SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE COFFIN BEARER

"The Coffin Bearer" by Tess Gerritsen  (from Birds of Prey, edited by Harlan Coben and C. J. Box, 2026)

Maggie Bird is a fifty-eight-year-old spending thee summer on remote, tiny Gam Island off the Maine coast.  Gam Island is small and has only one building, a sparce cottage, and the ruins of a burned -out cottage that had gone up in flames twenty years before; the only approach to Gam Island is by water.  Maggie is halfway back to Gam Island from making her weekly grocery run on Tucker Harbor when she notices a large flock of seagulls in the Penobscot Bay fog.  It was odd to have the bords flock in the middle of the bay like that, so Maggie turned her boat to investigate.  The birds were flocking over a boat that Maggie recognized belonging to Ben Bouchard, a local lobsterman.  There was no evidence of Ben on the boat, so Maggie pulled over and boarded it.  There was no sign of Ben, but his pot hauler is under tension, indicating that three lobster pots had been lowered down into the bay.  Knowing that boatman can be easily pulled overboard if their legs got tangled in a loop of rope, and not being strong enough to haul the heavy traps from the water, Maggie dons her wet suit and enters the cold water, hoping that Ben might still be alive.  There was no sign of Ben, but the rope that held the third pot had been severed.

Ben Bouchard was not a well-liked individual in Tucker Harbor.  He had a bitter divorce from his wife, who now lives with her daughter and five-year-old granddaughter.  Few people attended Ben's funeral and none of them were actually mourning.

A few days later, she finds Ben's body stuck on the rocks of the island.  It appears that he was killed there and the boat was set out to sea to hide that fact.  Maggie is concerned about any publicity she might get from finding Ben's abandoned boat.  It turns out that Maggie is not her real name and that she is most likely in witness protection.  She chose Gam Island because of its remoteness and that she would be able to spot any unfamiliar boat approaching.  She wonders if Ben's death had anything to do with her and those who are after her, or if it was simply a local murder completely unrelated to Maggie.  After all, it appears that Ben was smuggling drugs:  there was a half kilo of white heroin hidden in his boat.

Tucker Harbor is a small community where everybody knows everybody and family connections go back generations.  Could these connections have been responsible for the death of a disliked citizen?

An interesting mystery with an interesting protagonist, and a character study of rural Maine.

Tess Gerritsen is an internationally bestselling mystery author and a retired general physician.  she is best known for her series about homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles and for her Martini Club mysteries; she has also published a number of medical thrillers and romance thrillers.  Gerritsen's books have been published in 40 countries and have sold 25 million copies.  She won a RITA Award from the Romance Writers of America in 2002  for her novel The Surgeon and a 2006 Nero Award for Vanish.  Her Rizzoli and Isles series was the basis for a 2010-2016 television series.

Birds of Prey is an anthology from the International Thriller Writers; eleven writers were asked to pick a bird of prey and use it as an inspiration for a short story.  Gerritsen, who lives in Maine, chose the seagull, in part because she once made the mistake of feeding a seagull some dinner scraps and the gull kept returning for a month, rapping on her window, demanding more scraps, to the point where he cracked the glass.  In her story that seagull is immortalized as The Nuisance, a black-backed seagull (Larus marinus), "also known by the unsettling nickname of the coffin-bearer gull."  Birds of Prey also contains original stories by Kelley Armstrong, Ace Atkins, C. J. Box, Allison Brennan, S. A. Cosby, Robert Dugoni, Heather Graham, Gregg Hurwitz, Kathy Reichs, and Hank Phillippi Ryan.