Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

The Bleeding Chair by Janwillem van de Wetering

Though he was Dutch-born and his most popular detective fiction featured Grijpstra and de Gier, a pair of Amsterdam police officers, we never considered publishing Janwillem van de Wetering in our Passport to Crime department. That’s because the author was so fluent in English that he could write a story like the following in English, without any help from a translator or editor. Sadly, this longtime contributor to EQMM died several months ago. This may well be his last published story.

Let me introduce myself. Hi, I’m James. It’s too nice a name for me so I prefer to be called Vetty, short for “veteran.”

I got “veteran” on my license plate, too. As I swapped a leg for a medal, the pickup truck also sports one of those blue invalid cards.

Silly, I know. Like I want to advertise that there is something special about me, that I bravely fought for my country, losing a useful limb. That there is value to my being around here. While, in truth, I pride myself on my knowledge, okay, let’s say “strong suspicion,” that there is not.

I merely exist, I will tell the crowd at the Thirsty Dolphin. I am aimlessly adrift in the universe, on a desolate, but beautiful — especially now, because it’s the midst of winter — part of the Downeast Coast of the state of Maine, U.S.A.

Bunkport is my hometown. Small to middling, as Maine towns go. Fiercely Puritan once, but there’s been some intermingling with other tribes. An ongoing process that leads to exchange of ideas, differences in practice, adjustment of attitudes, that sort of thing.

The Thirsty Dolphin’s Bunkport’s only watering hole. Where the action is. The contemplation of action, rather. It is owned by Priscilla, a person of great wisdom and charm, weighing more than any human scale can measure. We all respect Priscilla, because she keeps an aluminum baseball bat under the counter and will not put up with either language, attitude, nudity, or violence that go beyond flexible local standards.

I’m not unhappily adrift, I tell my audience, who are willing to listen when I promise to pay for the next round of Priscilla’s cheaper draft. On the contrary, I tell them, I would be unhappy if I did have an aim. A purpose. A goal. You see, I figure that if I did want to get somewhere, reach some benchmark, I would be unhappy, miserable, outright depressed. Even, especially, if I crossed that line.

Then what?

Okay, enough of philosophy. This is a crime story; the publisher, who thinks I can write and occasionally commissions something specific, is into crime now. He is a moral man, but there is an off side to his goody-goody character and just to titillate himself, and his goody-goody readers, he told me he wanted me to write some real bad stuff this time.

“Like true crime?”

“Not too true,” the publisher said.

He is usually here for the summer. In wintertime, bothersome folks leave us in peace. They think we have weather here. Sure, we do have weather, very nice weather, too. Ice, sleet, freezing rain, blizzards, sea fog drifting in from the ocean, and very clear days when the water is almost unbearably blue, the chickadees are singing, and Priscilla has her big-bellied stove going and we all toss in maple logs, and beech, and oak, and apple-tree logs even, and have to peel ourselves out of our layers of jerseys and sheepskin vests and the younger women show their cleavages again. We exhibit some musical talents. Ex-Harvard graduate lobster-man Tom Tipper on keyboards; I work my snare drum and a minimal set of cymbals; and Doc Shanigan plays weird but acceptable bass. Priscilla plays trumpet. Usually softly, intricately, setting a theme and then improvising in unexpected ways, with us right behind her. One wouldn’t expect that a huge woman could be subtle. Sheriff hums, his wife Dolly sings scat.

Yes, crime stories. I know.

Bad stuff happens in picturesque Downeast Maine?

Define “bad.” You mean involving “blood and gore”?

Let me describe, for your amusement, in as much detail as strictly needed, some recent local tales incorporating blood and gore, perhaps, on occasion, even featuring me as a player. No confession on my part — please. None of this never happened. When pressed by the authorities, such as they are, I will suddenly know nothing. The double negatives used are correct language here, due to the many French-speaking folks in northern Maine, although right here, in Down East, we generally try to speak one of the many brands of English.

“Down” indicates that boats, when helpless due to torn sails or a gummed-up engine, are pushed by the prevailing winds to the lower east. Our clear blue sea hides razor-sharp cliffs, surrounded, right now, by ice floes rubbing each other with a silver sound. Some cliffs are pedestals to bizarre shapes sometimes. Right in front of Big Bitch Island you’ll see a rock formation that looks, from a certain angle, like a giant mother Labrador, howling at the moon. Her tits are swollen and two puppies gambol between her feet. Little Bitch Island just shows one puppy.

There is true danger down here. Freak high tides flood anchored boats, low tides make them rip their bottoms on gravel or bottom ice. Our powerful currents — well, you just can’t figure them out, they change at will. We have sudden strong wind falls, called “cat’s paws,” that tear at boats. If a vessel collects heavy snow on her superstructure she is likely to flip. Happens every winter a few times, always at night, and tends to annoy the insurance people, who tell us that their statistics show that snow-flipped boats are always old and only recently covered.

Yes sir, we love to suffer all kinds of impolite weather that the forecast fools forget to tell us about.

Down East is littered with sunken wrecks, hiding, waiting, desperately looking for company. Torn up themselves, they want to share their fate. Dead cargo boats from yesteryear, nineteenth-century tea clippers, hundred-year-old ferry boats out of Boston are marked on the charts with deadly crosses, but wrecks shift, and they stick you with a sharp mast, or throttle your boat inside their ribs sticking up from the slime.

“One dark, stormy winter night, driven toward an inhospitable coast, a cargo of chained young noblewomen prayed for mercy.” That’s one way seafaring crime tales like to start off. But our crime tale #1 started off on a bright winter morning. Everything was just right, until Elizabeth spotted the bleeding chair on top of a huge floating navigation marker. The sea, supporting this horror, except for slowly swirling currents and just a touch of ocean swell, was calm.

We were enjoying a day of Indian summer that warms our coast for a week or so that time of the year. We had stripped down to our long silk underwear, which looked good on my stern man. The dog Tillie preferred to melt close to the You Too cabin’s kerosene stove. Our shouts brought the little mongrel out reluctantly.

Tillie sniffed, then barked. “Fresh meat?”

She looks cute, but a dog is basically a wolf. She was soon scratching the gunwale, wanting to climb the marker and lick the blood off the chair.

We are lucky here. While the rest of the coast freezes up, Bunkport bay and harbor, and the sea around Bitch, Little Bitch, Shanigan, Squid, Snutty Nose, and Evergreen islands stays fairly liquid. There must be quite a few sea-bottom wells here, spouting hot water. I came close to one while diving for scallops and nearly got burned. And tell you what: I was sure that I was seeing big pink toothy worms down there, twisting toward me. The fear made me come up fast, contracting a case of the bends on the way, a diver’s affliction that can be fatal. Doc “Fastbuck Freddie” Shanigan flew me to Bangor and the treatment out there cost me a handful in copay, in spite of my veteran’s insurance.

Bad days, good days. The day I took Elizabeth out was perfect. Good-tempered harbor seals grunted at us from their rocks and herring gulls swished their wings as they came down behind us, assuming we were out fishing and wanting to share our catch.

Elizabeth kept pointing at the top of the buoy.

We were looking up at a giant marker, a channel buoy just off Bitch Island, a steel monster painted in garish colors. It comes with radar reflectors, a gong, lights that switch on at sunset — an impressive gadget at all times — and it was carrying a big easy chair, securely fastened by thin lobster-trap lines. Getting the chair up on a twenty-foot-tall buoy must have taken some doing. Elizabeth climbed the structure and shouted down that the chair appeared to be riddled by what could only be bullets. Bullets that hit their mark, for each hole was red-ringed.

Elizabeth, who usually doesn’t use language, shouting down at me now, used language.

“Beeping blood.” She tweaked her nostrils to keep the smell out. “Beeping feces.”

She was right. Beeping human fluids, for sure.

She climbed down, her silk bodysuit showing off her long legs, slender torso, and rippling muscles (she likes rock-wall climbing, and yoga, and that Chinese movement deal where you don’t move much but it generates lack of interest in selfish worries). She jumped into my boat, the You Too, and blew the stench out of her nose. She reported.

Whoever had sat in that chair, and got drilled by bullets, was tied down with strong ropes, bits and pieces of which were still there. Most likely the ropes were cut, when subject was dead, to allow the corpse to slide into the Atlantic. A human corpse, Elizabeth guessed. She didn’t think anybody, using block and tackle (for only apes and Tarzans could have lifted the object that high), had hauled a porpoise or a seal up there.

Like you, the puzzling reader, we tried to recreate a situation. We weren’t sure. We weren’t there when it happened.

“We” was me and my stern man. The stern man, this time, was a woman, but we don’t use the term “stern person” down here. We don’t talk politically correct much, either. “Stern man” it is, whatever the gender. Regular good-old-boys, gay people, a beautiful city-lady like Elizabeth, a teener going out on a first try, your grandpa, you; stern men they all are if they back up the captain. I, for as long as I am in charge of the vessel, am known as Skip.

Now who the hell would tie a live target to an easy chair, somehow get the load on top of a floating giant channel marker, and then shoot that body dead, and subsequently cut it loose, leaving chair, blood — and waste-stains — for visiting Elizabeth to discover?

Sadistic pirates?

Sure, we have pirates here (crime story # 2). Not flying the skull-and-bones flag no more, not using swords or muskets. Those wonderful days are gone, except on screen with Johnny Depp leading. Today’s pirates are sly. They became sly because of technology. Nowadays most vessels communicate via cell phones and radio. Any suspicious event will be promptly reported to law enforcement that, since 9/11, has become fast and nosy. Our part of the coast is patrolled by Coast Guard cutters; Sheriff, and his deputies Dog and Sycophant, are out too sometimes, using a confiscated speedboat. There are also military choppers and airplanes peering down. It won’t take long to catch pirates entering a vessel by force.

