"What
about groceries?"
"You
got the Island General Store. Or you bring stuff back from Burnt Harbor."
He lifted his chin toward the men in the harbor. "That's why they're
looking at us."
He
tied off the dinghy, and we walked down the pier. The men leaned °n a rail,
observing us as they smoked and talked.
"There's
your friend Everett Moss." Toby cocked his head at a burly man with a
white beard, wearing stained coveralls and an orange watch cap.
"Toby,"
the man called. Toby headed toward him, and I followed. "That the young lady
I was supposed to bring over this morning?"
"This
is her." Toby halted and lit a cigarette. "Cass Neary."
"Hello
there." Everett looked at me and nodded. He had bright blue eyes in a
sunburnt face, an easy smile. I waited for him to apologize for not waiting for
me.
Instead
he turned back to Toby. I glanced at the other men. They quickly looked away,
stubbed out their cigarettes then wandered in the direction of the closed bait
shop. Everett glanced across the dark waters of the reach to the mainland.
"You
haven't seen Mackenzie Libby?" he said to Toby. "Merrill called me
this morning. She didn't come in last night. My granddaughter Leela told me
they'd been emailing earlier, Kenzie said something 'bout going into
town."
Toby
frowned. "Mackenzie?"
"Merrill's
daughter."
"Oh."
Toby tugged at his braid. "She run off?"
I
snorted. "I would, if that was my father."
The
two men looked at me, Toby amused, Everett Moss less so.
"Cass
Neary," he said, as though he'd just figured out who I was. "You
stayed there last night, didn't you. She told my daughter she'd been talking to
you."
I
had a sudden flash of a white face in the night, black branches. I shifted my
camera bag from one shoulder to the other and looked at the sky. A wheel of
gray cloud had escaped from the dark ridge that was blowing in. As I stared,
the cloud began to turn, like a clock's mainspring unwinding. I heard a low
buzzing like a trapped fly and dredged up the image of the girl in the
Lighthouse, the way she peered shyly into my room, as though I had something
special hidden among the shabby furniture and plastic mattress cover.
There'd
been no reek of desperation about her, no fear, just a kid's longing for
something she couldn't put a name to yet. She was bored; she dreamed of waking
up somewhere else. Her father might have been an asshole, but he didn't beat
her or abuse her.
That's
why she hadn't interested me. No damage.
"Merrill's
wicked pissed off," said Everett.
"Yeah.
Now
he's
got to clean the motel rooms," Toby said. They both
laughed.
"Well,
he's all worked up, no doubt 'bout that." The harbormaster slung his hands
into his pockets. "John Stone told me Merrill called him this morning too,
got him out of bed. John told him she ain't back by sunset,
then
he
should call. Or maybe little miss went on down to Florida, see her ma. Anyway,
you see her, tell her to get herself home."
He
began walking down to the water, stopped and looked back at me.
"You
too," he said. His gaze wasn't threatening. It was worried. "You see
her, call me or John Stone, he's the sheriff. Don't like these kids running off."
He
lifted a hand to Toby and headed off.
"Come
on," said Toby. "We better get you up to Aphrodite's house."
We
walked through the village. The bait shop, a mobile home with a bunch of large,
scary-looking dolls standing in the window. The Island General Store, a
clapboard building covered in flaking rust-colored paint, with a low wooden
stoop and a gas pump with a trash bag tied over it. A bunch of flyers flapped from
the store's walls and screen door.
"That
guy," I said. I walked over and pulled at a faded piece of paper.
"Martin Graves. I keep seeing these everywhere. What's the deal with
him?"
I
glanced aside and saw another flyer, curled with damp and age. "Jesus.
What's the deal with all of them?"
I
smoothed out the second flyer. This one was a color xerox of a smiling teenage
girl, her face and hair bleached to a brown slurry between faded words.
'"Heather
Pollitt,'" I read aloud. "What happened to her?"
"She
ran off." Toby stepped up beside me. "Went down to Bangor, I think.
She had a baby or something. That's a real old flyer, that one; we should take
it down—"
He
tore it down and crumpled it, tossed it into a barrel by the door. Oh, and look
here—somebody's cat is missing too. That's a new one," he added, tapping a
handwritten sheet dated a few days earlier. "Poor Smoky! I hope they find
him. But that guy—"
He
pressed a scabbed-over thumb against the picture of Martin Graves. "I
don't know what happened. I heard he just took off or something. Supposedly he
had a fight with his girlfriend, or maybe it was his wife? Anyway, his parents
keep putting these up. You saw some driving up here?"
"Yeah.
I think I read about him online too. This place has a high mortality rate for
kids. And cats."
We
started back up the hill. Behind us gulls wheeled and screamed above the
harbor. The road was dirt and gravel and ice, chunks of broken blacktop. After
a few yards it curved and began to climb steeply between scrawny firs and
birch.
"Fishers
get the cats," said Toby.
"Huh?"
"What
you said about kids and cats. Fishers get them."
I
looked at him suspiciously. "They use them for bait?"
"Not
fishermen. Fisher cats. That's what they call them, but they're really just
fishers. They're kind of like a wolverine, or a big mink, but they can climb
trees. Usually they eat porcupines, but sometimes one will move into a
neighborhood and start picking off all the local pets. Cats, small dogs even.
"Kids?"
Toby
laughed. "Not that I ever heard. They re not that big—maybe the size of a
big coon cat. I think that's why they call 'em fisher cats."
"How
do they eat porcupines?"
"They're
really smart. Smarter'n a porcupine, anyway. But you don't find them on the
islands, usually. Just the mainland. Here, let's go this way."
