least I think she’s missing.”

“Say again, sir?” Hendricks had served in Vietnam as a radio man, and he was fond of military terminology.

“One of my house guests went for a swim at about one this morning,” said Foote. “She hasn’t came back yet. Her date found her clothes on the beach.”

Hendricks began to scribble on a pad. “What was the person’s name?”

“Christine Watkins.”

“Age?”

“I don’t know. Just a second. Say around twenty-five. Her date says that’s about right.”

“Height and weight?”

“Wait a minute.” There was a pause. “We think probably about five-seven, between one twenty and one thirty.”

“Color of hair and eyes?”

“Listen, Officer, why do you need all this? If the woman’s drowned, she’s probably going to be the only one you have — at least tonight, right? You don’t average more than one drowning around here each night, do you?”

“Who said she drowned, Mr. Foote? Maybe she went for a walk.”

“Stark naked at one in the morning? Have you had any reports about a woman walking around naked?”

Hendricks relished the chance to be insufferably cool. “No, Mr. Foote, not yet. But once the summer season starts, you never know what to expect. Last August, a bunch of faggots staged a dance out by the club — a nude dance. Color of hair and eyes?”

“Her hair is… oh, dirty blond, I guess. Sandy. I don’t know what color her eyes are. I’ll have to ask her date. No, he says he doesn’t know either. Let’s say hazel.”

“Okay, Mr. Foote. We’ll get on it. As soon as we find out anything, we’ll contact you.”

Hendricks hung up the phone and looked at his watch. It was 5.10. The chief wouldn’t be up for an hour, and Hendricks wasn’t anxious to wake him up for something as vague as a missing-person report. For all anybody knew, the broad was off humping in the bushes with some guy she met on the beach. On the other hand, if she was washed up somewhere, Chief Brody would want the whole thing taken care of before the body was found by some nanny with a couple of young kids and it became a public nuisance.

Judgment, that’s what the chief kept telling him he needed; that’s what makes a good cop. And the cerebral challenge of police work had played a part in Hendricks’ decision to join the Amity force after he returned from Vietnam. The pay was fair: $9,000 to start, $15,000 after fifteen years, plus fringes. Police work offered security, regular hours, and the chance for some fun — not just thumping unruly kids or collaring drunks, but solving burglaries, trying to catch the occasional rapist (the summer before, a black gardener had raped seven rich white women, not one of whom would appear in court to testify against him), and — on a slightly more elevated plane — the opportunity to become a respected, contributing member of the community. And being an Amity cop was not very dangerous, certainly nothing like working for a metropolitan force. The last duty-related fatality of an Amity policeman occurred in 1957 when an officer had tried to stop a drunk speeding along the Montauk Highway and had been run off the road into a stone wall.

Hendricks was convinced that as soon as he could get sprung from this God-forsaken midnight-to-eight shift, he would start to enjoy his work. For the time being, though, it was a drag. He knew perfectly well why he had the late shift. Chief Brody liked to break in his young men slowly, letting them develop the fundamentals of police work — good sense, sound judgment, tolerance, and politeness — at a time of day when they wouldn’t be overtaxed.

The business shift was 8.00 AM to 4.00 PM, and it called for experience and diplomacy. Six men worked that shift. One handled the summertime traffic at the intersection of Main and Water streets. Two patrolled in squad cars. One manned the phones at the station house. One handled the clerical work. And the chief handled the public — the ladies who complained that they were unable to sleep because of the din coming from the Randy Bear or Saxon’s, the town’s two gin mills; the homeowners who complained that bums were littering the beaches or disturbing the peace; and the vacationing bankers and brokers and lawyers who stopped in to discuss their various plans for keeping Amity a pristine and exclusive summer colony.

Four to midnight was the trouble shift, when the young studs from the Hamptons would flock to the Randy Bear and get involved in a fight or simply get so drunk that they became a menace on the roads; when, very rarely, a couple of predators from Queens would lurk in the dark side streets and mug passersby; and when, about twice a month in the summer, enough evidence having accumulated, the police would feel obliged to stage a pot bust at one of the huge waterfront homes. There were six men on four to midnight, the six largest men on the force, all between thirty and fifty years old.

Midnight to eight was usually quiet. For nine months of the year, peace was virtually guaranteed. The biggest event of the previous winter had been an electrical storm that had set off all the alarms linking the police station to forty-eight of Amity’s biggest and most expensive homes. Normally during the summer, the midnight-to-eight shift was manned by three officers. One, however, a young fellow named Dick Angelo, was now taking his two-week leave before the season began to swing. The other was a thirty-year veteran named Henry Kimble, who had chosen the midnight-to-eight shift because it permitted him to catch up on his sleep — he held a daytime job as a bartender at Saxon’s. Hendricks tried to raise Kimble on the radio — to get him to take a walk along the beach by Old Mill Road — but he knew the attempt was hopeless. As usual, Kimble was sound asleep in a squad car parked behind the Amity Pharmacy. And so Hendricks picked up the phone and dialed Chief Brody’s home number.

Brody was asleep, in that fitful state before waking when dreams rapidly change and there are moments of bleary semiconsciousness. The first ring of the phone was assimilated into his dream — a vision that he was back in high school groping a girl on a stairwell. The second ring snapped the vision. He rolled over and picked up the receiver.

“Yeah?”

“Chief, this is Hendricks. I hate to bother you this early, but—”

“What time is it?”

“Five-twenty.”

“Leonard, this better be good.”

“I think we’ve got a floater on our hands, Chief.”

“A floater? What in Christ’s name is a floater?”

It was a word Hendricks had picked up from his night reading. “A drowning,” he said, embarrassed. He told Brody about the phone call from Foote. “I didn’t know if you’d want to check it out before people start swimming. I mean, it looks like it’s going to be a nice day.”

Brody heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Where’s Kimble?” he said and then added quickly, “Oh, never mind. It was a stupid question. One of these days I’m going to fix that radio of his so he can’t turn it off.”

Hendricks waited a moment, then said, “Like I said, Chief, I hate to bother…”

“Yeah, I know, Leonard. You were right to call. As long as I’m awake, I might as well get up. I’ll shave and shower and grab some coffee, and on my way in I’ll take a look along the beach in front of Old Mill and Scotch, just to make sure your ‘floater’ isn’t cluttering up somebody’s beach. Then when the day boys come on, I’ll go out and talk to Foote and the girl’s date. I’ll see you later.”

Brody hung up the phone and stretched. He looked at his wife, lying next to him in the double bed. She had stirred when the phone rang, but as soon as she determined that there was no emergency, she lapsed back into sleep.

Ellen Brody was thirty-six, five years younger than her husband, and the fact that she looked barely thirty was a source of both pride and annoyance to Brody: pride because, since she looked handsome and young and was married to him, she made him seem a man of excellent taste and substantial attraction; annoyance because she had been able to keep her good looks despite the strains of bearing three children, whereas Brody — though hardly fat at six-foot-one and two hundred pounds — was beginning to be concerned about his blood pressure and his thickening middle. Sometimes during the summer, Brody would catch himself gazing with idle lust at one of the young, long-legged girls who pranced around town — their untethered breasts bouncing beneath the thinnest of cotton jerseys. But he never enjoyed the sensation, for it always made him wonder whether Ellen felt the same stirring when she looked at the tanned, slim young men who so perfectly complemented the long-legged girls. And as soon as that thought occurred to him, he felt still worse, for he recognized it as a sign that he was on the unfortunate side of forty and had already lived more than half his life.

Summers were bad times for Ellen Brody, for in summer she was tortured by thoughts she didn’t want to think — thoughts of chances missed and lives that could have been. She saw people she had grown up with: prep school classmates now married to bankers and brokers, summering in Amity and wintering in New York, graceful women who stroked tennis balls and enlivened conversations with equal ease, women who (Ellen was convinced) joked among themselves about Ellen Shepherd marrying that policeman because he got her pregnant in the back seat of his 1948 Ford, which had not been the case.

Ellen was twenty-one when she met Brody. She had just finished her junior year at Wellesley and was spending the summer in Amity with her parents — as she had done for the previous eleven summers, ever since her father’s advertising agency transferred him from Los Angeles to New York. Although, unlike several of her friends, Ellen Shepherd was hardly obsessed by marriage, she assumed that within a year or two after finishing college she would wed someone from approximately her own social and financial station. The thought neither distressed nor delighted her. She enjoyed the modest wealth her father had earned, and she knew her mother did too. But she was not eager to live a life that was a repetition of her parents’. She was familiar with the petty social problems, and they bored her. She considered herself a simple girl, proud of the fact that in the yearbook for the class of 1953 at Miss Porter’s School she was voted Most Sincere.

Her first contact with Brody was professional. She was arrested — or, rather, her date was. It was late at night, and she was being driven home by an extremely drunk young man intent on driving very fast down very narrow streets. The car was intercepted and stopped by a policeman who impressed Ellen with his youth, his looks, and his civility. After issuing a summons, he confiscated the keys to Ellen’s date’s car and drove them both to their respective homes. The next morning, Ellen was shopping when she found herself next to the police station. As a lark, she walked in and asked the name of the young officer who had been working at about midnight the night before. Then she went home and wrote Brody a thank-you note for being so nice, and she also wrote a note to the chief of police commending young Martin Brody. Brody telephoned to thank her for her thank-you note.

When he asked her out to dinner and the movies on his night off, she accepted out of curiosity. She had scarcely ever talked to a policeman, let alone gone out with one. Brody was nervous, but Ellen seemed so genuinely interested in him and his work that he eventually calmed down enough to have a good time, Ellen found him delightful: strong, simple, kind — sincere. He had been a policeman for six years. He said his ambition was to be chief of the Amity force, to have sons to take duck-shooting in the fall, to save enough money to take a real vacation every second or third year.

They were married that November. Ellen’s parents had wanted her to finish college, and Brody had been willing to wait until the following summer, but Ellen couldn’t imagine that one more year of college could make any difference in the life she had chosen to lead.

There were some awkward moments during the first few years. Ellen’s friends would ask them to dinner or lunch or for a swim, and they would go, but Brody would feel ill at ease and patronized. When they got together with Brody’s friends, Ellen’s past seemed to stifle fun. People behaved as if they were fearful of committing a faux pas. Gradually, as friendships developed, the awkwardness disappeared. But they never saw any of Ellen’s old friends any more. Although the shedding of the “summer people” stigma earned her the affection of the year-round residents of Amity, it cost her much that was pleasant and familiar from the first twenty-one years of her life. It was as if she had moved to another country.

Until about four years ago, the estrangement hadn’t bothered her. She was too busy, and too happy, raising children to let her mind linger on alternatives long past. But when her last child started school, she found herself adrift, and she began to dwell on memories of how her mother had lived her life once her children had begun to detach from her: shopping excursions (fun because there was enough money to buy all but the most outrageously expensive items), long lunches with friends, tennis, cocktail parties, weekend trips. What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.

At first she tried to reestablish bonds with friends she hadn’t seen in ten years, but all commonality of interest and experience had long since vanished. Ellen talked gaily about the community, about local politics, about her job as a volunteer at the Southampton Hospital — all subjects about which her old friends, many of whom had been coming to Amity every summer for more than thirty years, knew little and cared less. They talked about New York politics, about art galleries and painters and writers they knew. Most conversations ended with feeble reminiscences and speculations about where old friends were now. Always there were pledges about calling each other and getting together again.

Once in a while she would try to make new friends among the summer people she hadn’t known, but the associations were forced and brief. They might have endured if Ellen had been less self-conscious about her house, about her husband’s job and how poorly it paid. She made sure that everyone she met knew she had started her Amity life on an entirely different plane. She was aware of what she was doing, and she hated herself for it, because in fact she loved her husband deeply, adored her children, and — for most of the year — was quite content with her lot… By now, she had largely given up active forays into the summer community, but the resentments and the longings lingered. She was unhappy, and she took out most of her unhappiness on her husband, a fact that both of them understood but only he could tolerate. She wished she could go into suspended animation for that quarter of every year.

Brody rolled over toward Ellen, raising himself up on one elbow and resting his head on his hand. With his other hand he flicked away a strand of hair that was tickling Ellen’s nose and making it twitch. He still had an erection from the remnants of his last dream, and he debated rousing her for a quick bit of sex. He knew she was a slow waker and her early morning moods were more cantankerous than romantic. Still, it would be fun. There had not been much sex in the Brody house-hold recently. There seldom was, when Ellen was in her summer moods.

Just then, Ellen’s mouth fell open and she began to snore. Brody felt himself turn off as quickly as if someone had poured ice water on his loins. He got up and went into the bathroom.

It was nearly 6.30 when Brody turned onto Old Mill Road. The sun was well up. It had lost its daybreak red and was turning from orange to bright yellow. The sky was cloudless.

Theoretically, there was a statutory right-of-way between each house, to permit public access to the beach, which could be privately owned only to the mean-high-water mark. But the rights-of-way between most houses were filled with garages or privet hedges. From the road there was no view of the beach. All Brody could see was the tops of the dunes. So every hundred yards or so he had to stop the squad car and walk up a driveway to reach a point from which he could survey the beach.

There was no sign of a body. All he saw on the broad, white expanse was a few pieces of driftwood, a can or two, and a yard-wide belt of seaweed and kelp pushed ashore by the southerly breeze. There was practically no surf, so if a body was floating on the surface it would have been visible. If there is a floater out there, Brody thought, it’s floating beneath the surface and I’ll never see it till it washes up.

By seven o’clock Brody had covered the whole beach along Old Mill and Scotch roads. The only thing he had seen that struck him as even remotely odd was a paper plate on which sat three scalloped orange rinds — a sign that the summer’s beach picnics were going to be more elegant than ever.

He drove back along Scotch Road, turned north toward town on Bayberry Lane, and arrived at the station house at 7.10.

Hendricks was finishing up his paper work when Brody walked in, and he looked disappointed that Brody wasn’t dragging a corpse behind him. “No luck, Chief?” he said.

“That depends on what you mean by luck, Leonard. If you mean did I find a body and if I didn’t isn’t it too bad, the answer to both questions is no. Is Kimble in yet?”

“No.”

“Well, I hope he isn’t asleep. That’d look just dandy, having him snoring away in a cop car when people start to do their shopping.”

“He’ll be here by eight,” said Hendricks. “He always is.”

Brody poured himself a cup of coffee, walked into his office, and began to flip through the morning papers — the early edition of the New York Daily News and the local paper, the Amity Leader, which came out weekly in the winter and daily in the summer.

Kimble arrived a little before eight, looking, aptly enough, as if he had been sleeping in his uniform, and he had a cup of coffee with Hendricks while they waited for the day shift to appear. Hendricks’ replacement came in at eight sharp, and Hendricks was putting on his leather flight jacket and getting ready to leave when Brody came out of his office.

“I’m going out to see Foote, Leonard,” Brody said. “You want to come along? You don’t have to, but I thought you might want to follow up on your… floater.” Brody smiled.

“Sure, I guess so,” said Hendricks. “I got nothing else going today, so I can sleep all afternoon.”

