The incident was under investigation by both the USCG and the Connecticut State Police. Tom had been tied up on Nehantic, then spent two good hours on paperwork detailing the operation.
Last year he had been appointed AIES—adjunct investigator for Easterly Sector, meaning he had to follow up marine incidents. So when he finished at his desk, he headed toward the Hawthorne Shipyard, where Jeanne and Bart Dunham, the couple who had first come upon the wreck, kept their sailboat.
It was Memorial Day, and he hit major traffic on I-95. The weather was beautiful, and with hordes of people heading to beaches and harbors, he doubted he would find the Dunhams there—it was too nice a day not to be sailing. But when he parked in the shipyard lot and asked a rigger where Arcturus was docked, he found the boat in her slip and the couple sitting on deck. She was reading a book; he was staring at an iPad.
Still in his USCG uniform khakis, Tom walked down the finger pier, stopped at the stern of the vessel. She was sleek and pretty, well maintained with a white hull and a freshly painted blue cove stripe just below deck level. The couple glanced up as he approached.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Commander Tom Reid from the coast guard. Are you the Dunhams?”
“Yes, Jeanne and Bart,” the woman said.
“Are you here about the Sallie B?” the man asked.
“I am.”
“Come aboard,” Bart Dunham said.
Tom stepped from the wooden pier onto Arcturus’s deck, ducked under the frame of the white canvas awning that stretched over the cockpit from the cabin to the sailboat’s backstay. The Dunhams both stood, and they shook hands with Tom. The day was sunny and warm, but the awning kept the cockpit fairly cool.
“Please sit down,” Bart said. “Would you like some iced tea? Or a rum and tonic?”
“Iced tea would be great,” he said, and Bart went down below and almost immediately handed up a plastic glass. Tom heard bottles clinking and figured Bart was fixing himself a drink.
The three of them sat in the U-shaped cockpit, on blue-and-white-striped cushions.
“You’re not out sailing,” Tom said. “There’s a good breeze.”
“Right now, I never want to sail again,” Jeanne said.
“It must have been upsetting,” Tom said.
“Oh my God,” Jeanne said. “You wouldn’t believe. I can still smell fuel and smoke and burning hair. I can’t get the taste of it out of the back of my throat. Was that hers? The burning hair?” She shivered.
“We did recover Mrs. Benson’s remains,” Tom said, leaving out the part that, yes, the smell of incinerated hair and everything else had probably come from her.
“I’ve been reading about it online,” Bart said. Tom noticed the way Jeanne shot him a look. “The daughter’s okay?”
“How okay can she be?” Jeanne snapped at Bart. “She was blown out of the water, her mother’s dead, her little brother is drowned or worse!” Then, turning to Tom, “Did you know we saw a shark in the area? Good Lord, the boy could have been attacked! Didn’t you see our statement?”
“I read it, but there was no mention of a shark.”
“That wasn’t a shark fin, sweetie, it was the dog,” Bart said.
“How would you know? You were half in the bag. I saw what I saw.”
Tom made note to add the shark to the report, although he had his doubts—sharks known to attack humans were rare to nonexistent in the part of Long Island Sound where the wreck of the Sallie B had been found.
“After a shocking experience,” Tom said, “such as the one you went through, memories can be muddled. Sometimes they don’t come back for a long time. Is there anything else you saw or heard that you might not have remembered right away?”
“Well, the note,” Bart said.
“What note?” Jeanne asked.
“I showed it to you,” Bart said.
“You did not! What note?” she asked.
“Just when we got back to the dock and I hosed her off—you know I always do, wash the deck after coming back in,” he said, looking at Tom.
“Good for the boat,” Tom said.
“Get the salt off,” Bart said. “Helps keep the rust away. And I like a clean boat.”
“So when you hosed her down . . . ,” Tom said, wanting Bart to get back on track.
“Right. I found this scrap of paper stuck to the side of our damn boat, above the waterline. I mean, it had ripped, some of it was gone and the ink was pretty much unreadable. But I could see it was signed ‘Love, Sallie.’ Like the end of a note.”
“Where is it now?” Tom asked. During Dan’s second interview with the police, he had said Sallie had been distressed, and her distraction had caused her to make a mistake in the galley, that she had caused the explosion herself. Could she have been upset enough to do it on purpose? Could this be a suicide note?
“I threw it out,” Bart said. “It was soggy as hell. Must have stuck to our hull when we motored through the debris. There was a bunch of ash and other rude shit plastered to our port side. I tossed it all in the dumpster.” He gestured toward the shipyard.
Tom glanced over. “Where’s the dumpster?”
“In that alley between the rigging shed and the big boat building.”
Tom nodded.
“It’s in a plastic garbage bag along with a couple empties. Don’t bust me for not recycling.”
“Very funny,” Jeanne said.
“Do you know what happened, what caused the fire?” Bart asked. “I mean, I’m reading the news, hitting refresh constantly, but there’s nothing.”
“Not yet,” Tom said.
“Yeah,” Bart said. “I thought you might tell us something off the record sort of, considering we were right there. And the part we played, and all.”
“It was horrible,” Jeanne said, her eyes bright with tears. “The Bensons, we didn’t know them, but the boating world is so small, especially around here, at the mouth of the river. We saw them all the time.”
“Where?” Tom asked.
“You know, coming and going at West Wind Marina. Or out on the Sound. Just, out having fun. All of them, the four of them,” Bart said.
“Sometimes just him,” Jeanne said. “With a few guys. You know, friends heading out for some fishing or whatever. She was well known, you know. Once I heard ‘Sallie B’ was Sallie Benson, I recognized her name right away. A decorator.”
“Famous,” Bart said. “It’s all over the news. She designed half the muckety-mucks’ houses on the shoreline.” He finished his drink, swirled the melting ice around the bottom of his glass, and took a step toward the companionway. “Can I get you another iced tea?” he asked, glancing at Tom.
“No, thanks,” Tom said. “I’ll be going now. Thanks for your time. I’m going to call the state police right now, and someone will come by to collect that trash bag with the letter.”
“Waste of time. You can’t even read it,” Bart said.
“It’s one big nightmare,” Jeanne said. “As if it wasn’t bad enough seeing what happened to the people on board a boat we knew, we rescued Maggie, their little dog, and she’s probably going to die. It’s a miracle she survived at all.”