“Doesn’t this seem like a weird place for someone like that?”
“What’s weird about it? You’re here.”
I gave up. After a few more minutes we entered the harbor, passing a solitary lobster boat moored alongside a red float.
“Everett’s boat,” Toby said.
He brought the Northern Sky to a mooring and dropped anchor. I retrieved my stuff from the cabin.
“Weather’s changing,” Toby said when I got back on deck. He untied the dinghy and motioned for me to climb into it. “See those clouds? That’s a front coming in. You’re not planning on leaving today, are you?”
“I don’t actually have a fucking clue what I’m doing.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Toby.
He rowed toward the pier. The harbor was even smaller and grungier than Burnt Harbor’s. Busier, too. Paswegas may only have had thirty year-round residents, but half of them seemed to be hanging around the dock. Two derelict pickups were parked in front of a boarded-up building with a sign that read live bait coffee. One truck had cardboard covering half its windshield; another had no windshield at all.
“Beaters,” Toby explained as the dinghy drew up alongside the pier. Pilings black with creosote poked from the water. Budweiser cans floated past a ladder where a cormorant stood with wings outstretched, its eyes dull as uncut garnets. “No ferry service here, no mailboat anymore cause there’s no post office. Everyone shares those trucks. You keep your good vehicles in Burnt Harbor.”
“What about groceries?”
“You got the Island General Store. Or you bring stuff back from Burnt Harbor.” He lifted his chin toward the men in the harbor. “That’s why they’re looking at us.”
He tied off the dinghy, and we walked down the pier. The men leaned on a rail, observing us as they smoked and talked.
“There’s your friend Everett Moss.” Toby cocked his head at a burly man with a white beard, wearing stained coveralls and an orange watch cap.
“Toby,” the man called. Toby headed toward him, and I followed. “That the young lady I was supposed to bring over this morning?”
“This is her.” Toby halted and lit a cigarette. “Cass Neary.”
“Hello there.” Everett looked at me and nodded. He had bright blue eyes in a sunburnt face, an easy smile. I waited for him to apologize for not waiting for me.
Instead he turned back to Toby. I glanced at the other men. They quickly looked away, stubbed out their cigarettes then wandered in the direction of the closed bait shop. Everett glanced across the dark waters of the reach to the mainland.
“You haven’t seen Mackenzie Libby?” he said to Toby. “Merrill called me this morning. She didn’t come in last night. My granddaughter Leela told me they’d been emailing earlier, Kenzie said something ‘bout going into town.”
Toby frowned. “Mackenzie?”
“Merrill’s daughter.”
“Oh.” Toby tugged at his braid. “She run off?”
I snorted. “I would, if that was my father.”
The two men looked at me, Toby amused, Everett Moss less so.
“Cass Neary,” he said, as though he’d just figured out who I was. “You stayed there last night, didn’t you. She told my daughter she’d been talking to you.”
I had a sudden flash of a white face in the night, black branches. I shifted my camera bag from one shoulder to the other and looked at the sky. A wheel of gray cloud had escaped from the dark ridge that was blowing in. As I stared, the cloud began to turn, like a clock’s mainspring unwinding. I heard a low buzzing like a trapped fly and dredged up the image of the girl in the Lighthouse, the way she peered shyly into my room, as though I had something special hidden among the shabby furniture and plastic mattress cover.
There’d been no reek of desperation about her, no fear, just a kid’s longing for something she couldn’t put a name to yet. She was bored; she dreamed of waking up somewhere else. Her father might have been an asshole, but he didn’t beat her or abuse her.
That’s why she hadn’t interested me. No damage.
“Merrill’s wicked pissed off,” said Everett.
“Yeah. Now he’s got to clean the motel rooms,” Toby said. They both laughed.
“Well, he’s all worked up, no doubt ‘bout that.” The harbormaster slung his hands into his pockets. “John Stone told me Merrill called him this morning too, got him out of bed. John told him she aint’t back by sunset, then he should call. Or maybe little miss went on down to Florida, see her ma. Anyway, you see her, tell her to get herself home.”
