Riptide

Chapter 27

The following afternoon, Hatch left the island in fine high spirits. The pumps had been chugging in tandem all the previous day and on into the night, sucking millions of gallons of brown seawater out of the Pit, piping it across the island, and dumping it back into the ocean. Finally, after thirty hours, the uptake hoses had struck silt at the bottom of the Water Pit, one hundred forty feet down.

Hatch had waited tensely in his medical office, but by five he'd received word that high tide had come and gone without any apparent seepage of seawater into the Pit. There had been an anxious watch as the massive timbering groaned, creaked, and settled under its heavier burden. Seismographic sensors registered some small cave-ins, but they were in adjoining side tunnels and pits, not the main shaft. After a few hours the major settling seemed to cease. The cofferdam had held. Now, a crew was at work with a magnetized grappling hook, clearing out debris that had fallen into the Water Pit over the centuries and snagged on various crossbeams and timbers.

After mooring his boat in Stormhaven, Hatch stopped by the Co-op to pick up a salmon fillet. Then, on impulse, he drove the eight miles down the coast to Southport. Driving along Route 1A, the old coastal highway, he could see a line of sullen lightning flicker jaggedly across forty degrees of sea horizon, pale yellow against the blues and pinks of the evening. A massive thunderhead had reared up beyond Monhegan Island far to the south, rising to thirty thousand feet, its steel-colored interior glinting with internal electricity: a typical summer storm, promising a heavy rain and perhaps a few bolts, but without the virulence to blow up a dangerous sea.

Southport's grocery, though poorly stocked by Cambridge standards, carried a number of things not found in Bud's Superette. As he got out of his Jaguar, Hatch made a quick scan of the street: it wouldn't do for anyone to recognize him and report the treasonous act to Bud. He smiled to himself, thinking how alien this small-town logic would seem to a Bostonian.

Arriving home, Hatch made a pot of coffee and poached the salmon with lemon, dill, and asparagus, then whipped up a sauce of curried horseradish mayonnaise. Most of the dining room table was covered with a large green canvas, and he cleared a space at the far end and sat down with his dinner and the Stormhaven Gazette. He was partly pleased, and partly disappointed, to see that the Ragged Island dig had been relegated to second page. Pride of place on the front page went to the Lobster Bake, and to the moose that had wandered into the storage lot behind Kai Estenson's hardware store, run amok, and been tranquilized by game officials. The article on the dig mentioned "excellent progress, despite a few unanticipated setbacks," and went on to say that the man wounded in the prior week's accident was resting comfortably at home. As Hatch had requested, his own name did not appear.

Finishing his dinner, he dumped the dishes in the sink, then returned to the dining room and the large green canvas. Sipping a fresh cup of coffee, he pulled the canvas away, exposing a smaller canvas and, on it, two of the skeletons that had been uncovered the day before. He had chosen what he thought were the most complete and representative specimens from the staggeringly large burial group and brought the remains back to his house, where he could examine them in peace.

The bones were clean and hard and stained a light brown by the iron-rich soil of the island. In the dry air of the house, they emitted a faint odor of old earth. Hatch stood back, arms akimbo, and contemplated the skeletons and the pathetic collections of buttons, buckles, and hobnails that had been found with them. One had been wearing a ring—a gold ring set with an inferior cabochon garnet, valuable more for historical reasons than anything else. Hatch picked it up from among the neat array of items. He tried it on his little finger, found that it fit, and left it there, somehow pleased at this connection with the long-dead pirate.

Summer twilight lay across the meadow beyond the open windows, and frogs in the millpond at the bottom of the fields had begun their evening vespers. Hatch pulled out a small notebook, writing "Pirate A" on the left side of a page and "Pirate B" on the right. Then he scratched these out, replacing them with "Black-beard" and "Captain Kidd." Somehow, it made them more human. Underneath each heading he began jotting his first impressions.

First, Hatch sexed the skeletons carefully: he knew there were more female pirates plying the seas in the 1700s than most people realized. Both were male. They were also nearly toothless, a characteristic shared with the other skeletons in the mass grave. Hatch picked up a loose mandible, examining it with a magnifying glass. Along the mandibular process there was scarring due to lesions of the gums, and places where the bone had been thinned and apparently eaten away. The few remaining teeth showed a striking pathology: a separation of the odontoblast layer from the dentin. Hatch laid the jawbone down, wondering whether this was due to disease, starvation, or simply poor hygiene.

