Swimming With the Dead (13 page)

She was gloating.  Her daughter already had a family while Lydia was still single and alone.  I picked up the thread and started to pull.  “Yes, I hope we can help her get over Michael and move on,” I said, implying that the “we” included Ruby.

“How can I assist you?” she asked, actually eager.

“Well, maybe you can tell me a little about Mr. Stewart, before I talk with him.  What’s he like?”

“Oh, well . . .”  She hesitated, peering at those closed doors, then went on, “Mr. Stewart is a businessman.”

“What do you mean?”

“He keeps his distance.  Never lets anyone get the upper hand.  Guess that’s why he’s so successful.  Lots of others, the bankers and such, are afraid of him.  But that doesn’t keep them from doing business with Mr. Stewart.”

“You think he’s unethical?” I probed.

“I didn’t say that,” she said, wary now about the way the conversation was headed.  “He’s in business,” she rationalized.

I backed off a bit.  “Did you know Michael?”

“Oh yes.  He seemed like a nice boy, but he wasn’t an islander.”

“Do you think that was a problem?”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing: my husband would not have stood for it.  Of course, our daughter would never have even given one thought to marrying an outsider.”

“Did Michael ever come into the office?”

“Once, only once,” she said softly. 

“Why only once?” I prodded.  That’s all it took.  She was dying to tell the whole story.

“Must of been about a month ago.  Michael came by.  I could hear Mr. Stewart even behind those heavy doors.  He was yelling at Michael to stay away from Lydia.  Said if he saw her again, he’d never see anything else.  I couldn’t hear what Michael said.  He kept his voice real low.  But whatever he said, it must have been the wrong thing.  I heard a crash; then Michael came out of the office, his eye cut, blood dripping down his face.  I rushed in to make sure Mr. Stewart was all right.  He was standing there furious.  I’ve seen him angry before but never like that.  He just glared at me and told me to forget what I’d heard.”

That’s when Ruby realized she’d said too much.  “Well, I’m sure Mr. Stewart was just worried about Lydia.  I best be getting back to my work,” she said, standing.  “I’ll tell Mr. Stewart you were here.”

“I’m staying at the Treasure Chest.  Please ask him to call me there.”

Ruby still didn’t really know what my business was with Stewart.  I’d led her to believe I was a friend of Michael’s and Lydia’s.  Okay, I admit it: I’d been a bit disingenuous.  It’s what I get paid for.  Besides, I’m a firm believer in the end justifying the means. 

“You can tell him I’m a police officer looking into Michael’s death for his parents.”

Outside, I found myself in the midst of children on their way to school, girls wearing blue jumpers and white blouses, corn rows and barrettes adorning their heads, boys in neatly pressed white shirts and blue trousers, backpacks, books, and basketballs in tow.  They jabbered among themselves in patois, some combination of English and island chatter that I could not understand.  Every once in a while a familiar word emerged but nothing made any decipherable whole. 

When I stopped one of the older kids to ask if he could direct me to the library, he spoke in perfect English. “Yes, ma’am,” he responded, “just there at the circle, turn right on Fleming.  The library will be at the end of the street.  It is the white building with blue.  The library is on the second floor.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” he said, then ran to catch up with his friends, yelling “Jambala, ketch upwidal wat.”

I would have never found the place without the kid’s help.  It was located right in the middle of chaos, housed above a grocery store and next door to a bar from which a steady bass emanated.  As I climbed to the second floor, a guy standing on the balcony next door nodded, tipped back a Heineken, and then belched. 

I figured it was pretty unlikely that I’d find a shred of useful information in this ramshackle island library.  The book collection was limited to current paperbacks and several shelves of reference books.  But they were well along on the information highway.  Several computers with Internet hookups as well as a couple of microfiche machines lined the exterior wall of the second room.  All of the newspapers from the various islands, as well as
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
London
Times
and others were neatly organized in file drawers.

I started on the Internet but found little about the
Chikuzen
that wasn’t already written up in Michael’s dive book.  Perhaps the local paper.  I located the
Saint Martin Times
in the last cabinet, and since Michael had jotted August 2 in the dive book, I pulled the reel marked June–August of 2001.  The
Chikuzen
had been towed out of port in August right before the hurricane.  I scrolled through the reel until the headlines on August 16 caught my eye.  The front page was filled with warnings of the hurricane that was bearing down on Saint Martin, accompanied by photographs of people attaching huge pieces of plywood to windows, nailing down storm shutters, tying small craft to piers or towing boats to protected coves, and anchoring small outbuildings with stakes and ropes.  The
Chikuzen
was mentioned only in passing: “Determined too dangerous to leave in port, the government is forcing the owners to get her out of the harbor.”