They drove out in Brody’s car. As they pulled into Foote’s driveway, Hendricks said, “What do you bet they’re all asleep? I remember last summer a woman called at one in the morning and asked if I could come out as early as possible the next morning because she thought some of her jewelry was missing. I offered to go right then, but she said no, she was going to bed. Anyway, I showed up at ten o’clock the next morning and she threw me out. ‘I didn’t mean this early,’ she says.”

“We’ll see,” said Brody. “If they’re really worried about this dame, they’ll be awake.”

The door opened almost before Brody had finished knocking. “We’ve been waiting to hear from you,” said a young man. “I’m Tom Cassidy. Did you find her?”

“I’m Chief Brody. This is Officer Hendricks. No, Mr. Cassidy, we didn’t find her. Can we come in?”

“Oh sure, sure. I’m sorry. Go on in the riving room. I’ll get the Footes.”

It took less than five minutes for Brody to learn everything he felt he needed to know. Then, as much to seem thorough as from any hope of learning anything useful, he asked to see the missing woman’s clothes. He was shown into the bedroom, and he looked through the clothing on the bed.

“She didn’t have a bathing suit with her?”

“No,” said Cassidy. “It’s in the top drawer over there. I looked.”

Brody paused for a moment, taking care with his words, then said, “Mr. Cassidy, I don’t mean to sound flip or anything, but has this Miss Watkins got a habit of doing strange things? I mean, like taking off in the middle of the night… or walking around naked?”

“Not that I know of,” said Cassidy. “But I really don’t know her too well.”

“I see,” said Brody. “Then I guess we’d better go down to the beach again. You don’t have to come. Hendricks and I can handle it.”

“I’d like to come, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. I just thought you might not want to.”

The three men walked down to the beach. Cassidy showed the policemen where he had fallen asleep — the indentation his body had made in the sand had not been disturbed — and he pointed out where he had found the woman’s clothes.

Brody looked up and down the beach. For as far as he could see, more than a mile in both directions, the beach was empty. Clumps of seaweed were the only dark spots on the white sand. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “Leonard, you go east as far as the point. Mr. Cassidy, let’s you and I go west. You got your whistle, Leonard? Just in case.”

“I’ve got it,” said Hendricks. “You care if I take my shoes off? It’s easier walking on the hard sand, I don’t want to get them wet.”

“I don’t care,” said Brody. “Technically you’re off duty. You can take your pants off if you want. Of course, then I’ll arrest you for indecent exposure.”

Hendricks started eastward. The wet sand felt crisp and cool on his feet. He walked with his head down and his hands in his pockets, looking at the tiny shells and tangles of seaweed. A few bugs — they looked like little black beetles — skittered out of his path, and when the wavewash receded, he saw minute bubbles pop above the holes made by sandworms. He enjoyed the walk. It was a funny thing, he thought, that when you live all your life in a place, you almost never do the things that tourists go there to do — like walk on the beach or go swimming in the ocean. He couldn’t remember the last time he went swimming. He wasn’t even sure he still owned a bathing suit. It was like something he had heard about New York — that half the people who live in the city never go to the top of the Empire State Building or visit the Statue of Liberty.

Every now and then, Hendricks looked up to see how much closer he was to the point. Once he turned back to see if Brody and Cassidy had found anything. He guessed that they were nearly half a mile away.

As he turned back and started walking again, Hendricks saw something ahead of him, a clump of weed and kelp that seemed unusually large. He was about thirty yards away from the clump when he began to think the weed might be clinging to something.

When he reached the clump, Hendricks bent down to pull some of the weed away. Suddenly he stopped. For a few seconds he stared, frozen rigid. He fumbled in his pants pocket for his whistle, put it to his lips, and tried to blow; instead, he vomited, staggered back, and fell to his knees.

Snarled within the clump of weed was a woman’s head, still attached to shoulders, part of an arm, and about a third of her trunk. The mass of tattered flesh was a mottled blue-gray, and as Hendricks spilled his guts into the sand, he thought — and the thought made him retch again — that the woman’s remaining breast looked as flat as a flower pressed in a memory book.

“Wait,” said Brody, stopping and touching Cassidy’s arm. “I think that was a whistle.” He listened, squinting into the morning sun. He saw a black spot on the sand, which he assumed was Hendricks, and then he heard the whistle more clearly. “Come on,” he said, and the two men began to trot along the sand.

Hendricks was still on his knees when they got to him. He had stopped puking, but his head still hung, mouth open, and his breathing rattled with phlegm.

Brody was several steps ahead of Cassidy, and he said, “Mr. Cassidy, stay back there a second, will you?” He pulled apart some of the weeds, and when he saw what was inside, he felt bile rise in his throat. He swallowed and closed his eyes. After a moment he said, “You might as well look now, Mr. Cassidy, and tell me if it’s her or not.”

Cassidy was terrified. His eyes shifted between the exhausted Hendricks and the mass of weed. “That?” he said, pointing at the weed. Reflexively, he stepped backward. “That thing? What do you mean it’s her?”

Brody was still fighting to control his stomach. “I think,” he said, “that it may be part of her.”

Reluctantly, Cassidy shuffled forward. Brody held back a piece of weed so Cassidy could get a clear look at the gray and gaping face. “Oh, my God!” said Cassidy, and he put a hand to his mouth.

“Is it her?”

Cassidy nodded, still staring at the face. Then he turned away and said, “What happened to her?”

“I can’t be sure,” said Brody. “Offhand, I’d say she was attacked by a shark.”

Cassidy’s knees buckled, and as he sank to the sand, he said, “I think I’m going to be sick.” He put his head down and retched.

The stink of vomit reached Brody almost instantly, and he knew he had lost his struggle. “Join the crowd,” he said, and he vomited too.

THREE

Several minutes passed before Brody felt well enough to stand, walk back to his car, and call for an ambulance from the Southampton Hospital, and it was almost an hour before the ambulance arrived and the truncated corpse was stuffed into a rubber bag and hauled away.

By eleven o’clock, Brody was back in his office, filling out forms about the accident. He had completed everything but “cause of death” when the phone rang.

“Carl Santos, Martin,” said the voice of the coroner.

“Yeah, Carl. What have you got for me?”

“Unless you have any reason to suspect a murder, I’d have to say shark.”

“Murder?” said Brody.

“I’m not suggesting anything. All I mean is that it’s conceivable — just barely — that some nut could have done this job on the girl with an ax and a saw.”

“I don’t think it’s a murder, Carl. I’ve got no motive, no murder weapons, and — unless I want to go off into left field — no suspect.”

“Then it’s a shark. And a big bastard, too. Even the screw on an ocean liner wouldn’t have done this. It might have cut her in two, but…”

“Okay, Carl,” said Brody. “Spare me the gore. My stomach’s none too hot already.”

“Sorry, Martin. Anyway, I’m going to put down shark attack. I’d say that makes the most sense for you too, unless there are… you know… other considerations.”

“No,” said Brody. “Not this time. Thanks for calling, Carl.” He hung up, typed “shark attack” in the “cause of death” space on the forms, and leaned back in his chair.

The possibility that “other considerations” might be involved in this case hadn’t occurred to Brody. Those considerations were the touchiest part of Brody’s job, forcing him constantly to assess the best means of protecting the common weal without compromising either himself or the law.

It was the beginning of the summer season, and Brody knew that on the success or failure of those twelve brief weeks rested the fortunes of Amity for a whole year. A rich season meant prosperity enough to carry the town through the lean winter. The winter population of Amity was about 1,000; in a good summer the population jumped to nearly 10,000. And those 9,000 summer visitors kept the 1,000 permanent residents alive for the whole year.

Merchants — from the owners of the hardware store and the sporting goods store and the two gas stations to the local pharmacist — needed a boom summer to support them through the winter, during which they never broke even. The wives of carpenters, electricians, and plumbers worked during the summer as waitresses or real estate agents, to help keep their families going over the winter. There were only two year-round liquor licenses in Amity, so the twelve weeks of summer were critical to most of the restaurants and pubs. Charter fishermen needed every break they could get: good weather, good fishing, and, above all, crowds.

Even after the best of summers, Amity winters were rough. Three of every ten families went on relief.

Dozens of men were forced to move for the winter to the north shore of Long Island, where they scratched for work shucking scallops for a few dollars a day.

Brody knew that one bad summer would nearly double the relief rolls. If every house was not rented, there wouldn’t be enough work for Amity’s blacks, most of whom were gardeners, butlers, bartenders, and maids. And two or three bad summers in a row — a circumstance that, fortunately, hadn’t occurred in more than two decades — could create a cycle that could wreck the town. If people didn’t have enough money to buy clothes or gas or ample food supplies, if they couldn’t afford to have their houses or their appliances repaired, then the merchants and service firms would fail to make enough to tide them over until the next summer. They would close down, and Amity’s citizens would start shopping elsewhere. The town would lose tax revenue. Municipal services would deteriorate, and people would begin to move away.

So there was a common, though tacit, understanding in Amity, born of the need to survive. Everyone was expected to do his bit to make sure that Amity remained a desirable summer community. A few years ago, Brody remembered, a young man and his brother had moved into town and set themselves up as carpenters. They came in the spring, when there was enough work preparing houses for summer residents to keep everyone busy, so they were welcomed. They seemed competent enough, and several established carpenters began to refer work to them.

But by midsummer, there were disquieting reports about the Felix Brothers. Albert Morris, the owner of Amity Hardware, let it be known that they were buying cheap steel nails instead of galvanized nails and were charging their customers for galvanized. In a seaside climate, steel nails begin to rust in a few months. Dick Spitzer, who ran the lumberyard, told somebody that the Felixes had ordered a load of low-grade, green wood to use in some cabinets in a house on Scotch Road. The cabinet doors began to warp soon after they were installed. In a bar one night, the elder Felix, Armando, boasted to a drinking buddy that on his current job he was being paid to set supporting studs every sixteen inches but was actually placing them twenty-four inches apart. And the younger Felix, a twenty-one-year-old named Danny with a stubborn case of acne, liked to show his friends erotic books which he bragged he had stolen from the houses he worked in.

Other carpenters stopped referring work to the Felixes, but by then they had built enough of a business to keep them going through the winter. Very quietly, the Amity understanding began to work. At first, there were just a few hints to the Felixes that they had out-worn their welcome. Armando reacted arrogantly. Soon, annoying little mishaps began to bother him. All the tires on his truck would mysteriously empty themselves of air, and when he called for help from the Amity Gulf station, he was told that the air pump was broken. When he ran out of propane gas in his kitchen, the local gas company took eight days to deliver a new tank. His orders for lumber and other supplies were inexplicably mislaid or delayed. In stores where once he had been able to obtain credit he was now forced to pay cash. By the end of October, the Felix Brothers were unable to function as a business, and they moved away.

Generally, Brody’s contribution to the Amity understanding — in addition to maintaining the rule of law and sound judgment in the town — consisted of suppressing rumors and, in consultation with Harry Meadows, the editor of the Amity Leader, keeping a certain perspective on the rare unfortunate occurrences that qualified as news.

The previous summer’s rapes had been reported in the Leader, but just barely (as molestations), because Brody and Meadows agreed that the specter of a black rapist stalking every female in Amity wouldn’t do much for the tourist trade. In that case, there was the added problem that none of the women who had told the police they had been raped would repeat their stories to anyone else.

If one of the wealthier summer residents of Amity was arrested for drunken driving, Brody was willing, on a first offense, to book him for driving without a license, and that charge would be duly reported in the Leader. But Brody made sure to warn the driver that the second time he was caught driving under the influence he would be charged, booked, and prosecuted for drunk driving.

Brody’s relationship with Meadows was based on a delicate balance. When groups of youngsters came to town from the Hamptons and caused trouble, Meadows was handed every fact — names, ages, and charges lodged. When Amity’s own youth made too much noise at a party, the Leader usually ran a one-paragraph story without names or addresses, informing the public that the police had been called to quell a minor disturbance on, say, Old Mill Road.

Because several summer residents found it fun to subscribe to the Leader year-round, the matter of wintertime vandalism of summer houses was particularly sensitive. For years, Meadows had ignored it — leaving it to Brody to make sure that the homeowner was notified, the offenders punished, and the appropriate repairmen dispatched to the house. But in the winter of 1968 sixteen houses were vandalized within a few weeks. Brody and Meadows agreed that the time had come for a full campaign in the Leader against wintertime vandals. The result was the wiring of the forty-eight homes to the police station, which — since the public didn’t know which houses were wired and which weren’t — all but eliminated vandalism, made Brody’s job much easier, and gave Meadows the image of a crusading editor.

Once in a while, Brody and Meadows collided. Meadows was a zealot against the use of narcotics. He was also a man with unusually keen reportorial antennae, and when he sensed a story — one not susceptible to “other considerations” — he would go after it like a pig after truffles. In the summer of 1971 the daughter of one of Amity’s richest families had died off the Scotch Road beach. To Brody, there was no evidence of foul play, and since the family opposed an autopsy, the death was officially listed as drowning.

But Meadows had reason to believe that the girl was on drugs and that she was being supplied by the son of a Polish potato farmer. It took Meadows almost two months to get the story, but in the end he forced an autopsy which proved that at the time she drowned the girl had been unconscious from an overdose of heroin. He also tracked down the pusher and exposed a fairly large drug ring operating in the Amity area. The story reflected badly on Amity and worse on Brody, who, because several federal violations were involved in the case, wasn’t even able to redeem his earlier insouciance by making an arrest or two. And it won Meadows two regional journalism prizes.

Now it was Brody’s turn to press for full disclosure. He intended to close the beaches for a couple of days, to give the shark time to travel far from the Amity shoreline. He didn’t know whether or not sharks could acquire a taste for human flesh (as he had heard tigers do), but he was determined to deprive the fish of any more people. This time he wanted publicity, to make people fear the water and stay away from it.

Brody knew there would be a strong argument against publicizing the attack. Like the rest of the country, Amity was still feeling the effects of the recession. So far, the summer was shaping up as a mediocre one. Rentals were up from last year, but they were not “good” rentals. Many were “groupers,” bands of ten or fifteen young people who came from the city and split the rent on a big house. At least a dozen of the $7,000–$10,000-a-season shore-front houses had not yet been rented, and many more in the $5,000 class were still without leases. Sensational reports of a shark attack might turn mediocrity into disaster.

Still, Brody thought, one death in mid-June, before the crowds come, would probably be quickly forgotten. Certainly it would have less effect than two or three more deaths would. The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn’t willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.

He dialed Meadows’ number. “Hey, Harry,” he said. “Free for lunch?”

“I’ve been wondering when you’d call,” said Meadows. “Sure. My place or yours?”

Suddenly Brody wished he hadn’t called at mealtime. His stomach was still groaning, and the thought of food nauseated him. He glanced up at the wall calendar. It was a Thursday. Like all their friends on fixed, tight incomes, the Brodys shopped according to the supermarket specials. Monday’s special was chicken, Tuesday’s lamb, and so forth through the week. As each item was consumed, Ellen would note it on her list and replace it the next week. The only variables were bluefish and bass, which were inserted in the menu when a friendly fisherman dropped his overage by the house. Thursday’s special was hamburger, and Brody had seen enough chopped meat for one day.

“Yours,” he said. “Why don’t we order out from Cy’s? We can eat in your office.”

“Fine with me,” said Meadows. “What do you want? I’ll order now.”