He
turned off the narrow road into a pine grove. There was no path that I could
see, but Toby moved confidently among the trees. The shrieks of gulls died into
a muffled near silence; the sound of wind in the trees was louder than the
ocean. The moss underfoot was so thick and damp it was like walking on soggy
carpet, and the moss wasn't just on the ground—it covered everything, rocks,
logs, even an empty beer can. If I fell asleep on the ground, it would probably
cover me, moss and this bright yellow mold, and something Toby said was
old-man's-beard, long stringy hanks of lichen that hung from tree limbs like
hair. Unlike the rocks by the harbor, these looked soft and plushy with moss.
They looked
organic,
like if you stared at one long enough you might
catch it breathing.
It
was a weird place; what you'd imagine a fairy tale would look like if you fell
into one. They gave me a bad feeling, all those trees. When I touched one, the
bark wasn't damp but wet and slimy. It seemed to give beneath my finger, like
skin.
It
creeped me out.
I
used to like that feeling. I used to hunt that feeling down. For a second, I
thought of getting out my camera and hunting it again.
But
I couldn't. The island spooked me. I got the sense here that nothing you did
could ever matter—not for long, anyway. You could build a house or an entire
town and the island would just swallow it and you'd never know it had even
existed. Everything would just be eaten away. I kicked at a boulder, and my
boottip snagged in two inches of moss. I had to bend over to yank it out.
Toby
stopped to wait for me. "Porcupines like pine trees," he said.
"Like fishers do. But porcupines are stupid. Porcupines and skunks. Ever
notice how much road kill is porcupines and skunks? They rely so much on being
obnoxious, they think nothing can kill them. But a fisher's smart—vicious, but
smart. And fast. They come up on a porcupine, bite it on the nose then flip it
over and tear its throat and belly out. They'll go right for its head, rip its
whole face off, then eat it from the inside out."
I
made a face. Toby laughed.
"You
don't need to worry," he said. "Like I said, they don't come out here
to the islands. And they don't attack people. Not much, anyway. They go for
smaller things. I saw one once, in the woods by Burnt Harbor. It was playing
with a mouse, like a cat does." But what if one did come here?"
"I
don't know." He ran his hand along a branch covered with lichen that
looked like peeling orange housepaint, snapped the branch off and tossed &
'They can swim, I think. Maybe one could swim over. I guess then it could swim
back to shore. Or maybe they eat each other. There never seems to be a real
long-term problem back on the mainland. People trap them."
He
began to walk again. "You getting tired?"
I
shrugged. That hangover was starting to rage behind my eyes. It wasn't even
ten, and I was ready to crawl back to bed. "Just fried," I said.
"I didn't sleep well last night."
"The
Lighthouse didn't suit you?"
"It
wasn't that. Too wound up, I guess."
"Last
I saw, you were knocking back the Jack Daniel's. That would unwind me pretty
fast."
We
walked on. Now and then I'd spot sea urchins on the moss, their spines the same
gray-green as the lichen. I stopped and nudged one with my foot. "How do
these get here?"
"Sea
gulls drop them on the rocks to crack 'em open." Toby glanced at me
curiously. "So'd you see her last night? Merrill's daughter?"
"Just
for a few minutes." I picked up the sea urchin. Several spines fell away
at my touch, not sharp but soft and brittle, like burnt twigs. "She
checked me in. And she came to my room after, to tell me about that place where
we ate. The Good Tern. So I guess I can thank her for my hangover."
"I
think you can thank yourself for that," said Toby.
I
rubbed my finger across the sea urchin until the rest of the spines flaked off.
What I held now looked remarkably like one of the small tussocks of moss
everywhere. I cupped it in my hand then carefully put it into my bag.
"Those
are real fragile," Toby warned. "You want to watch, they break like
eggshells."
"I'll
be careful." I looked around, shaking my head. "It's so strange. I
mean, it's almost winter and it's still green."
"The
fog does that. It covers everything, the rocks and trees; then the moss and
lichens cover them and feed off the moisture. It's a paradise for
parasites."
Ahead
of us the pines thinned out. The shadowy green world gave way to a bleached-out
stretch of stone and birch, a building barely visible through the trees. I
thought of Mackenzie's white face momentarily blazing in my headlights.
She
was a cute kid. Probably she'd been running away—or, more likely, running off
with some boyfriend or girlfriend. I preferred to think of her on a Grayhound
headed south to Boston or New York, meeting a friend in Port Authority, heading
west. Who was I to stop her escape? I hoped she was a hundred miles away.
"How
much farther?" I asked Toby.
"Almost
there."
I
blinked as we stepped into milky sunlight. We were at the top of a long slope
leading down to the rocky shoreline and a small cove. The slope was scattered
with trees—birch, oak, hemlocks. Tucked within the trees were two small
gray-shingled buildings. Both looked utterly derelict and abandoned.
"You
were asking about the commune," said Toby, and pointed. "Most of it
was up at the top of this hill, but people salvaged it or burned it for
firewood. Those shacks are all that's left. Denny's old bus is over the hill a
ways. And that's Aphrodite's place there—"
Among
the trees by the cove stood a clapboard building that looked as though it were
attempting to pull itself up the hillside. There were loose and missing boards
everywhere. The roof was sunken, the stone chimneys crumbling. The white paint
had weathered to a uniform gray and was filigreed with moss, and moss-covered
boulders thrust up against the walls.
I
looked at Toby. "At midnight does it turn back to rocks and pine
needles?"
"Not
what you expected?"
"No.
It's so dark. Photographers want light."
"Light's
better on the eastern side." He gestured toward the black water of the
cove. "It's old. Wasn't real big, so she kept adding on to it.
"I
don't see any lights."
Toby
looked up. Smoke threaded from one of the chimneys, carrying the acrid smell of
creosote. "She's here. Someone is, anyway."
He
headed for the front door, its granite sill scattered with ashes. An untidy
stack of firewood stood beside it, and a snow shovel.