Gray Ghost (2 page)

“All set?” said Calhoun.

Vecchio put his little camera in his pocket and stowed his L.L. Bean bag in the watertight compartment under the middle seat. Then he took the front seat and said, “All set, Captain.”

Calhoun started up the motor and steered his way slowly through the fog and the dark among the buoys that marked the channel. Here and there the silhouette of a moored sailboat or lobster boat loomed up, and over the soft burble of the motor came the clank of some rigging and the squawk of a gull.

Paul Vecchio sat on the front seat sipping from his coffee mug. He didn’t ask a lot of questions or try to make conversation, which was a big relief. Calhoun figured Kate had prepped the man for a morning in his boat. “Stoney hates small talk,” she probably said. “Start asking him personal questions, he’ll clam right up. And he ain’t particularly impressed with credentials, so it don’t do any good to brag about your accomplishments. He don’t mind talking about fishing and dogs. That’s about it.”

When they cleared the harbor, Calhoun goosed the motor, the bow of the Lund lifted, then settled, and they were skimming across the flat water. Vecchio turned in his seat and pointed at the islands they passed, and Calhoun named them for him, yelling over the drone of the motor. Great Diamond. Peaks. Long. Little and Great Chebeague. He shrugged at some of the smaller ones. They all had names, he supposed, but he didn’t know them.

After five or six minutes, he cut the motor. As the boat drifted on its momentum, he pulled the rod with the sinking line out of its holder and tapped Vecchio on the shoulder with it. “We got a nice rip running up ahead there,” he said. “Climb up on the casting platform and throw your Clouser in there a few times, see if anybody’s home.”

The rip was an area between a couple of little islands where ledges and rocks funneled the currents across a sandbar on an incoming tide. The place was no secret among the Casco Bay regulars, but nobody else was here this morning, and it usually held a few fish. Paul Vecchio handled the heavy sinking line and the lead-eyed Clouser well enough. If a man could cast that rig, he could cast anything. He dropped the fly along the edge of the current, held his rod tip low, and stripped it back.

After five or six casts with no hits, Calhoun said, “Try throwing it all the way across and let the current swing it. Just keep a tight line and follow it along with your rod.”

Vecchio did it that way, and on his third cast his line went tight and his rod bowed. “Got one,” he grunted, and Calhoun heard the glee in his voice. “Feels big.”

After a few minutes, he got the fish alongside, and Calhoun reached down and grabbed it by its lower jaw. A nice striper, twenty-four or twenty-five inches, nothing special. He slid the barb-less Clouser out of its mouth and let it slide back into the ocean.

“How big was that fish?” said Vecchio.

“Couple feet. Decent fish.”

“I was thinking of getting a picture.”

“Sorry,” said Calhoun. “Guess we better catch ourselves a bigger one.”

They fished the rip for another ten minutes with no more hits, so Vecchio reeled in and Calhoun cranked up the motor.

They worked a rocky point off the back of Great Chebeague with no luck. They found some stripers swirling and sloshing on a grass flat near Cliff Island, and Paul Vecchio took three or four small ones on the surface with the Gurgler before the fish disappeared.

They cruised around for a few minutes, and then half a mile off to the east, where the horizon was growing silvery through the fog, Calhoun spotted a swarm of birds. He gunned the motor. As they got closer, he could see the spurts and sloshes of blitzing fish under the birds. They had corraled a dense school of baitfish. Peanut bunker, probably. The predators were bluefish, Calhoun guessed, though there were likely some stripers mixed in. Big striped bass sometimes lurked a few feet under the schools of bluefish and smaller stripers that slashed the bait at the surface, waiting for some bloody hunks of fish to sink down to them. Easy picking’s for the smart old cows.

Paul Vecchio was standing up in the boat snapping photos with his little digital camera. “Lookit that,” he kept saying. “Will you lookit that! Holy shit. This is awesome. What fun!”

“You here to have fun,” said Calhoun, “or to fish? Grab a rod and get to work.” He handed Vecchio the rod with the wire leader and the Deceiver. “Let her sink a little before you start stripping.”

Adrenaline filled the air. Diving, screaming gulls and terns. Panicky, leaping baitfish. Maurauding, slashing blues and stripers. And, of course, the fisherman and his guide, pumped and predatory themselves. Calhoun felt his own pulse racing.

Paul Vecchio began casting. He was sloppy, trying too hard, and his fly kept landing short.

