“So now you think . . .” I drew out his conclusion.
“Now I think, despite what experience told us, she must have floated out into the Gulf of Maine. Or,” he drew a long breath, “at the time, there had never been a fatal shark attack in Maine. Of course, there has been one since. Dressed in a wet suit like she was, she must have resembled a big, juicy seal. A great white could have dragged her out of the harbor.”
I shuddered at the idea.
“We closed the case a couple of weeks ago, when the court issued the death certificate.”
“Would the Busman’s Harbor PD be involved in any of that?” I asked.
“No. It’s a judicial proceeding, very cut-and-dried if the person has been continuously absent for five years. We’re not called unless we have something relevant to say. And in this case, we had nothing to say at all.”
Jamie closed the file and tossed it gently to the other side of his desk. Then he looked up at me. “I pulled three other missing-in-the-water cases we had on our books to see if they could tell us something.”
I doubted they could. The circumstances of Ginny’s disappearance seemed unique to her, but I nodded for Jamie to go on. If nothing else, I was curious.
Jamie picked up the first of the folders from the side of his desk. “When I was looking, I eliminated the cases of professional fishermen lost at sea, as well as all disappearances from boats that happened well outside the harbor, focusing only on reported disappearances inside the harbor or close in along the shore.”
“Makes sense.” There were plenty of empty graves in the Busman’s Harbor cemetery for sailors who had never returned from the sea. Those tended to be from the days when the town had a large fleet, with boats that went out for weeks at a time to far-off places like Georges Bank. Or, even further back, awful shipwrecks from the age of sail. But the fishing boats had left years before, and what remained, lobstering, was a day fishery. Maine lobstermen liked their jobs in part because they could sleep in their own beds at night. Though that was changing. As the water warmed, the lobsters moved farther and farther out, and more lobstermen were staying out overnight. To the south of us, on Long Island Sound, the day fishery had disappeared entirely.
“ ‘Lena Farber, 1959,’ ” Jamie read. “ ‘Disappeared off Westclaw Point. Body never found. Presumed a suicide though there was no note. Declared dead in 1964. ’ ” Jamie skimmed down the page and turned to the next one, shaking his head. “Doesn’t look like much here.”
He picked up the next folder, drawing up his dark eyebrows in recognition. “I thought this one might be interesting because it also involves Chipmunk Island. Robert Denison, 1970. Apparently, he had a fight with his wife at their home on Chipmunk and stormed off to sleep on his sailboat, which was moored in the marina there. Somehow in the night, the boat came loose from its mooring. It was found the next morning by a lobsterman, floating in the harbor. No one was aboard.”
“Was that one suicide, too?” I asked.
“No suggestion of it by any who knew him, but you know how that bunch out there is. They stick together and would never say even if they suspected. There was a strong belief that alcohol played a role.
“Anyway, he didn’t remain a missing person for long. His body was found four days later, after an intensive search, fetched up on Westclaw Point. The sailboat’s inflatable dinghy was found out there, too, about two hundred yards closer to the point.”
“So not the same as Ginny’s disappearance at all,” I said.
“No. I pulled the file because the successful search for Denison’s body very much informed how and where the search for Ms. Merrill was conducted. Reviewing the file, I thought maybe our success in the Denison search was too much of ‘lessons learned’ and we should have looked more widely for Ms. Merrill, especially as she didn’t turn up.”
“You’re convinced she died in the water,” I said.
“What else? She’s not been found in five years.”
What indeed?
Jamie reached for the third folder. “Your mother’s cousin Hugh,” he said.
I knew this story well. Or rather, both of these stories. I had grown up hearing that my mother’s distant cousin, Hugh, one of her only relatives, had disappeared off Morrow Island on the night of her twenty-first birthday party. There was an extensive search and when, like Ginny Merrill, he never turned up again, he was presumed drowned. Whether he’d deliberately harmed himself or had drunkenly fallen off a cliff on the island was never known.
But that wasn’t the entire story. Five years ago, I’d discovered Hugh had been living under an assumed name in Boston for decades, along with an entirely unknown branch of my mother’s family. It was the inheritance from Hugh that had paid for the renovation of Windsholme.
“Are you suggesting Ginny may be alive?” I asked Jamie.
“No.” He closed the folder. “I’m only reminding you that it’s happened before.”
The clock was ticking toward my rendezvous with Sonny at the town pier. “Thank you so much for this. What I really wanted was to be able to reassure my mother that everything that could have been done was, though it sounds to me that if you were looking for Ginny today, there are a few more places you would search.”
“A few. But please tell Jacqueline that despite any lingering concerns she may have, it’s pretty much a certainty that Ms. Merrill went into the water.”
“And didn’t come out.” I stared deep into Jamie’s blue eyes.
“And didn’t come out,” he agreed. He moved all four folders to the center of his desk. “I’m meeting Zoey at Gus’s. Do you have time to come along? We haven’t hung out in ages.”
“Now?” I poked my phone, and it flashed the time: 10:50 a.m. “Breakfast or lunch?”
“Lunch for me. I’ve been up since five. Breakfast for Zoey.” He grinned. “She’s keeping retailers’ hours.” Zoey Butterfield was the entrepreneur behind Lupine Design, a highly successful pottery business. She also had a storefront attached to her studio.
“Gus will never let you get away with that,” I said. There was a strict line between breakfast and lunch at Gus’s. Once he cleaned the pancakes and eggs from his grill, there was no turning back.
“That’s why the timing,” Jamie said. “Zoey’s ordering breakfast right now. At eleven o’clock, I’ll order lunch.”
“Brilliant.” I felt in my pocket to make sure I had cash; the only form of payment Gus accepted. No plastic, no phone apps, and absolutely no credit, not even when I used to live in the apartment over his restaurant and he knew where to find me twenty-four hours a day. “I’m in.” I texted Sonny to let him know I’d be taking the tour boat back to Morrow Island.
“Great!” Jamie seemed genuinely happy. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Zoey rose from one of Gus’s booths and waved us over. She smiled when she spotted me. “Julia! I hoped you’d come. Jamie said he was meeting with you.”
I gave her a hug. Jamie slid in next to her and I sat across from them. Our little triumvirate had been my saving grace during the off-season. Already reeling from the breakup with Chris, the second blow had fallen when Gus told me he needed to take back my apartment. His son and daughter-in-law, who lived in Arizona, had retired, and planned to spend six months a year in town.