Give up adventuring on the high seas?

Hey, this is America. Now we have friendly young boating types who offer their services to the mega rich about to sail their multimillion-dollar — it’s only shareholders’ money — yachts out for a spell. Our betters know about embezzling, helping themselves to other people’s money, but they don’t know about sailing. If they go out on their own they’re accident-prone, which could make them look foolish.

The charming young boating types tell the make-believe commodore they’d like to come along, just for the ride, they don’t care about wages, all that’s wanted are board, a hammock below deck, a gratuity at the end of the trip, maybe. They’re young and carefree. A bottle of rum and Hi Diddle Doodle “and here we are, Admiral. At your service. Check that global positioning system, adjust that automatic pilot, swab your decks, untangle your lines.”

So owner and girlfriends cavort in mahogany- and teak-lined cabins and the charming young boating types run the equipment, swab the decks, polish the plastic, slave away, grinning and singing.

Yes?

No. Not for long, anyway.

Ah, can you hear the double-bass groan as this scenario unfolds? As soon as the yacht is out of sight of land the newfound friendly crew, eager to please, point out an imaginary albatross or a killer whale or some other oddity. “Look over there, sir,” Sir, and the girlfriends, get shot through their heads. The live-in pirates check the yacht’s depth meter, sail to where they have a good distance under the keel, take their victims’ jewelry (did you see the ads for $30,000 watches in Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair?), cash, credit cards, electronic devices (especially laptops that store double bookkeeping, hidden wealth, numbered bank accounts complete with passwords), driving licenses, and other identification for future use and reference, and heave-ho-overboard the suckers go. The pirates usually take the trouble to attach weights to their victims’ bodies. That way the corpses, once they balloon with intestinal gas, can’t pop up to cause trouble to the living. Once safely on the bottom something will eat them pretty quick. The pirates don’t like to worry, they’re busy right now. Hoist all sails and look sharp, dead south as she goes.

Deep waters are the habitat of dogfish.

Dogfish, that’s a kind of shark. We have lots of them in Downeast coastal waters. Nasty-looking creatures. They won’t go for the living so much but they sure cherish the dead. Lobsters like corpses, too. Ever eat a Maine lobster? Tasty, eh? I like lobster myself. Lobsters and crabs are recycled dead meat, but it doesn’t do to be picky. Dogfish meat is also good, but it’s a hassle to drag those big buggers across the gunwale. Lobsters I dive for, grab a few from where they wave their antennae between the seaweed. In winter I go down, too. I have a good dry-suit. It’s fun down there between the waving kelp, especially when the sunlight filters through marine foliage.

The pirated yacht, under new management, sets a course around Florida and is sold to a Venezuelan oil mogul or a Mexican police general or a Colombian drug lord who had been checking out some luxury harbors. The foreign visitor points his choice out to the charming young boating types he has been introduced to by his U.S. Organized Crime agent, a two-sided government mini-mogul, most likely. Ese bote me sirve, amigos, Don Ladron says and pays some cash up front, promises the balance on delivery in a Mexican harbor, and drives his rental limo to a private jet waiting at Bar Harbor airport.

Good business, also for the heirs of the dead owners who, in time, will collect some considerable insurance.

A couple of those charming young boating types did appear in Bunkport three summers ago, and, a few weeks later, a yacht owned by a former CEO (now “pursuing other interests,” he told us, buying drinks at the Thirsty Dolphin) got reported as missing, together with Moneybags and his ladies. The very same lads showed again last summer, but this time the situation was different. Both pirates were shot dead, the hired skipper and his wife were executed, and all four corpses were found on the yacht Take It Easy, so a Coast Guard lieutenant told us.

So what happened?

Here, I put together a script.

Crime story #3

A local one-legged Vietnam veteran is enjoying his therapy in his converted fishing boat. It’s autumn. He watches summer birds taking off for the south and winter birds coming in to replace them. The fellow suffers from a Multi Traumatic Disorder. The psychiatrist told him his best bet to stay normal would be, apart from taking his medication regularly, to do next to nothing.

Our protagonist feels it’s time to take a nap. He maneuvers his boat behind some huge rocks where it is protected from currents. He drops his anchor. Just as he wants to slip into the cabin he spots the top of a mainsail on the other side of the rocks. He claws himself onto the roof of his boat’s cabin and witnesses Dramatic Action.

What do you know? There are the two beach bums in designer jeans he remembers from their previous appearance at the Thirsty Dolphin, where Commodore Moneybags hired them to run his vessel. The Cloud Nine was presumed to be lost at sea with the commodore, passengers, and crew lost forever.

And here we go again. From what the veteran is witnessing from his vantage point between sheltering granite formations, the charming young men are about to take over another sea castle, the Take it Easy, a Walton Wharf creation with a price that takes awhile to write down due to a multitude of zeros.

A month before Elizabeth’s appearance I was listening to an older couple who recently sold their ancient wooden mini schooner after sailing her around the world. Not having gotten much for their worm-eaten vessel, they put an ad in the Down Easter Courier offering to take yachts from A to B, which was answered promptly by the owner of the Take It Easy. Would the couple take his brand-new multimillion dollar yacht from Bunkport, Maine to Mobile, Alabama?

Why, sure, sir.

The owners flew down, were impressed by the old weather-beaten couple; up-front cash appeared, hands were shaken.

“Godspeed and see you soon. If you need a crew, feel free to hire.”

Taking the Take It Easy out for trials, the couple (this hypothetical script has it) is approached by our killers, on one of Bunkport’s floating docks, unseen by our veteran.

Our veteran now sees the new victims, the old man in his weathered Greek sailing cap and worn U.S. Navy peacoat and his wife in an overall and a battered hat, kneeling on the boat’s deck, looking into the barrels of the pirates’ pistols. The young men bring back their guns’ hammers slowly — crrrack, crrrack — and lightly touch their triggers. The shots ring out loudly. The old folks are knocked over backward.

Amazing. Not so much the violence he observes but the veteran’s own reaction. He feels he is getting into a rage. The veteran hasn’t been that desperately angry in years, not since Viet Cong mortar splinters shredded his left leg. The Traumatic Syndrome is raising its ugly head. Our hero’s innate coolness is tested. Or so he hopes. (Maybe he has no innate coolness.)

This kind of mood shift has happened before, where he felt filled with cold, deadly rage, after he woke up in an empty trailer on a back road in inland Maine, about a hundred miles from Bunkport. The pre-veteran is now five years old. He is alone, even his dad’s bad dog is gone. Looks like nobody is aiming to return soon. Have the unemployment checks run out? No more food stamps and church handouts? Where are his parents’ clothes, guns, flashlights, the deer hanging upside down from the trees behind the trailer, the canned beans stacked under the sink? “Mom! Dad! Did you go to sell the empty beer cans?”

The pre-veteran charges about the empty trailer, kicking walls, until, crying, he falls back into his cot.

Jacko, his half-brother, happens to drop in and finds moldy bread and a dented can of sardines. Jacko says today is the day he has to surrender himself to jail. “Take care, kid,” Jacko says.

Jacko must have made a phone call in town (the trailer’s phone is dead), for a social worker in a minivan picks up the child and houses it in a shelter for the homeless. Uncle Joe, a small man with a weathered face and bright eyes under tufted eyebrows, picks me up. Me? I mean the pre-veteran.

“If you don’t give a shit,” Uncle Joe tells me, “it don’t matter.”

Uncle Joe would repeat that saying often, to himself mostly, in case things did seem to matter. It calmed him down, he told me. He wouldn’t be tempted to throw his tools around or hit me. In fact, he never hit me, all because of his magic mantra.

Jacko told me, when I asked him what the point of it all was (meaning him going back to jail a lot), that the point is something that depressed people worry about, the non-depressed don’t. Like him, Jacko, for instance. He just worked in the jail’s garden. During winter he read comic-strip books. “Me worry?” Jacko asked. Jacko didn’t look worried to me. He looked more like puzzled.

Tom Tipper, the ex-Harvard guy who escaped to Bunkport, my beer buddy at the Thirsty Dolphin counter, told me to reduce everything back to nothing. Everything comes from nothing anyway, and everything goes to nothing. “You can’t worry about nothing,” Tom said, “because there is nothing there to worry about.” He would drink more and say, “Essentially, of course.” He would drink more and say, “Of course, the exact opposite is also true.” He would drink more and say, “But then nothing is.” He would drink some more and say, “Get it?”

I would like to get it.

Sometimes I did, but not when the old seafaring couple got knocked over like tin soldiers hit by pebbles from a slingshot.

The military shrink, born in Laos, who looks like a late teener and is about half my size, the doctor I see every two months or so, told me to make a list of things I like to do and give him a copy. Whenever I see him he consults the list. Am I eating sliced radishes on sourdough toast? Go for walks with my dog? Go boating for no purpose? See that married woman? Quit after the fourth beer? Smoke a joint once a week? Try to read novels in Spanish with minimal use of my dictionary?

Maybe because I hadn’t seen Dolly for a while and was going slow on radishes on toast, I couldn’t help reaching for Uncle Joe’s deer rifle, checking the clip, arming the weapon, taking — using the scope attached to the barrel — meticulous aim, and pulling the trigger gently.

