She was looking for you, Robert had said. She said you were nice.
Well, that was her first mistake.
She said you were going to give her a ride.
My stomach turned over, but not from the swell. I fumbled for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
She wasn’t running away. I knew that. Robert knew it too. She’d been looking for me, but she’d run into someone else. I thought of the boat I’d glimpsed that night in Burnt Harbor—its running lights, one red, one green; then darkness, its engine silenced. I remembered the animal crouched in the tree, its wild maddened eyes.
Fishers never leave the mainland.
“Whooee! Wicked cold out there.” Toby ducked beneath the dodger, shaking sleet from his anorak. He stuffed the scoop back into its bin and patted my shoulder. “You seem to have done okay. Here.”
He took the tiller and angled it slightly. The Northern Sky turned toward the far end of the beach. “Now we’re not going into the wind, we’ll make better time. If you can handle it for a few more minutes, I’ll go down and fire up the Coleman stove and heat us up some coffee, how’s that?”
“Sounds great.”
He grabbed the mugs and went below. I stood, brooding, as we drew closer to the island. Great reddish boulders were scattered on the rocky shore. On the cliffs above the beach, spindly stands of evergreen and birch. A glitter among the trees indicated a house or outbuildings.
Toby returned with two steaming mugs. “Here you go.”
I stared at the island. “It’s so big.”
“Don’t forget there was a whole village once.”
I raised the mug to my face, pressing it against my cheek until it burned. “I can’t believe you just come and go from here.”
“Not often. Fishermen do it all the time.”
“Yeah, and freeze to death for a living.”
“You think we have a choice? Places like Paswegas, we’re like Custer’s Last Stand. People from away, developers—they’re killing us. They move here from New Jersey and New York and they don’t want to let us hunt our own land anymore. The fishermen can’t catch fish. Red tide kills the clammers. We get your Lyme ticks, and your Nile mosquitoes … every bad thing we used to hide from, finds us now. Away isn’t ‘away’ anymore. It’s here.”
He didn’t sound angry the way Suze had: only resigned and sad. I sipped some coffee and scalded my tongue. Didn’t feel bad at all.
“I saw something,” I said. I backed up against the dodger, out of the wind. “Back on Paswegas. An animal, in those pine trees by Aphrodite’s house. I think it was that thing you told me about. A fisher.”
“What’d it look like?”
“Kind of big, or biggish. Black-brown, like a little bear but with a long tail. A lot of fur. It snarled at me.”
“Was it on the ground?”
“It was in a tree. Aphrodite’s dogs came running up, and it climbed away or jumped off or something. I’m sure it was a fisher.”
“Huh.” Toby sipped his coffee and steered the boat toward a long pier that seemed to be made of rusty metal. As we drew closer, I saw that it wasn’t metal but stone, the same bloody color as the boulders on shore. “It does sound like a fisher.”
“When I mentioned it to Suze, she thought I was crazy. She said it was impossible for a fisher to get out to one of the islands.”
“Well, that’s true. But if you saw it … people see things all the time. Wolves, mountain lions. Not on the islands, but back there—”
He cocked his head toward the mainland. “People report them to Fish and Wildlife, but the feds don’t want to admit they’re back in Maine. Once they admit we got mountain lions and wolves living here, you have a whole lot of issues about endangered species. Also a whole lot of pissed-off farmers and hunters, ‘cause the wolves and cougars eat their livestock, and they thin out the deer herd. But they’re here, all right.”
I felt a faint tingling on my neck. “So it’s theoretically possible for a fisher to be there, even if no one’s ever seen one before?”
“Sure. I mean, moose have swum out to the islands, and coyotes and foxes. Back a hundred years ago, there was one or two winters so bad there were places where the reach would freeze, and animals could walk over. You don’t usually find big pine trees on the islands anymore—they were all cut for lumber, or to make masts. Plus they don’t like the salt air. But there’s a few big pines on Paswegas, and there’s a couple of really big ones here on Tolba. So you could have porcupines, and maybe you could have a fisher. Anything’s possible.”
I finished my coffee. “You got any food down there?”
“Yeah, go and poke around in the galley, you’ll find something.”
I went below. It wasn’t exactly warm, but it was out of the wind and rain. Quiet, too. Well, not quiet, exactly, but the sounds were different. Rain slashing against the porthole windows, mildly ominous creakings, the drone of the engine. I sat and pulled a blanket around my shoulders. After a few minutes I went to the galley to see what I could find to eat.
There was enough rum and Moxie to qualify as an alternative energy source, but not a lot of what you’d call food. A few sprouting potatoes, a couple cans of tomato sauce. I found a half-full bag of green apples that seemed okay, also a box of blueberry Pop Tarts. I ate an apple then wolfed down Pop Tarts while rummaging through cupboards to see what more there was.
String, a corkscrew, plastic condiment packets. A bottom drawer held a first-aid kit, fishing line and hooks, matches in a waterproof tin. Aspirin, Ipecac, Benadryl. I shoved them aside and saw something else.
A flare gun.
I picked it up. About five inches long, made of plastic, with a black barrel and orange trigger. I checked the barrel. There was a single red canister inside. I held it, thinking, put it into the drawer and went back up on deck.
“Find something?”
“Some Pop Tarts.”
“Yeah, I bought a case of those for Y2K.”
I stood beside him at the tiller and watched black water slop against blocks of rose-colored stone. In the sleety mist it was hard to tell where the pier ended and the beach began. Granite blocks blended into boulders, boulders faded into reddish sand indistinguishable from stunted trees killed by salt and cold. A line of spruces well above the waterline glowed a green so deep it was almost black. Here and there, a black gleam as of eyes gazed back from the trees. A house.
“Is that where we’re going?” I asked.
“That’s it. Mr. Ryel’s Dream House.”
I thought we’d pull up to the pier. Instead, the Northern Sky angled off toward a pair of round floats. A lobster buoy bobbed nearby.
“Take this,” said Toby, leaving the tiller to me. “I’m going to cut the engine. Try to keep us from drifting away from those floats.”
He went below. The engine died. The only thing I could hear was the roar of the wind and the crash of waves on the rocky beach.
“This is a good mooring,” Toby shouted as he headed toward the stern. “We’ll tie up here and take the dinghy to shore. The boat’ll be safer if the weather gets rough.”
“Will it get worse?”
“Don’t know. It seems to be dying down now, but that could just be the eye. Whyn’t you get your stuff from below. That way if we end up staying over at Lucien’s place you’ll have it.”
He started to tie off the boat. I climbed down to the cabin and got my bag, put my camera back inside, checked to make sure my copy of Deceptio Visus was still safe. I opened it, flipping through the pages until I found the prints I’d made in the basement, the contact sheets and the other two. Aphrodite’s photo of the naked man I now knew must be Denny Ahearn, and Denny’s photo of Hannah Meadows. I looked at them then put them aside and stared at the snapshot of Gryffin.