Crimson Shore Read online

  “Help!” he screamed. “Someone help me!”

  A flock of blackbirds burst upward from a swath of cattails in a mass of beating wings. There was no way to outrun this dogged pursuer. He was just being pushed deeper and deeper into the marsh.

  The water. If he could just reach the water. He was a strong swimmer. The lunatic might not swim as well.

  He veered left, toward the heart of the marsh. Now the grass was so high he couldn’t see ahead, and he stumbled forward, bashing aside the sharp grass with his arms, barely noticing the cuts and slashes it inflicted. On and on he plunged, hearing the crash and swish of his pursuer, now only a dozen feet behind. The bay or a marsh channel would be ahead somewhere. Something, for God’s sake, something…

  And suddenly the grasses ended and he burst onto a mudflat, stretching ahead fifty yards to a swift-flowing channel of water.

  No help for it; he leapt into the mud, sinking to his knees. With a cry of fear, he struggled, flopping and sucking and flailing through the muck. He turned and saw the red-haired freak standing at the edge of the grass, bayonet in hand, his entire face distorted into a grotesque grinning visage.

  “Who are you?!” he screamed.

  The man melted back into the grass and disappeared.

  For a moment McCool stood in the muck, gasping for breath, coughing, his hands on his knees, feeling as if his lungs might fall out. What to do now? He looked around. The channel lay fifty feet farther on, a muddy stream going out with the tide. On the far side was more endless marsh.

  Never would he go back into that nightmare of grass: not with that maniac lurking in there. Never. And yet the only way out of this hell was back through the grass, or else to take to the water and drift out with the tide.

  He stood there, heart pounding. The light was fading; the water ran on and the blackbirds wheeled about, crying.

  He slopped his way toward the water channel. The mud grew firmer as he approached the edge, where he paused. The mud was cold—and the water, he knew, would be colder still. But he had no choice.

  He waded in. It was very cold. He pushed off, letting the current take him, and he began to swim downstream, burdened by the tweed jacket and mud-soaked trousers and heavy leather shoes. But he was an experienced swimmer and kept himself above water, taking long strokes, making fast time, the marsh grass slipping by. The channel narrowed, the current growing swifter, the grass closing in on both sides. He was heading toward the sea. That was all he could focus on. Thank God, he would soon see the beach, where he could climb out and get back to the safety of the Inn.

  As he rounded another bend in the channel, swimming frantically, he saw the wall of grass part to reveal a figure: red hair, distorted grinning face, blazing yellow eyes, gleaming bayonet.

  “God, no. No!” he screamed, making frantically for the far shore of the channel even as the current swept him toward the embankment where the figure stood—even as the figure leapt like a raptor into the water, crashing down on him—even as the thrust of cold steel felt like a sudden icicle piercing his guts.

  8

  Indira Ganesh had received the small bone late the previous evening and had worked on it all night and throughout the day. It was now ten PM and she’d been working nearly thirty hours straight, but she hardly felt tired. She liked working at night, when her lab, at the Peabody Museum on Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, was as quiet as a temple. In such an atmosphere, the work was like meditation or even prayer. When people were around she was never so productive.

  And this little bone was just the sort of puzzle she liked. Absolutely no information had come in with it—not even identification that it was human. She had no idea who needed the analysis or why. Only that Howard Kress, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and her boss, had personally brought her the bone and said, in mysterious terms, that if he could have a complete and total analysis by the morning after next, he would consider it the greatest personal favor.

  She had all the equipment and machines she needed at her disposal and she’d gone right to work. Identifying the bone as the right distal phalanx of a human index finger had been easy. From there the questions grew deeper and harder to answer. She always felt as if the bones she studied were whispering to her, eager to tell their stories. Now she had the story of this little bone—or at least, all that she could coax from it in thirty hours.

  As Ganesh hunched over her computer, preparing to type up the preliminary report, she had a strange feeling of something behind her, the almost psychic pressure of a person’s gaze on her back. She turned and gasped: a tall, pale man with a striking face stood in the doorway.

  “Dr. Ganesh? I’m so sorry to disturb you. The name is Pendergast. I am the one interested in the finger bone.”

  She put her hand on her chest. “You gave me such a start.”

  “May I take a seat?”

  When she hesitated, he reached into his jacket pocket, removed the shield of a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “Please,” she said, indicating a chair. “But how did you get in here? The museum’s closed.”

  “Someone must have left a door unlocked. Now, if you don’t mind, could we chat about the bone?”

  “I was just writing up the results.”

  The man waved his hand. “I’d much rather hear it from you directly. I’m in something of a hurry.”

  “All right.” She paused, recovering from her surprise, collecting her thoughts, determining where to start. “First of all, the size and robustness of the bone suggests a male. Someone with big, strong hands. The muscle attachments were so pronounced that I can say with confidence this person performed daily work, hard manual work, involving grasping and holding.”

  “Interesting.”

  “The distal end of the bone was severely abraded at the time of death. It seems the man literally scratched or clawed his finger to the bone. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’m at a loss to explain.”

