Generation Loss

17

“Get up.”

I buried my face in the pillow and groaned.

“Get up.” The voice came again, louder. The bed shook. It was a moment before I realized this was because someone had kicked it, another moment before I figured out the someone was Gryffin. I rolled onto my back and stared up at him, blinking in the morning light.

“What?”

“My mother.” He was fully dressed but looked terrible: unshaven, eyes bloodshot, his face knotted with grief. “You have to get up. My mother’s dead.”

“What?” I sat up and felt as though someone had jabbed a steel rebar through my skull. “Oh shit.”

“For God’s sake.” He lowered himself onto the bed. “Something happened, she fell or something. She—”

He covered his face with his hands and began to shake.

“Your mother?” I didn’t have to mime shock as memory overwhelmed me, her pallid skin, the pinprick froth of red on her lips. “Gryffin…”

He didn’t look up. I touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, so softly I wasn’t sure he heard me. He turned, and I leaned against him. His entire body shuddered as I stroked his arm.

At last he pulled away. He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. “It’s terrible.” His voice was raw. I wondered how long he’d been awake. “I heard the dogs in there whining. She—it looks like she fell. By that goddamn woodstove, she never even uses it—”

He choked and got unsteadily to his feet. “You better get dressed and come downstairs. The sheriff’s on his way over.”

“What?”

But he was gone.

I got up and dressed. I have as many words for “hangover” as an Inuit has for snow. None of them did justice to how I felt. I tried to make myself look presentable. I hadn’t imagined I could feel any worse, but the thought of being questioned by a cop pushed me close to panic. I popped another Adderall and hoped it would kick in before the sheriff arrived.

I went downstairs. The door to Aphrodite’s room was shut.

I found Gryffin in the kitchen. The deerhounds loped across the room to greet me, whining. I looked at Gryffin.

He sat staring out the window. It was overcast—high, swift-moving clouds but no fog, just an endless expanse of steely water and sky. A raven pecked at something on the gravel beach. On the horizon hung a ragged black shadow. Tolba Island.

“There’s coffee,” he said at last. He gestured toward the pot but didn’t look at me. I poured myself some then sat by the woodstove. After a minute, he turned.

“I went up to let the dogs out. Usually they come downstairs if she’s not awake. It looks like she hit her head on the woodstove.” His voice cracked, and he took a gulp of coffee. “I—I guess she was drunk and she tripped. I mean, every time I come here, I think I’m going to find something like this. And now…”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “God. Do you remember what time it was when we came in? Was it around midnight?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“And you didn’t see her, did you? Before you—before you came in to get warm.”

“No.” I cupped my hands around my mug.

Tears fell onto his shirt. He rubbed his eyes. One of the dogs turned and raced toward the mudroom and began to bark. The others followed, yelping. Gryffin ran a hand across his face.

“That’ll be him.” He went to get the door.

I waited in the kitchen. I thought of when Christine had died, and how the fact that we hadn’t gotten along or even recently spoken just made it worse. Any chance of making things right was gone.

I pushed the thought away, tried not to think about what lay on the floor upstairs. I heard the door open. The dogs’ barking rose to a frantic crescendo then diminished. There was the sound of male voices, a rumble of sympathy. Gryffin walked back into the room, trailed by a uniformed policeman and Everett Moss. Moss looked at me in surprise.

“I forgot you had company,” he said to Gryffin. “Well, I just needed to escort the sheriff over here. Marine Patrol will take over, I guess, when you need to get back. And other arrangements—”

He shook his head. “I guess State Office’ll deal with that. I’m sorry for your loss, Gryffin. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

He left. Gryffin restlessly smoothed back his hair. He looked young and vulnerable. Frightened.

“I’m so sorry about all this, Gryffin,” said the sheriff. He nodded at me. “I’m John Stone, Paswegas County Sheriff.”

He was short, gray-blond hair, slight paunch, a worn face with a kindly expression. The kind of cop who, after retirement, becomes a school bus driver and remembers everyone’s birthday.

“I know this isn’t the ideal time to ask you questions,” he said, “but I’ll have to do that.”

He took out a notebook and a pen, set a camera on the table.

“Go ahead,” said Gryffin.

“It shouldn’t take too long. I was coming over anyway to question you about Merrill Libby’s girl. Which I’ll have to get to after this.”

He sighed. “The dispatcher’s already called in about your mother. They’re sending down someone from Machias, but it’ll be a little while before he gets here. So I’ll try to finish this up as fast as I can.”

“Who’s coming from Machias?” asked Gryffin.

“Criminal investigator. Homicide. I’m sorry, but this is all routine, Gryffin. What you have here is what we call an unattended death. So we have to do this. I’m real sorry. I’ll start with you, then your friend.”

He sat at the table and began filling out a form. I took a seat and drank my coffee, trying to stay calm as he went down his list: Who was there, Where did Gryffin find the body, What time. Had her doctor been notified.

“Any sign of forced entry?”

“No.”

“Purse missing? Any money missing? Any valuables?”

“No. No. No.”

“Keys gone?”

“Sheriff, I have never seen a set of keys in this house.”

John Stone leaned back. “Well, you know, yesterday Tyler Rawlins had a set of keys disappeared down at the Island Store. So these things do happen.” He glanced at his clipboard again. “You said you were here last night.”

“Yes.”

“Did you see your mother?”

“No. Not since sometime in the afternoon.”

“Do you usually see her?”

“No. Usually she takes the dogs out, she’s gone most of the day. We’re not close. I was just here on business. You know she drinks, Sheriff.”

The sheriff gave a brief nod. “But you were here last night?”

“No. We went to Ray Provenzano’s for dinner.”

“Your mother with you?”

“No. Just me and her—” Gryffin indicated me. “You can check with Ray.”

“Okay, I will. What about when you got home? You do anything? Go right to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Your bedroom’s upstairs? Did you hear anything unusual? Before you went to bed. Or later. Did you look into your mother’s room?”

“No. I don’t come up here much. I—”

He stopped. John Stone wrote down something then asked, “Were you by yourself? When you went to bed?”

For the first time Gryffin hesitated. “No.” His face reddened. “I was—she was with me.”

He pointed at me. John Stone sucked at his upper lip, made another mark on his sheet. “Okay. Anything else you can think of? Anything out of the ordinary? Those dogs—”

He looked out to where the deerhounds ran along the rocky beach. “Did they bark?”

“No.” As quickly as he’d blushed, Gryffin paled. “Excuse me, I’m not feeling well. I—”

He bolted from the room. John Stone drew a long breath then looked at me. “Boy, I really hate this. Now I have to do the same with you.”

He put a new sheet onto his clipboard. “Can you spell your name, please.”

A flicker of panic went through me. But as the minutes passed I felt more confident. The Adderall kicked in with its laboratory glow of invincibility, and I had to remind myself that this was police procedure and not a job interview. The dogs chased a seagull on the beach. John Stone’s radio crackled. He checked it, turned to me again.

“So, why’d you come here?” He sounded genuinely curious.

“To interview Aphrodite Kamestos. For a magazine.”

“That’s right, she was supposed to be famous at some point, wasn’t she. I never knew her.” He frowned. “You knew her, then?”

“No. Not personally, not before I came here yesterday. Someone set it up—an editor. At the magazine.”

“What about Gryffin? You know him? He a friend?”

“No. I never met him. Not before yesterday.”

“What about Mrs. Kamestos? She seem sick to you? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“I never met her before yesterday. She seemed fine, I guess. She seemed … drunk.”

“So I gather. They’ll do a toxicology report, we’ll see what that says.” He made another mark on his clipboard and put down his pen. “I guess that’ll do it. Unless you can think of anything else?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t you go far, now,” Stone went on. “I still have to question you about this other thing. That girl from the motel you stayed at the other night. But I got to finish this matter here first.”

A shadow fell across the table. I looked up to see Gryffin. His hair was wet, he’d shaved and changed into a white oxford-cloth shirt and corduroys, a brown jacket.

“You finished?” He slid into the chair next to mine.

“Just about,” said John Stone. There was another crackle from his radio. He picked it up, spoke briefly before turning back to us. “That was the dispatcher. Marine Patrol just left Burnt Harbor, they should be here in a few minutes.”

Gryffin toyed with his coffee mug. “Then what?”

“He’ll ask you some more questions and take a look around. They’ll arrange for someone to bring the deceased over to the funeral home, and the State Medical Examiner will take over.”

“Christ.” Gryffin closed his eyes.

Stone glanced over his notes. “Well. What I need to do now is take a look at the deceased.”

They went upstairs. I poured the rest of the coffee and drank it, slung on my jacket and went outside. The dogs ran over to me then raced off into the pine grove.

“Nice display of grief,” I said, and threw a stick after them.

The sky was gray and unsettled, not a brooding dark but a bright pewter haze that stung my eyes. I shut them and bright phantom bolts moved behind the lids, shapes that became a face tangled in dendrinal knots, branches, blood vessels, Kenzie Libby running along the road.

I opened my eyes. Wind hissed through dead leaves, a sound like sleet. A few tiny white flakes blew past my face.

Who could live here? I wondered.

I thought of Kenzie, of Aphrodite dead, and the flyers I’d seen everywhere. Dead cats. Missing kids. A new one now.

HAVE YOU SEEN KENZIE LIBBY?

I shivered. Maybe this was one of those places where people weren’t meant to live, like Love Canal or Spirit Lake.

Yet it was beautiful. Not just the trees and water and sky, all those things you expect to be beautiful, but the rest of it—stoved-in clapboards and flyspecked modular homes, beer bottles in the harbor, houses cobbled from stuff that everyone else threw away, a light that seemed to leak from another world.

I could live here, I realized. It wasn’t exactly a comforting thought.

There probably isn’t a bigger way of blowing a story than what I’d just done. Like, if you were to take a photograph of Paswegas at that moment and ask, What’s wrong with this picture? the answer would be pretty clear. There was no way I could stay.

I thought of the film I’d hidden in the turtle shell and the stolen picture in my copy of Aphrodite’s book. I thought of Aphrodite herself, and how it wouldn’t take a crack team of investigators to dust for fingerprints under the bed and find mine.

I assumed John Stone wouldn’t bother. Aphrodite had been lit up like Las Vegas when I’d last seen her alive; the toxicology report would prove that. End of story, unless I tried to write something up for Mojo.

But I kept thinking of Kenzie Libby, making jewelry out of broken glass and beer cans; a kid in the middle of nowhere who knew the words to “Marquee Moon.” What must it have been like to hear those guitars for the first time, here on a rock in the middle of the winter, everything around you black and white and that music like a message in a bottle tossed to you from a city five hundred miles away?

What was it like to be so desperate to escape your life that someone like me looked like a way out instead of a way down?

I hunched against the cold and swore, and wished I had another bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of hitching a ride back to the mainland with a cop. Or a corpse. I’d wait till everyone left then head down to the harbor and see if I could find Toby. I already owed him money for the ride over. I’d make it a round trip and call it even and get the hell out of Dodge.

I glanced back through the window to see if Gryffin and John Stone had come downstairs. The kitchen was still empty. I jammed my hands into my pockets. My feet in the cowboy boots were already freezing. I headed toward the pine grove, hoping to warm myself by moving.

That was another bad idea. The wind blasted me, and the trees offered little in the way of shelter as a flurry of snow whirled up. My ears throbbed from the inside, like someone had jabbed a pencil in there. I swore again.

Above me, something growled. I looked up.

An animal crouched in a pine tree—cat sized, with blackish brown fur and glittering eyes and a small red mouth, a sleek furry tail. It glared at me, teeth bared in a hiss. I stared back, too stunned to run away. I’d seen foxes and coyotes in the woods back when I was a kid, and once even a bobcat, but nothing like this, all rage and teeth. It looked like the Tasmanian Devil in the old cartoons. It crept to the edge of the branch, its back reared like a cat’s about to spring. For a moment it was silent. Then it snarled.

I’ve never heard anything like that noise. It didn’t even sound like an animal. It sounded like a human, like a person growling in pure rage. The snarl grew louder, the fur around the animal’s face fanned out in a brown-gold halo. It moved forward, gaining better purchase on the tree limb. It was going to jump.

I took a stumbling step backward, heard a flurry of barks, and turned.

Aphrodite’s deerhounds ran along the top of the hill. Behind them strode a tall figure in a police parka. Sighting me, one of the dogs broke away and raced down the hillside. I looked back at the pine tree, but the animal was gone.

The man walked toward me. “These your dogs?” He sounded pissed off.

“No. They belong to them.” I pointed at the house.

The dogs rushed past us, sniffed hopefully then loped toward the beach.

“You part of the family?”

“They’re inside.”

The man nodded. He was broad shouldered, with a square face and blue eyes, close-cropped blond hair and a nick on his chin from shaving. Tom’s of Maine meets Tom’s of Finland. His name tag read Jeff Hakkala.

“I’ll be doing the investigation,” he said. “You said next of kin’s in there? And the sheriff?”

“Yeah.”

He headed toward the house. I let him get a few yards ahead of me then followed.

Gryffin opened the door. Hakkala introduced himself and went into the kitchen to confer with John Stone. Gryffin remained in the mudroom with me.

“You look pretty bad,” I said.

“I am. God, this is awful.”

I hesitated then asked, “Do they have any idea what happened?”

“‘They?’ Who’s ‘they?’” He glanced into the next room. “There is no they. There’s John Stone, and now this guy. He’ll call the medical examiner, they’ll do an autopsy. I have to arrange some kind of funeral…”

He buried his head in his hands.

“I’m sorry.” I felt a real pang of grief—not for Aphrodite but for him. I touched his shoulder. “Really. It’s—well, I’m just sorry, is all.”

He nodded and put his hand on mine, just for an instant.

“Yeah,” he said at last and looked away. “I gather this guy is going to ask us a few more questions and then do whatever he does up there at the crime scene.”

The back of my neck went cold. “Crime scene?”

“That’s what they call it. An unattended death—they treat it like a homicide. He didn’t think it was anything but her falling, three sheets to the wind, as usual. That’s what the autopsy will tell them, anyway. I guess it takes a few weeks before they sign off on everything.”

“Do I need to wait around?”

He shot me a grim look. “No. This guy’ll question you, and the sheriff wants to question us about the girl in the motel. Then you can go, I guess.”

For a minute we stood in silence. Finally I said, “Me being here … I guess I made it worse.”

“No, Cass.” He started for the kitchen. “You just made it weird.”

18

The detective didn’t spend much time with me. I answered his questions, he wrote everything down. Then he went to see Gryffin in the living room. I remained with John Stone in the kitchen, watching as he fed the woodstove.

“Been up here before?” He nudged the stove door shut with his foot.

“No.”

“Probably won’t be in much of a hurry to come back, now.”

I shrugged. “I dunno. I kind of like it, except for the cold.”

“Not much besides the cold. For the next six months, anyway.”

He looked up as Gryffin stepped back into the room.

“He’s on the phone,” Gryffin said. “This could take a while.”

John Stone glanced from him to me. “Mind if I ask you a few quick questions about Merrill Libby’s girl?”

Gryffin sank into a chair. “Go ahead.”

“Well, did either one of you see her the other night? I gather you did—Everett said his daughter was on the computer with Merrill’s girl. She said she’d seen you at the Lighthouse.” He turned to me. “And that Robert Stanley, the one works for Mr. Provenzano—he said you was talking to Merrill’s girl. That’s what she told him, anyway.”

“MacKenzie,” I said. The sheriff looked confused. “Libby’s girl—she’s got a name. MacKenzie.”

John Stone blinked. “Well, yes, of course she does. But she—did you see her?”

“She checked me into the motel. Afterward, she came to my room—I’d asked her father if there was someplace to eat. He said no, but she wanted to tell me there was a place, that restaurant down at the harbor. The Good Tern.”

“She enter your room?”

“Yeah. For, like, a minute. It was freezing, I didn’t want to make her stand outside. She told me about the restaurant. Then she left. End of story.”

“Some of the kids—well, one of them, Robert, he said that the girl—that MacKenzie told him you were going to give her a ride somewhere.”

Fucking Robert. I felt myself grow hot. “I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her anything. I said about five words to her, and that was it.”

John Stone allowed himself a wry smile. “Five words, huh? Well, Miss Neary, we picked up a lot of chatter—teenagers talking, you know. They may confiscate her computer, see what shows up on there.”

My mouth went dry. “What do you mean?”

“Computer records. We had a incident last year, a juvenile met someone online and was abducted. Picked her up down in Portsmouth.”

He shook his head. “Least she was alive. Me, I wouldn’t let my kids do that stuff. God knows who they meet up with. So you were at the Good Tern that night? Did you see her there?”

“No.”

Stone stared out the window again, brooding. “I talked to Toby Barrett yesterday evening, he said you’d been there with him and Gryffin here.”

He looked at Gryffin. “You were at the motel too, right? You and Miss Neary—you were in adjacent rooms? And Toby said you were at the Good Tern afterward. But Miss Neary, you said you only met him yesterday.”

I stared at John Stone. So did Gryffin.

“I forgot,” I said at last. “I mean—I saw him at the motel. I bumped into him.”

“Really bumped into me,” said Gryffin. “Outside my room.”

“What does this have to do with MacKenzie Libby?” I said. “Because my father’s an attorney, and if you’re going to do any kind of questioning, I’m going to call him right now.”

John Stone lifted a placating hand. “No, no—Merrill Libby said he hadn’t seen the two of you together when you checked in. He said he always rents those two rooms out in the winter, something about the heat. We just—he’s obviously concerned about the young lady. MacKenzie. He says she’s a good kid. A good girl.”

He sighed. “These kids … I got a grandson that age, you don’t want to think of what can happen to them. Right now they’ve got the Game Warden searching for her.”

“Game warden?” I broke in. “An old lady dies of natural causes and you send out a homicide detective, but this kid disappears and she gets a freaking game warden? Like she’s a dog?”

John Stone looked taken aback. “Well, it’s standard procedure. They’re starting to organize people to search for her. Merrill Libby, he’ll mobilize the whole town. But I’ll you the truth, Miss Neary—you wander off into the woods, you’re a lot better off having the warden service look for you with trained dogs. He knows those woods better’n anybody.”

“But you just said she might have taken off with someone. Not that she’s lost in the woods.”

John Stone shrugged. “Well, probably that’s all that happened. Probably she got ticked at her dad and run off. Then it got cold, it got dark, she started back but she got disorientated and she’s out there now. I just hope she didn’t take a fall somewhere, like if she went down to that pier at Burnt Harbor.”

He made a grim face. “Probably not cold enough for someone to freeze to death, long as she didn’t go in the water, not a young person in good health, anyway.”

He turned to where Hakkala was putting away his phone. “Well, I think that’s about it. Time to go find Everett, take me back over. You think of anything else about Merrill Libby’s girl, you let me know, okay?”

“Kenzie,” I said, but John Stone didn’t hear. He set down his clipboard and headed into the next room. Gryffin went with him.

I looked at the table. Stone’s ballpoint was lying on top of the papers he’d filled out. It was a nice pen, dark blue with gold lettering on the barrel. I picked it up and read paswegas county police department: proud to serve. I glanced to where Stone and Gryffin were talking, their backs to me, then slid the pen into my jacket pocket.

“Sorry again for your loss,” the sheriff said. He shook hands with Gryffin, stepped over to have a word with Hakkala. Gryffin walked back to me.

“Well,” he said.

“I better get going too.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at my feet. “Look, I—”

“Stop.” He turned to the window, blinking away tears, then glanced back at me. “How’re you getting back to Burnt Harbor?”

“Toby, I guess. If he’ll take me.”

“Oh, he’ll take you. If you can find him. Know where he lives?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I stared at him, that green-shot eye, and, inexplicably, thought of Christine. Grief took me, the irrevocable knowledge that I was seeing him for the last time and I would never, ever be able to make it right.

I looked away. “I better go get my things. Will they let me go upstairs?”

“I already brought them down.”

He ducked into the next room, and I had a flash of panic, recalling the turtle shell with my film in it. Before I could say anything, he’d returned.

“Here.” I tried to look grateful as he handed me my bag and camera. “Hope you get home okay.”

“Yeah, me too. Gryffin—I’m really sorry.”

I turned to go. He stopped me and drew me to him. For just an instant he held me, his chin grazing the top of my head. Then he pulled away and walked into the next room.

I zipped my jacket, grateful I still had Toby’s sweater, slung my bag over my shoulder then looked up to see Hakkala watching me.

“You’re leaving?”

“Unless you need me for something.”

“Is there a way to contact you—cell phone, local number?”

“I don’t have a cell phone. I’m going to Burnt Harbor to get my car and drive back to New York. You have my number there.”

He nodded. “Thanks for your assistance,” he said and rejoined the others.