“Egg salad, I guess, and a glass of milk. I’ll be right there.” Brody called Ellen to tell her he wouldn’t be home for lunch.

Harry Meadows was an immense man, for whom the act of drawing breath was exertion enough to cause perspiration to dot his forehead. He was in his late forties, ate too much, chain-smoked cheap cigars, drank bonded Bourbon, and was, in the words of his doctor, the Western world’s leading candidate for a huge coronary infraction.

When Brody arrived, Meadows was standing beside his desk, waving a towel at the open window. “In deference to what your lunch order tells me is a tender stomach,” he said, “I am trying to clear the air of essence of White Owl.”

“I appreciate that,” said Brody. He glanced around the small, cluttered room, searching for a place to sit.

“Just throw that crap off the chair there,” Meadows said. “They’re just government reports. Reports from the county, reports from the state, reports from the highway commission and the water commission. They probably cost about a million dollars, and from an informational point of view they don’t amount to a cup of spit.”

Brody picked up the heap of papers and piled them atop a radiator. He pulled the chair next to Meadows’ desk and sat down.

Meadows rooted around in a large brown paper bag, pulled out a plastic cup and a cellophane-wrapped sandwich, and slid them across the desk to Brody. Then he began to unwrap his own lunch, four separate packages which he opened and spread before himself with the loving care of a jeweler showing off rare gems: a meatball hero, oozing tomato sauce; a plastic carton filled with oily fried potatoes; a dill pickle the size of a small squash; and a quarter of a lemon meringue pie. He reached behind his chair and from a small refrigerator withdrew a sixteen-ounce can of beer. “Delightful,” he said with a smile as he surveyed the feast before him.

“Amazing,” said Brody, stifling an acid belch. “Absofuckinlutely amazing. I must have had about a thousand meals with you, Harry, but I still can’t get used to it.”

“Everyone has his little quirks, my friend,” Meadows said as he lifted his sandwich. “Some people chase other people’s wives. Some lose themselves in whiskey. I find my solace in nature’s own nourishment.”

“That’ll be some solace to Dorothy when your heart says, ‘That’s enough, buster, adios.’”

“We’ve discussed that, Dorothy and I,” said Meadows, filtering the words through a mouthful of bread and meat, “and we agree that one of the few advantages man has over other animals is the ability to choose the way to bring on his own death. Food may well kill me, but it’s also what has made life such a pleasure. Besides, I’d rather go my way than end up in the belly of a shark. After this morning, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Brody was in the midst of swallowing a bite of egg salad sandwich, and he had to force it past a rising gag. “Don’t do that to me,” he said.

They ate in silence for a few moments. Brody finished his sandwich and milk, wadded the sandwich wrapper and stuffed it into the plastic cup. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. Meadows was still eating, but Brody knew his appetite wouldn’t be diminished by any discussion. He recalled a time when Meadows had visited the scene of a bloody automobile accident and proceeded to interview police and survivors while sucking on a coconut Popsicle.

“About the Watkins thing,” Brody said. “I have a couple of thoughts, if you want to hear them.” Meadows nodded. “First, it seems to me that the cause of death is cut-and-dried. I’ve already talked to Santos, and—”

“I did, too.”

“So you know what he thinks. It was a shark attack, clear and simple. And if you’d seen the body, you’d agree. There’s just me—”

“I did see it.”

Brody was astonished, mostly because he couldn’t imagine how anyone who had seen that mess could be sitting there now, licking lemon-pie filling off his fingers. “So you agree?”

“Yes. I agree that’s what killed her. But there are a few things I’m not so sure of.”

“Like what?”

“Like why she was swimming at that time of night. Do you know what the temperature was at around mid-night? Sixty. Do you know what the water temperature was? About fifty. You’d have to be out of your mind to go swimming under those conditions.”

“Or drunk,” said Brody, “which she probably was.”

“Maybe. No, you’re right — probably. I’ve checked around a little, and the Footes don’t mess with grass or mescaline or any of that stuff. There’s one other thing that bothers me, though.”

Brody was annoyed. “For Christ’s sake, Harry, stop chasing shadows. Once in a while, people do die by accident.”

“It’s not that. It’s just that it’s damn funny that we’ve got a shark around here when the water’s still this cold.”

“Is it? Maybe there are sharks who like cold water. Who knows about sharks?”

“There are some. There’s the Greenland shark, but they never come down this far, and even if they did, they don’t usually bother people. Who knows about sharks? I’ll tell you this: At the moment I know a hell of a lot more about them than I did this morning. After I saw what was left of Miss Watkins, I called a young guy I know up at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. I described the body to him, and he said it’s likely that only one kind of shark would do a job like that.”

“What kind?”

“A great white. There are others that attack people, like tigers and hammerheads and maybe even makos and blues, but this fellow Hooper — Matt Hooper — told me that to cut a woman in half like that you’d have to have a fish with a mouth like this" — he spread his hands about three feet apart — “and the only shark that grows that big and attacks people is the great white. There’s another name for them.”

“Oh?” Brody was beginning to lose interest. “What’s that?”

“Man-eater. Other sharks kill people once in a while, for all sorts of reasons — hunger, maybe, or confusion or because they smell blood in the water. By the way, did the Watkins girl have her period last night?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“Just curious. Hooper said that’s one way to guarantee yourself an attack if there’s a shark around.”

“Did he say about the cold water?”

“That it’s quite common for a great white to come into water this cold. Some years ago, a boy was killed by one near San Francisco. The water temperature was fifty-seven.”

Brody sucked a long drag from his cigarette and said, “You’ve really done a lot of checking into this, Harry.”

“It seemed to me a matter of — shall we say — common sense and public interest to determine exactly what happened and the chances of it happening again.”

“And did you determine those chances?”

“I did. They’re almost nonexistent. From what I can gather, this was a real freak accident. According to Hooper, the only thing good about great whites is that they’re scarce. There’s every reason to believe that the shark that attacked the Watkins girl is long gone. There are no reefs around here. There’s no fish-processing plant or slaughterhouse that dumps blood or guts into the water. So there’s nothing at all to keep the shark interested.” Meadows paused and looked at Brody, who returned his gaze silently. “So it seems to me, Martin, that there’s no reason to get the public all upset over something that’s almost sure not to happen again.”

“That’s one way to look at it, Harry. Another is that since it’s not likely to happen again, there’s no harm in telling people that it did happen this once.”

Meadows sighed. “Journalistically, you may be right. But I think this is one of those times, Martin, when we have to forget the book and think of what’s best for the people. I don’t think it would be in the public interest to spread this around. I’m not thinking about the townspeople. They’ll know about it soon enough, the ones that don’t know already. But what about the people who read the Leader in New York or Philadelphia or Cleveland?”

“You flatter yourself.”

“Balls. You know what I mean. And you know what the real estate situation is like around here this summer. We’re right on the edge, and other places are, too, like Nantucket and the Vineyard and East Hampton. There are people who still haven’t made their summer plans. They know they’ve got their pick of places this year. There’s no shortage of houses for rent… anywhere. If I run a story saying that a young woman was bitten in two by a monster shark off Amity, there won’t be another house rented in this town. Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There’s something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them. If we tell people there’s a killer shark around here, we can kiss the summer good-by.”

Brody nodded. “I can’t argue with that, Harry, and I don’t want to tell the people that there is a killer shark around here. Look at it from my point of view, just for a second. I won’t dispute your odds or anything. You’re probably right. That shark has probably gone a hundred miles from here and won’t ever show up again. The most dangerous thing out there in the water is probably the undertow. But, Harry, there’s a chance you’re wrong, and I don’t think we can take that chance. Suppose — just suppose — we don’t say a word, and somebody else gets hit by that fish. What then? My ass is in a sling. I’m supposed to protect people around here, and if I can’t protect them from something, the least I can do is warn them that there is a danger. Your ass is in a sling, too. You’re supposed to report the news, and there’s just no question but that someone killed by a shark is news. I want you to run the story, Harry. I want to close the beaches, just for a couple of days, and just for insurance sake. It won’t be a great inconvenience to anybody. There aren’t that many people here yet, and the water’s cold. If we tell it straight, tell people what happened and why we’re doing what we’re doing, I think we’ll be way ahead.”

Meadows sat back in his chair and thought for a moment. “I can’t speak for your job, Martin, but as far as mine is concerned, the decision has already been made.”

“What does that mean?”

“There won’t be any story about the attack in the Leader.”

“Just like that.”

“Well, not exactly. It wasn’t entirely my decision, though I think that generally I agree with it. I’m the editor of this paper, Martin, and I own a piece of it, but not a big enough piece to buck certain pressures.”

“Such as?”

“I’ve gotten six phone calls already this morning. Five were from advertisers — one restaurant, one hotel, two real estate firms, and an ice cream shop. They were most anxious to know whether or not I planned to run a story on the Watkins thing, and most anxious to let me know they felt Amity would best be served by letting the whole thing fade quietly away. The sixth call was from Mr. Coleman in New York. Mr. Coleman who owns fifty-five per cent of the Leader. It seems Mr. Coleman had received a few phone calls himself. He told me there would be no story in the Leader.”

“I don’t suppose he said whether the fact that his wife is a real estate broker had anything to do with his decision.”

“No,” said Meadows. “The subject never came up.”

“Figures. Well, Harry, where does that leave us? You’re not going to run a story, so as far as the good readers of the Leader are concerned, nothing ever happened. I’m going to close the beaches and put up a few signs saying why.”

“Okay, Martin. That’s your decision. But let me remind you of something. You’re an elected official, right?”

“Just like the President. For four thrill-filled years.”

“Elected officials can be impeached.”

“Is that a threat, Harry?”

Meadows smiled. “You know better than that. Besides, who am I to be making threats? I just want you to be aware of what you’re doing before you tinker with the lifeblood of all those sage and discriminating souls who elected you.”

Brody rose to go. “Thanks, Harry. I’ve always heard it’s lonely here at the top. What do I owe you for lunch?”

“Forget it. I couldn’t take money from a man whose family will soon be begging for food stamps.”

Brody laughed. “No way. Haven’t you heard? The great thing about police work is the security.”

Ten minutes after Brody returned to his office, the intercom buzzer sounded and a voice announced, “The mayor’s here to see you, Chief.”

Brody smiled. The mayor. Not Larry Vaughan, just calling to check in. Not Lawrence Vaughan of Vaughan & Penrose Real Estate, stopping by to complain about some noisy tenants. But Mayor Lawrence P. Vaughan, the people’s choice — by seventy-one votes in the last election. “Send his honor in,” Brody said.

Larry Vaughan was a handsome man, in his early fifties, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a body kept trim by exercise. Though he was a native of Amity, over the years he had developed an air of understated chic. He had made a great deal of money in postwar real estate speculation in Amity, and he was the senior partner (some thought the only partner, since no one had ever met or spoken to anyone named Penrose in Vaughan’s office) in the most successful agency in town. He dressed with elegant simplicity, in timeless British jackets, button-down shirts, and Weejun loafers. Unlike Ellen Brody, who had descended from summer folk to winter folk and was unable to make the adjustment, Vaughan had ascended smoothly from winter folk to summer folk, adjusting each step of the way with grace. He was not one of them, for he was technically a local merchant, so he was never asked to visit them in New York or Palm Beach. But in Amity he moved freely among all but the most aloof members of the summer community, which, of course, did an immense amount of good for his business. He was asked to most of the important summer parties, and he always arrived alone. Very few of his friends knew that he had a wife at home, a simple, adoring woman who spent much of her time doing needlepoint in front of her television set.

Brody liked Vaughan. He didn’t see much of him during the summer, but after Labor Day, when things calmed down, Vaughan felt free to shed some of his social scales, and every few weeks he and his wife would ask Brody and Ellen out to dinner at one of the better restaurants in the Hamptons. The evenings were special treats for Ellen, and that in itself was enough to make Brody happy. Vaughan seemed to understand Ellen. He always acted most graciously, treating Ellen as a clubmate and comrade.

Vaughn walked into Brody’s office and sat down. “I just talked to Harry Meadows,” he said.

Vaughan was obviously upset, which interested Brody. He hadn’t expected this reaction. “I see,” he said. “Harry doesn’t waste any time.”

“Where are you going to get the authority to close the beaches?”

“Are you asking me as the mayor or as a real estate broker or out of friendly interest or what, Larry?”

Vaughan pressed, and Brody could see he was having trouble controlling his temper. “I want to know where you’re going to get the authority. I want to know now.”

“Officially, I’m not sure I have it,” Brody said. “There’s something in the code that says I can take whatever actions I deem necessary in the event of an emergency, but I think the selectmen have to declare a state of emergency. I don’t imagine you want to go through all that rigmarole.”

“Not a chance.”

“Well, then, unofficially I figure it’s my responsibility to keep the people who live here as safe as I can, and at the moment it’s my judgment that that means closing the beaches for a couple of days. If it ever came down to cases, I’m not sure I could arrest anyone for going swimming. Unless,” Brody smiled, “I could make a case of criminal stupidity.”

Vaughan ignored the remark. “I don’t want you to close the beaches,” he said.

“So I see.”

“You know why. The Fourth of July isn’t far off, and that’s the make-or-break weekend. We’d be cutting our own throats.”

“I know the argument, and I’m sure you know my reasons for wanting to close the beaches. It’s not as if I have anything to gain.”

“No. I’d say quite the opposite is true. Look, Martin, this town doesn’t need that kind of publicity.”

“It doesn’t need any more people killed, either.”

“Nobody else is going to get killed, for God’s sake. All you’d be doing by closing the beaches is inviting a lot of reporters to come snooping around where they don’t have any business.”

“So? They’d come out here, and when they didn’t find anything worth reporting, they’d go home again. I don’t imagine the New York Times has much interest in covering a lodge picnic or a garden-club supper.”

“We just don’t need it. Suppose they did find something. There’d be a big to-do that couldn’t do anybody any good.”

“Like what, Larry? What could they find out? I don’t have anything to hide. Do you?”

“No, of course not. I was just thinking about… maybe the rapes. Something unsavory.”

“Crap,” said Brody. “That’s all past history.”

“Dammit, Martin!” Vaughan paused for a moment, struggling to calm himself. “Look, if you won’t listen to reason, will you listen to me as a friend? I’m under a lot of pressure from my partners. Something like this could be very bad for us.”

Brody laughed. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you admit you had partners, Larry. I thought you ran that shop like an emperor.”

Vaughan was embarrassed, as if he felt he had said too much. “My business is very complicated,” he said. “There are times I’m not sure I understand what’s going on. Do me this favor. This once.”

Brody looked at Vaughan, trying to fathom his motives. “I’m sorry, Larry, I can’t. I wouldn’t be doing my job.”

“If you don’t listen to me,” said Vaughan, “you may not have your job much longer.”

“You haven’t got any control over me. You can’t fire any cop in this town.”

“Not off the force, no. But believe it or not, I do have discretion over the job of chief of police.”

“I don’t believe it.”

From his jacket pocket Vaughan took a copy of the corporate charter of the town of Amity. “You can read it yourself,” he said, flipping through until he found the page he sought. “It’s right here.” He handed the pamphlet across the desk to Brody. “What it says, in effect, is that even though you were elected to the chief’s job by the people, the selectmen have the power to remove you.”

