The Anteater of Death (18 page)

From the doorway, Aster Edwina’s voice interrupted my apology. “Leave her alone, Teddy.”

How long had she been standing there? Almost grateful for the reprieve, I walked out of the bedroom and followed the old woman down the staircase.

Instead of having a servant throw me out of the house, she beckoned for me to follow her into the library. “We need to talk, dear.”

Dear?

After she closed the library door behind us, she surprised me even further. “What’s the name of that therapist your mother went to after your father embezzled all that money? I think you saw him a few times, too.”

You can’t hide anything in a small town, especially not visits to the local shrink. I’d seen him twice: once before Caro shipped me off to Miss Pridewell’s Academy, and more recently, when my marriage collapsed.

“Dr. Steven Katzenberg. His office is in San Sebastian.”

Aster Edwina’s wrinkled face betrayed no emotion. “The man’s discreet?”

“Very.” And perceptive. Dr. Katzenberg had told me that finding meaningful work would help me recover from my heartbreak. Remembering all my talk about animals when I’d seen him as a teen, he’d suggested the zoo. When I’d acted on his suggestion, my mother threatened him with a malpractice suit. She knew full well what dangers zoo work would entail, “Are you thinking about taking Jeanette to see him?”

“I’m not interested in therapy for myself, I assure you,” she answered acidly. “You saw that suit on the bed. My grand-niece won’t stop talking to it. Or doing other things.”

I didn’t ask what other things. “It’s so sad.”

She snorted. “It’s pathetic, that’s what it is, caring so much about another person that you’re completely directionless without them.” This from a never-married childless woman. What could she know about loss? “As much as I dislike the idea of Jeanette airing her dirty linen to a stranger, at least I’ll have the security of knowing that a psychiatrist must adhere to some sort of ethical code which keeps him from blabbing. Unlike her so-called friends.”

That stung. “I don’t blab.”

“So you say. Until she pulls herself together, I prefer you stay away from her. The next time you come sneaking in here like that, I’ll call the police. Are we understood?”

I nodded.

“Good. It’s bad enough that the newspapers had a field day with the murder and the Trust fiasco. There’s no point in letting them crow over our sorrows, too.”

I noted the way she’d phrased, “
our
sorrows,” as if the entire Gunn clan wailed with grief over Grayson’s death.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

As the sun sank toward the Pacific, I hurried home to the
Merilee
only to find a note from Caro taped to the door:

I HEARD ABOUT THE BEARS. CALL ME!

I stuffed the note into my pocket and limped inside, where I saw that DJ Bonz had already piddled on the carpet. After spending the next few minutes sponging up, I took him for his regular walk, albeit slowly. Everything hurt, especially my bruised heel and bitten arm. All I wanted to do for the rest of the evening was to pour myself a glass of wine, slump into a deck chair, and
not
think about bears.

But when I returned to the
Merilee
, I found two members of the Harbor Liveaboard Committee standing on the dock, eyeing my boat. They carried clipboards.

“What’s up, guys?” Bonz whined at my feet. I freed him from his leash and let him jump on board, where he immediately vanished into the salon.

“We’ve got trouble,” said Linda Cushing, who lived on the
Tea 4 Two
, a Catalina 30 sailboat. Years of seaside living had been rough on her, and she looked every one of her sixty-odd years.

“Big trouble.” This from Walt McAdams, a burly San Sebastian firefighter with a hair-trigger temper, whose
Running Wild
, a decommissioned trawler similar to my own, lay berthed three slips away. “Maxwell Jarvis is on the warpath again, but this time he’s got Eleanor doing his dirty work.”

Maxwell, a San Francisco-based society orthodontist, owned the biggest yacht in Gunn Landing and held considerable sway over Eleanor Jacobs, the harbor master. Although everyone liked the eminently fair Eleanor, it remained her job to enforce rules and regs. Giving other anal-compulsives a bad name, the orthodontist kept her supplied with a list of harbor rule breakers, updated weekly.

I sighed. “What’s Maxwell carrying on about this time?”