He cradled the skull of the pirate he'd labeled Blackbeard and examined it, Yorick style. Blackbeard's one remaining upper incisor was distinctly shoveled: That implied either East Asian or Amerindian stock. He replaced the skull and continued his examination. The other pirate, Kidd, had broken his leg in the past: The ends of the bone around the fracture were abraded and calcified, and the break had not knitted together well. Probably walked around with a limp and in severe pain. In life, Kidd would not have been a good-tempered pirate. The man also had an old wound in the clavicle; there was a deep score in the bone, surrounded by spurs. Cutlass blow? Hatch wondered.

Both men appeared to be under forty. If Blackbeard was Asiatic, Captain Kidd was probably Caucasian. Hatch made a mental note to ask St. John if he knew anything about the racial makeup of Ockham's crew.

Hatch walked around the table, musing, then picked up a femur. It seemed light and insubstantial. He bent it and, to his surprise, felt it snap like a dry twig between his fingers. He peered at the ends. Clearly a case of osteoporosis—thinning of the bone—rather than simple graveyard decay. Looking more closely now, he examined the bones of the other skeleton and found the same symptoms.

The pirates were too young for this to be gerontological in origin. Again, it could be either poor diet or disease. But what disease? He ran through the symptoms of several possibilities, his diagnostic mind working, and then suddenly broke into a broad smile.

He turned to his working bookshelf and plucked off the well-thumbed copy of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. He flipped through the index until he found what he was looking for, then turned quickly to the page. Scurvy, it read: Scorbutus (Vitamin C Deficiency). Yes, there were the symptoms: loss of teeth, osteoporosis, cessation of the healing process, even the reopening of old wounds.

He shut the book and slipped it back on the shelf. Mystery solved. Hatch knew that scurvy was now rare in most of the world. Even the poorest Third World areas he had practiced in produced fresh fruits and vegetables, and in all his career he had never seen a case. Until now. He stepped back from the table, feeling uncommonly pleased with himself.

The doorbell rang. Damn, he thought, hastily pulling the canvas cover over the skeletons before stepping into the living room. One of the prices of living in a small town was that nobody thought to telephone before dropping by. It wouldn't do, he thought, to be seen with his dining room table laid with ancient skeletons instead of the family silver.

Stepping up to the front and glancing out the window, Hatch was surprised to see the stooped form of Professor Orville Horn. The old man was leaning on his cane, wisps of white hair standing from his head as if charged up with a Van de Graaf generator.

"Ah, the abominable Doctor Hatch!" the professor said as the door opened. "I was just passing by and saw the lights burning in this old mausoleum of yours." His small bright eyes roved restlessly as he spoke. "I thought perhaps you'd been down in the dungeon, cutting up bodies. Some young girls are missing from the village, you know, and the townsfolk are restless." His gaze landed on the large canvas lump on the dining room table. "Hullo! What's this?"

"Pirate skeletons," said Hatch with a grin. "You wanted a present, right? Well, happy birthday."

The professor's eyes went incandescent with delight as he stepped unbidden into the living room. "Marvelous!" he cried. "My suspicions were well-founded, I see. Where did you get them?"

"Thalassa's archaeologist uncovered the site of the pirate encampment on Ragged Island a couple of days ago," Hatch replied, leading the old man into the dining room. "They found a mass grave. I thought I'd bring a couple back and try to determine cause of death."

The professor's shaggy brows raised at this information. Hatch pulled back the canvas cover and his guest leaned forward with interest, peering closely, poking an occasional bone with his cane.

"I believe I've figured out what killed them," said Hatch.

The professor held up his hand. "Hush. Let me try my hand."

Hatch smiled, remembering the professor's love of scientific challenges. It was a game they had played on many an afternoon, the professor giving Hatch a bizarre specimen or scientific conundrum to puzzle over.

Dr. Horn picked up Blackbeard's skull, turned it over, looking at the teeth. "East Asian," he said, putting it down.

"Very good."

"Not terribly surprising," replied the professor. "Pirates were the first equal opportunity employers. I imagine this one was Burmese or Bornean. Might have been a Lascar."

"I'm impressed," Hatch said.

"How soon they forget." The professor moved around the skeletons, his beady eyes glittering, like a cat circling a mouse. He picked up the bone Hatch had broken. "Osteoporosis," he said, raising an eye in Hatch's direction.

Hatch smiled and said nothing.