Brody read the paragraph Vaughan had indicated. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “But I’d love to see what you put down for ‘good and sufficient cause.’”

“I dearly hope it doesn’t come to that, Martin. I had hoped this conversation wouldn’t even get this far. I had hoped that you would go along, once you knew how I and the selectmen felt.”

“All the selectmen?”

“A majority.”

“Like who?”

“I’m not going to sit here and name names for you. I don’t have to. All you have to know is that I have the board behind me, and if you won’t do what’s right, we’ll put someone in your job who will.”

Brody had never seen Vaughan in a mood so aggressively ugly. He was fascinated, but he was also slightly shaken. “You really want this, don’t you, Larry?”

“I do.” Sensing victory, Vaughan said evenly, “Trust me, Martin. You won’t be sorry.”

Brody sighed. “Shit,” he said. “I don’t like it. It doesn’t smell good. But okay, if it’s that important.”

“It’s that important.” For the first time since he had arrived, Vaughan smiled. “Thanks, Martin,” he said, and he stood up. “Now I have the rather unpleasant task of visiting the Footes.”

“How are you going to keep them from shooting off their mouths to the Times or the News?”

“I hope to be able to appeal to their public-spiritedness,” Vaughan said, “just as I appealed to yours.”

“Bull.”

“We do have one thing going for us. Miss Watkins was a nobody. She was a drifter. No family, no close friends. She said she had hitchhiked East from Idaho. So she won’t be missed.”

Brody arrived home a little before five. His stomach had settled down enough to permit him a beer or two before dinner. Ellen was in the kitchen, still dressed in the pink uniform of a hospital volunteer. Her hands were immersed in chopped meat, kneading it into a meat loaf.

“Hello,” she said, turning her head so Brody could plant a kiss on her cheek.

“What was the crisis?”

“You were at the hospital. You didn’t hear?”

“No. Today was bathe-the-old-ladies day. I never got off the Ferguson wing.”

“A girl got killed off Old Mill.”

“By what?”

“A shark.” Brody reached into the refrigerator and found a beer.

Ellen stopped kneading meat and looked at him. “A shark! I’ve never heard of that around here. You see one once in a while, but they never do anything.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a first for me, too.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Is that sensible? I mean, isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Sure, there are some things I could do. Technically. But there’s nothing I can actually do. What you and I think doesn’t carry much weight around here. The powers-that-be are worried that it won’t look nice if we get all excited just because one stranger got killed by a fish. They’re willing to take the chance that it was just a freak accident that won’t happen again. Or, rather, they’re willing to let me take the chance, since it’s my responsibility.”

“What do you mean, the powers-that-be?”

“Larry Vaughn, for one.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize you had talked to Larry.”

“He came to see me as soon as he heard I planned to close the beaches. He wasn’t what you’d call subtle about telling me he didn’t want the beaches closed. He said he’d have my job if I did close them.”

“I can’t believe that, Martin. Larry isn’t like that.”

“I didn’t think so, either. Hey, by the way, what do you know about his partners?”

“In the business? I didn’t think there were any. I thought Penrose was his middle name, or something like that. Anyway, I thought he owned the whole thing.”

“So did I. But apparently not.”

“Well, it makes me feel better to know you talked to Larry before you made any decision. He tends to take a wider, more overall view of things than most people. He probably does know what’s best.”

Brody felt the blood rise in his neck. He said simply, “Crap.” Then he tore the metal tab off his beer can, flipped it into the garbage can, and walked into the living room to turn on the evening news.

From the kitchen Ellen called, “I forgot to tell you: you had a call a little while ago.”

“Who from?”

“He didn’t say. He just said to tell you you’re doing a terrific job. It was nice of him to call, don’t you think?”

FOUR

For the next few days the weather remained clear and unusually calm. The wind came softly, steadily from the southwest, a gentle breeze that rippled the surface of the sea but made no whitecaps. There was a crispness to the air only at night, and after days of constant sun, the earth and sand had warmed.

Sunday was the twentieth of June. Public schools still had a week or more to run before breaking for the summer, but the private schools in New York had already released their charges. Families who owned summer homes in Amity had been coming out for weekends since the beginning of May. Summer tenants whose leases ran from June 15 to September 15 had unpacked and, familiar now with where linen closets were, which cabinets contained good china and which the everyday stuff, and which beds were softer than others, were already beginning to feel at home.

By noon, the beach in front of Scotch and Old Mill roads was speckled with people. Husbands lay semi-comatose on beach towels, trying to gain strength from the sun before an afternoon of tennis and the trip back to New York on the Long Island Rail Road’s Cannonball. Wives leaned against aluminum backrests, reading Helen MacInnes and John Cheever and Taylor Caldwell, interrupting themselves now and then to pour a cup of dry vermouth from the Scotch cooler.

Teenagers lay serried in tight, symmetrical rows, the boys enjoying the sensation of grinding their pelvises into the sand, thinking of pudenda and occasionally stretching their necks to catch a brief glimpse of some, exposed, wittingly or not, by girls who lay on their backs with their legs spread.

These were not Aquarians. They uttered none of the platitudes of peace or pollution, or justice or revolt. Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty. As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anemia. Their teeth — thanks either to breeding or to orthodontia — were straight and white and even. Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odor. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.

None of which is to say that they were either stupid or evil. If their IQs could have been tested en masse, they would have shown native ability well within the top 10 per cent of all mankind. And they had been, were being, educated at schools that provided every discipline, including exposure to minority-group sensibilities, revolutionary philosophies, ecological hypotheses, political power tactics, drugs, and sex. Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing. They had been conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world was really quite irrelevant to them. And they were right. Nothing touched them — not race riots in places like Trenton, New Jersey, or Gary, Indiana; not the fact that parts of the Missouri River were so foul that the water sometimes caught fire spontaneously; not police corruption in New York or the rising number of murders in San Francisco or revelations that hot dogs contained insect filth and hexachlorophine caused brain damage. They were inured even to the economic spasms that wracked the rest of America. Undulations in the stock markets were nuisances noticed, if at all, as occasions for fathers to bemoan real or fancied extravagances.

Those were the ones who returned to Amity every summer. The others — and there were some, mavericks — marched and bleated and joined and signed and spent their summers working for acronymic social-action groups. But because they had rejected Amity and, at most, showed up for an occasional Labor Day weekend, they, too, were irrelevant.

The little children played in the sand at the water’s edge, digging holes and flinging muck at each other, unconscious and uncaring of what they were and what they would become.

A boy of six stopped skimming flat stones out into the water. He walked up the beach to where his mother lay dozing, and he flopped down next to her towel. “Hey, Mom,” he said, limning aimless doodles with his finger in the sand.

His mother turned to look at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What?”

“I’m bored.”

“How can you be bored? It isn’t even July.”

“I don’t care. I’m bored. I don’t have anything to do.”

“You’ve got a whole beach to play on.”

“I know. But there’s nothing to do on it. Boy, am I bored.”

“Why don’t you go throw a ball?”

“With who? There’s nobody here.”

“I see a lot of people. Have you looked for the Harrises? What about Tommy Converse?”

“They’re not here. Nobody’s here. I sure am bored.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Alex.”

“Can I go swimming?”

“No. It’s too cold.”

“How do you know?”

“I know, that’s all. Besides, you know you can’t go alone.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Into the water? Certainly not.”

“No, I mean just to watch me.”

“Alex, Mom is pooped, absolutely exhausted. Can’t you find anything else to do?”

“Can I go out on my raft?”

“Out where?”

“Just out there a little ways. I won’t go swimming. I’ll just lie on my raft.”

His mother sat up and put on her sunglasses. She looked up and down the beach. A few dozen yards away, a man stood in waist-deep water with a child on his shoulders. The woman looked at him, indulging herself in a quick moment of regret and self-pity that she could no longer shift to her husband the responsibility of amusing their child.

Before she could turn her head, the boy guessed what she was feeling. “I bet Dad would let me,” he said.

“Alex, you should know by now that that’s the wrong way to get me to do anything.” She looked down the beach in the other direction. Except for a few couples in the dim distance, it was empty. “Oh, all right,” she said. “Go ahead. But don’t go too far out. And don’t go swimming.” She looked at the boy and, to show she was serious, lowered her glasses so he could see her eyes.

“Okay,” he said. He stood up, grabbed his rubber raft, and dragged it down to the water. He picked up the raft, held it in front of him, and walked seaward. When the water reached his waist, he leaned forward. A swell caught the raft and lifted it, with the boy aboard. He centered himself so the raft lay flat. He paddled with both arms, stroking smoothly. His feet and ankles hung over the rear of the raft. He moved out a few yards, then turned and began to paddle up and down the beach. Though he didn’t notice it, a gentle current carried him slowly offshore.

Fifty yards farther out, the ocean floor dropped precipitously — not with the sheerness of a canyon wall, but from a slope of perhaps ten degrees to more than forty-five degrees. The water was fifteen feet deep where the slope began to change. Soon it was twenty-five, then forty, then fifty feet deep. It leveled off at a hundred feet for about half a mile, then rose in a shoal that neared the surface a mile from shore. Seaward of the shoal, the floor dropped quickly to two hundred feet and then, still farther out, the true ocean depths began.

In thirty-five feet of water, the great fish swam slowly, its tail waving just enough to maintain motion. It saw nothing, for the water was murky with motes of vegetation. The fish had been moving parallel to the shore-line. Now it turned, banking slightly, and followed the bottom gradually upward. The fish perceived more light in the water, but still it saw nothing.

The boy was resting, his arms dangling down, his feet and ankles dipping in and out of the water with each small swell. His head was turned toward shore, and he noticed that he had been carried out beyond what his mother would consider safe. He could see her lying on her towel, and the man and child playing in the wave-wash. He was not afraid, for the water was calm and he wasn’t really very far from shore — only forty yards or so. But he wanted to get closer; otherwise his mother might sit up, spy him, and order him out of the water. He eased himself back a little bit so he could use his feet to help propel himself. He began to kick and paddle toward shore. His arms displaced water almost silently, but his kicking feet made erratic splashes and left swirls of bubbles in his wake.

The fish did not hear the sound, but rather registered the sharp and jerky impulses emitted by the kicks.

They were signals, faint but true; and the fish locked on them, homing. It rose, slowly at first, then gaining speed as the signals grew stronger.

The boy stopped for a moment to rest. The signals ceased. The fish slowed, turning its head from side to side, trying to recover them. The boy lay perfectly still, and the fish passed beneath him, skimming the sandy bottom. Again it turned.

The boy resumed paddling. He kicked only every third or fourth stroke; kicking was more exertion than steady paddling. But the occasional kicks sent new signals to the fish. This time it needed to lock on them only an instant, for it was almost directly below the boy. The fish rose. Nearly vertical, it now saw the commotion on the surface. There was no conviction that what thrashed above was food, but food was not a concept of significance. The fish was impelled to attack: if what it swallowed was digestible, that was food; if not, it would later be regurgitated. The mouth opened, and with a final sweep of the sickle tail the fish struck.

The boy’s last — only — thought was that he had been punched in the stomach. The breath was driven from him in a sudden rush. He had no time to cry out, nor, had he had the time, would he have known what to cry, for he could not see the fish. The fish’s head drove the raft out of the water. The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft. Nearly half the fish had come clear of the water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh and bone and rubber. The boy’s legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom.

On the beach the man with the child shouted, “Hey!” He was not sure what he had seen. He had been looking toward the sea, then started to turn his head when an uproar caught his eye. He jerked his head back seaward again, but by then there was nothing to see but the waves made by the splash, spreading outward in a circle. “Did you see that?” he cried. “Did you see that?”

“What, Daddy, what?” His child stared up at him, excited.

“Out there! A shark or a whale or something! Something huge!”

The boy’s mother, half asleep on her towel, opened her eyes and squinted at the man. She saw him point toward the water and heard him say something to the child, who ran up the beach and stood by a pile of clothing. The man began to run toward the boy’s mother, and she sat up. She didn’t understand what he was saying, but he was pointing at the water, so she shaded her eyes and looked out at sea. At first, the fact that she saw nothing didn’t strike her as odd. Then she remembered, and the said, “Alex.”

Brody was having lunch: baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. “Mashed potatoes,” he said as Ellen served him. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“I don’t want you to waste away. Besides, you look good chunky.”

The phone rang. Ellen said, “I’ll get it,” but Brody stood up. That was the way it usually happened. She would say, “I’ll get it,” but he was the one who got it. It was the same when she had forgotten something in the kitchen. She would say, “I forgot the napkins, I’ll get them.” But they both knew he would get up and fetch the napkins.

“No, that’s okay,” he said. “It’s probably for me anyway.” He knew the call was probably for her, but the words came reflexively.

“Bixby, Chief,” said the voice from the station house.

“What is it, Bixby?”

“I think you’d better come down here.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it’s like this, Chief…” Bixby obviously didn’t want to go into details. Brody heard him say something to someone else, then return to the phone. “I’ve got this hysterical woman on my hands, Chief.”

“What’s she hysterical about?”

“Her kid. Out by the beach.”

A twinge of unease shot through Brody’s stomach. “What happened?”

“It’s…” Bixby faltered, then said quickly. “Thursday.”

“Listen, asshole…” Brody stopped, for now he understood. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up the phone.

He felt flushed, almost feverish. Fear and guilt and fury blended in a thrust of gut-wrenching pain. He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore. He had to take the blame, but it was not rightly his. It belonged to Larry Vaughan and his partners, whoever they might be. He had wanted to do the right thing; they had forced him not to. But who were they to force him? If he couldn’t stand up to Vaughan, what kind of cop was he? He should have closed the beaches.

Suppose he had. The fish would have gone down the beach — say, to East Hampton — and killed someone there. But that wasn’t how it had worked. The beaches had stayed open, and a child had been killed because of it. It was as simple as that. Cause and effect. Brody suddenly loathed himself. And just as suddenly, he felt great pity for himself.

“What is it?” asked Ellen.

“A kid just got killed.”

“How?”

“By a goddamn sonofabitch of a shark.”

“Oh no! If you had closed the beaches…” She stopped, embarrassed.

“Yeah, I know.”

Harry Meadows was waiting in the parking lot at the rear of the station house when Brody drove up. He opened the passenger-side door of Brody’s car and eased his bulk down onto the seat. “So much for the odds,” he said.

“Yeah. Who’s in there, Harry?”

“A man from the Times, two from Newsday, and one of my people. And the woman. And the man who says he saw it happen.”

“How did the Times get hold of it?”

“Bad luck. He was on the beach. So was one of the Newsday guys. They’re both staying with people, for the weekend. They were onto it within two minutes.”

“What time did it happen?”

Meadows looked at his watch. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. No more.”

“Do they know about the Watkins thing?”

“I don’t know. My man does, but he knows enough not to talk. As for the others, it depends on who they’ve been talking to. I doubt they’re onto it. They haven’t had any digging time.”

“They’ll get onto it, sooner or later.”

“I know,” said Meadows. “It puts me in a rather difficult position.”

“You! Don’t make me laugh.”

“Seriously, Martin. If somebody from the Times gets that story and files it, it’ll appear in tomorrow’s paper, along with today’s attack, and the Leader will look like hell. I’m going to have to use it, to cover myself, even if the others don’t.”

“Use it how, Harry? What are you going to say?”

