by Nick Pirog
As I passed through the tire entrance roughly at three miles per hour, I made out close to fifteen kids meandering on the small wooden pier. There was one runt I rooted for each time whose name was Kellon. He was a foot smaller than the other boys and looked like he still belonged on his momma’s tit.
Kellon was the only one to notice my boat penetrate the harbor and stealthily entered the water. He had about a twenty-second head start before any of the other kids took notice and dove in. He was within ten feet, splashing up so much water he was hardly visible, when he was overtaken by a couple of the elder boys.
I ran to the edge of the boat and shouted, “Come on, Kellon! Come on, buddy! You can do it. Show these kids who owns this friggin’ town.”
The elders were pulling themselves over the side when they kept accidentally falling back in. When Kellon finally reached the hull, I leaned over the edge and snatched him from the surf. Then I stood him on the railing and whispered in his ear, “Tell the big kids who owns this town.”
He took a deep breath and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Kellon owes dis fwiggin’ town.”
Now, I didn’t like kids much, but if I said I wasn’t looking for a place to stow him, I’d be lying. He was about three beer bottles tall, with brown eyes the size of half dollars, and missing his four front teeth. With him on the railing, I was only a couple inches taller than him and before I knew it, the guy was wrapped around my neck like a koala.
From previous conversations, I knew Kellon was seven, had a bit of a lisp, and boats were his favorite thing in the “wool-wide-wuld.”
I let him go to work and watched in silence as he jimmied the sails and expertly navigated the boat to my designated slip. It was common knowledge that slot 23B belonged to Thomas Prescott, aka, Captain Dipshit.
The marina manager was Kellon’s dad, and instead of giving Kellon a Franklin, he gave him a Dr. Pepper. What a lame-o. Plus, the kid needed Ritalin, not caffeine.
I took out my wallet to pay him, but unless Kellon took plastic, he was shit out of luck.
I hauled the cooler and chair out of the boat and Kellon insisted on carrying the cooler to the car for me. When everything was tucked away in the trunk of my Range Rover I asked him, “What’s your second favorite thing in the whole wide world?”
He stared at the ground deep in thought, then brown eyes bulging, yelled, “Kwytes!”
Then a kite it was.
I screeched out of the dirt parking lot and onto a long expanse of leaf-checkered road, Maine once again impressing me with the wide spectrum of colors at its disposal.
I’d grown up near the Puget Sound which is beautiful in its own right, but it couldn’t compete with the majesty of Maine. The road in front of me wrapped around a jutting mountain before straightening out, and I floored the gas, putting all 320 of the Range Rover’s horses to work.
There was a front coming in over the Atlantic, and the ocean and sky were beginning to mesh into gray. I squealed around an inlet and thanked God I was off the water. If I were inept when the conditions were perfect, I could only imagine how quickly I would find a way to die if the waves reached two feet. Speaking of the waves, they were beginning to pick up in their intensity, smashing against the rock banks, turning frothy milk white then vanishing between the cracks.
I grabbed my cell phone from the glove compartment and the display screen showed I had three new messages. The first message was from my sister’s boyfriend, Conner, reminding me of our rowing engagement the following morning. The second was Lacy relaying she wasn’t “hip to cooking” and that I should pick up something on the way home. The final message blindsided me and I slammed on the brakes, the Range Rover fishtailing twice before coming to rest courtesy of Maine’s many miles of coastal guardrail.
I replayed the message. It was Caitlin. She was wondering how I was doing and wanted to get together for dinner. I hadn’t talked to Caitlin in over a month. I wondered what had prompted the call. Possibly the anniversary of the first murder. Perhaps my sitting in my car outside her house last night for close to five hours. It could be any number of things.
Unable to banish Caitlin’s message from thought, I nearly missed the exit for the town of Belfast. I navigated through the small coastal town and saw the bustling of September coming to an end. People were packing up for the winter and businesses were liquidating merchandise. The 25% OFF signs of a week ago had been swapped out for 50% OFF, and in another week those would be replaced with YOU NAME THE PRICE.
