Riptide (19 page)

Hatch reached the front of the line, and turned his attention to the enormous, steaming piles of seaweed. The nearest cook
flipped over one of the piles, exposing a row of red lobsters, some ears of corn, and a scattering of eggs. He picked up an
egg with a mitted hand, chopped it in half with a knife, and peered inside to see if it was hard. That, Hatch remembered,
was how they judged when the lobsters were cooked.

“Perfecto!” the cook said. The voice was distantly familiar, and Hatch suddenly recognized his old high-school classmate Donny
Truitt. He braced himself.

“Why, if it ain’t Mally Hatch!” said Truitt, recognizing him. “I was wondering when I’d run into you. Damn it to hell, how
are you?”

“Donny,” Hatch cried, grasping his hand. “I’m not bad. You?”

“The same. Four kids. Looking for a new job since Martin’s Marine went under.”

“Four kids?” Hatch whistled. “You’ve been busy.”

“Busier than you think. Divorced twice, too. What the hell. You hitched?”

“Not yet,” Hatch said.

Donny smirked. “Seen Claire yet?”

“No.” Hatch felt a sudden swell of irritation.

As Donny slipped a lobster onto his plate, Hatch looked at his old classmate. He’d grown paunchy, a little slow. But otherwise,
they’d picked up right where they left off, twenty-five years before. The talkative kid with few brains but a big heart had
obviously grown up into the adult equivalent.

Donny gave Hatch a suggestive leer.

“Come on, Donny,” Hatch said. “Claire and I were just friends.”

“Oh, yeah. Friends. I didn’t
think friends
were caught kissing in Squeaker’s Glen. It
was
just kissing, Mal… wasn’t it?”

“That was a long time ago. I don’t remember every detail of my every romance.”

“Nothing like first love, though, eh, Mal?” Donny chuckled, one goggle eye winking below the mop of carrot-colored hair. “She’s
around here somewhere. Anyway, you’ll have to look elsewhere, ’cause she ended up—”

Suddenly Hatch had heard enough about Claire. “I’m holding up the line,” he interrupted.

“You sure are. I’ll see you later.” Donny waved his fork with another grin, expertly flipping open more layers of seaweed
to expose another row of gleaming red lobsters.

So Donny needs a job,
Hatch thought as he headed back toward the table of honor.
Wouldn’t hurt for Thalassa to hire a few locals.

He found a seat at the table between Bill Banns, the editor of the paper, and Bud Rowell. Captain Neidelman was two seats
down, next to Mayor Jasper Fitzgerald and the local Congregational minister, Woody Clay. On the far side of Clay sat Lyle
Streeter.

Hatch looked at the two locals curiously. Jasper Fitzgerald’s father had run the local funeral home, and no doubt the son
had inherited it. Fitzgerald was in his early fifties, a florid man with handlebar mustaches, alligator-clip suspenders, and
a baritone voice that carried like a contrabassoon.

Hatch’s eyes traveled to Woody Clay.
He’s obviously an outsider,
he thought. Clay was, in almost every way, the opposite of Fitzgerald. He had the spare frame of an ascetic, coupled with
the hollow, spiritual face of a saint just in from the desert. But there was also a crabbed, narrow intensity to his gaze.
Hatch could see he was ill at ease being part of the table of honor; he was one of those people who spoke to you in a low
voice, as if he didn’t want anyone else to overhear, evident from his low-pitched conversation with Streeter. Hatch wondered
what the minister was saying that was making the team leader look so uncomfortable.

“Seen the paper, Malin?” Bill Banns interrupted Hatch’s thoughts with his characteristic lazy drawl. As a young man, Banns
had seen
The Front Page
at the local cinema. Ever since, his views of what a newsman should look like had never altered. His sleeves were always
rolled, even on the coldest day, and he’d worn a green visor so long that today his forehead seemed lonely without it.

“No, I haven’t,” Hatch replied. “I didn’t know it was out.”

