The Midcoast, page 29
She would later tell a DEA agent that she thought Ed seemed preoccupied, like a man who had meant to ask a question but couldn’t remember what it was (it’s possible he had intended to ask Brittany about the pasta, a dish that he had promised Coach Morris would be served, but which, for the record, was never served).
“You okay?” Brittany asked him.
“Yuh.”
“You gonna get me that lobster soon?”
“Yuh.”
The smoke was rising out of the seaweed, drifting into the air and upriver on a southwesterly. Downriver, the sky was tapering into its own kind of smoke—cold fog, billowing up from the ocean. Ed glanced along the path of burning tiki torches, down the pier, which appeared to fade into the distance. Tied to the float, his lobster boat and the faint lines of its antennae were just barely visible. The deck was already full of young women, a few of their parents, too. They were supposed to go out on the river and haul a string of traps, the ones that Ed and Chuck had already preloaded with lobsters.
“Now would be good,” Brittany said, nodding at the weather. “Don’t wanna lose your way out there.”
“I know my way,” Ed said.
She shoveled at the seaweed, took a drag from the cigarette. “EJ here yet?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“I was hoping to see him.”
“Yuh—me, too.”
Ed gave Brittany the same goodbye he gave me—a squeeze above the collarbone—and then he went down the ramp to the Miss Stephanie.
Those already on the boat saw Ed go to Steph, who was standing by the bow, holding the line, and engage in a brief, hushed conversation, but the engine was on, rumbling loudly, so no one could hear what was said.
Steph would later recount to me that she was expressing concern about Allie: “She had just showed me a gift that Dougie Page gave her. Allie asked me what she should do because it was a nice gift, but she wasn’t interested in Dougie.”
“What kind of gift?” I asked her. This was in our final interview.
“A necklace,” she said. “I bet that kid didn’t even know how much it was worth. I don’t think Allie did either. She thought she did, but it was even nicer than that. There was a diamond on this thing you wouldn’t believe.”
“What’d you end up doing with it?”
“What did I end up doing with it?”
“Well, yeah. Or—what happened to it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
I waited.
“It was Allie’s,” she said, speaking very deliberately, looking almost offended by the idea that she might know more about the necklace than she’d already divulged. I stared at her for a moment, trying to decide if she could really be so oblivious to the implication here. If what Steph was saying was true, it was entirely possible that Allie still had the stolen necklace. I hoped—I really hoped—that she didn’t. “What did Ed say?”
“Nothing, really. I asked him if he thought the necklace was stolen, and he said he didn’t know, but that it might explain the boats. ‘Which boats?’ I said, and he told me the boys had been seeing lobster boats lurking around the peninsula. They weren’t sure who they belonged to, but maybe someone had seen Dougie and come looking for him.”
“Ed didn’t say what he planned to do about it?”
“He said he’d look into it.”
“And then you got on the boat?”
“And then we got on the boat.”
Once they were aboard, the lines were dropped and Chuck steered the vessel into the river. At some point, Ed took the helm. He pushed the throttle forward and powered through the river in a wide arc, heading south. High tide was approaching. Some of the girls were on the bow, and Ed asked them to sit low so he could see the buoys as they flashed toward the boat. They were running right down the middle of the river—from where they were, they couldn’t see either shoreline.
“I’ve tried to navigate the Midcoast in a thick fog,” Chip told me over the phone during one of our interviews. “It’s hard. Even with modern technology. Ed wasn’t even using his GPS. I was watching him closely. He just knew where to go. It was quite the feat of navigation.”
Those players who weren’t on the bow were sitting on the white bench in the stern, where the lobster barrels used to go. The women were shivering and huddling close to one another but laughing and shouting over the loud twin engines. More women and parents stood between them, the wind bending around the wheelhouse and blowing their hair back. Chuck stood in the center of the deck, wearing his orange rubber overalls and boots, a cut-off sweatshirt showing off his hairy arms. He wore black rubber gloves, ready to handle the lobster. Behind Ed, Steph sat in one of the captain’s chairs. Sandy Smith sat in the other captain’s chair, and Chip stood in front of her.