He began walking down to the water, stopped and looked back at me.
“You too,” he said. His gaze wasn’t threatening. It was worried. “You see her, call me or John Stone, he’s the sheriff. Don’t like these kids running off.”
He lifted a hand to Toby and headed off.
“Come on,” said Toby. “We better get you up to Aphrodite’s house.”
We walked through the village. The bait shop, a mobile home with a bunch of large, scary-looking dolls standing in the window. The Island General Store, a clapboard building covered in flaking rust-colored paint, with a low wooden stoop and a gas pump with a trash bag tied over it. A bunch of flyers flapped from the store’s walls and screen door.
“That guy,” I said. I walked over and pulled at a faded piece of paper. “Martin Graves. I keep seeing these everywhere. What’s the deal with him?”
I glanced aside and saw another flyer, curled with damp and age. “Jesus. What’s the deal with all of them?”
I smoothed out the second flyer. This one was a color xerox of a smiling teenage girl, her face and hair bleached to a brown slurry between faded words.
“‘Heather Pollitt,’” I read aloud. “What happened to her?”
“She ran off.” Toby stepped up beside me. “Went down to Bangor, I think. She had a baby or something. That’s a real old flyer, that one; we should take it down—”
He tore it down and crumpled it, tossed it into a barrel by the door. “Oh, and look here—somebody’s cat is missing too. That’s a new one,” he added, tapping a handwritten sheet dated a few days earlier. “Poor Smoky! I hope they find him. But that guy—”
He pressed a scabbed-over thumb against the picture of Martin Graves. “I don’t know what happened. I heard he just took off or something. Supposedly he had a fight with his girlfriend, or maybe it was his wife? Anyway, his parents keep putting these up. You saw some driving up here?”
“Yeah. I think I read about him online too. This place has a high mortality rate for kids. And cats.”
We started back up the hill. Behind us gulls wheeled and screamed above the harbor. The road was dirt and gravel and ice, chunks of broken blacktop. After a few yards it curved and began to climb steeply between scrawny firs and birch.
“Fishers get the cats,” said Toby.
“Huh?”
“What you said about kids and cats. Fishers get them.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “They use them for bait?”
“Not fishermen. Fisher cats. That’s what they call them, but they’re really just fishers. They’re kind of like a wolverine, or a big mink, but they can climb trees. Usually they eat porcupines, but sometimes one will move into a neighborhood and start picking off all the local pets. Cats, small dogs even.”
“Kids?”
Toby laughed. “Not that I ever heard. They’re not that big—maybe the size of a big coon cat. I think that’s why they call ‘em fisher cats.”
“How do they eat porcupines?”
“They’re really smart. Smarter’n a porcupine, anyway. But you don’t find them on the islands, usually. Just the mainland. Here, let’s go this way.”
He turned off the narrow road into a pine grove. There was no path that I could see, but Toby moved confidently among the trees. The shrieks of gulls died into a muffled near silence; the sound of wind in the trees was louder than the ocean. The moss underfoot was so thick a
nd damp it was like walking on soggy carpet, and the moss wasn’t just on the ground—it covered everything, rocks, logs, even an empty beer can. If I fell asleep on the ground, it would probably cover me, moss and this bright yellow mold, and something Toby said was old-man’s-beard, long stringy hanks of lichen that hung from tree limbs like hair. Unlike the rocks by the harbor, these looked soft and plushy with moss. They looked organic, like if you stared at one long enough you might catch it breathing.
It was a weird place; what you’d imagine a fairy tale would look like if you fell into one. They gave me a bad feeling, all those trees. When I touched one, the bark wasn’t damp but wet and slimy. It seemed to give beneath my finger, like skin.
It creeped me out.
I used to like that feeling. I used to hunt that feeling down. For a second, I thought of getting out my camera and hunting it again.