Twice.

The pirates, shot through the heads, hit the deck sideways. I cleaned the rifle, put it away, and lit a joint while the Take It Easy took it easy, drifting away erratically, vaguely aiming for open sea.

While, some hours later, I was ruminating, a chopper, alerted by a lobsterman checking his traps, who phoned the Coast Guard, dropped a crew to sail the yacht to their base at Southwest Harbor.

The next night a Guard lieutenant mentioned the event at the Thirsty Dolphin, after guzzling complimentary cold ones (support our troops) from patriotic Priscilla.

“We found four corpses,” the lieutenant told us: “Two perpetrators, two victims — it looked like to a state police detective we called in. Must have been a triple event. Crime andpunishment, for those who read Dostoyevsky. Amoral guys shooting immoral guys shooting a moral old man and his moral wife.”

The lieutenant is the head of the literary society that meets at the public library once in a while. He is smart.

“I would like to remind you,” the smart lieutenant said, “that justice carries a badge in our great country. Vigilantes will be arrested, prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” He pounded the bar. “We’ve got Homeland Security now.” He pounded the bar again. “Okay?”

We all pounded the bar. “Okay!”

“The victims,” the lieutenant continued, “were killed point-blank, with 9mm bullets fitting the pirates’ pistol barrels. According to the state police expert (he dropped his voice) who had the FBI looking in too, the pirates, in turn, got shot from some distance, say sixty feet. Bullets came from a rifle that we are now looking for.

“Who?” the lieutenant shouted.

“Who?” we shouted after him.

The lieutenant told us he supposed the shooter fired from an island, maybe. Or from another vessel, maybe. He was shouting again. “Are we dealing with an insurgent trying to save the world on his liberal own? Is anyone around here trying to think out of the box?” The lieutenant glared. “Would anyone in this town dare to believe there is no box?”

“A Che Guevara?” Tom, who wears a silk-screened Che Guevara T-shirt, asked.

The lieutenant glared at us through the righteous eyes of Fundamental Christianity. The sacred quest has started up again. Evil will be wiped out and replaced by A-1, one hundred percent, first-quality Good. This service will be rendered by uniforms, and suits with badges. Was he making himself clear?

We told him he was making himself clear.

Surprisingly, the lieutenant calmed down.

“Any of you ladies and gentlemen noticed anything remarkable relating, possibly, to this incident?” he asked us gently.

A sympathetic silence filled the Thirsty Dolphin.

“No?” he whispered.

We told the lieutenant that it is hard to notice much with all of those islands blocking the view, and there was some fog the day the yacht was found drifting, and being on the water is kind of fatiguing anyway. It’s the reflected sunlight that makes us extra tired. Hell, we are mostly working men (and in my case, crazy), we have no time to check on pleasure boaters. As the lieutenant said just now, interfering with pirates is government business, right?

The lieutenant asked Priscilla to pin his card on the big tamarack beam above the bar. In case some relevant detail ever came to mind. He also mentioned a reward. Ten thousand dollars, to be paid by one of the Take It Easy’s owner’s holding companies. Another ten thousand by the insurance people. Maybe more. There might be a Certificate of Reward, possibly issued by the governor, who knows? Otherwise by the Coast Guard. Signed in ink. Not stamped.

“Sure thing, Captain, when we hear something you’ll be the first to know,” Priscilla said, wiggling hippo hips and grinning helpfully. “Just leave it to us.”

Did I tell you I was in Vietnam?

I did?

Okay, there I was, on my fourth stretch out (I kept signing up, liking that harbor-master job at the officers’ club far away from the front lines), and one of the native masseuses introduced me to her grandpa. Old codger sat cross-legged in a cave in a hill overlooking my yacht-club harbor. Grandpa rather reminded me of my uncle Joe, partly morphed into the Dalai Lama. The hermit came out of the silence when I handed over greenbacks.

What Paleface wanted?

I asked for guidance. Why not? Old Silver Long-hair was right there and who knows what those holybolies discover in their, what is it again? Transmutations? And lo and behold, the hermit, in a croaky voice, smiling benevolently, did come up with a high-level tidbit. “Grandpa wants you to know that the unforeseeable invariably happens,” my masseuse translated, “but the predictable hardly ever occurs.” She smiled and patted my cheek, “Grandpa wants you take care now, you hear?”

Now ain’t what the hermit said the truth?

Next thing, just after I got back to the harbor, my right leg got shredded along with four of my buddies’ entire bodies. The masseuse (who used to sing love songs to me) and her psychic grandpa vanished.

Jet planes from a nearby carrier applied napalm to any habitation overlooking the harbor. Our patrol, checking out the area, reported finding parts of enemy kids, women, and farm animals but no traces of any military folks or the grenade-firing gadget that had interfered with our pleasures.

After amputation I got flown stateside, and the Veterans Administration equipped me with a technological leg. A chaplain told me that Uncle Joe, having slipped on the ice and broken his skull, was no longer living. A captain in dress uniform saluted and said he felt sorry for my loss. Once my new leg hurt less I got a seat on a military plane flying to Bangor. A jeep took me to Bunkport. I moved back into Uncle Joe’s cabin and Larry the lawyer had me sign a form that I accepted everything Uncle Joe left me. There were no taxes, as Uncle had Larry set up some kind of trust. I did have to pay Larry.

Before I became his ward I knew Uncle Joe from saying hi whenever we happened to see each other, and saying yes, I wanted a hamburger. And two hot dogs. And a shake. “Thank you.”

Once I moved in he made sure I went to school and took me “naturing and maturing” on weekends. I learned local navigation and general boat tending in the You Too. We kept up appearances by doing some line fishing and we kept a few lobster traps going, but fish wasn’t Uncle’s first interest. “Fishing is regular work,” he told me. “There ain’t no money in regular work.” He looked at me furiously. “No pleasure either.”

Uncle and I used his snowmobile to hunt our yearly deer without the costly license. Again, once a year, he set me up to shoot a moose to stock our freezer and sell the surplus meat for cheap to Thirsty Dolphin buddies. Uncle wouldn’t have no dealings with substances, but we brought in loads of Cuban cigars (although he didn’t care for Castro) and excise-free cigarettes from nearby Canada, to sell to truckers aiming for “all them other states.” If the winter sea got rough we hitched a trailer-sled to his snowmobile to keep the business going. Depending on the season we took tourists for rides on water or snow, preferably when there was a storm brewing so they could be thankful for our bringing them back alive and hand over big tips. Uncle might give me a fiver once in a while so I could smoke cigarettes and get sick with my buddies. He also got me a bicycle, so I didn’t have to wait for the summer school bus, paid for decent clothes, taught me to cook muffins and lobsters and some strange spinach-and-egg dish, and got me the dog Millie as company when he was out. Millie was a comfort, like her descendant Tillie is now.

Later, when puberty hit, I did some break-ins in rich folks’ summer cabins to pay for dope and booze. Uncle grumbled. When Jacko, in between jail time, gave me the use of what he called a “found” muscle car that he completed with stolen license plates, Uncle lost the vehicle and boarded me out at a school at the far side of the state. I had to do yard work and house cleaning for bus money so I could get back to him for holidays. He was changing then. Getting old, he even forgot to get drunk sometimes, the cabin was dirtying up, and the You Too needed painting and fussing with the electronics. I got so busy helping out that I had no time to tend to my bad habits. When school was done I moved back to Bunkport and took care of him. When I got drafted Priscilla had a state nursing service take over. Priscilla claims I loved Uncle Joe, and I wouldn’t argue with such a powerful personality, but I never figured out what “love” means.

Uncle would have agreed. “Care about nothing and nothing will take care of you very nicely.” He did want me to do a good job on anything that might come up. “Just for the hell of it, Jimbo.” Tom Tipper taught likewise but left out the “good job.” Tom definitely tended to overdo negation, to the point where nihilistic insights led to disorderly euphoria and Sheriff, on occasion, had to transport a handcuffed Tom to a Bangor crisis center.

Father Mikey, when stopping off at the Thirsty Dolphin between services, told us about love being the Mystery. The Mystery, by its very nature, could not, the father said, be explained.

“Anyone wants to fight the Mystery?”

Silence in the Dolphin.

“Then the Mystery has won.”

Another triumph for the noble priest.

Uncle Joe said that’s what he liked about the Church. “It goes every which way, Nephew.” He sometimes went to Mass. “To be with the Mystery.”

When I asked whether Uncle would be in hell now, Father Mikey smiled. “What if he is? A well-organized man, Vetty, and Joe was just that, will be comfortable anywhere.”

Ah well. Me worry? But just to be sure, every clear full moon, I float flowers (in winter cedar branches) just off Snutty Nose Island, where Uncle liked to fish for cod, and once in a while caught one, and, because it was endangered, put it back carefully.

We floated his hat when the current and the wind were outward, again behind Snutty Nose Ledge and the island.

Same place where Jacko, couple of weeks after Uncle died, in a rowboat that he actually paid for, successfully overdosed on whiskey and heroin, after mailing a note to Sheriff. The note said where to collect the boat.

Jacko left a note pinned to his chest:

The crime story? you ask.

Two dead pirates aren’t enough for you? And now a suicide? A suicide is not a crime, you say. Okay. Here we go.

Crime story #1 (continued)

I was happy in the cabin that I cleaned up after Uncle’s death. New oak floors, new roof, new plumbing. Coastal art on the whitewashed walls, by up-and-coming Maine artists. I linseed-oiled the hand-hewn posts and beams. I enjoyed the view from Uncle’s sturdy bed on wheels, that I moved about so Tillie, who slept in my arm, could enjoy the best views. I always spent more than my disablement check, filling the hole with cash I found under a loose board in a walk-in closet.

