Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [24]
“Why, do I seem out of my element as an innkeeper?”
“A little, I guess. I just had the feeling you once did something…outdoorsy.”
“As outdoorsy as you can get, little lady. I fished crab for years in the Bering Sea, and lived to tell about it.”
“He was a wild one, he was,” said Angie.
My spine struck high C. Down the front ran the sweatworks again.
“I laid away a nice nest egg, sold the boat, bought the cottages. Now you have the complete story of my life.”
“Oh, you held back a few things,” said a devilish Angie.
“You hush now.”
“You had a boat?”
“Oh, you can’t crab without a boat. Your arms get tired.”
He and the missus cracked up. I could see the secret to their marriage.
“Did your boat have a funny name?”
“Only yachts have funny names. Fishin’ is deadly serious, and the boats are christened accordingly.”
I was glad to learn that.
Then he went on: “‘Northern Comfort’ could be ironic, I guess, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Woi Yesus. I’d already heard enough to know my life would never again be quite the same, the way it has to change once you’ve seen a ghost or a flying saucer or some other thing you know cannot exist. You wind up spending the rest of your life retelling the story, hoping someone will believe you, which is kind of what I’m doing right now, this keyboard on my lap, the snow falling outside my window.
I went the extra fathom with Frank.
“Did that boy, James Coyote, ever crew for you?”
“Isn’t that something?” trilled Angie. She looked at the old skiper and clapped her hands once. “After you left, we started talking about that old murder…that awful tragedy.”
“Yeah, and I remembered,” said Frank, “how James crewed for me one summer. He made big money for those days and bought himself a used Ford four-by, still in high school. He told me he wouldn’t be going out with me the next season. All he wanted to do was ride his four-by and chase after white girls.”
“Oh, he didn’t say that either,” said Angie.
“No, he said he couldn’t go out again ‘cause he was flat out scared to. There’s no shame in that. Every man who goes crabbing up there is scared but they weigh the risk against the reward and they go out anyway. I really expected James would too, but by the time the season rolled around again, somebody had blown off his head.”
Woi Yesus again. I was an abbreviated boo away from flinging off my clothes and running naked through the rain.
I collected Odd at the end of the counter and told him we had to get outside or else I was going to disappear in a flash of flame. On the sidewalk I saw that he had the old Indian man in tow, his hand under his arm, half guiding, half supporting.
“He says he knows me…from before.”
Woi Yesus a third time.
“Where are we taking him?”
“He’s taking us.”
The old man had to sit in the back, in the cage, but it seemed to make no great difference to him. He was secure in his cosmic innocence. To worry about him talking off your ear had to be another of Frank’s lame jokes, because he didn’t say anything, except to direct us, finally to one more dirt road that dipped into a wetlands, though the whole island seemed wetlands to me. When we got to where we were going, the drizzle stopped and the sun broke through. I put on my shades.
A large black mongrel with wet matted hair barked menacingly at our arrival, out of a sense of duty, apparently, because he seemed happy to see us once we alit from the car, his tail wagging, his head down for a pat. A cat on the porch licked her paw. A rooster and his harem of hens scratched about within leaping distance of the cat but were unafraid.
Old man Drinkwater asked us to wait while he went inside.
It was a poor house, one tiny room added to another over the years, one shed of plywood and sheet metal constructed after another, as the need arose and the materials afforded. I had been measuring my breath ever since getting out of the car. Now standing there, looking at the house,