Still Water (38 page)

His clothes smouldered and the skin on his hands and feet blistered but he didn’t notice any of this.

As the last of the fire died, he was overcome with fatigue. The blanket was singed and burning along one edge. He heard voices shouting, and figures rushed from the darkness, and then hands took him and guided him to the dock and the last thing he saw was somebody peering down at him.

A voice said, “Jesus, somebody run for the doctor.” Then he succumbed to the darkness that closed around.

Part Four

The Santorini’s bright blue paintwork was scorched black on the wheel-house where it faced the deck. Earlier a crowd had gathered to stand and stare. They gradually broke into smaller groups and then drifted away, many to their own boats to head out again in pursuit of bluefin, though many were saying the fish had gone, that they had left the gulf as quickly as they had appeared. By an hour after sunrise nearly all the vessels in the harbour had left.

A police cruiser was parked by the harbour master office and an unshaven Baxter, dressed in the jeans and T-shirt he’d pulled on after being dragged from his bed by a phone call at three thirty in the morning, was talking to the man who had first seen the flames. He was a baker who worked in the store across from the dock and he’d been on his way to work when he spotted the fire. He said he hadn’t seen how it started.

Ella was alone on the Santorini, sorting through the mess of charred and blackened equipment on the deck. Matt watched her from the dock as she crouched to look at something which she held in her hands before she put it aside and stood up. Her expression was blank, numbed by what had happened. She appeared pale and vulnerable and alone and he wondered if this would prove to be the last straw for her. So far she’d remained resilient in the face of everything that had happened, but even somebody as strong as Ella must have a limit to her endurance.

He went over to her, and as he approached she looked up.

“I just talked to Anne Laine at the hospital and she said to let you know that Gordon’s going to be okay. He’s got some pretty nasty burns on his arms, but apparently they’re not as bad as they seemed.”

She closed her eyes as if offering a silent prayer of thanks. When Gordon had been loaded on to the helicopter which had flown him to the mainland he’d been swathed in dressings, the clothes he’d worn had mostly been cut free and lay on the ground, blackened and smelling strongly of smoke and gasoline. Ella had been stricken with grief and perhaps guilt, and Matt didn’t doubt that she blamed herself at least to some extent.

“He sent you a message. He said don’t worry about him.”

Visible relief washed over her and she took a deep breath and it seemed with an enormous effort of self-control she kept herself together.

“Ella,” Matt said. Though the timing was lousy he wanted to tell her about the dive Ben Harper would make that day. Maybe she would see that it was time now to tell the truth before anyone else got hurt. But she gave no sign of having heard him.

Before he could try again, Baxter came over.

“Any leads on how this started?” Matt asked.

“We found an empty gas can along the dock,” Baxter replied. “We’ll see if we can get any prints off it, but even if we can we can’t prove it was used to start the fire.”

All at once Ella snapped from her stunned state. “It was Jake who did this dammit! Are you just going to let him get away with it? Gordon could’ve been killed!”

“I talked to Gordon before the chopper took him to hospital,” Baxter said. “He didn’t get a good look at who did this. And I already talked to Jake. He claims he was at home when this happened and his wife backs him up.”

Ella was incredulous. “And you believe him?”

“I can’t prove any different, Ella.”

She looked at Matt and then angrily turned away.

Baxter looked at his watch and spoke in a low voice. “Harper’s ready. We have to beat the tide if we’re going to do this. There’s nothing much else we can do here now.”

3 4

“I’ll be right with you,” Matt said. He lingered, trying to think of something he could say that would comfort Ella, but the words that half formed turned to dust in his mouth. In the end he said that he was sorry, but she gave no sign of having heard him. As he walked along the dock towards Ben’s launch he could feel her watching him, though he couldn’t begin to guess what thoughts plagued her mind.

Ben Harper’s boat was a thirty-eight-foot planing launch with a flying bridge up top where Ben could steer from. In the back of the boat a wet suit hung from a rail at the cabin entrance, and scuba tanks, masks and flippers lay on the stern deck.

