“Lance Cabot.”
“It’s Holly.”
“I thought you would have drowned by now.”
“Near enough. Do you know one of your people named John Collins?”
“Perhaps,” Lance said.
“Is he supposed to be in Maine?”
Lance was quiet for a long moment. “How bad?”
“Fatal.”
“Means?”
“Two to the head. Happened on the ferry, which hasn’t run since last night.”
“Perhaps you’d better stay there for a while.”
“Where else am I going to go?”
“I know you’re due back in New York. Don’t go.”
“I can’t swim that far.”
“Has the state police become involved?”
“The island-based Sergeant Young is at Stone’s lunch table as we speak.”
“I don’t want them to have the body.”
“Nobody can move it in the present weather.”
“Ask the sergeant to move it to Stone’s garage at the first opportunity, then to call me on this line. You stay where you are and watch your ass.” Lance hung up.
Holly returned to the table. “That was Lance Cabot on the phone. You’re about to have another guest, Stone; one John Collins, says Lance. Sergeant,” she said, handing him a note. “Please call Lance at this number as soon as you’re able. He asks that you not remove the body from the island but store it in Stone’s garage.”
“So now I’m running a mortuary?” Stone asked.
“Looks like it. They won’t be able to get a chopper in here today.”
“I’ll have to call my captain,” the sergeant said.
“If I know Lance, he’s doing that right now. Call him before you speak to your captain.” The sergeant’s cell phone rang. He walked away from the table and answered it, then returned. “Stone, you have an ice machine, don’t you?”
“Two of them.”
“Can I borrow some plastic garbage bags and all your ice?”
“Leave enough to fill a few whiskey glasses,” Stone replied.
The sergeant nodded. “Somebody from our station told me that we’re going to get more rain here this weekend than we’ve had since the hurricane of ’47. That one was about nineteen inches, as I recall.”
“Stone,” Ed Rawls said, “if we get that much rain, your two boats down at the dock are going to end up on your back lawn.”
“As long as they don’t end up in my living room,” Stone said.
After lunch, everybody had a glass of whiskey, because there wasn’t anything else to do. Around nightfall, the sergeant’s colleagues deposited the remains of John Collins in the garage, next to Stone’s MG TF 1500, with bags of ice around him. Stone and Holly both had a good look at him.
“Know him?” Stone asked.
“No,” she said, snapping the man’s photo with her iPhone. “But Lance might.”
3
Stone slept longer than usual, and so did Holly. He got up and looked out a window: it was still raining, but not as much, and occasionally, a bit of blue sky could be seen. He switched on the TV, muted it to let Holly sleep, and looked at the weather radar. “Oh, good,” he said to himself.
Stone was at breakfast when Holly came down, dressed, but looking a bit bleary. “What’s happened?” she asked, sitting down. “Why is the rain gone?”
“Are you complaining?” Stone asked.
“No, just disoriented. I’ve grown accustomed to wind, rain, and thunder.”
“God changed his mind. Live with it.” He sipped his coffee. “We may be able to fly today.”
“Lance said I can’t go back to New York,” she said.
“Where does he want you to go?”
“He wants me to stay here, until he says I can return to Washington.”
“I guess I can stand one more day here,” Stone said, “but tomorrow we’re flying or you’re enjoying Maine on your own.”
“There’s a reason he doesn’t want me to return yet.”
“What reason?”
“He didn’t say. But Lance never gives suggestions without a reason. Has anybody checked on John Collins?”
“Still dead, and Seth has refreshed his ice packs.”
“Good.”
“Which part?”
“The ice packs.”
“You said Lance knows Collins?”
“He said he does, but he may not.”
“Either I’m confused, or Lance is.”
“What I heard on the phone yesterday was Lance being baffled. He told me he may know Collins, because he doesn’t want us to know he doesn’t know him.”
“Now I’m baffled,” Stone said.
“Lance cultivates an air of knowing everything.”
“I’ve noticed that,” Stone said.
“Sometimes, if he doesn’t, he pretends to. When we next hear from him he will have had time to find out what he doesn’t know. I sent him the photograph of the corpse. Maybe that will help him order his mind.”
They heard a distant ringing.
“That’s the phone in the little office.” Holly got up and trotted in that direction. She had been spending a couple hours a day tending to White House business and dealing with various issues.
“Hello?”
“It’s Lance.”
“Good morning.”
“Is it? Has the torrential rain gone away?”
“Sort of. Have you learned anything new about Mr. Collins?”
“I have. Mr. Collins doesn’t exist.”
“That’s fairly obvious. I mean, he hasn’t complained about the ice.”
“You misunderstand. There is no one by that name employed by the Agency in any capacity. I ran the photo you sent through our identity recognition software, which is the best in the world, and he apparently doesn’t exist anywhere.”
“Has that ever happened before?”
“Early on, when we were still getting the bugs out of the software, but not recently. There is no record, anywhere, of his fingerprints, either.”
“I didn’t send you his fingerprints.”
“The Maine State Police did.”
“Shall we return the corpse to them? It’s technically in their custody, anyway.”
“They’ll send a chopper down as soon as they can. In the meantime, keep him iced.”
“Don’t worry.”
“You can come back to Washington tomorrow. I’ll tell the Cabinet to expect you.”
“Fine.”
“You may be interested to know that Islesboro has had twenty-one inches of rain during the last two days. It’s a record.”
“I’ll alert the media, such as they are.”
“They already know. I read it in the Bangor newspaper.”
“You’re a subscriber?”
“We subscribe, in one way or another, to every news source in the world.”
“I had forgotten.”
“For shame.” Lance hung up, and Holly went back to the table and reported the news to Stone.
At midday, a police chopper set down at the airfield and an ambulance met them there, the ferry service having been restored. They came to Stone’s house, removed the corpse, then flew it away.
Seth, without being told, disinfected and pressure-washed the garage floor, then left the outside door open to hurry the drying. Mr. Collins was no longer a houseguest.
4
The following day, Stone freed his airplane from its bonds, and since he had only Holly and half the fuel aboard, he got it off the runway in an amazingly short distance and flew back to Teterboro, where he turned the aircraft over to the people in the Strategic Services hangar and Holly over to the Air Force One crew, for transfer to Washington, and he was met by his factotum, Fred, in the Bentley and driven home.
Stone was greeted by his secretary, Joan Robertson, as he walked into his office. “There’s little to warrant your attention,” she said, “since I have proceeded on the basis that you would not return until the snow flies. You may go back to Maine now, if you wish.”