“Just this morning,” Banns answered. “Yup, think you’ll like it. Wrote the lead article myself. With your help, of course.”
He touched a finger to his nose, as if to say,
you keep me in the pipeline, and I’ll keep the good words flowing
Hatch made a mental note to stop by the Superette that evening for a copy.

Various instruments for lobster dissection lay on the table: hammers, crackers, and wooden mallets, all slick with lobster
gore. Two great bowls in the center were heaped with broken shells and split carapaces. Everyone was pounding, cracking, and
eating. Glancing around the pavilion, Hatch could see that Wopner had somehow ended up at the table with the workers from
the local Lobsterman’s Co-op. He could just catch Wopner’s abrasive voice drifting on the wind. “Did you know,” the cryptanalyst
was saying, “that, biologically speaking, lobsters are basically insects? When you really get down to it, they’re big red
underwater cockroaches….”

Hatch turned away and took another generous pull on his beer. This was turning out to be bearable, after all; perhaps more
than bearable. He was sure that everyone in town knew his story, word for word. Yet—perhaps out of politeness, perhaps out
of pure rural bashfulness—not a word had been said. For that, he was grateful.

He looked across the crowd, scanning for familiar faces. He saw Christopher St. John, sandwiched at a table between two overweight
locals, apparently contemplating how to dismantle his lobster while making the least degree of mess. Hatch’s eyes roved farther,
and he picked out Kai Estenson, proprietor of the hardware store, and Tyra Thompson, commandant of the Free Library, not looking
a day older than when she used to shoo him and Johnny out of the building for telling jokes and giggling too loudly.
Guess it’s true what they say about vinegar being a preservative,
he thought. Then, in a flash of recognition, he saw the white head and stooped shoulders of Dr. Horn, his old biology teacher,
standing on the outskirts of the pavilion as if not deigning to soil his hands with lobster ruin. Dr. Horn, who’d graded him
more toughly than any graduate school professor ever did; who told him he’d seen roadkill that was better dissected than the
frogs Hatch worked on. The intimidating, yet fiercely supportive Dr. Horn, who more than any other person had fired Hatch’s
interest in science and medicine. Hatch was surprised and relieved to see him still among the living.

Looking away, Hatch turned toward Bud, who was sucking lobster meat out of a leg. “Tell me about Woody Clay,” Hatch said.

Bud tossed the leg into the nearest bowl. “Reverend Clay? He’s the minister. Used to be a hippie, I hear.”

“Where’d he come from?” asked Hatch.

“Somewhere down around Boston. Came up here twenty years ago to do some preaching, decided to stay. They say he gave away
a big inheritance when he took the cloth.”

Bud sliced open the tail with an expert hand and extracted it in one piece. There was a hesitant note in his voice that puzzled
Hatch.

“Why’d he stay?” Hatch asked.

“Oh, liked the place, prob’ly. You know how it goes.” Bud fell silent as he polished off the tail.

Hatch glanced over at Clay, who was no longer talking to Streeter. As he examined the intense face curiously, the man suddenly
looked up and met his gaze. Hatch looked away awkwardly, turning back toward Bud Rowell, only to find that the grocer had
gone off in search of more lobster. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the minister rise from the table and approach.

“Malin Hatch?” the man said, extending his hand. “I’m Reverend Clay.”

“Nice to meet you, Reverend.” Hatch stood up and took the cold, tentative hand.

Clay hesitated a moment, then gestured at the empty chair. “May I?”

“If Bud doesn’t mind, I don’t,” Hatch said.

The minister awkwardly eased his angular frame into the small chair, his bony knees sticking up almost to the level of the
table, and turned a pair of large, intense eyes on Hatch.

“I’ve seen all the activity out at Ragged Island,” he began in a low voice. “I’ve heard it, too. Banging and clanging, by
night as well as by day.”

“Guess we’re a little like the post office,” Hatch said, trying to sound lighthearted, uncertain of where this was heading.
“We never sleep.”

If Clay was amused, he didn’t show it. “This operation must be costing somebody a good deal,” he said, raising his eyebrows
to make it a question.

