Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  “That’s just it,” said Richard. “He’s staying in one empty house until all the food is gone, then moving to another one. Skulking around, stealing and trespassing. I bet he’s armed, too, an escaped convict—or worse.”

  Buster looked at Vergil and Gus for some sign that this was a joke but saw none.

  “Don’t use a monkey wrench,” Calvin told Zeke. “It’ll slip and skin your knuckles. Use a box end if you got one.”

  “Suppose he’s a hunter or a camper, and he’s staying in the woods,” Buster said. “You got fifteen square miles of forest down here, and it belongs to Mrs. Bowditch—all of it. I doubt she’d give a rat’s ass if she knew somebody was camping on her land. She lives in Boston. Maybe he’s her son or nephew or something.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” said Richard.

  “Me be foolish? You’re the ones being foolish. Somebody sees someone she doesn’t know, and the whole island runs for cover, forms a posse for Christ’s sake. Imagine that on the mainland. Somebody comes running into a store and says ‘I seen somebody I didn’t know! Call out the National Guard! Deputize the menfolk! Alert the Coastal Picket!’ Christ.” Buster sniffed.

  “Oh, I know,” said Dwight. “But it could be a German. There’s a war you know. A woman in Ellsworth saw two of them last month, and the police caught them.”

  “Well, maybe he is.” Buster tucked the empty mailbag under his arm and took hold of the ramp railing. “I’ll leave you fellows to take care of it, and I’ll probably avoid getting shot by mistake when I do. There’s a big box from Sears for Miss Bowen. Why don’t you come aboard and sign for it, Gus? Maybe you can carry it over to her when you go next.”

  When the boy had gone aboard the mail boat, out of earshot, Vergil said, “Maybe it’s one of Amos’s spooks.”

  Dwight laughed. “Maybe it’s Amos himself, taken on a ghosty form. Except I can’t imagine his ghost ever leaving the cove, not while Maggie’s there, at least.”

  “Ghosts,” said Richard, still seething from Buster’s attitude. “What a crock of shit.”

  “We’ll get some men together in the morning and go looking,” Dwight said.

  Gus came up the ramp with a flat box and leaned it against the stack of shingles.

  “What is it?” Vergil wanted to know.

  “It says ‘table,’ ” Gus said.

  “Looks awful small to be a table.”

  “Maybe it’s a small table,” Calvin said.

  “We can take cars down the road on both sides, checking houses. The young ones—the rugged ones—can walk down the length of the island through the woods,” Richard suggested.

  “In pairs,” Dwight said.

  “Like beaters on a tiger hunt,” Gus added. “Me and Vergil will be one team.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Vergil said.

  “Sure. You don’t think you and me could take care of whoever he is?” Gus wanted to know. “Hell, the two of us could—”

  “This isn’t a hunt,” Dwight said. “We can’t have people thinking that way, talking like that.”

  “Which is why we’re waiting until the morning, until people have calmed down.” Richard pointed at Gus. “We just want to find this guy and talk to him, not gun him down.”

  Aboard the mail boat, Buster cast off the bow line and handed himself along toward the stern. Richard searched his pockets, muttered something that sounded like “Well hell, then,” clumped in a hurry down the ramp and stepped onto the mail boat like a man who had been hurrying to catch her.

  When Buster had rounded the thoroughfare buoy and turned out into the bay, he opened her up, and Richard came forward to join him at the wheel.

  “That Albert Crowell thinks he’s some funny,” Richard said. “He pisses me off is what he does. It’s high-minded sons of bitches like him I can’t stand.”

  Buster struck a match on the thigh of his raised leg and puffed his pipe alive.

  “You could use a drink,” he said. “I’d offer you one if I had it, but my rum’s all gone. I’m not the first person to mention that to you, am I now?”

  Richard pulled down the brim of his hat to shade the setting sun. Buster pulled up his stool.

  “You ought to stop in to see Lump and tell him about your stranger; ask if he knows anything about him.” Buster said. “He’s in his office till six.”

