Fisherman's Bend Page 15

  Her green eyes hinted at a sparkle. “Isn’t it ridiculous?” she asked. She opened the door of the freezer again, looked in at all the bags, and then shook her head with a laugh. “There’s no room for anything else! Parker is always being given bags of coffee beans as gifts from the ships he delivers the pilot to. When he first started hiring himself out as the person who would deliver the pilot to the ships to guide them into the harbor and then pick the pilot up once they were safely at sea again, the ships were always giving him bottles of liquor in appreciation for his service. He said it was one of the perks. Only thing was, we don’t drink. He finally told them that we couldn’t give away any more booze, so they began with the coffee beans. We have beans from all over South and Central America. We’ve given tons away as gifts, and still have more than we’ll ever use.” Her explanation made me recall the scotch whiskey Willard Kelley had in his bag when Cal and I picked him up from the Asprella. “These are my favorite beans; they’re from Guatemala.” Lillian held up what must have been five pounds of very black, oily-looking beans. “Would you like to take some home when you go?”

  “I would love to. Thanks,” I said. This was a treat that I could share with my landlords when they got home from their mussel-scouting trip. I quickly got down to the business of tackling the file folders to get a sense of Parker Alley on paper. I really wanted to question Lillian, but didn’t think I should start in quite yet. Everything was fairly well organized. Statements were in chronological order with the most recent on top. Lillian kept me company as I read. We both sipped coffee until the pot was empty. I couldn’t find anything unusual—except for the large amount of money they had. The fishermen I had known who owned and operated their own small boats barely survived. Parker Alley was indeed a smart investor. Archie had always told me that a hardworking fisherman who didn’t blow his money on the usual bad habits and addictions could do very well. But until now, I had never really seen an example of that. I found where Parker’s life insurance policy had been upped from $100,000 to $200,000—certainly the timing could be seen as a red flag, I thought. But the amount did nothing to arouse suspicion in light of the value of the entire portfolio. I continued to pore through the pages well past the time that my stomach suggested lunch. “Have you had a chance to put together a list of your husband’s enemies, or been able to figure out if anyone might have wanted to do him harm?” I asked when I couldn’t stand waiting any longer.

  Lillian tucked a loose tendril of auburn hair back into the knot on the back of her head from which it had escaped. She concentrated on swishing around in the bottom of her START YOUR DAY WITH THE LORD mug what would be a last sip of coffee. Although she appeared to be thinking, I suspected she was avoiding thought. She began to weep. I waited patiently for a response. Her hands began to shake and she sobbed. She had seemed so strong yesterday. Maybe it was just too soon. Eventually, she wiped the tears from her cheeks and eyes, swallowed, and took a deep breath. Good, I thought, she was pulling herself together. “I want to find your husband. I just need something, anything. A list of his enemies would be very helpful.”

  “Evan is putting that together for you. But the list will be incomplete,” she stated as a matter of fact.

  “Really? How so?” I asked.

  “Evan won’t have included my name—and it belongs right at the top.”

  12

  ALTHOUGH I WAS CERTAIN that I’d heard Lillian correctly when she said that her own name should be at the top of the list of her husband’s enemies, I asked her if she could repeat what she’d just said, hoping that she would do so and tell me more. She did and did. Like most confessions, hers was tearful. Unlike most, this was one I had not anticipated. It seemed that Lillian Alley was convinced that she had driven her husband to take his own life. “We had a terrible fight,” she began. “The night before Parker went missing, I called him a coward and said that if he were any kind of man at all, he would kill himself and be done with his miserable life.”

  “Did you fight often?” I asked. Lillian said that she and Parker never fought. In fact, they never even argued. She was distraught about the death of their son, she let her emotions get wildly out of hand, and she lost control of her senses. A discussion about nothing turned into a bitter argument that ended with her suggestion that Parker remove himself from this world. He had stayed up all night, she said. And she had lain awake, too, into the wee hours. She finally fell asleep at daybreak and didn’t awaken until mid-morning. When she got up, Parker was gone; she presumed he was making a pilot run or hauling lobster traps. She never imagined he would actually harm himself.