When I visited the Smiths’ house—on our way to that wedding in Massachusetts—Chip met me in the foyer, wearing a faded polo and a beard of white stubble. He looked freshly showered, comb lines still etched in his hair. He led me through the kitchen to the den, flicked on the lights, and there it all was: the pictures of Chip and Sandy, pictures of the boat, the oil painting. I looked around at the bookcases, the trophies, the grandfather clock, the Amherst chairs. And then Chip told me about the conversation that had taken place with Ed in that very room, told me about returning to look at the painting when he read the article in the Globe. I had a notebook, and I was jotting down everything I could, too excited to keep my letters from smearing across the page. When he was done with the account, I thanked him again and again and said I would be on my way now but then remembered I had a few more questions to ask and also needed to snap some pictures. He said go ahead, so I photographed the walls with my phone. I would study them when I got home.
On the way back through the kitchen, passing a marble island the size of a parade float, I asked Chip how old the house was and he said not as old as it felt, and then as we walked through a hallway and past a watercolor portrait of all four Smiths posed on a silver couch, Victoria and Trip much younger, I asked how his kids were doing, but instead of replying directly, Chip reminded me that I had wanted to know about Ed’s behavior on the day before the Amherst-Bowdoin lacrosse game, and I said yes, thanks, I did. Steph had insisted that Chip and Sandy arrive in advance of all the other guests. She wanted to give them a guided tour of our town. It was the Smiths’ first trip to the Midcoast in over two decades.
“Well, he seemed quiet,” Chip said.
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I said. “Did he say anything in the car?”
“Not really. But maybe because Steph was doing all the talking.”
“What was she talking about?”
“Oh, just—this improvement, that improvement.”
“It’s come a long way, hasn’t it?”
“What, Damariscotta?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose.” But this was all he gave me. I expected him to pay us a few compliments—as anyone who had ever been to our village tended to—but Chip seemed reluctant to place Damariscotta in a more positive light.
“You didn’t like the changes?” I asked. We were back in the foyer by then.
“No, no, I did,” he said. “It’s just—well, first, I should admit that I was a bit preoccupied that day.”
“By what?”
“Oh, just—here’s the thing: Damariscotta was very different from the way I remembered it. I guess one of the things Sandy and I used to love about the town was how untouched it seemed.”
“Steph says that all the time.”
“And yet she touched it.”
“Right,” I said. “No, I know. She definitely touched it.”
He started to say something, then stopped. He appeared to be weighing his words carefully. “There used to be something a little more authentic about the lack of amenities,” he said.
“That’s probably true.”
“Now it feels more like the Cape or the Hamptons. Or other towns in Maine. I guess that’s the way it always happens. Visitors go to the Midcoast because they think they want something rustic and industrial—the way life should be and all that—but really what they want is rustic and industrial plus one good coffee shop, and if they’re staying for longer than a weekend, then they want all that plus two good coffee shops, because the first one gets boring after a while—”
“It really does.”
“I understand. But then the tourists also want a T-shirt shop that sells gifts to bring home for the in-laws, and then a designer boutique because they weren’t expecting it to get so cool at night and because they’ve talked themselves into spending more money than they’d budgeted for just because they’re on vacation and because it’d be nice to find a knit sweater that matches exactly with their notion of what a well-heeled mariner on the Maine coast might wear on exactly such an evening, and so the town tries to provide all these services until, before you know it, it’s made enough concessions, on behalf of convenience and some imagined version of the town that only exists in brochures—to eventually, not that anyone’s really noticed, because it takes place over years or decades—trade ‘authenticity’ for what feels more like an airbrushed portrait of itself. A caricature. Buildings shaped like factories but containing everything someone from out of town thinks they don’t want but do want, or thinks they do want but don’t want.”
“So Damariscotta should have stayed in its lane,” I said.
I meant it as a joke, but Chip seemed to take it seriously. “You know, it probably should have,” he said.
Sandy came down the wide staircase right at that moment, wearing tennis whites, descending like the commodore of a yacht club. “I’m heading to the court,” she said to Chip, once we had introduced ourselves. She stood with her hands on her waist, legs shoulder width apart—the stance of a jock. She wore tight shorts instead of a skirt. On her right wrist, she wore a terry cloth wristband. And on her left hand, she wore the most eye-catching diamond I have ever seen attached to another human. I couldn’t have guessed how many carats were welded to that platinum band, but Maeve’s diamond is a half carat, and Sandy’s stone had to be ten times the size of it. Slowly I realized that I was staring at the ring, and that the Smiths were waiting patiently for me to bring my eyes back to conversation level. So I did. And yet, I had questions about that diamond. It looked exactly like the one I had seen in the case files (where the owner was listed as Sandra Richards, Sandy’s maiden name). But it couldn’t be the same diamond. Could it? Was it a replica? Paid for by whom? Insurance? Insurance. However, in that case, when had they replaced the stolen ring? And had Sandy ever worn the diamond around Ed? Or Steph? Had her illness—the lupus—made her joints too swollen to slide her rings on? And was there ever a moment in which Steph and Sandy were wearing different versions of the same ring at the same time? There must have been. Maybe on the boat. But no one had ever noticed. Or at least, no one had ever let on that they noticed.