  “And get laughed at?” Richard showed his teeth. “Like hell I will.”

  “No need to get ugly about it.”

  The last of the ferryboats carrying quarrymen home was unloading at Green Head. The Stonington fishing fleet had long since come in and been moored and washed down; the men had gone home to their tidy houses, arrayed on the ledges that rose behind the town. Parker Waite stood in his skiff, talking to Bill McDonnell on the Nana, but not another man was to be seen on the water. Richard looked for a light in his mother’s kitchen window, but it was obscured from this angle by the roof of the Noyes house.

  “I wonder if there’s a movie tonight,” he said.

  “I think there is,” Buster allowed. “It’s a comedy; I don’t remember the name of it. Rose said it was good. If it made her laugh, it might cheer you up. Me, I’m going to listen to Martha Raye and Parkyakarkas.”

  Richard coiled the bow line on the deck. “You wouldn’t want to look the other way on the matter of the fare would you? There’s nobody around to know.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” Buster waited.

  Richard pulled sixteen cents from his pants pocket and looked at it in his palm.

  “How about I pay you for both ways in the morning?” he asked.

  “All right then,” said Buster.

  As he climbed the wharf ladder, Richard mumbled, “Jew,” under his breath.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SHE MUST BE BAKING A PIE, HE THOUGHT AS HE LET HIMSELF OUT of the truck and stood to stretch in the dying light. By the smell, she was burning birch in the kitchen stove, birch set aside for baking. He had parked in the tall grass beside her car and the old garage, where Amos’s truck had sat undisturbed since the funeral. The sun had gone down behind the mountain, leaving the cove in a late-summer-evening shade. A cloud of little flies danced high in a late glance of sunlight. In the wide cleft between the granite ledges, under the broad canopy of oaks, the fresh mound over Amos’s grave was barely visible. The pillar of smoke from the kitchen stove rose to the tops of the trees, then slipped away in the light wind. Tomorrow would be a good day on the water and a damned shame to waste. Gus slipped his knapsack onto one shoulder and balanced the flat box on his head to carry it to the house.

  Maggie met him in the dooryard, smiling, her head tilted in curiosity. She had seen little of Gus since school started and they stopped patrolling every night. In the morning, she saw him on the wharf or aboard the boat as she left for class; when she returned at the end of the day he was gone, and the cove was empty. Alone in the silent evening house, she worried about his fishing so often by himself, missing nearly two months of school, and going home to a bitter father and a mother who was shrinking with grief.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “You knew I was baking, so you brought my lap table over thinking you’d get a dish of cobbler for your troubles.”

  “Is that what this is, a lap table?”

  “Yes. Let me help you,” she said.

  “No, I got it.”

  She stepped ahead of him to hold the door, not saying that he hadn’t come just to deliver her package, not with a knapsack on his back. The front room was warm with the sweet smell of cooking fruit. He set the package next to the wood box and removed his cap, leaving a startled shock of red hair over his forehead. Maggie waited.

  “Mother wants me to spend the night here,” he said quickly. “She made me promise I would.”

  Maggie smiled, swept a dusting of flour from her forearm. “Why did she make you promise?”

  “Because you’d be insulted that she thought you needed somebody to protect you, that she thought you might be afraid
. She said you’d be angry and try to send me home.” Gus smiled.

  “What?” she asked.

  “She pretended she was you—tucked her chin down and glared at me and talked in that frozen voice you use when you’re mad. It was comical.”

  Maggie laughed. “Since you’ve already been scolded, you might as well make yourself comfortable. The truth is that I am happy to have company, yours especially.” She reached to brush his hair flat, but he pulled back slightly and patted it down himself.

  “Father said I should sleep in the garage, so as not to be in your way,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll sleep here.”

  “He said you probably don’t believe there’s a stranger down here, and even if you do you’re not scared of him,” Gus said.

