The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable Page B

leave your DNA in addition to your fingerprints.
    There was no comb, it was a twig of driftwood. I kept picking up glass. The more I picked up, the more seemed to appear, sparkling amid the straw, dried seaweed, and crumbly remnants of a styrofoam fishing float. My fingerprints were all over the bottle, I kept thinking; if I left even one shard of glass it could connect me to this murder. It could say,
he
was here, the man who fought Ian. I was stuffing the glass fragments into my beach bag. The label of the bottle, with its embossed design of St. Basil’s Cathedral, remained intact, clinging to the largest pieces of glass I could find.
    There was no one in sight, but how soon would that change? I had to leave, I had to run. Clutching the beach bag, twisting it shut to prevent anything else spilling out, I leapt from slab to slab of rock and was soon out of breath. It was both dangerous and useless to hurry. It also looked suspicious, but then, anyone crossing the breakwater this night would look, in retrospect, suspicious. And if I
did
meet people—anyone—on the breakwater, what would I do? Ignore them? Speak, but turn away? They might continue along the breakwater far enough to find Ian, then remember my photograph, from our comedy troupe flyers, the ones I’d posted with Roberto all over town. In my mind, each flyer became a “Wanted for Murder” poster.
    I met no one on the remainder of the breakwater, thank God, and my walk to my car in the Herring Cove lot was uneventful. I took the right side of the shore road, with the traffic to my back. When traffic approached me from the opposite direction, I hung my head, hiding my face, stared at my deck shoes.
    Every step I took brought me farther away from murder, away from everything except the horror of the memory.

Chapter Nine
    I had some chloral hydrate at my apartment. I took two, washed down with some bad Chablis. Showering, I cried into the spray, then fell into bed.
    When the sun rose and stung my eyes awake, I realized immediately that it had set on Ian forever
    Until last night on the breakwater, I hadn’t realized the potency of my feelings for Ian—almost fraternal, we’d shared so much. Vignettes from our past kept playing in my head, of swimming, games of baseball, building forts in the sumac and cat briar of Eastern Point, and, of course, of his saving me in the storm in Gloucester Harbor. And our sex in the dunes kept screening in my consciousness, like a snuff film on endless loop.
    My milk had soured, so I dribbled some tap water over my muesli before deciding this was unsatisfactory. So I drove partway up Bradford Street, but it was seven-thirty, so the supermarket of course was closed. Instinctively, I headed toward Arthur’s. I had to speak with Arthur, whether he was “up to it” or not.
    His BMW, the gray of an old fedora, was parked in his driveway. The buttercup-yellow house looked serene, the peonies bending under the weight of their open, globe-like flowers. I heard someone singing—singing!—on this horrible morning. It was Arthur’s voice, damaging something from
The Pirates of Penzance.
    “Hello?” I called, stepping toward the garden.
    Instantly, the air filled with noise, like the sirens from every fire engine on Cape Cod.
    Arthur came running in a terrycloth robe. “Don’t move!” he yelled to me, then vanished inside the house. After an interval that seemed endless, the racket ceased.
    “Your new alarm,” I said, when he returned.
    “It’s a bit hypersensitive, like its owner.”
    A neighbor’s shar pei was barking from the yard across the street.
    “They’re adjusting the alarm later today,” Arthur said, “before my neighbors evict me.” He began pouring birdseed into a Plexiglas cylinder wired to his silver maple. “You’re up early.” He was his buoyant old self, the Arthur of summers past.
    I was casual. “The early bird gets the worm.”
    “And then some.” Arthur closed the top of the feeder and then