Uncle’s savings, even with inflation, could last me a lifetime.

“I got all my needs covered,” I declared on a fourth beer.

“Oh dear,” Priscilla said. “That means you haven’t.”

An Abinaki Native American further down the counter, raising a forbidding hand, agreed. He told me to be careful. Had I heard about the invisible ever-present Thunderbirds, who trap happy humans into learning situations until the goddess Manitou steps out of the woods and takes us away altogether?

“You must be getting bored,” Deputy Sheriff Sycophant said. Deputy Dog thought so too.

Everybody agreed that contentment equals depression. As I mentioned before, it’s a bad thing to be happy.

Stupid too. Tillie comforted me. Dolly was busy at that time.

“Breed koi,” Dr. Frederic J. Shanigan, MD, said. Koi are big carp that come in exotic colors. They freeze in their ponds in winter but thaw back to life in the spring. Dr. Shanigan breeds them for money on his island that none of us got invited to. Our medical recluse — who brags about his beautiful island home designed by an architect from far away, an Oriental who even created a Zen garden: artfully arranged rocks surrounded by white, carefully raked gravel — lives about ten miles out of Bunkport Harbor. He has a clinic in town that’s mostly run by Nurse, as Doc likes to travel. He uses his expensive powerboat as a ferry to the mainland, and a small but fast seaplane for getting further away. He is a sporty type who kayaks as well. Fastbuck Freddie heals for money only. No insurance, no treatment, unless there is top dollar in advance. Doc refers old people to out-of-the-way clinics because Medicare cuts into his bill. A pregnant homeless woman turned up with her baby stuck sideways. Doc sold her pain pills he got as samples. Priscilla, when she saw the woman collapse on her doormat, called the county helicopter service. By the time the chopper got to Bangor Hospital it carried a dead mother and a still-born baby.

But, you know, even Freddie Shanigan has different aspects. I had a splinter festering up my hand and Doc took it out for free. Priscilla broke out in shingles and Doc was right there with the injection and the ointment. Again: no charge. He treated Dolly, Sheriff’s wayward wife, for a fungus infection. Tom Tipper, treated free for side effects of alcoholism, claims Freddie sees us as members of his sacred inner circle.

I still won’t breed no koi or shoot, like Doc, the herons that sneak up into the pond to eat them.

“Learn to fly,” Sheriff, who used to be Air Force, said. That would be nice, but I get sleepy a lot. The boat can be anchored and the truck parked, but planes need somewhere where they can put themselves down. There are strips in Maine, but mostly they are private and the owners use trespassers for target practice.

I let that go, too.

Dolly smiled at me in her special way. In between lovers, was she? Beautiful woman, Dolly is.

Maybe Dolly wasn’t what I needed either.

Priscilla said we were getting close here. Female companionship would be the answer.

“Right,” Tom Tipper agreed. “I can come over for dinner.”

I said Tillie, sitting next to me on her own barstool, needed to go out, and please excuse us.

The subject came up again when the Big and Little Bitch Islanders, led by the Sisters, their lead lobstermen, showed up for refreshments.

The Sisters also suggested I should look for intimate company. “Be like us, get yourself a woman.” The Sisters are powerful personages, housed in powerful bodies, who use the young ladies they refer to as their “squeezes” as stern men. They own powerful fishing boats (Bad Cat is the leading vessel), and a refurbished WWII landing craft. The landing craft ferries their motorcycles and pickup trucks to the mainland and back. They stomp about armed.

“Get yourself a squeeze or two,” Big Sis told me.

“Sure thing,” I said.

I wasn’t too sure.

Shouldn’t I know better? There was the high-school teacher who got me to get her into trouble and we might have married if I hadn’t found a helpful medic. The Vietnam masseuse didn’t mean well, either. There was the one-night-stand in a Boston singles bar where lonely secretaries, nurses, some widows, maybe, a divorced woman or quietly dressed twenty- and thirty-pluses, in sensible shoes, toting handbags, looking through intellectual-looking paperbacks, glance at men shyly. The glancer I ended up with told me she was a biologist’s assistant, single, no complications, the last boyfriend was long gone. She preferred a motel until she got to know me well enough to invite me to her apartment. She had booze in her bag. I was alone when I woke up late the next morning. No wallet, no car keys, even my twenty-dollar watch was missing. No goodbye note, either.

The police reminded me we live in a bad, bad world. A fellow veteran lent me a Franklin to get me home.

Still. A woman. You never know. Someone from away, perhaps. A fleeting relationship. Or a long-time prostitute with manners. Some lady looking for a break.

I started thinking about the Sisters again.

I suppose, being a minority, the third gender has to prove superiority. Maybe the Sisters overdo their act a tad. The Sisters give me lobsters from time to time. They let me blunder about in their territory at will. They have me visit on their boat, and baby-talk to Tillie, who lets them hold her upside down and nuzzle her bare belly.

I advertised in the Washington Post, Tom Tipper’s hometown. He said government women get frustrated. He helped with the ad’s text; so did Dolly, who writes a supportive column in the Greater Bunkport American, a weekly. She also wrote a Harlequin novel. Larry the lawyer was the copyeditor. Doc Shanigan took digital pictures and created a Web site. I showed up as the kind, grizzly outdoorsman with his cute little doggie. The cabin and its neat interior, the boat and the pickup truck, both shiny in late sunlight, the snowmobile and the all-terrain vehicle, everything was there against a backdrop of islands and mountains in the distance. Odd man out, maybe, but a man of substance.

Tom Tipper told me to mention jazz. I visit his trailer to listen to the CDs he makes me order and we play duets. His keyboard blends with my sense of percussion. “Jazz attracts the sensitive, the intelligent, the spiritual, yet cool,” he whispered, “and the beautifully erotic.”

LOBSTER YACHT’S, named YOU TOO, OWNER/SKIPPER, MAINE COAST. VIRILE ONE-LEGGED VET MARINE. NO DEBT OR TV. SHORE CABIN WITH PLUMBING. IN NEED OF SINGLE WOMAN. AGE 30–40. LOG FIRES. THE CHICKADEES SING ALL WINTER.visit www.james.holbert.com for pictures and ‘contact me’

My publisher called. He said we had to talk. He knew he had specified crime but on second thought there had to be romance, too. “Put that in, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

Priscilla calls him Walrus. Bald head, big moustache, obese, waddles, very persistent. Walruses must be persistent to get all the food they need to gather that weight.

You’re familiar with Alice in Wonderland, are you? She’s in the public domain so I can quote without permission:

(and a romantic entanglement, okay?)

The ad drew a bit of e-mail. I countered with polite refusals. I mean they were certainly nice women, and I appreciated them taking the trouble to contact me, but there were problem kids in reform schools who came out once in a while, and/or weight problems, or Tillie-eating dogs in tow, even prowling former lovers on parole. One was stalked by a rich rapist.

“Never mind,” Tom said. “Luck is with the lucky.”

Elizabeth didn’t bother to e-mail or send a photograph, she showed up, saying it isn’t difficult to locate a one-legged lobster-yacht owner/skipper in Downeast Maine.

And there she was. Striding into a full Thirsty Dolphin at Happy Hour on Friday. Coming straight at me, kissing me lightly on a grizzly cheek.

The audience applauded.

Elizabeth dropped her duffel bag so she could shake Priscilla’s hand across the bar. She introduced herself to the good old boys, the Sisters and their squeezes, Dr. Shanigan, Sheriff and Dolly, Tom Tipper, Larry the Lawyer, Father Mikey, and Deputy Dog (Sycophant being on duty that evening) as Elizabeth Scofield, single, thirty-four years old, lover of jazz and small dogs (Tillie sat on the barstool next to me, she got picked up and cutie-pied), an adept at coastal sailing, presently boatless due to a settlement with a recently divorced husband. For work, our applicant told us, she did freelance journalism.

“Due for a long vacation.” She gave me a long look. “Right here in Bunkport.” She stared at me critically but not disapprovingly.

“Would the relationship work?”

She looked at the faces of my buddies.

“Is he okay?” she asked, pointing at my head.

“A pervert,” the Sisters said. “He only likes women.”

“But kind of neat as men go,” a beautiful squeeze called Evelyn said.

“A drunk, but not as bad as me,” Tom Tipper said. “Nobody is as bad as me.” He got up, spilling beer, trying to stare us all down. “But nobody, okay?”

“Good health,” Dr. Shanigan said. “Life signs of a man ten years younger. Blood tests, last month, were fine.” He glanced at Dolly. “No sexual encounters since then, I would think.”

“A believer,” Father Mikey said, “with a new terminology. If he met God, God might like him.”

“God might like everybody,” Priscilla said. “So do I, with a large number of exceptions.” She gave Elizabeth her wide smile. “I like your advertiser, though. Pays his tab. Can be helpful. Good boater if he doesn’t go full blast in the fog. Walks home after four beers.”

“After I caught him that time,” Deputy Sycophant said. “Boy oh boy, good thing I lost the paperwork.”

Okay, so I had five beers that evening. Sycophant is a fuss body.

“Good slow lay,” Dolly said.

I don’t know what Sheriff would have said. His cell phone, a minute ago, had called him out on a case of domestic violence in the trailer park that Deputy Dog was having trouble with. We could see Sheriff outside, putting on body armor and checking his shotgun.

