Portola Bay

By Jan Suzukawa

A Northern California fishing town. Mysterious activities in the abandoned cannery district late at night. A dead body and a man who can no longer avoid facing his own dark past

When David Jackson returns to Portola Landing to investigate his childhood friend Peter Santangelo's untimely death, he rejects the official verdict of suicide and goes deep into the small town's secrets to discover the truth. But the darkest secret lies in his own past-a past he thought dead and buried-and now it threatens to destroy him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 11, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595904044

Jan Suzukawa

JAN SUZUKAWA currently works as a freelance editor and English adaptation writer in anime and manga publishing. She lives in California. For more information: www.jansuzukawa.com

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

Acknowledgements

My thanks and appreciation to Mary Templeton, Rose McKesson, Edith Tonelli, Harold Bernstein and Coco Stewart for their support and encouragement.

Nothing stays buried forever.

PROLOGUE

NOSTALGIA HAS never been my kind of thing, but that’s not why I went home.

I had received a padded envelope in the mail from my boyhood friend Peter Santangelo. Peter and I had fallen out of touch in recent years, but I knew he was trying to turn around a difficult situation, what with his fishing business failing and having an aging mother to cope with. The size of the envelope surprised me; we never sent each other things, only letters or postcards. But there was clearly a something inside this envelope.

Despite my curiosity, I let it sit on my kitchen counter for a few days. The research project I was working on, along with ten other associates, had a crucial deadline at the end of that week. When we met the deadline on that Friday, naturally we went out for drinks; some of us stayed for dinner; and by the time I took Metro back to my apartment in Arlington it was close to 10:00 p.m.

I felt relaxed. The weekend lay before me and I had no plans. I had the TV on, tuned to CNN, before I remembered the envelope.

I couldn’t find the letter opener, the wooden one with a pineapple carved into the top that a Filipino colleague brought back from Manila for all of us. I ended up using scissors to open it.

Inside was a floppy disk, wrapped in a single lined sheet of paper. On the paper Peter had written, Call me. P.

I realize it’s backwards of me, in this day and age, but while I work on a computer at my job I have resisted getting one for my home.

Something in me refuses to allow the new paradigm into my sanctuary, my one-bedroom Arlington castle. I was therefore faced with going out to Kinko’s at that late hour, or waiting until the next day or perhaps even Monday when I could look at whatever was on the disk at work; that is, if the computers at work still had floppy disk drives. Peter used a laptop that was as old as the hills.

In the end practicality and laziness won out; and I fell asleep on my sofa, the news of the world still sounding in my head.

I dreamed of a huge fish. It had a body like a big gray pancake, with two long fins at the back end that pointed straight up and down. Its eye—the eye I could see, from the side it was presenting to me—was big and round, its expression placid and unhurried. The mouth formed a perfect O, hanging open like a floating cavern. There was something vaguely familiar about this creature, and even in my dream I wondered where I’d seen it before. In the next moment Peter’s face, older, a touch of gray at the temples—his father had also been prematurely gray—appeared in front of the fish. He was looking at me, or the me in the dream at least, very intently, in that wonderfully alert and focused way of his; there wasn’t a trace of sadness or pain in his eyes. He seemed pleased to see me.

I awoke with a jolt. The TV blared from across the room; I shut it off using the remote.

I had never really remembered any of my dreams before this, but this one I couldn’t forget. It was 3:30 when I woke up, and I didn’t even try to go back to sleep. Something about the look in Peter’s eyes, even though it was just a dream, disturbed me. He looked contented, at peace … at rest.

That was it. There was a finality, a sense of completion to the scene in my dream.

I called Peter’s number later that morning, taking into account what time it was in California, and left a message on his voicemail.

As I went about my day—I needed to go to Tysons Corner, to the mall, to get a few things—a feeling of expectation weighed on me, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. When I returned from the mall, I checked my messages. Mary, Peter’s sister, had left a message saying to call.

As soon as I heard her voice on the phone, I knew she would confirm what I somehow already knew.

Peter’s body had been found that morning on the rocks beneath the old Domaine cannery.

*    *    *    *

The next twenty-four hours were spent making arrangements. I called my boss at his home and told him I needed to take the next week off. As independent contractors, technically, we were free to do this at any time, though the research associates at my work were treated more like employees than contract workers. My relationship with Tom is a good one, bordering on friendship. I felt bad at the short notice, but he knew me and my work, and knew I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t something serious. It’s a family matter, I heard myself saying to him. I wondered at that after I’d hung up. Then I stopped feeling guilty. If anyone was family to me, it was Peter.

Had been Peter.

I booked a flight to San Francisco, reserved a rental car, called a small but pleasant hotel that I remembered from the last time I’d been to Portola Landing, six years before for my mother’s funeral.

And flew out on sunday.

ONE

PORTOLA LANDING is the name of the town, though outsiders often mistakenly call it Portola Bay, which is actually the greater geographic region encompassing the town, several small fishing hamlets, and miles of quiet sandy beaches. As Northern California coastal towns go, Portola Landing is pretty typical. The weather is temperate year-round, with the exception of a few chilly weeks in winter. In recent years winemakers have begun growing grapes just inland from the town. The road that connects Portola Bay to Highway 101 and the outside world runs through a valley where much of the country’s lettuce crop is grown.

