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CHAPTER 1

The last time I'd worked in Port City had been in 1989 when an important software tycoon had hired me to retrieve his wife, who had run off with a fisherman named Costa. Her name was, incredibly, Minerva, and I found her okay. She was living in a shack on the waterfront with Costa, who, when the fish weren't biting, which was mostly, worked as a collector for a local loan shark. This led Costa to believe that he was tougher than he actually was, a point he finally forced me to make. He spent a couple of days in the hospital afterward, and while he was in there Minerva refused to leave his side. I finally concluded that, despite his shortcomings, she was better off with him than she was with the important software tycoon, and I bowed out. The tycoon refused to pay me.

And when I wouldn't tell him where his wife was, he attempted to get my license revoked. I heard that he went down to Port City himself after that and got booted out of town by the Police Chief, an ex-state cop named DeSpain, who as far as I could see ran the town, despite the official presence of a Mayor and a board of Aldermen. I called Minerva a couple of years later to see how she was, and they were gone. I never knew where.

Now, driving with Susan through a hard, cold rain that slanted in steadily against the windshield, nothing much had changed. The city was in a punch bowl, with the land sloping harshly down to the harbor. It had always been a fishing port, and once it had been a textile manufacturing city as well. But after the war, the mills had moved South in search of cheap labor. Now there was nothing but fish processing, and the smell of it hung over the town. In the time of the mills' flourishing, the Yankees who owned them had lived in handsome federalist houses up on Cabot Hill above the town, away from the smell offish, and well clear of the fishermen and mill workers, and fish cutters living below them along the waterfront.

They had founded a small liberal arts college, with a handsome endowment for the education of their children. They had played golf and tennis and ridden horseback and sailed twelve-meter sloops out of their yacht club at Sippican Point north of the city, where the water was still blue, and on clear days the sunlight skipped blithely along the crests of small waves.

When the mills moved out, Cabot Hill society staggered but didn't go down. It tightened in on itself, bought into the fish business, continued to be rich, added the Cabot academics to its ranks, and clustered around the college like survivors of a capsized boat clinging to a channel buoy. There was a neighborhood school on Cabot Hill and a brick-and-clapboard shopping center, where you could buy imported Brie and Armani suits. There were two liquor stores, a movie theater, and a private security patrol with blue-and-yellow prowl cars. Who could ask for anything more.

The only reason to go downtown was the Port City Theater Company, of which Susan was a board member. The theater was connected in various ways to Cabot College. Its Artistic Director was on the Cabot faculty. The college subsidized it. And Cabot Hill was the prime source of its audience. The theater, which was in its fifteenth season of putting on plays too hard for me, flourished inscrutably amid the boarded-up store fronts, and the abandoned cars, near the waterfront. Which is where we were heading.