Elizabeth put Tillie down carefully, took a few steps back, pirouetted, and asked if I found her attractive.

Sure I did. What man doesn’t like long legs, a full bosom (hidden by a tightly buttoned-up blouse), long thick auburn hair, sparkling green eyes, slender well-cared-for hands, a sultry voice, like Marlene Dietrich. That voice could have warned me. Marlene was a chick one couldn’t push around, not even in her movies. Ever see The Blue Angel? Jeezum!

Priscilla had been watching Elizabeth’s performance carefully. “Nothing is ever one thousand percent right. Tell us what’s wrong with you, will you, dear?”

She patted her left breast. “This boob is fake.”

She told us about her cancer, all through one breast when it was finally detected, and spreading into lymph ducts up to the armpit. The surgeon did his job and prescribed chemo that made her bald and sick to her stomach for quite some months but she had been in remission for quite a while now. The surgeon said, “This type always comes back.” Next time around it was likely to kill her. The oncologist said she might live into old age, dementia, and a final rest in a nursing home.

She turned to me. “I can have another breast manufactured from surplus flesh of my belly if the lopsiding bothers you. Won’t take too long but I’ll have to fly back home and stay awhile.” She patted the other breast. “This one is perfect.” She smiled. I admired her well-cared-for teeth. Even so, the smile was twisted. Nervous maybe.

My smile must have been nervous, too. One breast, one leg, a fine kettle of fish. A matching kettle of fish?

Priscilla winked. “What do you say, James?”

Right. James. She got that from the ad. I was a new man. Hi, I am James.

I could have hemmed and hawed, suggested that Elizabeth should stay in Priscilla’s motel for a bit, that we do some introductory getting together, share a few meals in Bunkport’s falling-apart lobster- and crab-pier’s restaurant shack, but I liked those sparkling eyes and I’m used to lopsided anyway. Even my latest leg, mostly made in China, is a tad shorter than the other.

I would say we liked each other at first sight.

Love at first sight, according to Priscilla. She likes movies with “feel good” endings and reads pure romance. Tarzan and Jane stuff. Sentimentality, hard to find these days. Larry the Lawyer was on my side. So was Tom Tipper and Deputy Dog. “Love is for the lovebirds,” the deputy said. “And they are birds, dammit,” Tom Tipper said.

Like at first sight. That was okay. We agreed. Except Priscilla, she had been married once. She knew about true love. Her husband died in Montreal during their honeymoon. Some say she squashed him.

Elizabeth moved into the cabin and the weather was fine for a week and we were mostly boating. I bought her a diving suit and cylinders and goggles and showed her where the last cod swims, and we saw two types of Maine seals, smiling at us from rocks overgrown with bright orange rockweed. We met with a bevy of harbor porpoises, and, briefly, with a thresher and a blue shark, both of them large, but not hungry, maybe it was too cold for them. She went ooh and aah spotting herons, ospreys, eagles, wild turkeys, turkey vultures, and listened to the lonely call of a loon. She also noticed the bleeding chair. There were cormorants (big black seabirds) on it, but they flew away as she pointed.

Elizabeth liked crime. She was also interested in the incident featuring the corpses on the Take It Easy. She kept asking around about what happened, even made notes, read newspaper clippings in the library, consulted charts.

And now this.

After she had climbed all over the giant buoy, she wondered whether we should contact the authorities.

I didn’t think so. Why meddle?

She found a camera in her bag and clicked away.

“What do you care?” I asked and she said she was a journalist, remember? Taking pictures of amazing events had become a habit. I told her our Bunkport friends wouldn’t like a write-up on easily misunderstood events, especially this close to home.

Why not?

I told her. The authorities like making a fuss. Anybody, any local body, who spotted the chair would know exactly what happened here. I mentioned fishing territory. Some fool lobsterman had broken the code. This was a Bitch Island Sisters reserve. The Sisters, I assumed, would have caught an intruding thief in the act and warned the trespasser, then, on another occasion, warned the fool again. And then, well, they killed him, created an example.

“Have anyone specific in mind, James?”

Me?

“So the Sisters shot this poor guy up?”

Well now...

“Tom Tipper was the victim?” Elizabeth wanted to know, which was a good guess, for Tom, who reads Nietzsche in German, and has become convinced that we’ve made up our own values and that, because we are wrong, the values are wrong too, may have been drawing the wrong conclusions. Amorality ain’t immorality. But Tom, he doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about nothing no more. The way he is going I have been thinking of persuading Tom to sign himself into a mental institution. Save Sheriff the trouble of dragging him, kicking and screaming. A dry-out place behind bars someplace. Get some peace and quiet.

“Tom who?” I asked.

It was true I hadn’t seen Tom Tipper for a while. I was sure Elizabeth — having gathered enough Down East lore during her investigations — might be guessing right. So the Sisters kidnapped the poor blighter, his recliner and all. They heaved the lot onto the back of the pickup truck and ferried the load to Bitch Island. They got their squeezes to help them maneuver chair and Tom on top of the giant marker. They tied everything up good, got back in their boat, and round and round the avengers go, firing away. Poff poff POFF.

All done now. Leave him up for a day to feed the vultures, then cut what’s left loose. Weigh him down with four fifty-pound anchors attached to durable steel chain, and there he goes, off Bitches Ledge where the sea is, what... five hundred feet deep?

“Sorry, Tom,” the Sisters would have said. But what the hell. Their law is the law.

Tom had it coming. Drunk out of his mind again, he had called the Sisters sexist names. He had been picking fights with big guys who felt embarrassed but hit him anyway, causing drunk-and-disorderly charges. Priscilla was about to ban him for messes made in the Dolphin’s bathroom. Even I had avoided him lately, after he applied Zen to the art of shooting, showing me how to become one with his shotgun, and missing the target, a fifty-five-gallon drum at short distance.

Sheriff had pulled Tom’s driving license. Tom, by now a habitual offender, still slammed his old truck around Bunkport’s alleys. He would soon have to be arrested. The jails around here aren’t known for comfort.

I drove out with Elizabeth to check Tom’s trailer that the bank was aiming to foreclose on. The door was locked. Tom’s dog, Cindy, wandered about outside, looking sickly. I offered her beef jerkies that I kept in the truck but her teeth were too weak. She snarled at Tillie, who wanted to play.

“Terrible,” Elizabeth said. “He could have gotten himself treated.” She shrugged. “Quit booze, swallow pills, what part of that is not to understand? But the Sisters went too far. Right, James?”

I huh-huh-ed.

“So you won’t do nothing either?” (Elizabeth had picked up our double-negating ways).

I hah-hah-ed.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t horrified by what I was pretty sure had happened. Blame the Sisters? What do I know? I’m no part of a minority. Male heterosexual whites have it easy in Maine. We just bumble along, no need for defense. If white males would go out of fashion in Maine I might become vicious too. (This is where crime story #4 starts). We have a summer camp for city girls behind Bunkport, in the woods — pretty out there: a brook for skinny-dipping, a glade between the maple trees for campfires, some low hills for enjoying the views, a landscaped moss-and-shrub garden, Chinese style. And there are some comfortable lodges that belong to a trust set up by a long-dead wealthy lady. City girls can let go there, have themselves a nice vacation. But some of our trailer-trash rednecks liked to bother the girls for being different. The machos set fire to a lodge, punctured some tires, tore up tents, then raped a few of the young and pretty. There were no charges pressed, but Sheriff stepped in anyway, making arrests for DUI, driving to endanger, assaulting a police officer, and managed to hand out jail time. Enraged, the boys tried again, but this time the summer ladies contacted the Sisters by cell phone and before you could say Jane Robinson big motorbikes cut the boys’ vehicles off the road. There was some gunfire but no one got hit by bullets. The leader-rapist drowned in a shallow pond — I heard a whisper that some heavy person had a foot on his head. State detectives found no witnesses. The Sisters smiled sweetly. Beat-up rednecks claimed they had been drinking and couldn’t remember having bothered no summer girls. Black eyes? They always had black eyes. Broken ribs? Same thing. People get careless with baseball bats. Who were swinging the bats? “Sorry, Detective, it was dark, I had two beers, you know how it goes.”

Sheriff wasn’t helpful either. Deputies Dog and Sycophant knew nothing neither. Tribal fights, liquor, minor bruises, boys will be boys, but no one died, except the drowned guy, but then, being no more, he couldn’t press charges. Autopsy showed lots of liquor in the boss fellow’s veins.

“Rape? Murder? Them are big words around here, Detective.”

I didn’t tell Elizabeth about all that, not then, but she kissed it out of me later. I didn’t want her to get mad at me. We were having a good time. Intimacy can certainly be all it is cracked up to be. Shared laughs. Sex, ah, sure, sex too, but there is a limit to that. It’s part of the thing, what with living in the same cabin and all. Good cooking. Tillie the dog took us for long walks. We hired a piloted airplane and I showed her the bays, islands, and coastal mountains. There were more warm and windless days, another brief Indian summer, and we lay about naked on my porch, sunning our scars.

Elizabeth had taken my truck to the Bangor mall to buy female stuff. I had gone boating. It so happened that Sheriff and I met on the water. Sheriff keeps rum on his boat, in case a hauled-out man-overboard needs warming up. There being a chill in the air again, we made some hot toddy.

Sheriff and I go back a ways. Back to when his wife got to knowing me a little bit better. Now that Elizabeth is in the way he no longer holds it against me.