Walt thrust his clipboard at me. “See?”

Attached was a copy of the latest harbor ordinance codes, all forty-five pages of them.

Belatedly remembering my manners, I asked the pair, “Come aboard for a glass of wine. I have some Riesling that’s not too bad.”

Walt shook his head. “No time for that. We have to make several more stops.”

Linda, her furrowed face grim, said, “Look at that paragraph defining ‘sea-going vessels.’ It means that if you want to stay in the harbor, you’ll have to do something about the
Merilee
.”

Which I would if I had the money. “Someday,” I promised.

Walt sounded as unhappy as Linda. “You don’t get it, do you? The
Merilee
’s on the list.”

“What list?”

He looked at Linda, then back at me. “Didn’t you read the new ordinance codes?”

“I haven’t even read the old ones yet.” All I knew about ordinance codes was that boat owners needed to take out the trash before it started stinking, and were forbidden to flush their bilges into the harbor. Maxwell’s efforts notwithstanding, rule enforcement had always been relatively lax, which explained some of the more peculiar boats tied to the slips.

Close by was the
Tipsy Teepee
, a hand-built, shingle-sided contraption that looked more like a backwoods shack than a boat; the
Cruisin’ 4 A Bruisin’
, a one-time garbage scow that sported the tail fins of a 1963 Chrysler; and my personal favorite, the
Mickey
, a Boston Whaler painted to look like a mouse.

At my confessed ignorance, Linda flipped through the papers on her clipboard. Once she found the page she wanted, she handed it to me. “This is the list of boats slated for eviction unless they pass the test voyage.”

“
Eviction
? Test voyage? What are you talking about?”

Walt jumped in, a dangerous note in his voice. “Maxwell’s been bitching about the way the south end of the harbor has started to look. The other day he stormed into the harbor master’s office screaming that we Southies are destroying the—I’m quoting from his typed complaint—the ‘property values’ of the Northies’ slips. The bastard.”

When Linda elbowed him in the ribs, he took a few deep breaths. I remembered, then, that after he’d once punched a suspected arsonist, the fire captain had forced him to enroll in anger management classes.

He continued in a calmer voice. “Maxwell wants every liveaboarder gone, hopefully to some inland river marina far away, and he’s demanding we prove the seaworthiness of our ‘vessels.’ By the end of the month, every boat on the list has to complete a round trip to Dolphin Island with the harbor master on board to make sure there’s no cheating. You’re expected to contact her no later than the end of the week to get the
Merilee
on the schedule.”

He pointed out into the Pacific where the dark bump of tiny Dolphin Island, no more than a glorified sandbar, shimmered in the fading light. Although only eight miles away, it remained an impossible destination for a diesel-run engine that hadn’t been overhauled within living memory. Dad had bought the
Merilee
for poker games, not boating, and his friend Al had continued the tradition. Oh, sure, Al had started the engine on occasion, but never ran it long enough to stave off the inevitable deterioration.

Truth be told, I hadn’t done much better. In the time I’d lived on the
Merilee
, I’d taken her out only once, intending to picnic with friends on Dolphin Island. Halfway there, strange noises began emanating from the engine, and I turned tail back to the harbor.

I stared at the island, then at the
Merilee
. “But that’s crazy! Half the liveaboards around here couldn’t complete that trip!”

“That’s the whole idea, to get rid of us,” Linda snapped. “It’s the same thing marinas up and down the coast have been doing for years.”

“But not
our
harbor!”

She gave me a sour smile. “Wake up and smell the bilge water, kid.”

“We’re all in the same boat, not-so-metaphorically speaking,” Walt said. “Linda’s
Tea 4 Two
leaks like a sieve, and my
Running Wild
should have slept with the fishes decades ago. The
Silver Shoal
has a broken keel, the
Nancy
’s sails are ripped all to hell, the
Tumbling Dice
has…”

I waved away his recital of sea-going sorrows. “Okay, okay, so some of us live in floating slums. The question is, what can we do about it?”

“Fix the problems or find another marina.”