  The pale man sat in silence for a moment. Then he spoke. “The gentleman in question was walled up alive.”

  Ganesh leaned forward. “Really?”

  A nod.

  “So this is a murder investigation?”

  “Of an antique sort.”

  “I see.” She cleared her throat. “The bone was well preserved and had plenty of collagen. I did a radiocarbon date on the sample. It’s fairly recent, relatively speaking. Because of that the age was a little hard to measure, but it appears to date back one hundred forty years, plus or minus twenty.”

  “And there’s no way to narrow the margin of error, I understand.”

  “That’s correct. Radiocarbon dating works best on artifacts between five hundred and fifty thousand years old. The error bars get longer at both ends.”

  “Did you use beta counting or mass spectrometry?”

  Ganesh was amused by this. Here was a man trying to show off his knowledge, but he knew just enough to ask a dumb question. “With such a recent date, only accelerator mass spectrometry would give a usable result.”

  “I see.”

  And now she wondered if, rather than being dumb, maybe he had been testing her. What a strange and compelling man this was. “With the abundance of collagen and the lack of contamination, I did manage to get some really good DNA results. The individual is definitely male, with seventy-five percent African ancestry, the other twenty-five percent western European.”

  “Curious.”

  “This is a typical mix for African Americans, almost all of whom have a proportion of European ancestry. He would have had a dark but probably not black skin color.”

  “And his age?”

  “A histological examination indicated an age of around forty. It also showed he was in excellent health, aside from several short but severe bouts of an illness when he was young. Thin sections I studied indicate the illness might well have been scurvy—a severe vitamin C deficiency.”

  “The fellow was a
sailor, then?”

  “The evidence points that way. The same isotope analysis showed a diet high in fish, shellfish, wheat, and barley.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “The food you eat and the water you drink get broken down and the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen become incorporated into your bones. Those three elements have various stable isotope ratios, which differ from food to food—and from water sources. Based on the ratios of those isotopes, we can tell what a person was eating and drinking during, say, the last twenty years of his or her life.”

  “Drinking?”

  “Yes. As you go higher in latitude, the ratio of oxygen isotopes in freshwater changes.”

  “Interesting. And at what latitude did this fellow’s drinking water come from?”

  “From around 40 to 55 degrees. In North America, that corresponds to an area roughly from New Jersey to Newfoundland and points west. The test is not very accurate.”

  “And his diet?”

  “The wheat came from eating bread, and the barley most likely came from beer. Add the fish and shellfish and you get a classic nineteenth-century coastal diet. I tested the bone for antibodies. They came back positive for malaria.”

  “Malaria again implies a sailor, no?”

  “Absolutely. And he was also positive for TB.”

  “You mean he had tuberculosis?”

  “No. He was far too healthy. Virtually everyone living in seaport cities in the nineteenth century would have tested positive for TB, however. Everyone was exposed.”

  “I see. Anything else?”

  “Putting it all together, I’d say what you have here is a large, strong, healthy, forty-year-old African American male, a sailor by trade who worked with his hands, perhaps a helmsman or foretopman, who probably came from a fairly comfortable socioeconomic class, given there were no signs of malnutrition other than the scurvy. He was born around 1840 and died around 1880. When not at sea he lived in a seaport town or city. He sailed at least part of the time in the tropics.”

  The FBI agent nodded slowly. “Remarkable, Dr. Ganesh. Truly remarkable.”

  “The bones speak to me, Mr. Pendergast. They tell me their stories.”

  The pale man rose. “Thank you. You have been most helpful. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to retrieve the sample.”

  Ganesh smiled. “I wish I could oblige. But you see, every question I ask consumes a tiny bit of bone. As the bone tells its story, it dies just a little. I’m afraid the bone gave up its existence along with its story.” She spread her hands.

  As she did so, the man took one of her hands in his, which felt cool and smooth. “I bow before your ability to speak to the dead, Dr. Ganesh.” And he kissed her hand.

  Ganesh found herself flushed and warm long after the man had departed.

  9

  Constance stepped through the door, then stopped and frowned in instinctual disapproval. The place looked more like a rag-and-bone shop than a historical society. A lot of stuff was randomly hung on the wall—faded maps, old nets, buoys, harpoons, gaff hooks, narwhal horns, sail needles, a gigantic lobster shell on a plaque, another wooden plaque covered with sailing knots, and pictures of Exmouth in the old days. The center of the “museum” sported an old dory, about twenty feet long, with several sets of oars between wooden dowels.

  She had jingled a door-opening upon entering and was soon confronted by an eager, gray-haired man with fat-lobed ears stuck onto a narrow, bony face. A badge identified him as a volunteer named Ken Worley.

  “Greetings,” said the volunteer, looming into her field of view and proffering a pamphlet. “Welcome to the Exmouth Historical Society and Museum!”

  Trying to be polite, Constance took the pamphlet with a murmured “Thank you.” She began an assiduous examination of the dory, hoping he would vanish.

