Sing It to Her Bones

8

It was twenty minutes past two and Dennis’s Taurus was already parked in the shade next to the icehouse when Connie and I finally made it to the marina. It was my fault we were late. I spent ages looking for my jeans, the ones I had come close to ruining the day I discovered Katie’s body, until I remembered they were still in the dryer. Connie had dressed in a bathing suit and had thrown on over it the white shorts and striped top that made her look disgustingly like a twenty-year-old model for a mail-order catalog. Me? I pulled a Dive BVI T-shirt over my jeans. I wasn’t ready for swimsuits yet, even if the Chesapeake Bay had been warm enough for swimming in May, which since I was not a polar bear, in my opinion it wasn’t. I had nightmares of diving overboard and resurfacing only to discover that the little latex foam pad I used for a breast had come bobbing up to the surface like a discarded shoulder pad.

Sea Song lay in slip number thirty-two at the end of a long wooden pier hinged every five feet or so and floating comfortably on sturdy pontoons. It undulated slightly as we walked, and with or without the wine I’d consumed, I reeled down it like a drunk. We found Dennis waiting in the cockpit, feet propped up on a small ice chest. He was dressed in a navy blue T-shirt tucked into khaki shorts and wore Dock-Siders with no socks. He removed his sunglasses and smiled at us, and I saw once more what Connie might have found so attractive about the man. One could easily be mesmerized by those Mel Gibson eyes! Dennis unlatched a section of the lifeline and helped me aboard while Connie fussed with something on the dock.

Hal’s head popped out of the main hatch. “Hello, ladies.” He pointed to the cooler. “The drinks are on ice, and I picked up a half dozen submarine sandwiches at Ellie’s.”

“Sounds good, Hal.” I was starving. Despite the elegant catering, I had got hardly anything to eat at the Dunbars’. Hal moved aside in the companion way, so I could step below and stow my jacket. While I wolfed down half a chicken sandwich, I noticed someone had opened up the hatches so that a fresh breeze flowed through the boat, chasing out the musty, mildewed odor of its having been shut up for weeks.

I felt Sea Song tip slightly as Connie hopped aboard. “I see you’ve opened her up. Thanks, Hal.”

“No problem.” He pointed to his head, where a maroon cap with the Calvert Marina logo embroidered on it in white was mashed down over his wiry hair. “That’s what you pay me for.”

Connie laughed. “Enough of your BS, Hal! Just hand me the clipboard, will you?”

Although Connie’s bookkeeping is a mess, her seafaring life is governed by checklists. This is the part I hate: when she grabs that damned clipboard of hers with the laminated checklist and a black grease pencil tied to it with a string, looks around at the crew, makes some sort of quick assessment, and assigns everyone a job. I’d much rather be pulling on lines and cranking things, but Connie must have decided it’d be too strenuous in my convalescent condition, so she asked me to turn on the water cocks. “And don’t forget that one there, Hannah. It’s for the water supply that cools the engine.”

I lifted the floorboards near the companionway ladder. “Really, Connie!” I complained, my knuckles scraping on the fiberglass as I reached into the bilge and twisted the various levers until they were parallel with their respective hoses. “I don’t know why you bother. Craig never did. It’s not like the boat is going to sink or anything if you don’t turn them off each time you bring Sea Song in.”

“Hoses can develop leaks, floors can be ruined, so humor me,” she said, then handed me the handle for the bilge pump.

While I sat in the cockpit and worked my arm up and down as I listened to what little water there was in the bilge gurgle out a hole in the back of the boat, Hal and Dennis removed the lines that secured the stern to the dock and the spring lines at each side that kept the boat from crashing into the pilings when the tide in the Chesapeake rose and fell. The lines attached to the bow were still firmly tied. At a signal from Connie, Dennis untied the two remaining lines and flung them to Hal on the dock, who, in a matter of seconds, draped them neatly over the pilings before leaping nimbly back aboard. Connie flipped a few switches, turned the key, and started the engine, shifting smoothly into reverse. She backed Sea Song neatly out of the slip, then pointed her toward the mouth of the Truxton River.

