by Paul Doiron
Eli had been reenergized by the rise Rudyard had gotten out of the harbormaster. “Or what?”
Harmon’s voice became a growl. “I’m not going to warn you twice, Washburn.”
Eli pulled up his anorak and shirt to reveal a flat belly inked with violent images. A tattooist had made a round scar into the eye of the Midgard Serpent. “You going to … shoot me again?”
I positioned myself to intervene, but I needed to be careful. In close-quarter combat you want to deliver rapid blows to your opponent’s face and neck to disorient him and give yourself a moment to draw your weapon. You don’t want to press your muzzle into his body where it might prevent the gun from firing, and you don’t want to give him a chance to grab the action and restrict the slide.
“I’m videotaping this, assholes!” Ariel had her phone out and was recording the exchange. “I push a button and it uploads to The New York Times before you take your next breath.”
The Washburns were old-fashioned lawbreakers. They’d grown up on a remote island in a time before everyone carried a phone equipped with a recording device patched into a worldwide data network. This was probably their first encounter with crime prevention in the digital age, and they were clearly perplexed.
“Bitch!” shouted Eli.
“Race … traitor!” added Rudyard.
“Save it for the FBI,” I said. “They’re investigating death threats against Ms. Evans. And you boys just made their list.”
Eli spat at my feet. But his bravado was gone.
I kept my body sandwiched between the Washburns and Harmon Reed until the brothers had retreated to their matching trucks.
They revved their engines until the smoke billowed like dragon’s breath. They wanted us to scatter, but I held my ground, and so did Reed. Finally, they shifted their transmissions into reverse and executed synchronized turns. Moments later I watched their brake lights vanish in the darkness and haze.
I was startled to turn around and see Harmon walking quietly in the direction of his house. I had expected him to stick around to gloat. Some of the others also used the occasion to drift off, no doubt figuring the night couldn’t get any more exciting. The hard-core alcoholics stumbled back into the bar.
Only Radcliffe and Ariel remained in the lot.
“Why were the Washburns asking about Hiram?” I asked the constable. “And why did it make Harmon so angry?”
“I have no idea.”
The constable couldn’t lie to save his own life.
But I was beginning to put together a theory about Harmon Reed’s surviving son and the nature of his problems.
“I have this for you,” Radcliffe said sullenly.
He handed me a sealed stationery envelope. It contained his list of hunters, I realized. I wondered if I would find his name on it. According to Harmon Reed, the constable had lied to me when he said he’d given up deer slaying.
Ariel had an air of drunken triumph about her. “You’re welcome,” she said.
Staring into her glassy eyes, I had a recognition. “Were you even taping that?”
“Battery’s dead,” she said with a loud laugh that wasn’t as musical as the sober version.
“Time to go home.”
Still laughing, she followed me to my pickup. I tossed her bicycle into the smeared blood where the deer had been.
* * *
Whether it was because she was sobering up or simply exhausted in body and spirit, Ariel let her head loll against the window. As we passed the spot where we’d had our crash, she asked, “What did you do with that deer?”
“Handed it over to Radcliffe to give to someone who needed the meat.”
“Did you know deer’s closest relatives are giraffes?”
“I did know that.”
“Poor dead deer.”
“It’s the circle of life.”
“I can still mourn it,” she said with more testiness than my comment merited. She raised herself up in her seat.
“How did you know that the Washburns are neo-Nazis?”
“I’m a journalist.”
“I’m serious, Ariel.”
“There’s this marvelous invention called the internet, you know. You should try using it. You might solve a case every once in a while.”
Because she was drunk, I couldn’t take offense. “Are the Washburns listed on some database of white supremacists you have access to?”
“I did a search for Nazis and Maquoit. And they popped up.”
“How?”
“EBay. They buy and sell Nazi paraphernalia: coins, stamps, daggers, uniforms, flags.”
“Under their own names?”
“You should read my book! These people no longer feel like they need to hide. They believe their hour’s arrived to seize their country back from the Jews, the racial minorities, the feminists, the LGBTQ people, and the SJWs.”
“What are SJWs?”
“Social Justice Warriors. The term’s ironic.”
“Is that what they call you?”
“Hell no! I’m a race traitor who exposed their secrets. I’m Public Enemy Number One.”
There was no denying her courage, whatever else she was. “So I have been wondering about the title of your book. Why Ghost Skins?”
“It’s slang for supremacists who hide their racist beliefs. Like cops who are secret members of the KKK. People in the military who are closet Aryans. Certain respectable-seeming politicians.”
“I can’t imagine the bravery it must have taken for you to infiltrate that compound in Idaho. I say that as someone who used to go to work every day wearing a ballistic vest.”
“Someone needed to expose those assholes.”
“How many death threats have you received?”
“I don’t know,” she said, trying to master her drunkenness for my sake. “My publisher sends the hate mail to the FBI without showing me. But what’s the expression? ‘You never hear the bullet that kills you’? The special agent who’s assigned to me has a way of putting it. ‘Truly scary people don’t make threats,’ he says. ‘They make plans.’”
We’d arrived at Gull Cottage. I had intended to drop her off and return to the Wight House for the night. But our ominous discussion had given me second thoughts.
