“Joe Dupree,” he said.
She allowed her own hand to be briefly engulfed in his, like a little fish being swallowed up by an eel.
“Sharon Macy.”
He released her hand. “Put your stuff in the back. You want the tour?”
“Sure. Do we get to stop and take pictures?”
He laughed briefly. It sounded, she thought, like tectonic plates might sound as they rubbed against one another beneath the earth.
“I think you can safely leave your camera in your bag.”
They did a U-turn, then headed up the short road that led from the jetty to the main intersection. Dupree hung a left.
“You always meet the ferry?”
“Try to. It’s more important in summer than winter. We get a lot of people through here in July and August. I was only kidding about the pictures. This place is beautiful in summer and there are some pretty expensive summer homes dotted around the island. Mantle, the guy who runs the Fable computer company? He has a house here. Big Time Warner executive named Sandra Morgan owns a cottage out by Beech Cove, and there are a couple of others too. They’d be real pissed if someone trashed their houses.”
He pulled in at the redbrick municipal building.
“We do it all out here. There’s a doctor comes out from the mainland two afternoons a week, and Doc Bruder is still here, although he’s officially retired, but we’re the first point of contact. We’re also the fire department, game wardens, school patrol, crossing guards, and dogcatchers.”
He left the Explorer. Macy followed. The sliding garage doors were open, revealing four vehicles parked inside. “Medcu Fourteen,” said Dupree, pointing at the ambulance inside the door. “If an emergency arises, we go out in this, do what we can to get the patient comfortable, then get them to the ferry landing or, in a really urgent case, out to the baseball diamond for a chopper pickup.”
He moved on to the red fire trucks, and patted the first.
“This is Engine Fourteen. We use it mostly to pump water. Over there is Ladder Fourteen, the primary attack vehicle. That’s what we take out to fires while we’re waiting for the local volunteers to get organized. That smaller truck in the corner is Tank Fourteen. Basically, it’s just a big bucket on wheels. We take it out to those places on the island that don’t have hydrants.”
“Are there many of those?”
“A couple,” he said, in a tone of voice suggesting that half the island was probably without hydrants. He carried on into the station house. There was an open area with a table and two chairs, some books and magazines on the table. To the left was the communications center: a radio, a computer, a bulletin board pasted with notices, reminders and scribbled notes. A large map of the island dominated one wall.
“We have a secretary?”
“Nope. All nine-one-one calls go through the dispatch center in Portland, but most people just call us direct. Paperwork, filing, well, we do that ourselves.”
Across the main reception area was a second room, housing an emergency generator, various pieces of equipment, and a locker containing a single shotgun.
“This is it for weapons?” said Macy.
“We don’t have too much call for SWAT teams out here,” said Dupree. “Last time I used this was to kill a rabid raccoon. It had been so long since I’d fired it, I was just grateful that it didn’t blow up in my face.”
Macy took the Mossberg pump-action from his hands. It had been cleaned recently, she noticed.
“Doesn’t look so bad,” she said.
“I gave it a pretty good cleaning a day or two back,” said Dupree.
She glanced at him, alerted by his tone.
“Why, something happen?”
“No,” he said. “But you never know.”
He wasn’t smiling.
“Guess not,” she said.
Upstairs was a sofa bed, a TV, some chairs, a small kitchen area, and a bathroom with a shower stall and toilet.
“No cells,” she said.
“Nope. If we make an arrest, we call Portland. They send out a boat and take the prisoner back. Until then, there are two steel loops in the main reception area. I’ve had to use them a handful of times.”
“We’ve only got one patrol vehicle?”
“We used to have a golf cart as well, but it broke down. I live about two hundred feet from here and I’ve got my own Jeep if we need another vehicle. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and introduce you to some people.”
As Macy followed him from the building she rubbed her fingers together, feeling the oil on her skin. She couldn’t be certain, but from the smell of the shotgun it had been fired recently.
Somebody had been practicing.
Dupree introduced her to the folks at the market, to the Tooker sisters at the diner (Nancy Tooker half-jokingly warned her to stay away from “her” Berman), to Dale Zimmer and Jeb Burris, and, finally, to Larry Amerling. By then it was time for lunch, and Dupree suggested to Macy that she take the Explorer and drive around the island in the company of the postmaster while he made some calls. Amerling, the old Lothario, was quite content to spend his lunch hour in the company of an attractive young woman, especially one who had read his book.
“If he tries anything,” Dupree warned her, “shoot him.”
“What if she tries anything with me?” Larry protested.
Dupree looked hard at Macy. “You get that desperate, shoot yourself.”
There was no road leading directly to the Site, which was surrounded on three sides by patches of bog. Instead, Dupree parked at the top of Ocean Street, which ran north from Island Avenue almost to the center of the island, and walked along the trail toward the burial ground. The forest was mainly evergreens, but there were also scattered maples and beech and hemlock. Amerling was right; the trail was obscured by the fallen branches and the last dry leaves, but tan winter maleberry had also encroached, some of its round seed capsules cracking beneath his feet, along with gray-black winterberry bushes and tattered larches. Within ten minutes, Dupree was in trouble. The trail had virtually disappeared, and only his own knowledge of the island enabled him to continue in what he thought was the right direction. It came as a shock to him when he found himself approaching a stretch of road and realized that, somehow, he had walked southwest instead of southeast, and was now back on Ocean Street, except maybe half a mile below where he had started.
Frustrated, he retraced his steps and found that he had mistaken a secondary walking trail for the main path, for bushes and briers had obscured the principal artery so effectively that there was no way to distinguish it from the rest of the forest unless one knew where to look. He hacked a way through using his Maglite and continued along the path, almost losing his way twice more when it once again began to disappear. As he drew nearer to the Site, he noticed that more and more trees were dying, and that the patch of bog at the island’s center appeared to be increasing in size. Still water lay like a black mirror, almost level with the narrow causeway formed by the trail as it crossed the marsh. If heavy rains came in the spring, the trail would be submerged. Here the greenery was at least understandable, leaf retention being reasonably common among bog plants. Bog rosemary, bog laurel, and labrador tea grew steadily beside green tubular pitcher plants, the remains of insects still trapped in their inner pools. The trees here appeared stunted, their trunks lost beneath the encroaching bog. Others had their shallow roots layered with a dark green sphagnum moss and lush, creeping vines. The life here was hidden, visible only to those who were patient and knowledgeable enough for it to reveal itself: back swimmers and beetles, dragonfly larvae and mayfly nymphs, and smaller mammals like voles and squirrels moved busily through this world. What seemed quiet and dead was secretly alive; wary, but alive.