Dr. Horn picked up a mandible. "Evidently these pirates did not believe in flossing twice a day." He examined the teeth, stroked his face with a long, thoughtful finger, and straightened up. "All indications point to scurvy."

Hatch could feel his face fall. "You figured that out a lot faster than I did."

"Scurvy was endemic on sailing ships in past centuries. Common knowledge, I'm afraid."

"Maybe it was rather obvious," said Hatch, a little crestfallen.

The professor gave him a pointed look, but said nothing.

"Come on, have a seat in the parlor," Hatch said. "Let me get you a cup of coffee."

When he returned with a tray of cups and saucers a few minutes later, the professor had taken a seat in an easy chair and was idly flipping through one of the old mysteries Hatch's mother had so adored. She'd kept about thirty on the shelf—just enough, she'd said, so that by the time she'd finished the last, she would have forgotten the first, and could start over again. Seeing this man out of his own childhood, sitting in his front parlor and reading his mother's book, gave Hatch a sudden stab of bittersweet nostalgia so intense that he banged the tray harder than he intended onto the small table. The professor accepted a cup, and they sat for a moment drinking in silence.

"Malin," the old man said, clearing his throat. "I owe you an apology."

"Please," Hatch replied. "Don't even mention it. I appreciated your candor."

"To hell with my candor. I spoke hastily the other day. I still think Stormhaven would be better off without that goddamned treasure island, but that's neither here nor there. I have no right to judge your motives. You do what you have to do."

"Thanks."

"As atonement, I've brought along a little something for show-and-tell this evening," he said, the old familiar gleam in his eye. He removed a box from his pocket and opened it to reveal a strange, double-lobed shell, a complicated pattern of dots and striations set into its surface. "What is it? You've got five minutes."

"Siamese sea urchin," Hatch said, handing the shell back. "Nice specimen, too."

"Damn. Well, if you refuse to be stumped, at least make yourself useful by explaining the circumstances surrounding that" The professor jerked a thumb in the direction of the dining room. "I want all details, no matter how trivial. Any oversights will be dealt with most harshly."

Stretching out his legs and crossing his feet on the braided carpet, Hatch related how Bonterre found the encampment; the initial excavations; the discovery of the mass grave; the gold; the astonishing array of artifacts; the dense tangle of bodies. The professor listened, nodding vigorously, eyebrows alternately rising and falling at each fresh piece of information.

"What surprises me most," Hatch concluded, "is the sheer body count. The teams had identified eighty individuals by the end of this afternoon, and the site isn't fully excavated yet."

"Indeed." The professor fell into silence, his gaze resting vaguely in the middle distance. Then he roused himself, put down his cup, brushed the lapels of his jacket with a curiously delicate gesture, and stood up. "Scurvy," he repeated, almost to himself, and followed with a snort of derision. "Walk me to the door, will you? I've taken up enough of your time for one evening."

At the door the professor paused, and turned. He gave Hatch a steady look, his eyes dancing with veiled interest. "Tell me, Malin, what are the dominant flora of Ragged Island? I've never been there."

"Well," said Hatch, "it's a typical outer island, no trees to speak of, covered with sawgrass, chokecherries, burdock, and tea roses."

"Ah. Chokecherry pie—delicious. And have you ever experienced the pleasure of rose hip tea?"

"Of course," said Malin. "My mother drank lots of rose hip tea—for her health, she said. Hated the stuff myself."

Professor Horn coughed into his hand, a gesture that Hatch remembered as one of disapproval. "What?" he asked defensively.

"Chokecherries and rose hips," the professor said, "were a staple part of the diet along this coast in centuries past. Both are very good for you, extremely high in vitamin C."

There was a silence. "Oh," said Hatch. "I see what you're getting at."

"Seventeenth-century sailors may not have known what caused scurvy, but they did know that almost any fresh berries, fruits, roots, or vegetables cured it." The professor looked searchingly at Hatch. "And there's another problem with our hasty diagnosis."

"What's that?"

"It's the way those bodies were buried." The old man rapped his cane on the floor for emphasis. "Malin, scurvy doesn't make you toss fourscore people into a common grave and skedaddle in such a hurry that you leave gold and emeralds behind."

There was a distant flash, then a roll of thunder far to the south. "But what would?" Hatch asked.

Dr. Horn's only answer was an affectionate pat on the shoulder. Then he turned, limped down the steps, and hobbled away, the faint tapping of his cane sounding long after his form had disappeared into the warm enveloping darkness of Ocean Lane.