the back of my neck didn’t settle down until I sat behind the wheel. I blew out a breath. Okay, I’d gotten carried away, opening the trash cans. Not nice, but in a list of crimes certainly on the minor side. I looked around. Other than a few cars in the lot, the place was deserted. My guilty conscience must have manufactured a spy.
I pulled out of the driveway and passed the fancy “Sunnyside Aquaculture” sign. John Hamilton’s interest in sustainable fuel for the U.S. was obviously genuine. He was truly apologetic that I could not go out on the pier, which he could see I itched to do. All in all, a decent guy.
His wife was a different matter. I’d only seen her for a moment, but the way he jumped when she walked in was curious. I also didn’t like the way she gave me the once over—sizing me up, I guessed, to judge who was smarter or maybe more attractive.
Besides that, John had given me a tidbit of information that might turn out to be important. Cyril White disappeared from view right before the buoy fell on Peter.
I stopped to buy yogurt and fruit for lunch before I hid away in my office. Despite my concern about the circumstances around Peter’s death, my focus had to be the NOAA grant proposal. The deadline was approaching fast and there was a hell of a lot of work to do.
I logged on to check the streaming data from the buoys we’d deployed. Columns of numbers from the first buoy lined up on my screen—wind direction, wind speed, wave height, water temperature. I looked skyward and sent a prayer to the science angel (there might be one), and ran my finger down the hourly averages.
Damn. The temperature hadn’t budged. I rubbed my eyes. Maybe the second buoy would be different. It wasn’t, and neither were the others.
I walked to the window and leaned my forehead against the pane. If water temperature didn’t increase significantly real soon, the proposal would be much harder to write. I could rely on earlier data, but the argument about rising temperature in Maine’s waters wouldn’t be nearly as strong.
I was excited about my research and hopeful grant reviewers would be, too. My former grad students and I had evidence that phytoplankton were dwindling in Maine’s warmer waters. We’d found declines in numbers and types of phytoplankton, the lovely tiny floating plant-type species that feed Gordy’s fish, and speculated the reason might be reduced mixing between increasingly warm—and therefore lighter—water floating on top of denser, colder water below. Phytoplankton need light, and grow in the upper sunlit layer. But as they grow, they use up nutrients. If new water from below can’t mix in, the algae starve.
One of my students won a prize for his talk about this research at the last Society of Oceanography meeting. But we’d just started the work, and I needed more grant money to continue.
Thank goodness there was time to write the proposal; I’d taught my half of Introductory Oceanography during the first part of the semester and now another faculty member was in charge. I loved teaching, but the course took a lot of time—hours to prepare lectures delivered electronically to students all over the state three times a week plus more hours to answer students’ emailed questions plus exams to grade. Every professor I knew struggled with balancing teaching and research.
My teaching skills hid a secret. Nobody, not even Harvey, knew that public speaking terrified me. Just the thought of it made seasickness seem like a picnic. People from MOI’s publicity office asked me to talk to local groups like the Lions and Rotary Clubs, but I made up any excuse I could think of. They stopped asking, and I felt guilty as hell about the whole thing.
By midafternoon, my back hurt from hunching over the computer. I got up to stretch. A heavy knock on my door startled me, and I opened it to a most unwelcome visitor.
“I would like to speak with you, if I may,” Seymour said.
Stepping aside, I pointed to a chair and sat back down at my desk, swallowing hard. Whatever Seymour had to say to me couldn’t be good. He sat, shifting his weight as if he found the chair uncomfortable. His thin face was impassive, and his steel-gray eyes gave nothing away.
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “To the task at hand. I must deny your request for a match for your NOAA proposal.”
My heart froze. Matching money from MOI was a pre-requisite for even submitting the NOAA grant. “But that means I won’t have money for research cruises. I’ll miss a whole year.”
He looked away, then back at me. “Mara, my budget—”
“You’ve known for months I’d need that match.”
“Listen to me. Matching money came from a state program that’s been gutted. I just found out about it.”
“So nobody in the department will get the match?”
Seymour crossed his legs. “I think I can squeeze out one or two. Your research is, ah, somewhat preliminary. You only have last spring’s data. Is that correct?”
“I’ll have two years with the new buoy values.”
“I believe your proposal is more likely to be funded if you have data from spring, summer, and fall.”
Seymour stood, pulled my door open, looked back at me, and left.
I shut the door, returned to the window, and again rested my forehead on the cool pane. My whole body seethed hot with anger. Seymour knew I couldn’t collect data without research money. He said his matching budget was slashed, and in the next breath said he’d squeeze out funds. For someone else, of course.
I stepped back and looked out. A breeze picked up on the bay, and several sailors briskly rowed tenders out to their boats for an afternoon jaunt. All smiles in yellow and red wind jackets, they looked so happy. It was, what, only four days since I’d felt that way as I bounded up Intrepid’s gangway.
I rolled my shoulders. My back muscles were tense and a dull ache crept up my neck to my head. Time for a break. When I’m low, there’s a soul whose gentle ways never fail to lift my spirits. His name is Homer.
I TOOK THE BACK STAIRS down to the basement and pulled open the double doors. The smell of salt-laden air and the deafening roar of seawater jetting through giant pumps greeted me. Throughout the cavernous room, splashing water spilled over aquaria into holding tanks, down pipes, and back to the ocean outside.
I walked to Homer’s tank and peered in. He was asleep inside his favorite bottle.
I tapped softly on the glass. “Hi, baby.”
Homer stirred, backed out, and touched an antenna against the aquarium window. Without question the two-and-a-half-foot Homarus americanus was the prettiest lobster I’d ever seen. His carapace was bluer than most, a striking contrast to the bright red at the tips of his claws.
Homer and I had a human-crustaceal relationship.
Homer’s round black eyes followed me as I paced in front of his aquarium. I told him about all my money worries.
“I get that Seymour’s in a bad way if his budget was gutted. But he walked in on Harvey and me and saw that list on the whiteboard. I’ve got to wonder if he denied my match as some kind of message.”
I stopped pacing