Hal took the opportunity to reach inside the cooler, root around in the frigid water, select and discard several brands of beer until he retrieved a Samuel Adams golden pilsner. He shook the water from his hand, then reached into his pocket for a bottle opener. He popped the cap, flipped it overboard, and took a long drink. “I sure appreciate this chance to get out on the water. My boat’s out of commission. Hull delaminations.”

Dennis’s head swiveled in Hal’s direction, and a look I couldn’t read passed over his face. Whatever message he meant to convey was lost on Hal as he settled back against the seat cushions, picked absentmindedly at the label on the beer bottle with his thumbnail, and turned his full attention on me. “First noticed it after I got back from Puerto Rico.”

Connie spun the steering wheel expertly to the left, straightened it, then eased the lever that controlled the accelerator slightly forward. Sea Song’s speedometer inched upward to three knots. “Hal practically lives on that boat, Hannah. You wouldn’t believe the places he’s sailed on her.”

“Paul keeps promising to take me to the Virgin Islands.” Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes as I thought about how easily lifelong dreams could be shattered. I turned my head away and looked out over the water.

We were motoring past the point of land where the business end of Calvert Marina lay: Hal’s office, the ship’s store, a gas dock, a couple of sheds. Connie pointed to a huge, tentlike structure with something like streetcar rails leading into it from the water. “Pegasus is in there. He’s cut a hole in her to remove a large section of wet fiberglass. They’re shining heat lamps on her and letting her dry out for a few days before beginning the real work.”

“When do you think she’ll be back in the water, Hal?” I asked.

“About a month. Certainly in time for the Memorial Day regatta. Maybe you’d like to crew for me?”

“Not if you’ve got your heart set on winning.”

A smile exaggerated the creases in his suntanned cheeks, shaving years off his age. Something that I hoped was hunger fluttered in my stomach.

At the No. 2 flashing green buoy that marks the entrance into the bay from the Truxton River, Connie nosed Sea Song toward Holly Point. “Hoist the main!” she shouted.

Hal grabbed my hand and pulled me to the cabin top after him. We released the sail ties and raised the mainsail. He cranked the winch handle while I held the tail end of the line where it wound off the winch as the big sail rose slowly to the top of the mast. When the mainsail was fully raised, Hal took the line from me, wrapped it in a figure eight around a cleat, made a reverse loop, and pulled it tight. Connie adjusted the main sheet and pointed Sea Song into the bay. Meanwhile, Dennis cranked in the line that unfurled the jib sail.

The wind caught both sails with an audible snap that caused Sea Song to surge forward. Connie turned the wheel and squinted up toward the billowing mainsail, adjusting her course until the bits of colored string that were attached to the sail, called telltales, began streaming straight back. Sea Song cut through the water, a craft perfectly balanced between the natural forces of wind and sea. Smiling in satisfaction, Connie shut off the engine.

As I stepped back into the cockpit, I thought, This is the part about sailing I like the best. When the only sound you hear is the wind, the snapping of the sails, and the clean sloosh of water as it curls up, foaming and hissing, along the sides of the hull.

Several hundred yards off Holly Point, Connie tacked toward the Eastern Shore, trimmed the sails in tight, and Sea Song heeled to starboard. The cooler slid sideways in the cockpit, reminding me I was thirsty. I reached inside for a Coke. “Connie, Dennis, what’s your pleasure?”

While I dug around in the icy water, Dennis drained the remaining drops of beer from a bottle he had opened not five minutes before. I produced a can of Heineken and waved it in his direction; he eagerly made the trade. I watched him pop the top and made a quick calculation. Three glasses of wine at the reception, two beers already: It should turn out to be a relaxing day on the water for our friendly neighborhood policeman. Earlier he had stonewalled when I asked him, casually, about how it went in his interviews with the Wildcats. I decided to forget the direct approach and keep the beer coming in hopes it would loosen his tongue.