Portola Landing is known—if it is known at all—for its fishing industry. It’s primarily a thing of the past, since the last cannery closed thirty years ago. But fishing on a smaller scale still supports many in the town. The days of the great fish catches—the heyday of ‘Canning Town,’ on the town’s southern edge—were in the 1960s and ‘70s, when Pacific pilchards swam thick in the cool offshore waters, along with scores of mackerel, yellowtail, steelhead trout and anchovies. Tunas had their season as well, in those days: some alba-core and bluefin, but mainly yellowfin, skipjacks and bonitos. The town stank of fish; you could smell it from our house halfway up Cabrillo Hill.

In the mid-1970s, the pilchards began to disappear. Overfishing was the common conclusion reached, though some chose to believe the pilchards had a fifty-year migratory cycle which sent them to South America every half century or so. This was based on the historical fact that they first began to show in abundance in Portola Bay in the late 1920s, and then were later sighted near Chile at the end of the ‘70s. Most people preferred to believe the pilchards couldn’t count.

In any event, they went away; taking with them most of the town’s trade, industry and prosperity. The first cannery to close was the smallest, the Nakamura Abalone Company, a family-run business conducted in a three-room building on the northern edge of Canning Town. The connection between pilchards and abalone may not be readily obvious, but, as I came to discover—as all of Portola Bay came to discover—it exists. When one link in the food chain is severely depleted, the entire chain suffers. The Nakamura family moved inland to the Crespi Valley and grew broccoli.

The next to fail was Maria Domaine, my father’s employer. The Maria Domaine cannery had harvested and processed fish for forty years.

The California Pilchard Company, the largest employer in town, closed the year after Domaine, and the town’s fate was sealed. By the early 1980s, Portola Landing was a ghost town. Cannery workers either worked the fields in nearby Crespi Valley or moved away entirely, to Los Angeles or San Francisco. Some who had been fishermen for the canneries, like Peter’s father, went out on their own. It was a tough time. Eventually I left for junior college in San Francisco, finished up at San Francisco State and later moved to Washington, D.C.

Peter’s father’s business thrived for years. Pietro Santangelo had been a fisherman in Sicily before settling in this small coastal town, an hour and a half out of San Francisco, in his thirties. He met a Mexican girl in the flats and married her. When the Domaine cannery closed, Pietro considered his family—by then Maria and six children—and took the risk of starting his own fishing business. A small operator could succeed where the canneries no longer could. A big enterprise trying to haul every last fish out of the bay was doomed to fail at some point, while a smaller operator could move in and out, harvesting more judiciously, thus keeping both its business and the sea’s chain of life in balance.

I have often thought that we humans, being at the top of the food chain, not only need to take but are supposed to take of our share of the earth’s bounty, including the sea. If we don’t, we’re not doing our part; but as always, it is in the way that we do it, the degree to which we kill and take, where we err. We take more than our share, in many things.

The Santangelo home was unchanged. A turn-of-the-century wooden frame house, its front was deceptively small, showing only two rooms and a porch; but the house actually extended back for a number of rooms, in an L shape. I knocked on the door.

The door opened: it was Mary, Peter’s sister, the second oldest child. She had to be thirty-eight now.

Oh, it’s you, she said. Hi. We hugged each other, a bit awkwardly. It’s David, she called over her shoulder.

Mrs. Santangelo came forward to greet me. At sixty, she still was a handsome woman, with all the warmth that I remembered well from my early years. The hair had whitened, but she still wore it in the same fashion, loose and flowing just past her shoulders. She took my hands in hers, smiled up at me.

Tears filled her eyes; she turned abruptly and went into the next room. Mary made as if to go after her, but I shook my head. I could imagine how it must have struck her, seeing me after all these years; little David Jackson, her son’s childhood friend, now a grown man forty years of age as had been her son; my face the reminder both of what was and what no longer could be. It’s all right, I said to Mary. I think she’ll be all right. Could you and I talk for a moment?

*    *    *    *

The kitchen was as I remembered, with the table dead-center in the middle of the room. Mary and I sat over coffee and talked about what we didn’t want to talk about.

The body was discovered on the rocks under the Domaine cannery, just above the water. The coroner ruled it a suicide, finding no signs of foul play even though the body was found in a battered condition. It was assumed that Peter jumped from the abandoned cannery building, and the waves had knocked the body between the pilings over and over, like a pinball in a game machine. I set aside my repulsion, and sadness, and asked Mary the question.

Was it suicide?

She hesitated. I don’t know, she said finally.

I didn’t understand, and she saw that I didn’t understand. You don’t know what Peter was going through, Mary said softly. He still owed money from the business. And he wasn’t happy about moving back in.

She said the latter in a lowered voice, looking towards the room where Maria was. I knew Peter had had to move back in with his mother and sister. But suicide? I still can’t imagine things being that bad for him. He wasn’t the sort who would … I stopped, not wanting to say it.

Give up? Mary finished for me. It’s all right, you can say it. I don’t know. I wasn’t inside his head. I just don’t know.

Did he leave a suicide note?

No. We looked all over his room yesterday and through the house. There’s nothing.

She picked a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it. Her face looked worn; the years had aged her skin. Mary always did love the sun, spending every day she could at one of the local beaches. She had Maria’s large dark eyes, but little of her softness.

When did you see him last?

She thought. I came into the kitchen Friday morning. He was just leaving the house.

Did he look … funny? Like he was depressed, or down?

No, Mary said. "No, he was just quiet, you know. We haven’t been talking a lot recently, just, you know … He was kind of