Chapte 10 of the novel, The Talking Mime

Chapter 10

Five nails in a coffin

As I drove a wooden plug into the cut hose as a safety precaution, I heard the heavy thump of boots on the deck as the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's office came to the rescue. The voices were familiar - it sounded like the deputies from the day before - and then another raised voice starting barking orders, a voice that was much more familiar.
       It was Wilma Krebs, Santa Cruz County Undersheriff, who sounded simultaneously relieved and quite pissed.

She and Nym exchanged words above decks in the cockpit and then I heard the sheriff's boat roar off, probably to get more pumps or to arrange for some other docking somewhere for The Talking Mime. One deputy stayed aboard, looking down at me through a porthole. When I gave him the thumbs-up sign to indicate we had found the leak, he grinned and stood up away from the window.
     Jacob and Jerrod had done a great job scrambling around the boat, closing all the thru-hulls and looking for any other leaks. The years in the boatyard working on our boat were paying off and I realized that they could probably start doing a lot more mechanical work about Rocinante in the future.
       It turned out that the toilet hose was the only real leak in the boat. All the rest of the thru-hulls were fine. And thanks to boys, closed and secured.

"You people certainly get around," Wilma said as I came up into the cockpit. "I appreciate you saving this tub. And I want to see this cut water hose your wife told me about. Obviously we missed something yesterday when my men tossed the boat. I guess we'll look again when the water goes down. Somebody didn't want the boat searched a second time."

As she said, "we'll look again," Nym's eyes lit up almost as brightly as when I gave her a diamond anniversary band, 10 years into our marriage.  Both boys popped their heads from the forward cabin, the same look across their faces.

"Oh no! Absolutely not," Wilma said, raising her hands as if she was about to push against a wall. "You're civilians and even if you found something, then I can't use it as evidence."

I opted to stall for a moment, offering that while I certainly agreed, couldn't we help check the boat over for any other possible leaks, just in case? Whoever had tried to sink the boat, might have some other less-obvious devices ready to go. The thinly veiled excuse placated her just enough to nod her head slightly, which catapulted Jacob and Jerrod back into the forward cabin where they had been rummaging before she arrived.

"You know Wilma, you don't exactly have a pristine crime scene here anyway," I said. "We've been crawling over every inch of the boat for the last half-hour looking for leaks. And now that we know someone tried to sink the boat, well, if you would tell us what you think might be here? We might have already seen something and not recognized it."

Wilma Krebs, sat down on the settee, looking like a female James Earl Jones and for the first time in my life, I understood what the expression, "weighing the alternatives," really means. Wilma tipped her head left, then right, moving her tongue around over her teeth like she had just eaten a doughy burrito. She looked up at the cabin ceiling for a moment, then back down directly at Nym, who hadn't said a word, but was wearing a slight smirk that told me I was on the right track with my argument.

"OK. Here's the deal," Wilma said. "You keep looking around for boat problems that might sink this thing, while I wait for my deputies to get back here. I can't really say what we are looking for, but make sure we're going to float. My deputies aren't exactly skilled in this area."

Nym and Wilma disappeared into the aft cabin and head to take a look at the severed hose. I could hear them speaking in low tones and could only make out a brief "Jesus" from Wilma, probably when she saw the cut hose.
     Then I had another thought: Why not deputize Nym (or all of us) which would then make any evidence we found admissible in court.
     I plunked down at the navigation station in the main cabin, where nautical charts for the west coast of Mexico and Baja California were on the counter with casually drawn stars and pencil marks on them. There wasn't really a course plotted - there were no lines or compass headings to indicate direction or speed - but it looked like someone had wanted to highlight places on the coast. Most of the points were not ports, but anchorages.
     I turned on the Global Positioning Unit and electric chart plotter, which had several dozen saved programs of courses to west coast destinations, arranged alphabetically by port. It was quite different from my GPS.  I have never totally trusted the electric charts on Rocinante, preferring instead to work on paper. I made a mental note to get Jacob to rearrange the waypoints in the GPS and electric charts to show me the most recently accessed charts and destinations, provided Wilma let us stay on the boat and tinker that much.
      Next to the navigation station there was a coffee mug, half-filled with what looked like days-old coffee, judging from the bacteria floating on top. I marveled that the cup stayed upright — considering how much the boat had listed at the worst of the flooding. It also was interesting that the deputies hadn't touched it. I kept my hands away from it, too.
     I could feel that the water in The Talking Mime was starting to drop quickly. The boat had stopped wallowing in the swell and was only about 10 degrees off level.

     I was making some progress on the GPS - to see where The Talking Mime had likely come from the most recently - when I heard Nym call me from the aft cabin.

"Alex, Wilma's going to come over to Rocinante when the boat is all pumped out and secure. And they are going post a guard here. Why don't you and the boys go back over and put on some coffee. One of the boys can come back in the dinghy in a half-hour or so if I need a ride over. Or I can catch a ride with Wilma on the sheriff's boat."

I was clearly being dismissed, as my coffee is so bad, some of my faculty colleagues at the university boycott the pot in the faculty lounge if there's any chance I've been near it. But it was obvious Nym wanted a few moments with Wilma without any other ears around. My adrenalin had worn off anyway and a cup of coffee - even mine - sounded good.

It took a measure of stern fatherly urging to get the boys to disengage from the forward cabin where they were looking through some magazines. But I drew a happy sounding war whoop from both of them in the dinghy when I told them the undersheriff was coming to Rocinante for a visit. They were still bouncing around as we were about 100 yards away, when Nym came out on the stern and shouted for us to come back.
      "Hey! I'll go with you. Wilma is too nice to make her suffer through your coffee."
     I ignored the insult as we rowed back toward Rocinante, the mid-morning sun feeling good.  I could feel the day slipping away from me at light speed. I had wanted to begin a draft of new book on the trip, a way of avoiding several unfinished manuscripts in my desk back in my university office. But so far the sailing life - and this adventure - was intruding. Then again, I was just procrastinating, too.

Wilma had said she and the lone deputy on board would be fine - the boat seemed safe and was floating level when we left. And the sheriff's boat was already at the dock near the Anchor Inn and would likely return shortly.

The boys were watching a pod of dolphins in the distance, and Nym had a mysterious smile on her face. I knew that once we got aboard Rocinante I would hear a preview of what Wilma was going to tell us. Or perhaps they found something, I thought. Most of the time, Nym likes to treat Jerrod and Jacob like the Hardy Boys. But this particular mystery was too close to us and had enough danger that she seemed to want to keep them at a distance. Criminals and their minds is her area of expertise anyway, not mine, so I rowed and made some mental notes on what I wanted for a late breakfast or lunch and tried to guess if we would end up dining with Wilma.

I saw the sheriff's boat leaving the dock, where the breakfast crowd had gone back inside as it appeared the boat was safe after all. We clambered aboard Rocinante, and, predictably, the boys quickly commandeered the dinghy to row over toward the dolphins.
      Seeing some fog blowing in, I threw them two windbreakers and a gratuitous "be careful," as they rowed off.
       In the cabin below, Nym started the coffee while I waited for her to break silence.

Finally, I gave up and asked. "Is it a sorority secret? You know the boys might not be gone long. They'll be back for food as soon as they realize they haven't eaten."

Nym sat down on the settee before speaking, looking at that back of her hands for a moment.

"I think I found his fingernails," she said, a small smile growing as she spoke.

"Whose fingernails?" I asked, then I realized quickly who she was talking about.
     "Kee-rist!" I said.

"Yes, I think so," Nym said. "Five entire fingernails. From the hand we had on our deck."

Chapter 11 - The Woman's Touch