Free The Maine Mutiny by Jessica Fletcher Page B

sun drawing red lines across the horizon, we roared out of the harbor, angling toward a fishing territory claimed for Cabot Cove’s lobstermen and no others. We passed a flotilla of fluorescent-hued buoys bobbing in the water, careful not to come close enough to snag the lines.
    “Every man has his personal colors,” Levi had yelled over the noise of the engine. “Makes it easy to pick out your own.”
    The morning air was refreshing, brushing my hair back from my face, blowing steadily on the boat and covering up its smell, which at that early hour was fishy but not yet sour. We whizzed over calm water, attracting an audience of gulls that circled overhead checking for breakfast and, finding none, winged off toward another possible meal. Before the sun was fully up, we’d reached an area dotted with Levi’s buoys, which were painted with alternating stripes of shocking pink and lime green.
    “Some of the lobsters’re still hardenin’ up after the molt,” Levi had told me. “We’ll start layin’ the traps farther out today, where we think they’re goin’ to go. Each day we move ’em ahead a bit more.”
    “How do you know where the lobsters are going to go?” I’d asked.
    He pointed to his head. “Experience. What got passed to me from my father and his father before him. You learn and you keep a weather eye out all the time. You got to balance the time of year, the tide, the wind, the current, the wave height. It all matters. Today, o’ course, we got a lot of technology helping out, too. It’ll make it too easy for his generation,” he said, eyeing Evan.
    Levi’s technology included a combination compass and depth finder, a global positioning device, and a citizens band radio, explaining the forest of antennae that sprouted from the roof of his wheelhouse. On the outside wall of the cabin was a piece of equipment that looked like a yellow lantern. Levi said it was an emergency transmitter. He also had something he called a “Thistle box.”
    “We’re part of a study lookin’ to track where the lobsters are and make sure they stay healthy,” he said, patting the top of a computer screen that was covered with numbers and symbols. “Got to take care o’ the little ones or else they won’t grow up to be keepers.”
    Everyone in Cabot Cove knew that Maine had come through several years in a row in which each landing, as the lobster harvest was called, exceeded the previous one, although no one seemed to know exactly why we were so lucky. Some said that global warming was making the lobsters grow faster. Others credited overfishing of sea bass and cod, which like to feast on baby lobsters, and whose declining numbers left the ocean bottom safer for crustaceans. While the lobstermen thrived, other fishermen were not so fortunate, struggling with catches insufficient to cover the cost of keeping up equipment, much less feeding and housing a family. One of Mara’s cooks had signed on this year after cashing out, selling his boat, and giving up the sea.
    Of course, there were no guarantees of bounties for the lobstermen. This year had started out slow and stayed that way, with the rain and fog limiting fishing and the hauls more meager than expected. Mary had said the prices were rising. It made sense to me. It was a logical case of supply not being able to keep up with demand. And lobsters are always in demand.
    The festival committee had arranged with Tim Nudd to store lobsters for the festival. Tim had a small lobster pound—a series of holding bins with cold water flowing through them—on his side of the dock. But Henry Pettie was the broker, and it was he who determined what was saved and what was sold.
    We’d gotten spoiled by the boom years, I saw now. No one had ever expected that there wouldn’t be enough lobsters in stock by midsummer for the coming festival. I was still confident the star of the meal would show up on time, and I prayed I was right. Today was sunny, not rainy. I hoped the