Before long Dennis went below, to use the bathroom, I thought, until I heard him call, “Hey, Con! Where’d you put Craig’s old tackle box?”

“It’s in the V berth, on the port side. The poles are on the shelf opposite.”

In a few minutes two long fishing poles emerged from the main hatch, followed by Dennis’s arm, then the rest of his lanky body. The trailing arm held a gray plastic toolbox, which he placed on the floor of the cockpit before returning to his seat next to me. Hal had already relieved Dennis of the fishing poles and had set them into rod holders attached to the chrome-plated stanchions on the stern.

Dennis lifted the tackle box to his lap and opened it, revealing a fascinating assortment of lures. I leaned over and selected an iridescent fish made out of a gooey plastic material that reminded me of the jelly shoes Emily made me buy for her when she was twelve, but it felt so creepy I put it right back. Plastic squids shared a compartment with wiggle jigs like big-eyed minnows in hula skirts, and in the next compartment lay something blue with flecks of gold still clipped to a cardboard card labeled “crippled crab.” “Yuck,” I said. In spite of all the decorative foliage, the one thing they all had in common was a nasty-looking hook hidden underneath somewhere.

“Craig used to enjoy making these.” Dennis lifted out the top tray to reveal rolls of monofilament line, plastic boxes containing metal swivels, packages of wire leaders, feathers and bucktail “teasers,” paint, brushes and nylon thread, and miscellaneous hooks and lead sinkers. He held up a particularly large fishhook. “They call this a number nineteen Tony. There’s some smaller sixteen, seventeen, and eighteens in here, too.”

I watched while Dennis selected a bright red “eel” fashioned of surgical rubber tubing and a large silver “spoon.” Looking not at all like an eating utensil, the spoon consisted of a six-inch fish-shaped piece of bright chrome with yellow tail feathers covering a wicked-looking hook. “Maybe we’ll catch some bluefish today. They say they’re running.” He attached a lure to the lines at the end of each pole, then swung the lures in turn out over the stern. I figured we could eat for weeks on any bluefish big enough to clamp its mouth around that spoon.

“Anything I can do to help?” Hal asked.

Dennis regarded him coolly. “Thanks. I think it’s under control.” Slowly he played out the fishing lines until the lures were trailing well behind the boat, held by lead sinkers at a depth of three or four feet under the surface of the water. At the leisurely speed we were sailing, they’d bob and weave, looking like tempting snacks to any hungry blues that might venture into the neighborhood.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“We troll. We wait. And have another beer. How about it, Hannah?”

I handed him a fresh Heineken. This was going to be easy.

Dennis stretched his legs across the cockpit, leaned back against the seat cushions, and sipped his beer in contentment. Every once in a while in a quiet voice Connie would ask Hal, who was seated in the cockpit to her right, to make some adjustment to the sails. I had nearly mustered up enough nerve to ask Dennis a question about Chip when Connie inquired about Dennis’s father-in-law’s health. I listened to their conversation for a while, hoping to get a word in edgewise, but after a few minutes the topic shifted to his daughter Maggie’s current state of mind. I was annoyed at Connie for making me feel like an intruder, but I didn’t feel like horning in on their private tête-à-tête, so I excused myself and took a fresh Coke to the bow of the boat, where I lay down on the warm deck with my head resting against the bump of the forward hatch. I was nearly asleep, the sun full on my face, when everything went dark under my eyelids. I opened my eyes to find Hal sitting next to me. I was lying in his shadow.

“I thought you might like a sandwich.” He passed me a sub, still wrapped in white paper with “veggie” penciled on the side in black grease pencil.

I elbowed my way into a sitting position. “Thanks, Hal. Looks good.” We unwrapped our subs and ate in silence. I donated some limp lettuce and a surfeit of onions to the fish.

