Quinn’s family came from Philadelphia when his parents chose to trade the high-pressure life of working in a city hospital for a more laid-back island lifestyle.
My family’s journey was more out of necessity. Dad was a civil engineer who worked for years in city planning in my home town of Greenwich, Connecticut. When the economy went sour, he got laid off and decided to move us to Pemberwick to try something new, which turned out to be starting his own gardening business. It wasn’t the most glamorous job but there was definitely a need, seeing as so many rich people wanted their summer places to look brochure-worthy. So Dad went from planning the growth of a city to planning the growth of petunias.
Though he was raking in a lot more grass than money, Dad seemed to like living here. Mom did too. She was an accountant who did freelance work for many of the small businesses on the island. She often talked about how much fun she was having meeting new people and helping them with their work. As far as I could tell, neither missed our former life—which was cool—but it didn’t seem fair that somebody like my dad could work so hard to get through school and earn a big fat degree and slave for years to build a career only to be tossed on the trash heap because some budget needed to be balanced. That wasn’t right. My parents always tell me to work hard in school because it’ll lead to a good career and a good life. Well, my father did exactly that and got dumped like a dead battery. If it could happen to him, a guy who does nothing but the right thing, it could happen to anybody.
It makes me wonder what the point of it all is. Why work so hard to try to get ahead if the rug can be pulled out without warning? Or you drop dead during a football game? Maybe that’s why I don’t try all that hard in school. I figure that whatever comes my way I’ll deal, but I won’t bother sweating about it until then. That way I’ll never have to feel as though I got burned.
Quinn doesn’t agree with that. He’s all about piling on the AP courses and building his resume to get into some great school and set himself up to do something important…whatever that might be. It’s pretty much the only thing we don’t agree on. But that’s okay. Whatever happens, we’ll always have each other’s back.
As I sat in the cruiser watching the helicopter make passes over the ocean, another vehicle drove up. The headlights were right in my face so I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it looked to be a pickup. It stopped about thirty yards away. The driver got out as Sheriff Laska came over to greet him. He was an older guy wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Because he was backlit by his own headlights I didn’t recognize him, but he looked to be tall and solid—your basic islander. He spoke to Laska and they shook hands as Deputy Donald joined them. Laska introduced them and started back toward me. As he walked, he motioned for Quinn and our parents to join us. We all converged at his Jeep.
“Who was that?” I asked, pointing to the guy in the plaid shirt.
“Another witness,” Laska replied. “Guess he was the fella you two saw riding his horse on the bluff. Deputy Donald’s taking his statement now.”
“So he’s okay?” I asked. “We thought he got hurt by the explosion.”
“Seems fine,” Laska said. “And his story matches yours.”
“Of course it does,” Quinn exclaimed. “Why would we make this up?’
“Quinlan!” Quinn’s mom scolded.
“Aw, c’mon,” Quinn protested. “We’ve been getting grilled like we’re trying to pull off some kind of prank. Is that what happens to people who do their civic duty?”
“Enough,” Quinn’s dad snapped.
“It’s okay, Doctor Carr,” Laska said. “We have been putting them through the ringer.”
“See?” Quinn exclaimed. “Whose side are you on, Dad?”
Doctor Carr rolled his eyes. He was used to Quinn being argumentative.
Quinn gave me a quick wink. I knew what he was doing. He was putting everybody else on the defensive so we didn’t have to be. There was no way we were going to get in trouble for lying about being in bed and riding our bikes out there.
“Look,” Laska said with patience. “You have to admit it’s a wild story. You can’t expect us to buy it just like that. We have to do our job.”
“I understand,” Quinn said. “Continue.”
I had to keep from smiling. Laska may have been the law but Quinn was calling the shots.
“The Coast Guard’s leading the inquiry,” Laska said. “It’s their jurisdiction. So far they haven’t had any reports of a boat or a plane missing.”
“I don’t think it was either,” Quinn said.
“And what exactly do you think it was?” Doctor Carr asked.
“A UFO,” Quinn stated bluntly.
That got nothing but surprised gasps from our parents, and from me. Quinn hadn’t mentioned that before.
“What?” Quinn said defensively. “I’m not saying it was from Mars. But it was flying, and we couldn’t tell what it was. It didn’t look like any kind of plane I’d ever seen. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a UFO?”
It was hard to argue with his logic.
“Whatever it was,” Laska said, “we believe you saw something. So does the Coast Guard and they’re going to figure out exactly what it was. So why don’t you all go on home and we’ll let you know if anything turns up.”
“What about the truck?” I asked.
“What truck?” Laska replied.
“The pickup I told you about that was parked out on the bluff a little way back.”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “I told Donny all about it.”
“Deputy Donald,” the sheriff corrected.
“Whatever.”
“There’s no truck back there,” Laska said. “We checked that out first thing.”
Quinn and I exchanged looks. Of all the things we had witnessed, the lone pickup truck was probably the least strange—until now. Had something happened to it when the shadow exploded? Or had there been yet another witness on the bluffs who drove off after the fireworks?
