Without a Grave

TEN

MR THEODORE R. ZICKES… CAME HERE AND ORDERED A THIRTY-FOOT AUXILIARY SLOOP. UNCLE WILL COMPLETED THE BOAT… AND IT WAS NAMED SWEET-HEART. THE SWEET-HEART WAS LEFT HERE YEAR ROUND IN UNCLE WILL’S CARE. I WET THE DECKS EACH MORNING WHEN IT DID NOT RAIN AND THERE WAS NO DEW. FOR THIS JOB I RECEIVED TWO SHILLINGS (28 CENTS) PER MONTH. EACH YEAR THE SWEET-HEART WAS GIVEN A COMPLETE PAINT JOB BY SOME OF UNCLE WILL’S WORKMEN.Haziel L. Albury, Man-O-WarMy Island Home, p. 55

I stuck my head into the bedroom where Paul had been hiding out all morning with his laptop, manipulating geometrical shapes with his Sketchpad software. A cube was spinning crazily around the screen.

‘The barge is just in, so I’m off to the grocery.’

‘Apples,’ he said without looking up. ‘And English muffins if they have them.’

His fingers only paused; they were still glued to the keys.

‘Dreamer,’ I muttered. The last time the Pink Store had English muffins, they had been three weeks past their sell-by date, but I bought them anyway. A shout out for calcium propionate, sorbic acid and monoglycerides.

I added ‘apples’ to my list and an optimistic ‘Eng muff,’ slipped the list into my pocket and my feet into my Crocs. As I emerged into the sunlight from the shade of the porch, I checked the sky. A malevolent black cloud had settled over Abaco. I wondered if I had time to get to the grocery and back before it reached Bonefish Cay and gave me and my purchases a good drenching.

I made a quick detour to haul the clothes off the line, toss them into the laundry basket without folding and slide it on to the bunkhouse porch under the shelter of the roof. They would need ironing, but since we didn’t have an iron – such a pity! – what did it matter?

Ten minutes later, I tied Pro Bono up at the government dock in Hawksbill Harbour and went ashore. The barge was still unloading cardboard crates of produce and dairy products at the Pink Store, so I walked on, stopping for a minute or two at Hawksbill Marina to enjoy the view. Fishing boats and luxury yachts that Paul and I could never afford in a million years were tied up to finger piers, gently rocking. I wondered if any of their owners would be moving to Mueller’s Tamarand Tree Marina when it opened in six months’ time, and what effect their desertion would have on the locals.

Next door, at Tropical Treats, I placed an order for lunch – two conch burgers and fries to go. Service at Tropical Treats is glacial – you pay extra for that – so I knew I could dilly-dally around town for as long as an hour before my order would be ready. But the food was always worth the wait.

At Pinder’s Boat Yard, I loitered outside the shed to observe while workers put the finishing touches on one of their custom-made launches. As I peered through the open doors, they lowered the helm into place on a twenty-five foot beauty and began fastening it to the deck. Nearby sat a fiberglass hull still in the mold; the next boat that would come off their modest, low-tech assembly line. I would have stayed longer, but I was starting to hallucinate on fiberglass resin fumes, so I decided to see what was going on in the yard outside.

Behind the shed, two other workers had maneuvered a yacht on to a sled and were hauling it out of the water on a marine railroad. The sled was attached by a steel cable to an electric winch, which cranked the vessel along the rails, across the road and up a slight incline where another winch and pair of rails moved the boat sideways. The whole operation took less than ten minutes, and when it was done, the boat was tucked neatly into a slot between two other boats at least fifty feet up on dry land. Impressive. Back home, that task would have taken three guys, one supervisor and a hundred ton, half-million dollar Marine Travelift the size of a town house.

Because it was hurricane season, the yard was full of yachts propped up on jack stands, packed together like proverbial canned sardines, awaiting the return of their owners in November when the threat of hurricanes would be over. Some were covered with shrink wrap, others with tarps. Still others were being cleaned, repaired and repainted, like the sailboat someone I recognized was working on now.

‘Bonjou, Daniel.’

Daniel stood on the top rung of a ladder propped up on the side of the vessel’s hull. He was brushing varnish on the wooden toe rail with deft, fluid strokes. When I spoke, he balanced his paintbrush on the rim of the varnish can and looked down. ‘Bonjou!’

‘Bel bato, n’est-ce que pas!’

Ah, I should own such a boat. A cobalt-blue hull, color so pure and deep I felt I could dive right into it. Woodwork varnished to a high gloss, glowing in the sun. Someone was very lucky.