And that was it. As abruptly as Aphrodite had dismissed me during our aborted interview, I’d been cut loose. I really was free to go.

The realization should have been a relief. Instead I felt a stab of hopelessness that not even speed could blunt. I took a deep breath, went outside and started walking, stooped against the frigid wind. I’d buy another bottle of Jack Daniel’s and then find Toby. As I headed through the evergreens I scanned the trees, looking for signs of the animal I’d seen earlier. But there was nothing there.

19

There was a little crowd inside the Island Store when I arrived. Five young guys in Carhart jackets stood by the beer cooler, talking. As the door slammed behind me they glanced up. One of them was Robert.

“Hey,” Suze called as I approached the counter. “What’s going on up there? I heard Gryffin’s mother died.”

“Yeah, n’she probably killed her,” muttered Robert.

Suze glared at him. “It’s Sunday! No beer till twelve!”

“Isn’t that one underage?” I cocked my thumb at Robert.

“What, just because he’s still in high school?” She shook her blond dreadlocks then lowered her voice so the others couldn’t hear. “They’re looking for trouble. Actually, they’re looking for you. So stick around here after they leave, okay? You guys ready?” she yelled.

They shuffled over. They were all built like Robert, heavyset and leaning toward muscle, with cold, challenging eyes. They bought cigarettes and Slim Jims and a couple bottles of Mountain Dew, took their change and left, brushing past me as they headed for the door. After they’d gone, Suze’s big black dog ambled out from behind the counter, tail sweeping the floor in a lazy wave, and snuffed at me.

I scratched his ear and looked at Suze. She wore a lime green hooded sweatshirt and baggy cargo pants, earcuffs shaped like silver lizards.

“So you heard,” I said. “She died in the night, I guess. Gryffin found her when he got up. It looks like she fell and hit her head.”

“Poor Gryffin. I never really knew her. She didn’t come in much, and she wasn’t real friendly when she did. Like I said, a bitch. Want some coffee?” She filled a Styrofoam cup. “Here. You look like you could use it.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, I saw John Stone go up there, and that state cop. It’s no surprise—you know that, right? She was a mean drunk; she got picked up a few times over the years when she’d go over to Burnt Harbor and drive. She finally had her license revoked. I think Gryff got the car.”

She went into the kitchen. A moment later I heard PIL coming from the boombox.

I wondered what she did for fun around here. Wait for people like me to show up? I drank my coffee and glanced down toward the harbor. Robert and his cronies stood beside an abandoned building, smoking.

“What’s his problem?” I said when Suze came back out.

“Robert? He thinks you had something to do with Kenzie taking off.”

“What?”

She raised her hands. “I know. But that’s Robert. He’s not the sharpest knife in the box.”

“She his girlfriend?”

“Nah, they’re just friends. All the kids here, you know—they fight like cats, but they look out for each other. And people from away, they’re not too popular here. I mean, the lobster fishery’s in trouble from shell disease, there was a red tide last year killed the clamming season. The Grand Banks are fished out. I saw some underwater pictures this guy took, an urchin diver? The whole bottom of the ocean’s scraped clean. Like a fricking desert—nothing’s there. Scallop trawlers did that. So the fish are gone, and the paper mills are shut down, and everyone’s buying their timber from Canada ‘cause it’s cheaper. You see those logging trucks heading south, they’re not from here. Ten years ago, MBNA came in, hired people to work as telemarketers, and everyone thought that was the best thing ever happened. Then MBNA pulled out and everyone’s out of work again, only now they’re carrying a shitload of credit card debt. It sucks. Meanwhile, the tourists come and think this is fucking Disneyland. You own property here or Burnt Harbor, doesn’t matter if your family’s been there for a hundred years. Our taxes went from one or two thousand bucks a year to ten or twelve thousand. A lot of people don’t make that much in a year. So they have to sell their houses for teardowns, or their land, and all of a sudden you have all these rich assholes complaining that they can’t get a moccachino.”

I finished my coffee and tossed the cup into the trash. “Your point?”

“We don’t like people from away.”

“What about you?” I leaned against the counter. “You don’t like me either?”

Suze set her elbows down and leaned forward until her forehead touched mine. I cupped her chin in my hand, speed fizzing in me like champagne, then kissed her, her mouth small and warm.

“I like you just fine,” she said in a low voice. “I was hoping you might stick around for a while. But now—”

She withdrew, glanced out the window and shook her head. “Those boys, they’d just hassle you. And me. And if Kenzie doesn’t show up soon, it could get ugly. If I were you, I’d split.”

“What, frontier justice?”

“Pretty much. Doesn’t matter what the cops say. If they don’t find her, they’ll start looking for someone else.”

“Seems like you’d have some likely candidates without going too far out of the gene pool.”

“We hang together here. Like, we beat our wives and kids and shit, but we still don’t like people from away.”

“What about those flyers? And people disappearing and washing up on the beach? Did they all run into someone from away?”

“Hey, it’s nothing personal.”

She turned and climbed up the ladder. She had a cute ass, what I could see in those cargo pants, anyway. I said, “While you’re up there, get me another pint of Jack Daniel’s.”

“Sure.” She stepped down and over to the register. “That it?”

I nodded. “I saw something back there by Gryffin’s place. In those woods leading up to the house, those pine trees? There was an animal up in one of them.”

“Did it look like Robert?”

“No. Really. I never saw anything like it before. It was about this big—” I held out my hands. “Dark brown fur. Kind of a long fuzzy tail. It was fierce. I thought it was going to attack me. It growled, and I could see its teeth, these white sharp teeth—it was mean.”

Suze frowned. “That’s weird.”

“I think it was a fisher. Toby told me about them—the ones that eat all the cats.”

“A fisher?” She slid my Jack Daniel’s into a bag and handed it to me. “If you were over in Burnt Harbor, yeah. But not here. Fishers never leave the mainland.”

“Toby said they can swim.”

“Technically, maybe. But they’re pretty big, and their fur is so heavy that if they swim, it just weighs them down. I know, ‘cause one of my uncles used to trap them. You take a rooster and cut its throat and hang it from a tree, alongside a steel trap. It’s illegal now. My uncle, he once saw one on the ground and it jumped, like, twenty feet. From here—”

She pointed to a far corner of the room. “—to there. Bang, like that. Jumped right into the tree. Those things are vicious as a wolverine. What you saw, that was probably somebody’s cat. Was it gray? Maybe it was Smoky.”

“This was big,” I said. “And it wasn’t a cat.”

“Well, maybe. But I doubt it was a fisher. I’ve been here my whole life, and I never heard of a fisher here. There’s nothing for them to eat—no rabbits or porcupines or anything.”

“That’s why it ate Smoky.” I picked up my bag. I was getting pissed off; I definitely needed something to slow me down a little. “Is Toby around? I need to talk to him about a ride back to Burnt Harbor.”

“He’s probably still in bed.” She peered down at the harbor. “Yeah, his boat’s there. You know where he lives, right? Just go round back and knock real loud. He’ll be bummed about Aphrodite—not for her, for Gryff. They’re good buds.”

I stuck the bourbon into my pocket and said, “Gryffin was telling me about that guy Denny Ahearn. He seems kind of weird. To me, anyway. Like, if this was the United States of America, Homeland Security or someone would be asking him questions about this girl, and not me.”

“Denny?” Suze smiled. “Nah. He’s pretty harmless.”

“Do you know him?”

“Sure. I used to hang out with all those guys when I was sixteen, seventeen. Denny was really charismatic. Plus, he always had the best dope.”

She laughed. “He was fucking crazy! The mirror game, that was one of his big things. When you were tripping. Some people totally freaked over that shit. I always thought it was fun. For a while, anyway. Then some sad shit came down, Denny’s girlfriend died. He never really got over that.”

“How’d she die?”

“Car accident.”

The door banged open and the same woman with two small kids barged in. “Listen,” I said quickly to Suze. “You have a phone I could borrow? It’s long distance, but I really need to make a call down to New York. Here—”

I started to pull out my wallet, but Suze stopped me.

“Don’t worry about it.” The kids started smacking the ice-cream cooler as Suze handed me a phone. “Here, go upstairs, it’s quieter.”

I hurried up to the second floor and dialed Phil’s cell phone. It rang, I heard the noise of downtown street traffic, then his voice.

“Phil Cohen Enterprises.”

“Phil, it’s Cass—”

“Hey hey! Cassandra Android! How’s it going up there?”

“Not good.” I paced the room nervously. “You sent me here. Why?”

“Why?” His voice edged up defensively. “Whaddya mean, Cassie?”

“I mean you told me that Aphrodite wanted me—that she specifically wanted me to come up here to interview her. Then I got here and she says she never fucking heard of me. Or you.”

“No shit.” The background noise grew louder. Phil shouted at someone, then said, “Well jeez, Cass, I—”

“Don’t fuck with me, Phil.” I leaned against the wall and wiped sweat from my cheeks. “She had no clue about any of this. She never even knew there was an interview.”

“I—”

“You said there was some guy up here you knew.”

Silence. Car engines droned into the bass thump of a radio.

“Phil! Who was it?”

“The guy I used to do business with,” he said at last. “Guy named Denny Ahearn.”

“Denny Ahearn.” I stared across the room at the shelf with the bowling trophy and the turtle shell. “Did you ever talk to her at all? Aphrodite?”

Another silence.

Then, “No. I mean, I couldn’t, I didn’t have her number or anything. I emailed Denny, we went back and forth a few times. We started batting around names of people who might go up there to see her, and I mentioned I knew you, and suddenly he got all hepped up. So I figured I’d do you a favor.”

“Goddam it, Phil! Why’d you fucking lie to me?”

“Listen, Cassie.” He sounded aggrieved. “I woulda suggested you anyway—”

“I don’t care about that! I don’t know who this guy is! Why did he ask for me? What did he say?”

Phil sighed. “Well, okay, let me think. He said he liked your book—he said you were very simpatico. I guess he’s an artist or something these days. And he knows her—Aphrodite. He just wanted you, that’s all. I thought he was like doing you a favor, huh? He said he wanted you to see his work. He said he thought you’d see eye to eye.”

Eye to eye.

“Fuck,” I said. I hung up.

“Hey, Cass?” I turned and saw Suze’s face framed in the doorway. “You okay? I need the phone.”

“Yeah, sure.” I handed it to her. “I’ll be right down.”

She left. I dug out the Jack Daniel’s and drank until my hands steadied, walked over and picked up the turtle shell.

S.P.O.T. That crudely carved eye.

And, on the other side, the letters ICU.

Not a set of initials, not the intensive care unit.

“I see you too,” I whispered, and put it back.

I went downstairs. Suze was alone again.

“Why doesn’t he go off that island?” I knew I sounded wired and drunk, but I didn’t care. “Denny. And how would anyone know if he did or not?”

Suze stared at me curiously. “I hardly see him. Once or twice a year, he’ll come over to get supplies. Toby always brings him. Toby says he’s gotten kind of, I dunno, just weird, I guess. Like an agoraphobe. And he and Aphrodite, they kind of hate each other. So in a place as small as this, you just keep your distance, you know? But I don’t think Denny could hurt someone.”

“I have one word for you, Suze: Unabomber.”

“Really, that’s not Denny.” She sounded pissed off. “He’s more like—”

“Charles Manson? John Wayne Gacy?”

“No! He’s more—well, spiritual. The commune, it wasn’t just smoking dope and stuff. After it busted up, I was, what, sixteen? Denny organized this guerrilla street theater, we’d go around and protest. Down to Bath Iron Works where they built those battleships; we threw pig blood on them and got on TV. After that Denny really got into the mystical shit. He was reading all these books, eating a lot of acid. You’re about my age, you remember what it was like, right? He was playing the mirror game once, he thought he had a vision or something. Like a vision quest.”

She turned to shove a carton of cigarettes onto a shelf. “So then we all had to get spirit guides. Totem animals. We made these beautiful masks out of papier-mâché—they were amazing. I still have mine, up there—”

She looked at the ceiling. “In my apartment. You want to see it?”

“Maybe another time.” I started for the door. “I really have to find Toby.”

“Boy, you’re suddenly in a hurry.” She cocked her head. “You think you might be back?”

“I doubt it. I couldn’t afford the taxes.”

“Cheaper if you share,” she said and grinned.

At the door I paused. “So what was your spirit animal?”

“A dolphin. Fun in the sun, endless summer. What about you?”

“DeeDee Ramone,” I said, and left.

I took a few steps toward the harbor, then stopped. I searched the road until I found the sea urchin I’d set down the day before. I looked around, saw no one, put my boot on top of the shell and pressed until it cracked.

The keys were there, glinting in the drab light. I nudged them with my boot’s pointed toe then kicked them so they landed near the Island Store’s stoop.

“Be more careful next time, Tyler,” I said. I headed for the water.

20

It was late—past noon. A ragged cloudbank hung above the mainland. The wind shifted, smelling more of smoke than the sea. I turned down the narrow alley that led toward the Mercantile Building.

It was like a northern ghost town. Dead ivy covered a wall made of granite. Near the water stood three clapboard houses, abandoned and falling into disrepair. All had for sale signs on them. Abutting them was a wooden structure, shingles flaking off like fish scales. bouldry’s chandlery was painted in white letters on the side. It had high, narrow windows, most of them broken, empty doorways that opened onto a cavernous space that smelled of turpentine. Next to this was the Mercantile Building.

I walked quickly, bent against the wind. The alley was so narrow it seemed like a building might fall on me, if someone gave it a good shove.

“Junkie bitch.”

Two figures stood in an empty doorway of the Chandlery. Robert’s cronies. One took a drag on his cigarette then tossed it at me. I flinched as it struck my arm.

“You’re going the wrong way,” he said. “If you’re leaving.”

I had no time to run before they surrounded me.

“Did you hear that?” said the guy who spoke first. “You’re going the wrong way.”

They weren’t much taller than me, but they were heavier. And there were two of them. The bigger one, a guy whose Carhart jacket read Dewey’s Garage, pointed at my bag.

“That your stash in there?” He reached for it.

I stared at him, holding his gaze; drew my foot back and with all my strength smashed it into his shin. My boot’s steel tip connected with something hard as he shouted then crumpled, yelling.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit.”

“What the fuck!” His friend stooped beside him.

“I’m not a junkie,” I said.

I took off for the Mercantile Building. The back door was off the alley. Tacked to the wall was a yellowed index card with Toby’s name on it.

I hammered on the door. “Toby!”

The guy I’d kicked had gotten to his feet. He clung to his friend, both of them staring at his leg.

“Toby!” My knuckles hurt from pounding. “Open the door!”

I could outrun these guys, but could I outrun the whole town if they got their friends after me? “Toby, goddam it—”

The door swung open. I pushed past a bleary-eyed figure and shoved it closed.

“Two guys just jumped me out there. Can you lock that?”

Toby turned a deadbolt and looked at me. He wore a Motorola T-shirt and wool pants, a pair of slippers.

“Good morning.” He rubbed his eyes, yawning. “Is it early?”

It would be hard to tell if it was—we might have been in a cave, or a subway tunnel. There were no windows that I could see, nothing but stacks of lumber and old furniture.

“Noonish,” I said. “Thanks for letting me in.”

“No problem.” He regarded me curiously. “Somebody tried to beat you up?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you do something to annoy them?”

“Besides walk down the street? No.”

“That’s a bit unusual. Did you know them?”

“I saw them earlier at the general store. I think they think I kidnapped that girl or something.”

Toby raised an eyebrow. “Really? Why would they think that?”

“Who the hell knows? Everyone here is paranoid. Including me, now.”

He tugged at his beard. “Well, my apartment’s down by the boiler room.” He pointed at a stairway. “This is all just storage up here.”

The stairway was dark. The room we emerged into was even darker, until Toby pulled a string and an overhead bulb flared to life.

“Boiler room,” said Toby. He walked past a contraption that looked like something out of Metropolis. “My apartment’s there.”

He pointed at a door covered with a pirate flag. “Welcome.”

There was something very different about his apartment, and it took me a minute to figure out what it was. It was warm. It was hot. I unzipped my jacket, plucking at Toby’s sweater.

“That’s one of the good things about living by the boiler room,” he said. “In the summer, I just switch it off and the whole place is so cool you wouldn’t believe it—those brick walls are a foot thick. It’s like what they say about Maine women.”

“Which is?”

“You want a big woman with tattoos. Shade in the summer, warm in the winter, and moving pictures all year long.”

His place was a cross between a machine shop and a roadside museum. There were boxes everywhere, jars full of nuts, bolts, drillbits. Racks of antique tools hung from the ceiling, bolts of sailcloth. A vintage Triumph motorcycle peeked from beneath a Naval Academy Sailing Squadron flag.

Toby called to me from farther back in the warren. “Come here, I’ll show you something.”

I followed him to his sleeping quarters, a bunk in the back corner. It was like being inside a submarine captained by Pee-wee Herman. Semaphore flags dangled from the ceiling. There was a brass hookah and a bunch of old computers and dozens of empty bottles of Captain Morgan’s rum.

I ducked beneath a chart of Paswegas Bay. “This is amazing.”

“Why, thank you.” Toby smiled. “Check this out.”

On a table beside the computers was a black rotary phone, a cheap Radio Shack microphone attached to its handset. The lunar-landing ping of a satellite connection came through the mike while a laser printer spat out sheets of paper. Toby bent to peer at one of the computer screens.

“See that?” He pointed to a grid of lines and numbers, tapped the second monitor, which showed a series of sine curves, and finally the third, which displayed a gray-and-white whorl that, when I squinted at it, resolved into a satellite map of the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern Seaboard. “That’s a northeaster.”

He picked up one of the printed pages and handed it to me. It showed a higher-definition version of what I’d seen onscreen, with classified slashed across it in white letters.

“Naval weather satellites,” he explained. “I had the Arabian Gulf earlier.”

“You hacked into this with a rotary phone?”

“It’s not that hard. You want some coffee?”

“Some water.”

He lit a cigarette and moved methodically about the room. I felt as though my face was starting to peel back, just above my eyes. When Toby appeared again, I started.

“Here—” He moved a roll of charts, revealing a chair, and handed me a glass of water. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks.” I drank gratefully.

Toby pointed at my boot. “You got some paint there on your shoe.” He tossed me a roll of paper towels, unscrewed the top from a bottle of rum. “Want some?”

“No thanks.” I cleaned the blood off the tip of my boot and tossed the paper towel into a wastebasket. “Listen. Things haven’t been going so good. Aphrodite—Gryffin’s mother—she died last night.”

Toby’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure. I think she was drinking and fell and hit her head.”

“Jesus. How’s Gryffin taking it?”

“As well as can be expected.”

“I better call him.”

He hurried to the front of the apartment. I fidgeted and fought my paranoia with more Jack Daniel’s. It helped, but not much.

“He doesn’t sound too good.” Toby returned and sat across from me. “Coroner or someone’s on the way over; they’re taking her body to Augusta. Gryffin’s got to do something about a service and cremation. What a shame.”

He looked upset but not surprised. “She had kind of a drinking problem for a long time. Like I said, I never knew her that well, but—that whole crowd from back then, for a while there we were pretty tight. Someone should tell Denny.”

“Are you going to help Gryffin?”

Toby sighed. “I wish I could. But that northeaster—I got to get over to Lucien’s place and make sure everything’s battened down. Denny’s supposed to have closed everything up for the winter, but Lucien likes me to run backup.”

“I’ve got to get back to the city. I really need a ride back to Burnt Harbor. Can you bring me before you go?”

“I can’t. Sorry. I should have checked Lucien’s place last week, but I got caught up with another job. And now the weather’s supposed to come down. Can’t let the pipes freeze.”

“Couldn’t you just run me over first? Like, just a real quick trip there and back?”

“I’m sorry.” His dark eyes glinted. “Any other day, I’d be glad to. But I can’t let this slip. First thing tomorrow, though, I’ll be out.”

“Shit. Well, Is there someone else? Like Everett? Can I call him?”

Toby sucked at his lip. “Boy, you’re in a spot. I don’t know if you could find anyone today. They’ll be out looking for Kenzie Libby.”

“So why wouldn’t one of them give me a lift?”

“Well, I don’t know as I’d ask them. If I were you, I mean. Maybe you should just lay low till tomorrow morning. Kenzie’ll show up by then, everyone will be all pissed off at her for scaring ‘em. They’ll fall all over themselves to help you. If the weather’s not too bad, I mean. This is the first big northeaster of the year.”

“I don’t give a fuck. I want to get the hell out of here—”

Toby shrugged. “Well, you can go down to the harbor and take your chances, I guess. I wouldn’t. Tempers running high already, and now this thing with Aphrodite. But you can stay at my place if you want.”