“I was wondering, Hal. How do you know those guys on the basketball team so well? Not that you look all that old”-I smiled at him-“but they must be at least fifteen years younger than you.”

“Sorry, Hannah. I thought Connie might have told you. Before Dad became too frail to run the day-to-day business of the marina, I was the high school basketball coach.”

“Really? For how long?”

“From the time I got out of the army until 1990. About ten years, I guess.” Hal took a sip of his beer and looked over my shoulder toward the Eastern Shore, still a blueish smudge on the horizon. “That last year was the best. We won the state championship.” He raised his bottle. “Here’s to the 1990 Wildcats!”

“You must have hated to give it all up.”

“Yes, but it was time to go. Move on. Quit while you’re ahead, my papa always said.”

That didn’t make sense. A coach with a string of losing seasons might see the handwriting on the wall and hang up his Nikes, but with a championship season under his belt, Hal should have been able to name his price. Maybe there was a woman involved?

“Have you ever married?” I asked.

“Came close to it once. After Vietnam.” He looked at me and beamed. “Other than that, never met anyone I particularly wanted to marry.”

He stared at me so long with that charismatic grin on his face that I began to feel uncomfortable. His hand reached out, touched, and lingered briefly over mine before closing over my empty Coke can. “Want another drink?”

“No, thanks, Hal. Not just yet. But I’ll bet Dennis does.” Hal disappeared aft but returned almost immediately with another beer, before I, heart racing, had had time to fully recover from whatever it was that had just happened.

As Hal stretched out on the deck close beside me, I searched through my database for some discouraging words. “Paul and I were married just out of college, in ’73.”

“Lucky guy.”

Maybe it was something in the way he said it or maybe it was the casual way he lay next to me, oozing testosterone and hops from every pore, that made me flash back to high school. I suddenly felt like the girl who prayed to God every night for a week that the sore spot on her nose wouldn’t erupt into a full-blown zit before Ron Belanger had the chance to ask her to the prom.

I floundered on. “We’ve been quite happy, but I sometimes think I’m more than he bargained for.”

Hal had been lying on his back but now turned on his side and propped himself on one elbow to look at me. “You seem perfect to me.”

“Hardly. Hasn’t Connie told you? I’ve recently had cancer. And a mastectomy. Under these clothes and this ridiculous wig, I look like an anorexic Yul Brynner.”

His face turned serious. He turned on his back and rested the beer bottle, half full, on his chest. “My mother died of breast cancer, Hannah, when I was seven. But that was a long time ago. Medical science has come a long way since then.”

“That’s what I’ve been told, but I’ve read that the ancient Egyptians treated breast cancer about the same as we do today-slash and burn-although I will give medical science points for Taxol, tamoxifen, and Herceptin.”

“You crack me up, Hannah!” He adjusted the bill of his cap to shade his eyes better and was silent for a moment. “You ever worry about dying?”

“Every day. That’s why I find myself wanting to spend time with my family and friends, doing things I love. I want to make memories, Hal. Not only for me but for them. Maybe that’s what immortality is all about.”

“No one could forget you, Hannah. You could be anywhere in the world right now. Instead you’ve chosen to be here in Podunk, U.S.A.”

I decided not to mention that my choice to come to this forgotten little corner of the world was triggered by the possibility that my husband had been unfaithful.

“I know I should be back home in Annapolis right now, but I can’t get Katie Dunbar out of my mind.”

“She was a likable kid.” Hal turned his head and stared off toward the horizon, where the water met the sky in a seamless wash of blue and gray.

“Did you know Katie well, Hal?”

When he didn’t answer right away, I figured he hadn’t heard me over the wind. Or maybe he’d nodded off. “Hal?” I poked him with my finger.

“Huh?”

“I was wondering if you knew Katie Dunbar?”

“Not really. Saw her around, is all.”

“But you just said she was likable.”

“Everybody liked Katie. Most popular girl in the high school.”