But I couldn’t. The island spooked me. I got the sense here that nothing you did could ever matter—not for long, anyway. You could build a house or an entire town and the island would just swallow it and you’d never know it had even existed. Everything would just be eaten away. I kicked at a boulder, and my boottip snagged in two inches of moss. I had to bend over to yank it out.
Toby stopped to wait for me. “Porcupines like pine trees,” he said. “Like fishers do. But porcupines are stupid. Porcupines and skunks. Ever notice how much road kill is porcupines and skunks? They rely so much on being obnoxious, they think nothing can kill them. But a fisher’s smart—vicious, but smart. And fast. They come up on a porcupine, bite it on the nose then flip it over and tear its throat and belly out. They’ll go right for its head, rip its whole face off, then eat it from the inside out.”
I made a face. Toby laughed.
“You don’t need to worry,” he said. “Like I said, they don’t come out here to the islands. And they don’t attack people. Not much, anyway. They go for smaller things. I saw one once, in the woods by Burnt Harbor. It was playing with a mouse, like a cat does.”
“But what if one did come here?”
“I don’t know.” He ran his hand along a branch covered with lichen that looked like peeling orange housepaint, snapped the branch off and tossed it. “They can swim, I think. Maybe one could swim over. I guess then it could swim back to shore. Or maybe they eat each other. There never seems to be a real long-term problem back on the mainland. People trap them.”
He began to walk again. “You getting tired?”
I shrugged. That hangover was starting to rage behind my eyes. It wasn’t even ten, and I was ready to crawl back to bed. “Just fried,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“The Lighthouse didn’t suit you?”
“It wasn’t that. Too wound up, I guess.”
“Last I saw, you were knocking back the Jack Daniel’s. That would unwind me pretty fast.”
We walked on. Now and then I’d spot sea urchins on the moss, their spines the same gray-green as the lichen. I stopped and nudged one with my foot. “How do these get here?”
“Sea gulls drop them on the rocks to crack ‘em open.” Toby glanced at me curiously. “So’d you see her last night? Merrill’s daughter?”
“Just for a few minutes.” I picked up the sea urchin. Several spines fell away at my touch, not sharp but soft and brittle, like burnt twigs. “She checked me in. And she came to my room after, to tell me about that place where we ate. The Good Tern. So I guess I can thank her for my hangover.”
“I think you can thank yourself for that,” said Toby.
I rubbed my finger across the sea urchin until the rest of the spines flaked off. What I held now looked remarkably like one of the small tussocks of moss everywhere. I cupped it in my hand then carefully put it into my bag.
“Those are real fragile,” Toby warned. “You want to watch, they break like eggshells.”
“I’ll be careful.” I looked around, shaking my head. “It’s so strange. I mean, it’s almost winter and it’s still green.”
“The fog does that. It covers everything, the rocks and trees; then the moss and lichens cover them and feed off the moisture. It’s a paradise for parasites.”
Ahead of us the pines thinned out. The shadowy green world gave way to a bleached-out stretch of stone and birch, a building barely visible through the trees. I thought of Mackenzie’s white face momentarily blazing in my headlights.
She was a cute kid. Probably she’d been running away—or, more likely, running off with some boyfriend or girlfriend. I preferred to think of her on a Grayhound headed south to Boston or New York, meeting a friend in Port Authority, heading west. Who was I to stop her escape? I hoped she was a hundred miles away.
“How much farther?” I asked Toby.
“Almost there.”
I blinked as we stepped into milky sunlight. We were at the top of a long slope leading down to the rocky shoreline and a small cove. The slope was scattered with trees—birch, oak, hemlocks. Tucked within the trees were two small gray-shingled buildings. Both looked utterly derelict and abandoned.