“Or move back to dry land,” Linda added. From her tone, I knew she’d rather drown.

“But none of us can afford to…”

Seeing the look on their faces, I shut up. As nearby slip-owners, they’d frequently heard my mother pleading with me to move back to Old Town. Like everyone else, they confused her bank account with mine.

I didn’t bother to set them straight. “Thanks for the warning.”

Bad news officially delivered, the two walked away to ruin another liveaboarder’s evening.

Feeling more miserable than ever, I joined Bonz and Priss in the salon, where I debated the ethics of using my father’s embezzlement money to help myself instead of someone else.

What were the ramifications?

On the ethics side, helping myself to “dirty” money would be wrong, which is why I’d never done it.

But my legal situation? I was no Pearl Pureheart. As soon as I’d made that withdrawal to cover Zorah’s bail, I’d become Dad’s partner in crime, even if only after the fact. Once she was cleared—and I was doing my best to make certain of that—I planned to return every penny to the off-shore account. What judge could fault me for that? I tried to ignore the voice that whispered inside my head:
Any judge who cares about the law.

Worry haunted me throughout the night, following me into a dream, where I stood on the
Merilee
’s deck as she sank on the way to Dolphin Island. When I dove into the water, followed by Priss and Bonz, we were immediately surrounded by a school of sharks. One of them, a sharp-toothed Great White decked out in a black leather bustier and cheap blond wig, was singing Celine Dion’s sappy “My Heart Must Go On,” while a chorus of otters—two of them with the faces of Joe and my ex-husband—sang off-key backup.

I woke up, laughing and crying at the same time.

For a while I lay there listening to the waves bump the
Merilee
. Too restless to sleep, I tried to read, but couldn’t keep my mind on the book. Priss, curled against my hip, questioned me in a sleepy
meow
, then went back to sleep, but Bonz, lying at my feet, crawled along the comforter until he reached my face and gave me a sloppy kiss.

“Oh, dog,” I whispered. “What are we going to do?”

He didn’t answer, just gazed at me with his trusting brown eyes.

When the sun rose behind the hills of Old Town, I made my decision.

If worse came to worse, I would give up my
Merilee
.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

After taking Bonz for his morning walk, I was about to cobble breakfast together when I heard footsteps coming along the dock. The dog pricked up his ears, but didn’t growl. Priss, who hated any visitor, scampered into her favorite hiding place in the forward cabin. The footsteps stopped and someone gave several raps against the
Merilee
’s hull. More bad news from the Liveaboard Committee? Another nagging visit from my mother? I’d wondered how long it would take for her to find out about the new ordinance codes and renew her efforts to move me back to Old Town.

“Permission to come aboard, Captain!” Joe, attempting wit. Apparently no one ever told him that once you start locking up a woman’s friends, your witticisms tend to fall flat.

Intending to shoo him away, I stuck my head out of the salon hatch, but after noting the large sack from Chowder ‘n’ Cappuccino he held, I invited him aboard. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, just civvies and a windbreaker to cover his holster. Good. The visit wasn’t official.

“Shouldn’t you be in church?” I asked. His Irish mother never missed Sunday Mass, and insisted that the family accompany her.

Without waiting for his reply, I opened the sack, took out two Mucho Grande lattes, and transferred some warm croissants to a plate. The scent of hot yeast and coffee overrode the smells of dog, cat and dirty harbor water.

Sitting down with me at the galley table, he took a sip from one of the steaming containers. “Church? Probably. But I thought we need to clear the air, and since Sunday’s your only day off…”

I took a bite of my croissant, which gave me time to think about the ramifications of air-clearing. People who say you can be friends with former lovers don’t know what they’re talking about. There are too many memories, too many wounds.

Chasing the croissant with a slug of latte, I said, “Sunday’s my heavy cleaning day. I have the laundry, the…”

He smiled, almost breaking my heart all over again. “Yes, yes, you’re a busy woman. I thought—considering what happened in the bear pit and all—that you might take it easy today.” The smile wavered. “When I heard…”