I stopped at an Italian restaurant called Angelini’s and read the sign in the window: “Last day October 10th, see you in May.” (Maine literally closed down from mid-October to late May. Technically speaking, the population of Maine plummeted from 537 to somewhere around 300.)
I ordered two meatball sandwiches from Angelini and inquired if there were any bookstores nearby. He directed me to a store in the same complex and said he could have two fresh sandwiches ready for me in about ten minutes if I wanted to check out the store.
The Bookrack was owned by a fifty-something gal named Margery. Margery had coke bottle lenses held within light pink frames and her white hair was styled soft serve vanilla making her look closer to eighty than sixty. Margery told me she didn’t have any copies of Eight in October at the “pres-ant mom-ant,” but was expecting another shipment in the next couple days.
These mom-and-pop stores are all the same and I told Margery that if she could somehow find it in her heart to rummage up a copy of Eight in October I would buy at least two other hardback novels. Five minutes later, I left the Bookrack with a bag containing Michael Crichton’s latest novel I got a 1550 on my SATs! What’d you get, stupid?, Sailing for Idiots, and Eight in October.
Back in the car, I took Route 1 northbound to the town of Surry. I passed the legendary Lighthouse Museum (historical side note: The Lighthouse Museum houses the largest collection of lighthouse lenses in the world) and turned onto a small street leading to the Surry Woods. The houses in Surry Woods are separated by miles of oaks, maples, and firs, and if you’re going out to your mailbox, you should think about packing a lunch.
I drove for a half mile, went down a steep hill, found the dirt entrance to 14 Surry Woods Drive, wound eastward for a short par three, and parked in an immense leaf-strewn yard.
My sister and I moved into the large, three-story Colonial about ten months ago, Christmas Eve to be exact. The house was built in the late 1950s but had been completely restored in the last couple years. The majority of the house was comprised of copper brick and the trim was a ghastly pea green I’d had on my to-do list for, well, the last ten months. I’d had a run in with the house a year ago and fallen in love with the location. Ten miles of woods to the north, south, and west. Three thousand miles of ocean directly east. 14 Surry Woods Drive was literally one of the few places in the world where dense woods visibly met white, sandy beach.
The previous owners gave me a good deal on the house for bringing their daughter’s killer to justice. Who was I to argue?
Walking around the car, I took a gander at my front bumper. The collision with the guardrail was more serious than I’d let on and the bumper looked a little loose. Okay, it was hanging on by a thread.
I marched the seven stones to the front door and was reaching for the doorknob when the flap to the doggie door flew open and something shot through my legs. Unless Baxter stood still it was impossible to discern if he was a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a racquetball. I mean I love dogs but not dogs that are smaller than cats. That goes against everything God intended. I once saw Baxter get beat up by a rabbit. I’m not kidding you. A little white rabbit beat the piss out of him. He wouldn’t leave the house for a month.
I walked through the front door and set the cooler on the kitchen counter, then remembered the sandwiches. I went back out to the car and grabbed the Angelini’s off the passenger seat and noticed that Baxter, at some point, had jumped into the car and falle
n fast asleep on the driver’s seat.
Did I mention Baxter was narcoleptic?
He could fall into the deepest of sleeps at a whim. It took the vet four visits before they diagnosed him with the sleeping disorder.
I nudged the pug with my hand, watched him stir, and then he vanished in a puff of smoke. I’d come to the conclusion that Baxter was half pug, half poltergeist. He was a pugtergeist.
When I walked back into the kitchen, Lacy was emptying the contents of my cooler into the refrigerator, her dark brown hair visible over the top of the refrigerator door. Her voice boomed from behind the stainless steel, “How were the sandwiches?”
“Great. I ate the egg salad and the bologna.”
“You didn’t eat the turkey?” Lacy was world famous for her turkey sandwiches and she stood up, her right hand heavy on her hip. She smiled, “Good. We can eat them tomorrow when you take me painting.”
Painting? Oh, right. “What time do you want to get going?”