He gestured vaguely at a corner. “There’s a futon.”

“I have to leave,” I said.

Toby’s phone rang. “’Scuse me,” he said and ducked into the shadows.

I stared at the row of monitors. They now appeared to be clocking atmospheric disturbances somewhere east of Subar.

I got up and started pacing. I searched for a mirror, to see if I looked as crazy as I was starting to feel, but of course there were none, not even a window.

The bathroom had a shower stall. But no mirror.

I went to the kitchen and got some more water. Toby stood in the doorway, phone pressed to his ear, and stared into the boiler room, talking to Gryffin again, I assumed. He lifted his hand to me, and I turned away.

I wandered toward the back of the room again and passed a cluttered table. From underneath it peeked a mask. I stooped and pulled it out, another brightly colored confection made of papier-mâché and chicken wire and acrylic paint.

It was a frog’s head, like the one I’d seen on Northern Sky. This one was even more eerily totemic. Also surprisingly heavy, as I discovered when I lifted it. I put it over my head, knocking a book off the table as I did.

Inside, the mask smelled like library paste and hashish. I took it off and put it back where I’d found it then picked up the book.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. The same book I’d seen in Denny’s bus. I set it on the table, frowning.

Something else had fallen over, a photo in a cheap plastic frame. I picked it up.

It was an SX-70 close-up of a naked girl lying on her back, hands splayed beside her face. The film emulsion had been manipulated so that fizzy lines exploded around the edges of the picture. Her hair formed a dark corona around her head, and an eye had been drawn on each of her open palms.

You couldn’t see her face. It was covered by a tortoise shell that had two more eyes painted on it. In one, someone had painted a tiny green star.

“What the hell,” I said.

Toby came up alongside me. “Whatcha looking at?”

“Where’d you get this?”

He took it and held it to the light. “Denny. Sort of experimental, isn’t it?” He handed it back and pulled meditatively at his pigtail.

“Who’s the girl?”

“That was a girl named Hannah Meadows—’Hanner.’ She had a real strong Maine accent. You can’t tell from that, but she was real good-looking.”

“You can’t tell from this if she was even alive.”

“Oh, she was alive. She was one of Denny’s girlfriends. He had a bunch of them back then. Bunch of women, bunch of kids. He got into all that tribal stuff.”

He pointed at the mask beneath the table. “Like that. That took me forever to make. And God, did I sweat in it.”

“You made that?”

“Sure. We all had to make our own masks—that was part of the thing. You chose your spirit animal, and then you made the mask, and then we had a ritual, and you were filled with the mask’s energy. That was the theory, anyway,” he said and laughed. “But Hannah, she was a nurse—she worked the night shift at the hospital up past Collinstown. She was beautiful, and something about her—well, a lot of those girls were cute, but Denny just loved to take her picture. She used to model for him all the time. He even talked about marrying her.”

He whistled. “And boy, Aphrodite, she wasn’t happy about that. And she sure didn’t like him taking all those pictures.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“Oh, that was terrible. Really sad. She got into a car accident driving home one night. In the summer; it was after she got off work. She flipped over the guardrail and went into a lake. She got out of the car okay, but then she never made it to shore. They got the car out of the lake, but she wasn’t in it. Took them almost a week to find the body. Denny was the one found her, he was with the crews out looking. She’d gotten tangled up in some alders along the shore. I guess it was pretty bad. Something had been at the body, some kind of animal. He kind of went off after that, accused Aphrodite of cutting her brakes, though I don’t think they ever found any proof. It was a bad scene. Hey, you okay?”

His face creased with concern. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”

“C’mere.” He steered me to a chair and made me sit. “Put your head between your knees,” he said. “That’s it. So you don’t faint. Just stay there for a minute, I’ll be right back.”

He went and got a cold washcloth, pressed it to my forehead. “There. Boy, you look a mess. Maybe you should try to take a nap. Sounds like you had a rough morning over there.”

“I haven’t eaten anything,” I said, though the last thing I felt like was food. “Do you have some crackers or something?”

He got me some stale Uneeda Biscuits, also a glass of something cold and brown. “Here, see if this helps.”

I ate a cracker, took a tiny sip of the brown liquid. “Christ, that’s disgusting! What is it?”

“Moxie.”

“It tastes like Dr. Pepper laced with rat poison.”

“That’s the gentian root.”

I shoved the Moxie back at him and finished the crackers. Toby raised an eyebrow. “Better?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

He puttered into the kitchen. A few minutes later he returned, carrying something. “Denny gave me this last time I saw him, back around Labor Day, when I brought his supplies to Lucien’s house. This is what he’s doing these days.”

It was a large color photograph, 12x24, in a handmade frame, like the one at Ray Provenzano’s house. From an upright black shape, like a rock or tree, something protruded. A truncated branch, or an arm. Leaves surrounded it, silvery green. It was impossible for me to tell if the color was real or if the emulsion had been tampered with.

But in other places, the photograph had definitely been distressed, with needles and brushes, maybe a fingernail. Layers of pigment bled through. Handmade color separations, I would bet my life on it: a brilliant serpent green, a murkier, brownish jade, brilliant scarlet, dull orange, porcelain white. A muted, flaking shade of rust, like old iron.

I ran my finger across the surface, feeling countless little whorls and bumps and scratches, then held it beneath the lamp.

“There’s leaves in there. And insects,” I said, squinting. “And, I dunno, some kind of bug. A baby dragonfly, maybe?”

“Where? Oh—yeah, you’re right.” Toby ran his finger along the outline of an insect’s thorax, with tiny, oar-shaped wings. “That’s a damsel fly. A darning needle, we called them when I was a kid. They were supposed to come into your room at night and sew your lips and eyes together while you slept. Denny was scared of them.”

I looked at the damsel fly. Beside it were scraps of paper, each with a letter on it.

Part of an address? I brought the print to my face. “Jesus, this is like the other one! It stinks.”

“Denny’s not much of a housekeeper.”

“It smells like dead fish, only worse. Skunky.”

“Well, he sets out a few traps, for lobster. And I know he goes ice fishing in the winter.”

I was going to ask how you went ice fishing in the ocean, but then I saw something written in the margin.

Some Rays pass right Through S.P.O.T.

“‘Some rays pass right through.’” I looked at Toby in surprise. “That’s from a Talking Heads song.”

“Denny’s big into music. I don’t know it.”

“It’s about exposing a photograph—that’s what happens, you expose the emulsion paper to the light. Some rays pass right through.”

I tapped the edge of the photo. Tiny particles rained from it.

“Ray told me these pictures are worth a lot of money,” I said. “Denny just gave it to you?”

“It was payment for some work—I built him a new darkroom a while ago. I do a lot of jobs on barter. I live here free, in exchange for keeping an eye on things. Thinking of which—”

He crossed the room. “I’ve got to get ready to go.”

I sat for another minute, examining the photo. A flake of rust-colored pigment came off and stuck to my hand. Where it had been, I could clearly see a torn piece of paper that had been embedded into the emulsion. A fragment of another, a black-and-white photograph of a bare foot with the ghostly outline of a street sign and something scrawled across it in blue ink.

ICU

My foot. Canal Street.

It was a detail from one of the photos in Dead Girls.

I stared at the flake of pigment then sniffed. It had a faint whiff of that same fishy odor. Cupping it in my palm, I walked to the wastebasket, fished out the wadded-up paper towel I’d just tossed, and smoothed it on the desk.

You got some paint there on your shoe.

The smear of blood from where I’d kicked Robert’s friend wasn’t the exact same shade as the flake of dried pigment. But it was close enough.

I threw the fragment and the paper towel into the wastebasket, ran into the kitchen. Toby was filling a gallon jug from the tap.

“Listen,” I said. “After you finish your work at this other island—are you coming back here? Or heading straight over to Burnt Harbor?”

“Depends on the weather. Probably I’ll be back. Unless it really comes down, in which case I’ll drop anchor over at Tolba and stay in Lucien’s house. Why?”

“Maybe I could ride out with you to the island. Then later, if you do go over to Burnt Harbor, you can drop me off. If not, I’ll just come back here with you.”

“You really want to get out of here, don’t you? Okay. I guess, if you don’t mind getting cold and wet. I just thought you might want to take a nap or something. You looked pretty whipped, to tell you the truth.”

“If I fall asleep now, I’ll never wake up.”

“Don’t want that.” He picked up the jug and headed for the door. “You got much to carry?”

“No.” I slung my bag over my shoulder. “Just this. My camera.”

“Good. You can help bring some things down. Then we won’t have to make two trips.”

He gathered a canvas bag of extra clothing, a toolbox, two water jugs. He stopped by the door and pulled on a parka.

“Cold out there.” He eyed my leather jacket and cowboy boots. “You’re not going to be warm enough.”

“I still have your sweater.” I unzipped my jacket to show him, and the sweater rode up, exposing my stomach.

“That a tattoo?” He stooped to peer at the scroll of words entwined with a scar. “‘Too tough to die.’”

He gave me an odd look. “Looks like you earned that.”

I didn’t reply. I thought of a girl walking toward a car beneath a broken streetlamp; of another girl walking down a darkened pier where a boat drifted, its engine cut and running lights switched off.

“Did it hurt?” asked Toby softly.

“It all hurts,” I said and turned away.

For a moment he was quiet.

“Here,” he said. “Take this—”

He opened a cupboard and tossed me a blaze orange watchcap. “You lose ninety percent of your body heat through your head. Not that it’ll do you much good if you go overboard.”

He picked up the toolbox and the canvas bag, gestured at the gallon jugs. “Can you handle those?”

I pulled on the watchcap and picked up the jugs. “Yeah.”

“What about this?”

He reached into the shadows and grabbed a wooden pole about six feet long, tipped with a lethal-looking bronze spike that had a hook like a talon welded to it. He hefted it, eyed it measuringly, then handed it to me.

“What is it? A harpoon?”

“Boat hook. For grabbing stuff that falls overboard. Among other things. Like if we run into your friends again outside. You know how to use a boat hook, don’t you? You just put your lips together, and—”

He mimed smashing someone. “Run like hell. Come on.”

I followed him outside. I tightened my grip on the boat hook, but the alley was empty.

“We’ll go this way.” Toby headed around the corner. “Shorter walk.”

It also avoided that sorry little main drag. A small crowd had gathered at the far end of the beach. I recognized Everett Moss and a few of the other men I’d seen when I first arrived, but not the guys I’d encountered by the Chandlery. Two black dogs played on the rocky beach. There were more boats in the harbor, including a Marine Patrol vessel.

“Guess that’s how they’ll get Aphrodite back to shore,” said Toby.

We headed toward the pier. No one seemed to have noticed us yet. They stood in a tight group, heads bent. Now and then someone looked across the reach to the mainland. “’Less they’re waiting for an ambulance boat or something.”

The sky had grown darker and more ominous. Clouds and sea were the same charred gray. A cold wind seemed to blow from everywhere at once. The black dogs were the same color as the clots of kelp they snapped at. The gulls were like white holes in the sky. Everything seemed to be part of one thing here, even the men in their slate blue coveralls and dun-colored coats and blaze orange vests: They were all like pieces that had broken off from the island but could be made to fit again, if you knew which jagged part went where.

I used the boat hook like a walking stick and tried not to lag behind Toby. A dog spied us and ran across the shingle, barking. The men all turned. I half expected someone to shout at us—at me—but they said nothing. Their silence unnerved me, but after a minute they turned away again.

Toby waited for me on the pier. “How you doing?”

“I’m okay.”

He held out a hand, steering me up the granite steps, and we walked to the dinghy. I felt exposed and went as fast as I could, my boots skidding on the slick surface. We reached the dinghy and climbed in. Toby rowed to where the Northern Sky was moored, climbed up on deck, and set down his things. I handed him what I’d brought, and he helped me on board.

“You get this stuff stowed below while I tie up the dinghy. Those water jugs go under the sink down in the galley. The rest of that stuff, just put it so we don’t trip on it.”

I started for the companionway then paused.

“I might want to take some pictures out here. You going to let me use my camera this time?”

Toby loosened a line from a cleat. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

“How come you had a problem with it yesterday?”

“I wasn’t sure yet whether or not you were going to be a problem.”

I felt oddly pleased and gave him a wry smile. He looked at me. “You still don’t have a mirror, do you?”

“Nope.” I stared back, then asked, “The mirror game. Suze told me that was something Denny used to do with everyone.”

He said nothing.

“What was it?” I prodded. “Was it something about that girl? Hannah?”

“No.” He sighed. “It really was a game. We’d get really stoned, then you’d just stare into the mirror until your face started to look all weird, like it was melting or something. The way if you repeat the same word over and over, it starts to sound funny? Like that. It was silly. But then Denny started to do some other stuff. He was reading a lot about primitive religions; he started making up these rituals. That was pretty silly too, at first. But then it just started to get bizarre. He started believing in the stuff he’d made up. He’d force people to do things—look at yourself in the mirror for an hour, three hours. He did it once for a whole day. All day, all night. It—”

He shook icy rain from his parka and shivered. “I was with him. I did it too—stared at myself in this big mirror. Every time I started to nod off he’d poke me. After a while he stopped, but he wasn’t asleep. He just sat there and stared at himself, and then he started whispering to himself. Just kept saying the same thing over and over. Like Chinese water torture.” He glanced at me. “That was when I knew I’d had enough. I got the hell out of there and got a job at Rankin’s Hardware for a few months, just to kind of normalize myself. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t stand it now, seeing myself in a mirror.”

He stared at the sky and shook his head, as though remembering.

“What was he saying?” I asked.

“‘I see you.’” He shielded his eyes from the rain. “‘I see you, I see you. I see you.’ That was all.”

Abruptly he turned and clapped my shoulder. “Go on now. You better get that stuff below.”

I climbed down the companionway and stowed the boat hook and water jugs and my bag. Toby joined me a few minutes later.

“I’ve got some extra foul-weather gear.” He rooted through a cupboard. “You’ll ruin those cowboy boots of yours, sliding around in the salt water. See if these fit.”

The anorak fit, but the Wellingtons were way too big. I said, “I think I better stick with my boots.”

“Suit yourself. Just be careful. Give me a hand with the rest of this stuff.”

It took me a few trips to get everything stowed below. Toby moved quickly and efficiently across the deck, seeming impervious to cold and sleet. When he finished, he beckoned toward the companionway.

’We’ll motor past the point there. Going straight into the wind like this, it would take us three times as long to sail. If the wind changes direction, we might motorsail.”

He squinted as icy spray gusted across the deck. “This could be rough. Think you’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?” He looked me up and down. “You feel bad, you can try going below. I don’t think that helps much, myself. You’re better here on deck where you can feel the wind. There’s life jackets there—”

He cocked his thumb at several orange vests and a life preserver. “Not that they’ll do you much good. You go overboard, you’ve got eight minutes before hypothermia kicks in. That’s how they train kids down at the yacht club—they throw ‘em in the harbor and toss ‘em a life preserver to help get ‘em to shore.”

“They get them back out, right?”

“That’s what the boat hook’s for.”

I huddled in the stern while Toby went below. After a few minutes I heard the rumble of the engine turning over. Smoke spewed across the water. Toby hopped back up on deck and stood beside me at the tiller as the Northern Sky nosed away from the pier. I tugged the watchcap over my ears and looked across the harbor to the beach.

The men stood in that same small group. A few watched us pull out. The others had turned to watch four dark figures walking slowly down the road from the crest of the island. Two of the figures carried a stretcher. Behind them walked a heavyset man in a black overcoat, and a tall lanky figure. Ray Provenzano.

And Gryffin.

“Look,” I said.

Toby turned. He ran a hand across his brow then raised it in a wave.

On shore, the tall figure stopped. He lifted his head and gazed across the water then slowly lifted his hand. His voice came to us, garbled by wind and the throb of the engine.

“What’d he say?” I asked Toby.

“‘Be careful.’”

I watched as the figures on shore grew smaller and smaller, until they were no bigger than the rocks and, at last, became indistinguishable from them, disappearing completely as we rounded the point.

21

You can get used to anything, even hanging. Even cold. Still, I thought longingly of the little woodstove I’d seen down in the Northern Sky’s cabin. When I asked Toby about it, he looked at me dubiously.

“Think you can get a fire going? It’s tricky. Time you did, we’d probably be there.”

I reluctantly agreed. We’d left the point behind us. Now Paswegas was a green-black hump, like a breaching whale. There was no real chop, but a lot of long swells. It didn’t make me feel sick, more like being in a gray uneasy dream that I couldn’t quite wake from. Now and then a big wave would catch us sideways, flinging frigid water over the bow. I started counting these to see if there was a pattern, and yeah, every third wave was big, and every twelfth wave was really big. I helped Toby pull up the dodger, a small awning that covered the cockpit, and ducked under it as another wave slapped the boat. It wasn’t much protection, but it kept the worst of the spray from us, and some of the wind. My feet were swollen inside my boots. My face felt as though it had hardened like cement.

Churning sea thrust against roiling sky. The sky pushed back. We fought both of them. A few gulls beat feebly against the clouds. I went below and got my camera, returned to the relative shelter of the dodger and did my best to keep my balance while I shot that unearthly expanse of gray and white and sickly green. Islets rose from the water, some little more than big black rocks, others crowned with salt-withered spruce or birch. I saw tangles of bone white driftwood on rocky beaches, and dead seabirds, creosote-blackened pilings ripped from God knows where. I thought of photos I had seen of Iceland, of volcanic islands rising from the sea.

Who would ever live here? I thought. And answered: I could.

“Cass.” I capped my camera and put it back beneath my jacket. “Come here, I’ll teach you how to keep a heading. The currents are okay for the moment.”

He showed me how to read the compass, its face tilting beneath a transparent plastic dome; how to hold the tiller steady.

“I’m going below for a second.” He raised his voice above the wind and pointed. “That’s where we’re headed—”

A long black shape skimmed the broken surface of the water. “That’s Tolba. We’re sailing a line of sight—not sailing, motoring. So you just keep heading in that direction, okay?”

I minded the tiller while he went below. It was like fighting with a live stick, but I figured Toby wouldn’t leave if he didn’t think I could hold my own. He returned a minute later with two coffee mugs, a liter of Moxie and a bottle of Captain Morgan’s rum.

“See if this warms you up.”

He poured Moxie into each mug, added a slug of rum, and handed one to me. I took a sip and nearly spat it out.

Toby looked hurt. “You should try it with a little squeeze of fresh lime. Nothing finer.”

I fished beneath my anorak until I found my Jack Daniel’s. Toby finished off his mug and set it down. The deck was treacherous with spray, but he moved easily, keeping the tiller steady. The freezing mist had turned to a fine, steady rain. After a few minutes, Toby shook his head.

“We’re dragging,” he yelled above the wind. “The dinghy. Here, I’ll need you to take over again—”

He opened a storage box and removed a bleach bottle that had been cut to make a scoop, turned and placed my hands on the tiller. “I’ve set it so we’re going into the wind now. That’ll slow us down while I bail. Keep that heading.”

He ducked out from the cockpit and headed toward the stern. I watched him lower himself down into the dinghy and begin bailing then turned my attention back to the tiller.

Ahead of us, Tolba Island rose against the mottled sky. It was like watching a photograph develop: bit by bit, details grew clear. The finely etched tips of spruce on the island’s heights; slashes of white that were ancient birches; a sweep of blood red stone that gave way to a pale, red-pocked strand; a granite pier projecting into the water.

It was big; far bigger than Paswegas.

I looked back to check on Toby.

He shouted, “How you doing?”

“Okay.”

“Almost done here! Hang on—”

Exhaustion seeped through me like another drug. My gut ached from coffee and speed and alcohol. If I crashed now, I’d be down for the count. I fingered the film canister in my pocket that held the stolen pills. I had enough speed to last me another day or two if I rationed it. I had the Percocet for when I needed to sleep. If I held off till I got back to Burnt Harbor, I could hit the road and get as far south as Bangor that night, find a Motel 6 and crash there. Not exactly deluxe accommodations, but better than the Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse…

I thought of that first night in Burnt Harbor, of Kenzie’s white face disappearing into the shadows, like a moth.

She was looking for you, Robert had said. She said you were nice.

Well, that was her first mistake.

She said you were going to give her a ride.

My stomach turned over, but not from the swell. I fumbled for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

She wasn’t running away. I knew that. Robert knew it too. She’d been looking for me, but she’d run into someone else. I thought of the boat I’d glimpsed that night in Burnt Harbor—its running lights, one red, one green; then darkness, its engine silenced. I remembered the animal crouched in the tree, its wild maddened eyes.

Fishers never leave the mainland.

“Whooee! Wicked cold out there.” Toby ducked beneath the dodger, shaking sleet from his anorak. He stuffed the scoop back into its bin and patted my shoulder. “You seem to have done okay. Here.”