“It’s hard to imagine anybody wanting to murder a sweet girl like that.” I recalled her sudden academic problems and fickle behavior. “Maybe she had a dark side that nobody knew about.”

Hal struggled to his feet and poured his remaining beer, now warm, overboard. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

I stood up, too, suddenly thirsty for a Coke. “I wonder if Dennis has made any progress on the case?”

Hal grinned at me. “I’m here to report that the good lieutenant has finished off the Heineken and has started on the Bud Light. When last seen, he was rubbing sunblock number eight into your attractive sister-in-law’s shoulders. I’d say there’s no time like the present to ask.”

Hal followed me along the leeward side of the boat, holding on to the lifelines that circled the deck like a double clothesline, then stepped into the cockpit. “Hi, you guys.”

Connie raised a lazy arm. “Hi, yourselves. Have some chips.” She had removed her shorts and top. Dressed in her bathing suit, she was sprawled on her stomach on one of the seat cushions. Dennis, looking a little looped, stood behind the wheel, piloting the boat. I wondered if it was such a good idea. All we’d need was for the coast guard to pick up a cop on a drunken boating charge.

Hal and I arranged ourselves on the cushion opposite Connie and munched on chips we took from an opened bag that had been rolled down and secured with a clothespin. Connie’s work, no doubt.

No one was saying anything at the moment, so I leaped right in. “Dennis, when I talked with Chip at the funeral this morning, he seemed the farthest thing from a murderer than anyone I could imagine. I know you interviewed him. I figured if he were guilty, you would probably have arrested him by now.”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but to my thanks, the beer had wrought magic on its journey from stomach to brain to tongue.

Dennis eyed the compass and adjusted his course slightly. “We brought him in yesterday for a couple of hours, and at first he recited, almost word for word, the same story he did in ’90. I still think he might be hiding something, but I couldn’t trip him up. He never denied leaving with Katie after the dance or tried to cover up the fact that witnesses had seen them in the car arguing. So I asked him what the argument was about, and he said it wasn’t important. I told him I’d keep him there, in a cell if I had to, until he told me what they fought about. After about fifteen minutes he gave up. ‘Over sex,’ he says.”

“So what else is new?” Hal chuckled and opened another Bud Light for each of them.

“My first thought,” Dennis continued, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the fresh beer. “Then he claims that they drove to the parking lot behind Hamilton’s Restaurant and that Katie put the moves on him. He goes with the flow for five minutes or so until it gets so hot and heavy that they’re steaming up the windows and he pushes her off. Buttons up his shirt and tells her to put her dress back on, he’s taking her home. She cries and wails that he must not really love her and he explains that au contraire, he loves her too much to violate her chastity. That if he slept with her, she wouldn’t be the kind of girl he would want to marry.”

Connie squinted at her watch and sat up. “That sounds so wacko it almost has to be true.” She pulled on her shirt and took the wheel back from Dennis. “Time to head home, crew. Ready about!”

“Sounds like born-again logic to me!” I shouted above squealing winches and the noise of the sails swinging and flapping to the other side of the boat.

Once Sea Song was heading confidently back in a homeward direction, Dennis chose to sit next to Connie behind the wheel, where he calmly reeled in each fishing line. “I’m beginning to believe his story myself. Besides, we’ve turned up absolutely no physical evidence linking Chip Lambert to the crime. It’s been a frustrating week.” He handed the rods to Hal, who disappeared below with them. “Can’t catch a damn fish, either.” He leaned back and breathed in deeply. “But what a fabulous day! Someone gave me a mug that says, ‘A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work,’ and ain’t it the truth!”

Just off Holly Point, with the wind blowing down the Truxton directly on Sea Song’s nose, we lowered the main, furled the jib, and cranked up the engine. Dennis talked a little more about his plans to reinterview Angie and the rest of the Wildcats before we sighted the marina and everyone became busy with predocking tasks.