Before the scene at the Trap House, I’d considered and discarded the possibility that someone on the island had murdered Miranda thinking she was the author and “race traitor” Ariel Evans. Having learned about the Washburns’ sideline in Third Reich collectibles, I was no longer so confident.
“Maybe I should check out the house first,” I said.
“That’s so cute!”
So much for Ariel’s having sobered up. “We’ll go in together.”
But she was already stumbling out of the truck. There was no time for me to shine my flashlight on the grass to look for fresh prints. All I could do was try to keep up.
She flipped on the lights inside the door. “Nazis! Nazis! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
“Have a seat while I take a look around.” I noticed the half-empty bottle of Scotch on the coffee table. “I wouldn’t recommend having a nightcap.”
“I had too much to drink already,” she said, nearly tripping over a chair leg as she headed to the nearest electrical socket to plug in her dead cell phone.
I made a quick pass through the house and found no one lying in wait or any signs of the rooms having been disturbed. When I returned to the living room, I found her slumped on the couch with an almost hypnotized emptiness in her eyes.
“You’ll feel better tomorrow if you sleep upstairs in a bed.”
She yawned and straightened up. “Where are you going to sleep?”
“Back at my inn.”
“You can stay here if you want.” Her lids were heavy; her voice thick.
“That wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“What if the Washburns come in the night to burn a cross on the lawn and ravish me?”
“I’ll stay fo
r a while but only if you go upstairs to bed.”
“My bodyguard.”
I removed my peacoat and tossed it over a chair. Then I sat down on the sofa and watched her as she slowly climbed the stairs. The couch was still warm from where she’d been sitting.
34
I heard the toilet flush upstairs and then the water running in the shower. It surprised me that, drunk as she was, she had the energy to bathe.
I sat down on the sofa and tore open the envelope Radcliffe had grudgingly given me. It was just a list of typed names:
Eli Washburn
Rudyard Washburn
Elias Washburn
Judah Washburn
Zach Washburn
Blake Markman?
Tom McNulty
Pete Shattuck
Dante Corso
George Gordon
Kit Billington
Nat Pillsbury
Hiram Reed
Kenneth Crowley
Joy Juno
And I suppose I should include myself. I haven’t shot a deer in years, as I said, but I’ve gone for walks in the woods with a rifle. I wasn’t entirely honest with you about that. I still own a Sauer 202 if you’d care to see it.
It appeared to be the same roster of persons Harmon had provided me, seemingly ordered from most suspicious to least suspicious. I appreciated that Andrew had come clean about his own place on the list.
I’d spoken to many of these people already and had missed my chance to interrogate some of the others (who had no doubt been drinking at the Trap House) before the Washburns arrived. At least I had the beginnings of a plan for the coming day. I needed to seek out the hunters who had avoided me, and obviously that meant making a trip across the demilitarized zone that separated Reed land from Washburn land.
The shower stopped. I got up and went into the kitchen to raid the provisions Miranda had left behind. I doubted that Ariel would begrudge her bodyguard a late-night snack.
In the refrigerator I found wedges of artisanal cheeses, cave-aged Gruyère, Taleggio, and bleu d’Auvergne, along with an unopened Italian salami, from the fancy food shop in Ellsworth. In the breadbox was a loaf of island-baked sourdough from Graffam’s. I made myself a thirty-dollar sandwich with the gourmet ingredients.
Every drink I could find in the refrigerator contained alcohol or was meant to be mixed with alcohol, so I stuck with filtered water from a jug.
I wanted to give Ariel time to fall asleep before I returned to the Wight House. Without my phone (out to sea) and my laptop (in my room), I was cut off from all communication with the outside world. For the moment I had no clue how I would summarize the events of the evening for Captain DeFord.
I brought my sandwich into the parlor with all the sketches of Blake Markman. When I sat down at the desk, Ariel’s laptop flickered to life. Behind the password prompt the lock screen displayed a photograph of Ariel and Miranda as towheaded girls—seven and five years old was my best guess—dressed identically in pirate costumes. Ariel was showing off that wry, skeptical smile of hers. But Miranda’s aqueous-blue eyes were what drew me into the picture. They had depths that you rarely see in a child. Even then, her thoughts were unfathomable.
Crazy attracts crazy, Ariel had said. And while she seemed unconcerned about Blake Markman, others were keen that I focus on the mysterious recluse. Beryl McCloud, for instance, had all but accused the man.
A state police detective had once told me to concentrate on means and opportunity. Motive, he said, would come later. Markman had greater opportunity than anyone else to have killed Miranda. All he had to do was slip across the Gut in his dory and slip back before the nearest neighbor could even arrive at the cottage. As for means, it was just a matter of his possessing another firearm beyond the fancy shotgun he’d shown me. He even had a motive if he feared that Miranda might expose his carefully kept secrets to the wider world.
But Ariel said that her sister had confessed her true identity to Blake Markman. If that was so, why would he have bothered killing a bipolar drug addict? Who would have believed Miranda Evans about anything?