He took the tiller and angled it slightly. The Northern Sky turned toward the far end of the beach. “Now we’re not going into the wind, we’ll make better time. If you can handle it for a few more minutes, I’ll go down and fire up the Coleman stove and heat us up some coffee, how’s that?”

“Sounds great.”

He grabbed the mugs and went below. I stood, brooding, as we drew closer to the island. Great reddish boulders were scattered on the rocky shore. On the cliffs above the beach, spindly stands of evergreen and birch. A glitter among the trees indicated a house or outbuildings.

Toby returned with two steaming mugs. “Here you go.”

I stared at the island. “It’s so big.”

“Don’t forget there was a whole village once.”

I raised the mug to my face, pressing it against my cheek until it burned. “I can’t believe you just come and go from here.”

“Not often. Fishermen do it all the time.”

“Yeah, and freeze to death for a living.”

“You think we have a choice? Places like Paswegas, we’re like Custer’s Last Stand. People from away, developers—they’re killing us. They move here from New Jersey and New York and they don’t want to let us hunt our own land anymore. The fishermen can’t catch fish. Red tide kills the clammers. We get your Lyme ticks, and your Nile mosquitoes … every bad thing we used to hide from, finds us now. Away isn’t ‘away’ anymore. It’s here.”

He didn’t sound angry the way Suze had: only resigned and sad. I sipped some coffee and scalded my tongue. Didn’t feel bad at all.

“I saw something,” I said. I backed up against the dodger, out of the wind. “Back on Paswegas. An animal, in those pine trees by Aphrodite’s house. I think it was that thing you told me about. A fisher.”

“What’d it look like?”

“Kind of big, or biggish. Black-brown, like a little bear but with a long tail. A lot of fur. It snarled at me.”

“Was it on the ground?”

“It was in a tree. Aphrodite’s dogs came running up, and it climbed away or jumped off or something. I’m sure it was a fisher.”

“Huh.” Toby sipped his coffee and steered the boat toward a long pier that seemed to be made of rusty metal. As we drew closer, I saw that it wasn’t metal but stone, the same bloody color as the boulders on shore. “It does sound like a fisher.”

“When I mentioned it to Suze, she thought I was crazy. She said it was impossible for a fisher to get out to one of the islands.”

“Well, that’s true. But if you saw it … people see things all the time. Wolves, mountain lions. Not on the islands, but back there—”

He cocked his head toward the mainland. “People report them to Fish and Wildlife, but the feds don’t want to admit they’re back in Maine. Once they admit we got mountain lions and wolves living here, you have a whole lot of issues about endangered species. Also a whole lot of pissed-off farmers and hunters, ‘cause the wolves and cougars eat their livestock, and they thin out the deer herd. But they’re here, all right.”

I felt a faint tingling on my neck. “So it’s theoretically possible for a fisher to be there, even if no one’s ever seen one before?”

“Sure. I mean, moose have swum out to the islands, and coyotes and foxes. Back a hundred years ago, there was one or two winters so bad there were places where the reach would freeze, and animals could walk over. You don’t usually find big pine trees on the islands anymore—they were all cut for lumber, or to make masts. Plus they don’t like the salt air. But there’s a few big pines on Paswegas, and there’s a couple of really big ones here on Tolba. So you could have porcupines, and maybe you could have a fisher. Anything’s possible.”

I finished my coffee. “You got any food down there?”

“Yeah, go and poke around in the galley, you’ll find something.”

I went below. It wasn’t exactly warm, but it was out of the wind and rain. Quiet, too. Well, not quiet, exactly, but the sounds were different. Rain slashing against the porthole windows, mildly ominous creakings, the drone of the engine. I sat and pulled a blanket around my shoulders. After a few minutes I went to the galley to see what I could find to eat.

There was enough rum and Moxie to qualify as an alternative energy source, but not a lot of what you’d call food. A few sprouting potatoes, a couple cans of tomato sauce. I found a half-full bag of green apples that seemed okay, also a box of blueberry Pop Tarts. I ate an apple then wolfed down Pop Tarts while rummaging through cupboards to see what more there was.

String, a corkscrew, plastic condiment packets. A bottom drawer held a first-aid kit, fishing line and hooks, matches in a waterproof tin. Aspirin, Ipecac, Benadryl. I shoved them aside and saw something else.

A flare gun.

I picked it up. About five inches long, made of plastic, with a black barrel and orange trigger. I checked the barrel. There was a single red canister inside. I held it, thinking, put it into the drawer and went back up on deck.

“Find something?”

“Some Pop Tarts.”

“Yeah, I bought a case of those for Y2K.”

I stood beside him at the tiller and watched black water slop against blocks of rose-colored stone. In the sleety mist it was hard to tell where the pier ended and the beach began. Granite blocks blended into boulders, boulders faded into reddish sand indistinguishable from stunted trees killed by salt and cold. A line of spruces well above the waterline glowed a green so deep it was almost black. Here and there, a black gleam as of eyes gazed back from the trees. A house.

“Is that where we’re going?” I asked.

“That’s it. Mr. Ryel’s Dream House.”

I thought we’d pull up to the pier. Instead, the Northern Sky angled off toward a pair of round floats. A lobster buoy bobbed nearby.

“Take this,” said Toby, leaving the tiller to me. “I’m going to cut the engine. Try to keep us from drifting away from those floats.”

He went below. The engine died. The only thing I could hear was the roar of the wind and the crash of waves on the rocky beach.

“This is a good mooring,” Toby shouted as he headed toward the stern. “We’ll tie up here and take the dinghy to shore. The boat’ll be safer if the weather gets rough.”

“Will it get worse?”

“Don’t know. It seems to be dying down now, but that could just be the eye. Whyn’t you get your stuff from below. That way if we end up staying over at Lucien’s place you’ll have it.”

He started to tie off the boat. I climbed down to the cabin and got my bag, put my camera back inside, checked to make sure my copy of Deceptio Visus was still safe. I opened it, flipping through the pages until I found the prints I’d made in the basement, the contact sheets and the other two. Aphrodite’s photo of the naked man I now knew must be Denny Ahearn, and Denny’s photo of Hannah Meadows. I looked at them then put them aside and stared at the snapshot of Gryffin.

I shut my eyes and recalled his face as I’d first seen it, the emerald flaw in his iris. The green ray. I thought of the photo in Aphrodite’s room—a different green-flecked eye—and the larger picture of Hannah Meadows in Toby’s apartment. Painted eyes, one with a green star inside it.

I couldn’t make sense of it. There was no sense to it, not to anyone except the person who’d shot those pictures.

I’ve heard alcoholics say they can recognize another alcoholic without ever seeing them take a drink, that they can read a book or hear a song and know that the person who wrote it was a drunk. I’m not crazy 24/7, but I’ve been crazy enough that I recognize someone else who’s nuts.

Especially another photographer. Like Diane Arbus. She was a genius, and maybe I’m not. But I know what she saw out there when she looked at the world through her viewfinder. I know what she saw when she killed herself. Just like I know what I saw when I watched Aphrodite die, what I felt: the stench of damage like my own sweat, and my own reflected face like a flaw in her iris.

I rode a wave of grief that left nothing in its wake, not memory or remorse or rage. When it passed I looked down and saw Gryffin’s photo still in my hand. I slid it into Deceptio Visus and put the book into the bag with my camera. I went back on deck.

“We’re all set,” announced Toby. His cheeks were white with cold. “You got everything? Grab one of those life jackets.”

The rain had nearly stopped, but the sky remained nickel colored, swollen with cloud. I fished out another Adderall and washed it down with a mouthful of whiskey. There was something behind those clouds, something behind that black lowering bulk of granite and stunted trees, something I couldn’t see yet. I got the life jacket and waited in the stern by the dinghy. Toby returned with another life jacket, the canvas bag, and a toolbox.

“I think this is everything. You sure you’re okay?” His brow furrowed.

“I think so.” I picked up the boat hook. “What about this? Can it come along?”

“Yeah, sure, go ahead and bring it. Just don’t leave it behind.”

We loaded the dinghy then rowed to shore. It was rough but not scary. Or maybe I was just getting used to it. I scanned the sea for signs of another boat, saw nothing but a few floats. No planes in the sky, no sign of the mainland; just a few black shapes that seemed to flicker above the dark water. Fish, I thought, or maybe dolphins or seals. Toby said they were rocks.

“Another reason Denny never leaves,” he said, pulling at the oars. “Summer it’s okay, but winter—forget it.”

We reached the shore and got out. I helped him pull the boat well above the highwater mark, kicking through tangles of seaweed encrusted with dead crabs. When we were done, he straightened and shaded his eyes, staring out to sea.

“I don’t see Lucien’s boat.” He frowned. “Huh. Denny must’ve moved it.”

I hoisted my bag and the boat hook. Toby dug a cigarette from his pocket and looked at me. “So. What do you think?”

It was beyond desolate: it was where desolation goes to be by itself. Stone pilings reared from the water, skeletal remains of a dock. I couldn’t see a house. Surf-pounded stones lay on the beach between skeins of weed and blackened driftwood. Farther up, those huge blocks of blood red granite were the only jolts of color in a scoured gray world. My entire body ached with cold and fatigue, but somehow that seemed like the right way to feel here. It was a place that had the flesh stripped from it. Just above the shoreline reared a stand of dead trees—cat spruce, said Toby—trunks bleached white and every needle stripped from their branches. Overturned tree stumps surrounded them, roots exposed like tentacles, and the wing of a seabird, its feathers eaten away so it resembled a shattered Chinese fan.

And everywhere, red granite. Not boulders or rocks but immense blocks and overturned pillars, Greek columns covered with lichen, poison green, blaze orange, white, half-carven angels and a monolithic horse and rider.

“This is incredible.” I walked to an angel whose face was veiled with black mold and ran my hand across its eyes. “It’s not all rotted away.”

“That’s why they call it granite.” Toby took a drag from his cigarette. “Back when everyone left here, they just packed their clothes and what they could carry. Obviously they weren’t going to cart off the granite. They left things you wouldn’t believe. When Lucien built his place, I found saw blades and drills. Beautiful stuff; I’ve got some of ‘em back in my place. Not to mention the carvings. They had a hundred guys out here quarrying the stuff, but there were men stayed in the sheds and just carved stone. You know how you see all those memorials from a hundred, hundred-fifty years ago? Well, a lot of them were carved here then shipped out to Boston and New York. Angels, statues … if the carvers made a mistake, they’d just leave it here.”

“It’s amazing.”

“Wait’ll you see Lucien’s place.”

We began walking up a narrow gully. I was glad I had the boat hook to help steady me against the slick rocks underfoot. As we climbed, the gully widened into the remnants of a road.

“That story you told me before,” I said. “About Denny’s girlfriend. The one who died.”

“Hanner.”

“Right, Hannah.” The gale picked up. I looked back to where the Northern Sky bobbed in the water like a gull at rest. “Those masks everyone made—did she have one? Did she have a totem?”

“I don’t think so. I think she just went along with whatever Denny did.”

“Your totem animal? It was a frog?”

“Yeah. Because they’re amphibious. They live on the land and the water both. Like me.”

I hitched my bag from one shoulder to the other. “What about Denny? What was his totem?”

“Denny?” Toby drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. “Good question. It was a long time ago, but—”

He pinched the cigarette out between his fingers then flicked it onto the slick stones at our feet. “I think it was a snapping turtle.”

22

Lucien Ryel’s house showed what you could do with Ray Provenzano’s scrap-metal ethic and several million dollars. It resembled an ancient temple crossed with the remains of a lunar lander, built in the lee of a granite dome above the ocean and surrounded by a stand of massive pine trees and withered rosebushes. A cantilevered deck made of steel girders and I beams ran the length of the building, all glass and weathered metal, inset with blocks of carved granite: huge feathered wings, a colossal arm, an immense, preternaturally calm face. Solar panels carpeted a roof bristling with satellite dishes. The windows were pocked with silhouetted cut-outs of flying birds.

“First summer Lucien was here, we had so many dead birds we had to pick ‘em up with a shovel.” Toby paused to catch his breath. “They’d fly right into the windows. So he put those stickers up. Kind of messes with the view.”

The road wound toward the back of the house. Two large propane tanks were set alongside the wall. I stared at the roof. “He looks pretty plugged in.”

“That’s nothing. Lucien comes all the way out here and then he never leaves the house, just spends all his time in the studio or online. He got a digital switch so he could get high-speed Internet. Paid a bundle to run it here. He keeps talking about getting a windmill, but right now everything’s powered off batteries. I’ve got to make sure they haven’t drained. Denny’s supposed to check them, but he forgot once. He comes up here to use the phone and Internet but never bothers to check the goddam power.”

He stopped and stared at a small outbuilding tucked into the trees. A modular utility shed, its doors flapping in the wind.

“That shouldn’t be open.” Toby walked over to peer inside. “Huh. He took the tractor out too.”

He shut the doors and fastened them with a padlock. “Okay. Now we can get inside and maybe get you warm again.” He pulled out a key ring. “Eureka.”

After the onslaught of wind and cold, inside was eerily silent, save for a soft, rhythmic ticking sound.

“Solar batteries,” said Toby, shucking his rain gear.

We were in a long, open room, its vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by steel I beams. The polished wooden floor shone like bronze. No rugs, no cushions, but a lot of 1980s furniture made of welded copper and steel. The standing lamps resembled carnivorous insects. A Viking stove lurked behind a wall of industrial glass, along with a free-standing wine closet. The effect was of being on board the battleship Potemkin.

“So.” I wandered over to the window. “Did he really build all this? Or was it delivered directly from the gulag?”

Toby dumped his toolbox on the floor. “You wouldn’t believe what this place cost.”

“Yeah, I would. Taste this bad, you have to be so rich no one ever argues with you.”

“It’s very fuel efficient. See that south-facing window? You get incredible passive-solar gain from that.”

“When? On the Fourth of July?”

“No, really—it stays pretty warm in here, relatively speaking. Speaking of which, I got to go drain the water tanks. You try and warm up, I’ll be back up in a bit.”

“Here.” He fiddled with a dial on the wall. “That’ll make it easier. Heat.”

He got his tools and went downstairs. I peeled off my anorak, then my boots and wet socks. My feet felt like frozen lumps of meat. I warmed them as best I could with my hands, found some dry socks in my bag and put them on. I stuck my boots on top of the heater and set off on a quick circuit of the house.

It wasn’t exactly a party pad. The wine closet was locked. Other rooms contained yet more minimalist furniture, a plasma-screen TV, small recording studio. A powder room—no medicine cabinet—where I tried to clean myself up. The water was brackish, but it was warm. Right then I wouldn’t have traded warm water for the best sex or drugs I’d ever had.

I emerged feeling, if not appearing, a bit more human. I forced myself to stand in front of the mirror, staring at a face that looked more like Scary Neary than it ever had. I resembled my own skeleton, tarted up with bloodshot eyes and wind-burned skin.

I bared my teeth in a grimace and wandered into the master bedroom suite. It seemed to float among giant pine trees. Lucien Ryel had sunk a ton of money into building this place and heating it all winter long, not to mention keeping a caretaker on retainer.

Now I understood why.There was a fortune in artwork on those bedroom walls. And not the usual stuff your aging rock stars collect, Warhols and Schnabels and Koons and Curtins.

Ryel had a taste for the art equivalent of rough trade, or what had been considered rough trade up until about ten years ago, when, like bondage equipment, outsider art became mainstreamed. There were two Chris Mars canvases, a Joe Coleman, paintings by artists whose names I didn’t recognize but which were the sorts of things that would give you bad dreams, if you’re susceptible to them.

The stuff was amazing. Some, like a Lori Field collage of women with animal heads and pencil-thin limbs, were ethereal. Others, like a Nick Blinko drawing of a skeleton eating its own skull, were nightmarish.

There were photographs too. A couple of eerie Fred Resslers where you could faces in the trees. An early Mapplethorpe portrait of Patti Smith. A vacant lot by Lee Friedlander. Works by Brian Belott, Branka Jukic … I would have been happy to take whatever could fit into my pockets, if I’d had room.

Then I saw the photos beside his bed.

There were three of them. Oversized color prints, handmade frames, no glass. Monotypes, like the photos at Ray Provenzano’s place and Toby’s apartment. All three had the same childish signature.

S.P.O.T.

Nothing else to identify them. No title. No song lyrics.

Yet I knew they formed a sequence with the others. And even though I still couldn’t pin down what these were photos of, I knew they were linked, somehow, with the older photos I’d seen in Aphrodite’s room—those crudely manipulated SX-70 prints—and Toby’s picture of Hannah Meadows.

I couldn’t tell how they fit. The pattern was there, but because it wasn’t my own craziness I couldn’t put a finger on what held them together. But I knew they were all images of the same thing.

What?

From some angles it resembled a body, from others an island, or the humped form of some kind of animal. The colors were murky greens and browns and viscous blues, shot through with glints of red and orange. Like the others, these used handmade emulsion paper distressed with a needle or fingernail. In spots the dyes had flaked or been rubbed off. Stuff was embedded in the layers of pigment—a fly’s wing; hair; shreds of newsprint. Messy, but it gave the prints a strange depth, as though they’d captured some of the real world the photo sought to hold on to.

They reminded me of daguerreotypes. When you look at one of those head-on, even the darkest parts throw light back at you, so you get a reverse image. It’s like a photographic negative and positive, all in one.

But then you tilt a daguerreotype just right, and the shadows and light fall into place, and what you’re looking at becomes a 3-D image. It’s an effect impossible to reproduce in a book or print, or even with computer imaging technology: the purest example of generation loss I can think of. A daguerreotype portrait always seemed like the closest you could come to actually seeing someone who had died a century and a half ago.

I tried to puzzle out the scraps of newsprint embedded in the photos.

U S T 2 SEE

EN

The letters reminded me of the ransom-note typography on 1970s album covers and band posters.

ST 29

Street 29? Saint 29? Maybe it wasn’t an address. Maybe it had some bizarre religious meaning. I took the first photo from the wall and sniffed it.

I gagged. That same sick, rank fishy odor combined with the worst dead skunk you can ever imagine.

“Uh, Cass?” Toby stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“Come here. I want you to smell this.”

“What?”

I handed him the photo and went to the next two.

“Whoo boy!” Toby thrust the print back to me. “That stinks!”

“No shit. These do too.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” He tugged his pigtail. “Did they go off or something? Can a photograph go bad?”

“I don’t think so.” I hung them back on the wall. “I think it’s something in the pigments he used to make the emulsion.”

“Do they use stuff like that? Stuff that spoils?”

“Not usually. Not at any photo lab I ever hung out at, anyway.”

Toby peered at the prints, his nose wrinkling. “It smells like, I don’t know—cod liver oil or something. Only worse. Like a skunk.”

“That’s what I thought too.”

“Is there a kind of fish that smells like a skunk?”

“You tell me.”

He wandered the length of the room, looking at the other paintings. “I forgot he had this stuff. Kind of dark for my taste.”

He stopped by the window, stared out at the sea then glanced at his watch. “It’s getting pretty late. We’re not going to make it back tonight, not if we don’t hurry. I still have to check a few things here. And I need to go see Denny…”

He sighed. “I don’t want to be the one to tell him about Aphrodite, but I guess I’ll have to.”

“Were they still close?”

“No. But I think that makes it worse. Gryffin—”

He fell silent and looked away.

“We better keep moving,” he said at last.

He left. I hurried to a nightstand, rifling the drawers till I located a piece of stationery. Then I got out John Stone’s pen and my film canister with the stolen pills and removed four Percocets.

proud to serve read the pen, and it did. I rolled it back and forth on top of the pills, pressing with the heel of my hand to crush them to a powder. When I was done, I scraped the powder into the slip of folded paper and stowed it carefully in my pocket.

I was almost to the door when I saw a bookshelf nearly hidden behind a metal bureau. Its oversized art and photography books were organized by size, not artist, but I knew where I’d find Dead Girls, lined up neatly between Untitled Film Stills and Roberta Bayley’s Blank Generation. I pulled it out and looked at the title page.

For Lucien

A shot in the eye! This one’s the REAL THING.

Denny

I left without looking at Denny’s photos again. I didn’t want to get any closer to them than I already was.

23

Toby was in the kitchen, putting away his tools. I sidled toward the counter.

“You mind if I give that rum and Moxie thing another try?”

“Go ahead.” He smiled wearily. “Help yourself.”

“You want one too?”

“Thanks, yeah. Not too much rum.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m going out to have a cigarette. Lucien doesn’t like me smoking in the house. Right back.”