The paper was predicting the hurricane to be one of the worst in recent years, with winds between 125 and 130 mph and gusts between 145 and 150 mph, classifying it as a category four hurricane.  The storm had developed seven hundred miles east of the Leewards and had steadily been moving west while increasing in severity.  It was expected to hit Saint Martin sometime in the early-morning hours.  People were being evacuated from coastal homes and businesses.

The hurricane had hit with a vengeance the following morning, splitting telephone poles, destroying coconut palm trees, wrenching shutters from windows, stripping roofs.  A fourteen-foot surge from the sea had swamped beaches, tearing boats from their moorings and breaking them on the rocks.  Six inches of rain had fallen, causing flash flooding.  Some 25 percent of the homes had been damaged, leaving fifteen thousand homeless.

The storm had proceeded on its path with equal ferocity to the Virgin Islands.  Saint Croix and Saint Thomas sustained extensive damage, every house, hotel, school, and factory flooding.  Power lines had been severed.  With reports of looting, troops were being brought in along with financial assistance.  The storm made its way to Puerto Rico, then up South Carolina, finally dissipating in the cool temperatures of Canada.

News of the cleanup filled the papers for the next week, then gave way to more mundane events: a report of graft in the governor’s office, an upcoming regatta from Saint Martin to Saint Barts.  One short blurb on the back page said that jewels stolen from the Emerald and Diamond Emporium were still unrecovered and were considered lost in the tumultuous waters produced by Hurricane Henry.  Interesting stories, but hardly relevant.

The August 2 date that Michael had written in the dive book bothered me.  Why that date?  The
Chikuzen
had been hauled out of port on the sixteenth.  I needed to get in touch with Vanderpool at the Saint Martin port authority, the guy whose name Michael had jotted in the book, to find out more about the
Chikuzen
. 

By the time I left the library, it was almost noon.  I’d have just enough time to grab something to eat before I headed over to see Carr.  I wandered down to the harbor and stopped at a seaside vendor’s.

“Afternoon, ma’am, try my famous calamari?”

“Sure,” I said. 

He handed me one of those red-and-white-checked cardboard containers overflowing with deep-fried tentacles.  These were the same little guys I’d seen at the wreck.  Five or six of them had been swimming around there, changing hues to blend with their surroundings and ejecting spurts of defensive ink.  What the hell, maybe with enough catsup they’d taste like onion rings or french fries.

“Did you know Michael Duvall, the American who drowned down here in December?” I asked.  It was possible that someone down at the docks had seen him going out.

“Naw,” he said. “Saw him around but never talked to him.”

“Ever see him down here with anyone?”

“I never gets down to the docks till after eleven.  Most the fishermen, divers, they likes to get out early mornin’.  Check with ol’ Capy down at the end of the pier.  He practically lives down here.  Useta be the best fisherman around till he started hittin’ the bottle, hittin’ it hard.  Got hisself haunted, is wat I think.  The sea demons done captured him.  Got so no one would go out wid him.  Then he got hisself caught out there in a nasty storm.  Lost his boat and that was that.  Mos’ folks calls him touched,” he said, pointing a finger to his head. “They gives him a wide berth, but he’s harmless enough, and ole Capy knows the docks.”

As I approached, I could hear Capy singing, “ples don’ ya rock ma bot, ’cause I don’ wan’ ma bot ta be rockin’.”

“Hi, there,” I said.  “You a Bob Marley fan?”  I’d collected all of Marley’s albums.

“Sure, mon,” he said.  “Dat man can play dem tunes.”

“Yeah, too bad he died so young.  No telling what he would have gone on to do,” I responded.

“He dead?  Now, dats a cryin’ shame.  When he die?  Maybe I’ll go to the funeral.”

“Oh, well, I think it’s been a while ago now.”  Like about twenty years, but I decided not to break that news to Capy.

“Damn sorry to miss dat service.  How’d he go?  End up in the deep blue?” he asked.

