Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [99]
On the front porch of the hotel, wind and rain stirred a set of empty rocking chairs as men took cover, and Nichols could see the storm building to a fury. Main Street was blanketed by black clouds that extended up the Jersey coast and across to Long Island. A storm was prowling the region with thunder and lightning that would fell trees that evening and set houses afire and strike and kill two horses and three men working on railroad tracks, miles away. Leaning into the wind, John Nichols hunkered through the darkness and the rain and the booming thunder toward the shouts at the creek. The muddy bank trembled with percussions of the thunder and dynamite. Nichols saw illuminated by lightning the shadowy figures of men along the creek with rifles and heard the shouts and the explosions that filled him with woe.
No shark had been spotted, but men continued to kill anything that stirred. Dynamite blasts rent the creek to cries of “Shark!” whereupon bubbles appeared that were mistaken for signs of the shark's presence, leading to more shouts of “Shark!” and more dynamite until “the excitement became intense” and “many believed they saw sharks moving after each blast,” The New York Times reported. Patiently, Nichols moved among them, explaining that dynamite would never find the man-eater, and as for bullets, “a shark's thick, tough skin would hardly take an impression from buckshot and would probably turn the .32-caliber bullets fired off them.” He also warned that the fish being killed in the creek could attract sharks. But men proceeded as if Nichols were a specter.
If John Nichols had hoped for better cooperation for his investigation as he trudged back toward town and a room at Matawan House, he received it later that evening as the creek made him a grisly prophet. Ralph Gall, one of the hunters riding a motorboat downcreek, claimed to have seen not one but four large sharks heading upcreek toward Matawan. Shouting wildly and firing warning shots into the air, Gall motored up-creek to give the alarm, but by the time he reached town, the sharks had vanished with the supple mockery of phantoms. Gall's alarm triggered panic up- and downcreek as everywhere people saw sharks or apparitions of sharks. Three big sharks were reported near the old steamboat docks. Men plunged heavy pig-wire into the water to trap them, and the firing began anew, hitting nothing now but currents and tides.
By five-thirty the next morning, the storm had blown over and the sun warmed the tranquil waters of Matawan Creek. The muddy banks dried and the tide came in clean, as if the rage from men and heavens was spent or had never happened. One by one, the dozens of shark hunters had gone home; William Stilwell had at last retired. Edward Craven was walking like a dead man along the creek, his rifle crooked in tired arms, about to turn in himself to get some sleep when he saw something large moving in the creek. It was right behind the old bag factory, and it must have just surfaced, for other shark hunters had recently passed behind the bag factory on their way home and seen nothing.
Craven gripped his rifle and hurried closer, charged with adrenaline. He was one of the last of the armed men who'd spent the night without having glimpsed one of the monsters, and he must have felt pressure now to be a hero. If it was the shark, Ed Craven wanted to blast it out of the water. But the thing in the creek was rocking listlessly with the lap of the tide. If it was a fish, it was a big one and already dead. If it was the shark, the village's worries were over and he would deliver the good news. Scrambling down the muddy bank to get a closer look at the floating mass, he realized with a lurch in his gut that the thing was a body.
Wary of touching the body himself, Craven ran to get Constable Mulsoff,