The Harbormaster Mysteries

The *Ada Mae* is a forty-foot lobster boat, and at dead low she is upright in thirty feet of water with three feet of mast showing. Flat calm, no wind. Forty households asleep a stone's throw, and nobody heard a thing. Her owner had the claim number written down by seven that morning. A well-liked man came ashore drowned with his own skiff tied to her mooring.

Gid Trask sat on his porch through it and heard two engines: one working, one idling off the mouth with a knock he could not name. He has a summer man's phone video and a tide table. You cannot put an engine noise in an evidence bag.

Cody Teele is nineteen, two years a sternman, careful, and drowned on the far Coombs edge of the Gridiron — water no Teele fishes. The trawl fouled around him belongs to nobody. Its buoy is bone-yellow with a red top, a color no living license wears, and its trap tags carry a name two years in the ground.

Gid Trask heard a pot hauler working that bottom at one in the morning and told himself a man has to sleep. By breakfast the town has its story: the feud's first blood, a Coombs did it. By Wednesday the dead boy's uncle has a name, and it belongs to a boy of twenty-two who was home asleep.

Salvage is not a fee. Save a vessel from real peril and an admiralty court owes you a share of what you saved — no cure, no pay — and on a fine yacht the share can run to a fifth of her. The *Second Wind* is insured for $640,000. Her engine quit six miles out with a family of four aboard; her steering quit eight minutes later, on an unrelated system; and a tug came out of the haze inside twenty minutes and lifted a nine-year-old across four feet of open sea by the hands.

That is the sixth since May. Curt Salter is the finest boat handler on this coast. Six is a business. One is bad luck.

KH 2 is the red nun on the east side of the entrance. It is the town's buoy, on a federal permit, and the harbormaster signs for where it stands. Gid Trask's name is on the last paper that said so, and he has not looked at it since the first week of October.

Wendell Grindle has run forty-six feet of wooden scalloper for twenty-two years and comes home through the gut in the dark, because going around is forty minutes he has not got. He hugs the red, because the bar is dry to port and only a fool goes left at low water. At twenty minutes to two he put her on the corner of The Trivet.

Sabina Roque is from away, and she came with a folder three inches thick and soft at the corners, with an abstract of title she paid for herself before she ever made an offer. She has better paper than anybody in Kettle Harbor, and that includes the harbormaster.

Gid Trask ran a steel tape under her at dead low and got forty-two feet four inches, twice. Her certificate says thirty-eight feet six. It is supposed to run short — nine inches, a foot, a foot and a half. In two years of it the widest gap in his book is two feet one inch, on a sloop with an overhang, and he wrote the reason down.

*Going out about ten. Down around the outer islands, anchor in the lee somewhere tonight, home Sunday afternoon on the tide.* Wil Nason goes out one night a month, eats his supper out of a pot, and has never once brought home a fish.

Tilda Nason telephones the Harbor Office at ten past nine on Sunday morning. Overdue is the word that opens the file; missing belongs in somebody else's paperwork. By afternoon there are two forty-fives and a helicopter on it, and every hour of it — the track spacing, the altitude, the size of the circle — comes off one position, and the error around it grows.