  Lillian was miserable waiting for her husband’s daily radio call. It never came. “I figured he was still upset and didn’t want to talk to me. I would never have thought that my hateful words would get to him like that. Then I found the note.” Lillian stood and reached into her hip pocket, retrieving a slip of paper. She handed it to me to read.

  “You know that in addition to being deputy sheriff, I work as a consultant for insurance companies. Let’s just say that once I read this note, I would be required to file a report about its existence. And if your insurance company has proof that Parker’s death was a suicide, then they don’t have to pay one cent of the policy benefits you would be owed if they came to the conclusion that his death was an accident.” I held the note in an open palm for her to take back and destroy if she so chose. I’m all for doing my job, but wanted to make sure I wasn’t taking advantage of a widow’s grief.

  “That money means nothing. I want the truth to come out. I want you to find Parker’s body. He was a great man and deserves a proper burial. You’ve seen the accounts—Parker left me very secure financially. I don’t need the pittance the insurance company would love to save. My husband was a good man. And he was a great fisherman. He never would have died in an accident and never would have fallen overboard. He killed himself grieving for our son. I’m afraid I pushed him. But what could be more honorable than a man who can’t live without his son?”

  I unfolded the shipping receipt and read the scrawled note:

  Dear Lillian,

  You are right. I am a coward. I hope you’ll someday be able to forgive me. Your life will be better without me. I have always loved you and always will.

  Parker

  I refolded the note and stuck it in my bag. “Where did you find it?” I asked.

  “In his lunch pail. I was feeling so bad about the fight and everything I had said that I got out of bed and wrote him a note apologizing.” Lillian’s emotions had stabilized. She was calm and clearly wanted to tell her story. She was convinced that she was responsible for her husband’s death. That wasn’t something she could share with their family. I was clearly the first person with whom she’d been able to share her terrible secret. “I always pack Parker’s lunch the night before and put it in the refrigerator out in his workshop. He leaves before daylight. So I put my note in with his lunch knowing that he would get it at ten when he breaks for a sandwich. He didn’t take his lunch pail, but he took my note and left his for me.”

  “May I see the workshop?” I asked. Of course Lillian was very cooperative, as she now was feeling like a heavy weight had been lifted from her shoulders. I explained to her that, legally, she was not guilty of anything, and reminded her that people fight and say things they don’t mean. I certainly wasn’t trying to clear her conscience, but until I was able to uncover the truth, I needed Lillian to be frank with me about everything. And becoming her friend would facilitate that end more than acting like a hard-nosed cop would. If she trusted me, maybe I could get her to open up about her son.

  “But I told Parker that I hated him. That had to kill him. It would me.” I followed Lillian through a back door of the kitchen into a large shop. “Parker spent most of his time at home out here.” She flipped on some fluorescent lights. “He was a workaholic. He loved his work more than life itself.”

  I wandered the floor of the shop and was impressed w
ith the array of tools and the workstations he had organized. At the far end of the room was an air compressor and some type of mechanical contraption that I didn’t recognize. Everything surrounding this station was covered with a thick layer of dust. “It doesn’t look as though he had used this equipment lately,” I said, mostly to myself and not expecting an answer.

  “No, you’re right. This is where Parker built his lobster traps. Like most young fishing families, we started out with nothing but an old wooden boat and a few rickety traps. Parker had to build his own gear to save money. He took great pride in doing everything possible to cut out the middleman and maximize our income. Look”—Lillian pointed to a workbench to my left—“he even made his own freezer packs for shipping his lobsters and scallops. At first, doing everything himself was a necessity. We were really just scraping by.”

  “What else, other than fishing, was Parker involved in?” I was still finding it hard to believe that hauling lobster traps—even if you’ve cut out the middleman—could provide for a family in this style.