Another grandfather clock in the foyer was telling me that it really was time to go, time to pick up Maeve in Boston and head to my former student’s wedding, so I thanked Chip and Sandy for having me and said I’d show myself out, but Chip insisted on walking me to the car. He held the massive door open, then followed me down the pebbled walkway.
I had parked in front of their three-car garage, so had to execute a five- or six-point turn to get the Subaru pointed in the right direction. As the metal gate was sliding itself open, I rolled down my window and waved to Chip. He waved back, but then he held one finger in the air, as though something had just occurred to him.
He took a step toward the car and called out, “I don’t know if you’re aware, Andrew, but the statute of limitations in Maine is six years. So we couldn’t have pressed charges, even if we’d wanted to.”
“Oh,” I said. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Just an FYI. For your book.”
“Okay,” I said. “Appreciated.”
He waved again and smiled—his first real smile of the day—then told me to drive safely on my way to the wedding.
* * *
—
It wasn’t until recently, when I was writing about that visit to Weston, that I went back to the notebook I’d had with me that day and found Chip’s parting words, which I’d recorded right away but forgotten about in the intervening months. He’d chosen a strange tense, I realized: Instead of We couldn’t press charges, he said, We couldn’t have pressed charges, implying an earlier time frame than I’d first understood, a time frame that had closed at some point. Probably the distinction didn’t matter. But the slim possibility that it did kept bothering me. I called Chip, but he didn’t pick up, so I sent him an email, asking if he’d meant to use that tense and also when, precisely, he’d looked up the law on Maine’s statute of limitations, because even if he and Sandy couldn’t have pressed charges, there were other measures they could have taken, as I was sure he was aware.
I’m still waiting to hear back.
* * *
—
For what it’s worth, when I asked Steph if she knew that she was in possession of Sandy’s ring, she looked down at her left hand and said she had owned what she was wearing for over twenty-five years. Therefore it was her ring. Sandy had her own ring, she said.
“Well,” I said.
“Well what?”
“Nothing—I just—I’m not sure if Sandy would see it that way.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know how Sandy would see it, but that’s none of my business.” She looked out the window, then across the room, at Ben’s old workbench. “And also, you’re missing the point.”
“I am?”
“Yeah.”
She stood and went to the workbench, opened the top drawer, removed something, and came back to the living room. In her hand was a small white box, Scotch tape keeping the lid on. She handed it to me and sat down.
“Go ahead,” she said, “open it.”
I unsealed the tape and lifted the lid. Inside was an object, or the ghost of an object, that I hadn’t seen for over a quarter century: a bracelet made of twine. Back from the dead, I thought. But no, it couldn’t have been the bracelet I’d thrown in the dumpster. It had to be something else, a newer version. Steph had already told me about her conversation with Ed on the Kerrys’ dock, Ed assuring her that he could make her another bracelet, but she hadn’t told me that he’d actually done it. The twine had dried out by now. I could still smell the sweet wax, but only faintly. The bracelet, like the ring, was a replica, although when a replica outlasts its original by so many years, it’s hard to argue that it’s not the more important artifact. This was the point Steph was trying to make about the ring, I guess, but the bracelet had been lost, whereas the ring had been stolen and destroyed, so to my mind the analogy didn’t fit, not the way Steph would have liked.
“Ed gave me that bracelet when we were teenagers,” she said.
“But you know,” I said cautiously, “that this isn’t the original, right?”
“Well, of course I know, Andrew. I mean, that’s kind of how Ed and I got together. He thought I’d just ignored this nice thing he made for me, and I felt bad about that, and it was like the easiest way to make him feel better was to just let him make me a new bracelet and tell him I loved it.”
“And you know what happened to the first one?”
“Ed said he gave it to you, and you sent it to me, but it never got there. I guess the post office must have lost it.”
I hesitated, a little stunned to hear this version of the story. “That’s what he told you?”