‘Ki-moun posede sa bato?’ I asked Daniel.

Daniel grinned. ‘Mister Jaime.’ With his paintbrush, Daniel gestured toward the stern of the vessel, which I took as an invitation to check it out for myself.

At the stern I found another worker up on a ladder lettering A-L-I-C-E I-N W-O-N-D-E-R-L-A-N-D on the transom. That figured. The jerk probably thought that naming a boat after his wife would make up for the black eye.

As I admired the boat, though, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. Like luggage on airport baggage carousels, many boats look alike – their fiberglass bodies are laid out one after another in identical molds, after all – yet this one seemed familiar.

I stepped back for a broader view. The Alice in Wonderland had two masts, the smaller of the two mounted in the stern, behind the helm. So it was a yawl. An unusual rig for a boat these days. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of yawls we’d seen in the Abacos since our arrival.

Trying to act casual, I paced off the distance from bow to stern. Forty feet, more or less.

My heart did a quick rat-a-tat-tat in my chest. Frank and Sally’s Wanderer was a forty-one foot yawl.

I couldn’t count the number of times we’d sailed the Chesapeake Bay with the Parkers on Wanderer. I remembered one long day on the bay when Frank, trying to beat a squall, plowed Wanderer into a piling, gouging her bow. I walked around to the bow of Alice in Wonderland and reached up as high as I could, running my fingers along the rounded seam, feeling for any sign of damage. But if there’d been any, it had been repaired.

Paul would tell me that I was letting my imagination run away with me.

And yet as I stared at the boat, at its distinctive keel, I flashed back to a Sunday afternoon at the Naval Academy marina where Paul and I had helped Frank and Sally roll anti-fouling paint on Wanderer’s hull. I’d painted around that propeller shaft myself, or one exactly like it.

If I were to prove that this vessel was Frank and Sally’s boat, I’d have to get inside. But I couldn’t do that while Daniel and his co-workers were on the job.

I thought about the problem as I walked to the grocery where I picked out the supplies I needed – alas for Paul, no English muffins – and set them down on the checkout counter. I visited with Winnie for a while, killing time until noon when I hoped the boat-yard workers would break for lunch.

‘How’s Lisa?’ I asked as I packed my purchases into the Trader Joe’s bag I’d brought with me. There’d been a benefit supper for the seven-year-old, Winnie’s granddaughter, at one of the local churches. Hand-printed signs announcing the event had been tacked up on every telephone pole in town.

‘She’s in good spirits,’ Winnie told me. ‘Ted took her to Nassau yesterday. They may have to do surgery.’

‘That’s too bad,’ I said, meaning it. I’d rather straddle a log and dog-paddle to a hospital in Florida than have surgery for anything more serious than a hangnail in Nassau. ‘Do you mind if I ask what kind of surgery?’

‘It’s a heart valve defect. Congenital.’

Yikes, I thought. That’s one for the Mayo Clinic, not Princess Margaret in Nassau.

We chatted until the clock over Winnie’s head read eleven fifty-five, then I picked up my groceries, wished her goodbye, good luck and God speed, and made my way back to the boatyard.

As I had hoped, Daniel and his co-workers were at lunch, most of the men sitting on upturned buckets in the shade of a tree, playing cards, using the top of a cable spool as a table. Daniel sat with his back against an upturned dinghy, eating a sandwich and reading his Bible.

I waved casually, nodded, smiled and walked on, but as soon as I was out of their sight, I ducked around the corner of a utility shed and into the boatyard.

Alice in Wonderland appeared deserted, Daniel’s ladder still propped against her hull.

After a quick look around, I stashed my groceries next to an empty trash can and scampered up the ladder. I threw my leg over the lifelines, hopped into the cockpit and crouched down, hardly breathing, feeling about as inconspicuous as a fly on a wedding cake. Tools lay on the cockpit bench where they’d been neatly arranged by one of the workers who had apparently been in the process of installing an autopilot when he broke for lunch. The instrument itself hung half in and half out of the control panel on the steering pedestal, dangling by its wires.

No sirens, no alarms, no shouts of ‘Hey you!’ so I got slowly to my feet and sat down behind the wheel. I remembered my sister-in-law Connie’s sailboat, Sea Song, had its hull identification number stamped into the fiberglass on the stern. Taking a chance I’d not be spotted, I peered over the stern, searching the transom. But if there had ever been any numbers inscribed there, they were gone now.

I needed to look inside.