“You were asking about the commune,” said Toby, and pointed. “Most of it was up at the top of this hill, but people salvaged it or burned it for firewood. Those shacks are all that’s left. Denny’s old bus is over the hill a ways. And that’s Aphrodite’s place there—”
Among the trees by the cove stood a clapboard building that looked as though it were attempting to pull itself up the hillside. There were loose and missing boards everywhere. The roof was sunken, the stone chimneys crumbling. The white paint had weathered to a uniform gray and was filigreed with moss, and moss-covered boulders thrust up against the walls.
I looked at Toby. “At midnight does it turn back to rocks and pine needles?”
“Not what you expected?”
“No. It’s so dark. Photographers want light.”
“Light’s better on the eastern side.” He gestured toward the black water of the cove. “It’s old. Wasn’t real big, so she kept adding on to it.
“I don’t see any lights.”
Toby looked up. Smoke threaded from one of the chimneys, carrying the acrid smell of creosote. “She’s here. Someone is, anyway.”
He headed for the front door, its granite sill scattered with ashes. An untidy stack of firewood stood beside it, and a snow shovel.
“Hey, Aphrodite.” Toby rapped loudly on the door. “You got visitors.”
I felt a flicker of real excitement. I thought of the pictures in Deceptio Visus, of a Medusa’s frozen face gazing from a black-and-white photograph. Then the door opened, and those Medusa’s eyes were staring at me.
10
She was so small and finely built that I felt huge and ungainly standing in front of her, silver-white hair to her shoulders, white skin, bright red lipstick carelessly applied. Her face was lined, but otherwise she looked remarkably like the woman in the photo. Behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses the familiar onyx eyes glittered, bloodshot but still challenging. She wore a black woolen tunic, black leggings, scuffed-up moccasin slippers. She looked like a girl headed for dance class, or a wizened geisha doll.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Without warning a mass of dark shapes surrounded her, growling and whining. I backed away in alarm. “Jesus—”
“They won’t hurt you.” Aphrodite gestured at me impatiently then crooned, “Runi, Fee—down, get down.”
The writhing shadows resolved into three immense dogs, the biggest dogs I’d ever seen. Toby put a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
“Those are her dogs,” he said.
“No shit.” I pulled away from him. One of the dogs jumped toward me, its head brushing my chest before I pushed it down. Another stood on its hind legs and pawed at Toby’s shoulders. It was so tall it looked as though they were dancing.
“They won’t hurt you,” Aphrodite repeated. The look she gave me was disdainful.
Toby took a step back, toward the trees. “I better get going,”
he said. “I’ll see you later.”
“Hey, wait,” I said and pushed at a grizzled, narrow muzzle. “I didn’t pay you yet.”
“Not to worry,” he said. “You can catch me another time.”
“Get inside,” ordered Aphrodite. “Fee! Tara, Runi! Now.”
The panting dogs receded. As I followed them inside, one thrust its nose against my hand and stared up at me with moist, imploring eyes.
“I’m Cassandra Neary,” I said as Aphrodite yanked the door shut. “Man, those are some big dogs. Are they wolfhounds?”
“Deerhounds.”
She hissed a command, and the dogs pattered off. We stood in a narrrow foyer, its pine flooring scratched and furrowed, tattered rugs askew. A line of windows on the opposite wall looked across the cove to open water and a gray prospect of islands and gathering cloud. There was a bench heaped with yellow rain slickers and boots, split kindling and old newspapers, aerosol cans of Deet, several big flashlights. Kerosene lamps hung from the ceiling alongside coils of rope and a pair of snowshoes. Aphrodite’s small, black-clad figure was incongruous among all this North Woods clutter. She stared up at me imperiously, finally asked, “Who did you say you were?”
“Cass Neary. Cassandra Neary.” My mouth went dry. “I’m supposed to—Phil Cohen said he’d spoken to you. About an interview for Mojo magazine.”
“Never heard of it. An interview?” She made a throaty sound that I realized was a disgusted laugh. “I never give interviews. Who sent you?”
“Phil Cohen.”
She continued to stare at me, shrugged and turned away. “Never heard of him.”
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