“It’s hard to imagine anybody wanting to murder a sweet girl like that.” I recalled her sudden academic problems and fickle behavior. “Maybe she had a dark side that nobody knew about.”
Hal struggled to his feet and poured his remaining beer, now warm, overboard. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
I stood up, too, suddenly thirsty for a Coke. “I wonder if Dennis has made any progress on the case?”
Hal grinned at me. “I’m here to report that the good lieutenant has finished off the Heineken and has started on the Bud Light. When last seen, he was rubbing sunblock number eight into your attractive sister-in-law’s shoulders. I’d say there’s no time like the present to ask.”
Hal followed me along the leeward side of the boat, holding on to the lifelines that circled the deck like a double clothesline, then stepped into the cockpit. “Hi, you guys.”
Connie raised a lazy arm. “Hi, yourselves. Have some chips.” She had removed her shorts and top. Dressed in her bathing suit, she was sprawled on her stomach on one of the seat cushions. Dennis, looking a little looped, stood behind the wheel, piloting the boat. I wondered if it was such a good idea. All we’d need was for the coast guard to pick up a cop on a drunken boating charge.
Hal and I arranged ourselves on the cushion opposite Connie and munched on chips we took from an opened bag that had been rolled down and secured with a clothespin. Connie’s work, no doubt.
No one was saying anything at the moment, so I leaped right in. “Dennis, when I talked with Chip at the funeral this morning, he seemed the farthest thing from a murderer than anyone I could imagine. I know you interviewed him. I figured if he were guilty, you would probably have arrested him by now.”
For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but to my thanks, the beer had wrought magic on its journey from stomach to brain to tongue.
Dennis eyed the compass and adjusted his course slightly. “We brought him in yesterday for a couple of hours, and at first he recited, almost word for word, the same story he did in ’90. I still think he might be hiding something, but I couldn’t trip him up. He never denied leaving with Katie after the dance or tried to cover up the fact that witnesses had seen them in the car arguing. So I asked him what the argument was about, and he said it wasn’t important. I told him I’d keep him there, in a cell if I had to, until he told me what they fought about. After about fifteen minutes he gave up. ‘Over sex,’ he says.”
“So what else is new?” Hal chuckled and opened another Bud Light for each of them.
“My first thought,” Dennis continued, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the fresh beer. “Then he claims that they drove to the parking lot behind Hamilton’s Restaurant and that Katie put the moves on him. He goes with the flow for five minutes or so until it gets so hot and heavy that they’re steaming up the windows and he pushes her off. Buttons up his shirt and tells her to put her dress back on, he’s taking her home. She cries and wails that he must not really love her and he explains that au contraire, he loves her too much to violate her chastity. That if he slept with her, she wouldn’t be the kind of girl he would want to marry.”
Connie squinted at her watch and sat up. “That sounds so wacko it almost has to be true.” She pulled on her shirt and took the wheel back from Dennis. “Time to head home, crew. Ready about!”
“Sounds like born-again logic to me!” I shouted above squealing winches and the noise of the sails swinging and flapping to the other side of the boat.
Once Sea Song was heading confidently back in a homeward direction, Dennis chose to sit next to Connie behind the wheel, where he calmly reeled in each fishing line. “I’m beginning to believe his story myself. Besides, we’ve turned up absolutely no physical evidence linking Chip Lambert to the crime. It’s been a frustrating week.” He handed the rods to Hal, who disappeared below with them. “Can’t catch a damn fish, either.” He leaned back and breathed in deeply. “But what a fabulous day! Someone gave me a mug that says, ‘A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work,’ and ain’t it the truth!”
Just off Holly Point, with the wind blowing down the Truxton directly on Sea Song’s nose, we lowered the main, furled the jib, and cranked up the engine. Dennis talked a little more about his plans to reinterview Angie and the rest of the Wildcats before we sighted the marina and everyone became busy with predocking tasks.
Hal stood on the bow with a boat hook, ready to snag a dock line and hand it to me. Dennis stood aft, waiting to grab a line from a piling to act as a brake. Later I tried to reconstruct it all, to figure out how something so stupid could have happened. One minute I was standing there minding my own business, waiting for Hal to hand me a dock line, and the next I was tripping over an anchor line or a coiled-up dock line, something soft anyway, and flipping overboard, feet over ass. In retrospect, I suppose it would have been best to simply get wet, but natural instincts being what they are, I grabbed for the lifelines, connected, and nearly ripped my arm out of its socket. A pain that can only be described as searing, like a hot knife, spread across my chest as the muscles on my “good” side felt as if they were separating from my chest wall. I remember seeing Hal’s hand shoot out a fraction of a second too late, and I recall hanging from the lifelines, screaming.
Four knots per hour might not seem all that fast until you’re trying to scrabble up the side of a polished hull with the water licking greedily at the bottom of your shoes every time the boat slices into a wave. While I flailed ineffectually with my feet, Hal caught my hand and held on tight. I heard Connie shouting something to Dennis about the boat hook. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dennis drop the line he was holding and stagger forward. He snatched the metal pole that Hal had dropped and thrust it in my direction. After a few unsuccessful attempts I was able to grab on. Shouting contradictory instructions and swearing loudly at each other, the two men gradually pulled me aboard. I lay on the deck in pain, gasping like a beached fish.
I have no memory of the docking of the boat, but somehow she got into the slip, Connie’s checklist was completed, and I ended up resting against Hal with a plastic bag of ice wrapped in a towel clamped under my left arm. I refused to cry but kept moaning and apologizing, “How can I have been so clumsy?” I looked up into the face of this man who had the knack of being around when I was at my very worst and felt a strong tug of affection that frightened the bejeezus out of me.
Yet I didn’t push him away. Hal accompanied me on the ride home, sitting with me in the backseat of Connie’s car, insisting all the while that I let them take me to the emergency room at Chesapeake County Hospital. I was equally adamant that they did not. I had no desire to call more attention to myself. Dennis, shocked sober by adrenaline, followed in his car. When I was comfortably settled on the couch in Connie’s living room and they had extracted a promise from me that I would call the doctor if I didn’t feel better in the morning, they left, but not before I heard them muttering together just out of earshot.
Around eight-thirty I wandered out to the kitchen to eat the cream of mushroom soup and peanut butter sandwich Connie made me for supper. Later, back on the couch with a heating pad under my arm and Connie comfortably nearby, reading the latest P. D. James in an overstuffed chair near the window, I dozed. I awakened just in time to catch the end of a dreadful made-for-television movie I had seen before and the beginning of the eleven o’clock news. I was about to flip over to the weather channel when the screen filled with a perfectly coiffed reporter standing in front of the honey yellow brick wall outside Gate Three at the Naval Academy. “Connie! Come here, quick!”