I found a glass in a cupboard and tipped the crushed pills into it. I could see Toby through the window, smoking on the stone steps. I poured a shot of rum into the glass then filled it with Moxie.

I sniffed and took a tiny sip. The stuff tasted so foul to begin with, I couldn’t tell any difference with the Percocet chaser. To be on the safe side I added more rum.

I needed this to work fast if it was going to work at all, but I didn’t want to kill him. Toby was a decent guy. He was also my only ticket back to Burnt Harbor.

Someone told me once that there’s no such thing as luck. You make decisions all the time without being conscious of it—like, you move before you realize you’re darting to avoid an oncoming truck. Or you walk toward a car before you realize the voice you hear is a stranger’s, and it isn’t whispering your name.

So maybe these things aren’t accidents at all. Maybe they’re just the beginning of a long chain of events that you set in motion yourself. Maybe you set it in motion before you were even old enough to remember. Playing in the car while your mother’s driving. Hearing what happened next. Opening your eyes when they should have remained closed. Seeing something you should never have seen. Moving when you should have stood still. Standing still when you should have run.

I watched Toby through the window. When he put out his cigarette I grabbed another glass and sloshed some Moxie into it.

“Hey,” I said as he walked back in. “Here—”

I handed him the doped glass. He looked approvingly at my nearly empty one.

“See? It grows on you.” He took a sip. “You know, it’s going to be an hour or two till I get back from Denny’s. If I’d thought this through better I wouldn’t have drained the hot water tank. You could’ve taken a shower.”

“That bad?”

He smiled and drank some more. “No, no. I just thought, you must be tired. I know you’re cold.”

“I’m better now.” I looked around and tried to determine which piece of barbed-wire furniture would be the most comfortable for someone to pass out on. I decided on a chaise that looked like a head-on collision, pulled a chair beside it and sat. “So where does ol’ Denny live?’

Toby settled on the chaise. “Other side of the island, past the little quarries. His place is by the biggest one. Maybe a mile. There’s an old road where they used to haul granite down to the harbor.”

He pointed toward the empty beach. “Hard to believe now.”

“Mmm.”

I waited impatiently. I was so wired I felt like smashing through those nice big windows. That would fit right in with Ryel’s aesthetic. I choked back a mouthful of Moxie and poured myself some Jack Daniel’s.

“Cheers,” I said, drinking. “I’m reverting to type.”

Toby finished his cocktail. “You sure you don’t want to take a nap?”

“Toby,” I said. “Listen to me: I don’t want to take a fucking nap.”

I prayed those Percocet weren’t controlled-release. Best-case scenario, Toby would start feeling drowsy within a few minutes. I banked on the alcohol boosting that.

“You’re the one doing all the work,” I said. “Rowing and stuff. Why don’t you chill out for a few minutes? I’ll wake you.”

Toby leaned back on the chaise. “Too much to do, if we’re going to get back to Paswegas tonight.” He yawned.

“Go on, rest for five minutes,” I urged. “I will if you will.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe. But…”

He looked at me, dazed. Faint comprehension crossed his face. “Hey. This is kinda…”

He tried to stand then sank back, staring at me with glazed eyes. “You.”

“It’s okay, Toby.” I poured myself some more Jack Daniel’s. “I can wait.”

He closed his eyes. I waited.

It didn’t take that long. When I thought he was out, I crouched at his side.

“Hey, Toby,” I whispered then raised my voice. “Toby, man, wake up.”

I shook him gently. He snorted, and I lowered him onto the chaise.

Down for the count. I folded my anorak and slid it under his head. His eyes fluttered open. He gazed at me blankly then began to snore.

I looked outside. It was almost three o’clock. The sun would set in an hour. I had ninety minutes before nightfall, tops. I went into the kitchen and yanked open drawers and cabinets until I found a flashlight. I pocketed it, got some water and swallowed one more Adderall. I only had two left.

My instinct was to bring the Konica. But I didn’t want to risk losing it. If I made it back safely I could retrieve it then. If not…

I stood and zipped my leather jacket. I pulled on the orange watch cap, grabbed the boat hook, and headed for the door. As I did, I caught a glimpse of myself in a dark window: a gaunt Valkyrie holding a spear taller than I was, teeth bared in a drunken grimace and eyes bloodshot from some redneck teenager’s ADD medication.

“Hey ho, let’s go,” I said, and went.

24

Christine once showed me a quote from Nietzsche: “Terrible experiences give one cause to speculate whether the one who experiences them may not be something terrible.”

“That’s you.” She shoved the book at me. “What happened to you in the Bowery that night—”

“Shut up,” I said.

“I’m right! You know I’m right! You can’t let go of it, you can’t even think of letting go of it or grieving or doing any goddam thing that might help! So you better just hope nothing else bad ever happens to you. Because you know what, Cass?”

She stabbed a finger at my portfolio on the table: Hard To Be Human Again. “You’ve got so much rage in you, you’re hardly even human now.”

I walked until I found the road Toby had spoken of, an earthen track covered with chunks of stone. Far below, the wind roared off the gray Atlantic; to either side, cat spruce thrashed and moaned like something alive.

The speed made me even colder. My fingers on the boat hook were almost numb. I slid on wet rocks and struggled to keep my balance as the sky darkened. It was difficult to believe there had ever been sunlight at all. My lower abdomen burned as though I’d been branded. I slipped my hand beneath my T-shirt and felt the familiar ridge of scarred skin.

I thought of Kenzie Libby. Studs in her chin and ear, a necklace of weathered glass and aluminum. That childish face and the bad dye job on her cropped hair.

People make themselves spiky for a reason. Maybe being stuck in Burnout Harbor was enough, watching the trickle of rich strangers grow to a torrent and wash away your world, with no hope of anything for yourself but a job at Wal-Mart or—maybe, if you were lucky—someone from away who’d take you with them when they left, spikes and all.

But those spikes don’t do anything to protect you. I remembered what Toby had said about the fishers—how they’d flip a porcupine over then rip its belly out.

They think nothing can kill them.

Fishers never came to the islands, but I’d seen one.

Denny never leaves the island.

I kept climbing. It felt strange to walk along a road without houses or telephone poles or utility lines. Ragged thickets covered the thin soil, along with dead ferns, scattered birch and maples. Bushes thrust from cracks in moss-covered granite. A crow flapped up from a tree, screaming, and disappeared into the shadows.

But after a while I began to see signs of former human habitation in the underbrush. Crumbled stone foundations; fallen chimneys; cellar holes filled with rubble. A few minutes later I reached the first quarry.

It was set off from the old road, a miniature lake cut into the hillside. The water looked solid and cold as obsidian. Wiry, leafless trees clustered at the water’s edge.

I used the boat hook to keep from sliding on loose scree, grabbed one of the trees and bent it toward me. It had smooth, silvery brown bark covered with tiny bumps that looked like insects. Dozens of blood red shoots sprouted from its trunk, like a hydra. It looked malevolent, and more alive than anything in that frigid landscape.

I clambered back up the slope and kept walking. I passed two more small quarries, and more cellar holes, but nothing that even a hermit could have lived in.

Eventually the road curved. I found myself looking down across crowns of cat spruce to an expanse of rose-colored rock that gave way to a muddy beach. Blocks of granite were scattered across it, like giant dice. In the center of the beach stood a ramshackle wooden pier. Tied up at the end was a motorboat: Lucien Ryel’s Boston Whaler.

I saw no other signs of people. My forehead grew clammy with sweat. I swallowed a mouthful of Jack Daniel’s and kept walking. A few more minutes, and I reached the big quarry.

It was about the size of a baseball diamond. Sheer rock walls rose thirty or forty feet above the waterline. I didn’t want to think how deep it was. A crow swooped down, flew croaking above the black surface, and landed in a dead tree on the opposite shore. I stared at it and frowned.

There was something in the tree, a ragged mass like a squirrel’s nest, but with something snarled in it, something blue and white. A plastic bag, maybe, or a balloon. It was impossible to tell from where I stood. But if I wanted a better look, I’d have to walk all the way around the quarry then fight my way through the underbrush. I didn’t want to do that.

I continued on up the road. It was nearly full dark, but I was afraid to use my flashlight and draw attention to myself. Beyond the quarry, I could just make out the remains of several buildings, worksheds or barns. Still nothing that looked like where someone might live now. An icy mist blew up from the shore. The air grew hazy, the ruins insubstantial as paper cutouts. I couldn’t stop shivering. A few minutes later, I stood on the crest of the hill.

Around me the island dropped down to the sea. Fog rolled across the water and up the hillside. I could just make out the Boston Whaler. I turned to where the road began its descent.

Through the dusk, lights gleamed. A group of small buildings stood behind the quarry, tucked between spruce and more remnants of Tolba’s abandoned industry—broken statues and granite columns, piles of rubble that gleamed in the yellow glow from a small house with smoke coiling from its chimney.

The sight of those glowing windows made me sick. I clutched the boat hook, leaned over and spat up a thin string of bile, waited for the feeling to pass.

It didn’t. I swallowed another mouthful of Jack Daniel’s.

Fear and whiskey, I thought. Run, Cass, run. Light guttered from a broken streetlamp. So you’re really from New York, huh? That must be really, really nice.

I saw her stumbling through the cold dark toward Burnt Harbor, then down toward the beach, hands shoved in the pockets of her hoodie. Trying to get up the courage to go into the Good Tern and talk to a stranger from the city.

I would love to go to New York.

Yeah, well maybe I could fit you in the trunk on my way back.

Whose voice did she think she’d heard as she walked on the beach by the Good Tern?

My fingers tightened on the boat hook. I took a few steps toward the lights when I heard the crow again. I looked up.

Several yards from the road, a single pine reared from a black thicket of underbrush. The crow sat in the tree’s uppermost branches. It stared at me and gave another harsh croak, lifted its wings, and flew down toward the beach.

I watched it go then squinted at the tree’s lower branches, at a dark tangle like what I’d seen in that other tree overlooking the quarry: a shapeless mass like a squirrel’s nest.

Only this was way too big for a squirrel’s nest. I tugged my jacket tighter and headed toward the tree. Between the failing light and the thicket, it was difficult to see clearly.

The tree was huge. In its shadow, a mossy area had been meticulously cleared of everything save a few sticks and dead leaves. Here a number of small, flattish objects had been set in a circle about eight feet across.

I crouched and turned on my flashlight.

At first I thought they were rocks, maybe as big as my hand. But they weren’t rocks.

They were shells. Not seashells—turtle shells.

I picked one up and grimaced.

It was a baby snapping turtle. I used to find them as a kid in Kamensic; they’d fall into swimming pools and you’d have to retrieve them with a skimmer. The most vicious little things I’d ever seen—after you rescued them, they’d run at you hissing, tiny jaws wide.

It had been a while since this one had attacked anyone. I tipped it back and forth. It seemed empty. But I caught a whiff of something, a musky reek like rotting fish and skunk.

I set the shell back down and stared at the others: a dozen baby turtle shells in a circle. In the center of the circle, four small indentations formed a square.

That circle had a definite ritual appearance. The indentations looked more like holes left by tent pegs. But the area was too small for a tent, only the size of a Porta-Potty. I straightened, saw a small white object beside one of the turtle shells.

A candle nub. I rolled it between my fingers, thinking, and put it in my pocket.

The sky was nearly black. Icy rain spattered my face as I slowly traced the flashlight’s beam across the circle. A few tiny objects shone white against the ground, like bits of broken crockery. I picked one up.

An eggshell. Not a turtle egg or something exotic, just the broken shell of an ordinary egg. I chucked it away, continued searching the ground until I saw a faint gleam, as though my light struck glass.

I got on my knees, searched until I saw a glint like gray metal. A nail head, I thought; but when I tried to pick it up, there was nothing there.

What the hell?

I pointed the flashlight at the ground. The reflected light was gone.

But when I looked at my finger, I saw a grayish smudge. Not dirt, more like the residue left when you kill a silverfish, greasy and dark. I sniffed my finger: no smell. I wiped my hand on my jeans, stood, and trained the flashlight on the tree.

The jumble of sticks was about ten feet above me, caught in the crotch of two large branches that splayed into smaller limbs, their stiff needles shaking in the wind. The tree held other things as well. A torn bag, hanks of dead grass.

I walked toward it. When I stepped outside the circle of turtle shells, something cracked beneath my boot. I bent to pick it up.

An antler, mottled white, thin and slightly curved, with tiny ridges along one edge where it had been gnawed by an animal. I ran my finger along it, felt hardened shreds of tissue like splinters of wood, then held it to the flashlight.

My mouth went dry. I’d spent enough hours thirty years ago, photographing myself with a lifesize model of a human skeleton to know this wasn’t an antler.

It was a human rib.

I turned it to clearly see the crosshatch of teethmarks at one end, panicked and flung it into the darkness. I spat on my fingers and rubbed them frantically on my jeans. Then, clutching the boat hook, I walked the last few steps to the pine tree and slowly raised my flashlight until, at last, I saw what was there.

A body. What remained of it, anyway, caught in the crook of the branches like a burst trash bag. A T-shirt and ragged jeans still clung to it, the shirt dangling so I could see the faded Nike wing emblazoned on the chest. What I had taken for sticks was a tangled mass of bones, blotched with dried shreds of sinew. Part of the ribcage protruded through the T-shirt. What I had taken for dead grass was black hair, matted with leaves and hanging from something that resembled a deflated soccer ball.

I backed away, my boots sliding on slick rock and moss.

I’d just seen Martin Graves.

25

I stumbled back to the road. I’d seen bodies before—I’d sought them out, back in the day—but nothing like this.

No animal could have dragged that body into the crotch of a tree. Denny Ahearn had—but why?

The wind whipped up from the sea, carrying gusts of rain. I took a few deep breaths then swallowed, tasting salt and blood. I spat, leaned on the boat hook and willed the throbbing in my head to stop. A few hundred yards below me, buildings yawned black in the gathering dusk—all save that one house with its malign yellow windows. I thought of what I’d just seen in the tree, and of the other tangled mass by the first quarry’s edge.

Yellow light pulsed. Someone whispered my name.

Cass, Cass.

It never ends. It’s always 4 am. beneath a broken streetlamp. And afterward every step, every drink, every person whispers the same thing: You didn’t fight.

Until now.

I swallowed some whiskey and gulped another Adderall, hefted the boat hook, and started toward the house.

Denny’s compound consisted of several outbuildings scattered between stunted trees. A few buildings had been repaired with plywood or driftwood. Others were little more than cellar holes patched with drywall and plastic sheeting, roofed with sheets of blue Styrofoam.

One building, an old barn, had been more carefully renovated. Its doors were open. I shone the flashlight inside and saw a small tractor and stacks of plastic storage containers, a chainsaw.

I moved on. The ground was slippery. There was rubble everywhere. Granite obelisks and broken columns, an arm as tall as a man. Cemetery figures of angels and grieving women. On each the same symbol had been painted: two concentric circles with a dot in the center.

I realized then what I had seen on the standing stone by Denny’s abandoned bus.

Not a bullseye: an eye. And every single one held a blotched green star.

Sleet rattled against the outbuildings. I crouched alongside a low shed with a wire run. A gleam showed through windows covered with blue tarps, and I could hear the low murmur of birds roosting inside. A henhouse.

The main house was about fifty feet away. At the back stretched a small, windowless addition, its shingles raw and unstained. I recalled what Toby had said about building a darkroom. There were solar panels on the roof, and a jerry-rigged water system—plastic tubing, oil drums, a large metal holding tank. I headed toward the rear of the house.

As I drew close I could hear music. Woodsmoke wafted through the icy rain. I approached one darkened window and then the next, and tried to peer inside.

It was hopeless. Sheets of plastic opaque with grime had been nailed across each window. Everything stank of urine and that now-familiar reek of musk and fish. At the back of the house I found a liquid propane tank and a woodshed. I continued to the other side.

Windows boarded up with plywood; flapping bits of plastic. Something crunched beneath my boots—a pile of eggshells. I took a few more steps and halted by a big wooden box, about five feet tall, no lid. I shone the flashlight inside and shaded my eyes, dazzled. It was filled with splintered plate glass.

I killed the flashlight and headed for the front of the house. I clutched the boat hook as tightly as I could, and edged toward the steps.

A figure stood in a pool of light by the open door.

“Hello,” he whispered.

He was a good six inches taller than me, broad shouldered and muscular, his face gaunt, clean shaven. He wore a brown tweed jacket with frayed sleeves, wool pants tucked into gumboots, a white cotton shirt pocked with tiny holes. His white hair hung in two long, tight braids to his chest. Around his neck was a heavy silver disk inlaid with turquoise and threaded on a leather thong.

He said, “Are you looking for someone?”

He had the face of an aging WASP ecstatic, with high cheekbones and deepset eyes, wide mouth, sharp nose. I felt sucker punched, not just by his beauty but by the sudden dreamlike sense that I knew him, that this had happened already and something—drugs, drink, my own slow spin into bad craziness—had kept me from seeing the obvious.

Then he lifted his head, and I knew.

He had eyes the color of dark topaz. In the left one, just below the iris, was a spray of green pigment like a tiny star.

Stephen Haselton wasn’t Gryffin’s father. Denny Ahearn was.

No one had bothered to tell me. And of course I had never asked.

“I—yeah,” I stammered. “I’m, uh—are you Denny? I’m a friend of Toby Barrett’s.”

“Toby.” He repeated the name in a whisper; a cultivated voice, less Maine than Boston Brahmin. His big hands shook in a slight palsy as he looked past me into the rain. “Is Toby here?”

“He’s—he’s on his way. He had to do something at Lucien’s house.” I remembered Aphrodite’s death, and nausea gave way to a rush of adrenaline. “We—I—have a message for you.”

“Come in out of the rain.” He held up a hand. “But you must leave your staff outside.”

He pointed at the boat hook. I hesitated, then leaned it beside the door.

“You’re a friend of Toby’s?”

I nodded. He bent over a stack of firewood beside the door, picked up three enormous logs as though they were made of Styrofoam.

“I thought he closed up the house a few weeks ago,” he said and straightened. “I wasn’t expecting him.” He stared at me, licked his lips, then whispered, “And you are…?”

“Cass.” My voice broke. “Cassandra Neary.”

“Cassandra Neary?”

His mouth parted in a smile. My skin prickled. There was a dark blue line along his upper and lower gums, as though he’d outlined them in indigo Magic Marker.

“Please, please—come in,” he whispered. He stood aside so I could pass.

Everywhere were mirrors. Big mirrors, small mirrors, beveled mirrors in gilded frames, tiny compacts and those big convex eyes you see at the end of driveways. They covered the walls and hung from every corner. Mirrors, and hundreds of snapping turtle shells. Music played on a turntable, Pink Floyd, “Set Your Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” A hurricane lamp was the only illumination.

“This is where I live.” Denny dropped the logs beside a woodstove, then gestured at the ceiling. “Do you see?”

The ceiling was covered with CDs, silver side down so that I stared at my own reflected face in hundreds of flickering eyes.

“From AOL,” he explained. “I go to the post office in Burnt Harbor a few times a year. They always have lots of them. Do you know what a dream catcher is? Those are light catchers.”

He stared at me, mouth split in that awful livid smile. He tilted his head to gaze at the ceiling, and his face reflected beside mine in those myriad eyes.

“I see you,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “I see you too.”

I crossed the room. On one wall hung a turtle shell the size and shape of a shield, painted with two almond-shaped eyes. A carefully drawn green star gleamed in one of them.

“They’re sacred,” said Denny. He picked up a small snapping turtle shell. His palsied hands trembled as he touched it to his forehead, reverently. “All turtles, but especially these.”

I noticed that the turquoise in the silver disk he wore was carved in the shape of a turtle. I said, “They—they must mean something.”

He nodded. “The turtle is the bridge between worlds, earth and sky. They carry the dead on their backs. It’s my totem animal.”

“You chose it?”

“No. It chose me.”

“Where do you find them?”

He replaced the little shell on a table covered with others just like it. All faced the same way, to where a 8x10 was propped against a piece of driftwood, a faded black-and-white photo of a beautiful young man, long haired, smiling. His arms were around a fresh-faced girl in a much-patched denim shirt covered with embroidery, her dark hair falling into her eyes. She gazed at him with such unabashed joy that I had to turn away.

“They live in the quarries here,” whispered Denny. “Lakes and quarries and swamps. They eat the dead, did you know that? So that they can be reborn.”

I glanced around. I didn’t know what would be worse—to see some sign that Kenzie had been here, or not.

There was a sofa and armchair, a few tables, an old turntable and rows of LPs. A wooden drying rack hung above the woodstove. Tucked into a corner was a propane-fueled refrigerator, a slate sink with an old-fashioned hand pump. A stale smell hung over everything, sweat and marijuana mingled with woodsmoke and the underlying stink of fish and musk.