In any case, the point was moot now that Dolly, having done with the departed dock builders, had gotten to know a Mexican landscape gardener who looked like, and was therefore named, King Carlos (of Spain). Sheriff told me he had found someone too, way out in Bangor. Which was good. A bit of distance makes the contact more exciting.

Sheriff, as I figured, knew about the bleeding chair on the channel marker. Eugene, our chief illegal clam digger, just wanted Sheriff to know. There was no dead body when he spotted the decorated marker, but another digger had heard shots earlier on that week. The other digger, having lost his license for working a closed area, hadn’t bothered to go nearer.

Sheriff went out to check the crime scene but the chair was gone. The night’s heavy rain and gale-force winds washed the marker clean.

“You didn’t see no body?” Sheriff asked me.

“Me?”

He stared at me.

“No,” I said. “Elizabeth saw no body either. Just blood, cut ropes.”

“She is going to talk to someone?”

“I hope not,” I said.

“And if she does?”

“I never saw nothing,” I said. “No chair either. Chair? What chair?”

We drank hot toddy.

“The victim is Tom, you know that,” Sheriff said. “Good riddance of good garbage. Pity. Right? Now how about perpetrators?”

“The Sisters?” I asked/told Sheriff.

“The Sisters?” he asked/told me.

Sheriff had checked on the whereabouts of Tom Tipper.

Like me, he hadn’t been able to locate our friend. Like me, Sheriff had seen Cindy, Tom’s dog, wandering about in bad shape. Unlike me, he had shot the old helpless and dying dog. Tom’s old boat wasn’t at its mooring. We all knew that Tom hardly had any lobster traps left and made his living, or his drinking, rather, by working traps owned by the Sisters.

“The chair?” I asked, for I hadn’t been inside Tom’s trailer for a while. Sheriff had. Tom’s door was unlocked. Tom’s huge old recliner was still there, beer-fart perfumed, in front of the DVD player (Tom didn’t watch TV) with a Pat Metheny DVD in the slot.

“So the Sisters got a chair from the dump?”

“For sure,” Sheriff said. He had seen the dump guy, who said he was missing a discarded recliner that he sometimes used for napping.

Sheriff, as I expected, wasn’t going to be active on the Bleeding Chair mystery. Tom had already been reported as missing. The Sisters would know enough to sink his boat, quietly, at night. It’s a big ocean out there.

Coming home, I vaguely reported non-ascertainable assumptions to my live-in reporter. Elizabeth was working her computer. I glanced at the screen and she was scrutinizing Doc Shanigan’s Web site. Her pencil pointed at a paragraph that mentioned abortions.

“Pregnant?” I asked casually.

“Not today,” she said casually. She kissed me. “I thought you had yourself fixed.”

I had, long ago, after returning from Vietnam, not wanting to cause more babies to become maimed soldiers in the next war.

“Dr. Fastbuck Freddie Shanigan, MD,” Elizabeth said, sitting on the bed after dinner, her long bare legs twisted in the lotus position. “Your beloved doc. He makes good money, does he? His Web site looks appetizing. He performs abortions?”

I thought he did. Summertime sex carelessly enjoyed by the rich folks will lead to creative mishaps. Then the piper is called in and has to be paid.

“You sure?”

Me? I’m never sure of nothing.

Elizabeth kept asking and I kept answering somehow, avoiding specifics. Sure. Doctors can be big earners, big spenders. Shanigan made nothing on us, his mates, and little money on the other locals, but he reputedly made, or used to make, a fortune on the summer crowd in their vacation mansions on the ridge overlooking Bunkport Bay. The rich can afford to believe in, and pay for, hoohaha medicine. Doc learned how to do acupuncture, magic massages, studied homeopathic medications, used his “healing hands” and his “hypnotic” sea-blue eyes to heal hypochondria and psychosomatic symptoms. He also performed shamanism and sold instructions he lifted from the Internet and printed up nicely. Self-published gems, copied by the great Shaman himself. He also became a Rinko master. Rinko? I think that’s the term. I don’t know what Rinko masters do. Probably another variant on bring me your sick and give me your money. That’s all cash on the barrel-head trade, insurance doesn’t pay for any hullabaloo and way-out scary whatdoyoucallit.

Elizabeth was smiling. “I take it you don’t believe in alternative medicine.”

I said I wasn’t quite ready yet. Maybe I was waiting for the light.

“Is Doc in the cosmetic-surgery business, too?” Elizabeth asked. “Tucks and nips?”

Oh, sure.

“Working on the summer residents? But didn’t you say used to?”

Well... I did hear, from the help working for the folks on the hill, and visiting the Dolphin on their evening off, that Doc wasn’t so popular on the Ridge no more. He had been successfully sued for malpractice. Other doctors proved he installed wrong-size bosoms. Some of his treatments caused bad allergies with potentially lethal sideeffects.

The rich folks’ help is local. They have good ears and eyes. They like to gossip about their masters. Doc was out on his ear, the help told us, and there was another healer working the Ridge now: big man with a perfumed beard, a booming New Orleans jazz voice, a Vishnu and Kali MD, graduated out of a Greenland-based correspondence university. The celebrity Ridge dwellers started writing him fat checks, then the ordinary millionaires followed.

“So Shanigan isn’t doing so well now?”

Coming to think of Doc’s show of increasing wealth, I told her, it seemed he was doing even better. Who knows what his inventive genius was whispering in his ear? Was he playing the market? The new airplane (a super-fast Mooney, replacing the still-good Cessna), the new cabin cruiser (same thing there, the high-class boat he traded was only three years old), the refurbishing of his island buildings and gardens, wouldn’t that add up to a million here and there? As the Wall Street Journal says, if you go that way you’re soon talking real money.

Which he may have been borrowing. The banks were easy those days. And then maybe he paid them off, Elizabeth suggested.

“The man interests me,” Elizabeth insisted. “I could write an article if I can get some facts documented. Make some good money. Living at your expense is pleasant but I would like to help out.”

I shrugged. She had been leaving big cash on the table that I put back in her purse when she wasn’t looking.

She unfolded her shapely legs, walked about the room naked. She wasn’t shy about the lack of a breast anymore. She was talking again, tapping her notebook with a pencil. “I was listening to an intellectual carpenter,” (we have some living here, fugitives from the cities) “who said he did repairs on the Shanigan property, and who called him ‘Shenanigan.’” Elizabeth looked at me, but I don’t care about her private goings-on. Some interesting carpenter? Me jealous? Ha ha.

She continued. “My very old impotent carpenter informer says Shanigan gave him the creeps, but raved about the exotic art your drinking buddy is collecting.” She specified, saying that this happily married carpenter listed some of Shanigan’s valuables: fine Persian rugs, antique Papua New Guinea spirit shields and masks, a sketch of an elephant by Rembrandt.

I was dozing and thinking, vaguely felt her hands unclipping my fake leg and putting it gently into its night holder.

I think Elizabeth had expectations, but my thinking kept me distracted. What old carpenter? I didn’t know no old carpenter. I do know some young ones. Single guys.

The next day brought disturbing news.

It turned out that Sheriff’s and my and the Sisters’ theory was hogwash.

Tom Tipper’s body was found by Sheriff. Tom’s leaky boat, the Mary-Ann, had gotten herself stuck on a ledge behind Evergreen Island. Tom’s headless corpse was found sitting on his bunk in the cabin. A thick red V showed on the cabin’s wall behind him, his hands were holding his shotgun, aimed at where his face had been, his big toe was still stuck in the weapon’s trigger hold. Empty bottles, cigar stubs, a plate with a rotten slice of pizza, drug paraphernalia, a girlie centerfold pinned to the cabin door, contradicted a shelf filled with books on Taoism, Buddhist beat poetry, a leather-bound copy of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, and high-quality sound equipment complete with its CD collection. Monk, Eliane Elias, Miles, Mehldau, Bobo Stenson.

A note pinned to Tom’s sweatshirt said Thank you for putting up with me.

Sheriff, to show activity, called in Higher Power, that drove in from Bangor, dressed in woolies and furs and a rabbit-skin hat with flaps, boated out with Sheriff and Deputy Dog, looked, threw up, and was ready to leave.

“Suicide, right?” Sheriff asked the detective sergeant when he helped her ashore. He was holding up the thank-you note. “That’s Tom’s handwriting, all right. You want to have it verified? I got his diary, surely you have an expert up there in Portland?”

She had messed up her fur coat.

“Suicide?” Sheriff asked again.

“Just barely,” she said, leaning on Dog’s arm while she staggered to her gleaming police cruiser, driven by a female uniform. Looked like she wouldn’t be back.

“Better have Tom’s leftovers picked up by the discount cremation service,” Deputy Dog said.

“And the bleeding chair?” Elizabeth asked me over dinner that day. “Who really got shot up on the chair, you think?” She tried to stare the truth out of me. “Not Tom, am I right?”

Right, not Tom.

So who else was missing in the fair town and district of Bunkport?

Sheriff told me he had made the rounds and visited any fisherman active at this time of the year. They were all present. Their stern men, too. He also checked the Rich Ridge, the trailer camp, the nearby islands. The Sisters came over to tell us they were sorry for our loss. We played music during the wake, King Carlos replacing Tom on keyboards. He played, and sang, a Mexican version of “You Can’t Step into the Same River Twice.”

Tom would have liked that.

That night Elizabeth woke me to suggest that maybe there was no fish-person involved.

So who?

