Having caught his breath, he looked about the shiny flats. He could see the holes of the soft-shell clams everywhere. This was a good flat and nobody had clammed it for a while, because it was so hard to get to, with a walk through sharp marsh grass and a weary trudge across another, closer flat that had already been pretty much clammed out. Getting out wasn’t so bad, really, but returning with a forty-pound hod full of clams was a bitch.
He sank his hoe into the shiny, quivering surface of mud, then pulled back, exposing more clams. He kept up the rhythm, moving a few steps forward each time, swiping, overturning, plucking, tossing, then repeating the process. As he worked, his line approached the edge of the marsh grass, and once he arrived he paused to look about for another good line. He stamped his foot on the shivering mud, and saw a bunch of squirts go off to his right. That would be a good place to dig. But as he bent down to begin his line, he glimpsed, off in the twilight, something odd: what looked like a bowling ball with hair sticking up from it. It was attached to a lumpy form, partly sunken in the murky channel that snaked through the mud.
He put down the heavy hod and moved over to investigate, his waders making an unholy noise with each step. It didn’t take long for Doyle to realize he was looking at a body, lodged in the muck, and a few more steps brought him up to it. It was a naked man, lying facedown, legs and arms splayed out, face and lower portion of the body buried several inches in the mud. The back of the head was partially bald, with a big shiny spot in the center of a ring of salt-encrusted hair. A tiny green crab, sensing motion, scuttled across from one hair patch to the other and hid cowering in the comb-over.
Boyle had seen plenty of bodies drowned and washed up, and this looked like most of them did, even down to the holes piercing the flesh here and there where ravenous sea life—crabs, fish, lobsters—had begun to feast.
He stood there for a time, wondering if he knew who this person was. He couldn’t recall the bald spot offhand, but a lot of people had bald spots, and without clothes he just couldn’t come up with a possibility. Of course he would have to call the police, but curiosity got the better of him. He still had the rake in hand, so he bent over the corpse and slid the rake into the muck under the belly. With his other hand clutching the corpse’s upper arm, he gave a pull. The body broke free of the grasping muck and flopped over with a hideous sucking-popping sound, the stiff arm smacking down hard into the mud.
Impossible to see anything; the face and torso were completely covered with black mud. Now what? He needed to rinse the mud off the face. Moving around the body, he waded into the shallows of the stream channel, cupped his hands, and began splashing water on the body. The mud ran off quickly, the stark white flesh exposed in rivulets and then sheets.
Boyle stopped, frozen. The face was pretty much eaten off—eyes, lips, nose—not so uncommon with a body immersed in salt water, as he knew. But what had stopped him was not the face, but the man’s torso. He stared at it, trying to make sense of it. What he had thought at first were crude tattoos turned out to be something quite different.
Benjamin Franklin Boyle set down the clam rake, fished in his pocket under the hip waders, and removed his cell phone. He dialed in the number of the Exmouth Police Department. When the dispatcher answered he said, “Doris? This is Ben Boyle, down in the mudflats. There’s a body here, nobody local, looks like it washed out of the marshes. A real artist went to work on it. No, I can’t describe it, you’ll just have to see for yourself.” He explained his location in more detail, and then hung up and slid the phone back into his pocket.
His brow wrinkling, Boyle considered what to do now. Even if the cops left immediately, they wouldn’t get here for at least twenty minutes. There was still time to fill up his hod.
He thumped on the mud with his foot, saw where the little squirts were thickest, and began digging a line through them, building up a rhythm: two steps, sink, turn over, pluck, toss, and repeat.
13
Bradley Gavin, up to his thighs in muck, adjusted the last of the light stands and plugged the cord into the generator. With some effort he extracted his waders from the mud and stepped back onto the temporary boardwalk that ringed the site.