  “Just work. That’s it. No hobbies or anything, if that’s what you mean. He fished and saved money, bought a better boat and then a better boat, the same as everyone else around here. A few years ago, Parker had the opportunity to work as the pilot boat, which really helped us out financially. He was the only boat servicing Cobs Bay Pilots, so he had a couple runs a week. Every time a tanker needed to go up the river to the refinery or a cruise ship had a scheduled stop in Bar Harbor, Parker was moonlighting. We were doing fine without the pilot work, but that extra money was all invested and has done well.” She stopped long enough to think for a few seconds then added, “The only other thing Parker had going on was that he participated as a volunteer in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.”

  “What did that consist of?”

  “First of all, Parker never volunteered for anything. He was too busy making money. Some government program provides fuel money for people with boats who agree to patrol and report anything suspicious. No one spends more time on the water than Parker did, so it seemed like a good fit for him to be keeping an eye out, and he was reimbursed for the fuel he would be burning fishing or piloting anyway.”

  “Did he ever report or mention any suspicious activity to you?”

  “No, in fact everyone involved knows it’s sort of a way of getting money for nothing from the government. Apparently any seacoast town where there is no military base has been determined by the experts to be at greater risk for terrorist activity. Cobble Harbor? Terrorist attack? It’s laughable.” Lillian leaned over a chest freezer and opened it, exposing more coffee beans and a small basket filled with freezer packs for shipping. “Having said that, I have to admit that my first thought when I saw the dead man yesterday was that he must be a terrorist and that Parker had killed him. For a brief moment, I thought my husband would be revered as a hero.” Lillian hesitated and looked as though her next breath caught in her chest. Her eyes welled up again, but she fought the tears and held them back. “Then I came to my senses and realized that I was still unable to face the fact that Parker had killed himself and that I may have had a lot to do with it. What would terrorists target in Cobble Harbor—the sardine cannery? And with all of the fishermen on the water, someone would have seen a boat that didn’t belong.”

  I was aware of the different incentives offered in the name of Homeland Security, and agreed that Cobble Harbor was the least likely target for terrorism that I could imagine. I walked the perimeter of the shop once more. Parker Alley’s shop was in the same condition that his boat had been—superorganized, every tool in a special place, even a custom-built rack to hold delicate scales for weighing. If everything Lillian had said was truthful and accurate, it was quite probable that Parker had committed suicide. And I did have the note he’d written. That didn’t explain the corpse, though, with the bait iron in its chest. Maybe there was no connection. It would certainly be helpful to hear from Dane and Quasar that they were headed into Southwest with another body for the family to ID, I thought. Now who was grasping at straws?

  After I checked out Parker’s inventory of shipping supplies, which were exactly the same kind of supplies I had seen aboard the Eva B., Lillian and I left the shop, returning to her kitchen table without a word. There wasn’t much more I could do here without a list of enemies to question and without the promised e-mails from the banks and credit card companies, which I thought I should peruse to see if there was any deviation from the norm. I wanted to begin learning about her son, Jason, and the circumstances surrounding his overdose, but even though Lillian had calmed considerably, I couldn’t take her there yet. She had said the account information had been promised by the end of the business day, which probably meant five P.M. on the dot. But I needed to head back to the Sea Pigeon soon; if I didn’t, I ran the risk of worrying Cal needlessly. “From what you’ve told me, I don’t think your husband would consider you enemy number one,” I said. “In fact, I would guess the opposite to be true.”

  “I think when you mentioned the list, it was an opening for me to blurt all that out before I lost my nerve,” Lillian said. That was exactly how I read it. “Evan is putting a list together and will drop it off on his way home from fishing this evening. I can’t imagine anything will come of it. I guess Parker had some enemies, mostly people who are jealous of the fruits of his labor. He was certainly center stage in the opposition to the oyster farm, and he had an ongoing feud with the Passamaquoddy Indians over fishing grounds and rights, but those things have never escalated beyond slashed tires or spray paint.”