I hustled down the companionway ladder and found myself standing in a rich, teak-paneled cabin as familiar to me as my own living room: a dinette to port, a galley to starboard, a navigation station to the rear. Many boats were laid out that way, however, even Connie’s.

Where Frank and Sally had a liquor cabinet, there was a microwave, and although our friends had never had a TV, a flat screen hung on the bulkhead of the V-berth in the master cabin.

A stainless-steel cover was drawn over the stove. I checked under it quickly. Three burners. Just like Wanderer, but thousands of other boats, too.

It was the upholstery on the cushions throughout the boat that really got my attention: a distinctive red, green, blue and black tartan. Sally’s maiden name was McDuff. Their dog was named Duffy. Sally’d picked that fabric out herself, the tartan of Clan McDuff. That was proof enough for me.

Jaime Mueller might have been able to hire a crew of Haitians to strip, clean and repaint a boat within a matter of days, I thought, but reupholstering was another matter. I knew from Pattie’s Net bible that there was only one guy in Marsh Harbour who reupholstered boat cushions, and his waiting list was a mile long. He ordered all his fabric from the States, which took forever. Even all of Jaime’s daddy’s money couldn’t turn boat cushions around that fast in the Abacos.

Think, Hannah. If you go to the Marsh Harbour police with your suspicions, they’ll listen politely, then show you the door. Plaid, madam? I could hear the laughter now.

I checked my watch. Daniel and his co-workers would still be at lunch. By my calculations I had twelve minutes, no more, before they came back. Sweat rolled down my cheeks and between my breasts.

There had to be something to prove that this was the Parkers’ boat!

I checked the medicine cabinet. Empty.

I opened the door under the sink where Sally had kept her cleaning supplies. Spotless.

I peeked into the fridge. Not a speck of food.

Someone had scrubbed the stove, too, polishing its stainless-steel surface to a high gloss. Even the oven gleamed. It could have been new.

I leaned back on the stove, and it moved, reminding me of one of my less stellar cruising maneuvers.

Nautical stoves are gimballed. They swing with the motion of the boat, so that pots and pans stay level while you’re cooking under way. I got down on my hands and knees in front of the oven and pushed the stove back, squinting under it into the narrow space between the bottom of the oven and the floor.

On the white fiberglass surface near the back of the stove there was a dark, reddish-brown stain the size of my fist.

I sat back on my heels. Jesus! It had been my fault, that stain. Sally had spaghetti sauce simmering. We girls had been down below, making salad when Wanderer hit a wake and I’d crashed into the stove, sending the pot flying and the sauce splashing over the cook top and dribbling down the side. Apparently, my clean-up had been less than thorough.

Well you see, officer, there was this dried-up spaghetti sauce. Right. That would convince them.

Keep looking.

I pawed through the contents of the navigation station, searching for registration papers, anything that would identify this vessel as Frank and Sally Parker’s boat, Wanderer, but the only contents of the nav station were a 2008 edition of Steve Dodge’s A Cruising Guide to the Abacos, a brand-new logbook, a pair of binoculars and two pens.

I got down on my hands and knees, crawled around the floor, looking for clues, peeping into nooks and crannies not normally peeped into – unless one is falling down drunk – like under the companionway stairs. Nothing, not a scrap.

I lifted the seat cushions and looked under them. Nada. I even pulled up the floorboards and peered into the bilge.

When I sat down on a settee to think, I noticed a drawer in the settee opposite. I pulled the drawer open and when I saw it was empty, pulled it out completely to examine the space behind. Disappointed again, I started to slide the drawer back, but as I did I noticed something written in pencil on the bottom. ‘2304.’ I checked the bottom of the drawer under the settee I had just been sitting on. It also had ‘2304’ penciled on the raw wood. Was it a part number of some sort? Hoping somebody could tell me, I pulled my iPhone out of my fanny pack and took a picture.

I was still puzzled why this boat didn’t seem to have a builder’s plaque. On Connie’s boat, it was nailed to the hatch cover. Where would it be on a Cheoy Lee?

There had been nothing of a plaque-like description in the cockpit. I didn’t find it in my crawl around the interior of Alice in Wonderland. The only objects hanging on the bulkhead were a barometer and a clock, and one of Andy Albury’s smaller half-boat models. From the slightly pitted brass, I could tell that the barometer and the clock had been there forever, but the boat model looked new.

I popped up to the cockpit, grabbed a screwdriver from the array on the bench and quickly backed out one of the screws that held the ship model in place. I loosened the second screw and moved the model to one side.

The model had been hiding two screw holes, about six inches apart, but whatever had been mounted there was gone.

