Death in a Cold Hard Light

Book by Mathews Francine

The cold hard light of a December dawn hung heavily over Nantucket Sound, turning the sea opaque and alien. It clung to the church spires and curled like smoke along the gray-shingled eaves of the huddled houses. It flew on the spines of maple leaves as they skittered lonesomely down the length of Main Street, and cast a rime of frost over the lettering carved deep in the cemetery's timeworn headstones. The sadness at the edge of the blanketing clouds made the few scallop boats in the harbor seem even dingier and more futile as they dredged less with every cast from the slowly dying shallows.

Beyond Brant Point and the stone jetties thrusting bravely out to sea, a curtain of freezing rain obscured the approaching ferry. It was the first boat of the day--the first boat of a holiday weekend--but no one was there, really, to observe its arrival. Just a log half-submerged in the harbor's chop, seaweed streaming from one end like a tangle of human hair.

The captain of the Steamship Authority's M/V Eagle sighed deeply at the last of his coffee and dabbed an ineffectual towel over his fogged windows. Ted Moran had been awake since three A.M. The wife he had left behind in Hyannis was habitually unkind to him. His wool socks were damp and his toes were chilled. He was worried, as usual, about money. And as he gazed out over the dispiriting Sound, he felt the weight of that hard cold light settle as quietly as a gull on his slumped shoulders. It folded its wings and prepared to stay.

Captain Moran expelled a deliberate breath against the glass. The sourness of his own coffee churned with the odors of dust and exhaust and burning rubber that pervaded the ship. He grimaced and thrust open a porthole to one side of his control panel. The briny wind dispersed the interior funk. The captain turned his face to the sky and looked out over the tourists' heads grouped in the bow below his perch. They were craning, inevitably, for the first glimpse of Brant Point Light. Moran's gaze moved beyond them, and registered the log.

It bobbed with a sharp, wooden gracelessness in the waves, as though attempting to keep time to another man's music. And it was drifting directly in the steamship's path as it approached the harbor channel marked by the stone jetties.

Moran swore aloud, then adjusted the Eagle's controls a hairsbreadth. The ferry's massive hull would hardly register the impact of even a sailboat thrown in its way, but he preferred to avoid obstacles when he could. The Eagle began its turn to port, nosing into the channel, and the bow wave shoved the piece of driftwood sideways into the starboard jetty. Spume broke over the jagged breakwater. The log rolled upward--and showed a pallid, mortal face beneath the streaming weeds of its hair.

"Jesus," Moran whispered; and at that very moment, the tourists began to scream.
The chief of Nantucket's police, John Folger, usually awoke a few seconds before the first car ferry of the day rounded Brant Point and blared its horn into the stillness. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, the ferry horn was a predictable sort of chaos. The sound came and went at scheduled intervals, punctuating the island hours in much the way that the Angelus had once divided the devotional day. As if in genuflection to that thought, Chief Folger said a fragmentary prayer into the cold hard light that filled his bedroom, closed his eyes, and waited. The blow of the ferry's horn came just as he ceased to expect it--a long, multitoned, earsplitting bray. When the last note had died away, he swung his feet to the bare plank floor. And at almost the same moment, like the ferry's strident echo, his bedside telephone rang.