“We’re all set,” Ben said. He started the engines and called out for them to untie her. Baxter took the stern line and climbed aboard with a kind of heavy resignation like a man unable to avoid his fate, compelled by forces beyond his control. It occurred to Matt that if he could have found a half good enough reason to do so, Baxter would have called this whole thing off. He had the air of a man on his way to the reading of a will, the contents of which he feared he wouldn’t like. Matt un looped the bow rope and threw it over. For a second he stood at the edge of the wharf, looking down at the water.

“Everything all right?” Baxter asked.

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

He grabbed the rail and vaulted across. He staggered a little with the slight motion of the boat but hung on to the rail with both hands, aware of the other two men watching him.

“I got a buddy who gets sick every time I take him out,” Baxter said, not unkindly.

“I’m okay.”

Ben called down to them from above. “Come on up if you like, the breeze might make you feel better once we get going.”

“I’ll just stay here for a minute.” Matt let them think he was just seasick. He could feel the blood literally drain from his face as the motors roared into life and the boat turned away from the wharf. This was the first time since the day he’d almost drowned as a child that he’d been on anything smaller than a ferry, and he’d only done that a couple of times in his life. The

3 5

gut-churning irrational fear that he experienced paralysed him. He’d read about people who had phobias about flying, who couldn’t set foot on an aircraft without turning into a quivering mass of neurosis and he imagined they must feel something like he did now. The water beyond the rail slipped by, and to Matt it appeared endlessly deep and threatening. It was placid and calm in the harbour, but once out beyond the heads he knew they would be in the ocean swell. He looked at the blue sky, clear to the horizon where the hazy smudge of the front coming in still lingered. The weather couldn’t be better, but he knew how quickly it could change, how fast the sea could become a churning threatening mass ready and willing to seize the unwary and drag them down.

“Jesus,” he muttered to himself. Cold sweat beaded on his brow. He staggered to the ladder and gripped it hard with both hands.

“You okay?” Ben’s voice from above was edged with real concern.

“I’m fine.” Matt raised his eyes as they passed the Santorini but there was no sign of Ella.

When they were clear of the moorings Ben lined up his course for the mid-channel marker in the harbour, and opened up the throttle. The screws bit deep, and the bow came up as green water rushed past.

Ella watched Ben Harper’s launch as it left the harbour, her mouth pressed in a tight line.

She spent the next few hours cleaning up the damage caused by the fire. She went right over the Santorini from bow to stern, and though the fire had burnt the paint off the deck, and parts of the wheel-house, the boat remained seaworthy. She worked to keep busy, to occupy her mind, but often she found herself paused in her task, looking out towards the heads, wondering where Ben’s boat was. She recalled Matt and Baxter’s quiet conversation, something about the tide, and she thought about the scuba gear she had glimpsed in the back of the boat.

A pile of charred wood and other rubbish accumulated on the dock. The sky was clear, and the sun hot. A series of faces paraded ceaselessly through her mind. Matt, Gordon, her mother and Kate Little. She tried not to think, but again her gaze was drawn towards the ocean beyond the harbour, and the tension in her grew until at last she knew she couldn’t just sit here and wait, not knowing what was happening.

The sound of footsteps approaching registered, but she didn’t look up until they stopped. A figure stood on the dock and Ella shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun.

“I heard about the fire. I thought you might need some help,” Kate Little said.

During the night the orcas had swum south, passing among the islands towards the coast. There were fewer boats on the gulf at night, and those that remained were the bigger vessels working out of the ports on the mainland coastline from Massachusetts through New Hampshire and Maine. They fished the banks and shelves further out near the slope waters where the gulf met the Atlantic ocean.