There were lots of books. Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castaneda, Terence McKenna. The Whole Earth Catalog, the Anarchist’s Cookbook. Photography books. A copy of Deceptio Visus. I opened it and saw Aphrodite’s elegantly penned inscription inside.

For Denny, who longs to see the Mysteries

With love from One who knows Them

There were other photography books, and numerous tomes on folklore and anthropology—including, of course, The Sacred and The Profane. I picked it up.

“You know that book,” said Denny. It wasn’t a question.

He touched the volume with a trembling hand. His fingertips were dark pink, as though they’d been dyed.

“To emerge from the belly of a monster is to be reborn,” he whispered. “The beloved passes from one realm to the next and is devoured to be reborn. When I found her they had been at her already for a week. But there is no death. You understand that. I always knew that you understood.”

He bared his teeth again in that blue-veined smile. “I told him to send you. Because you’re the girl who shoots dead things. So I knew you would come.”

He lifted a shaking hand and pointed to another book. As though sleepwalking, I knelt and drew it from the shelf.

DEAD GIRLS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CASSANDRA NEARY

The pages were soiled and worn from being pored over. I turned them slowly, while Denny stood above me and watched.

“Hannah gave me that,” he whispered. “As a present. She thought it was better than Aphrodite’s book.”

I stared at all those portraits of my twenty-year-old self, all those speed-fueled pictures of my friends. On every page, in every one, he’d effaced the eyes with White-Out then drawn another pair with a tiny green star in each.

I turned to the last page. There, beneath the Runway colophon and a small black-and-white photo of me in torn jeans and T-shirt, were three carefully formed letters in black ballpoint ink.

I C U

I fought to catch my breath. What I felt was so beyond damage it was like a new color, something so dark and terrible it left no room for sight or sound or taste.

I put the book back on the shelf and stood. Denny stared at me. His eyes shone, childlike.

“I’m a photographer too,” he said.

“I know. Toby—he told me. I saw—he showed me a couple of your pictures. Ray Provenzano too. And I saw the ones at Lucien’s place. They’re—they’re beautiful.”

“We have the eye.” He looked at the ceiling, his face everywhere, and laughed. “When I saw your pictures, that was when I knew. Aphrodite began the process, but she stopped. You and me, we carry the dead on our backs. We write on the dead. Thanatography—we invented that.”

“I don’t think I invented it,” I said. “Matthew Brady, maybe. Or, uh, Joel-Peter Witkin.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Just us, Cassandra. You and me.”

I looked around, fighting panic. Other than the single picture enshrined on that table, there were no photos anywhere.

“That girl.” I pointed at the photograph. “Who was she?”

He said nothing; just stared at me.

“Your pictures,” I said. “Don’t you have any of your other pictures?”

“Of course.” He turned and shuffled toward a door. “It’s why you’re here.”

He held the door for me, switched on a fluorescent bulb to reveal a tiny windowless room with no furniture, only a small round prayer rug on the floor. Around its circumference was a circle formed of turtle shells.

“Be careful.” Denny picked up a turtle shell, pressed it to his forehead then replaced it on the floor. He straightened. “These are what you came to see.”

Photographs covered the walls, all in handmade frames: color prints on handmade emulsion paper, worked with pen and needle and ink. They had the same eerie, highly saturated glow as Aphrodite’s archipelago sequence.

But seeing these, I knew why Aphrodite had stopped working, and maybe why she’d started drinking.

Because they weren’t just better than her photos. They were better than almost anything I’d ever seen. Every comparable artist I could think of, all those so-called transgressive photographers—the ones who pretend to push the envelope, then before you know it they’re signing a deal with Starbucks and doing the Christmas windows at Barney’s—this guy wiped the floor with them. Those photographers would take you to the edge of something.

Denny went the rest of the way, to a place you didn’t want to go. And once he got there, he jumped.

Aphrodite had pulled back from there, and from him. Wisely, I thought, now that I could see what he’d been doing all these years.

But it was too late for me. I was already falling.

I wanted to touch them, I could touch them. I could smell them too—the entire room reeked of musk and rotting fish. I gagged and covered my nose with my sleeve.

Denny seemed to have forgotten I was there. He stood in front of one picture and stared at it. I forced myself to breathe through my mouth then shoved my hands in my pockets so he wouldn’t notice how they shook.

Based on what I’d glimpsed in the tree outside, I now had a pretty solid idea as to what they were pictures of. But I might have a hard time convincing anyone else, unless they’d seen what I’d seen by the quarry. These images were so murky and strange, so tied into Denny’s own, incomprehensible mythology, that they defied any simple description. They didn’t shout out Dead Body! They shouted Beautiful, and Weird.

Beside the door hung a black-and-white photo that seemed older than the rest, the only picture that wasn’t in color. It showed the arching limbs of a leafless tree, its bark striated black and white against a gray sky. A large animal crouched in the crux of two limbs ten feet above the ground. I immediately thought of the fisher.

But when I peered at it more closely, I saw that it wasn’t crouching. It was dead.

And it wasn’t a fisher. It was a dog, a black Labrador retriever. Its front legs dangled so that I could see where the fur had been eaten away. Where its eyes had been were two coronas of bone, and a tendril that might have been an insect or a bit of tissue. The flesh had drawn away from its muzzle, giving it a snarling rictus. Its loose pelt appeared to be sliding from its body.

“That’s my dog, Moody.” I jumped as Denny breathed in my ear. “He was a good old dog.”

I stared at the words the bottom of the print: S.P.O.T 1997 and a title.

“‘Sky Burial,’” I read aloud.

“That’s what they do in Tibet,” said Denny. His eyes were huge and nearly colorless in the fluorescent light. “Excarnation. A bridge between the worlds, we carry the dead to be reborn.” He smiled, flashing blue-lined gums. “The first step.”

“Right,” I said. “Thank you for letting me see these.”

I edged toward the door, and something broke beneath my boot.

I’d stepped on one of the turtle shells. Denny looked at it then ran his tongue along his lip.

“Wait for me in the other room,” he said.

I did. The turntable had gone silent. I thought of Toby, snoring on Lucien’s chaise, and of Kenzie, God knows where. I fumbled for my Jack Daniel’s, heard myself saying Fuck fuck fuck beneath my breath.

Denny stepped back into the room. “What?”

“Nothing.” I ran a hand through my hair, stalling. “Just, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

“The—the turtle. Your turtle shell. It seemed, they all seemed … special. The dog too.” I hesitated. “And her. The dead girl. Hannah.”

“Nothing really dies. You understand that. Cassandra. Cass.” My name came out as a soft hiss. “Your pictures—you understood. You know what happens. You’ve seen it.”

I remembered being in a car in the woods, headlights shining through trees then fading into darkness; something I saw but could never look at.

“No,” I said.

He flexed his hands, tugged the cuff of his shirt as though it irritated him. Above his wrist were three raw red lines where he’d been scratched. He glanced up and saw me staring.

“You said you had news.” He went to the woodstove, picked up a log, and shoved it inside. “What is it?”

“Aphrodite. She’s—she’s dead. Last night, there was an accident. She, it looks like she fell.”

He stood, silent, as though he hadn’t heard. Finally he whispered, “Aphrodite. She told you to come see me?”

“No—no, she’s dead. Because—”

“Because what?” His head tilted and his eyes went black. “What happened?”

“I came here to talk to her,” I stammered. “To interview her. That’s how I saw your pictures. I—”

“I brought you here.” His voice rose hoarsely, and he lifted his hand as though to strike. Abruptly he covered his eyes. “Oh, Aphrodite, oh, oh…..”

His voice dropped so I could barely hear him. “Does the boy know?”

“Yes.”

Denny’s eyes opened.

“It was you,” he whispered.

Everything contracted to a pinprick of pure black. The room was gone, he was gone. There was nothing but the memory of light, and myself plunging into a void. My hand shot out to keep from falling. Something grabbed it, cold and horribly strong. Within a guttering streetlamp I saw an eye, the eye, turning upon itself until it swallowed everything.

“No.” I blinked and pulled away. The eye belonged to Denny, not me, green flecked, staring. “No. It was an accident. She fell. That was all.”

Denny gazed at me. At last he said, “You watched.”

“Yes,” I said. “I watched.”

He picked up a poker and looked at it contemplatively. Then he walked to the rows of records, withdrew an LP and placed it on the turntable. After a moment, vinyl hiss and pop gave way to a sound like a heartbeat. Harry Nilsson, “Jump into the Fire.”

“Such a beautiful song,” he whispered.

He stood between me and the door and ran his hand along the poker. My voice broke as I asked, “Do you—could I use your bathroom?”

“It’s right in there.” He gestured toward the back of the room. “It’s a composting toilet.”

He walked to the front door and stared outside.

The composting toilet reeked of fresh sawdust, shit, spoiled meat, and musk. There was no lock inside the bathroom, no window, no sink. Just a plastic bucket on the floor and a metal shower stall with a heavy canvas curtain.

But there was a second door with shiny new brass hardware. The addition: the new darkroom that Toby had built. I slipped inside and closed the door behind me.

It was pitch black and smelled of sulfur and almonds. I trailed my hand along the wall until I found a switch that bathed the room in red safelight.

Shelves held bottles of pigment, processing chemicals, sheaves of watercolor stock; a five-pound bag of granulated sugar. A table with three sinks was recessed into the wall alongside a plastic water barrel and footpump, a metal garbage can with a lid.

A second table looked as though it had been set for a macabre dinner. Feathers and dead leaves surrounded a single large sheet of paper. Fanned around it were locks of hair arranged by color—black, gray, pale gold—and what appeared to be slivers of dried fungus.

And something else. An oversized scrapbook, its cover made of much-patched and heavily embroidered denim, its title picked out in ransom-note lettering.

EYE

AM

WITHIN

DENNIS AHEARN, S.P.O.T.

Photos spiraled around the title, fragments of snapshots, SX-70 Polaroids, pictures ripped from magazines and newspapers. Every one was an eye.

I touched the raised medallion that surmounted Denny’s name. It was a snapping turtle carapace no bigger than a quarter. Where its head should have been was a minute braid of human hair.

The book was so heavy, I needed both hands to open it. The pages were crowded with Denny’s handwriting and Denny’s photographs, retouched with paint and decorated with dried leaves and flowers, dead insects, feathers, scraps of fur, and human hair, a toenail. There were pictures of a girl with long brown hair, mugging for the camera with a spotted turtle shell in each hand: covering her breasts with the shells, covering her face, laughing. I turned to a Polaroid of Denny and Hannah Meadows, naked and lying side by side, a caption inked beneath in painstaking blue letters.

Sacred and Profane Order of the Turtle

I thought of the awful irony, to play at ritual then have your rites become horribly real, when you discovered your lover’s decomposing body attended by your totems.

When I found her they had been at her already for a week.

I thought of lying facedown on the backseat of a car in the dark; of kneeling in an empty street beneath a broken lamp as another car sped away; of erasing a voice from an answering machine a few hours before the sky filled with ash.

You and me, we carry the dead on our backs.

I stared at the pictures before me, photographs of the dead and collages made of hair and human skin, a fringe of pale eyelashes like a tiny feathered wing, fingerbones and teeth strung on a length of silver cord.

I shivered. Not because I was afraid.

Because it was beautiful. And because I recognized it.

It was like neurons firing inside my own skull, like something I’d dreamed in childhood. I have no idea how long I stood there, turning those pages, but for those moments nothing else mattered. There was only me and a book of photos illustrating rites only I would ever understand, heroes and heroines only I knew. A girl in a white nurse’s uniform, a brave black dog, a schoolbus like a tortoiseshell palace. Lovers dressed in carapaces of bone and dried flesh and hummingbird pelts. A trapdoor had opened in the world and I’d fallen through, onto a bridge built of bone and flayed skin and eyes, the wings of dragonflies and a snapping turtle’s shell. I couldn’t look away.

I turned the final page. A piece of crumpled paper dropped to the floor.

have you seen martin graves?

I closed the book. Music still swirled from the living room. I went to the shelves above the sink, grabbed a packet covered with brown paper and ripped away one corner.

Sheets of plate glass.

I covered my nose then pried open the metal garbage can. It was filled with eggshells and a putrid syrup of rotting yolks. I shoved the lid back in place.

Albumen: egg white. It’s what the earliest photographers used to create a glass negative. It was low-tech, perfect for someone living off the grid. Perfect for someone with time on his hands. You take egg whites and sugar—that’s what the sugar was for—water and potassium iodide, beat them to a froth and decant them. You pour this over a glass plate, then fix it by suspending it above a heat source. A woodstove would be ideal. Afterward you soak each plate in a bath of silver nitrate and gallic acid, rinse off the excess silver, repeat the entire process and let them dry.

I’d read about this stuff, but I’d never known anyone who actually did it. I searched until I found the last part of Denny’s fantasy factory—an unwieldy contraption of black canvas and long wooden poles.

A dark tent. Beside it stood a homemade box camera.

He was making daguerreotypes. The dark tent’s legs—that’s what caused the indentations I’d seen in the ground by the corpse tree. He’d slide the glass negative into the box camera, go outside and set up the tent with its black curtains to keep the light out. He’d shoot.

It would take a long exposure time, a quarter-hour if overcast. That’s why the people in old daguerreotype portraits always have such fixed expressions—they couldn’t move, or the negative would register a blur.

This wasn’t a problem with Denny’s subjects.

And after the neg was exposed…

I looked quickly among the shelves until I found a very old glass prescription bottle.

BOLTON-LIBBY DRUG CO.

BURNT HARBOR, MAINE

I tilted the bottle toward the safelight to read the last word.

MERCURY

Daguerreotypists developed their negs inside the dark tent, holding the glass plate above a bowl of mercury and a spirit lamp. As heated mercury vapor whirled around the plate, the image appeared.

Denny must have done this hundreds of times, for years and years. It’s why his hands shook, and why his gums had turned blue; it explained why everyone said he was such a sweetheart.

He had been, once upon a time. Then Hannah Meadows died, gruesomely, and to memorialize her he revived a lost art, without bothering to learn about its dangers. Otherwise he’d have known that what drove 19th century hatters mad, with brain damage and psychosis, had driven daguerreotypists mad too.

Denny had mercury poisoning.

I put the mercury down and looked until I discovered another century-old bottle, the reason why Denny’s darkroom smelled of bitter almond.

CYANIDE OF POTASSIUM

Daguerreotypists used it to clean glass negs, so they could be reused. I remembered one of my NYU instructors reading a 1856 text on the subject.

I feel a little unwilling to recommend this mode, as it involves the use of the deadly poison cyanide of potassium; but as every man who photographs must necessarily use what we call dangerous chemicals, I can only caution the beginner.

I replaced the bottle, turned off the safelight, and stepped back into the bathroom.

And froze.

The black canvas shower curtain was moving—the slightest ripple, as though from a faint breeze.

But there was no wind, only the wail of music in the next room. I drew the flashlight from my pocket and stepped toward the shower stall; grabbed the curtain and yanked it back.

She lay on her side in five inches of black water, her head above the scummed surface, hair plastered against white skin, her hooded sweatshirt and jeans soaked with filth. Dried blood webbed her cheeks. Her wrists were bound with duct tape, her knees drawn to her chest. There was duct tape across her mouth; duct tape across her eyes, where he had drawn circles in magic marker. A scrawled star was in one of them.

She didn’t move. The water did.

A black shape emerged from the muck and began to crawl across her face, claws scratching her cheeks, its shell black with slime.

The girl moaned. She was alive.

I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her up. The baby snapper fell as dark forms suddenly bobbed everywhere, scrabbling at her head and arms.

“Kenzie—it’s me. Cass,” I whispered. “From the motel. Hold still, for Christ’s sake—”

She struggled to kick me with her bound legs. Turtles slopped over the stall’s lip and scrambled across the floor. I dragged Kenzie from the stall, pulled a corner of the tape covering eyes.

“You have to shut up!” I breathed. “Kenzie, please—”

The wet tape slid off easily. Beneath, her eyes were blood-red slits in oozing skin. I thought she’d been blinded, but then her eyes widened. She began to shake her head frantically.

“Listen!” I hissed. “Don’t scream. I’ll take it off your mouth, but you can’t fucking scream—”

She nodded, and I peeled the tape from her mouth. She leaned over and vomited, bile and bitter almond. On the other side of the door, Denny’s voice rose with the music, singing wordlessly.

A baby turtle cracked beneath my boot as I grabbed Kenzie and dragged her into the darkroom. I shut the door and turned on the safelight. Kenzie leaned against the sink, gasping. I jammed the dark tent’s legs beneath the doorknob, grabbed the bag of sugar, and poured some into my palm.

“Eat this!” Kenzie gagged as I shoved my hand into her face. “Eat it!”

She retched but kept it down. Glucose is an antidote to cyanide—Rasputin survived poisoning because of sweet pastries and Madeira. I had no idea if it would help, but Denny obviously hadn’t given her enough cyanide to kill her; not yet, anyway.

She wiped sugar onto her filthy shirt, and I reached for her hand. Her fingers were scraped raw, her knuckles black with bruises.

“You fought,” I said. “Good girl.”

“There’s a gun.” She began to sob. “He—”

I clamped my hand over her mouth. “Shhh.”

The music had stopped.

“Get under there,” I whispered. “Cover your eyes.”

She scrambled beneath the table. I grabbed the largest bottle on the shelf and turned off the safelight.

There was a soft knock on the bathroom door. “Cassandra?”

In the next room the door opened.

“Oh no, oh no…”

His cries were like a bird crooning. I heard something skitter across the bathroom floor. Denny swore under his breath and gave a guttural shout. The darkroom door shook as an object was flung against it. I heard stomping as he crushed one shell after another beneath his feet.

Then silence.

I could see nothing. From beneath the table came Kenzie’s ragged breathing. I braced myself against the sink and pried the cork from the bottle.

There was a rustle of cloth, the scrape of wood as Denny pushed against the darkroom door. The dark tent’s legs snapped. The reek of dead fish and musk filled the room. Kenzie whimpered.

He was inside.

I grasped the bottle in one hand, with the other found the flashlight in my pocket. Phantom shapes swam in front of me in the darkness. I began to shake, imagining each of these was Denny. The floor creaked a few feet from where I stood.

“Cass,” he whispered. “Cass, Cass…”

Nausea overwhelmed me, a darkened street.

“Cass, Cass.”

I couldn’t move. The sound of my own name bound me, formless horror and Aphrodite’s voice in my head.

Both of you—nothing.

Something brushed my foot.

No, I thought. Not this time.

I turned on the flashlight. Denny’s dazzled face hung before me, his mouth a gaping hole as I shouted, “Kenzie! Run!”

I flung the mercury at his eyes.

With a scream he fell. Kenzie bolted for the door with me behind her.

“Run!” I yelled as we stumbled into the living room. “Run and don’t stop! Here—”

I thrust the flashlight at her. She took it and stared at me blankly until I pushed her roughly toward the front door.

“Get the fuck out of here!”

She fled outside. Behind me Denny’s screams rose to a howl as he staggered from the bathroom.

“Come—BACK!”

Kenzie was right. He had a gun.

Mirrors exploded as a shot went wild, then another. Denny clutched his eyes with one hand then aimed the gun at me. I turned and ran out onto the front steps, icy rain slashing at my cheeks.

Kenzie was gone. I grabbed the boat hook, whirled to see Denny’s face, gray splotched with mercury. The gun’s barrel thrust against my temple.

“You can’t go.” His breath was cold and stank of rotting fish. “I see you, Cass. I know.”

He twisted his hand. I cried out as metal bored through the skin beside my eye.

“Tell me what you saw,” he whispered. “You saw them. I know you saw them.”

I didn’t move.

“I know what you saw.” He licked his lips. “Tell me. Tell me.”

I swallowed. My hand tightened imperceptibly around the boat hook.

“All of them.” My voice came in a hoarse whisper. “I saw all of them.”

“Where?”

“In the quarry.”

“Where else?” He dragged the gun’s barrel across my cheekbone and I moaned, feeling my skin tear.

“The photos,” I gasped. “All your photos—I saw them too.”

“And the mirrors?” His voice was so soft I could barely hear him. “What did you see there?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You saw me.” I heard him breathing faster. “You saw me, Cassandra. And you saw—”

I struck his shoulder glancingly with the boat hook then staggered backward. Blood streamed into my eye as I caught my balance, grasped the boat hook with both hands, and swung it like a club.

The bronze end struck his hand. There was a deafening retort. Fire lanced my upper arm, and I screamed.

Denny stood at the edge of the granite step, his long white braids spattered with blood.

“I see you,” he whispered and laughed.

I screamed again, beyond rage and pain, beyond everything.

