Here I come.
Fort Riley, when I find it, sits on the northern lip of Portsmouth Harbor, a castle keep built on a cliff wall, staring out at the sea. For a couple hundred years it was an active United States Army fort, minding the coast during the Revolution, the War of 1812, all the way up to World War II, when civil reserves in green helmets would sit in seaside redoubts like this one, up and down the coast, peering out at the northern Atlantic for U-boats. For half a century Riley was a state park and historical site; now it’s where Brett Cavatone, my missing man, has come to make camp. I turn off the highway into the parking lot, a long narrow spit of gravel with dense woods to the left and, to the right, the high tumbling stone wall of the old fort itself.
I get off the bike and lift Houdini from the wagon and set him down in the gravel. My chest is thick with anticipation. The air smells like the sea. He’s here, I’m thinking. This is it. Hello, sir. My name is Henry Palace.
I walk slowly down the length of the parking lot, hands out of my pockets and slightly raised, a picture of harmlessness, in case anyone is watching—anyone with a pair of sniper rifles and reason to be wary of visitors. There’s one car in the lot, a gray Buick LeSabre with Quebec plates and all four tires shot out. In the backseat, a teddy bear and an Uno deck. The entrance to the fort is all the way at the end of the parking lot, an arched doorway just where the stone wall bends away to the south and the gravel ends in grass and weeds. Farther on is the ocean.
Put down your weapons, sir. Your wife would like you to come home.
“Okay,” I say, to no one, or to the dog I guess, but then I see that he’s decided to stay back by the bicycle. I turn around and he’s way back up there where the parking lot begins, skittering back and forth between the chained-up ten-speed and our supply wagon. I gesture to my right, around the corner of the wall, into the fort proper.
“You coming?”
Houdini doesn’t answer. He growls uneasily, sniffs at the ground. “All right,” I tell him. “You stay there.”
The buildings of the fort, half a dozen tottering stone piles and decomposing wooden ruins, are scattered over one big uneven hill—an acre or acre and a half of muddy grassland, sloping down toward a cliff over the water. The layout is as haphazard as might be expected of a centuries-old military campus, built piecemeal by different commanders at different times for different purposes. It’s all centered around one structure, though: the blockhouse, a wooden tower on a sturdy granite base, rising high above the center of the fortland like a birthday cake. The blockhouse could be somebody’s tidy colonial house, a charming white-sided vacation home overlooking scenic Portsmouth Harbor, except that it’s perfectly octagonal and slitted all around its eastern faces with narrow rifle ports, for spotting incoming ships and shooting at them.
I shade my eyes and look up at the narrow windows. He might be up there. He might be in any of these buildings. Cautiously I pick my way through the mud and seagrass, over the foundation stones like flat gravestones, alert for the presence of Brett.
The rifleman’s house is a square red-brick building, as small as a one-room schoolhouse. A cornerstone announces the structure’s provenance of 1834, but there is no roof; maybe it was never completed, or maybe the tiles were repurposed by the army when this fort was decommissioned, or maybe they were stripped last month by looters and carted away like Sergeant Thunder’s brick shed.
I linger there in the roofless shelter. This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things. In fifty years, everything will look this way, desolate and quiet and overgrown. Not even fifty years—next year—by the end of this one.
I make my way carefully down the gentle slope to the granite wall that rings the fort’s easternmost edge. There’s a narrow trench dug into the mud just in front of the wall, except it’s not a trench at all, it’s an entrance, a stairhead carved out of the wet ground. A gash in the base of the wall, and then a short steep staircase into a dark chamber with a wet clay floor. The room is dank and close, as long and narrow as the barrel of a gun. A brass plate screwed into the granite wall identifies the room with an unfamiliar word: caponier. It smells like brine and fish and ancient mud. Light seeps in through nine high slit windows along the eastern face.
I am too tall, in a room like this. It bears down on me, coffin-like, and I can hear my heart beating, experience an unexpected sharp awareness of my body’s functioning as a machine.
I walk slowly across the room and lean into one of those slitted windows and squint. To the south there’s a lighthouse, to the north, uninterrupted miles of Maine coast. Way out on the horizon is the tiny black dot of an incoming ship and, twenty degrees to its left along the blue-green horizon, the tiny black dot of another. I stare for a minute, watching them come.
They must come all day. Big ships, their holds packed with desperate cargo, famished and exhausted, people from all over the world, the Eastern Hemisphere emptying itself out.
As I watch I see a third one, another speck on the far edge of the horizon, almost to the lighthouse on the harbor’s southern lip. I have a sudden vivid picture of the earth as flat, a tray, covered in marbles, and someone is tilting it, and the marbles are rolling, cascading, from east to west.
“It is hard to imagine the conditions onboard those ships.”
A voice deep and calm, and then there’s the scrape of a boot heel behind me, and I take a breath and turn around and there he is at last.
“The countries of origin, many of them, were impoverished to begin with,” says Brett Cavatone, his voice soft, even, scholarly. “More so since Maia. The ships are packed with travelers. They live in darkness, below decks in miserable dank holds, crawling with rats and bugs.” His beard has grown in more, thickened into a dense black jungle. His eyes are deep set and black as a well. “It is hard to conceive of what they eat, on those ships, or how they drink. Still they come.”
“Officer Cavatone, my name is Henry Palace. I’m from Concord.” He doesn’t respond. I keep talking. “Martha asked me to find you. She wants you to come home.”
Brett’s face betrays no surprise or confusion at this announcement. He doesn’t ask, as I have anticipated, how I found him or why. He just nods his head, once—message received.
“And has Martha found Mr. Cortez?”
“Yes.”
He nods again. “And is Mr. Cortez honoring our bargain?”
“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”
“Good. Then Martha is safe? And healthy?”
“She’s devastated. Heartbroken.”
“She is safe and healthy?”
“Yes.”
Brett nods a third time, nods deeply and closes his eyes, almost bows. “Thank you for coming.”
I hold up my hands. “Wait. Wait.”
It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem real, somehow, that at the end of this journey I should find a thirty-second conversation, a quick fair hearing and then goodbye, thank you for coming.
“Do you have a message for me to bring back to her?”
Brett closes his eyes and steeples his fingers. He’s in camouflage pants but a plain white T-shirt, sandals on his feet. “You may tell her that the asteroid has forced some hard decisions in me, as it has in many of us. Martha will understand what I mean.”