Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

He nodded.

Then on to Greg. Greg had a cut on his forehead, a gash that must have bled like a geyser, but because of the water it looked like a shriveled weal. His nose was out of place, too. The Chief had spent some time over the past nine months studying Greg’s face, trying to figure out if the man was telling the truth about what happened with the girl at school. Was Greg a man of honor or a creep? The Chief was notoriously stingy with the benefit of the doubt, but he had given it to Greg-because of Andrea, yes, and Tess, but also because he loved Greg. Greg was like his feckless little brother, the talented one, the handsome one, the one who was chased by women old and young. Greg had wept openly when Tess walked down the aisle toward him on their wedding day, and then again when his twins were born. He had wept less openly that night at the Begonia when the Chief took him for drinks and said, I’m not sure if I believe you, but I’m going to stick my neck out for you anyway.

Now he was dead.

The Chief nodded. Joe covered Greg back up.

“Are you worried about that cut on his head?” the Chief asked. “Or about how Tess lost that hair?”

“I can’t decide.”

“What do we think happened?” He looked at Joe Finch, the commanding officer out on the water, a man he considered not a friend, exactly, but a colleague, steady and true. “What’s your best guess?”

“I’d say they caught a gust the wrong way,” Joe said. “He got hit in the head by the boom and went down. She was either thrown from the boat or she went after him. They got disoriented-people do, underwater-she hit her head on the bottom of the boat, or for some other reason couldn’t make her way to the surface. His right foot was snarled in the ropes. My crew found a broken bottle of champagne floating with their personal effects. So they were drinking. Maybe they were drunk. If they were drunk and they fell and he was tangled and she was trying to reach him and got confused, or if she panicked… there are a million reasons it could have ended up this way. Neither of them was wearing a life preserver. And they were way out in the middle of nowhere, about a mile north of Muskegut. If the guy couldn’t sail, he had no business being all the way out there, not on a day like today, not unless he was very well acquainted with the wind and what it could do.”

The Chief nodded and made a motion with his hand to cut Joe off. He didn’t want to hear Joe pin the blame on Greg. The guy was dead, lying under a tarp. And yet the Chief knew that Joe was right. Greg was an overconfident sailor, always had been. The Chief had capsized with him on a Sunfish on Coskata Pond two summers earlier. Greg’s understanding of the wind and the jib and when to tack was muddled, but even when the Chief got dumped into the pond, he didn’t upbraid Greg the way he should have. At the time, he hadn’t seen the point. Greg sailed by instinct instead of by following the rules, and that meant occasionally ending up wet. So what?

So now he was dead. He had tried going all the way to the Vineyard in 30-mile gusts, and he had been drinking. It didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure out how they lost control of the boat. The boom swung around in a gust and caught Greg unaware, and off he went, and his leg was caught in the ropes and he couldn’t get loose. Tess tried to save him, but she was afraid of the water, had been since she was a kid; she was no match for a grown man sinking in choppy waves. They both went down. Or Tess was thrown and Greg tried to save her. He tried to pull her up by the hair, which would explain the patch of bald scalp.

“We put the time of death at one-thirty, maybe two. Another sailor put in the call about an abandoned capsize at quarter to three and gave us the coordinates. We got there forty minutes later, at three twenty-five. They were both trapped under the boat.”

“And that doesn’t seem strange to you? There are a million ways that could have happened?”

Joe removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which were such a pale gray they were almost clear, the color of water. Joe was probably, like Ed, still shy of his fiftieth birthday, but something made him seem older-his beard, his uniform, his title. He knew these waters, he knew the wind, and he knew the craft. Tess and Greg had been sailing on a 12-meter sloop, a bigger boat than Greg was used to, by far.

“I just wonder what happened. Why they couldn’t get to the surface.”

“Let’s say they were drinking. Their judgment was impaired, and their motor skills. Would one bottle of champagne and a few beers have incapacitated them? Well, it wouldn’t help matters. This could have happened sober, too. One of them got knocked unconscious, or lost their balance. She was taking a leak off the back of the boat and fell in and he went after her, got caught in the ropes, couldn’t fight his way to the surface. I could have the ME run toxicology. Do you want me to ask him to do that?”

Did the Chief want to do that? Would it help to know that Tess was drunk or Greg was high? God, no. It wouldn’t help him and it wouldn’t help the kids. He could ask Joe to run the toxicology in confidence. The only people who would see the results were himself and the ME, Danny Browne. But somehow, someway, rumors would fly. They always did. The Chief had seen it time and time again. You thought something was locked up in the vault when it turned out that everyone, including the girls who made pizza at the Muse, were talking about it. Getting the story right enough to maim, and wrong enough to kill. Tess and Greg had just had their lives examined under a microscope with the goddamn April Peck thing. Some child in Finn’s second-grade class had told Finn that his father was a cradle robber. A second-grader! It made the Chief angry enough to want to throw somebody in the slammer-the second-grader or Greg, the Chief wasn’t sure. Gossip was insidious. The Chief could not, in good conscience, create more gossip. And yet he was the police chief. He had to know what had happened.

“Run toxicology,” he said.

“Will do,” Joe said.

“On the down low,” the Chief said.

“Absolutely.”

“No, I mean it.”

“I understand,” Joe said. He was looking at the Chief steadily. “You have my word.”

“That’ll do,” the Chief said.

The Chief followed Joe upstairs to sign the paperwork. Joe brought out two heavy-duty clear plastic bags with USCG stamped on them. One of them contained Greg’s guitar case.

“This is what my guys found at the scene,” Joe said. “We divided it into personal effects and what appears to be rubbish. But look through the rubbish to be sure we didn’t accidentally throw away something important.”

This was all standard operating procedure, but the Chief wasn’t sure he could follow through. But if not him, then who? He couldn’t ask Andrea to go through these bags, or Delilah or Jeffrey or Phoebe. The sight of Greg’s guitar case made him queasy. He opened it up. The guitar was surprisingly dry, light, intact. The Chief held it the way he’d seen Greg do hundreds of times, and felt like a fool. Still, he was certain that if he strummed a chord, it would sound clear and untroubled. The guitar had survived the capsize, but two strong, capable adults were dead.

The Chief resisted the urge to play the guitar incorrectly. He set it down.

Joe Finch excused himself to make the phone call to the medical examiner. The Chief dug through the bag of rubbish first, thinking that would be easier. There was a bottle of Moët & Chandon, broken at the neck and side. Also the cork, the wrapper, the cage. There were two plastic cups, both cracked. Two empty bottles of Heineken, no caps. Two glass cereal bowls that the Chief recognized as those from his own kitchen, cracked. Two halves of a soggy paperback book, Life’s a Beach , by Claire Cook. The book was saturated like a sponge, more pulp than pages. But it had been Tess’s, and the Chief had to ask himself, Would Andrea want it? He decided not. He left it with the broken glass. On to the personal effects.