“Yup.”
I stared out the window, unable to speak. If Ed had really believed that I’d sent the bracelet, not lost it, then he’d been treating me with much more trust than I deserved.
“Anyway,” Steph said, looking at me like maybe she should ask if I was feeling okay, “the point is: That bracelet is way more important than any piece of jewelry. Ed made the bracelet. I did love it. I’ve always loved it.”
* * *
—
Ed brought the boat into Seal Cove, where the loaded traps had been sunk, and then he pulled back on the throttle. The fog was thicker than ever, and for a moment the visitors on the boat felt certain they were lost. They were surrounded by pot buoys, none of them, it seemed, painted yellow and pink.
Normally Ed would have used the small rock island in the center of the cove as a directional marker, but by now it was high tide, and the island was submerged. He guided the boat in a circle. They couldn’t see more than ten feet.
“Hey!” one of the young women shouted. She was pointing at a dark shape in the river, which seemed to be resting, somehow, just beneath the surface. A seal. On the island. It slithered on its belly and dipped into the water. For Allie, the seal was no big deal, but for many of her teammates it was the highlight of the ride thus far. (I’m not sure which lacrosse player saw the seal first—both Dana and Kim told me they had been the one to get everyone’s attention—so maybe they saw the seal simultaneously. Maybe it was a tie.)
The seal indicated to Ed where the island was, and once he knew that, he could find his traps. He steered in their direction, then saw a marker, the one he had been looking for, materialize from the fog. He went to it, letting the buoy bump against the side of the boat, idling and waiting as Chuck leaned over and grabbed the long wooden stem. Chuck pulled on it and lifted the slimy green line from the water. He brought it to the stainless-steel pulley, which had never been used—it was part of the Miss Stephanie’s renovations, there only for show up until that point—and he looped the line over the wheel and asked the girls to help him pull.
On a real working lobster boat, there would have been a hydraulic hauler, but Ed’s boat was a pleasure cruiser now, not a commercial fishing vessel. However, with all the women pulling—all of whom had been building their cores since the fall, getting stronger and stronger—they could replace the force of the hauler, and it was shallow where they were—Ed and Chuck had picked this location on purpose—so within a minute, the first trap was looming up from the darkness, breaching the surface and swinging toward the gunwale. It was loaded with blue flapping and snapping lobsters.
“You okay?” Brittany asked him.
“Yuh.”
“You gonna get me that lobster soon?”
“Yuh.”
The smoke was rising out of the seaweed, drifting into the air and upriver on a southwesterly. Downriver, the sky was tapering into its own kind of smoke—cold fog, billowing up from the ocean. Ed glanced along the path of burning tiki torches, down the pier, which appeared to fade into the distance. Tied to the float, his lobster boat and the faint lines of its antennae were just barely visible. The deck was already full of young women, a few of their parents, too. They were supposed to go out on the river and haul a string of traps, the ones that Ed and Chuck had already preloaded with lobsters.
“Now would be good,” Brittany said, nodding at the weather. “Don’t wanna lose your way out there.”
“I know my way,” Ed said.
She shoveled at the seaweed, took a drag from the cigarette. “EJ here yet?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“I was hoping to see him.”
“Yuh—me, too.”
Ed gave Brittany the same goodbye he gave me—a squeeze above the collarbone—and then he went down the ramp to the Miss Stephanie.
Those already on the boat saw Ed go to Steph, who was standing by the bow, holding the line, and engage in a brief, hushed conversation, but the engine was on, rumbling loudly, so no one could hear what was said.
Steph would later recount to me that she was expressing concern about Allie: “She had just showed me a gift that Dougie Page gave her. Allie asked me what she should do because it was a nice gift, but she wasn’t interested in Dougie.”
“What kind of gift?” I asked her. This was in our final interview.
“A necklace,” she said. “I bet that kid didn’t even know how much it was worth. I don’t think Allie did either. She thought she did, but it was even nicer than that. There was a diamond on this thing you wouldn’t believe.”
“What’d you end up doing with it?”
“What did I end up doing with it?”
“Well, yeah. Or—what happened to it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
I waited.
“It was Allie’s,” she said, speaking very deliberately, looking almost offended by the idea that she might know more about the necklace than she’d already divulged. I stared at her for a moment, trying to decide if she could really be so oblivious to the implication here. If what Steph was saying was true, it was entirely possible that Allie still had the stolen necklace. I hoped—I really hoped—that she didn’t. “What did Ed say?”
