Read The Castaways for Free Online

gust and caught Greg unaware, and off he went, and his leg was caught in the ropes and he couldn’t get loose. Tess tried to save him, but she was afraid of the water, had been since she was a kid; she was no match for a grown man sinking in choppy waves. They both went down. Or Tess was thrown and Greg tried to save her. He tried to pull her up by the hair, which would explain the patch of bald scalp.
    “We put the time of death at one-thirty, maybe two. Another sailor put in the call about an abandoned capsize at quarter to three and gave us the coordinates. We got there forty minutes later, at three twenty-five. They were both trapped under the boat.”
    “And that doesn’t seem strange to you? There are a million ways that could have happened?”
    Joe removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which were such a pale gray they were almost clear, the color of water. Joe was probably, like Ed, still shy of his fiftieth birthday, but something made him seem older—his beard, his uniform, his title. He knew these waters, he knew the wind, and he knew the craft. Tess and Greg had been sailing on a 12-meter sloop, a bigger boat than Greg was used to, by far.
    “I just wonder what happened. Why they couldn’t get to the surface.”
    “Let’s say they were drinking. Their judgment was impaired, and their motor skills. Would one bottle of champagne and a few beers have incapacitated them? Well, it wouldn’t help matters. This could have happened sober, too. One of them got knocked unconscious, or lost their balance. She was taking a leak off the back of the boat and fell in and he went after her, got caught in the ropes, couldn’t fight his way to the surface. I could have the ME run toxicology. Do you want me to ask him to do that?”
    Did the Chief want to do that? Would it help to know that Tess was drunk or Greg was high? God, no. It wouldn’t help him and it wouldn’t help the kids. He could ask Joe to run the toxicology in confidence. The only people who would see the results were himself and the ME, Danny Browne. But somehow, someway, rumors would fly. They always did. The Chief had seen it time and time again. You thought something was locked up in the vault when it turned out that everyone, including the girls who made pizza at the Muse, were talking about it. Getting the story right enough to maim, and wrong enough to kill. Tess and Greg had just had their lives examined under a microscope with the goddamn April Peck thing. Some child in Finn’s second-grade class had told Finn that his father was a cradle robber. A second-grader! It made the Chief angry enough to want to throw somebody in the slammer—the second-grader or Greg, the Chief wasn’t sure. Gossip was insidious. The Chief could not, in good conscience, create more gossip. And yet he was the police chief. He had to know what had happened.
    “Run toxicology,” he said.
    “Will do,” Joe said.
    “On the down low,” the Chief said.
    “Absolutely.”
    “No, I mean it.”
    “I understand,” Joe said. He was looking at the Chief steadily. “You have my word.”
    “That’ll do,” the Chief said.
    The Chief followed Joe upstairs to sign the paperwork. Joe brought out two heavy-duty clear plastic bags with
USCG
stamped on them. One of them contained Greg’s guitar case.
    “This is what my guys found at the scene,” Joe said. “We divided it into personal effects and what appears to be rubbish. But look through the rubbish to be sure we didn’t accidentally throw away something important.”
    This was all standard operating procedure, but the Chief wasn’t sure he could follow through. But if not him, then who? He couldn’t ask Andrea to go through these bags, or Delilah or Jeffrey or Phoebe. The sight of Greg’s guitar case made him queasy. He opened it up. The guitar was surprisingly dry, light, intact. The Chief held it the way he’d seen Greg do hundreds of times, and felt like a fool. Still, he was certain that if he strummed a