"No. We're taking off from the Cape tomorrow early. I'll be spending two days or so getting Ella Hatton ready."
"Who's she?"
"My boat."
"Oh I see. Getting her ready to take her out of the water?"
"No. Getting her ready for a cruise around Cape Cod Bay. I don't want anyone except you and the family, and Jim DeGroot, to know where I am or how long I'll be gone. If you need me, call Mary and leave a message."
"and what do you intend to do on this cruise?"
"I'm going to find the boat: Penelope, Windhove r… Whatever the hell her name is, I'm going to find her if I have to pick up Cape Cod by Provincetown and Buzzards Bay and turn it upside down and shake it."
"That's a dumb idea."
"I didn't expect you'd think it was a great idea. Mary is not too wild about it either."
I rose to go, but he detained me. He opened a small metal filing case behind him and drew out my card. It was my application to own and carry a handgun. These are very difficult to get in Massachusetts. If you are caught toting a handgun and are not so licensed, you are sentenced to a year in the can. No ifs, ands, or buts. Chief Brian Hannon, after some debate, had granted me the Permit to Carry two years ago when I took up target shooting. He examined some slips of paper behind the card.
"Hmmm. Two additions since your original purchase. Ruger Bull-Barrel auto target pistol, caliber 22. Browning 9 millimeter auto. Tell me, Doc, you're not thinking of taking these along with you on your cruise are you'? And if you do, do you really think you might need them?"
I paused at the doorway and turned.
"As Fats Waller used to say: 'One never knows, do one?' "
"I still can't believe we went, Charlie," said Mary as she slid into the front seat. It was just before midnight and we were leaving the Surf Theater in Wocasset.
"How did you like them?"
"I can't believe they're legal. Honest to God I had no idea-"
"But how did you like them?"
"I think they're disgusting. I mean even the titles."
"I don't know, I thought the titles were rather clever, especially A Hard Man Is Good to Find."
"Hmmm. What was the other one called?"
" Genitals Prefer Blondes."
"Well it was disgusting."
"Well then I'm sorry I took you."
"You didn't like them, did you?"
"I think a little dirt every now and then is nice. You sure you didn't like them even a little bit?"
She protested that she didn't. The movies exploited both men and women she said, and debased sex. And furthermore, if she'd any idea that they were that explicit and graphic she never would have consented to go in the first place. And she would never go again. I kept my mouth shut.
We had arrived back at The Breakers the day before. All through the drive we discussed-argued actually-the merits and disadvantages of my secret Bay cruise aboard the Ella Hatton. I was propounding the former, she the latter. I finally managed to convince her that I would be safe because I would remain inconspicuously in the background: in small bays and inlets, in snug harbors and along beaches.
We swung into the wide gravel drive, exited the car and started up the back steps. The surf was loud. Mary had been strangely silent during the ride back to the cottage, as if she I were concentrating on something.
As soon as I shut the door behind us, she jumped me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The list grew. The piles and stocks of supplies grew consequently. These items were transported semi-surreptitiously down to the Hatton's slip in, Wellfleet Harbor where, incidentally, there had been no sign whatsoever of Penelope. My beard was half grown and emerging iron gray. Dark glasses and a big floppy canvas hat helped further to keep my face hidden. With Jack helping out, I managed to secure the cargo aboard the Ella Hatton. It was two weeks past Labor Day but the harbor was still full. The hard-core sailors didn't take their boats out until late October. A few diehards have been known to leave their boats in the water all winter, going on the assumption it won't freeze solid. If it does, the boat has had it, crushed between packs of moving ice like a grape in a wine press.
When we were finished, every cubby, hatch, and shelf in the Hatton's interior was filled with canned hams, fresh corn and melons, cases of soda water and beer, wedges of cheese, cigars and pipe tobacco, and everything else needed for a couple of weeks afloat in comfort and style.
Ella Hatton's antique appearance comes mostly from her rig. The wide, low sails and the graff rig, the bowsprit and the jibboom all bespeak an earlier age: the turn-of-the-century fishing and clamming industry on the Cape where these boats originated. Also the wheel, tiny portholes, wide rudder, and her soft, blocky lines have the plain, rugged look of a commercial craft rather than the sleek, faintly fragile appearance of the racing yachts.
She draws just two feet of water with her centerboard up, which means that she can be beached. Also, because of her flat bottom and wide shape, she sits perfectly upright when stranded on a tidal flat. This is important because in Cape Cod Bay stranding is a common, often times intentional thing, and a boat that sits level is far more comfortable than one that lies on her side.
Jack and I finished stowing the gear after I had placed the two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice into the icebox beneath the cockpit seat. Then we closed the teak shutters, drew back the main hatch, and locked up tight with a big brass padlock. In the morning I would top up the fuel and water tanks and cast off.
"It seems to me we put about two tons of stuff aboard," said Jack as he stood up on the dock looking down at the catboat, "but she doesn't seem any lower in the water or anything."
"She's as wide as a pie pan. Maybe that's why."
We went back to The Breakers for dinner.
A driftwood fire was crackling away in the grate. I unrolled the charts on the low coffee table and we poured over them, roughly outlining my mission. Mary was to be settled in at the domicile in Concord with Joe, who was coming for an extended visit. He loved his Beacon Hill flat, but a sojourn in the countryside-particularly in fall-was an annual custom he looked forward to. From my point of view, considering certain recent events and possible future complications, I was glad an armed officer of the law would be staying with Mary.
Tony had finished his summer job in New Hampshire and was up in Acadia National Park camping with friends. Jack would return to Concord with Mary in the morning; I didn't want him or any of my family at The Breakers without me.
I told them I would head west along the inside of the Cape first, nosing my way into the small harbors of Barnstable and Sandwich. From there I would either head north to Plymouth, or south through the Cape Cod Canal down into Buzzards Bay and the oceanside, although I doubted this. Whatever was happening-if anything-was happening in the Bay, or to the north.
Next morning after the breakfast dishes were cleaned and put away, we shut The Breakers up tight, hiding all the valuables and locking it. Then Jack and I dragged the twelve-foot Swampscott dory up from the beach and put it on the roof rack of his Land Cruiser. We stowed the tiny British outboard engine in the back and headed for the harbor. I would tow the fiberglass dory behind the Hatton. It would enable me to come ashore from any anchorage and provide easy dockside access in any harbor I chose to enter. Besides these conveniences, it was unsinkable (the Hatton, with its lead ballast, was not) and would make a good lifeboat should the Hatton swamp in a heavy sea or dash herself to pieces on a ledge.