“Nothing, really. I asked him if he thought the necklace was stolen, and he said he didn’t know, but that it might explain the boats. ‘Which boats?’ I said, and he told me the boys had been seeing lobster boats lurking around the peninsula. They weren’t sure who they belonged to, but maybe someone had seen Dougie and come looking for him.”
“Ed didn’t say what he planned to do about it?”
“He said he’d look into it.”
“And then you got on the boat?”
“And then we got on the boat.”
Once they were aboard, the lines were dropped and Chuck steered the vessel into the river. At some point, Ed took the helm. He pushed the throttle forward and powered through the river in a wide arc, heading south. High tide was approaching. Some of the girls were on the bow, and Ed asked them to sit low so he could see the buoys as they flashed toward the boat. They were running right down the middle of the river—from where they were, they couldn’t see either shoreline.
“I’ve tried to navigate the Midcoast in a thick fog,” Chip told me over the phone during one of our interviews. “It’s hard. Even with modern technology. Ed wasn’t even using his GPS. I was watching him closely. He just knew where to go. It was quite the feat of navigation.”
Those players who weren’t on the bow were sitting on the white bench in the stern, where the lobster barrels used to go. The women were shivering and huddling close to one another but laughing and shouting over the loud twin engines. More women and parents stood between them, the wind bending around the wheelhouse and blowing their hair back. Chuck stood in the center of the deck, wearing his orange rubber overalls and boots, a cut-off sweatshirt showing off his hairy arms. He wore black rubber gloves, ready to handle the lobster. Behind Ed, Steph sat in one of the captain’s chairs. Sandy Smith sat in the other captain’s chair, and Chip stood in front of her.
When I visited the Smiths’ house—on our way to that wedding in Massachusetts—Chip met me in the foyer, wearing a faded polo and a beard of white stubble. He looked freshly showered, comb lines still etched in his hair. He led me through the kitchen to the den, flicked on the lights, and there it all was: the pictures of Chip and Sandy, pictures of the boat, the oil painting. I looked around at the bookcases, the trophies, the grandfather clock, the Amherst chairs. And then Chip told me about the conversation that had taken place with Ed in that very room, told me about returning to look at the painting when he read the article in the Globe. I had a notebook, and I was jotting down everything I could, too excited to keep my letters from smearing across the page. When he was done with the account, I thanked him again and again and said I would be on my way now but then remembered I had a few more questions to ask and also needed to snap some pictures. He said go ahead, so I photographed the walls with my phone. I would study them when I got home.
On the way back through the kitchen, passing a marble island the size of a parade float, I asked Chip how old the house was and he said not as old as it felt, and then as we walked through a hallway and past a watercolor portrait of all four Smiths posed on a silver couch, Victoria and Trip much younger, I asked how his kids were doing, but instead of replying directly, Chip reminded me that I had wanted to know about Ed’s behavior on the day before the Amherst-Bowdoin lacrosse game, and I said yes, thanks, I did. Steph had insisted that Chip and Sandy arrive in advance of all the other guests. She wanted to give them a guided tour of our town. It was the Smiths’ first trip to the Midcoast in over two decades.
“Well, he seemed quiet,” Chip said.
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I said. “Did he say anything in the car?”
“Not really. But maybe because Steph was doing all the talking.”
“What was she talking about?”
“Oh, just—this improvement, that improvement.”
“It’s come a long way, hasn’t it?”
“What, Damariscotta?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose.” But this was all he gave me. I expected him to pay us a few compliments—as anyone who had ever been to our village tended to—but Chip seemed reluctant to place Damariscotta in a more positive light.
“You didn’t like the changes?” I asked. We were back in the foyer by then.
“No, no, I did,” he said. “It’s just—well, first, I should admit that I was a bit preoccupied that day.”
“By what?”
“Oh, just—here’s the thing: Damariscotta was very different from the way I remembered it. I guess one of the things Sandy and I used to love about the town was how untouched it seemed.”
“Steph says that all the time.”
“And yet she touched it.”
“Right,” I said. “No, I know. She definitely touched it.”
He started to say something, then stopped. He appeared to be weighing his words carefully. “There used to be something a little more authentic about the lack of amenities,” he said.
“That’s probably true.”