“You fuck.” I hefted the boat hook and with all my strength smashed it into his face.

I heard a sound like a jack o’ lantern hitting pavement and swung again. Denny roared and dropped to his knees. The gun spun into darkness. I kicked him, felt my boot’s steel tip dig into his chest as though it were loam. He tried to roll away, and I kicked him again and again then raised the boat hook and rammed it against his skull. He tried to raise his hands as I struck him repeatedly, half blinded with weeping and my own blood.

Finally I stopped. I leaned on the boat hook, panting, and looked down.

He lay on his side, staring at me. A black stain crept across his forehead like a spider. One eye bulged like a crimson egg, a white petal of skin folded beneath it. As I stared, his other eye opened. His mouth parted in a wash of red and indigo as he gazed up at me. He smiled.

“I see you.”

I backed away as he began to get to his feet. Another voice echoed faintly through the rush of rain and wind.

“Cass!”

I clutched the boat hook and fled down the steps and into the darkness, past the granite sentinels with their green-flecked eyes, until I reached the road.

26

Kenzie waited near the quarry, her white face glowing in the flashlight.

“I told you to keep going!” I grabbed her roughly, spat a mouthful of blood, then snatched the flashlight from her hand. “Come on.”

She stared at me wide-eyed. “Oh my God, your face. Are you okay?”

“I’m fucking great.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

She began to sob. I whacked her with the butt-end of the boat hook.

“You want to go back and finish for me? Come on, there’s someone at Ryel’s house; we have a boat, if—”

“If what?” she wailed.

“If you keep your goddam mouth shut.”

I dragged her after me, still sobbing. For several minutes we stumbled along the road in almost total darkness, following the flashlight’s wan beam. Then I stopped. Kenzie stared at me.

“What is it?”

I killed the light and clapped my hand over her mouth. Beneath the rattle of wind in the trees and the crash of waves I heard another, fainter sound on the road behind us.

“It’s him,” I breathed.

Kenzie moaned. I found her hand, icy cold, and pulled her to the side of the road. I turned on the flashlight, just long enough to pick out a break in the trees, then moved as quickly as I could, feeling my way with the boat hook with Kenzie right behind me.

We struggled through a tangled hell of brush and whiplike trees, icy stones and frozen earth. My face burned where sleet slashed it; my right eye was swollen shut. Not that I could have seen much of anything. I listened for more sounds behind us but heard nothing above the rising wind.

I had no idea where we were but figured we couldn’t be too far from the road, with the smaller quarries between us and Denny’s compound. After a few minutes the trees thinned and I halted, panting. Kenzie drew up beside me as I leaned on the boat hook and fought to catch my breath. I strained to see something, anything, that might signal safety, finally gave up.

“Can you see?” I whispered hoarsely.

“I think there’s a light,” Kenzie said.

She pointed, and I could just make out a blurred point that might have been light, or maybe just a break in the trees. But I thought it was the right direction for Lucien’s house.

“All right. Here—”

I fumbled for her hand in the darkness, thrust the flashlight into it. “You take this. Stay right in front of me and don’t move too fast. Keep the light close to the ground and listen for me, I’ll tell you to put it out if something happens. Go on, I’m right behind you.”

She nodded then went on ahead, the flashlight’s beam so feeble that more than once I lost it among the wind-thrashed trees and underbrush. I followed her as best I could, lurching clumsily, my boots sliding across stones and fallen tree limbs as sleet lashed at my face. My feet were so numb it was difficult to move. I jammed the boat hook against the ground with every step, feeling my way in the dark.

There were fewer trees here but more rocks. Several times I tripped and nearly fell, catching myself with the boat hook at the last moment. The wind shifted again; the hiss of sleet against dead leaves fell silent. I breathed on my fingers, trying to warm them; then held my hand out, palm up, and felt a touch like another, colder breath. Snow.

Through the trees I saw a pale glimmer, like the moon but moving, slowly, resolutely: Kenzie.

Good girl, I thought.

I kept going, head down, when a thin wail drifted back to me. I looked back but saw nothing and staggered on toward the sound.

I found her standing at the edge of a large clearing, the flashlight turned so it blinded me.

“Put it down!”

She ignored me, just moaned and pointed the light into the clearing. I came up alongside her, grabbed the light and swept it across the ground. Snow sifted down, flakes fine as dust, but enough to leave a thin white tracery across several dark, humped forms. I handed the boat hook to Kenzie and walked toward them slowly then stopped.

Three huge turtle shells had been arranged in a rough circle. Each was so large that my hands, extended, would not have encompassed it. Instead of legs and tails, grayish shapes like driftwood protruded from the shells. Large white fragments were scattered where the heads should have been. I thought of tiny shells being crushed beneath Denny’s feet then bent and picked up a cusp of jawbone as long as my finger. Between two teeth, long white strands of hair were snagged, like fishing line.

I dropped it and stumbled to where Kenzie waited.

“What—” she began.

“Just go,” I said and pushed her. “Faster.”

We stumbled on across the island. Snow changed to rain again; the wind rose and fell. My heart felt like a fist pounding at my chest. Kenzie whimpered; I pulled her to me and held her, murmured until her voice stilled and I drew away, and we both moved on. We saw no further sign of Denny Ahearn, heard nothing but wind and then, gradually, a noise that I recognized as waves beating against rock.

“There…”

I pointed at a phantom light that seemed to waver ahead of us. I coughed, spitting blood, touched my swollen eye and winced. The light remained, and I began to run.

Ahead of us, Lucien’s house loomed into view. A single light shone from the kitchen.

“Toby’s there,” I said, but Kenzie had already raced ahead of me.

I staggered inside after her, locked the door, and turned to see Toby standing unsteadily in the living room.

“Cass?” His voice was thick. He looked down, saw the glass of Moxie on the floor, and reached for it.

“No.” I kicked the glass away. “We have to get out of here.”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him into the kitchen.

“Is that Kenzie?” He stared at her in disbelief, then at me. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Denny Ahearn happened.” I flinched as he reached to touch the corner of my eye. “Your harmless hippie friend.”

“Let’s go, let’s go.” Kenzie looked at us wild-eyed. “Why are you waiting?”

Toby blinked, uncomprehending. “Kenzie? Were you—was she here? In this house?”

“Toby. We have to go. Now.”

He shook my hand from him. “Cass. You did this, didn’t you?” He didn’t sound angry, just confused and stoned. “You … drugged me, right? Like a roofy?”

“Yes! I’m sorry! I’m a shit! We still have to leave!”

He glanced back at Kenzie. “Jesus Christ.”

“It was bad, okay?” I said. “I’ll tell you when we’re on the boat. Right now we have to get out of here.” I pounded the door in frustration. “Can you sail that fucking boat or not?”

“I guess.” He ran a hand across his face. “I don’t feel too good, but…”

He looked at me, holding the boat hook like a lance, then at Kenzie’s bruised face. “But I guess I’ll take my chances.”

He put a hand on Kenzie’s shoulder and rested it there for a moment. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”

They went outside. I grabbed my camera, ransacked kitchen drawers till I found some dish towels. I used one to stanch my bleeding arm; with the other made a bandage for my eye. I bound it in place as best I could then hurried after them.

A stiff wind sent curtains of freezing mist up from the water’s edge. Toby and Kenzie had already dragged the dinghy into the shallows. I clambered in beside them, using the boat hook to push off as Toby rowed us out to Northern Sky.

“We’ll have to motor,” he yelled above the wind. “It’ll be rough. Kenzie, you better stay below.”

We boarded the sailboat. Toby tied off the dinghy and pulled on his foul weather gear, then turned to Kenzie.

“You wait below like I said, okay?”

She shook her head fiercely. I thought of the bound figure on the floor of that filthy shower stall. Toby started to argue, and I cut him off.

“Just give her a life vest. She’ll stay out of your way.”

Kenzie shot me a grateful look. Toby frowned.

“If you say so. Here—” He tossed a life vest at each of us. “You too, Cass. I need you to help navigate.”

I started to pull it on, wincing as it snagged my wounded shoulder, then gave up. It wouldn’t fit over my camera, anyway.

Toby began coiling lines. “You going to tell me what the hell happened back there?”

I did. When I was finished, he shook his head.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, I do believe it, but…” He glanced at Kenzie huddled in the cockpit. “It’s hard.”

I snorted. “Yeah, well, I don’t know what you guys were smoking thirty years ago, but I think Denny got some of what Ted Bundy was having. Aren’t you going to call someone? Like the Coast Guard?”

“The Coast Guard rescues people,” said Toby. “Is our boat in distress? Do we need to be medivaced to a hospital?”

He glanced at my bandaged eye, then at Kenzie, and shrugged. “Yeah, but by the time they got here we’d be on shore. They’d tell me to radio the police. We’re better off just getting out of here fast as we can.”

He held up two oversized flashlights and tossed me one. He shielded his face from blowing sleet, pointed past the bow to a distant gleam like a dim emerald star.

“See that light? It’s a buoy. There’s a bunch of them between here and Burnt Harbor. Some are lighted, some aren’t. We need to follow one to the next, point to point. Use the flashlight to find them. I’ll tell you where to look, right or left.”

He switched on the running lights. A dull green glow illumined the right side of the cabin, red on the left, white at the stern. “Think you can handle it? I’ve got spreader lights up there on the mast, but they mess up my night vision. Plus, if Denny’s really out there looking for us, it’ll be like a billboard. You stay in the bow and I’ll yell out to you. Once we get past Paswegas it’s clear sailing to the mainland, and we should be able to see the lighthouse up to Togus Head.”

His voice was calm, but he moved quickly and nervously, ducking beneath the rigging and pausing only to light a cigarette. “Get Kenzie settled, I’ll be another minute.”

I joined Kenzie in the cockpit. She sat, staring at her knees. Beneath the orange life vest she wore the same clothes I’d found her in. She looked much older than fifteen; like someone who’d crawled out of a burning building only to find the rest of the world bombed to rubble.

I fumbled in my pocket till I found the Jack Daniel’s. There was hardly any left. I gazed at the dark hulk of Tolba Island and drank a mouthful then passed it to Kenzie.

She took a sip and coughed. “That’s nasty.”

“Damn straight.” I finished the bottle and set it down then glanced at her white face, the crosshatch of claw marks across her cheeks. “Hey. You okay?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t look at me.

“Did he—”

“No.”

Sleet rattled the dodger’s awning. I looked across black water to where Paswegas waited, lost in night and fog.

“What were you doing?” I finally asked. “That night. When you went down to the harbor.”

From below came the engine’s stuttering roar. The boat rocked and moved forward. Kenzie stared silently into the darkness.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” she said at last. She sounded defiant, but then I saw she was crying. “That was all. I just wanted to talk to someone else. From away.”

“From away. Well, that makes sense.”

“I hate it here.” She kicked out furiously, and the empty whiskey bottle went flying. “I fucking hate it.”

I smiled. “Hold that thought,” I said. “I’m going to help Toby. Here—”

I handed her my camera and the boat hook. “Keep an eye on these, okay?”

I stepped across the icy deck to the bow.

“That lighted buoy’s the first one,” Toby shouted as he hurried toward the cockpit. “After a hundred feet, start looking left—”

I stood in the bow and swept the flashlight’s beam across the water until it picked up the second buoy.

“There!” I yelled.

“Good. Next one’s about three hundred feet, still to the left—”

It was like a dream, the Northern Sky drifting through a world where all color had been burned away; a world of nothing but black water and black sky, with a shifting scrim of gray between and the occasional shaft of black where ledge emerged from the water like an island being born, the flashlight’s beam insubstantial as a white straw flung across the channel. The cold wind made it hard to hear the clanking of the buoys, but Toby kept directing me where to look, and we fell into a kind of restless dance, the flashlight sweeping through the night, the Northern Sky shifting right or left as she bore inexorably away from Tolba Island, the engine’s drone like my own steady breathing. We might have traveled for miles, for hours; I might have fallen asleep, exhausted as I was and no longer able to tell where one world ended and another began, sky and water and stone and blood.

Then Kenzie’s cry cut through the wind like a gull’s.

“Cass!”

She pointed behind us, toward Tolba Island.

“That’s his boat!” she shouted. “That’s him!”

Toby peered through the dodger’s window. I stepped to the side of the bow, squinting through the mist. I couldn’t see anything.

But I could hear it—the roar of a powerboat. Kenzie screamed.

“Get below!” commanded Toby. He pushed her toward the companionway. “There’s a radio; see if you can get it to work and put out a Mayday signal. Stay down there till I get you—”

She disappeared down the ladder, and I stumbled into the cockpit.

“Shit.” Toby stared at the silvery shape arrowing across the water. “He’s got Lucien’s Boston Whaler. Thing’s got a twelve horsepower engine, we can’t outrun him.”

The roar grew louder: the boat was a hundred yards off, heading straight at us. Denny stood in the stern by the outboard motor. I couldn’t see clearly through the sleet and fog.

But he could.

“I see you!” His voice rose to a ragged shriek. I swore and turned to Toby.

“What do we do?” I demanded. “He’s got a fucking gun—”

I remembered the flare gun below. As Toby hunched over the tiller, I darted to the companionway and climbed down. Kenzie held the two-way radio and the NOAA band. The boat hook and my camera were on the bench beside her.

“Is that radio working?”

“I don’t know.” She punched a button. I heard a blast of static. “I think so. Maybe.”

“Keep trying.” I flung open the drawer, grabbed the flare gun. As I passed Kenzie I hesitated, then grabbed my camera and climbed back up on deck. Toby stared at me from the cockpit, his face taut. He gestured angrily at the flare gun.

“That’s useless!”

“Not if I nail him.”

The distance between the boats had narrowed to about fifty feet. Denny’s arm dangled limply at his side. He had a gun but showed no sign of using it. His head looked misshapen, his features blackened and smeared across his face like tar. His jaw sagged, and I could see where the flesh had been torn away, like a peeled fruit.

He was smiling.

“I see you,” he cried thickly.

“He’s coming right at us.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Like he’s going to ram us.”

“Look out—” Toby swung the tiller, and the sailboat tacked sharply to the right. “Watch your head!”

I ducked and grabbed the rail as the Boston Whaler shot toward our stern. There was a grinding sound, and the Northern Sky lurched.

Toby’s face went dead white. “He’s going for the rudder—he’s trying to shear it off—”

The outboard’s roar became a furious whine. The Boston Whaler circled then swept toward us again, Denny crouching over the motor.

“By his feet.” Toby called to me and pointed. “There’s a plastic container, it’s usually got fuel in it. You only have one flare. See if you can hit it.”

I braced myself against the rail. It was hard for me to take aim with one eye bandaged, but I did my best. Denny straightened to stare at me. His mouth opened in a wordless shout.

“I see you too,” I said, and fired.

There was a low whoosh, and a white ball rocketed toward the Boston Whaler. Around us the world glowed as a bright plume like a meteor’s tail split the sky in two. Denny lifted his face, arms outstretched, his shirt blinding white. The flare plummeted soundlessly to his feet and continued to burn, not fiercely but steadily, while brownish smoke rose around him. I dimly heard Toby behind me, cursing. Then the Northern Sky arced smoothly away from Denny’s boat and began to churn across the reach.

I clung to the rail and stared at Denny. The flare’s light still glowed in the Boston Whaler’s stern, but he made no move to put it out or kick it away from the fuel container, only stood with arms lifted and face tilted to the night, as though welcoming something. I could see the dull glint of the gun in his hand. Then his fingers opened. The gun fell, disappearing into the water. Denny lowered his ruined face until he stared at me then stooped for something at his feet. The flare, I thought.

But then he straightened. His eyes trapped the flare’s dull glow as he shook his head, slowly, sorrowfully, and his mouth split into an anguished smile as he held something out to me, a large, flat, rectangular object that flapped in the freezing wind and billowing smoke. His book.

There was a hiss like air escaping from a valve. Denny’s legs bloomed orange and black.

“Get down!” shouted Toby. “That’s the fuel line!”

A column of flame shot into the air. Denny screamed, a terrible high-pitched sound like a child’s cry, and the engine exploded.

I stared transfixed as gold and argent pinwheels spun from the boat’s stern. Black smoke ballooned and momentarily obscured everything as I grabbed the camera around my neck and clawed off the lens cap. I braced myself against the rail, shielded the lens from sleet, and coughed as oily smoke enveloped me then dispersed, windblown, as Denny burned.

I shot him as he died, his clothes ragged wings and his hair ablaze, his hands beating at the flames as though they were swarms of fiery bees. His face blackened and collapsed; one arm twitched rhythmically as the boat began to dip below the water’s surface; and still he burned, a man like a dancing ember. I pressed the shutter release and angled myself along the rail, coughing as smoke coiled around me and my eye streamed, until a dome of black and gray erupted from the water’s surface and the Boston Whaler disappeared. Gray eddies washed toward us, the stink of diesel and melted fiberglass and charred meat.

The Northern Sky drifted, slowly, its engine a soft drone. As in a dream I replaced the lens cap on my camera, pulled it from my neck, put it in my bag, and shoved it out of the way. I stood against the rail and stared across the black swells.

A life preserver floated a few yards off, yellow nylon line, a clotted white shape that might have been part of the outboard engine: scattered wreckage that was too far off for me to see. Freezing rain beat against my face. It was a moment before I realized I was crying. I wiped at my one good eye, touched the sodden bandage on the other, and gazed back out at the water.

The life preserver had drifted out of sight, but the swells brought other things closer: sheets of oversized paper, some torn but others miraculously intact, or nearly so: Denny’s book, its pages ripped from the homemade binding. I stared in disbelief as a sheet floated past and disintegrated before my eyes, its layers detaching themselves—leaves, hair, green pigment, ochre, albumen, blood, all dissolving into a bright slick upon the surface of the sea then disappearing into flecks of foam and brown kelp. A tiny shard like an arrowhead seemed to crawl across a page floating past. A swell lifted it, and a torn photograph curled from the sheet. I had a glimpse of eyes blurring into mouth and hands, a turtle’s shell.

I gasped and leaned forward with one hand, reaching for a sheet that seemed intact. My fingers closed around one corner, the heavy paper sodden but untorn. Another swell nearly tugged the sheet from my grasp. I stretched out my other hand to grab it, winced as my hand closed on it and my legs suddenly shot out from under me. My boots slid across the icy deck as I pitched forward, and overboard.

The water slammed me like a wall. My mouth opened to scream, and I kicked out frantically as I sank. Frigid water filled my mouth and nostrils. I kicked again, frantic, pinioned by utter darkness. Freezing water crushed me; I saw nothing, felt nothing but that terrible weight and then the shock of light, air, my name.

“Cass! Cass!”

I gasped then choked as air filled my lungs, felt a dull pressure against my cheek. Something glinted then struck me again, on the shoulder this time. The boat hook. I tried to grab it but my hands were numb, then dimly saw a figure reaching from the stern. Kenzie.

“Hang on!” she shouted.

Another shape appeared behind her. “We got you, Cass, hang on there—”

Toby grabbed me by the shoulders as Kenzie dug the boat hook beneath my arm. Together they pulled me on board. I knelt, puking up sea water, as Toby draped a blanket around me.

“Come on, girl, let’s get you below. Come on,” he urged. “You’re gonna freeze to death.”

He half-carried me below deck, giving instructions to Kenzie beside us. “Try to get her warm, whatever you do keep her warm—”

Kenzie forced me onto one of the bunks and peeled off my clothes, wrapped me in more blankets, then lay beside me. Most of the grime was gone from her wan face, and she’d put on one of Toby’s heavy sweaters over her filthy sweatshirt.

“Are you okay?” she whispered.

I nodded but said nothing. The two of us lay there in silence, listening as Toby spoke calmly into the radio and then climbed back up on deck.

When he was gone, the cabin seemed to contract around us. The lamp guttered to a dull glow as I listened to the creak of wood, a noise like someone scratching at the hull. The hiss of sleet sounded like my name. After a while Kenzie and I sat up, still without speaking. We crouched side by side on the bunk, with Toby’s worn blankets wrapped around us and his voice echoing faintly from above, and stared out the porthole into the darkness until the first lights of Burnt Harbor shone through the night.

27

We were met by John Stone and Jeff Hakkala, two ambulances and a number of state troopers. A crowd had already gathered outside the Good Tern. I recognized Robert and the two guys who’d set upon me earlier; also Merrill Libby; Everett Moss, the harbormaster; and a small white TV van, headlights blazing through the fog.

“My camera,” I said.

Toby gave me a funny look.

“It’s safe,” he said. “I put it below. Out of sight,” he added.

I swore as someone started running toward us from the news van.

Toby put his arm around me and walked me toward the ambulance. When the reporter drew up beside us, Toby shook his head fiercely.

