Bev’s eyes lit up. “A sinkin’ boat is a sight to behold, lemme tell you. A sight to behold.”
“You were there?”
“Oh yeah, ‘course. Happened ‘round ten o’clock.”
“At night,” Mick said.
Bev nodded. “That’s right. Ten at night. Your dad had taken a crew out that day. He came in early with a week’s worth o’ fish. He hung around for a while, went home—we figured to you and your brother. Then he came back later that night to finish cleaning up the boat. That was a bit odd. He didn’t usually come back.” She shrugged. “But that’s what he did, and that’s when the brouhaha started. A woman down the dock a ways thought she was havin’ a heart attack. Small town ‘at we are, out came the ambulance! Out came the fire truck! Out came the chief o’ police! Anyone who had a siren on top o’ their car, here they came.”
“Flyin’ out here with all their bells’n whistles,” Mick said.
Bev cocked her arms at the elbows and moved them back and forth like she was running. “There they went, barrelin’ by me and Mick, the boys, and your dad, out to her slip. It was a ways down from the Cassandra.”
The Cassandra. Pippin had forgotten that Leo had named the boat after her mother. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Was the woman okay?”
“Perfectly fine. A false alarm. They treated her and started to leave.” Bev leaned back against the counter. “But that’s when the real commotion started. When those authorities walked back down the dock, they came up to the starboard side of your daddy’s boat. Right there, in the next slip. Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug. That boat was sinkin’.”
“Sinking,” Pippin repeated. She felt like she would have remembered hearing about a sinking boat at the marina, but Grandmother Faye had whisked Grey and her away so quickly after their father disappeared on them that she’d never had the chance to hear about it.
“Goin’ straight down,” Mick said with a whistle. He peered at Bev from his couch. “I cain’t remember. What kinda boat was it?”
“Oh, I remember. It was an old steel hulled houseboat. Don’t see many of those out here. Not aluminum. Not fiberglass. Steel.” She looked at Pippin. “You’d think a boat like that’d take a while to go under, but it didn’t.”
“Nobody could stop it?” Pippin asked.
“Not a goddamned thing they could do,” Mick said. “That thing went down fast.”
“Why’d it sink?”
Bev folded her skinny arms over her equally skinny chest. “Now that’s the most interesting thing ‘bout this whole story. They sent a diver down to check the boat.”
Pippin felt her eyes go wide. “Was someone on board?”
“No, no. Not a soul,” Bev answered. “We hadn’t seen anyone around that boat in a while. But what they did find is still a mystery. That boat had two three-inch plugs. Let’s just say, those plugs? They are no longer on that boat.”
Pippin shook her head, trying to process what that meant. “I don’t get it.”
“What I’m sayin’, darlin’, is that those plugs didn’t pull themselves free. The working theory is that someone was on board, heard the sirens, and sank that boat before the authorities arrived.”
“But you just said you hadn’t seen anyone around that boat in weeks.”
“That’s where the rumors started,” Bev said. “Your daddy was there. Some people thought he saw something he shouldn’t ‘ave. That someone was on the boat, but we just didn’t know it. They pulled the plugs, swam to another pier, and no one was the wiser. There’s also people who think Leo managed to get from his boat to the other one, pull the plugs, then got himself back onto his boat before anyone was the wiser.”
“But why would he do that?” Pippin asked. “Why would he sink another boat?”
“Like I said, rumors.”
“So what happened?” Pippin asked.
At this, Bev’s shoulders lifted and fell with an exaggerated shrug. “The boat’s still down there. Over the years, there’ve been divers who’ve checked it out, but—”
Pippin interrupted. “It’s still down there?”
“Sure,” Bev said. “It’d cost God knows how many thousands to float that thing up. Who’s gonna pay? Us?”
Mick scoffed. “When they find Davy Jones’s Locker, that’s when I’ll pay to float that houseboat.”
Pippin didn’t get the joke, but Bev laughed. “Which is to say, never. We have deep water slips. That thing is down too far. It’s never coming up.”
“So could whoever pulled the plugs still be down there?” Pippin asked, assuming it hadn’t been her father who’d done the deed.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that anythin’ is possible, but probably not. Like I said, divers have been down there, and they haven’t found anything,” Bev said. She stood and came closer to Pippin, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “It was a long time ago, darlin’. I sure didn’t mean to stir anything up. You just forget about it.”
That was not possible. The seed had been planted and now Pippin would always wonder if her father had anything to do with that boat sinking. Maybe he was on the run because of it. If that were the case, at least it was a reason for him leaving.
“You came here for somethin’,” Bev said. “Whatdya need, honey?”
Pippin blinked. “Right. I did. My grandparents had my dad’s boat hauled to my parents’ house here in Devil’s Cove.”
“I remember that,” the woman said. “They gave it a few months, from what I remember. Hoping he’d come back, I reckon, but in the end, they gave up the slip to dry dock the boat.”
“It’s been sitting there for a long time.”
“It sure has. I go by that house now and again. I’ve seen the work you’ve been doin’.” Her face lit up. “Why I even saw Travis carrying a load of wood and Jimmy working the table saw out front the other day!”
“You know them?” Pippin asked, but she shouldn’t have been surprised. Devil’s Cove was a small town. It swelled when the tourists came, but in the off season, it was just the locals. Everyone knew everyone.
“Oh sure. Travis’s daddy had a boat he kept here, and Jimmy and my boy, Howie, went to school together. They used to tool around the harbor during the summers.” She chuckled. “Got up to no good in the cove. Travis was the odd duck out. Howie was good to him, but Travis was a loner. Never quite fit in.”
Pippin had heard of the cove, but she’d never been there. It was a popular swimming hole for locals, but that was all she knew about it. It had been another location on her mother’s list of forbidden places. What Pippin did know was that the cove was a small sheltered inlet with a narrow jetty, and it was responsible for the name of the island. It was rumored that a ship carrying Caribbean liquor called “Devil’s Rum” had come to the colonies sometime in the mid-17th century. The ship went down in the Atlantic, slipping to the depths of the graveyard. The crew—and the rum—was thought to be lost until two men piloting a single shallop made their way to the Sound and then to the cove with bottles of the lost rum and, legend has it, with some treasure they’d managed to take from the ship. The area became known as Devil’s Rum Cove. Over time, as happens, it was shortened to Devil’s Cove.