“I want to see the sunset.” She laughed. “Well, not see, literally.”
I laughed with her. Lacy was taking her blindness in stride. If you weren’t the wiser, you’d never suspect Lacy’s almost-teal eyes served only for decoration. Lacy had Multiple Sclerosis and her current acute exacerbation, better known as an attack, relapse, or flare, was temporary blindness. According to the doctor, Lacy’s condition was due to an inflammation of her optic nerve. He said this usually clears in four to twelve weeks. It’d been eight weeks since the lights went out for Lace. I prayed every night she would open her eyes and the world would be staring back.
I replied to her painting question, “Sounds good. By the way, I’m rowing with your boy toy in the morning.”
“That’s what I heard. I’m glad you and Conner still hang out even though you and Caitlin broke up.”
Conner was Caitlin’s little brother. Caitlin and I had been the ones to hook up the two of them. “Speaking of Caitlin, she left a message on my phone this afternoon. She wants to get together for dinner. I’ve been brainstorming excuses for the last hour.”
“Tell her you went blind, it always works for me.” She snickered at her own wit and said, “Just kidding. I was the one who told her to call you.”
“What do you mean you ‘told her to call me?’”
“I had lunch with her this afternoon and we talked about you guys. It’s usually an off-limits topic, but I could see how lonely she was. She really misses you. And God knows you’re too stubborn to call her. Even though you’re just as lonely, I might add. The two of you were good. Don’t let another one get away because you’re an idiot.”
Speaking of which, I wondered if they had Relationships for Idiots. I made a mental note to ask Margery next time I was at The Bookrack.
Lacy and I grabbed our sandwiches and retired to the living room. The Italian leather couches, oak entertainment center spanning the wall, and plate glass coffee table came with the house for an extra ten grand. Lacy flopped down on one of the tan couches and picked up the remote. If I were a Mariners’ fan, Lacy was a diehard. She’d forced me to buy some digital cable package where you get every baseball game on the planet (there was even a channel where you could watch little Asian boys play pickle).
Lacy found the Mariners’ playoff game—they were down 5-4 in the seventh—and took a third of her sandwich down in one bite. She smiled, revealing one of Angelini’s mammoth meatballs bulging from each cheek.
I couldn’t help myself and said, “Conner has trained you well.”
Lacy said she was going to bed and I watched her negotiate the stairs flawlessly. I, on the other hand, retreated to the back deck for some leisure reading. I wasn’t cold, but I had goose bumps on my arms and threw a couple logs in the outdoor fireplace. (I’d chided Lacy when she’d first purchased the novelty, but it had come to be my favorite addition to the house.)
The waves washing up thirty yards behind me played lead orchestra to the Surry Breakwater lighthouse’s baritone foghorn.
I cracked open my second copy of Eight in October, the white pages glistened in the moonlight, and I had the eerie feeling the moon was trying to read over my shoulder. I was a half paragraph into Tooms’ description of the third victim when Eight in October reunited with his long lost cousins in the outdoor fireplace. The heart of the book erupted in flames, shimmering the deck in a flaxen glow. I laid back in the chaise lounge, my goose bumps a distant memory.
Chapter 5
I woke up as a couple jaundice-riddled fingers of light began to extend from the horizon. The Surry Breakwater lighthouse floated in the fog, its strident warning coming in thirty second intervals.
I ambled down the deck stairs to the beachfront and did a hundred sit-ups followed by a hundred push-ups, then set off at a brisk trot down the shoreline. The gull-to-sand-grain ratio went from roughly one-to-eight to one-to-none in a matter of twelve seconds. If you’ve never seen a maladroit seagull, you’re one of the lucky ones. It’s almost painful to watch these birds expend so much energy simply to hover. It was the aviary equivalent of only paying the interest on your credit card bill. But enough about birds.
My right quadriceps tightened after a quarter mile and I stopped to knead the muscle with my hands. My right quadriceps was visibly smaller than its left counterpart, and my fingers subconsciously found the bullet’s entry and exit wounds. Both scars were roughly the size of a nickel, and it looked and felt like the tissue was made of cork.