“Can’t you see this lady’s injured?”

“That ain’t no lady,” a voice yelled as the reporter fell back into the crowd.

I glanced over to see Robert standing beside Kenzie and her father. He grinned at me, tongue stud glinting in the headlight, then turned away.

At Paswegas County Hospital, Kenzie was examined and treated for trauma and poisoning; there was no sign of sexual assault. My arm was cleaned and bandaged. I got fifteen stitches and a temporary eye-patch.

“You’re going to have a scar there,” the ER doctor told me.

I stared into the mirror, at a black starburst of stitches and dried blood beside my right eye.

“Souvenir of Vacationland,” I said.

I was released around three am. They kept Kenzie overnight then released her the next morning to her father and the ministrations of local law enforcement.

I spent the rest of the night with the state police. So did Toby. There were a lot of questions, especially for me, and I gathered there’d be more once the FBI arrived and investigators saw what was in the trees on Tolba Island. I didn’t want to think about what they’d find in the quarry, or that clearing.

I was beyond exhaustion. And I felt a sick pang, that I hadn’t saved Denny’s book. All that terrifying beauty, lost. Only glimpses would remain, in the pictures Ray had, and Lucien Ryel.

But they were like postcards of the Taj Mahal. And I’d seen the real thing.

Denny Ahearn had created an entire world out there with his turtle shells and daguerreotypes, his mangled home religion and tormented attempts to reclaim something from the death of the girl he had loved all those years ago. It was a horrifying world, but it was a real one. How many of us can say we’ve made a new world out of the things that terrify and move us? Aphrodite tried and failed.

Monstrous as he was, Denny was the real thing. So was his work. He really had built a bridge between the worlds, even if no one had ever truly seen it, besides the two of us. Now it was up to me, to carry the memory of the dead on my back.

It was dawn when Toby finally drove me to the Lighthouse.

“Here.” He handed me my camera. “I figured you’d want this.” As I turned it to the light, he added, “No one’s seen it. Didn’t seem like it was their business.”

The sign in front of the motel now read no vacancy. Merrill had arranged for us to be given cabins in the woods behind the motel, rather than the rooms near the main road.

“In case reporters start showing up,” explained Toby. He looked drawn and exhausted, but also immeasurably sad. “Be a little harder for them to find us there.”

“That’s thoughtful of him.”

“Merrill’s not a bad guy. I told you that. I should have, anyway.” He looked at me and shook his head. “You should get some sleep.”

“Yeah. You too,” I said and stumbled inside.

Sunlight leaked through the blinds as I locked the door. I kicked my boots off and set them atop the heater, downed the last two Percocets and fell into bed. I slept like the dead, dreamless, mindless. When I finally woke, it was night again.

I spent the next two days in a daze: no booze, no drugs. A lot of time giving statements to various law enforcement officials. A background check brought up the time Christine had called the police on me for domestic assault, but as she’d never pressed charges no one could run with that. Toby and Suze vouched for my whereabouts and everything I’d done during the time since MacKenzie Libby went missing. Toby made no mention of me slipping him a Mickey. There were a few raised eyebrows and some unpleasant moments—I’ve never been good at interviews—but there was no arguing with the fact that Kenzie was alive and safe, and that she wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t intervened. I gave all my pertinent contact information and was told I could go, for now.

The press had a field day. Within hours the incident had leaked to the national media, with headlines like photo finish and silence of the snapping turtles. Denny’s story had nearly everything—murders, abductions, madness, art. Best of all, a teenage girl who survived to tell the tale—though not, it turned out, to the tabloids. Merrill Libby surprised me again by taking a relatively hard line with any exploitation of his daughter. There was an exclusive interview with the Bangor Daily News, and that would be it. For now, anyway. Kenzie was in counseling; she’d been sent to stay with relatives near Collinstown for a few days. Merrill had been in touch with her mother for the first time in several years.

The wreckage of the Boston Whaler was recovered. Denny’s body was never found, despite divers who searched the frigid waters off Tolba Island. This further complicated things as far as the investigation went.

All this must have been terrible for Gryffin. I still hadn’t seen him. Toby said he was caught up with the details of his mother’s funeral, as well as with the nightmare of learning his father was a compulsive murderer. It was unnerving to think that, in the space of a few days, I had effectively orphaned him.

I’d also insured that the youth of Paswegas County would be provided with a campfire story for years to come. Toby told me the locals were already referring to Denny as The Mad Hatter, after I’d explained to the investigators about the contents of Denny’s darkroom. All artists crave some kind of immortality. Denny Ahearn had achieved his. Unless, of course, he really was too tough to die.

The night after Kenzie’s rescue, I finally called Phil Cohen back in the city.

“Cassandra Android! There’s a horrible picture of you in the Daily News! What the hell happened up there?”

I gave him a thumbnail account. “Thanks for doing me another favor, Phil.”

“Jesus,” he said. I could hear the city around him—traffic, voices. Even at this distance, it sounded impossibly loud, compared to the wind and crying gulls above Burnt Harbor. “Hey, Neary—tell me there’s no causal relationship between all this shit and your being there?”

“No causal relationship whatsoever.”

I could tell from the silence that he didn’t believe me.

“So,” he said at last. “Did you at least get an interview before the old lady kicked?”

“Nope.”

“Photos?”

“Uh-uh.”

“So what the hell did you do up there? I mean, other than saving the kid.”

“Not a lot, Phil,” I said. “Listen, does this mean I don’t get a kill fee?”

“A kill fee?” He laughed. “I’ll see what I can do, okay? You could bank this story, you know that, right? You and the girl, that’s real Scary Neary shit, you could really—”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back in a few days; I’ll call you.”

“Wait—!”

I hung up.

The following morning, Merrill Libby came to my cabin and said that Kenzie wanted to see me.

“What you did.” He stood outside the door, sweating even though it was starting to snow. “That was a good thing, Mrs. Neary.”

“It’s Ms. Neary.” I took his outstretched hand and shook it tentatively. “But thanks.”

Late that afternoon, Toby drove me to Collinstown. Heavy wet snow splattered the windshield as we crept along a gravel road. The pickup’s tires were bald, so we went very slowly. The house was a new modular, surrounded by scraped earth sifted white and starred with children’s footprints. Kenzie opened the door.

“Hey,” she said shyly.

Her aunt and cousins looked just like Merrill. But they were friendly and didn’t ask me any questions.

“Kenzie’s staying in Shannon’s room,” her aunt said. “I told Shannon to give you some privacy.”

She turned and told the kids to keep it down. Toby settled with them on the couch to watch TV.

“Thanks for coming,” Kenzie said as we walked down the hall. “I’m going kind of crazy here. They’re nice, but…”

We entered a small room. Pink walls, pink cartoon-patterned sheets, one bed and a sleeping bag on the floor. I sat on the bed. Kenzie flopped onto the floor and picked up a black vinyl CD case. She wore a new red hoodie with Tinkerbelle printed on it. The fretwork of scars on her face had already begun to fade, and while there were dark circles under her eyes, her cheeks were pink. When she looked at me, she smiled.

“I really want to go down to Florida to see my mom.”

“They won’t let you?”

“No, they will. In a few days, I think. It’s just boring.”

“You have a high threshold for excitement.”

She pointed at my eyepatch. “Does that hurt?”

“Not really.”

“Are you blind?”

“Nah. They just don’t want the stitches under it to tear. The skin there’s really sensitive.”

She smiled that sweet kid’s smile. “It looks really, really cool.”

“Yeah?” I touched the corner of the patch gingerly. “Maybe I should keep it.”

“You should.”

She stared at her knees. I reached for the CD case and began flipping through it. “Shit. Is this what you listen to?”

“Pretty much. My mom says she’s going to get me an iPod when I’m down there.”

I read some of the CD titles and grimaced. “Jesus. Well, these are okay—” I tapped Fire of Love and volume two of the Ramones Anthology.

“I like their early stuff better.”

“Yeah, me too.” I stared at the case for another moment then handed it back to her. “Listen, when I get back to the city I’ll send you some CDs to rip. You like Patti Smith?”

“I love her! ‘Dancing Barefoot’…”

“Forget that. Her first album, you have that one? No? I’ll send it to you. You’re online, right? Give me your email address, I’ll write and tell you some other stuff you should be listening to.”

“Really? That would be so great.”

I stood. “I better get back. Toby’s truck, it doesn’t do too good in the snow.”

I stepped to the door of the bedroom. Kenzie followed, hands shoved in the pockets of her cargo pants.

“Here,” she said. She withdrew her hand from her pocket and handed me something. “I made this for you.”

It was a bracelet of braided string and fishing line and seaglass, beertabs and red glass beads.

“Thanks.” I looked at her and smiled. “It’s beautiful. Really.”

She hesitated, then said, “They said you did a book? Like, photographs of stuff? I’d like to read it.”

“I would’ve thought you had enough of photography.”

“No. I mean, yeah, but not this kind. I’m going to get a digital camera. My father said I could, with the money we get from the article.”

“Yeah? That’s really cool. You do that. Send me your stuff. I’d like to see what you come up with.”

She walked me to the front door. Toby got up, and we walked outside.

“Thanks, Cass,” Kenzie called as we picked our way through the snow.

“I’ll send you those CDs,” I said and got into the pickup.

Toby backed into the road. I stared at the house. Kenzie had followed us out into the darkness and stood there, snow swirling around her pale face and settling onto her black hair. I rolled down the window.

“Bye Kenzie,” I said. She waved as we drove back to Burnt Harbor.

28

The next afternoon there was a memorial service for Aphrodite at the Burnt Harbor Congregational Church. I didn’t go, though Toby thought I should. He’d returned to the island after dropping me off the night before, and spent the night with Gryffin. Now it was two-thirty in the afternoon.

“You really should come to the service. You should say good-bye to Gryffin, at least.” Toby stood in the door of my cabin, wearing dark wool pants and a pinstriped jacket that smelled of mothballs. He’d trimmed his beard and rebraided his pigtail. “We’re going to dinner afterward at the Good Tern. You should come. You need closure.”

“Closure? I’ve had enough closure to last a lifetime.” I shook my head. “I already feel like the bad fairy at the christening. I need to get on the road.”

My car remained parked down in Burnt Harbor. I still hadn’t been back to it. I’d been sleeping way too much—I had a sleep deficit going back at least a week—but I figured if I left before dark I could get as far as Bangor, find another motel, then hit the road again first thing next morning.

This time tomorrow I’d be in the city again. It felt like I’d been gone a year.

Toby’s face creased. “Can’t you wait till after the service? So we can at least say good-bye? You’ll need a ride down to get your car at the harbor, anyway.”

I sighed. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

“Good.” He brightened and stepped back outside. “We’ll come by afterward. See you then.”

“Toby.” He stopped, and I said, “I—well, just thanks, that’s all. For everything.”

“Oh, sure.” He stared at his feet, reached down to wipe snow from his boots, then with a sigh straightened. “Jesus. What a horrible week. Poor Gryffin. Poor Aphrodite. And Denny…”

“Poor everyone.”

He looked at the sky. “It’s supposed to snow later. A big storm. I heard eighteen inches,” he added. He waved at me and left.

It was almost three o’clock. It had been a flawless day, new snow glittering like broken glass and the evergreens green as malachite against the cloudless sky.

But already the light was failing. I didn’t believe it was going to snow—there was a thin ridge of clouds to the west, but otherwise it was the nicest day I’d seen since arriving in Maine. I watched through my cabin window until Toby drove off. Then I sat on the bed and stared at my camera bag. Finally I withdrew the copy of Deceptio Visus and opened it.

Our gaze changes all that it falls upon…

Denny’s gaze certainly had changed things. Aphrodite’s too, I supposed; though as I looked through Deceptio Visus now, her photos seemed calculated and overdone.

And too easy. She’d photographed beautiful things—islands, clouds, the rising sun—and made them more beautiful. Whereas Denny had striven to capture something horrifying and make it beautiful, beautiful and eternal. For him, Hannah Meadows had never really died. Or maybe it was that she had never stopped dying. In all the years since he’d found her drowned corpse by that quarry, he’d never been able to look away.

I found the stolen photograph of Gryffin.

“I see you,” I whispered.

I closed the book and put it in the bottom of my bag. Then I got my camera, removed the exposed film and loaded it with my last roll of Tri-X, and went outside.

The dying light sent long, thin shadows across the snow. The pines were still sheathed in white. I walked into the woods that bordered my cabin, found a small clearing, and began to shoot.

I wasn’t trying for anything special. I just wanted to feel myself behind the camera. I wanted to see if my eye, injured or not, had changed.

And I guess I wanted to see if the world had changed as well. I shot most of the roll before I lost the light, black branches and the shadows between fallen leaves, a pile of punctured acorns like tiny skulls, gaps in the underbrush where it seemed that small faces stared back at me. Once I thought I heard something moving in the crotch of a tree overhead, and I stumbled backward and nearly fell.

But when I looked up there was nothing there, only a flickering shadow that might have been a squirrel or crow, or maybe something larger.

The light was gone when I walked back to my cabin. I went into my cabin and cleaned up for the last time and replaced my bandage. I checked to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, then sat to wait for Toby.

It was past five when someone knocked at the door. I stood and opened it.

“Cass. Hi.”

It was Gryffin. He looked down at me, his face pale and eyes red. “Toby’s got Suze and Ray and Robert all crammed into his truck. So I said I’d get you. You have everything?”

“I think so.” I struggled to keep my voice calm as I put on my jacket, wincing as I stuck my bad arm through the sleeve. I picked up my bag and my camera. “This is it.”

We walked to where he’d parked his old gray Volvo, outside the motel office. I went inside—the door was open—and left my room key on the desk. Merrill was gone. There was a note he’d be back that night. As I returned to Gryffin’s car I saw that the sign now read closed for the season.

A few scattered snowflakes melted against the windshield as we headed toward Burnt Harbor. After a few minutes Gryffin glanced at me.

“That looks like it hurt.”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath. He looked awful. Not merely exhausted but ravaged by grief and, I knew, something worse. “I—I don’t know what to say. Just, I’m sorry about everything.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed.

“Thanks. It’s bad. Denny—well, you know. My mother was so enraged when he dumped her for that girl Hannah, his name isn’t even on my birth certificate. But I knew. Everyone knew. And the way they do things up here—well, no one ever talked about it. I haven’t had any contact with him since I was really young, but the police have been talking to me now, I can tell you that. It’s horrible. Beyond horrible. But—”

He peered out through the thin snowfall to the dark road winding ahead of us. “He’s gone now. I guess. I hope so, anyway. Now it’ll just be forensics and trying to figure out who all those other people were.”

“Will you be leaving too?”

“Leaving? I wish I could. I’ve got to stick around and go through my mother’s stuff. The state office is calling it an unexplained death with alcohol as a factor. But I still have to deal with her estate. And the police. And lawyers. Try to figure out what they can and can’t confiscate as part of the investigation. It’s a mess.”

We rounded a turn too fast; the car skidded toward the woods before Gryffin eased it back onto the road. He slowed to a crawl, reached into his pocket, and tossed me something. “Here. I think this belongs to you.”

I caught it and looked down: a roll of Tri-X film. Before I could open my mouth he said, “My box turtle shell—it had been moved, I noticed first thing when I got up that morning. I picked it up and I could feel something inside. I meant to give it to you then—I guess it was some sort of joke, right? But then I found my mother, and…”

He looked away. “I forgot about it.”

I ran my fingers across the roll then tucked it into the pocket of my leather jacket. “Well,” I said. “Thanks. I, uh—”

“Forget it.” For a moment he was quiet. Then he said, “That box turtle shell … it was the only thing he ever gave me. Denny.”

He glanced out the side window at snow slanting through the trees. “When I heard, I took it down to the beach and threw it into the water. It’s gone now. They’re all gone.”

He downshifted as we approached a curve. “These old Volvos are terrible in the snow. Rear wheel drive. Every year I tell myself I’ll buy a new car. Why’d you come after her?”

“Kenzie?”

“No. My mother. Why’d you come here to talk to her?”

I stared outside. “Because I loved those two books,” I said at last. “Deceptio Visus and Mors—they changed my life. When I saw them, that’s when I decided I wanted to be a photographer.”

“What made you stop?”

When I didn’t reply, Gryffin said, “I found a copy of your book online. I ordered it from ABE. It goes for two hundred dollars now. Did you know that?”

“Really? No shit? Two hundred bucks?”

“No shit. With all this stuff going on, I bet you could get a reprint deal if you wanted.” He gave a harsh laugh. “Good career move, Cass, all this.”

He glanced at me. “Cass. Listen. Why don’t you stick around here for a while?”

“I have to get back to work.”

“Oh yeah, right. The stockroom at the Strand. Like they’re going to miss you? Look, I’ve started going through my mother’s stuff. Her photos and letters and things like that. She kept everything. I’m already getting calls from dealers and collectors—this horrible thing with Denny, all of a sudden everyone is interested in Aphrodite Kamestos again. Not to mention Denny’s stuff. Some agent contacted me about a book.

“But I can’t stand to look at any of it. So I was thinking. If you were interested, if you could stand it—you could stay and help me collate things. Get a catalog together. I know about rare books, but I don’t know enough about photography, and it seems like you do. I couldn’t pay anything right off, but you could stay at the house, and then if we got a deal we could work something out. What do you think?”

I stared out the window into the woods, thinking. I shook my head. “No. Thanks, but—”

“But what?”

“Well, for starters, I don’t think I could hack living here.”

“Really? Seems to me you’ve hacked it pretty good so far.” He gave me that odd furtive look, shot with annoyance but also regret. “Well, okay. I thought it was a good idea. Keep it in mind, all right? I’m probably going to end up hiring someone. It would be good if it was someone like you.”

Ahead of us the lights of Burnt Harbor began to shine through the snow. We coasted down to the Good Tern and parked alongside Toby’s red pickup. A few people stood by the pier, looking across the water and talking. As we got out they turned—Toby, Suze from the Island Store, Ray Provenzano and Robert.

“Hey,” Suze called. She kicked through the snow to join us, hiking her long peasant skirt above clunky boots. A knit cap covered her blond dreadlocks. “That was a nice service, Gryffin. You did the right thing. As always.”

She hugged him then looked at me. “How’re you feeling?”

I shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Under the circumstances.”

She smiled. “You’re a local hero. You know that, right?” She tipped her head, indicating my eyepatch. “That looks nasty. Will you be able to see?”

“Yeah. It’s just till I pull the stitches out.”

She stood on tiptoe to kiss Gryffin’s cheek. He smiled wanly, and Ray put an arm around him.

“You’ll be okay, Gryffin. We’ll take care of you,” said Ray. He looked at me then added in his hoarse voice, “Well, you’ve had quite a little visit.”

Toby lit a joint and held it out. I shook my head. He passed it to Ray then said, “So. You got everything, Cass?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

Suze rocked back on her heels and stared at the snow whirling down. “You oughta stick around. They already got eight inches in Portland, had to close 95 cause a semi went off near Bangor. ‘A tombstone every mile.’ Just like the song.”

Robert nodded. “We’re gonna get hammered.”

“Come on.” Gryffin touched my elbow and gestured to my car, parked in the shadows a few yards off. “You better get going if you’re going to beat the storm.”

We walked, my boots sliding on the greasy blacktop. I kept my head down so no one could see my face. We reached the car.

“Uh-oh,” said Suze.

I looked up. “What the fuck?”

The Rent-A-Wreck sagged, its carriage resting on the ground. I crouched to stare at the front tire. It had been slashed.

“Looks like they got ‘em all,” said Toby. He walked to the rear, shaking his head. “Huh.”

“Robert?” Ray’s braying voice echoed across the empty harbor. “Robert!”

“It wasn’t me! I swear to God, it was Bip—”

“Bip?” I stared at him in disbelief. “Who the fuck is Bip?”

“That guy you beat up. He was wicked pissed,” he added, and shrugged sheepishly.

Ray punched his shoulder. “You’re gonna fix her tires, understand? You and frigging Bip! First thing tomorrow. Or well, whenever the storm lets up.”

“Shit.” I stared at the car. Suze came up beside me.

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” she said. “This kind of stuff happens all the time. We’ll get you fixed up.”

I turned and looked out across the whorl of white and black, to where the lights shone on Paswegas Island, all but indistinguishable from the falling snow.

“Come on,” said Gryffin. He put his arm around me and pointed at the Good Tern. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

The others started toward the bar. I watched them go, then looked up at Gryffin.

He smiled, and for a fraction of a second he looked exactly like the young man in the photograph—not ecstatic, maybe, but still open to the possibility of happiness.

The possibility of something, anyway. I stared at him then slung my camera bag over my shoulder.

“Oh, what the hell,” I said, and we followed the others inside.