“Now it feels more like the Cape or the Hamptons. Or other towns in Maine. I guess that’s the way it always happens. Visitors go to the Midcoast because they think they want something rustic and industrial—the way life should be and all that—but really what they want is rustic and industrial plus one good coffee shop, and if they’re staying for longer than a weekend, then they want all that plus two good coffee shops, because the first one gets boring after a while—”
“It really does.”
“I understand. But then the tourists also want a T-shirt shop that sells gifts to bring home for the in-laws, and then a designer boutique because they weren’t expecting it to get so cool at night and because they’ve talked themselves into spending more money than they’d budgeted for just because they’re on vacation and because it’d be nice to find a knit sweater that matches exactly with their notion of what a well-heeled mariner on the Maine coast might wear on exactly such an evening, and so the town tries to provide all these services until, before you know it, it’s made enough concessions, on behalf of convenience and some imagined version of the town that only exists in brochures—to eventually, not that anyone’s really noticed, because it takes place over years or decades—trade ‘authenticity’ for what feels more like an airbrushed portrait of itself. A caricature. Buildings shaped like factories but containing everything someone from out of town thinks they don’t want but do want, or thinks they do want but don’t want.”
“So Damariscotta should have stayed in its lane,” I said.
I meant it as a joke, but Chip seemed to take it seriously. “You know, it probably should have,” he said.
Sandy came down the wide staircase right at that moment, wearing tennis whites, descending like the commodore of a yacht club. “I’m heading to the court,” she said to Chip, once we had introduced ourselves. She stood with her hands on her waist, legs shoulder width apart—the stance of a jock. She wore tight shorts instead of a skirt. On her right wrist, she wore a terry cloth wristband. And on her left hand, she wore the most eye-catching diamond I have ever seen attached to another human. I couldn’t have guessed how many carats were welded to that platinum band, but Maeve’s diamond is a half carat, and Sandy’s stone had to be ten times the size of it. Slowly I realized that I was staring at the ring, and that the Smiths were waiting patiently for me to bring my eyes back to conversation level. So I did. And yet, I had questions about that diamond. It looked exactly like the one I had seen in the case files (where the owner was listed as Sandra Richards, Sandy’s maiden name). But it couldn’t be the same diamond. Could it? Was it a replica? Paid for by whom? Insurance? Insurance. However, in that case, when had they replaced the stolen ring? And had Sandy ever worn the diamond around Ed? Or Steph? Had her illness—the lupus—made her joints too swollen to slide her rings on? And was there ever a moment in which Steph and Sandy were wearing different versions of the same ring at the same time? There must have been. Maybe on the boat. But no one had ever noticed. Or at least, no one had ever let on that they noticed.
Another grandfather clock in the foyer was telling me that it really was time to go, time to pick up Maeve in Boston and head to my former student’s wedding, so I thanked Chip and Sandy for having me and said I’d show myself out, but Chip insisted on walking me to the car. He held the massive door open, then followed me down the pebbled walkway.
I had parked in front of their three-car garage, so had to execute a five- or six-point turn to get the Subaru pointed in the right direction. As the metal gate was sliding itself open, I rolled down my window and waved to Chip. He waved back, but then he held one finger in the air, as though something had just occurred to him.
He took a step toward the car and called out, “I don’t know if you’re aware, Andrew, but the statute of limitations in Maine is six years. So we couldn’t have pressed charges, even if we’d wanted to.”
“Oh,” I said. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Just an FYI. For your book.”
“Okay,” I said. “Appreciated.”
He waved again and smiled—his first real smile of the day—then told me to drive safely on my way to the wedding.
* * *
—
It wasn’t until recently, when I was writing about that visit to Weston, that I went back to the notebook I’d had with me that day and found Chip’s parting words, which I’d recorded right away but forgotten about in the intervening months. He’d chosen a strange tense, I realized: Instead of We couldn’t press charges, he said, We couldn’t have pressed charges, implying an earlier time frame than I’d first understood, a time frame that had closed at some point. Probably the distinction didn’t matter. But the slim possibility that it did kept bothering me. I called Chip, but he didn’t pick up, so I sent him an email, asking if he’d meant to use that tense and also when, precisely, he’d looked up the law on Maine’s statute of limitations, because even if he and Sandy couldn’t have pressed charges, there were other measures they could have taken, as I was sure he was aware.
I’m still waiting to hear back.