“I don’t know, yet; as I said, I’m in a rather difficult position.”

“Who are you going to say ordered it hushed up? Larry Vaughan?”

“Hardly.”

“Me?”

“No, no. I’m not going to say anybody ordered it hushed up. There was no conspiracy. I’m going to talk to Carl Santos. If I can put the right words in his mouth, we may all be spared a lot of grief.”

“What about the truth?”

“What about it?”

“What about telling it the way it happened? Say that I wanted to close the beaches and warn people, but the selectmen disagreed. And say that because I was too much of a chicken to fight and put my job on the line, I went along with them. Say that all the honchos in Amity agreed there was no point in alarming people just because there was a shark around that liked to eat children.”

“Come on, Martin. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s. We came to a decision, took a gamble, and lost. That’s all there is to it.”

“Terrific. Now I’ll just go tell the kid’s mother that we’re terribly sorry we had to use her son for chips.” Brody got out of the car and started for the back door of the station house. Meadows, slower to extract himself, followed a few paces behind.

Brody stopped. “You know what I’d like to know, Harry? Who really made the decision? You went along with it. I went along with it. I don’t think Larry Vaughan was even the actual guy who made the decision. I think he went along with it, too.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I’m not sure. Do you know anything about his partners in the business?”

“He doesn’t have any real partners, does he?”

“I’m beginning to wonder. Anyway, fuck it… for now.” Brody took another step, and when Meadows still followed him, he said, “You better go around front, Harry… for appearances’ sake.”

Brody entered his office through a side door. The boy’s mother was sitting in front of the desk, clutching a handkerchief. She was wearing a short robe over her bathing suit. Her feet were bare. Brody looked at her nervously, once again feeling the rush of guilt. He couldn’t tell if she was crying, for her eyes were masked by large, round sunglasses.

A man was standing by the back wall. Brody assumed he was the one who claimed to have witnessed the accident. He was gazing absently at Brody’s collection of memorabilia: citations from community-service groups, pictures of Brody with visiting dignitaries. Not exactly the stuff to command much attention from an adult, but staring at it was preferable to risking conversation with the woman.

Brody had never been adept at consoling people, so he simply introduced himself and started asking questions. The woman said she had seen nothing: one moment the boy was there, the next he was gone, “and all I saw were pieces of his raft.” Her voice was weak but steady. The man described what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.

“So no one actually saw this shark,” Brody said, courting a faint hope in the back of his mind.

“No,” said the man. “I guess not. But what else could it have been?”

“Any number of things.” Brody was lying to himself as well as to them, testing to see if he could believe his own lies, wondering if any alternative to reality could be made credible. “The raft could have gone flat and the boy could have drowned.”

“Alex is a good swimmer,” the woman protested. “Or… was…”

“And what about the splash?” said the man.

“The boy could have been thrashing around.”

“He never cried out. Not a word.”

Brody realized that the exercise was futile. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll probably know soon enough, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” said the man.

“One way or another, people who die in the water usually wash up somewhere. If it was a shark, there’ll be no mistaking it.” The woman’s shoulders hunched forward, and Brody cursed himself for being a clumsy fool. “I’m sorry,” he said. The woman shook her head and wept.

Brody told the woman and the man to wait in his office, and he walked out into the front of the station house. Meadows was standing by the outer door, leaning against the wall. A young man — the reporter from the Times, Brody guessed — was gesturing at Meadows and seemed to be asking questions. The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one — “a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it,” she said — and when he didn’t find himself suddenly wooed by gaggles of summer people, he was humiliated. He tore the alligator off the pocket and used the shirt as a rag to clean the lawn mower with which he earned his summer income. More recently, Ellen had insisted on buying several shifts made by the same manufacturer — paying a premium they could ill afford for the alligator emblem — to help her regain her entree to her old milieu. To Brody’s dismay, one evening he found himself nagging Ellen for buying “a ten-dollar dress with a twenty-dollar lizard on it.”

Two men were sitting on a bench — the Newsday reporters. One wore a bathing suit, the other a blazer and slacks. Meadows’ reporter — Brody knew him as Nat something or other — was leaning against the desk, chatting with Bixby. They stopped talking as soon as they saw Brody enter.

“What can I do for you?” Brody said.

The young man next to Meadows took a step forward and said, “I’m Bill Whitman, from the New York Times.”

“And?” What am I supposed to do? Brody thought. Fall on my ass?

“I was on the beach.”

“What did you see?”

One of the Newsday reporters interrupted: “Nothing. I was there, too. Nobody saw anything. Except maybe the guy in your office. He says he saw something.”

“I know,” said Brody, “but he’s not sure just what it was he saw.”

The Times man said, “Are you prepared to list this as a shark attack?”

“I’m not prepared to list this as anything, and I’d suggest you don’t go listing it as anything, either, until you know a hell of a lot more about it than you do now.”

The Times man smiled. “Come on, Chief, what do you want us to do? Call it a mysterious disappearance? Boy lost at sea?”

It was difficult for Brody to resist the temptation to trade angry ironies with the Times reporter. He said, “Listen, Mr. — Whitman, is it? — Whitman. We have no witnesses who saw anything but a splash. The man inside thinks he saw a big silver-colored thing that he thinks may have been a shark. He says he has never seen a live shark in his life, so that’s not what you’d call expert testimony. We have no body, no real evidence that anything violent happened to the boy… I mean, except that he’s missing. It is conceivable that he drowned. It is conceivable that he had a fit or a seizure of some kind and then drowned. And it is conceivable that be was attacked by some kind of fish or animal — or even person, for that matter. All of those things are possible, and until we get…”

The sound of tires grinding over gravel in the public parking lot out front stopped Brody. A car door slammed, and Len Hendricks charged into the station house, wearing nothing but a bathing suit. His body had the mottled gray-whiteness of a Styrofoam coffee cup. He stopped in the middle of the floor. “Chief…”

Brody was startled by the unlikely sight of Hendricks in a bathing suit — thighs flecked with pimples, genitals bulging in the tight fabric. “You’ve been swimming, Leonard?”

“There’s been another attack!” said Hendricks.

The Times man quickly asked, “When was the first one?”

Before Hendricks could answer, Brody said, “We were just discussing it, Leonard. I don’t want you or anyone else jumping to conclusions until you know what you’re talking about. For God’s sake, the boy could have drowned.”

“Boy?” said Hendricks. “What boy? This was a man, an old man. Five minutes ago. He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed bloody murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again. There was all this splashing around, and blood was flying all over the place. The fish kept coming back and hitting him again and again and again. That’s the biggest fuckin’ fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a fuckin’ station wagon. I went in up to my waist and tried to get to the guy, but the fish kept hitting him.” Hendricks paused, staring at the floor. His breath squeezed out of his chest in short bursts. “Then the fish quit. Maybe he went away, I don’t know. I waded out to where the guy was floating. His face was in the water. I took hold of one of his arms and pulled.”

Brody said, “And?”

“It came off in my hand. The fish must have chewed fight through it, all but a little bit of skin.” Hendricks looked up, his eyes red and filling with tears of exhaustion and fright.

“Are you going to be sick?” said Brody.

“I don’t think so.”

“Did you call the ambulance?”

Hendricks shook his head no.

“Ambulance?” said the Times reporter. “Isn’t that rather like shutting the barn door after the horse has left?”

“Shut your mouth, smart ass,” said Brody. “Bixby, call the hospital. Leonard, are you up to doing some work?” Hendricks nodded. “Then go put on some clothes and find some notices that close the beaches.”

“Do we have any?”

“I don’t know. We must. Maybe back in the stock room with those signs that say ‘This Property Protected by Police.’ If we don’t, we’ll have to make some that’ll do until we can have some made up. I don’t care. One way or another, let’s get the goddam beaches closed.”

Next morning, Brody arrived at the office a little after seven. “Did you get it?” he said to Hendricks.

“It’s on your desk.”

“Good or bad? Never mind. I’ll go see for myself.”

“You won’t have to look too hard.”

The city edition of the New York Times lay in the center of Brody’s desk. About three quarters of the way down the right-hand column on page one, he saw the headline: SHARK KILLS TWO ON LONG ISLAND Brody said, “Shit,” and began to read.

Brody finished reading the article and set the paper on the desk. Chance, that doctor said, pure chance. What would he say if he knew about the first attack? Still pure chance? Or would it be negligence, gross and unforgivable? There were three people dead now, and two of them could still be alive, if only Brody had… “You’ve seen the Times,” said Meadows. He was standing in the doorway.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it. They didn’t pick up the Watkins thing.”

“I know. Kind of curious, especially after Len’s little slip of the tongue.”

“But you did use it.”

“I did. I had to. Here.” Meadows handed Brody a copy of the Amity Leader. The banner headline ran across all six columns of page one: TWO KILLED BY MONSTER SHARK OFF AMITY BEACH. Below that, in smaller type, a subhead: Number of Victims of Killer Fish Rises to Three.

“You sure get your news up high, Harry.”

“Read on.”

Brody read:

Brody looked up from the paper and said, “Did Santos really decline to comment?”

“No. He said nobody but you and I had asked him about the cause of death, so he didn’t feel compelled to tell anybody. As you can see, I couldn’t print that response. It would have pinned everything on you and me. I had hoped I could get him to say something like, ‘Her family requested that the cause of death be kept private, and since there was obviously no crime involved, I agreed,’ but he wouldn’t. I can’t say I blame him.”

“So what did you do?”

“I tried to get hold of Larry Vaughan, but he was away for the weekend. I thought he’d be the best official spokesman.”

“And when you couldn’t reach him?”

“Read.”

“Who was your talkative selectman?” asked Brody.

“All of them and none of them,” said Meadows. “It’s basically what they all said, but none of them would be quoted.”

“What about the beaches not being closed? Did you go into that?”

“You did.”

“I did?”

“Jesus, Harry,” said Brody, “you really put it to me. You’ve got me arguing a case I don’t believe, then being proved wrong and forced to do what I wanted to do all along. That’s a pretty shitty trick.”

“It wasn’t a trick. I had to have someone give the official line, and with Vaughan away, you were the logical one. You admit that you agreed to go along with the decision, so — reluctantly or not — you supported it. I didn’t see any point in airing all the dirty laundry of private disputes.”

“I suppose. Anyway, it’s done. Is there anything else I should read in this?”

“No. I just quote Matt Hooper, that fellow from Woods Hole. He says it would be remarkable if we ever have another attack. But he’s a little less sure than he was last time.”

“Does he think one fish is doing all this?”

“He doesn’t know, of course, but offhand, yes. He thinks it’s a big white.”

“I do, too. I mean, I don’t know from whites or greens or blues, but I think it’s one shark.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. Yesterday afternoon I called the Coast Guard out on Montauk. I asked them if they’d noticed a lot of sharks around here recently, and they said they hadn’t seen a one. Not one so far this spring. It’s still early, so that isn’t too strange. They said they’d send a boat down this way later on and give me a call if they saw anything. I finally called them back. They said they had cruised up and down this area for two hours and hadn’t seen a thing. So there sure aren’t many sharks around. They also said that when there are sharks around, they’re mostly medium-sized blue sharks — about five to ten feet — and sand sharks that don’t generally bother people. From what Leonard said he saw yesterday, this is no medium-sized blue.

“Hooper said there was one thing we could do,” Meadows said. “Now that you’ve got the beaches closed down, we could chum. You know, spread fish guts and goodies like that around in the water. If there’s a shark around, he said, that will bring him running.”

“Oh, great. That’s what we need, to attract sharks. And what if he shows up? What do we do then?”

“Catch him.”

“With what? My trusty spinning rod?”

“No, a harpoon.”

“A harpoon. Harry, I don’t even have a police boat, let alone a boat with harpoons on it.”

“There are fishermen around. They have boats.”

“Yeah, for a hundred and a half a day, or whatever it is.”

“True. But still it seems to me…” A commotion out in the hall stopped Meadows in mid-sentence.

He and Brody heard Bixby say, “I told you, ma’am, he’s in conference.” Then a woman’s voice said, “Bullshit! I don’t care what he’s doing. I’m going in there.”

The sound of running feet, first one pair, then two. The door to Brody’s office flew open, and standing in the doorway, clutching a newspaper, tears streaming down her face, was Alexander Kintner’s mother.

Bixby came up behind her and said, “I’m sorry, Chief. I tried to stop her.”

“That’s okay, Bixby,” said Brody. “Come in, Mrs. Kintner.”

Meadows stood and offered her his chair, which was the closest one to Brody’s desk. She ignored him and walked up to Brody, who was standing behind his desk.

“What can I do…”

The woman slapped the newspaper across his face. It didn’t hurt Brody so much as startle him — especially the noise, a sharp report that rang deep into his left ear. The paper fell to the floor.

“What about this?” Mrs. Kintner screamed. “What about it?”

“What about what?” said Brody.

“What they say here. That you knew it was dangerous to swim. That somebody had already been killed by that shark. That you kept it a secret.”

Brody didn’t know what to say. Of course it was true, all of it, at least technically. He couldn’t deny it. And yet he couldn’t admit it, either, because it wasn’t the whole truth.

“Sort of,” he said. “I mean yes, it’s true, but it’s — look, Mrs. Kintner…” He was pleading with her to control herself until he could explain.

“You killed Alex!” She shrieked the words, and Brody was sure they were heard in the parking lot, on the street, in the center of town, on the beaches, all over Amity. He was sure his wife heard them, and his children.

He thought to himself: Stop her before she says anything else. But all he could say was, “Ssshhh!”

“You did! You killed him!” Her fists were clenched at her sides, and her head snapped forward as she screamed, as if she were trying to inject the words into Brody. “You won’t get away with it!”

“Please, Mrs. Kintner,” said Brody. “Calm down. Just for a minute. Let me explain.” He reached to touch her shoulder and help her to a chair, but she jerked away.

“Keep your fucking hands off me!” she cried. “You knew. You knew all along, but you wouldn’t say. And now a six-year-old boy, a beautiful six-year-old boy, my boy…” Tears seemed to pulse from her eyes, and as she quivered in her rage, droplets were cast from her face. “You knew! Why didn’t you tell? Why?” She clutched herself, wrapping her arms around her body as they would be wrapped in a straitjacket, and she looked into Brody’s eyes. “Why?”

“It’s…” Brody fumbled for words. “It’s a long story.” He felt wounded, incapacitated as surely as if he had been shot. He didn’t know if he could explain now. He wasn’t even sure he could speak.

“I bet it is,” said the woman. “Oh, you evil man. You evil, evil man. You…”

“Stop it!” Brody’s shout was both plea and command. It stopped her. “Now look, Mrs. Kintner, you’ve got it wrong, all wrong. Ask Mr. Meadows.”

Meadows, transfixed by the scene, nodded dumbly.

“Of course he’d say that. Why shouldn’t he? He’s your pal, isn’t he? He probably told you you were doing the right thing.” Her rage was mounting again, flooding, resuscitated by a new burst of emotional amperage. “You probably decided together. That makes it easier, doesn’t it? Did you make money?”

“What?”

“Did you make money from my son’s blood? Did someone pay you not to tell what you knew?”

Brody was horrified. “No! Christ, of course not.”

“Then why? Tell me. Tell me why. I’ll pay you. Just tell me why!”

