Snow Falling on Cedars Read Free Page B

walked out to the end of the community pier with his binoculars dangling from his neck. Sure enough, the Susan Marie lay drifting on the tide well into the bay on an angle north by northwest, he’d found, and so he’d radioed the sheriff.
    In fifteen minutes they came abreast of the drifting boat and Abel turned back the throttle. In the calm of the bay their approach went smoothly; Art set the fenders out; and the two of them made fast their mooring lines with a few wraps each around the forward deck cleats. ‘Lights’re all on,’ observed Art, one foot on the Susan Marie’s gunnel. ‘Every last one of ’em, looks like.’
    ‘He ain’t here,’ replied Abel.
    ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ said Art.
    ‘Went over,’ Abel said. ‘I got this bad feeling.’
    Art winced at hearing this. ‘Let’s hope not,’ he urged. ‘Don’t say that.’
    He made his way just abaft of the cabin, then stood squinting up at the Susan Marie’s guys and stays and at the peaks of her stabilizer bars. The red and white mast lights had been left onall morning; the picking light and the jacklight at the end of the net both shone dully in the early sun. While Art stood there, pondering this, Abel Martinson dragged the hatch cover from the hold and called for him to come over.
    ‘You got something?’ Art asked.
    ‘Look here,’ answered Abel.
    Together they crouched over the square hold opening, out of which the odor of salmon flew up at them. Abel maneuvered his flashlight beam across a heap of inert, silent fish. ‘Silvers,’ he said. ‘Maybe fifty of ’em.’
    ‘So he picked his net least once,’ said Art.
    ‘Looks like it,’ answered Abel.
    Men had been known to fall into empty holds before, crack their heads, and pass out even in calm weather. Art had heard of a few such incidents. He looked in at the fish again.
    ‘What time you figure he put out last night?’
    ‘Hard to say. Four-thirty? Five?’
    ‘Where’d he go, you figure?’
    ‘Probably up North Bank,’ said Abel. ‘Maybe Ship Channel. Or Elliot Head. That’s where the fish been running.’
    But Art already knew about these things. San Piedro lived and breathed by the salmon, and the cryptic places where they ran at night were the subject of perpetual conversation. Yet it helped him to hear it aloud just now – it helped him to think more clearly.
    The two of them crouched by the hold a moment longer in a shared hiatus from their work. The still heap of salmon troubled Art in a way he could not readily articulate, and so he looked at it wordlessly. Then he rose, his knees creaking, and turned away from the dark hold.
    ‘Let’s keep looking,’ he suggested.
    ‘Right,’ said Abel. ‘Could be he’s up in his cabin, maybe. Knocked out one way or t’other.’
    The Susan Marie was a thirty-foot stern-picker – a standard, well-tended San Piedro gill-netter – with her cabin just abaft of midship. Art ducked through its stern-side entry and stoodto port for a moment. In the middle of the floor – it was the first thing he noticed – a tin coffee cup lay tipped on its side. A marine battery lay just right of the wheel. There was a short bunk made up with a wool blanket to starboard; Abel ran his flashlight across it. The cabin lamp over the ship’s wheel had been left on; a ripple of sunlight, flaring through a window, shimmered on the starboard wall. The scene left Art with the ominous impression of an extreme, too-silent tidiness. A cased sausage hanging from a wire above the binnacle swayed a little as the Susan Marie undulated; otherwise, nothing moved. No sound could be heard except now and again a dim, far crackle from the radio set. Art, noting it, began to manipulate the radio dials for no other reason than that he didn’t know what else to do. He was at a loss.
    ‘This is bad,’ said Abel.
    ‘Take a look,’ answered Art. ‘I forgot – see if his dinghy’s over the reel.’
    Abel Martinson stuck his head out the entry. ‘It’s