The floor, repaneled in teakwood, was clean and shining. The walls were freshly painted a gleaming white, and there were bright flowered curtains over the portholes. The table was lowered from its stowed position, and covered with a simple white and pink checkered cloth. A single director’s chair was pushed up neatly under it. The air smelled faintly of flowers from the multitude of sachets that hung, sat, dangled, rested in every possible nook or cranny. A bud vase stood in the middle, complete with a purple rose. Jim touched it with a fingertip: silk. Beside it were two candles in short glass sticks, each half-burned. The berth was made up carefully, with a spread that picked up the background blue of the curtains, a couple of fluffy pillows, and a knitted afghan folded on the foot. A half dozen stuffed animals were tucked up against the pillows: floppy-eared dogs, a rabbit, a koala, a big Mickey Mouse.
“I thought...” said Raymond. “I thought she just threw this stuff away. It was... years ago.”
“I remember that dog from when she was a girl.”
“Didn’t she used to have curtains like these in her room?”
“Yes. Mom made that afghan.”
“The pillows look familiar, too.”
“They’re thirty years old, Ray.”
“Jesus. I can’t believe this.”
Weir couldn’t, either. It was like stepping into Ann’s girlhood room, right down to the horse miniatures that now stood upon the Formica pasture of the galley counter. He looked at Raymond, whose mouth actually hung open, a slow waltz of astonishment circling in his eyes. The lantern hissed, glowed brighter. But the more Jim looked, the more he saw that this was not just a girl’s cabin at all, but a woman’s. Behind the model horses sat a row of books: the Hardy and Eliot that Ann always had loved, May’s The Courage to Create, three volumes of Neruda, two of Marianne Moore, Marquez’s big novels, Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth George. Holding up the books at each end were two bottles of wine, all four of them expensive cabernets. Two wineglasses stood to the left of the books, a bottle opener beside them. Next to that was a pack of cigarettes, with two extending from the open hole as if in casual invitation. Atop the pack rested a lighter in a simple silver case, around which was wrapped a roll of U.S. postage stamps. Leaning against the galley wall was one large bar of Belgian chocolate, unopened.
Jim’s vision moved again to the fold-out table. At the far end, away from the chair, was a tumbler — one of Poon’s old scotch glasses, he knew — filled with pens and pencils.
He looked at Raymond, who looked back. “Where she wrote,” he said. “The journal can’t be far.”
But the leather-bound book was nowhere obvious. They searched the drawers and shallow cupboards, the stowage space beneath the berth and benches, the tiny shelf in the water closet, the railed compartments behind the countertop. It was not under a pillow or stuffed animal, not tucked into the space behind the fold-out table, not beneath the round pillow that Ann had set on the seat of the director’s chair.
“Outside,” said Jim.
“She wouldn’t leave it outside,” said Raymond.
“Well, Ray, it’s not here. I’m checking outside.”
In the lantern light, Jim unlatched the two stowage holds. Raymond’s flashlight beam sprayed across the life jackets and faded orange preservers, the buoys and nylon lines, the ancient green wool blankets, flares, spear guns, fishing tackle, Poon’s old lever-action .22. They unfolded the blankets, pulled out the preservers and life buoys, then put them back.
“Engine compartment,” said Weir.
“It’s going to be a mess,” said Raymond.
And that it was, an oil-caked Hades of grime and rust, what was left of a once-proud diesel that seemed to have somehow shrunk with time to little more than a blackened mechanical artifact.
Jim was lifting the lantern up for a better look when he saw the corner of plastic sticking up from under the plug wires. When he pulled, it slipped down and almost away — a surprising weight and mass. Carefully, he worked it out. The plastic was cut from drop cloth, with the four corners joined at the top by twine. Inside it was a brown grocery bag, folded over. It weighed at least a pound. “We just passed Go,” said Weir. “Take it inside.”
Jim set the package on Ann’s table, carefully unknotting the twine and pulling out the paper bag. This he sat upright and unfolded, holding open the top with both hands. Raymond shined in his flashlight. Weir could see at a glance that there was no leather-bound journal. What there were was a small bundle of letters held together with more twine, and a stack of old school notebooks with covers of various colors. He took the letters out, untied the twine, and spread the envelopes over the tablecloth.
He picked up the top one, addressed in type to Ann Cruz at a post office box in Balboa, no return. Jim recognized the PO box number, one of Poon’s old “secrets” that somehow everyone in the family knew, one that Jim had long assumed was buried with his father ten years ago. The letter was postmarked on May 15 of this year, the day before Ann died.
My Dearest Ann,
Your decision leaves me broken and scattered, but I stand with you in this as I will in all things. I will wait for you on any distant shore. Go to your husband if you want; maybe that is best. Please, dear one, no mention of Duty Free, ever, to anyone?
With Love and Affection,
Mr. Night
For the next hour, while Dwight Innelman and Roger Deak collected specimens and dusted for fingerprints, Jim and Raymond read through the letters to Ann, holding them to the lamplight in rubber-gloved hands, looking for the sentence, the phrase, the word that might identify Mr. Night. But it was almost as if they had been written with this in mind — they were general, obscure, shadowy.
In the end, to Weir, only three things were clear: that Mr. Night loved Ann in a passionate, reckless way; that she was carrying his child, that he had known her, and she him, for at least a quarter of a century; that she was planning to end the affair.
He met Raymond’s stare from across the table, a look so fraught with shame and helplessness that Jim wanted to turn away. But Raymond did first. He gazed down at the letter in his hand with the spent expression of a man whose entire flotilla of belief has just been blown to sea by a storm of cruel, undeniable fact. The comfort of denial was finally gone.
Dwight Innelman stood over the table with one of the wineglasses from the counter. “The whole place is crawling with prints,” he said. “Check this.”
Jim studied the white dust, saw the perfect thumbprint halfway down, the two lovely fingertips opposite.
Raymond looked up at him. “What did she know about Duty Free that Mr. Night was afraid of?”
“She saw the dumpers. Blodgett said they weren’t close enough to make them, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe Ann saw more than he did. Maybe she recognized the boat.” Again Weir thought of Blodgett’s implication, that Becky was doing the dumping, or at least someone using her boat was. No, he thought. Take a stand.
Raymond considered. “Dave Smith?”
“Or call him Mr. Night.”
Jim stood.
“Where now?”
“Phil Kearns,” he said, “has an alibi for us to meet.”
Half an hour later, showered and changed, they sat in Jim’s truck outside the Whale’s Tale, watching as Sgt. Kearns pulled away from the curb in a new Miata convertible.