“Because we didn’t think it could happen again.” Brody was surprised by his brevity. That was it, really, wasn’t it?

The woman was silent for a moment, letting the words register in her muddled mind. She seemed to repeat them to herself. She said, “Oh,” then, a second later, “Jesus.” All of a sudden, as if a switch had been turned somewhere inside her, shutting off power, she had no more self-control. She slumped into the chair next to Meadows and began to weep in gasping, choking sobs.

Meadows tried to calm her, but she didn’t hear him. She didn’t hear Brody when he told Bixby to call a doctor. And she saw, heard, and felt nothing when the doctor came into the office, listened to Brody’s description of what had happened, tried to talk to her, gave her a shot of Librium, led her — with the help of one of Brody’s men — to his car, and drove her to the hospital.

When she had left, Brody looked at his watch and said, “It’s not even nine o’clock yet. If ever I felt like I could use a drink… wow.”

“If you’re serious,” said Meadows, “I have some Bourbon back in my office.”

“No. If this was any indication of how the rest of the day’s going to go, I better not fuck up my head.”

“It’s hard, but you’ve got to try not to take what she said too seriously. I mean, the woman was in shock, for one thing.”

“I know, Harry. Any doctor would say she didn’t know what she was saying. The trouble is, I’d already thought a lot of the things she was saying. Not in those words, maybe, but the thoughts were the same.”

“Come on, Martin, you know you can’t blame yourself.”

“I know. I could blame Larry Vaughan. Or maybe even you. But the point is, the two deaths yesterday could have been prevented. I could have prevented them, and I didn’t. Period.”

The phone rang. It was answered in the other room, and a voice on the intercom said, “It’s Mr. Vaughan.”

Brody pushed the lighted button, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hi, Larry. Did you have a nice weekend?”

“Until about eleven o’clock last night,” said Vaughan, “when I turned on my car radio driving home. I was tempted to call you last night, but I figured you had had a rough enough day without being bothered at that hour.”

“That’s one decision I agree with.”

“Don’t rub it in, Martin. I feel bad enough.”

Brody wanted to say, “Do you, Larry?” He wanted to scrape the wound raw, to unload some of the anguish onto someone else. But he knew it was both unfair to attempt and impossible to accomplish, so all he said was, “Sure.”

“I had two cancellations already this morning. Big leases. Good people. They had already signed, and I told them I could take them to court. They said, go ahead: we’re going somewhere else. I’m scared to answer the phone. I still have twenty houses that aren’t rented for August.”

“I wish I could tell you different, Larry, but it’s going to get worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“With the beaches closed.”

“How long do you think you’ll have to keep them closed?”

“I don’t know. As long as it takes. A few days. Maybe more.”

“You know that the end of next week is the Fourth of July weekend.”

“Sure, I know.”

“It’s already too late to hope for a good summer, but we may be able to salvage something — for August, at least — if the Fourth is good.”

Brody couldn’t read the tone in Vaughan’s voice. “Are you arguing with me, Larry?”

“No. I guess I was thinking out loud. Or praying out loud. Anyway, you plan to keep the beaches closed until what? Indefinitely? How will you know when that thing’s gone away?”

“I haven’t had time to think that far ahead. I don’t even know why it’s here. Let me ask you something, Larry. Just out of curiosity.”

“What?”

“Who are your partners?”

It was a long moment before Vaughan said, “Why do you want to know? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Like I said, just curiosity.”

“You keep your curiosity for your job, Martin. Let me worry about my business.”

“Sure, Larry. No offense.”

“So what are you going to do? We can’t just sit around and hope it will go away. We could starve to death while we waited.”

“I know. Meadows and I were just talking about our options. A fish-expert friend of Harry’s says we could try to catch the fish. What would you think about getting up a couple of hundred dollars to charter Ben Gardner’s boat for a day or two? I don’t know that he’s ever caught any sharks, but it might be worth a try.”

“Anything’s worth a try, just so we get rid of that thing and go back to making a living. Go ahead. Tell him I’ll get the money from somewhere.”

Brody hung up the phone and said to Meadows, “I don’t know why I care, but I’d give my ass to know more about Mr. Vaughan’s business affairs.”

“Why?”

“He’s a very rich man. No matter how long this shark thing goes on, he won’t be badly hurt. Sure, he’ll lose a little dough, but he’s taking all this as if it was life and death — and I don’t mean just the town’s. His.”

“Maybe he’s just a conscientious fellow.”

“That wasn’t conscience talking on the phone just then. Believe me, Harry. I know what conscience is.”

Ten miles south of the eastern tip of Long Island, a chartered fishing boat drifted slowly in the tide. Two wire lines trailed limply aft in an oily slick. The captain of the boat, a tall, spare man, sat on a bench on the flying bridge, staring at the water. Below, in the cockpit, the two men who had chartered the boat sat reading. One was reading a novel, the other the New York Times.

“Hey, Quint,” said the man with the newspaper, “did you see this about the shark that killed those people?”

“I seen it,” said the captain.

“You think we’ll run into that shark?”

“Nope.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Suppose we went looking for him.”

“We won’t.”

“Why not?”

“We got a slick goin’. We’ll stay put.”

The man shook his head and smiled. “Boy, wouldn’t that be some sport.”

“Fish like that ain’t sport,” said the captain.

“How far is Amity from here?”

“Down the coast a ways.”

“Well, if he’s around here somewhere, you might run into him one of these days.”

“We’ll find one another, all right. But not today.”

FIVE

Thursday morning was foggy — a wet ground fog so thick that it had a taste: sharp and salty. People drove under the speed limit, with their lights on. Around midday, the fog lifted, and puffy cumulus clouds maundered across the sky beneath a high blanket of cirrus. By five in the afternoon, the cloud cover had begun to disintegrate, like pieces fallen from a jigsaw puzzle. Sunlight streaked through the gaps, stabbing shining patches of blue onto the gray-green surface of the sea.

Brody sat on the public beach, his elbows resting on his knees to steady the binoculars in his hands. When he lowered the glasses, he could barely see the boat — a white speck that disappeared and reappeared in the ocean swells. The strong lenses drew it into plain, though jiggly, view. Brody had been sitting there for nearly an hour. He tried to push his eyes, to extend his vision from within to delineate more clearly the outline of what he saw. He cursed and let the glasses drop and hang by the strap around his neck.

“Hey, Chief,” Hendricks said, walking up to Brody.

“Hey, Leonard. What are you doing here?”

“I was just passing by and I saw your car. What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out what the hell Ben Gardner’s doing.”

“Fishing, don’t you think?”

“That’s what he’s being paid to do, but it’s the damnedest fishing I ever saw. I’ve been here an hour, and I haven’t seen anything move on that boat.”

“Can I take a look?” Brody handed him the glasses. Hendricks raised them and looked out at sea. “Nope, you’re right. How long has he been out there?”

“All day, I think. I talked to him last night, and he said he’d be taking off at six this morning.”

“Did he go alone?”

“I don’t know. He said he was going to try to get hold of his mate — Danny what’s-his-name — but there was something about a dentist appointment. I hope to hell he didn’t go alone.”

“You want to go see? We’ve got at least two more hours of daylight.”

“How do you plan to get out there?”

“I’ll borrow Chickering’s boat. He’s got an AquaSport with an eighty-horse Evinrude on it. That’ll get us out there.”

Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of — let alone in — water above his head gave him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and an ache in his stomach — essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody’s dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t guess we’ve got much choice. Maybe by the time we get to the dock he’ll already have started in. You go get the boat ready. I’ll stop off at headquarters and give his wife a call… see if he’s called in on the radio.”

Amity’s town dock was small, with only twenty slips, a fuel dock, and a wooden shack where hot dogs and fried clams were sold in cardboard sleeves. The slips were in a little inlet protected from the open sea by a stone jetty that ran across half the width of the inlet’s mouth. Hendricks was standing in the AquaSport, the engine running, and he was chatting with a man in a twenty-five-foot cabin cruiser tied up in the neighboring slip. Brody walked along the wooden pier and climbed down the short ladder into the boat.

“What did she say?” asked Hendricks.

“Not a word. She’s been trying to raise him for half an hour, but she figures he must have turned off the radio.”

“Is he alone?”

“As far as she knows. His mate had an impacted wisdom tooth that had to be taken out today.”

The man in the cabin cruiser said, “If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s pretty strange.”

“What is?” said Brody.

“To turn off your radio when you’re out alone. People don’t do that.”

“I don’t know. Ben always bitches about all the chatter that goes on between boats when he’s out fishing. Maybe he got bored and turned it off.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s go, Leonard,” said Brody. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

Hendricks cast off the bow line, walked to the stern, uncleated the stern line, and tossed it onto the deck. He moved to the control console and pushed a knobbed handle forward. The boat lurched ahead, chugging. Hendricks pushed the handle farther forward, and the engine fired more regularly. The stern settled back, the bow rose. As they made the turn around the jetty, Hendricks pushed the lever all the way forward, and the bow dropped down.

“Planing,” said Hendricks.

Brody grabbed a steel handle on the side of the console. “Are there any life jackets?” he asked.

“Just the cushions,” said Hendricks. “They’d hold you up all right, if you were an eight-year-old boy.”

“Thanks.”

What breeze there had been had died, and there was little chop to the sea. But there were small swells, and the boat took them roughly, smacking its prow into each one, recovering with a shudder that unnerved Brody. “This thing’s gonna break apart if you don’t slow down,” he said.

Hendricks smiled, relishing his moment of command. “No worry, Chief. If I slow down, we’ll wallow. It’ll take us a week to get out there, and your stomach will feel like it’s full of squirrels.”

Gardner’s boat was about three quarters of a mile from shore. As they drew nearer, Brody could see it bobbing gently in the swells. He could even make out the black letters on the transom: FLICKA.

“He’s anchored,” said Hendricks. “Boy, that’s some lot of water to anchor a boat in. We must have more than a hundred feet out here.”

“Swell,” Brody said. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

When they were about fifty yards from the Flicka, Hendricks throttled down, and the boat settled into a slow side-to-side roll. They closed quickly. Brody walked forward and mounted a platform in the bow. He saw no signs of life. There were no rods in the rod-holders. “Hey, Ben!” he called. There was no reply.

“Maybe he’s below,” said Hendricks.

Brody called again, “Hey, Ben!” The bow of the Aqua-Sport was only a few feet from the port quarter of the Flicka. Hendricks pushed the handle into neutral, then gave it a quick burst of reverse. The AquaSport stopped and, on the next swell, nestled up against the Flicka’s gunwale. Brody gabbed the gunwale. “Hey, Ben!”

Hendricks took a line from the lazaret, walked forward, and made it fast to a cleat on the bow of the AquaSport. He looped the line over the railing of the other boat and tied a crude knot. “You want to go on board?” he said.

“Yeah.” Brody climbed aboard the Flicka. Hendricks followed, and they stood in the cockpit. Hendricks poked his head through the forward hatch. “You in there, Ben?” He looked around, withdrew his head, and said, “Not there.”

“He’s not on board,” said Brody. “No two ways about it.”

“What’s that stuff?” said Hendricks, pointing to a bucket in the corner of the stern.

Brody walked to the bucket and bent down. A stench of fish and oil filled his nose. The bucket was full of guts and blood. “Must be chum,” he said. “Fish guts and other shit. You spread it around in the water and it’s supposed to attract sharks. He didn’t use much of it. The bucket’s almost full.”

A sudden noise made Brody jump. “Whiskey, zebra, echo, two, five, niner,” said a voice crackling over the radio. “This is the Pretty Belle. You there, Jake?”

“So much for that theory,” said Brody. “He never turned off his radio.”

“I don’t get it, Chief. There are no rods. He didn’t carry a dinghy, so he couldn’t have rowed away. He swam like a fish, so if he fell overboard he would’ve just climbed back on.”

“You see a harpoon anywhere?”

“What’s it look like?”

“I don’t know. Like a harpoon. And barrels. Supposedly, you use them as floats.”

“I don’t see anything like that.”

Brody stood at the starboard gunwale, gazing into the middle distance. The boat moved slightly, and he steadied himself with his right hand. He felt something strange and looked down. There were four ragged screw holes where a cleat had been. The screws had obviously not been removed by a screwdriver; the wood around the holes was torn. “Look at this, Leonard.”

Hendricks ran his hand over the holes. He looked to the port side, where a ten-inch steel cleat still sat securely on the wood. “You imagine that what was here was as big as the one over there?” he said. “Jesus, what would it take to pull that mother out?”

“Look here, Leonard.” Brody ran his index finger over the outer edge of the gunwale. There was a scar about eight inches long, where the paint had been scraped away and the wood abraded. “It looks like someone took a file to this wood.”

“Or else rubbed the hell out of it with an awful tight piece of heavy rope.”

Brody walked over to the port side of the cockpit and, aimlessly, began to feel his way along the outer edge of the gunwale. “That’s the only place,” he said. When he reached the stern, he leaned on the gunwale and gazed down into the water.

For a moment, he stared dumbly at the transom, unseeing. Then a pattern began to take shape, a pattern of holes, deep gouges in the wooden transom, forming a rough semicircle more than three feet across. Next to it was another, similar pattern. And at the bottom of the transom, just at the water line, three short smears of blood. Please, God, thought Brody, not another one. “Come here, Leonard,” he said.

Hendricks walked to the stern and looked over. “What?”

“If I hold your legs, you think you can lean over and take a look at those holes down there and try to figure out what made them?”

“What do you think made them?”

“I don’t know. But something. I want to find out what. Come on. If you can’t dope it out in a minute or two, we’ll forget about it and go home. Okay?”

“I guess so.” Hendricks lay on the top of the transom. “Hold me tight, Chief… please.”

Brody leaned down and grabbed Hendricks’ feet. “Don’t worry,” he said. He took one of Hendricks’ legs under each arm and lifted. Hendricks rose, then bent over the transom. “Okay?” said Brody.

“A little more. Not too much! Jesus, you just dipped my head in the water.”

“Sorry. How’s that?”

“Okay, that’s it.” Hendricks began to examine the holes. “What if some shark came along right now?” he grunted. “He could grab me right out of your hands.”

“Don’t think about it. Just look.”

“I’m looking.” In a few moments he said, “Sonofabitch. Look at that thing. Hey, pull me up. I need my knife.”

“What is it?” Brody asked when Hendricks was back aboard.

Hendricks unfolded the main blade from the body of his pocket knife. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Some kind of white chip or something, stuck into one of the holes.” Knife in hand, he allowed Brody to lower him over the rail again. He worked briefly, his body twisting from the effort. Then he called: “Okay. I’ve got it. Pull.”

Brody stepped backward, hoisting Hendricks over the transom, then lowered Hendricks’ feet to the deck. “Let’s see,” he said, holding out his hand. Into Brody’s palm Hendricks dropped a triangle of glistening white denticle. It was nearly two inches long. The sides were tiny saws. Brody scrapped the tooth against the gun-wale, and it cut the wood. He looked out over the water and shook his head. “My God,” he said.

“It’s a tooth, isn’t it?” said Hendricks. “Jesus Christ Almighty. You think the shark got Ben?”

“I don’t know what else to think,” said Brody. He looked at the tooth again, then dropped it into his pocket. “We might as well go. There’s nothing we can do here.”

