The other speck was in the middle of his right ear. It was scarcely noticeable, but it was there. If the man were not deeply tanned, perhaps I would have missed it altogether. He wore a hearing aid.
I looked again at the neck. Thick neck. Prominent Adam's apple. The man was strong-heavily muscled and fit. A thick neck with heavy jowls means fat. It is often associated with heavy drinking. But thick necks with clean chins and bulging Adam's apples tell a different story: muscle in abundance; no fat.
This man, whoever he was, was a curious collection of contradictions. The thinning hair and hearing aid clearly told me he was middle-aged. Perhaps we were contemporaries at forty-seven-maybe he was a bit older. Still he wasn't ancient. Why would he be deaf? Then I thought of a logical reason: perhaps he was a diver. The hallmark of the scuba diver is broken eardrums.
The beard, "surfer" necklace, and extraordinary fitness all bespoke a man who's trying his damndest to look younger. I have a special sympathy for those people, being one myself. But the picture had a strange quality to it. The man resembled one of the yachting crowd; he certainly seemed out of place aboard a trawler. Then I remembered Ruggles telling me the boat was noncommercial. Yet she didn't even faintly resemble a pleasure craft.
I took the pictures into the living room and showed them to Mary, who was reading a book on Chinese porcelains.
"See what I mean? See that dark line inside the hull?"
"You mean this, the line that's slanting'?"
"Yeah. That is left by oil slick and dirty bilge water. Look how high up it is. I'd say it's a wonder she made it into Wellfleet. She was close to going down, even with her pumps working."
"Is this the man we saw'? He looks kind of neat. He looks like a pirate or something."
"He does at that. And he's elusive too. Your brother is going to help me, I hope."
Detective Lieutenant Joseph Brindelli wanted to know why. I explained, and he reluctantly agreed to see about the PO box. He called back ten minutes later with the news that Wallace Kinchloe did indeed have a post office box at the main Boston office.
"It's number twenty-three nineteen, but you can't get into it you know."
"Sure I know, I just want to drop him a line."
And I did, asking him if he had seen a scuba diver in the harbor when he had his boat repaired. I had the postcard in my hand and was just about to drop it in the mail when I reconsidered. According to official records Penelope was a new boat. Brand-new. And yet, thinking back on my photographs, I wouldn't have described the boat as new. It wasn't old and beat-up, true… but new would not be the first word that would pop into my head if I were asked to describe her. I followed a hunch and called Reliable Marine Service in Wellfleet. The raspy 'voice on the other end told me I had the old man on the line. I asked for Sonny and in ten seconds was speaking to him. His voice was deep and hollow, and I pictured him in my mind's eye as big and fat.
"Do you remember a green fishing boat you welded a patch onto earlier in the week?"
"Sure. Who you?"
"I'm a guy trying to find the owner. Listen: would you say, judging from what you saw of the boat, that she was new?"
"New'? How new?"
"Brand-new."
"Naw! She's six to eight years old at least. Tell by the steel. Maybe older. Somebody's yanking your chain, buddy."
"Thank you. Bye."
"Mary," I said that evening as I poured her glass of wine, "there's something fishy about that fishing boat. And it doesn't make me any more eager to have to visit Sarah Hart.”
To make matters worse, Mary got a phone call later in the evening and informed me that she had to fill in at the hospital for Irene Hamilton who'd called in sick. This meant I was to drive down to The Breakers alone and comfort Sarah. It was not a cheery prospect, and one would almost suspect that Mary was trying to get out of it were it not for the fact that she has seen more death and done more comforting and grief therapy than an army chaplain at Verdun.
So the next day found me trundling down to the Cape again in the Audi. Just before noon I cruised to a stop in front of the Hart house in Eastham. Sarah's car was there. Damn it. People face death, and think about it differently. I have a hard time with it. I didn't realize this fully until I left medical school and began to practice. I suppose I had always assumed that I was in medicine to conquer death, which is of course impossible. Ultimately every doctor must lose all his patients. It was this difficulty that eventually caused me to leave medicine and go into dentistry, and then-I suppose in retrospect-a sort of compromise in the middle: oral surgery. It was just about the time my third patient died that I began to seriously reconsider medicine as my life's work. -
And it was after my third patient's death, as we drew up the sheet and I felt the poisonous stares of his parents, that I knew I was going to leave. The boy was Peter Brindelli, aged eight. My nephew.
I walked up to Sarah's door and rang the bell. I
Grief is its own anesthetic. Thank God for that at least. Allan Hart's mother, like so many grief-crazed parents I had seen, was in that state between shock and. total surrender to the paralysis of grief. As such, her behavior was surreal, as if she were marking time before the axe was to fall. I remember clasping her elbow, the slip and slickness of the black silk blouse alive in my hand. She gazed up politely into my face. But her eyes had no life. Those pretty Irish eyes (and she had to be Irish; the black hair, cream skin, and light blue eyes confirmed it) stared at. me, looking right past me.
"It's so thoughtful of you to have come," she lilted. "It's so comforting when-"
But then she bit her lip quickly, to stop from shaking. Bit it till the blood came, and rushed over to the window, looking out. She stood there blinking and wincing for a while. Then I saw her hands move quickly, flash down into the window panes, and I ran to her. I grabbed her wrists hard, but not before she'd done the windows-not to mention her hands-a lot of damage.
Mary pulled up to the cottage at quarter to five, having finished her shift at three. She still wore her uniform. She found me out on the deck gazing off over the ocean. In my right paw was a gin and tonic big enough to float the Queen Mary.
"Hi, Charlie!"
"Mary, I have just had one of the most harrowing days in recent memory. I'm trying to put it back into the box and nail the top down so it'll quit leaping out at me."
I told, her about my grim session with Sarah Hart. How I'd washed her bloody hands and wrists in hot soapy water and she hadn't even flinched. Not even when I smeared the cuts with tincture of iodine. How I had confided in her about my guilt feelings, and explained exactly what happened in the harbor. How she'd listened passively as I told her, as if there was too much grief for doubt or hate to enter her mind.
"She finally let it go after I was there about twenty minutes," I told Mary. "It was like a seizure. She screamed and clung to me, digging her nails in. She, rolled her eyes and seemed to talk in tongues."
"I've seen it many, many times, Charlie. I can never get used to it. It kills people you know. The grief and depression can kill, sending people rushing after those who've died. And she's a widow too."
"She told me Allan was a very good diver. There's no reason to think he'd get into trouble, especially in the harbor."