A little after midnight, the bull changed course. The pod were spread out in a loose grouping. As their bodies broke the surface tension of the water and their dorsal fins rose into the warm humid night air, small phosphorescent bubbles formed in their wake. A silver moon hung close and heavy in a pregnant night sky. Most of the pod were dozing as they swam. They were in a deeply relaxed state, though their senses remained attuned to their environment so that they were never in danger of running aground by passing too close to the shallow sloping seabed near an island beach, or running into floating debris.

They had eaten their last meal around dusk the evening before. The bull had led them to a shelf, where the water temperature cooled a degree or two as the conflicting currents of the gulf stream and cooler water running offshore from deep trenches collided. The bull had hunted this area many times in the past, when fish that spent the day hiding deep in the trenches during the sunlight hours rose to feed as evening fell. The bull’s knowledge of the gulf hadn’t let him down, and the pod had fed well.

But now as the orcas moved in a sweeping arc towards the coast before turning back on themselves once more, the bull decided it was time for the pod to move north. During the day there were so many boats out on the gulf that the noise and confusion they caused was creating havoc with the orcas’ ability to hunt. Many of the big bluefin that had briefly appeared, had vanished again as quickly as they had arrived. Those that hadn’t been caught had headed out again into deeper water, and were moving northward themselves. It was time for the orcas to do the same. To swim out into the Aldantic and go north towards Novia Scotia where they would hunt seals and minke whales.

The bull set a course and for a short time he dozed along with the others. The world through which he moved so effortlessly was an orchestrated, ever fluid and changing environment. A part of his brain was so in synch with fluctuations of temperature, with slight alterations of current, that he was almost a part of the ocean itself.

One of the older females joined him and swam alongside, rubbing close to him as he woke from his dreaming slumber. Soon the whole pod were waking, and they formed into a close group to communicate with one another and reinforce their bonds with close physical contact. For an hour they changed places, swam together, and performed graceful aquatic manoeuvres.

Eventually, the bull tired, and he drifted off a little, while the younger animals continued their contact. He was joined by the female again, and another male who was the next oldest in the pod. These two sensed the bull’s weariness, and lately they often swam close to him. Over the years they had absorbed the knowledge of his accumulated experience, and they knew almost as well as he where to hunt, and what prey could be found in a particular place at a given time of year. At some point in the future, the bull would succumb to sickness, or perhaps his heart would simply give out with age, and these two would take over the roles of leading the pod and ensuring their continued survival.

Much had changed, and much was changing still. More and more the activities of man had the greatest effect on the orcas’ environment. Their lives were a constant learning process, understanding where both the dangers and the opportunities lay, and always they were aware of man’s unpredictable nature. Some vessels were benign, and their occupants watched with apparent fascination if the orcas passed close by, but others the orcas were far more wary of.

Towards dawn the pod reached a point where they were several miles off the east coast of St. George. Already the bull could hear the sound of many boats heading out from the harbour. The bull decided to cruise the waters closer to the island which the boats would largely bypass. He planned to hunt for schools of fish moving east to escape the many fishing vessels, and then at the end of the day he would lead the pod north and during the night they would pass out into the slope waters and head for open sea.

On board the Seawind there was an uneasy quiet. The men on the deck said little as they worked but now and then they would cast furtive looks towards the wheel-house where Jake stood with his back to them, scanning the surrounding sea. Occasionally he would come outside and stand against the rail, but he barely glanced at what was happening on deck. He seemed completely preoccupied with his own thoughts, and whatever they were, the expression he wore engendered a vague disquiet among the crew. Calder Penman worked alongside the other men. He occupied a difficult position now that he was first mate. He was treated with suspicion. The men were wary of his loyalties and were careful about what they said in his presence. He’d been their friend, and equal, but now that Bryan was gone, he directed their work. At times during these last two weeks Penman wished he could have stayed in his old job. He felt that he’d lost the close relationship he’d had with the other men, but had nothing to replace it with. Jake had never been the easiest guy to get along with, and Penman had never exactly felt comfortable around him. He felt he couldn’t ever relax, that he had to be wary of what he said in case Jake took offence.