Peter Benchley - Jaws

Brody dug at his memory for the ages of the Gardner children. Twelve, maybe; then nine, then about six. What kind of kid was the twelve-year-old? He didn’t know. Who was the nearest neighbor? Shit. Why didn’t he think of this before? The Finleys. “Just a second, Sally.” He called to the officer at the front desk. “Clements, call Grace Finley and tell her to get her ass over to Sally Gardner’s house right now.”

“Suppose she asks why.”

“Just tell her I said to go. Tell her I’ll explain later.” He turned back to the phone. “I’m sorry, Sally. All I can tell you for sure is that we went out to where Ben’s boat is anchored. We went on board and Ben wasn’t there. We looked all around, downstairs and everything.”

Meadows and Hooper walked into Brody’s office. He motioned them to chairs.

“But where could he be?” said Sally Gardner. “You don’t just get off a boat in the middle of the ocean.”

“No.”

“And he couldn’t have fallen overboard. I mean, he could have, but he’d get right back in again.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe someone came and took him off in another boat. Maybe the engine wouldn’t start and he had to ride with someone else. Did you check the engine?”

“No,” Brody said, embarrassed.

“That’s probably it, then.” The voice was subtly lighter, almost girlish, coated with a veneer of hope that, when it broke, would shatter like iced crystal.

“And if the battery was dead, that would explain why he couldn’t call on the radio.”

“The radio was working, Sally.”

“Wait a minute. Who’s there? Oh, it’s you.” There was a pause. Brody heard Sally talking to Grace Finley. Then Sally came back on the line. “Grace says you told her to come over here. Why?”

“I thought—”

“You think he’s dead, don’t you? You think he drowned.” The veneer shattered, and she began to sob.

“I’m afraid so, Sally. That’s all we can think at the moment. Let me talk to Grace for a minute, will you please?”

A couple of seconds later, the voice of Grace Finley said, “Yes, Martin?”

“I’m sorry to do this to you, but I couldn’t think of anything else. Can you stay with her for a while?”

“All night. I will.”

“That might be a good idea. I’ll try to get over later on. Thanks.”

“What happened, Martin?”

“We don’t know for sure.”

“Is it that… thing again?”

“Maybe. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. But do me a favor, Grace. Don’t say anything about a shark to Sally. It’s bad enough as it is.”

“All right, Martin. Wait. Wait a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand, and Brody heard some muffled conversation. Then Sally Gardner came on the line.

“Why did you do it, Martin?”

“Do what?”

Apparently, Grace Finley tried to take the phone from her hand, for Brody heard Sally say, “Let me speak, damn you!” Then she said to him, “Why did you send him? Why Ben?” Her voice wasn’t particularly loud, but she spoke with an intensity that struck Brody as hard as if she were yelling.

“Sally, you’re—”

“This didn’t have to happen!” she said. “You could have stopped it.”

Brody wanted to hang up. He didn’t want a repetition of the scene with the Kintner boy’s mother. But he had to defend himself. She had to know that it wasn’t his fault. How could she blame him? He said, “Crap! Ben was a fisherman, a good one. He knew the risks.”

“If you hadn’t—”

“Stop it, Sally!” Brody let himself stamp on her words. “Try to get some rest.” He hung up the phone. He was furious, but his fury was confused. He was angry at Sally Gardner for accusing him, and angry at himself for being angry at her. If, she had said. If what? If he had not sent Ben. Sure. And if pigs had wings they’d be eagles. If he had gone himself. But that wasn’t his trade. He had sent the expert. He looked up at Meadows. “You heard.”

“Not all of it. But enough to gather that Ben Gardner has become victim number four.”

Brody nodded. “I think so.” He told Meadows and Hooper about his trip with Hendricks. Once or twice, Meadows interrupted with a question. Hooper listened, his angular face placid and his eyes — a light, powder blue — fixed on Brody. At the end of his tale, Brody reached into his pants pocket. “We found this,” he said. “Leonard dug it out of the wood.” He flipped the tooth to Hooper, who turned it over in his hand.

“What do you think, Matt?” said Meadows.

“It’s a white.”

“How big?”

“I can’t be sure, but big. Fifteen, twenty feet. That’s some fantastic fish.” He looked at Meadows. “Thanks for calling me,” he said. “I could spend a whole life-time around sharks and never see a fish like that.”

Brody asked, “How much would a fish like that weigh?”

“Five or six thousand pounds.”

Brody whistled. “Three tons.”

“Do you have any thoughts about what happened?” Meadows asked.

“From what the chief says, it sounds like the fish killed Mr. Gardner.”

“How?” said Brody.

“Any number of ways. Gardner might have fallen overboard. More likely, he was pulled over. His leg may have gotten tangled in a harpoon line. He could even have been taken while he was leaning over the stern.”

“How do you account for the teeth in the stern?”

“The fish attacked the boat.”

“What the hell for?”

“Sharks aren’t very bright, Chief. They exist on instinct and impulse. The impulse to feed is powerful.”

“But a thirty-foot boat…”

“A shark doesn’t think. To him it wasn’t a boat. It was just something large.”

“And inedible.”

“Not till he’d tried it. You have to understand. There’s nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That’s their instinct. But this fish doesn’t run from anything. He doesn’t know fear. He might be cautious — say around an even bigger white. But fear — no way.”

“What else do they attack?”

“Anything.”

“Just like that. Anything.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“Do you have any idea why he’s hung around here so long?” said Brody. “I don’t know how much you know about the water here, but…”

“I grew up here.”

“You did? In Amity?”

“No, Southampton. I spent every summer there, from grade school through grad school.”

“Every summer . So you didn’t really grow up there.” Brody was groping for something with which to reestablish his parity with, if not superiority to, the younger man, and what he settled for was reverse snobbism, an attitude not uncommon to year-round residents of resort communities. It gave them armor against the contempt they sensed radiating from the rich summer folk. It was an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude, a social machismo that equated wealth with effeteness, simplicity with goodness, and poverty (up to a point) with honesty. And it was an attitude that, in general, Brody found both repugnant and silly. But he had felt threatened by the younger man he wasn’t really sure why — and the sensation was so alien that he had reached for the most convenient carapace, the one Hooper had handed him.

“You’re picking nits,” Hooper said testily. “Okay, so I wasn’t born here. But I’ve spent a lot of time in these waters, and I wrote a paper on this coastline. Anyway, I know what you’re getting at, and you’re right. This shoreline isn’t an environment that would normally support a long stay by a shark.”

“So why is this one staying?”

“It’s impossible to say. It’s definitely uncharacteristic, but sharks do so many uncharacteristic things that the erratic becomes the normal. Anyone who’d risk money — not to mention his life — on a prediction about what one big shark will do in a given situation is a fool. This shark could be sick. The patterns of his life are so beyond his control that damage to one small mechanism could cause him to disorient and behave strangely.”