  The clock on her microwave oven indicated that it was now 2:40, so I explained that I would be leaving as I needed to catch a ride from the dock at three. I printed my phone numbers—home and cell—on the back of an envelope and asked that she please call me when the information came in and to then also read me the list of names her brother-in-law came up with. She agreed to do so and thanked me for spending so much time with her. “I hope you’ll find Parker soon. I need to get on with my life somehow. Right now, I don’t know where to begin. For the past seventeen years I’ve been Parker’s wife and Jason’s mother. Now I am neither.” Although she had mentioned her son’s name, I would wait for our next meeting to bring him up myself.

  Lillian walked me through the house and held the screen door open for me. Armed with coffee beans and a suicide note, I walked with a brisk pace, hoping to arrive at the Sea Pigeon before Cal had even a second of concern. I dug into the bottom of my tote bag and found my cell phone. I turned it on and stared at the signal strength bars as I walked. Three bars, but no messages—par for the course, I thought. I dialed my home number and entered the two-digit code to play messages that might have been left on my machine in the apartment. “You have one new message,” the machine squawked. I waited for the message to play and crossed my fingers in prayer to hear Dane Stevens.

  “Hello, Deputy Bunker. This is Sheila from the Knox County Sheriff’s Department. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner called and asked us to notify you that fingerprints have confirmed a positive ID on case number two-two-seven-four-fiver. We have a name and passport number. Please call at your earliest convenience. Thank you.” Sheila left a number, which I scratched onto the sidewalk with a piece of gravel. This was so exciting, I thought. Finally a breakthrough; I wasn’t expecting any word on John Doe this soon. What were the chances of having fingerprints on file? As I dialed the number for the sheriff’s office, a truck pulled up beside me and came to a stop. I pushed the red button on my phone, severing the connection but storing the number for when I had privacy.

  George Paul leaned across the front seat and rolled down the passenger-side window. “Can I give you a lift?” I had a feeling that this was the truck I had seen leaving the parking lot earlier. Physically, George Paul appeared to have the ability to crush cars with his bare hands, but he carried himself with a rare kind of gentleness. I wanted to ask him where he went after our discussion at t
he pier the day Spartacus attempted to drive Quest onto the rocks of the breakwater, but was more anxious to make the phone call to learn the ID of the corpse.

  “No thank you. I’m only going to the town dock.”

  “I’m heading right there. Come on, get in.” He opened the door and waited. I hesitated. “Your friend is expecting you back aboard by three, and it’s”—he checked his wristwatch—“five minutes to.” Although my suspicion of George Paul was growing, the fact that he had spoken with Cal made me feel a bit easier about climbing into the truck with him. Dane Stevens thought he was a nutcase, and Willard Kelley claimed that he was a thief. Two reasons not to accept the ride, I thought as I pulled myself up and in and slammed the door. I left the window open and rested an elbow in the door frame. George Paul drove slowly, his hands dwarfing the steering wheel.

  “Nice truck,” I said.

  “Thanks. It’s not mine. I’m borrowing it.” I wondered if I was riding in a stolen vehicle. Since I wasn’t in town to investigate that, I really didn’t care. “How was your boat ride the other day?” he asked. That could have been interpreted as a signal for me to get the hell out of the truck. If he knew that we were menaced on the water, then it was a question with a sinister edge. If he didn’t know, then it was just a question. I decided it was the latter and that George Paul was fishing.

  “Fine. How was yours?”

  “Fine, thanks. Did you and your friends find what you were hoping to?” he asked.

  “Oh, we found something all right. But not exactly what we had hoped for. They’re still very confident that the survey will be successful.” My mind’s eye flashed on an image of the corpse with the faded streak of that red substance, which ran nearly the length of the body. I tensed while again making a connection with George Paul’s explanation of the Red Paint People’s burial ritual. George Paul held a key to some part of this mystery, I was certain. We arrived in the parking lot, and George pulled into the only empty spot and shut the engine off.