  “He’s right, I’m not scared—at least not any more than I normally am,” she said. “How can I not believe that there’s a stranger here, when your mother and perhaps others have seen him? I have every reason to believe it—more reason than you know—and I want him apprehended.”

  Gus looked quizzically at her as Amos would have. “Caught,” she said.

  “I promised father that I’d look through the houses tonight, Ava’s and Mineola’s. The cabin, too, for any signs of him.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll go with you,” she said. “But we’ll want to wait fifteen minutes until the cobbler is done. We can have a late dessert when we get back.”

  When it was done, she set the bubbling cobbler on the shelf to cool and stood in the kitchen door rolling down her sleeves, watching him as he broke Amos’s double-barreled shotgun and slipped in two shells.

  “Is that necessary?” she asked. “No, don’t tell me; you promised. I hope you plan to keep it broken; I’d hate to have one of my legs shot off.”

  “Of course I will,” he said. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been hunting plenty of times.”

  “Hunting for a German spy or for a ghost?” she asked. “You don’t believe in ghosts,” he said. “You don’t even believe in God.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Let’s go.” He held the screen for her.

  They walked side by side in the ruts that led to the houses, following the beam of her flashlight as it danced ahead of them. The wind had backed to the south, bringing a damp chill from the open sea.

  “The day before yesterday, Albert put Vergil ashore in Head Harbor so he could walk home,” Gus said. “His truck’s pooched again. When he was passing your house—your father’s—he felt something inside it. He didn’t see anybody; it wasn’t people. He just felt something, something large and awful. He got home in record time. What do you suppose it was?”

  “A bit of underdone potato,” she said. She shined her beam on the houses and it blinked back from each window it passed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It was his imagination,” she lied. “Just as it was Amos’s imagination that provided Ava and the others to keep him company here. If we run into them, we’ll ignore them, won’t we?”

  The shed where John had once kept his little store was in near collapse; the door hung by one hinge and the wall that had held the coal bin had given way, spilling its contents onto the ground. Maggie shined her light inside as they passed and led the way around the giant forsythia. Mineola’s house, the last and least sturdy of those built in the cove, was perched on a heave of granite ledge, with posts supporting its corners. In the mud-room she held the light while Gus took the key from the hook and opened the kitchen door. The floor, which had not supported human weight for seven years, sighed and buckled beneath them. A squirrel, or perhaps two of them, scampered across the floor above, fleeing to the attic.

  Maggie shined her light slowly over the counters and shelves, then into the little adjoining sitting room. Gus coughed nervously.

  “There’s nobody here,” he said. “Did you hear the squirrels?”

  “Yes, but I’ll look upstairs nevertheless,” she said. “Such a tiny house.”

  Gus stood still in the damp, moldy darkness and listened to her move about on the second floor, remembering how Amos used to say what a cold house this was with no cellar, as cold as the couple that lived in it.

  “No sign of anything or anybody up there,” she said, coming carefully down the steep staircase.

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

  When they had let themselves out and found the path, Gus thought that he hadn’t been afraid in Mineola’s house because there was no sense or feel of anything human to it. But as they approached Ava’s place, his stomach heaved up against his lungs, and his arms went weak. He stayed close behind Maggie, crowding her on the side-door stoop.

  She knocked loudly three times.

  “Don’t do that!” he hissed. “It’s not locked.”

  She turned the knob and pushed the door open partway, leaning ahead into the kitchen.

  “Ava? Walter? Anyone home?” she called.

  “Come on, cut it out,” he said, and pushed her forward. There were no sounds of skittering rodents, no complaining floorboards.

  Maggie took a kitchen match from the box on the wall by the stove and lit the kerosene lamp on the table. She ran her finger across the tabletop, leaving a shiny path in the dust.

  “Well, Ava’s not here,” she said, looking at her fingertip. “She’d never allow dust to collect like that.” She meant it as a joke, to encourage them both, but realized that the dust meant Amos wasn’t there any longer, either.