Priscilla said she had missed Dr. Shanigan lately. Had he maybe gone to the Bahamas again? According to Nurse, Elizabeth said — she and Nurse had become friendly — Freddie sometimes flew to the Caribbean in the super-fast Mooney, prostitute-resorts hopping, having a great time.

The next morning I visited Shanigan’s clinic. Nurse said she hadn’t seen her employer for over two weeks. He had left without notice and she hadn’t heard from him since. She expected him any day. She told me not to get the virus pneumonia that was knocking old folks down all over the place. “You take care now.”

I had heard that before.

There was no one else missing except Dr. Shanigan.

Elizabeth said she would talk to Nurse. Woman to woman. As a reporter she sometimes wore a wire. She showed me the gadget. It looked professional, very small. She must have been recording me too. Good thing I am an ignorant know-nothing.

“I worked in mental health before,” I heard Nurse say when Elizabeth played the tape for me. “Freddie Shanigan has a borderline personality disorder,” Nurse was saying, “There is some sadism in there, too. And lots of greed. Maybe we should tar and feather him, put him on a pole, and carry him out of town. We would all feel better.” Nurse gave us no specifics, but we knew a few already. The dead woman and her dead baby. An out-of-cash outsider lobsterman’s broken arm that Priscilla, a former army medic, had to splint, because Nurse had strict instructions to ignore the uninsured and Doc was away again. Other seriously ill or damaged poor folks who were referred to nowhere. Coming to think of what Doc was like, it was a wonder we hadn’t taken some action. Ah, right. It was because he treated us, his Thirsty Dolphin buddies, for free.

Some time passed. Elizabeth flew away to visit her sick aunt in Washington but she left some of her gear. Accidentally going through her duffel bag, I located a handgun and marveled at modern technology. This wasn’t army issue from the Vietnam era, we never had those computerized electronic gadgets. Another weapon, a lightweight Smith & Wesson mini revolver, looked more familiar. What with the holsters, body armor, the ample supply of ammo, the binoculars, even the special-model flashlight, I might assume that she had only taken her badge with her.

I missed my secret agent. Tillie slept in my arm again, not in the sheepskin-lined basket Elizabeth bought her.

Acute and severe depression struck, and was medicated away, somewhat, by my military shrink, who suggested I should advertise again. I didn’t, because I didn’t think the script had played itself out yet. For once I was right. A week later Elizabeth called, asking to be picked up at Bangor Airport the next morning. “I need your help.” She used her Marlene Dietrich voice.

She sat close to me in the truck, leaning her head on my shoulder. It was like college days all over, except that I never went to college. Kissing foreplay, but there was no time to finish what we were starting.

“We’ll need a pickaxe,” she said after sitting up straight. “And I hope the You Too is in good shape.”

Boating? Was she crazy? In a ten-to-fifteen-knot wind with occasional gusts up to thirty? It was an exceptionally cold day, too, although by then it was, calendar-wise, spring. The winter birds weren’t considering leaving yet and most of the summer birds were still enjoying southern heat.

We stopped at the cabin to pick up digging tools. The You Too was pushed by wind and current so it didn’t take too long to reach Doc Shanigan’s private harbor. Elizabeth jumped on the dock. I stumbled along bravely, being backup. Tillie rushed ahead.

Doc’s seaplane was out of the water and safely secured in its hangar but the cabin cruiser had got herself stuck under the floating dock and, with only her sleek nose sticking up, looked like a total loss to me. The koi fish were in their pond, moving sluggishly through slowly melting water. The house was dusty, with plenty of cobwebs and an odor breathing out of the refrigerator. Propane fed from a huge tank, powering radiators, had kept the plumbing from freezing, but the tank was running on empty.

No Dr. Fastbuck Freddie Shanigan, MD, anywhere.

Amazing. The plane was there, the boat was there. Had he kayaked ashore? No, the kayak was present too, hooked up to the side of a Japanese-style garden shed.

“My guess is Doc got picked up here, and after some doings, found himself dying on that shot-up recliner,” Elizabeth said, after coming back from a search that took awhile, with me patiently sitting on a rock, Uncle’s rifle across my knees, watching Tillie sniffing around the Zen garden and whining. A pole wall shielded me from the wind, the sun was warm. Elizabeth nudged me awake. “I’m going to dig up that exotic bit of landscaping that’s upsetting your hound. I’ll swing the pickaxe. Maybe you can scrape away some dirt. Your leg is okay?”

Sure my leg was okay, it was made of A-1 aluminum and plastics. My regular leg was okay, too, although I had some arthritis under the kneecap. Not yet advanced enough to bother.

The snow had melted off just a few days before, but the ground was still frozen and we had to hack our way through a few inches of neatly raked pebbles. When, after several hours of guessing and digging we found a little girl’s naked frozen body, we staggered back. “Bingo,” Elizabeth said weakly.

We took a break, then started afresh and found a second corpse, of a little boy this time.

Elizabeth used her cell phone to call “Division.” On the way back to Bunkport she showed me her FBI badge. “You knew, didn’t you?”

As I, modest fellow that I am, had begun to suspect, it wasn’t the romance oozing from my ad that brought beautiful Elizabeth to Bunkport.

Betrayed once again.

It wasn’t so bad this time. At least she didn’t steal my watch. She brushed my beard with her lips, told me she had been lucky, that she liked me, had enjoyed her stay at the cabin, looked forward to more staying at the cabin, that she hadn’t really joined me on false pretenses, the photos on the Web site turned her on, and that my actual presence, the sincerity and wisdom of which showed in the wording of the ad, and later in reality, turned her on even more.

Well, that was nice. Wasn’t it?

The next day the entire Bunkport motel was booked by an FBI cloak-and-dagger squad, consisting of nice enough middle-aged men in suits and ties and a motherly woman wearing sensible clothes and no makeup. Like everybody, Elizabeth had a badge pinned to her jacket but she didn’t show her gun. The motherly type didn’t either. The nice enough middle-aged men did: big super-shooters stuck in shoulder holsters under unbuttoned jackets.

A photographer/filmer and a pathologist arrived by helicopter bringing cyber-age tools and body bags for the kids. The squad started early, finished late, and were done. There were gory details. Shanigan had amused himself with the kids. A sadistic pedophile, and I had been drinking with the guy! “Hi Freddie, cold enough for you today? Bourbon on the rocks? There you go. Our health, Doc.”

Good actor, Dr. Shanigan.

Dumb audience, me.

That night Elizabeth was still at my place, explaining — while we sipped Cuban rum-laced coffee — the situation.

She told me Shanigan might, however unlikely, be on the loose somewhere and would be on a top-priority list of suspects. His corpse had not been found.

Many things indeed. More than shoes and ships and sealing wax, although, as it turned out, these items were part of the present situation.

It took awhile, Elizabeth said, before the FBI squad that got assembled to take on a case of two kidnapped children, both of wealthy parents, both living in exclusive homes just outside Boston — it took awhile for the squad to get started.

Lazy? Slow? Red tape?

None of the above.

All traces were cold, because the parents delayed their 911 calls for three days. Why? Because it took three days before the parents, knowing that they had bought a doll each, for their two-million-dollar payout each, were scared to show their faces to the authorities.

“Dolls? What dolls?” I asked.

She waved to shut me up. The dolls came later.

It took awhile, Elizabeth told me, to get some relevant info out of the fathers of the kids. They turned out to be con men, specializing in fleecing the rich, preferably doctors, dentists, and other top-income medical types who didn’t know about small, exclusive hedge and mutual funds. The con men kept their schemes going for two years, then suddenly folded their corporations and kept the money stolen from their clients, in cash, at home.

Shanigan was an investor in funds set up by the fathers of the kids.

He lost serious money.

Rather than go to the authorities, and facing the delays such actions produce, he became the winged avenger, or kidnapper, rather.

The con men, when they were contacted by cell phone (a throw-away item that couldn’t be traced), suspected that they were being blackmailed by one of their former investors but had no idea who. Having destroyed their records in a fire, they had no list of names for the FBI to check.

Shanigan put the kids on the phone, too. Both were begging their fathers to please save them. The little girl shouted something about a boat, and said, “You too,” and the letters M and E, before being shut up by what sounded like a slap in the face.

Shanigan, talking to the fathers — at an interval of some ten minutes between the two calls — gave them the coordinates of a parking lot belonging to an out-of-business shopping mall. The fathers were told to appear, at eight the next morning, with the money, at the mall’s southwest corner. Shanigan would be there with the kids handcuffed to a metal fence, at the mall’s northeast corner. The fathers were to put down the money, one suitcase each. Shanigan would walk toward them, holding the key for the handcuffs. He advised the fathers not to come armed, for his associate would be watching the scene, and shoot them, and the kids, with a sniper’s rifle, if anything at all looked the slightest bit suspicious.

“Yes?” Shanigan had asked. “Would you mind repeating my instructions?”

Shanigan had used his own car, a golden Toyota with stolen North Carolina plates, to kidnap the kids, both at locations between the school bus stop and their homes’ driveways. Shanigan caught both on the same day. Using the old-fashioned method of pressing a cloth soaked in chloroform in their faces, he made them unconscious, then drove them to a deserted airstrip some thirty miles out of Boston where the fast Mooney airplane was waiting. He hid the car and flew the kids to Shanigan Island, Maine, a short distance, especially in time. On the island he woke them, had his way with them, made the phone calls to their fathers, recorded their voices saying, “Hi Daddy, Hi Daddy!” and killed them. He had manufactured two life-sized figures out of bamboo and glue and dressed the dolls in the children’s clothes.