I had to give Jaime Mueller credit. When he stole a boat, he was thorough.

I snapped a picture of the screw holes with my iPhone, reattached the model and got the hell out.

Paul raised both hands. ‘Stop babbling, Hannah.’

I had been going on and on about Wanderer, starting from when I first spotted the vessel in the boatyard, followed by a blow-by-blow description of what led up to my discovery of the spaghetti-sauce spill.

‘Don’t build me a watch, Hannah. Just tell me what time it is.’

‘Alice in Wonderland is Wanderer,’ I sputtered. ‘And I think we can prove it.’

‘Ah.’ Paul laced his fingers together and rested his hands on his chest. ‘The spaghetti-sauce clue.’

‘Don’t be impossible!’ I pawed in my fanny pack for my iPhone, launched the camera icon, and showed Paul the picture of the number written on the bottom of the drawer.

‘2304. What does that mean?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. I was hoping you’d tell me.’ I flicked forward to the picture of the pair of screw holes I’d discovered in the wall behind the ship model. ‘And here’s where something was removed from the wall. Could have been the builder’s plaque.’

Paul slipped the iPhone out of my fingers and studied the picture closely. ‘Hard to tell from this. Could have been anything mounted up there. “The Captain’s Word is Law” or “Don’t Flush Anything You Haven’t Eaten First.”’

‘Ha ha ha.’ I pinched his ear lobe, hard, then sat down on the sofa. ‘I looked all over the boat for its hull identification number, but couldn’t find one.’

‘I hate to tell you this, Hannah, but boats built in the sixties weren’t required to have hull identification numbers. Wanderer, and this boat, might not even have one.’

‘Bummer,’ I said. Then I brightened as a thought occurred to me. ‘Do you think Wanderer might have been documented? Can we look it up on the Internet?’ I stood up. ‘Where’s your laptop?’

With Paul’s help, I located the NOAA website where one could search the vessel documentation database by name. I typed in ‘Wanderer,’ pressed Enter, and waited for the results. I sat back, disappointed. ‘Oh, damn. There’s a hundred and seventy-two of them!’

‘It’s a popular name, Hannah. Eric Hiscock sailed three or four Wanderers around the world and wrote books about it. He’s every blue-water dreamer’s hero.’

‘Help me to narrow it down, then. What’s Wanderer’s port of call?’

‘If it’s not Annapolis, I don’t have a clue.’

Only one vessel hailed from Annapolis, and it wasn’t a Cheoy Lee Reliant, but as I scrolled through the display, I realized I could also narrow the search by boat length. Five minutes later I cried, ‘I found it!’ and then, ‘Dammit!’ when I clicked on the record and found that, as Paul had predicted, the space for the hull identification number was blank.

‘Jot down the Coast Guard documentation number,’ Paul suggested. ‘Sometimes owners engrave them on the hull.’

I did as Paul suggested, but didn’t hold out much hope of that. I’d been all over that boat, and if there had been a Coast Guard number anywhere on board, I should have found it.

I stared at the computer screen, chewing my lower lip. ‘What now?’

‘Let’s ask the pro.’ Paul rose from his chair, crossed into the living room and picked up the radio. ‘Dive Gator, Dive Gator, this is Windswept.’ There was no response. After a couple of minutes, he tried again, but Gator was either busy or out of radio range.

‘Sit down and eat your lunch,’ Paul suggested. ‘It’s getting cold.’

‘I’m too upset to eat.’ I tucked my conch burger back into its Styrofoam clamshell and stuck it into the fridge. ‘If Jaime Mueller has Frank and Sally’s boat, then where are Frank and Sally?’

I washed my hands, tried to reach Gator again. This time he replied. ‘What can I do for you, Hannah?’

Since I didn’t want to broadcast my suspicions to everyone who might have been listening in on that channel, I made arrangements to drop by Gator’s office when he returned from his dive.

The afternoon dragged.

I spent some time Googling Cheoy Lee. The company was still in business, but hadn’t made the Reliant since 1976. They built large power yachts now. There appeared to be an active owners’ association, however. I bookmarked both.

Just as I was about to email the Rhodes Reliant and Offshore Forty website, the power failed. I telephoned the Bahamas Electric Company to report the outage. The worker who answered the phone assured me the power would be back in an hour, but with the BEC, that didn’t mean a damn thing. Could be an hour, could be days, depending upon how long it took workers to find and repair the break in the underwater cable. Molly swears they do it with duct tape.

No power, no backup generator, no Internet. Bummer.

Nothing to do but wait.