When I set off again, the sun had officially broken the horizon, its rays slowly riding the waves toward shore. It took me twenty minutes to cover the distance to Owl’s Head peninsula, smack the sign with my open palm, and turn around. I covered the distance back in about half the time, sprinting the final three bellows of the foghorn before collapsing in a heap on the white sand.
I glanced into the bay and saw Lacy treading water about thirty yards out. Lacy had been an All State swimmer in high school and had been attending Temple on a swimming scholarship when she was diagnosed with MS. With the onset of her temporary blindness, she began treading water daily for forty-five minutes to keep fit. She must have heard my sandy collapse and screamed, “Conner called ten minutes ago. He said that if you aren’t there in the next ten minutes, he’s hiring a lawyer then killing you.”
The Verona Rowing Club was a large red brick structure surrounded by high terra-cotta walls. There was a group of four women milling around the club entrance, all peeking in my direction as I approached. I wasn’t sure if it was fame or infamy that brought about the stares. Either way, it was unpleasant, and I picked up the pace as I made my way past them. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have walked like I was squeezing a quarter between my butt cheeks, but hindsight’s twenty-twenty. Get it?
As I made my way through the front entrance to the outdoor lockers I could make out Conner stretching on the other side of the bridge, an oar over his shoulders, bent over at the waist. I grabbed my rowing shoes from the locker and ran the last hundred yards up and over the bridge.
Conner caught my final strides and straightened. He had his shirt off and his initials, CED, tattooed across his ripped abdominals. I must have been a sight because his initials were vibrating wickedly.
He said, “What? Rowing isn’t enough of a workout, you have to get a ten mile jog in beforehand? You look like you just escaped your own grave for Christ’s sake.”
I would have laughed, had I not been throwing up. Conner tossed me an orange Gatorade, “Holy shit. You aren’t gonna die out there are you, old-timer?”
I rinsed out my mouth and killed off the entire contents of the Gatorade. “Call me ‘old-timer’ again and you can start calling that oar Bubba. You got that, Ellis?”
Connor bit the inside of his right cheek, something he did every time someone called him by his middle name. And about the threat, it was empty. Conner was like Godzilla and I was a fleeing three-foot-five Asian, yelling ill-ti
med English outbursts. Conner was twenty-seven, a couple inches taller than me, had blond hair, blue eyes, and a physique the likes of Batman’s armor.
The women from the entrance had made their way outside and I noticed a brunette pointing me out to a newcomer. She was either saying “That’s the guy who threw up all over the bridge” or “That’s the guy who walks with his butt clenched like a queer” or “That’s the guy from that Eight in October book.”
All the options were equally painful and I was ready to shy away from the paparazzi. I cocked my head at the water insinuating it was time to ship out, and Conner slipped into the front slot of the shell as I hopped in to the back.
An artificial reef helped stop the Atlantic from invading the mile and a half expanse of still water, which at seven in the morning housed close to twenty scullers. This was the fifth time I’d rowed with Conner—albeit, the first since the publication of Eight in October—and we hit a steady rhythm early on.
We skimmed over the glass water and Conner said between strokes, “So what’s it like being famous?”
Oh, and I forgot to mention, when you row with Conner, it’s imperative you pass the time with idle chatter. I tried to conceal my wheezing lung and said, “What?”
He yelled over his shoulder, “I said, what it is like being famous?”
I’d heard him the first time, but I’d needed a few seconds to rest and to phrase my answer. “That book never should’ve been written. (breath) I didn’t ask for this shit.”
“What? To be recognized? To be famous? Did you see that lady pointing at you? You’re a state treasure for Christ’s sake. Did I say state treasure? Because I meant national treasure. Which magazine cover was your ugly mug on? Time or People?”
For the record, I was on both. I wisely ignored his question. “What about you? (breath) Don’t tell me you haven’t (breath) been getting your (breath) fair share of celebrity (breath) status.”