“What do you want to do with Ben’s boat?”

“We’ll leave it here till tomorrow. Then we’ll have someone come get it.”

“I’ll drive it back if you want.”

“And leave me to drive the other one? Forget it.”

“We could tow one of them in.”

“No. It’s getting dark, and I don’t want to have to fool around trying to dock two boats in the dark. This boat’ll be all right overnight. Just go check the anchor up front and make sure it’s secure. Then let’s go. No one’s going to need this boat before tomorrow… especially not Ben Gardner.”

They arrived at the dock in late twilight. Harry Meadows and another man, unknown to Brody, were waiting for them. “You sure have good antenna, Harry,” Brody said as he climbed the ladder onto the dock.

Meadows smiled, flattered. “That’s my trade, Martin.” He gestured toward the man beside him. “This is Matt Hooper, Chief Brody.”

The two men shook hands. “You’re the fellow from Woods Hole,” Brody said, trying to get a good look at him in the fading light. He was young — mid-twenties, Brody thought — and handsome: tanned, hair bleached by the sun. He was about as tall as Brody, an inch over six feet, but leaner: Brody guessed 170 pounds, compared to his own 200. A mental reflex scanned Hooper for possible threat. Then, with what Brody recognized as juvenile pride, he determined that if it ever came to a face-off, he could take Hooper. Experience would make the difference.

“That’s right,” said Hooper.

“Harry’s been tapping your brain long-distance,” Brody said. “How come you’re here?”

Meadows said, “I called him. I thought he might be able to figure out what’s going on.”

“Shit, Harry, all you had to do was ask me,” said Brody. “I could have told you. You see, there’s this fish out there, and…”

“You know what I mean.”

Brody sensed his own resentment at the intrusion, the complication that Hooper’s expertise was bound to add, the implicit division of authority that Hooper’s arrival had created. And he recognized the resentment as stupid. “Sure, Harry,” he said. “No problem. It’s just been a long day.”

“What did you find out there?” Meadows asked.

Brody started to reach in his pocket for the tooth, but he stopped. He didn’t want to go through it all, standing on a dock in near darkness. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Come on back to the station and I’ll fill you in.”

“Is Ben going to stay out there all night?”

“It looks that way, Harry.” Brody turned to Hendricks, who had finished tying up the boat. “You going home, Leonard?”

“Yeah. I want to clean up before I go to work.”

Brody arrived at police headquarters before Meadows and Hooper. It was almost eight o’clock. He had two phone calls to make — to Ellen, to see if the dinner leftovers could be reheated or if he should pick up something on the way home, and, the call he dreaded, to Sally Gardner. He called Ellen first: pot roast. It could be reheated. It might taste like a sneaker, but it would be warm. He hung up, checked the phone book for the Gardner number, and dialed it.

“Sally? This is Martin Brody.” Suddenly he regretted having called without thinking the call through. How much should he tell her? Not much, he decided, at least not until he had had a chance to check with Hooper to see if his theory was plausible or absurd.

“Where’s Ben, Martin?” The voice was calm, but pitched slightly higher than Brody remembered as normal.

“I don’t know, Sally.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You went out there, didn’t you?”

“Yes. He wasn’t on the boat.”

“But the boat was there.”

“The boat was there.”

“You went on board? You looked all over it? Even below?”

“Yes.” Then a tiny hope. “Ben didn’t carry a dinghy, did he?”

“No. How could he not be there?” The voice was shriller now.

“I…”

“Where is he?”

Brody caught the tone of incipient hysteria. He wished he had gone to the house in person. “Are you alone, Sally?”

“No. The kids are here.”

She seemed calmer, but Brody was sure the calm was a lull before the burst of grief that would come when she realized that the fears with which she had lived every day for the sixteen years Ben had been fishing professionally — closet fears shoved into mental recesses and never uttered because they would seem ridiculous — had come true.

Brody dug at his memory for the ages of the Gardner children. Twelve, maybe; then nine, then about six. What kind of kid was the twelve-year-old? He didn’t know. Who was the nearest neighbor? Shit. Why didn’t he think of this before? The Finleys. “Just a second, Sally.” He called to the officer at the front desk. “Clements, call Grace Finley and tell her to get her ass over to Sally Gardner’s house right now.”

“Suppose she asks why.”

“Just tell her I said to go. Tell her I’ll explain later.” He turned back to the phone. “I’m sorry, Sally. All I can tell you for sure is that we went out to where Ben’s boat is anchored. We went on board and Ben wasn’t there. We looked all around, downstairs and everything.”

Meadows and Hooper walked into Brody’s office. He motioned them to chairs.

“But where could he be?” said Sally Gardner. “You don’t just get off a boat in the middle of the ocean.”

“No.”

“And he couldn’t have fallen overboard. I mean, he could have, but he’d get right back in again.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe someone came and took him off in another boat. Maybe the engine wouldn’t start and he had to ride with someone else. Did you check the engine?”

“No,” Brody said, embarrassed.

“That’s probably it, then.” The voice was subtly lighter, almost girlish, coated with a veneer of hope that, when it broke, would shatter like iced crystal.

“And if the battery was dead, that would explain why he couldn’t call on the radio.”

“The radio was working, Sally.”

“Wait a minute. Who’s there? Oh, it’s you.” There was a pause. Brody heard Sally talking to Grace Finley. Then Sally came back on the line. “Grace says you told her to come over here. Why?”

“I thought—”

“You think he’s dead, don’t you? You think he drowned.” The veneer shattered, and she began to sob.

“I’m afraid so, Sally. That’s all we can think at the moment. Let me talk to Grace for a minute, will you please?”

A couple of seconds later, the voice of Grace Finley said, “Yes, Martin?”

“I’m sorry to do this to you, but I couldn’t think of anything else. Can you stay with her for a while?”

“All night. I will.”

“That might be a good idea. I’ll try to get over later on. Thanks.”

“What happened, Martin?”

“We don’t know for sure.”

“Is it that… thing again?”

“Maybe. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. But do me a favor, Grace. Don’t say anything about a shark to Sally. It’s bad enough as it is.”

“All right, Martin. Wait. Wait a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand, and Brody heard some muffled conversation. Then Sally Gardner came on the line.

“Why did you do it, Martin?”

“Do what?”

Apparently, Grace Finley tried to take the phone from her hand, for Brody heard Sally say, “Let me speak, damn you!” Then she said to him, “Why did you send him? Why Ben?” Her voice wasn’t particularly loud, but she spoke with an intensity that struck Brody as hard as if she were yelling.

“Sally, you’re—”

“This didn’t have to happen!” she said. “You could have stopped it.”

Brody wanted to hang up. He didn’t want a repetition of the scene with the Kintner boy’s mother. But he had to defend himself. She had to know that it wasn’t his fault. How could she blame him? He said, “Crap! Ben was a fisherman, a good one. He knew the risks.”

“If you hadn’t—”

“Stop it, Sally!” Brody let himself stamp on her words. “Try to get some rest.” He hung up the phone. He was furious, but his fury was confused. He was angry at Sally Gardner for accusing him, and angry at himself for being angry at her. If, she had said. If what? If he had not sent Ben. Sure. And if pigs had wings they’d be eagles. If he had gone himself. But that wasn’t his trade. He had sent the expert. He looked up at Meadows. “You heard.”

“Not all of it. But enough to gather that Ben Gardner has become victim number four.”

Brody nodded. “I think so.” He told Meadows and Hooper about his trip with Hendricks. Once or twice, Meadows interrupted with a question. Hooper listened, his angular face placid and his eyes — a light, powder blue — fixed on Brody. At the end of his tale, Brody reached into his pants pocket. “We found this,” he said. “Leonard dug it out of the wood.” He flipped the tooth to Hooper, who turned it over in his hand.

“What do you think, Matt?” said Meadows.

“It’s a white.”

“How big?”

“I can’t be sure, but big. Fifteen, twenty feet. That’s some fantastic fish.” He looked at Meadows. “Thanks for calling me,” he said. “I could spend a whole life-time around sharks and never see a fish like that.”

Brody asked, “How much would a fish like that weigh?”

“Five or six thousand pounds.”

Brody whistled. “Three tons.”

“Do you have any thoughts about what happened?” Meadows asked.

“From what the chief says, it sounds like the fish killed Mr. Gardner.”

“How?” said Brody.

“Any number of ways. Gardner might have fallen overboard. More likely, he was pulled over. His leg may have gotten tangled in a harpoon line. He could even have been taken while he was leaning over the stern.”

“How do you account for the teeth in the stern?”

“The fish attacked the boat.”

“What the hell for?”

“Sharks aren’t very bright, Chief. They exist on instinct and impulse. The impulse to feed is powerful.”

“But a thirty-foot boat…”

“A shark doesn’t think. To him it wasn’t a boat. It was just something large.”

“And inedible.”

“Not till he’d tried it. You have to understand. There’s nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That’s their instinct. But this fish doesn’t run from anything. He doesn’t know fear. He might be cautious — say around an even bigger white. But fear — no way.”

“What else do they attack?”

“Anything.”

“Just like that. Anything.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“Do you have any idea why he’s hung around here so long?” said Brody. “I don’t know how much you know about the water here, but…”

“I grew up here.”

“You did? In Amity?”

“No, Southampton. I spent every summer there, from grade school through grad school.”

“Every summer. So you didn’t really grow up there.” Brody was groping for something with which to reestablish his parity with, if not superiority to, the younger man, and what he settled for was reverse snobbism, an attitude not uncommon to year-round residents of resort communities. It gave them armor against the contempt they sensed radiating from the rich summer folk. It was an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude, a social machismo that equated wealth with effeteness, simplicity with goodness, and poverty (up to a point) with honesty. And it was an attitude that, in general, Brody found both repugnant and silly. But he had felt threatened by the younger man he wasn’t really sure why — and the sensation was so alien that he had reached for the most convenient carapace, the one Hooper had handed him.

“You’re picking nits,” Hooper said testily. “Okay, so I wasn’t born here. But I’ve spent a lot of time in these waters, and I wrote a paper on this coastline. Anyway, I know what you’re getting at, and you’re right. This shoreline isn’t an environment that would normally support a long stay by a shark.”

“So why is this one staying?”

“It’s impossible to say. It’s definitely uncharacteristic, but sharks do so many uncharacteristic things that the erratic becomes the normal. Anyone who’d risk money — not to mention his life — on a prediction about what one big shark will do in a given situation is a fool. This shark could be sick. The patterns of his life are so beyond his control that damage to one small mechanism could cause him to disorient and behave strangely.”

“If this is how he acts when he’s sick,” said Brody, “I’d hate to see what he does when he’s feeling fine.”

“No. Personally, I don’t think he’s sick. There are other things that could cause him to stay here — many of them things we’ll never understand, natural factors, caprices.”

“Like what?”

“Changes in water temperature or current flow or feeding patterns. As food supplies move, so do the predators. A few summers ago, for example, a completely inexplicable phenomenon took place off the shore of parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island. The whole coastline was suddenly inundated with menhaden — fishermen call them bunker. Huge schools. Millions of fish. They coated the water like an oil slick. There were so many that you could throw a bare hook in the water and reel it in, and more often than not you’d catch a menhaden by foul-hooking it. Blue-fish and bass feed on menhaden, so all of a sudden there were masses of bluefish feeding in schools right off the beaches. In Watch Hill, Rhode Island, people were wading into the surf and catching bluefish with rakes. Garden rakes! Just shoveling the fish out of the water. Then the big predators came — big tuna, four, five, six hundred pounds. Deep-sea fishing boats were catching bluefin tuna within a hundred yards of the shore. In harbors sometimes. Then suddenly it stopped. The menhaden went away, and so did the other fish. I spent three weeks down there trying to figure out what was going on. I still don’t know. It’s all part of the ecological balance. When something tips too far one way or the other, peculiar things happen.”

“But this is even weirder,” said Brody. “This fish has stayed in one place, in one chunk of water only a mile or two square, for over a week. He hasn’t moved up or down the beach. He hasn’t touched anybody in East Hampton or Southampton. What is it about Amity?”

“I don’t know. I doubt that anyone could give you a good answer.”

Meadows said, “Minnie Eldridge has the answer.”

“Balls,” said Brody.

“Who’s Minnie Eldridge?” asked Hooper.

“The postmistress,” said Brody. “She says it’s God’s will, or something like that. We’re being punished for our sins.”

Hooper smiled. “Right now, anyway, that’s as good an answer as I’ve got.”

“That’s encouraging,” said Brody. “Is there anything you plan to do to get an answer?”

“There are a few things. I’ll take water samples here and in East Hampton. I’ll try to find out how other fish are behaving — if anything extraordinary is around, or if anything that should be here isn’t. And I’ll try to find that shark. Which reminds me, is there a boat available?”

“Yes, I’m sorry to say,” said Brody. “Ben Gardner’s. We’ll get you out to it tomorrow, and you can use it at least until we work something out with his wife. Do you really think you can catch that fish, after what happened to Ben Gardner?”

“I didn’t say I was going to try to catch it. I don’t think I’d want to try that. Not alone, anyway.”

“Then what the hell are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to play it by ear.”

Brody looked into Hooper’s eyes and said, “I want that fish killed. If you can’t do it, we’ll find someone who can.”

Hooper laughed. “You sound like a mobster. ‘I want that fish killed.’ So go get a contract out on him. Who are you going to get to do the job?”

“I don’t know. What about it, Harry? You’re supposed to know everything that goes on around here. Isn’t there any fisherman on this whole damn island equipped to catch big sharks?”

Meadows thought for a moment before he spoke. “There may be one. I don’t know much about him, but I think his name is Quint, and I think he operates out of a private pier somewhere around Promised Land. I can find out a little more about him if you like.”

“Why not?” said Brody. “He sounds like a possible.”

Hooper said, “Look, Chief, you can’t go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn’t evil. It’s not a murderer. It’s just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.”

“Listen you…” Brody was growing angry — an anger born of frustration and humiliation. He knew Hooper was right, but he felt that right and wrong were irrelevant to the situation. The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives. Most of all, Brody needed it dead, for the death of the fish would be a catharsis for him. Hooper had touched that nerve, and that infuriated Brody further. But he swallowed his rage and said, “Forget it.”

The phone rang. “It’s for you, Chief,” said Clements. “Mr. Vaughan.”

“Oh swell. That’s just what I need.” He punched the flashing button on the phone and picked up the receiver. “Yeah, Larry.”

“Hello, Martin. How are you?” Vaughan’s voice was friendly, almost effusively so. Brody thought, he’s probably had a couple of belts.

“As well as could be expected, Larry.”

“You’re working pretty late. I tried to get you at home.”

“Yeah. Well, when you’re the chief of police and your constituents are getting themselves killed every twenty minutes, that kind of keeps you busy.”

“I heard about Ben Gardner.”

“What did you hear?”

“That he was missing.”

“News travels pretty fast.”

“Are you sure it was the shark again?”

“Sure? Yeah, I guess so. Nothing else seems to make any sense.”

“Martin, what are you going to do?” There was a pathetic urgency in Vaughan’s voice.

“That’s a good question, Larry. We’re doing everything we can right now. We’ve got the beaches closed down. We’ve—”

“I’m aware of that, to say the very least.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Have you ever tried to sell healthy people real estate in a leper colony?”