* * *
—
For what it’s worth, when I asked Steph if she knew that she was in possession of Sandy’s ring, she looked down at her left hand and said she had owned what she was wearing for over twenty-five years. Therefore it was her ring. Sandy had her own ring, she said.
“Well,” I said.
“Well what?”
“Nothing—I just—I’m not sure if Sandy would see it that way.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know how Sandy would see it, but that’s none of my business.” She looked out the window, then across the room, at Ben’s old workbench. “And also, you’re missing the point.”
“I am?”
“Yeah.”
She stood and went to the workbench, opened the top drawer, removed something, and came back to the living room. In her hand was a small white box, Scotch tape keeping the lid on. She handed it to me and sat down.
“Go ahead,” she said, “open it.”
I unsealed the tape and lifted the lid. Inside was an object, or the ghost of an object, that I hadn’t seen for over a quarter century: a bracelet made of twine. Back from the dead, I thought. But no, it couldn’t have been the bracelet I’d thrown in the dumpster. It had to be something else, a newer version. Steph had already told me about her conversation with Ed on the Kerrys’ dock, Ed assuring her that he could make her another bracelet, but she hadn’t told me that he’d actually done it. The twine had dried out by now. I could still smell the sweet wax, but only faintly. The bracelet, like the ring, was a replica, although when a replica outlasts its original by so many years, it’s hard to argue that it’s not the more important artifact. This was the point Steph was trying to make about the ring, I guess, but the bracelet had been lost, whereas the ring had been stolen and destroyed, so to my mind the analogy didn’t fit, not the way Steph would have liked.
“Ed gave me that bracelet when we were teenagers,” she said.
“But you know,” I said cautiously, “that this isn’t the original, right?”
“Well, of course I know, Andrew. I mean, that’s kind of how Ed and I got together. He thought I’d just ignored this nice thing he made for me, and I felt bad about that, and it was like the easiest way to make him feel better was to just let him make me a new bracelet and tell him I loved it.”
“And you know what happened to the first one?”
“Ed said he gave it to you, and you sent it to me, but it never got there. I guess the post office must have lost it.”
I hesitated, a little stunned to hear this version of the story. “That’s what he told you?”
“Yup.”
I stared out the window, unable to speak. If Ed had really believed that I’d sent the bracelet, not lost it, then he’d been treating me with much more trust than I deserved.
“Anyway,” Steph said, looking at me like maybe she should ask if I was feeling okay, “the point is: That bracelet is way more important than any piece of jewelry. Ed made the bracelet. I did love it. I’ve always loved it.”
* * *
—
Ed brought the boat into Seal Cove, where the loaded traps had been sunk, and then he pulled back on the throttle. The fog was thicker than ever, and for a moment the visitors on the boat felt certain they were lost. They were surrounded by pot buoys, none of them, it seemed, painted yellow and pink.
Normally Ed would have used the small rock island in the center of the cove as a directional marker, but by now it was high tide, and the island was submerged. He guided the boat in a circle. They couldn’t see more than ten feet.
“Hey!” one of the young women shouted. She was pointing at a dark shape in the river, which seemed to be resting, somehow, just beneath the surface. A seal. On the island. It slithered on its belly and dipped into the water. For Allie, the seal was no big deal, but for many of her teammates it was the highlight of the ride thus far. (I’m not sure which lacrosse player saw the seal first—both Dana and Kim told me they had been the one to get everyone’s attention—so maybe they saw the seal simultaneously. Maybe it was a tie.)
The seal indicated to Ed where the island was, and once he knew that, he could find his traps. He steered in their direction, then saw a marker, the one he had been looking for, materialize from the fog. He went to it, letting the buoy bump against the side of the boat, idling and waiting as Chuck leaned over and grabbed the long wooden stem. Chuck pulled on it and lifted the slimy green line from the water. He brought it to the stainless-steel pulley, which had never been used—it was part of the Miss Stephanie’s renovations, there only for show up until that point—and he looped the line over the wheel and asked the girls to help him pull.
On a real working lobster boat, there would have been a hydraulic hauler, but Ed’s boat was a pleasure cruiser now, not a commercial fishing vessel. However, with all the women pulling—all of whom had been building their cores since the fall, getting stronger and stronger—they could replace the force of the hauler, and it was shallow where they were—Ed and Chuck had picked this location on purpose—so within a minute, the first trap was looming up from the darkness, breaching the surface and swinging toward the gunwale. It was loaded with blue flapping and snapping lobsters.