  “Nice dory, don’t you think? Disregarded age in corners thrown. That’s the motto of our little museum.”

  Parsing this inaccurate spouting of Shakespeare, and without thinking, Constance corrected him: “Unregarded age.”

  A sudden silence. “Are you sure? I’ll have to double-check that.”

  “No need to double-check anything,” Constance said. “You’re wrong.”

  Temporarily set back, the man retreated to his pile of pamphlets and busied himself with a large register book, opening it and flipping through the pages. Constance, who was studying some old framed maps of Exmouth and its environs, could tell that he was down but not vanquished.

  “Would you care to put down your name for special mailings and events?” he asked, pointing at the register book.

  “No, thank you. I was wondering—where do you keep your archives?”

  The man blinked. “We don’t have any archives.”

  “No town papers? Property maps? Old marriage registers?”

  “I’m afraid the town records were lost in the Great Hurricane of ’38. They called it the Yankee Clipper. It swept away the old Exmouth docks and wrecked half the town. You can still see the ruins on Exmouth Bay. Picturesque, in its own way.”

  “So this is it? This is all you have?”

  “It may not look like much, but every item here has a story. For example, that Newburyport dory you were admiring was used to hunt great blue whales. When whales were sighted going around Crow Island, the men would rush down to the beach and launch those dories into the surf, chase a whale, harpoon it, and drag it back to the beach, carve it up right there on the shore. Imagine the courage, the pluck, it took—Disdaining fortune, with his burnished steel, which smoked with bloody execution!”

  “Brandish’d steel.”

  A silence. “I’m quite sure it’s burnished,” said Worley in a stiff voice. “I was a thespian in my youth—and theater director for twenty years at the old Exmouth Playhouse.”

  Feeling a rising impatience with this tiresome man, Constance ignored him and continued poking around the museum, glancing over the framed pictures of ships, articles about storms and wrecks and legends of buried pirate treasure. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Worley retire to his chair behind the register book and busy himself with addressing envelopes laboriously by hand. She hoped that would keep him quiet at least until she had finished going through the museum.

  She was struck with a sudden thought: How would Pendergast respond to this situation? Would he be able to glean anything from these shabby artifacts and old newspaper stories? Was there something she, perhaps, was overlooking? As she looked around, it dawned on her how Pendergast would, in fact, profit from this situation. The realization caused her to flush with chagrin. She glanced at Worley, still addressing envelopes.

  “Mr. Worley?”

  He raised his eyes. “Yes?”

  And yet Pendergast’s method was difficult. It did not come naturally to her. “On second thought, I think you are right,” she managed. “It is burnished.”

  At this his face brightened. “I’ve played Macbeth many times.”

  “At the Exmouth Playhouse?”

  “Yes, and also once in Boston, at the Market Square Theater. Full house.”

  “Boston?” A pause. “I’ve always wanted to go onstage, but I never had the opportunity. One wonders how you remember all those lines.”

  Surely the motivation behind such a toadyish observation would be obvious. And yet the man was nodding. “There are ways,” he said. “Various tricks of the trade. It’s really not all that difficult.”

  Being a lickspittle was mortifying in the extreme, but Constance found the mortification somewhat mitigated by her observation that his stiff, offended manner was quickly dropping away.

  “You must know everyone in town,” she observed.

  “I certainly do! Nothing like theater to bring a town together.”

  “How fortunate. As it happens, I have a particular interest in lighthouses and was wondering if you knew anything about the one here.”

  “The Exmouth Light is one of the most historic in New England,”
Worley opined. “It was built in 1704 by order of Queen Anne herself. This was a dangerous stretch of coast. Many ships were lost.”

  “I was hoping to find a list of the keepers of the light and their tenures.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s compiled an official list.”

  She thought back to the information Pendergast had given her at breakfast. “Who was keeper around 1880?”

  A silence. “Why 1880?”

  She’d been pushing too hard. Really, this was most difficult. “No particular reason,” she said, forcing a little laugh.

  “Let’s see. The Slocum family were keepers from around the Civil War—all the way through to 1886, I think. That was when Meade Slocum fell down the lighthouse steps and broke his neck. Afterwards, it was taken over by the McHardies. Jonathan McHardie. They had it up to the time the light was automated in 1934.”

  “So there are none of Meade Slocum’s descendants in town?”

  “As far as I’m aware there are none anywhere. Widower, no children. He was a drinker. One of the hazards of the job, up at all hours, lonely, isolated—especially in winter. They say he went crazy in his last few years, claimed the lighthouse was haunted.”

  “Haunted? How so?”

  “The crying of babies at night, or something like that.”

  “I see.” She paused. “Where might I find out more about him?”

  Worley peered at her under bushy brows. “Are you by chance working with that historian?”

  In addition to the age and racial identity of the finger bone, Pendergast had mentioned Morris McCool to her at breakfast. She simply must learn how to ask questions more nonchalantly. “No. Simple curiosity.”

  “Because that fellow was asking the same kinds of questions.” He took a step closer, his face clouded with suspicion. “Who are you with?”