“No, Larry,” Brody said wearily.

“I’m getting cancellations every day. People are walking out on leases. I haven’t had a new customer in here since Sunday.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Well, I thought… I mean, what I’m wondering is, maybe we’re overreacting to this whole thing.”

“You’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Hardly, Martin. Now calm down. Let’s discuss this rationally.”

“I’m rational. I’m not sure about you, though.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Vaughan said, “What would you say to opening the beaches, just for the Fourth of July weekend?”

“Not a chance. Not a fucking chance.”

“Now listen…”

“No, you listen, Larry. The last time I listened to you, we had two people killed. If we catch that fish, if we kill the sonofabitch, then we’ll open the beaches. Until then, forget it.”

“What about nets?”

“What about them?”

“Why couldn’t we put steel nets out to protect the beaches? Someone told me that’s what they do in Australia.”

He must be drunk, Brody thought. “Larry, this is a straight coastline. Are you going to put nets out along two and a half miles of beaches? Fine. You get the money. I’d say about a million dollars, for openers.”

“What about patrols? We could hire people to patrol up and down the beaches in boats.”

“That’s not good enough, Larry. What is it with you, anyway? Are your partners on your ass again?”

“That’s none of your damn business, Martin. For God’s sake, man, this town is dying!”

“I know it, Larry,” Brody said softly. “And as far as I know, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Good night.” He hung up the phone.

Meadows and Hooper rose to leave. Brody walked them to the front door of the station house, As they started out the door, Brody said to Meadows, “Hey, Harry, you left your lighter inside.” Meadows started to say something, but Brody stepped on his words. “Come on back inside and I’ll give it to you. If you leave it around here overnight, it’s likely to disappear.” He waved to Hooper. “See you.”

When they were back in Brody’s office, Meadows took his lighter from his pocket and said, “I trust you had something to say to me.”

Brody shut the door to his office. “You think you can find out something about Larry’s partners?”

“I guess so. Why?”

“Ever since this thing began, Larry has been on my ass to keep the beaches open. And now, after all that’s just happened, he says he wants them open for the Fourth. The other day he said he was under pressure from his partners. I told you about it.”

“And?”

“I think we should know who it is who has enough clout to drive Larry bullshit. I wouldn’t care if he wasn’t the mayor of this town. But if there are people telling him what to do, I think we ought to know who they are.”

Meadows sighed. “Okay, Martin. I’ll do what I can. But digging around in Larry Vaughan’s affairs isn’t my idea of fun.”

“There’s not a whole hell of a lot that is fun these days, is there?”

Brody walked Meadows to the door, then went back to his desk and sat down. Vaughan had been right about one thing, he thought: Amity was showing all the signs of imminent death. It wasn’t just the real estate market, though its sickness was as contagious as smallpox. Evelyn Bixby, the wife of one of Brody’s officers, had lost her job as a real estate agent and was working as a waitress in a hash house on Route 27.

Two new boutiques that were scheduled to open the next day had put off their debuts until July 3, and the proprietors of both made a point of calling on Brody to tell him that if the beaches weren’t open by then, they wouldn’t open their stores at all. One of them was already looking at a site for rent in East Hampton. The sporting goods store had posted signs announcing a clearance sale — a sale that normally took place over the Labor Day weekend. The only good thing about the Amity economy, as far as Brody was concerned, was that Saxon’s was doing so badly that it laid off Henry Kimble. Now that he didn’t have his bartending job, he slept during the day and could occasionally survive through a shift of police work without a nap.

Beginning on Monday morning — the first day the beaches were closed — Brody had posted two officers on the beaches. Together, they had had seventeen confrontations with people who insisted on swimming. One was with a man named Robert Dexter, who claimed a constitutional right to swim off his own beach and who allowed his dog to terrorize the officer on duty, until the cop pulled his pistol and threatened to shoot the dog. Another dustup took place on the public beach, when a New York lawyer started reading the United States Constitution to a policeman and a multitude of cheering youths.

Still, Brody was convinced that — so far, at least — no one had gone swimming.

On Wednesday, two kids had rented a skiff and rowed about three hundred yards offshore, where they spent an hour ladling blood, chicken guts, and duck heads overboard. A passing fishing boat spotted them and called Brody via the marine operator. Brody called Hooper, and together they went in Flicka and towed the boys to shore. In the skiff the boys had a flying gaff attached to two hundred yards of clothesline, secured to the prow by a square knot. They said they planned to hook the shark with the gaff and go for a “Nantucket sleigh ride.” Brody told them that if they ever tried the stunt again, he’d arrest them for attempted suicide.

There had been four reports of shark sightings. One had turned out to be a floating log. Two, according to the fisherman who followed up the reports, were schools of jumping bait fish. And one, as far as anyone could tell, was a flat nothing.

On Tuesday evening, just at dusk, Brody had received an anonymous phone call telling him that a man was dumping shark bait into the water off the public beach. It turned out to be not a man, but a woman dressed in a man’s raincoat — Jessie Parker, one of the clerks at Walden’s Stationery Store. At first she denied throwing anything into the water, but then she admitted that she had tossed a paper bag into the surf. It contained three empty vermouth bottles.

“Why didn’t you throw them in the garbage?” Brody had asked.

“I didn’t want the garbage man to think I’m a heavy drinker.”

“Then why didn’t you throw them in someone else’s garbage?”

“That wouldn’t be nice,” she said. “Garbage is… sort of private, don’t you think?”

Brody told her that from now on, she should take her empty bottles, put them in a plastic bag, put that bag in a brown paper bag, then smash the bottles with a hammer until they were ground up. Nobody would ever know they had been bottles.

Brody looked at his watch. It was after nine, too late to pay a visit to Sally Gardner. He hoped she was asleep. Maybe Grace Finley had given her a pill or a glass of whiskey to help her rest. Before he left the office, he called the Coast Guard station at Montauk and told the duty officer about Ben Gardner. The officer said he would dispatch a patrol boat at first light to search for the body.

“Thanks,” said Brody. “I hope you find it before it washes up.” Brody was suddenly appalled at himself. “It” was Ben Gardner, a friend. What would Sally say if she heard Brody refer to her husband as “it"? Fifteen years of friendship wiped out, forgotten. There was no more Ben Gardner. There was only an “it” that should be found before it became a gory nuisance.

“We’ll try,” said the officer. “Boy, I feel for you guys. You must be having a hell of a summer.”

“I only hope it isn’t our last,” said Brody. He hung up, turned out the light in his office, and walked out to his car.

As he turned into his driveway, Brody saw the familiar blue-gray light shining from the living room windows. The boys were watching television. He walked through the front door, flipped off the outside light, and poked his head into the dark living room. The oldest boy, Billy, lay on the couch, leaning on an elbow. Martin, the middle son, age twelve, lounged in an easy chair, his shoeless feet propped up on the coffee table. Eight-year-old Sean sat on the floor, his back against the couch, stroking a cat in his lap. “How goes it?” said Brody.

“Good, Dad,” said Bill, without shifting his gaze from the television.

“Where’s your mom?”

“Upstairs. She said to tell you your dinner’s in the kitchen.”

“Okay. Not too late, Sean, huh? It’s almost nine-thirty.”

“Okay, Dad,” said Sean.

Brody went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a beer. The remains of the pot roast sat on the kitchen table in a roasting pan, surrounded by a scum of congealed gravy. The meat was brownish-gray and stringy. “Dinner?” said Brody to himself. He checked the icebox for sandwich makings. There was some hamburger, a package of chicken legs, a dozen eggs, a jar of pickles, and twelve cans of soda pop. He found a piece of American cheese, dried and curled with age, and he folded it and popped it into his mouth.

He debated heating up the pot roast, then said aloud, “The hell with it.” He found two pieces of bread, spread mustard on them, took a carving knife from a magnetic board on the wall, and sliced a thick slab of roast. He dropped the meat on one of the pieces of bread, scattered a few pickles on top of it, covered it with the other piece of bread, and mashed the sandwich down with the heel of his hand. He put it on a plate, picked up his beer, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

Ellen was sitting up in bed, reading Cosmopolitan. “Hello,” she said. “A tough day? You didn’t say anything on the phone.”

“A tough day. That’s about all we’re having these days. You heard about Ben Gardner? I wasn’t really positive when I talked to you.” He put the plate and the beer on the dresser and sat on the edge of the bed to remove his shoes.

“Yes. I got a call from Grace Finley asking if I knew where Dr. Craig was. His service wouldn’t say, and Grace wanted to give Sally a sedative.”

“Did you find him?”

“No. But I had one of the boys take some Seconal over to her.”

“What’s Seconal?”

“Sleeping pills.”

“I didn’t know you were taking sleeping pills.”

“I don’t, often. Just every now and then.”

“Where did you get them?”

“From Dr. Craig, when I went to him last time about my nerves. I told you.”

“Oh.” Brody tossed his shoes into a corner, stood up, and took off his trousers, which he folded neatly over the back of a chair. He took off his shirt, put it on a hanger, and hung it in the closet. In T-shirt and undershorts he sat down on the bed and began to eat his sandwich. The meat was dry and flaky. All he could taste was mustard.

“Didn’t you find the roast?” said Ellen.

Brody’s mouth was full, so he nodded.

“What’s that you’re eating, then?”

He swallowed. “The roast.”

“Did you heat it up?”

“No. I don’t mind it like this.”

Ellen made a face and said, “Yech.”

Brody ate in silence, as Ellen aimlessly turned the pages of her magazine. After a few moments, she closed the magazine, put it in her lap, and said, “Oh, dear.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I was just thinking about Ben Gardner. It’s so horrible. What do you think Sally will do?”

“I don’t know,” said Brody. “I worry about her. Have you ever talked money with her?”

“Never. But there can’t be much. I don’t think her children have had new clothes in a year, and she’s always saying that she’d give anything to be able to afford meat more than once a week, instead of having to eat the fish Ben catches. Will she get social security?”

“I’d think so, but it won’t amount to much. There’s welfare.”

“Oh, she couldn’t,” said Ellen.

“You wait. Pride is something she won’t be able to afford. Now there won’t even be fish any more.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“Personally? I don’t see how. We’re not exactly in fat city ourselves. But there may be something the town can do. I’ll talk to Vaughan about it.”

“Have you made any progress?”

“You mean about catching that damn thing? No. Meadows called that oceanographer friend of his down from Woods Hole, so he’s here. Not that I see what good he’s going to do.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s all right, I guess. He’s young, a decent-looking guy. He’s a bit of a know-it-all, but that’s not surprising. He seems to know the area pretty well.”

“Oh? How so?”

“He said he was a summer kid in Southampton. Spent all his summers there.”

“Working?”

“I don’t know, living with the parents probably. He looks to be the type.”

“What type?”

“Rich. Good family. The Southampton summer type. You ought to know it, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t get angry. I was just asking.”

“I’m not angry. I just said you ought to know the type, that’s all. I mean, you’re the type yourself.”

Ellen smiled. “I used to be. But now I’m just an old lady.”

“That’s a crock,” Brody said. “Nine out of ten of the summer broads in this town can’t do what you can for a bathing suit.” He was happy to see her fishing for compliments, and happy to give them to her. This was one of their ritual preludes to sex, and the sight of Ellen in bed made Brody yearn for sex. Her hair hung down to her shoulders on both sides of her head, then tucked inward in a curl. Her nightgown was cut so deeply in front that both her breasts were visible, all but the nipples, and was so diaphanous that Brody was sure he could actually see the dark flesh of the nipples. “I’m going to brush my teeth,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

When he returned from the bathroom, he was tumescent. He walked to the dresser to turn out the light.

“You know,” Ellen said, “I think we should give the boys tennis lessons.”

“What for? Have they said they want to play tennis?”

“No. Not in so many words. But it’s a good sport for them to know. It will help them when they’re gown-up. It’s an entree.”

“To what?”

“To the people they should know. If you play tennis well you can walk into a club anywhere and get to know people. Now’s the time they should be learning.”

“Where are they going to get lessons?”

“I was thinking of the Field Club.”

“As far as I know, we’re not members of the Field Club.”

“I think we could get in. I still know a few people who are members. If I asked them, I’ll bet they’d propose us.”

“Forget it.”

“Why?”

“Number one, we can’t afford it. I bet it costs a thousand bucks to join, and then it’s at least a few hundred a year. We haven’t got that kind of money.”

“We have savings.”

“Not for tennis lessons, for Christ sake! Come on, let’s drop it.” He reached for the light.

“It would be good for the boys.”

Brody let his hand fall to the top of the dresser. “Look, we’re not tennis people. We wouldn’t feel right there. I wouldn’t feel right there. They don’t want us there.”

“How do you know? We’ve never tried.”

“Just forget it.” He switched off the light, walked over to the bed, pulled back the covers, and slid in beside Ellen. “Besides,” he said, nuzzling her neck, “there’s another sport I’m better at.”

“The boys are awake.”

“They’re watching television. They wouldn’t know it if a bomb went off up here.” He kissed her neck and began to rub his hand in circles on her stomach, moving higher with each rotation.

Ellen yawned. “I’m so sleepy,” she said. “I took a pill before you came home.”

Brody stopped rubbing. “What the hell for?”

“I didn’t sleep well last night, and I didn’t want to wake up if you came home late. So I took a pill.”

“I’m going to throw those goddam pills away.” He kissed her cheek, then tried to kiss her mouth but caught her in mid-yawn.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid it won’t work.”

“It’ll work. All you have to do is help a little.”

“I’m so tired. But you go ahead if you want. I’ll try to stay awake.”

“Shit,” said Brody. He rolled back to his side of the bed. “I’m not very big on screwing corpses.”

“That was uncalled-for.”

Brody didn’t reply. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling and feeling his erection dwindle. But the pressure inside him was still there, a dull ache in his groin.

A moment later, Ellen said, “What’s Harry Meadows’ friend’s name?”

“Hooper.”

“Not David Hooper.”

“No. I think his name is Matt.”

“Oh. I went out with a David Hooper a long, long time ago. I remember…” Before she could finish the sentence, her eyes shut, and soon she slipped into the deep breathing of sleep.

A few blocks away, in a small clapboard house, a black man sat at the foot of his son’s bed. “What story do you want to read?” he said.

“I don’t want to read a story,” said the boy, who was seven. “I want to tell a story.”

“Okay. What’ll we tell one about?”

“A shark. Let’s tell one about a shark.” The man winced. “No. Let’s tell one about… a bear.”

“No, a shark. I want to know about sharks.”

“You mean a once-upon-a-time story?”

“Sure. Like, you know, once upon a time there was a shark that ate people.”

“That’s not a very nice story.”

“Why do sharks eat people?”

“I guess they get hungry. I don’t know.”

“Do you bleed if a shark eats you?”

“Yes,” said the man. “Come on. Let’s tell a story about another kind of animal. You’ll have nightmares if we tell about a shark.”

“No, I won’t. If a shark tried to eat me, I’d punch him in the nose.”

“No shark is going to try to eat you.”

“Why not? If I go swimming I bet one would. Don’t sharks eat black people?”

“Now stop it! I don’t want to hear any more about sharks.” The man lifted a pile of books from the bedside table. “Here. Let’s read Peter Pan.”