The FBI, Elizabeth told me, followed, after the complaints came in, a multitude of leads, only one of which vaguely pointed to Maine. The girl had mentioned a boat, so she had to be somewhere on the coast, and the letters M and E, which indicate Maine, are painted on the sides of boats registered in Maine. Then there was “you too,” which made no sense. “Love you, too?” “You’re in danger, too?” M and E were pronounced unclearly. Maybe she said M and A, which would be Massachusetts. The call had made her father very nervous. He babbled, cried, didn’t make much sense except that he was hoping that the FBI wouldn’t worry about the money, where he got it, he meant to say. He wanted to make a deal: He gave them the information about his daughter’s kidnapper, and there would be no other law enforcement agency involved. No SEC, no IRS, etc. Yes, please?

“What information?” the motherly agent, a top investigator and interviewer, suddenly shrieked. She yelled, shaking him by the shoulders, that so far he had told her diddly squat. Well, the father stammered, there was the parking lot he helped the FBI to find. And he had told them about the voice of the kidnapper, a white voice, with a New York accent, faint. The kidnapper had to be an educated man, a professional, one of their former dentist or doctor clients.

I pictured the scene as Elizabeth described what happened next. Shanigan buries the kids’ bodies, takes the dolls, and flies to the airstrip outside Boston. He gets in his waiting car.

Next scene: There are the dolls, handcuffed to the fence, so that they seem to be standing up, and they are yelling in the real kids’ recorded voices. There is the hooded and caped figure walking diagonally across the empty parking lot to meet the fathers walking toward the kids. Mr. Hood throws the handcuff key at the fathers, deliberately missing their outstretched hands by ten feet so that they have to walk away from him to get it. Mr. Hood walks on, picks up the suitcases left by the fathers, walks to his car, drives away leisurely (nobody is after him, the fathers are staring at the rag dolls dressed up like their kids). Shanigan drives to Bunkport, a six-hour drive at most. He parks the car in Bunkport, walks to the harbor carrying his suitcases. His kayak, that he dropped off using his powerboat some time before, is waiting at the harbor. He paddles it home to the island and has a good sleep. He is still not done. The next day he ferries himself in the powerboat back to Bunkport and drives to Boston in a rental from Enterprise, Bunkport, that he leaves at the airport. He now walks to the airstrip, flies home.

“Figured it out nicely,” Elizabeth said. “And it would never have been un-figured if you hadn’t put the name of your boat in your ad.”

“You too.”

That’s right, Elizabeth told me. “A boat with that name, on the Maine Coast, in Bunkport. That tied it all together for us.”

Which made me a suspect. For the little girl had seen my boat, and told her father, who didn’t get it, who told the FBI, who didn’t get it, but then the ad told the FBI and this time they got it and sent their special agent. Elizabeth.

“Who needed a change of scenery,” Elizabeth said, “what with her non-breast and her runaway husband.”

“You were a suspect,” Elizabeth admitted. “The ad you placed proves you’re somewhat of a character, maybe a little crazy, and the kidnapper/killer was obviously crazy too. The little girl mentioned your boat. You don’t work. You have all the time in the world to be bad.” She smiled. “But you don’t fit any of our kidnapper/child abuser profiles.” She kissed my cheek. “Look how you treat Tillie. There’s your interest in nature. You’re respectful of kids. You do have too much money, though.”

“Frugal,” I said.

“And the nephew and former henchman of a mysterious money maker.” She nodded. “Known as Uncle Joe. We heard about the inheritance which had to be much more than what it says in the probate, and your disabled-veteran monthly check.” She shook her head. “But you don’t seem to care about money. Old boat, aging pickup truck, regular cabin, fuzzy-haired mongrel for a dog, grow your own vegetables, catch your own fish, wear coveralls of which you own six pairs, all the same color.”

“Hey,” I said.

She scratched my beard lovingly. “That’s why I’m so fond of you. And you aren’t stingy, it’s just that you don’t care about the usual trappings of a man of your wealth. But the kidnapper was really fond of money. Nothing but the best for Dr. Freddie Fastbuck Shanigan.

“And there we are,” Elizabeth said. “Here we have our true suspect. Not the Sisters, not Priscilla, not Tom Tipper, none of your drinking buddies seem capable of killing little kids for cash.”

“DNA?” I asked. “You guys must have been given the dolls with the recorder inside. There were no fingerprints, hairs, anything?”

There were none. Shanigan was a doctor, used to working with rubber gloves on. Besides, neither his DNA nor fingerprints were on record.

“The car?” I asked. “No traces there?”

The FBI never found the car. Suspect must have sold it to a chop shop or driven it into a lake or burned it somewhere.

“Great,” I said. “But you still have no suspect in custody.”

“The dogfish have him,” Elizabeth said. “That’s my best bet. Some of you jokers caught him, found out what he did, did your vigilante thing. Local law and order.”

I looked surprised.

She narrowed her eyes, “How about you? Did you toss the doctor to the sharks? After that caper with the easy chair?”

“Nah,” I said. “With who helping me? Tillie?”

“I almost forgot,” Elizabeth said. “I want you to lose your uncle’s rifle. That case of the dead pirates is still open. My colleagues might want to pick up that file again.” She got up, picked up a long parcel from behind her luggage, and gave it to me. Unwrapping the present, I found a new, nicely scoped deer rifle. A new version of my uncle’s beauty. Elizabeth gave me the Dietrich smile. “My thank-you present. For all and everything.”

We went boating that day and Uncle’s rifle happened to slip out of my hands and splash into the sea at about the same place where Jacko once sprinkled Uncle’s ashes.

My secret agent was due to return to Washington the next day. The moon was out, we had a few at the Thirsty Dolphin, which was closing but Priscilla switched on the lights again. We walked home holding hands. She told me what her former husband, a congressman, said when he heard about the cancer. “How can you do this to me?” He wouldn’t drive her to the hospital. When she came back she stayed at a hotel and filed for divorce, which he agreed to in exchange for money. He later resigned because of a corruption charge. “He had attitudes,” she said, “you too, of course. But his were irritating.

“I never did well with men,” Elizabeth said. “With you it seems different. I wouldn’t mind spending time with you. Vacations. Long weekends, maybe.” She glared at me. “You’re still seeing Dolly?”

I told her Dolly had King Carlos now. And she was calming down some. She was also getting fond of Sheriff again. They were planning a holiday in Europe.

I drove Elizabeth to the airport next morning.

When Bunkport calmed down again and the seals were barking on the rocks, feeling the first breeze of what could perhaps be a slight warming up, I visited the Sisters to ask what made them target Dr. Shanigan.

“Bad Cat?” Big Sis asked, pointing at the stern of her boat where the name stood out in big bold letters. “Bad curious cat?”

“We just had to know what Doc was up to,” Less Big Sis said.

“We just had to check out that island. What was the man doing? How could he be buying all that stuff when he just lost his business on the Ridge? We waited until we saw him fly off, and phoned Nurse, who said he was in the Bahamas again. She wasn’t expecting him some time soon.”

“Worth the trouble,” Big Sis said. “Once we were in Doc’s house and looked around his office we figured it out. I used to be a bookkeeper, in Boston, can you believe it? Feels like a previous life now. I can handle computers.” She massaged my shoulder with surprisingly sensitive fingers. “Going through his financial files I saw plenty of income, but that was way back, before that hairy ape took over the medical business on the Ridge. So Shanigan’s income dipped toward zero, but then I found another money file, saying ‘cash.’ Which made sense, for none of the figures showed up on his bank statements, and he wasn’t using his credit cards anymore. Question was, where did all that cash come from?”

“We’re talking millions here,” Less Big Sis said. “What was he doing? Smuggling drugs with his airplane?”

“Then we found the dog cages in the basement,” Big Sis said. “And plastic containers filled with greenbacks. And human hair. He had kids imprisoned in there. And ransomed them for money.”

“What did you do with the money?” I asked stupidly.

The Sisters looked at each other. Then they looked at me. “Can’t remember,” Big Sis said.

“What money?” Less Big Sis asked.

“Maybe we left it for the FBI to find,” Big Sis said.

A joke. We laughed.

I remembered that the Sisters sometimes drove to Boston to help out with the National Battered Women Club. Maybe I had struck a sister-lode of goodness.

Big Sis was talking again. “We went back to Shanigan Island when Nurse told us he had returned. We went armed, of course. Doc Shanigan didn’t expect us. He seemed kind of nervous, scared, you might say. Even so, we had to work on him a bit. He confessed all right. On his knees, crying. He told us where the bodies were. We didn’t dig them up. Too much work and we would leave traces. We didn’t want to hang around too long, our Bad Cat was in full sight. Folks might see the boat and get ideas.

“So,” Less Big Sis said, “it wasn’t a good day for Fastbuck Freddie. We kept him chained down in our basement while we got the recliner from the dump and had the squeezes help create that work of art on the channel marker.”

“And then you emptied a few clips,” I said. “Jeezum, I wouldn’t like to mess with you guys.”

“You’re welcome,” Big Sis said.

“Just don’t mess with little kids,” Little Sis said. “It brings out bad things in us.”

“I’m sorry now,” Big Sis said, “having the squeezes paddling the Bad Cat around that marker, with us firing away.”

“You know the song, don’t you?” Less Big Sis asked.

The Sisters and I sang it together. We gave the song a new name. “Wake for Freddie.” All three of us have good voices. I thought of ways to improvise on the melody when the Bunkport Musicals would be playing again in the Thirsty Dolphin. Maybe send a recording to Elizabeth.