Calhoun didn’t say anything, and after a few minutes Vecchio found his timing and winged the Deceiver into the midst of that bloody chaos.

For about half an hour it was a fish on every cast. Calhoun and Vecchio didn’t say much. When the fish moved away, Calhoun turned on the trolling motor and caught up with them. Vecchio grunted and laughed and cursed happily. The bluefish ran to a size—ten to twelve pounds, big, strong, toothy gamefish—and there were a couple of two-foot stripers, too.

When Vecchio finally calmed down a little, Calhoun said, “Let your fly sink for a count of ten before you start bringing it back. The big smart girls like to hang out under all that commotion on top, let the little guys do all the work chopping up the bait, and then pick off the hunks that sink down to them.”

“That could work as a metaphor,” said Vecchio.

“Metaphor?” said Calhoun. “I’m just trying to tell you how to catch a big fish.”

“The big ones are girls?” said Vecchio.

“Mostly. All the smart ones are. And that ain’t supposed to be metaphor, either.”

Vecchio made a long cast, let it sink for a count of ten, began to strip it back. Then something really heavy latched on to it.

Fifteen minutes later Vecchio muscled the big fish alongside, and Calhoun lifted it into the boat. “Big cow striper,” he said. He put the tape on her. “Thirty-eight inches. Not quite a keeper, but an awfully nice fish.”

“Wouldn’t keep her anyway,” said Vecchio. “Fish like that, she should keep having babies.” He grinned. “That’s the biggest fish I ever caught on a fly rod. Thank you, Captain.”

Calhoun used Vecchio’s digital camera to take a couple of photos of him holding his big fish. Then they let her go.

Vecchio collapsed onto the seat. “You’re wearing me out, Stoney,” he said. “How about we take a little break? I gotta stretch my legs, take a leak, have some coffee, let my heart get back to normal.”

Calhoun shook his head. “Nope. Not now. Those fish ain’t going to hang around waiting for us. Stoney’s Rule. Never leave feeding fish. God gave you a pecker so you could pee over the side of a boat.”

Vecchio smiled.

“Go ahead,” said Calhoun. “Ralph won’t be offended.”

“Come on, man,” said Vecchio. “Give me a break.”

“You got up with the owls, hired me to bring you all the way out here … why ? To find you a good place to take a leak ?”

Vecchio grinned. “I’ll just take a minute. I’ve got to stretch out these old muscles.”

Don’t argue argue with the client
, Kate was always telling him.
He’s paying his money. Give him what he wants.

Calhoun shrugged. “Okay. We’ll go ashore, and you can take your leak. Let’s make it quick.”

While they’d been following the blitzing fish, the sun had cracked the horizon. Now it filtered through the haze and misty fog. The sea was flat as far as you could see. The rocky islands that peppered the bay were lumpy gray shapes.

Vecchio turned around, lifted the lid on the middle seat, got out his gear bag, and turned around so that he was again facing forward. He sat there with his back to Calhoun and the bag on his lap, rummaged around in it, and finally came out with a bottle of sunscreen. He squirted some into his hands and rubbed it over his face and neck, all the time looking around at the ocean and the islands. He turned around and held up the bottle of sunscreen. “Want some, Stoney ?”

Calhoun shook his head.

“You should always wear sunscreen,” said Vecchio.

“I know,” said Calhoun. “The ozone layer and all. I got some. I use it.”

“Okay. Good.” Vecchio put away his sunscreen, zipped up his bag, and stowed it back in the waterproof locker under the middle seat. He looked around for a few minutes, then said, “So where we going to go ashore?”

“First place we can land on, I guess,” said Calhoun.

“How about that island over there?” Vecchio pointed off to the left at one of the larger lumpy shapes.

“Okay by me.” Calhoun started up the motor and putted over to the island. There was a sheltered cove where he spotted a little patch of sand. Otherwise, the shoreline was a jumble of boulders.

“This island got a name?” said Vecchio.

“It’s got some Indian name I can’t pronounce,” said Calhoun. “Folks around here call it Quarantine Island. And me, being a salty Maine guide, I can tell you the story, if you want to hear it.”

Vecchio turned around in his seat and grinned. “Of course I want to hear it. Me, being a writer, I love stories.”

“It’s not a happy story.”

“Too late to tell me that,” said Vecchio. “I still want to hear it.”