“We’ll check it out,” Laska added. “Now head on home and let us do our job.”
Quinn’s mom put her arm around Quinn’s shoulder. She looked tired. So did her husband. I’d almost forgotten that they had been working late that night. I wondered if they had gotten the call from Quinn when they were in the middle of Marty’s autopsy. I did my best to shake that image.
“We still working tomorrow?” Quinn asked me.
I looked to my dad, who said, “That’s up to you guys.”
Quinn and I worked for Dad on Saturdays, helping out with his gardening business.
I shrugged. “Better than sitting around.”
After a few quick goodbyes, we got in our respective family SUVs and headed back toward town. I sat in back, fully awake, wondering if I could calm down enough to sleep. Ever.
“Are you okay, Tucker?” Mom asked.
I shrugged.
“Hell of a night,” Dad said.
“Understatement,” I replied.
“So you snuck out of the house to go riding in the middle of the night?” Mom asked.
There it was.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
There was a long silence. There were two directions this questioning could take. I didn’t particularly want to follow either of them.
Dad said, “So it was a moving shadow? Then a flash of light and it exploded? Are you sure it was an explosion?”
The new direction was set.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s not like I’ve seen a whole lot of explosions outside of the movies. It was a big flash of light and a huge boom and we were knocked to the ground. To me that says explosion.”
Mom and Dad exchanged worried looks.
“Could be a naval exercise,” Dad said. “They do all sorts of things without making an announcement.”
“Maybe it’s some new secret weapon,” I offered. “Like a drone.”
“Could be,” Dad said thoughtfully. “If that’s the case,
you can bet we won’t be reading about it in the paper. Five cents says we’ll never know.”
Mom wasn’t going to let it go as easily. Not the shadow-explosion, though; the after-hours tour.
“You shouldn’t be going out like that so late at night,” she said. “What if you got hurt?”
“I’m not a kid, Mom,” I argued.
“I don’t care how old you are, Tucker Pierce,” she shot back. “Traipsing around in the dark is dangerous.”
“I hear you. I’m not an idiot. I just wish you’d worry about something else besides me getting hurt all the time.”
She threw me a stern look over her shoulder and said, “Sorry. It’s my job.”
“And might I add that you’re very good at it,” I said.
That made Mom smile. Dad too.
It was indeed her job. After all I’d seen that night, I wanted to embrace that fact. I wanted my parents to take care of all the bad stuff and make it go away. I didn’t want to have to deal with un-explainable phenomena and police interrogations and mysterious witnesses, and most of all I did not want to have to deal with death. All I wanted was to hang out on my island home, play a little football, and help my father dig gardens.
Pemberwick was an incredible place to live…the kind of place that people chose to visit when they could go anywhere else. They came to my island to enjoy the warm days and mellow atmosphere and swim in the ocean and eat lobster and watch the sea grass sway while the sun sets over the rolling surf. For most people it’s an escape from reality. For me it’s home. I didn’t want to deal with disturbing events that made it seem like something other than paradise.
Was that too much to ask?
FOUR
“Nots?”
“Not nots,” said Quinn impatiently. “Knots. With a k, like they put on the front of knife for some reason I never understood. You can tell a lot about people by the way they tie knots.”
“You are so odd.”
Quinn and I were taking a lunch break from work. It was Saturday morning, the day after the game. Saturday was the day that football players rested up and healed. Most of them, anyway. I’d only been in the game for a total of five plays and didn’t need a whole lot of recovery. Any soreness I felt wasn’t from football. It hurts to get thrown off your bike by a mysterious exploding shadow.
Working for my dad meant grunt work. We raked leaves and mowed grass and pulled weeds and did any number of other brainless tasks that weren’t exactly fun, but Dad paid us pretty well and it was work he didn’t have to do himself, so everybody won.
“It’s true, Tuck,” Quinn continued. “Observe.”
We were sitting on a bench in the town square drinking canned iced teas, trying to stay cool in the shade. It was early September and hotter than it had been all summer. Across the street was a vintage Ford pickup making a delivery of live lobsters to Lesser’s Fish Market.
“How do you come up with these bizarre theories?” I asked. “Was it on one of those cable shows you watch at two in the morning?”
“No. I’m just a brilliant student of human nature,” he replied quickly. “Watch and tell me I’m wrong.”
A girl carrying a Styrofoam cooler strode out of the store, headed for the pickup. It was Tori Sleeper, a girl from our class. Her Saturday job was to help her father with his lobster business. Tori was cute, but odd. She had long dark brown wavy hair that she kept tied back in a practical ponytail. She usually wore equally practical jeans and T-shirts, along with a faded University of Southern Maine baseball cap. I never saw her hanging out with anybody our age, which was strange considering how small our school was. The few times I tried talking to her she answered in monosyllables. I couldn’t tell if she was brilliant, aloof, or brain-dead. I guess you’d call her an enigma.
I kind of liked that.
“And we begin,” Quinn announced.
