Last Exit in New Jersey Read Free Page A

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39°13’58.83”N/75°01’59.09”W
     

BIVALVE, NJ
     
     
    Typical of New Jersey summer weather, even as isolated storms deluged sections of coastline, other stretches baked under a cloudless sky. Along the southwestern shore, an unrelenting midday sun beat down on the marshy banks of the Maurice River, cooking the low-tide mud to a pungent level. Stagnant air hung wet and sticky, ripe for a good thunderstorm. This was Bivalve: the end of the road, figuratively and literally.
    Long ago there had been oysters. Freight trains full of oysters, history told. In its day, the one-time oyster capital of the world created more millionaires per mile than anywhere in the country. Oyster schooners by the hundreds sailed the bay, hauling up a seemingly limitless bounty. Oystermen crewed and dredged the bay; they built and maintained the schooners in hundreds of boatyards; jobs were plentiful on roads and rail, shipping the oysters across the country. By the late 1880s, Bivalve filled ninety freight cars a week, and by the 1920s, the annual harvest reached ten million dollars. But in the 1950s, disease struck. Oysters began dying off, taking with them the region’s bustling economy. Abandoned fleets sank into neglect and into the mud. Docks collapsed and marshes reclaimed the shores. Over time nature methodically erased most traces of a once booming industry until all that remained was a building here, a twisted length of railway there. Bivalve was a ghost town, and even the ghosts had long since packed up and moved on. Only a few people, a few docks, and a few boats remained.
    Among those boats were a plywood center console, an old Sea Ray, and a rust-streaked patrol cruiser. In slip F-18, the only numbered slip around, bobbed an ancient wooden Grady-White named Kindling , sporting hot-rod-style flames that covered the bow. Across from Kindling , Witch sat silent, all traces of the previous night’s voyage and cargo washed away.
    Above the docks, a faded plywood sign read:
    BRANFORD’S BOATYARD
GENERAL MARINE WORK—DOCKS AVAILABLE
     
    Along the bottom, fresh lettering in a shade of red remarkably similar to Witch ’s boot stripe stated: GO AWAY.
    Beyond the docks and past the lot paved in crushed white shells stood a sagging wood-frame building. Once a sailmaker’s loft, it presently housed Joe’s marine repair shop and yard amenities consisting of showers, a laundry room, small kitchen, wood stove, a sunken couch, and a pool table supported on all corners by car jacks. A carpenter’s level held a place of honor in the cue rack.
    Inside the shop, Hazel stared restlessly out the window at the lot. Her father had left an hour earlier with no explanation, depositing her under Joe’s protective custody, and she’d spent much of that time calculating how to make a break for it. She knew she wasn’t supposed to leave. Her father made that clear, even having her recite back his instructions.
    “Stay with Joe while you’re gone. Under no circumstances short of fire, earthquake, or nuclear attack should I leave this building.”
    She really did intend to keep her word, at least at first. That had to count for something.
    She sat beside the workbench and picked at red paint dried on her shredded jeans. She wanted to talk about last night, but since it “never happened,” that topic was off-limits. Instead she scanned the service manual for the dissected Johnson outboard currently spread across Joe’s workbench, passing him tools before he asked and trying not to worry about Micah. Joe concentrated on his work, focusing harder than usual as he loosened a fuel line. With each turn of the wrench, the colorful tentacles on his octopus tattoo writhed around the anchor and skull beneath them.
    If there was one thing Joe lacked, it was subtlety. She could see it in his eyes every time he glanced up. He kept studying her the same way he had last night, when she’d wandered trancelike into his apartment, blood-soaked, axe in