Calhoun throttled down the motor so that they were barely moving. “During the influenza epidemic back during the First World War,” he said, “the government built a kind of halfway house out on this island. Don’t know why they picked this one. I suppose because it’s rocky and godforsaken and no good for anything else.” He swept his hand around the bay. “They call all these the Calendar Islands. Know why?”

Vecchio smiled and shook his head.

“Someone figured there are as many islands on Casco Bay as there are days in a year. I guess if you count the rocks that stick up on low tide that’s pretty close.” Calhoun shrugged. “Anyway, they erected this hospital type of place here on Quarantine Island for newly arrived immigrants. They kept ‘em here before they’d let them set foot on the mainland. Anybody they thought might have the flu or even might’ve been exposed to it—or just anybody they didn’t like the looks of, probably—was sent here. Men, women, old people, babies. They were mostly Italians. Catholic nuns ran the place. They didn’t treat the people with medicine. It wasn’t really a hospital. They just kept them here so they wouldn’t infect any citizens. Anyway, one night in February of 1918 the place burned to the ground and everybody died. Nuns, children, everybody. A couple hundred people. They had no firefighting equipment, of course. Nothing they could do. Between the fire and the terrible cold, nobody survived.”

Vecchio shook his head. “That’s awful.”

“That ain’t the end of the story,” said Calhoun. “There was a lot of right-wing patriotic feeling during that war. Powerful anti-immigrant prejudice, plus panic about the flu. And there was that need that ignorant people always feel to have somebody to blame for anything that goes wrong. The suspicion was that some good Maine citizens came in their boats that night with torches and set fire to the place. Nothing was ever proved. Officially it was an accidental fire.” Calhoun paused. “Nowadays, folks hereabouts claim that on a winter’s night when the wind’s not blowing too hard out here on the bay, if you’re on one of the nearby islands or in a boat, you can still hear the screaming and crying and praying to God of all those poor people being incinerated.”

Paul Vecchio was staring at Calhoun. “Ghosts,” he said.

Calhoun smiled. “If you believe in ‘em.”

Vecchio nodded. “Sometimes I do.”

Calhoun, who’d had some encounters with ghosts, just shrugged. “You still want to go ashore here?”

“I suppose I wouldn’t want to do it at night,” said Vecchio, “but right now I’ve got a bladder that won’t wait.”

“I can’t move any faster,” said Calhoun, “unless you want a shipwreck.” He weaved slowly in and out among the big jagged boulders that were scattered in the cove. Now, on the high tide, they lurked just underwater, waiting to rip open the hull of a boat.

“You know your way around,” said Vecchio. “I never would’ve seen those rocks.”

“You can’t see ‘em until you’re right on top of ‘em,” said Calhoun. “You gotta know they’re here.” He nosed the boat onto the sand. “Hop out, then,” he said. “Pull the boat up a little and go for it. Ralph’ll probably want to join you.”

At that, Ralph lifted his head, yawned, stood up on the bottom of the boat, and stretched.

“You can go with Mr. Vecchio,” Calhoun said to him, “take a leak if you want. Then come right back, before we lose our fish.”

Vecchio stretched his arms, bent over at the waist, and flexed his legs a couple of times. Then he said, “C—mon, Ralph. Show me the way.”

Calhoun watched his client and his dog climb over the rocks along the shoreline and disappear through some bushes. In a minute they’d come upon what was left of the quarantine building just over the rise. Now it wasn’t much more than a big concrete-walled hole with a few charred floor joists still in place. The rest of it had burned into rubble that February night in 1918.

Every time Calhoun thought about it he got the willies.

He poured himself some coffee and sat there in his boat. It had been a good morning so far. They’d found fish and caught a few of them. The sea was calm, the sky overcast, the client competent. Paul Vecchio was good company in a boat, and so was Ralph, and Stoney Calhoun was content.

The tide had turned, and he was trying to decide where they might find fish stacked up on the outgoing when Ralph came scrambling over the rocks. Instead of jumping back into the boat, he stood there on the shore with his ears perked up and started barking.

“What’s up?” said Calhoun. “What’d you do with Mr. Vecchio?”

Ralph barked again, looked hard at Calhoun, then turned and trotted back through the bushes.

Calhoun figured he got Ralph’s message.
Well, shit,
he thought.
All those fish out there waiting to be caught, and something’s happened to my client