“No, I think he got sick,” I said. “Cancer, you know.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s nasty stuff, that dere cancer, grows in you like a monster.  Think I gots that cancer in me.  Some kinda monster I picked up in the sea.  One night I was out alone not too far from dat wreck off Mountain Point when a bad fog settled on me.  Couldn’t tell which way was home, couldn’t tell up from down, water so calm you could see the color of your eyes in it.  Boat hardly moving.  Splish-splashing in the calm.  Then I heards it.  Sometin’ in da water.  Sometin’ flashing by looking like a giant snake, me looking close over the side and dat dam thing comes out the sea almost takes my head off.  See dem scars?” he said, holding his arm up.  “Dat where dat thing stuck me.  Been out on dat water since I learnt to walk, almost sixty years, never seen nothing like dat.”

“Wow, that’s an amazing story,” I said.  I wondered if he’d really seen something out at the wreck.  An underwater light, maybe.  Maybe just the ravings of a drunk.

“Ever see that monster again?” I asked.

“Naw, los’ my bot after that; don’t go out on dat water anymore,”  he said, and took a long drink from the bottle in his hand.  It smelled like rum. 

“Name’s Marvin Hofsted.  Mos’ folks calls me Capy,” he said, holding out a scarred and calloused hand.

“I’m Hannah, Hannah Sampson,” I said, taking his hand.

“Nice ta meet ya.”  He offered me a sip from the bottle.

“No, thank you, Capy, but help yourself to some calamari.  Are you down here on the docks a lot?”

“Sure thing.  I live over there,” he said with a mouth full of crispy tentacles.  He pointed at a shack just a few yards away.

“Did you know Michael Duvall?” I asked.

“Well, I sees lotsa folks come and go ’round here.”

“He was American, a young man, blond, about six feet tall.  You might have seen him going out with diving gear.  Maybe you would have seen him with Lydia Stewart.”

“Oh, sure, dat white boy.  Lucky man.  Fact, I called him Lucky.  His bot be da
Lucky Lady
, but I called him Lucky ’cuz dat Lydia a real beauty.  Dem both good kids.  He done helped me patch dat der roof last year.  Brought some black paper, some shingles.  Worked all day on it.  One of dem kids would bring me fresh fruit practically every day.  Den one day he go out, never come back.  I figure dat monster gots him.  I tolds him better not go down under dat water.  That there snake gonna fin’ ya sooner or later.  Kept telling him he ain’t dat lucky.  Dam shame.  You know when dat funeral is?”

“I think it was a while back, Capy.”

“Damn, I mist dat service too!”

I wondered if I could believe anything this man told me, but I persisted.  “Did you see him go out?”

“Sure, I always helped him untie his lines.  Least I could do.”

“Anyone with him?”

“Naw. He was goin’ out by hisself real early.  In a hurry.  Kind of got the idea he was meetin’ someone out there.  Said no time to stop at da market, but Lydia be ’round later.  Seems like he was headed to dat wreck.  Guess so, ’cause dat’s where they found him, caught in dat monster.”

“Did he say anything else to you?” I asked.

“Not much.  He was kinda quiet.  Seemed kind of worried.”

“See anyone else around?” I asked.

“Dat time the mornin’ not a lot of folks about.  Always a couple of the fishermen going out early to check their traps.”

“Do you remember seeing anyone else at all?”

“Well, yeah, there was Jimmy.  He almost always goin’ out in the morning.  Best time to dive, calmer, not so much wind.”

“Jimmy?”

“Jimmy Constantine, owns da dive shop.  He and Pete O’Brien went out together.  Think it be da same day.  I remembers ’cause they be havin’ trouble getting the boat started.  Harry Acuff came by givin’ dem all kindsa grief about it.  Day finally got it going and headed out.”

So, Constantine and O’Brien were out diving on the same morning that Michael had been out there.  Why hadn’t O’Brien remembered that?  And if he did, why hadn’t he wanted to tell me?

“How long after Mike left did they go out?”

“Jeez, maybe half hour, maybe less.”

“Anyone with them?”

“Don’t know.  Didn’t see nobody else.  Coulda been.”

“Did you see Acuff or anyone else go out?”

“Didn’t notice nobody else.  Ya know, I kept tellin’ Lucky don go in dat water.  I tole him and tole him.  He not listenin’ to me, not listenin’ to the warnin’s in da sea neither. Jest not listen, not listen . . .”