Ultimately, I wasn’t ready to follow Beryl McCloud’s suspicions. I had a strong feeling that she’d pointed at the hermit as a means of distracting me from looking closely at someone else. But who?
Of everyone on the island, Jenny Pillsbury seemingly had the best reason to hate Miranda. But the shock and sadness I had seen on her face when the ferry arrived was beyond the ability of even the world’s best actor to fake. The woman had been legitimately shattered. Besides which, Jenny had been working at Graffam’s the morning of the shooting. Hiram had been there, too.
Had I been too quick to dismiss Kenneth Crowley from my list? What if he had actually shot Miranda by mistake as we had all initially believed? Harmon Reed could have decided that there was no point in his nephew confessing. If they took care of the rifle and everyone stuck to their stories, the odds were good that we would never be able to prove Kenneth had fired the fatal round.
The computer screen faded to black and I was left staring into nothingness.
I had to admit to myself the possibility—even the likelihood—that I might never find answers to the many questions that were plaguing me.
After a minute, I closed the laptop and returned to the kitchen with my dirty plate.
* * *
I don’t recall returning to the couch, let alone closing my eyes, but that was where I was when I heard Ariel call my name from upstairs. Her voice wasn’t loud or panicked.
“Mike? Are you there?”
I arose from the sofa and crossed to the staircase. “I’m here.”
The wooden steps creaked as I set one foot in front of the other. My heart made a dull, thudding noise that quickened as I neared the landing.
“Mike? Where are you?”
The hall was webbed with shadows, but her door was open and a flickering amber light came from within. I moved slowly and deliberately along the carpet runner as if I intended to surprise her.
From the edge of her room, I saw that she had lit an old-fashioned hurricane lantern. I didn’t remembered seeing it when Klesko and I had searched the house. The room smelled of lamp oil. The air was uncomfortably hot. Ariel lay with the blankets bunched down around her ankles and just a thin, translucent sheet pulled up to her neck. The outline of her body showed through the thin cotton. Her breasts, her navel, the shaved cleft between her legs.
“Come inside,” she whispered.
I hesitated on the threshold. I needed to turn around and leave the house before I did something I would regret.
But my body wouldn’t obey. My mind was unable to stop it. I crossed the floor to the bed. I stood over her in the orange glow of the oil lamp.
“Yes,” she said.
I reached down, ever so slowly, for the edge of the sheet. But when I closed my fingers around the fabric, I felt a sudden resistance. Her eyes were playful and her lips were parted in a lewd smile, but she was fighting me, preventing me from tearing away the cover that barely concealed her nakedness.
Then suddenly her hands opened and the sheet came flying off.
But instead of Ariel lying in the bed, it was Dani Tate. She spoke my name and opened her arms to me.
I gasped and awoke with a start. I found myself sitting upright on the couch with an erection in my pants. My pulse was galloping.
A piece of burning wood snapped and fizzled from inside the stove.
But it wasn’t the fire that had woken me. A raucous motor vehicle had arrived in the dooryard. Seconds later, I heard heavy footsteps on the porch. Then a fist pounding on the wood.
I glanced at my watch and saw that it was past midnight.
I peeled back a drape and saw a pickup I hadn’t before encountered on the island: a green Ford F-150 with no muffler or tailpipe. As with all of the other vehicles on Maquoit, the chassis was engaged in a losing battle against the salt air.
With my right hand I grasped the grip of
my SIG. With my left I turned the lock. I twisted the knob and took two steps backward.
Kenneth Crowley stood on the woven-rope welcome mat, panting. The skin on his face seemed bloodless, his eyes were sunken inside their sockets, crumbs were stuck in his billy-goat beard.
“It’s Hiram,” he said with a gasp. “He needs your help.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s dying.”
“How?”
“He’s OD’ing.”
How had Crowley known to find me here of all places?
I was no paramedic. I didn’t have training as an emergency medical technician. All I had was a certificate as a wilderness first responder. In the ten-day class I’d taken with Stacey we’d learned how to treat heatstroke, set a split around a broken fibula, staunch a bleeding wound. There had been nothing in the curriculum about how to respond to a drug overdose. And while some police forces were teaching their officers how to administer rescue drugs, the Warden Service was not one of them.
Behind me, Ariel called from the staircase, “What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
Far from being naked as she’d been in my dream, she appeared wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt, flannel pajama bottoms, and ragg socks.
“Hiram Reed overdosed.”
She continued down the steps. “Is there a doctor on the island?”
“No,” I said, remembering a sign I’d seen posted on Bishop’s Wharf warning all who arrived that there would no medical rescue should they fall ill or become injured. “There isn’t even an EMT.” I addressed Kenneth Crowley: “Does anyone on Maquoit have naloxone?”
The young man’s breath was foul from the beer he’d consumed. He seemed about to burst into tears. “I don’t know what that is.”
“The prescription name is Narcan,” I explained. “It comes as a nasal spray. You use it to rescue someone who’s having an opioid overdose. Certain people can get it if they have a family member who’s an addict. Do you know what Hiram took?”
Crowley’s raw eyes finally began to ooze tears. “Heroin. Maybe some coke, too. He might have mixed them. The needle’s still in his arm. I was afraid to take it out.”
