Spiraling off the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown has long been a place of escape, new beginnings, and diverse communities. Famous as an art colony, known for the Cape Cod School, its gallery scene is vibrant. Gay life is everywhere.Boston comic Mark Winslow has arrived this summer with a group of fellow improv actors ready to break into Provincetown’s club circuit. It should be a carefree summer, but currents swirl beneath the sunny surface. Does the tall ship out in the harbor herald an unusually large crowd of Scandinavian tourists? If not, who are the blond and ragged visitors seen everywhere?Then, at a philanthropist’s dinner opening the season, Mark gets into a very public fight with the son of local bluebloods—an old school friend. It makes him the prime suspect when the lawyer is later savagely murdered out on the beach. Though he stumbles from the scene, Mark thinks his choice is simple: find the killer or be charged with the crime.The Fisher Boy is Stephen Anable’s debut novel.

The Fisher Boy

By Stephen Anable

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright © 2008 Stephen Anable
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59058-480-4

Chapter One

In Provincetown, I felt enveloped in the shivery skin of a paranoid, all goosebumps and heartbeat. Everyone was a suspect in the brutal murders. Nothing seemed real but a sense of fear, fear as elemental and prevalent as the Cape Cod sand.

Provincetown is sand. It's just a sandbar really, washed together by glaciers and billions of tides—and slowly washing apart. Roots hold the whole of Cape Cod together, roots of grasses and shrubbery and trees. What man has done, building windmills and saltbox houses, Coast Guard stations and condominiums, the Pilgrim Monument and Route 6, is all secondary. Provincetown and all of Cape Cod is sand, no more stable than the sandbar at your favorite beach, the one that shifts, seductively, from summer to summer. That evangelist, who intruded into our lives that summer, was right about one thing, about the temporary nature of this coast ...

* * *

A ship was the harbinger of disasters to come, a ship the otherworldly white of a piece of the moon, like the Flying Dutchman dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor. But everyone knew this wasn't the ghost vessel of maritime legend, but the Swedish tall ship, the Vasa, sailing down the coast from Boston to Annapolis, with a crew of blond cadets with sunburnt ears, dressed in wide-collared, old-fashioned sailors' suits. Everything that happened that hot, dry summer when the rain refused to come, when the drought inflicted a kind of malnutrition on the land, seemed to begin with the presence of that ship on the silvery stillness of Provincetown Harbor.

I teased my friend Arthur about the Vasa. "Did you order that ship? Did you order it special for your party?"

And he laughed. "If I'd ordered that ship I'd have ordered the crew to be here en masse."

But no one needed an order to attend Arthur Hilliard's parties. In fact, people fought for invitations. Arthur was tall, with wiry gray hair. Big-boned and theatrical, he was as bright as the Gilbert and Sullivan scores he'd sung through college at Yale. Over the years, his body seemed to grow in proportion to the extroversion of his personality. Already, on Memorial Day weekend, he was as tanned as the cordovan of his tassel loafers, and he had donned his standard preppie summer drag, an indigo jacket shot through with yellow and shrimp-pink.

Like me, Arthur was a Bostonian, but it was his summer place in Provincetown that made his reputation. Buttercup-yellow, on the harbor side of Commercial Street, this extended saltbox was one of the most lavish homes in the West End. It all but groaned with antiques: gilt sconces delicate as frost, marble lions looted from pagodas, paintings of clipper ships in seas turbulent as Jacuzzis.

Years later, I'd remember that house not as a series of rooms but as a series of parties. Although Arthur was rich, he was in no sense materialistic and never any kind of collector. He owned things, he didn't buy them. Fun as he was, he was never frivolous. His parties—the springs of liquor and tables of food, the tequila and crab cakes, gin and lobster bisque—were always thrown to benefit a cause.

He was a fashionable yet beloved figure, which is often a contradiction in terms. "Think of the word 'colony,' as in 'summer colony,'" he'd say. "What did people do when they colonized a place? Exterminate the indigenous population with a combination of prayers and smallpox, then plunder the natural resources." Arthur worked to ensure we didn't colonize Provincetown, didn't treat the year-rounders as scenery or summer help, then vanish each autumn to forget the place. His parties funded good works for the town, bought computers for its schools, saved a marsh from reincarnation as a strip mall.

I suppose Arthur functioned as my "mentor," a slightly creepy term, I've always thought. We were both alumni of St. Harold's, a second-rate prep school that had expired two summers before in the Berkshires. He was my elder by a good twenty years, so we hadn't crossed paths on the playing fields, but had met much later at a restaurant-of-the-moment in the South End. He'd scrounged up my first job at an advertising agency, where I'd extolled the virtues of software and after-shave and had seemed too earnest to be fired.

But that was over. I'd left my job, paycheck, and health insurance for a sort of bungee jump into show business. Staying in Provincetown for the summer, renting a seedy furnished apartment above a leather store, I'd volunteered to book gigs for our fledgling comedy troupe. We had done ten well-received shows in the basement of a food co-op in Cambridge, and were now trying to crack the Provincetown club circuit. But we were late, pitifully late, because most clubs had booked their acts months before.

Sitting on my host's chintz sofa, I reminded Arthur I was hungry for introductions to the club owners sure to flock to his party. "We just need a break," I said. "We're 'almost there.'"

"I've been 'almost there' for most of my life." Arthur gave me an aquarium-sized gin and tonic. "Don't worry, Mark, all the contacts you need will be here today. Everyone knows I inaugurate the season."

"Roger Morton is especially important." Roger Morton owned Quahog, a restaurant known for its so-so food—flourfilled chowders and "scallops" that might be skate—and top-rate entertainment.

"He'll be here, they'll all be here."

"I've invited our best actor, Roberto Schreiber." I shamelessly added, "He's very attractive."

Strangely, the single Arthur let this remark pass, saying, "I want you to see my newest treasure." Some jade bodhisattva or Staffordshire spaniels a maiden aunt had given him, I assumed. Then this guess imploded when he said, "He's in the kitchen, making the bouillabaisse. I asked you early just so you could meet him."

Arthur led me through the low-ceilinged rooms, most painted a muted pea-green and containing enough nautical artifacts—scrimshaw, engravings of battles involving the Constitution—to make me think the treasure could be a sailor shanghaied from some earlier time, complete with pigtail, tarry fingers, and clay pipe.

"This is Edward," Arthur said. "Edward Babineaux."

Edward was short, five-six or so, with buzz-cut, honey-colored hair and the snub nose of a child or a Hummel figurine. His blue eyes matched the shells of the mussels he was cleaning, and the alertness of those eyes fought the sensuality of his other attractions—the muscular column of his neck, his full lips. He was twenty-five at most, half Arthur's age, in one of his host's monogrammed shirts, and, evidently, nothing else. The long, pin-striped expanse of Brooks Brothers cotton just covered the tawny hair of his thighs.

"Mark is a star of the stage, just as you are a star of the kitchen," Arthur told him. Then the doorbell rang and he drew a long slug from his gin and tonic before kissing Edward, then rushing to greet his guests.

A blush stained Edward's face. Was he was ashamed of being kissed by a much older man or by his sparse, borrowed wardrobe? Sometimes I'd worried that Arthur compensated for being single by loving all of society through doing good works. Edward might literally signal a change of heart.

Edward drew the vast abundance of fresh fish toward him over the polished granite counter. Here were clams with shells sturdy as castanets, crab legs,...