Tori tossed the cooler into the back of the pickup next to a bunch of others and grabbed the edge of a bright blue tarp. She deftly yanked the tarp over the coolers, then grabbed a rope that dangled from a grommet and in one quick move threaded it through a tie-down hook. She snapped the line tight and expertly tied a…whatever knot to secure the whole rig. The procedure took less than five seconds.
“Impressive,” I said.
“I’m telling you, Tuck,” Quinn said. “That shows confidence, intelligence, and creativity.”
“Or it just shows that she can tie a knot.”
Quinn shook his head in disappointment. “Look beyond the superficial, my narrow-minded friend. There’s so much to be learned from the minutia of human behavior. Now, go talk to her.”
“What? Why?”
“You’ve been wanting to ask her out for months. But you haven’t. Why? Because she’s intimidating and you think you’ve got nothing interesting to talk about. But that’s not the case anymore, is it? Now you can tell her all about unexplained celestial phenomena.”
I felt panic rising. “No! I mean, who said I wanted to ask her out?”
“Be serious,” he said impatiently. “Whenever she’s around, you get all quiet and start this hypnotic staring thing. It’s kind of creepy, to be honest.”
“Maybe I think she’s a freak.”
“And maybe you’ve got to start taking some risks. Nothing ventured, and all that.”
“I don’t want to ask her out.”
“You don’t want to get shot down. There’s a difference.”
He killed his iced tea, tossed the can to me, and stood up.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To prove my theory,” he said and headed for the truck.
I couldn’t be sure what theory he was talking about, he spewed so many, but before I could stop him, Quinn marched right up to Tori and started talking fast. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he kept waving his arms for emphasis while she occasionally glanced across the street—at me.
Uh-oh. I sat up straight, suddenly self-conscious. But Tori didn’t seem particularly amused or even interested. To be honest, I did think she was—what’s the word?—different. But in a good way. I didn’t go for the giggly girls who always seemed to be hatching plots against one another. Tori couldn’t be bothered with that kind of drama. Question was, what sort of drama did interest her? I kind of wanted to know, but Quinn was right. She intimidated me.
Thankfully, a guy who I figured was Tori’s father came out of Lesser’s and that broke her away from Quinn. The two got into their truck and drove off, leaving a cloud of exhaust.
Quinn watched them for a second, then strode back toward me wearing a smug smile.
“See?” he announced with pride. “I was one hundred percent correct.”
“About what?”
“She’s not only astute but incredibly intelligent.”
“How did you get that? She didn’t say a word.”
“She didn’t have to. Her look said it all.”
“What look?”
“The look she gave me when I told her you think she’s hot. She wants nothing to do with you, by the way.”
“What!” I shouted, horrified.
“No, this is good. Most girls would have giggled and blushed but she didn’t even blink. That shows self-confidence. I’m telling you, son, it’s all in the knots.”
I threw his crumpled can at him, bouncing it off his chest.
“I’ll put a knot in your head!” I shouted.
Quinn laughed and backed off. “I was just proving a point! Now you don’t have to suffer the rejection of getting shot down. You owe me.”
He turned to run and I was right after him, more embarrassed than angry. I never knew what Quinn would do next, though that’s one of the reasons I liked him. He pushed people’s buttons just to see their reaction. I was used to it, even when it was at my expense, which was often. It’s what made Quinn Quinn.
We went back to work at the Blackbird Inn. It was a huge old Victorian mansion that had once belonged to some sea captain but had lon
g since been converted into a hotel for people who liked to pretend they were vacationing in another era. It was one of Dad’s biggest accounts because of its huge lawn and dozens of flower beds. Our job that day was to mow the expansive lawn. It was grueling work but I always took pride in how good it all looked when we were done—which would have been a lot sooner if the two of us hadn’t been moving like zombies. It’s tough doing manual labor on two hours of sleep.
“I can’t believe you haven’t asked me yet,” Quinn said as he dumped a tarp full of grass clippings into a wheelbarrow.
“Asked you what?”
“About Marty. Don’t you want to know why he died? The autopsy, remember?”
“I was trying to forget. What happened?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I whacked him on the back of the head with the handle of my rake.
“You’re such an a-hole,” I said.
“I’m not! It’s unethical to discuss medical cases.”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“Because I can’t tell you what happened.” He lowered his voice and added conspiratorially, “But it isn’t unethical to tell you what didn’t happen.”
I stared at him for a long moment, then whacked him on the back of the head again. “Cut the riddles,” I commanded.
Quinn looked around to see if anybody was listening, then continued softly. “The autopsy turned up zip.”
“Define zip,” I demanded. “There had to be something. I mean, the guy died.”
“There wasn’t. He didn’t have any heart problems; there was nothing wrong with his brain; there weren’t any drugs in his system or disease or abnormality of any kind. The guy just stopped living.”
That was disturbing news. I had hoped to hear that Marty had a previously undetected heart condition or rare genetic defect or anything else that would explain why the most athletic guy in school had suddenly become the most dead guy in school. A rare medical condition would have meant his problem was a tragic but understandable fluke. Having no explanation meant the same thing could happen to anybody.
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