Hal stood on the bow with a boat hook, ready to snag a dock line and hand it to me. Dennis stood aft, waiting to grab a line from a piling to act as a brake. Later I tried to reconstruct it all, to figure out how something so stupid could have happened. One minute I was standing there minding my own business, waiting for Hal to hand me a dock line, and the next I was tripping over an anchor line or a coiled-up dock line, something soft anyway, and flipping overboard, feet over ass. In retrospect, I suppose it would have been best to simply get wet, but natural instincts being what they are, I grabbed for the lifelines, connected, and nearly ripped my arm out of its socket. A pain that can only be described as searing, like a hot knife, spread across my chest as the muscles on my “good” side felt as if they were separating from my chest wall. I remember seeing Hal’s hand shoot out a fraction of a second too late, and I recall hanging from the lifelines, screaming.

Four knots per hour might not seem all that fast until you’re trying to scrabble up the side of a polished hull with the water licking greedily at the bottom of your shoes every time the boat slices into a wave. While I flailed ineffectually with my feet, Hal caught my hand and held on tight. I heard Connie shouting something to Dennis about the boat hook. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dennis drop the line he was holding and stagger forward. He snatched the metal pole that Hal had dropped and thrust it in my direction. After a few unsuccessful attempts I was able to grab on. Shouting contradictory instructions and swearing loudly at each other, the two men gradually pulled me aboard. I lay on the deck in pain, gasping like a beached fish.

I have no memory of the docking of the boat, but somehow she got into the slip, Connie’s checklist was completed, and I ended up resting against Hal with a plastic bag of ice wrapped in a towel clamped under my left arm. I refused to cry but kept moaning and apologizing, “How can I have been so clumsy?” I looked up into the face of this man who had the knack of being around when I was at my very worst and felt a strong tug of affection that frightened the bejeezus out of me.

Yet I didn’t push him away. Hal accompanied me on the ride home, sitting with me in the backseat of Connie’s car, insisting all the while that I let them take me to the emergency room at Chesapeake County Hospital. I was equally adamant that they did not. I had no desire to call more attention to myself. Dennis, shocked sober by adrenaline, followed in his car. When I was comfortably settled on the couch in Connie’s living room and they had extracted a promise from me that I would call the doctor if I didn’t feel better in the morning, they left, but not before I heard them muttering together just out of earshot.

Around eight-thirty I wandered out to the kitchen to eat the cream of mushroom soup and peanut butter sandwich Connie made me for supper. Later, back on the couch with a heating pad under my arm and Connie comfortably nearby, reading the latest P. D. James in an overstuffed chair near the window, I dozed. I awakened just in time to catch the end of a dreadful made-for-television movie I had seen before and the beginning of the eleven o’clock news. I was about to flip over to the weather channel when the screen filled with a perfectly coiffed reporter standing in front of the honey yellow brick wall outside Gate Three at the Naval Academy. “Connie! Come here, quick!”

By the time she reached my side, the camera had shifted to the Administration Building. I was so involved in watching Paul leave the building with Murray Simon, his lawyer, that I didn’t hear what the reporter was saying. As they walked down the sidewalk, the camera followed along, with Paul looking straight ahead, ignoring it and the idiot reporters. He wore his best blue suit and the yellow tie that Emily had given him for Christmas. It was the tie that almost broke my heart. How could he do this to us? Someone asked a question, and Paul waved them away, smiling stiffly. The camera then panned up the flagpole to the U.S. flag, flapping and snapping in the breeze. It reminded me of the sails. While Paul was going through this ordeal, I was lying on the deck of a sailboat with another man, joking and trading life histories. I felt so overwhelmed by sadness and guilt that the tears I had fought to suppress since the afternoon finally came.

Connie, bless her heart, must have been listening to the voice-over. “It’s okay, Hannah. The academy isn’t saying anything. The midshipman hasn’t been identified. Channel Two must be hard up for news today, that’s all.”

I blew my nose. “I should have been there for Paul today, Connie. Guilty or innocent, I should have been there.”