The Shadow Box(29)

I dived in. The Sound was late-May cold. It felt bracing, and it stung every inch of my body, but just for a minute. I got used to it quickly. The salt buoyed me up. It soothed my bruises, felt like salve on my neck and shoulders. My muscles and joints had seized, like bolts rusted solid, after barely moving for three days; swimming fifteen yards off the beach loosened them and brought me back to life.

By the time I climbed out of the water, the sun was just cresting the horizon. I gazed west, saw lights on in one of the houses at Catamount Bluff: mine. Griffin was up already. I knew I had to move fast. I put on my clothes, tried to ignore the harsh feel of cotton sticking to my salty skin. Then I picked up the branch I had dropped and used the pine needles to brush away my footsteps. I found my shoes and disappeared into the trees.

The woods embraced me every bit as much as the sea had. By the time I reached my cabin, the sky was the deep blue of dawn, and I was so exhausted I could barely make it inside. Thoughts tumbled through my mind: I should go to the spring and rinse off; I should get more water before the sun is all the way up; I should go to the marsh and try to catch some blue crabs to eat later.

I lay down just for a moment, but my eyes wouldn’t stay open, and for the first time since I’d gotten here, I slept without nightmares.





15





TOM


Seventy-two hours after the Sallie B went down, the coast guard called off the search for Charlie. Tom couldn’t think of a time he had felt more shattered by the failure of an SAR operation. He’d known from the beginning that finding the Benson children was a long shot. After they rescued Gwen and saw that Charlie wasn’t in the yellow raft with her, the search shifted from rescue to recovery.

Both Dan and Gwen were still in the hospital, recovering from their injuries. While Dan had been taken to Easterly, Gwen was at Shoreline General; they were known for their superb pediatric care. Other than the single word Gwen had whispered to Tom, she still hadn’t spoken.

The incident was under investigation by both the USCG and the Connecticut State Police. Tom had been tied up on Nehantic, then spent two good hours on paperwork detailing the operation.

Last year he had been appointed AIES—adjunct investigator for Easterly Sector, meaning he had to follow up marine incidents. So when he finished at his desk, he headed toward the Hawthorne Shipyard, where Jeanne and Bart Dunham, the couple who had first come upon the wreck, kept their sailboat.

It was Memorial Day, and he hit major traffic on I-95. The weather was beautiful, and with hordes of people heading to beaches and harbors, he doubted he would find the Dunhams there—it was too nice a day not to be sailing. But when he parked in the shipyard lot and asked a rigger where Arcturus was docked, he found the boat in her slip and the couple sitting on deck. She was reading a book; he was staring at an iPad.

Still in his USCG uniform khakis, Tom walked down the finger pier, stopped at the stern of the vessel. She was sleek and pretty, well maintained with a white hull and a freshly painted blue cove stripe just below deck level. The couple glanced up as he approached.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Commander Tom Reid from the coast guard. Are you the Dunhams?”

“Yes, Jeanne and Bart,” the woman said.

“Are you here about the Sallie B?” the man asked.

“I am.”

“Come aboard,” Bart Dunham said.

Tom stepped from the wooden pier onto Arcturus’s deck, ducked under the frame of the white canvas awning that stretched over the cockpit from the cabin to the sailboat’s backstay. The Dunhams both stood, and they shook hands with Tom. The day was sunny and warm, but the awning kept the cockpit fairly cool.

“Please sit down,” Bart said. “Would you like some iced tea? Or a rum and tonic?”

“Iced tea would be great,” he said, and Bart went down below and almost immediately handed up a plastic glass. Tom heard bottles clinking and figured Bart was fixing himself a drink.

The three of them sat in the U-shaped cockpit, on blue-and-white-striped cushions.

“You’re not out sailing,” Tom said. “There’s a good breeze.”

“Right now, I never want to sail again,” Jeanne said.

“It must have been upsetting,” Tom said.

“Oh my God,” Jeanne said. “You wouldn’t believe. I can still smell fuel and smoke and burning hair. I can’t get the taste of it out of the back of my throat. Was that hers? The burning hair?” She shivered.

“We did recover Mrs. Benson’s remains,” Tom said, leaving out the part that, yes, the smell of incinerated hair and everything else had probably come from her.

“I’ve been reading about it online,” Bart said. Tom noticed the way Jeanne shot him a look. “The daughter’s okay?”

“How okay can she be?” Jeanne snapped at Bart. “She was blown out of the water, her mother’s dead, her little brother is drowned or worse!” Then, turning to Tom, “Did you know we saw a shark in the area? Good Lord, the boy could have been attacked! Didn’t you see our statement?”

“I read it, but there was no mention of a shark.”

“That wasn’t a shark fin, sweetie, it was the dog,” Bart said.

“How would you know? You were half in the bag. I saw what I saw.”

Tom made note to add the shark to the report, although he had his doubts—sharks known to attack humans were rare to nonexistent in the part of Long Island Sound where the wreck of the Sallie B had been found.