“We’ve got investors,” Hatch said.

“Investors,” Clay repeated. “That’s when somebody gives you ten dollars and hopes you’ll give back twenty.”

“You could put it that way.”

Clay nodded. “My father loved money, too. Not that it made him a happier man, or prolonged his life by even an hour. When
he died, I inherited his stocks and bonds. The accountant called it a portfolio. When I got to looking into it, I found tobacco
companies, mining companies tearing open whole mountains, timber companies that were clear-cutting virgin forests.”

As he spoke, his eyes never strayed from Hatch’s. “I see,” Hatch said at last.

“Here my father had given money to these people, hoping they’d give back twice as much. And that’s just what had happened.
They’d given back two, three, or four times more. And now all these immoral gains were mine.”

Hatch nodded.

Clay lowered his head and his voice. “May I ask how much wealth, exactly, you and your investors hope to gain from all this?”

Something in the way the minister pronounced
wealth
made Hatch more wary. But to refuse to answer the question would be a mistake. “Let’s just say it’s well into seven figures,”
he replied.

Clay nodded slowly. “I’m a direct man,” he began. “And I’m not good at small talk. I never learned how to say things gracefully,
so I just say them the best way I can. I don’t like this treasure hunt.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Hatch replied.

Clay blinked back at him intently. “I don’t like all these people coming into our town and throwing their money around.”

From the beginning, Hatch had steeled himself against the possibility of such a response. Now that he was hearing it at last,
he felt strangely relaxed. “I’m not sure that the other townspeople share your disdain of money,” he said evenly. “Many of
these people have been poor all their lives. They didn’t have the luxury of choosing poverty, as you did.”

Clay’s face tightened, and Hatch could see he’d hit a nerve. “Money isn’t the panacea people think it is,” the minister continued.
“You know that as well as I. These people have their dignity. Money will ruin this town. It’ll spoil the lobstering, spoil
the tranquility, spoil everything. And the poorest people won’t see any of that money, anyway. They’ll be pushed out by development.
By
progress.
”

Hatch did not reply. On one level, he understood what Clay was saying. It would be a tragedy if Stormhaven turned into another
overdeveloped, overpriced summer playground like Boothbay Harbor, down the coast. But that didn’t seem likely, whether or
not Thalassa succeeded.

“There’s not much I can say,” Hatch said. “The operation will be over in a matter of weeks.”

“How long it takes isn’t the point,” Clay said, a strident note entering his voice. “The point is the motivation behind it.
This treasure hunt is about greed—pure, naked greed. Already, a man lost his legs. No good will come of this. That island
is a bad place, cursed, if you care to call it that. I’m not superstitious, but God has a way of punishing those with impure
motives.”

Hatch’s feeling of calm suddenly dissolved in a flood of anger.
Our town? Impure motives?
“If you’d grown up in this town, you’d know why I’m doing this,” he snapped. “Don’t presume to know what my motives are.”

“I don’t presume anything,” Clay said, his lanky body stiffening like a spring. “I
know.
I may not have grown up in this town, but I at least know what’s in its best interests. Everyone here’s been seduced by this
treasure hunt, by the promise of easy money. But not me, by the Lord God, not me. I’m going to protect this town. Protect
it from you, and from itself.”

“Reverend Clay, I think you should read your Bible before you start throwing around accusations like that:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
”

Hatch realized he was shouting, voice shaking with anger. The surrounding tables had fallen silent, the people staring down
at their plates. Abruptly he rose, strode past the silent, white-faced Clay, and made for the dark ruins of the fort across
the meadow.

T
he fort was dark and chill with damp. Swallows flitted about the interior of the granite tower, whipping back and forth like
bullets in the sunlight that angled sharply through the ancient gunports.

Hatch entered through the stone archway and paused, breathing heavily, trying to recover his composure. Despite himself, he’d
allowed the minister to provoke him. Half the town had seen it, and the half that hadn’t would soon know about it.