  “It’s as though she just walked out,” Maggie said looking around at the clean dish towels, the curled tide calendar, the icebox door held slightly open by a string. “Or gone off to the mainland for a visit.” She flashed her light past the mirror on Ava’s bureau, then returned it for a moment to let them see the whole room in its reflection. In the window by Ava’s wicker chair, Gus saw the shivering figure of a man, caught his breath, then grinned at himself when it stepped back as he did. Maggie whacked the bed quilt with the flat of her hand to see the dust rise, then examined the closet and knelt to sweep the light under the bed.

  “Mother says I used to spend whole afternoons in this parlor,” said Gus, “but I don’t remember them.”

  Maggie straightened the doily on the radio. “Don’t you remember Ava’s stereopticon? You loved it so.”

  “Yes, I guess I do,” he said. “African villages. Niagara Falls. A hippopotamus.”

  “You called it a chowder mouse,” she said. “I wonder that Amos didn’t pull the hairs from her brush.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m going to look upstairs,” she said.

  “Oh, all right. I’ll go ahead of you. You shine the light for my feet.”

  The bureau and bed in Walter’s little room beneath the eaves were covered with faded newspapers. The shade was drawn, its pull string secured to a nail beneath the sill.

  Maggie shined the light on the bed. “What’s wrong with this picture?” she asked.

  “Some pages are faded and some aren’t,” Gus replied. “You think somebody’s used his bed. It coulda been squirrels.”

  “A very large squirrel,” she said. “One in too much of a hurry to bother to rearrange them properly.”

  Outside, she played the light across the meadow, then switched it off.

  “There’s no need to check the cabin. I was up there last night,” she said. “We ought to walk the cliffs, but that cobbler is getting cold. Look how bright the first stars are.”

  “You check it every night?” Gus unloaded the shotgun and crooked it over his shoulder.

  “Yes.” She wanted to take his hand across the grassy hump between the ruts, but did not. “And, yes, your single hair is still in place, Sherlock, as if you hadn’t gone to see for yourself.”

  “Mother’s hair,” he said. “I did, yesterday. I’m surprised that the paste has held so long, with the rain, or that the wind hasn’t blown the screen open some and broken the hair.”
/>   “I should write a testimonial for the company, describing how its schoolroom paste has gone to war.”

  “It couldn’t have been this guy who Amos saw, who he was watching for,” said Gus. “It was too long ago. I still think it was summer people he saw or thought he saw; I think they burned the lamp chimney black.”

  “I know you do, and I still think you’re wrong, too willing to overlook the salty footprints. Maybe it wasn’t this guy, this Goldilocks in Papa Bear’s bed. I doubt it. But I won’t be satisfied until I talk to him or find out otherwise.”

  “Mother says he’s a skinny little guy, nothing rugged about him. It would take more than that to knock Amos down or throw him off of the cliff, no matter how—”

  “Perhaps he’s not alone, or wasn’t,” she said. “Perhaps he has a good reason to stay away from the cabin. Perhaps he knows we’re watching it and knows damn well why.”

  “Or he’s moved up onto the mountain with his very-low-frequency machine. Morales says it wants to be on high ground, which is why they might choose this island. And it’s shelter and food that have brought him down, like the deer that show up when the summer people leave.”

  “I want to talk to him if they find him,” she said. “Will you make sure I get a chance?”

  “If I can,” he said.

  “Say you will. Promise it.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “Someone’s here!” Lucille looked up from her knitting, her eyes round in surprise. “Who could it be?”

  “A man,” said Claire. “He let himself in. It must be Richard.”

  “On a Thursday!?'’

  Richard switched on the light in the mudroom and shouted “Hello!” into the kitchen. He wiped his hat band with a gray handkerchief, mopped his brow, kicked off his heavy boots, and appeared before the ladies.

  “I didn’t expect you tonight, dear.” Lucille set her knitting in the button box and offered her cheek for a kiss. “Have you had your supper yet? Is everything all right?”

  “No I haven’t eaten. I came up on the mail boat. Nothing’s wrong. I just felt like visiting. Hello Claire.”