More Oddments

Smuggler’s Island

The first I heard that somebody had bought Smuggler’s Island was late on a cold, foggy morning in May. Handy Manners and Davey and I had just brought the Jennie Too into the Camaroon Bay wharf, loaded with the day’s limit in salmon — silvers mostly, with a few big kings — and Handy had gone inside the processing shed at Bay Fisheries to call for the tally clerk and the portable scales. I was helping Davey hoist up the hatch covers, and I was thinking that he handled himself fine on the boat and what a shame it’d be if he decided eventually that he didn’t want to go into commercial fishing as his livelihood. A man likes to see his only son take up his chosen profession. But Davey was always talking about traveling around Europe, seeing some of the world, maybe finding a career he liked better than fishing. Well, he was only nineteen. Decisions don’t come quick or easy at that age.

Anyhow, we were working on the hatch covers when I heard somebody call my name. I glanced up, and Pa and Abner Frawley were coming toward us from down-wharf, where the café was. I was a little surprised to see Pa out on a day like this; he usually stayed home with Jennie when it was overcast and windy because the fog and cold air aggravated his lumbago.

The two of them came up and stopped, Pa puffing on one of his home-carved meerschaum pipes. They were both seventy-two and long-retired — Abner from a manager’s job at the cannery a mile up the coast, Pa from running the general store in the village — and they’d been cronies for at least half their lives. But that was where all resemblance between them ended. Abner was short and round and white-haired, and always had a smile and a joke for everybody. Pa, on the other hand, was tall and thin and dour; if he’d smiled any more than four times in the forty-seven years since I was born I can’t remember it. Abner had come up from San Francisco during the Depression, but Pa was a second-generation native of Camaroon Bay, his father having emigrated from Ireland during the short-lived potato boom in the early 1900s. He was a good man and a decent father, which was why I’d given him a room in our house when Ma died six years ago, but I’d never felt close to him.

He said to me, “Looks like a good catch, Verne.”

“Pretty good,” I said. “How come you’re out in this weather?”

“Abner’s idea. He dragged me out of the house.”

I looked at Abner. His eyes were bright, the way they always got when he had a choice bit of news or gossip to tell. He said, “Fella from Los Angeles went and bought Smuggler’s Island. Can you beat that?”

“Bought it?” I said. “You mean outright?”

“Yep. Paid the county a hundred thousand cash.”

“How’d you hear about it?”

“Jack Kewin, over at the real estate office.”

“Who’s the fellow who bought it?”

“Name’s Roger Vauclain,” Abner said. “Jack don’t know any more about him. Did the buying through an agent.”

Davey said, “Wonder what he wants with it?”

“Maybe he’s got ideas of hunting treasure,” Abner said and winked at him. “Maybe he heard about what’s hidden in those caves.”

Pa gave him a look. “Old fool,” he said.

Davey grinned, and I smiled a little and turned to look to where Smuggler’s Island sat wreathed in fog half a mile straight out across the choppy harbor. It wasn’t much to look at, from a distance or up close. Just one big oblong chunk of eroded rock about an acre and a half in size, surrounded by a lot of little islets. It had a few stunted trees and shrubs, and a long headland where gulls built their nests, and a sheltered cove on the lee shore where you could put in a small boat. That was about all there was to it — except for those caves Abner had spoken of.

They were located near the lee cove and you could only get into them at low tide. Some said caves honeycombed the whole underbelly of the island, but those of us who’d ignored warnings from our parents as kids and gone exploring in them knew that this wasn’t so. There were three caves and two of them had branches that led deep into the rock, but all of the tunnels were dead ends.

This business of treasure being hidden in one of those caves was just so much nonsense, of course — sort of a local legend that nobody took seriously. What the treasure was supposed to be was two million dollars in greenbacks that had been hidden by a rackets courier during Prohibition, when he’d been chased to the island by a team of Revenue agents. There was also supposed to be fifty cases of high-grade moonshine secreted there.

The bootlegging part of it had a good deal of truth though. This section of the northern California coast was a hotbed of illegal liquor traffic in the days of the Volstead Act, and the scene of several confrontations between smugglers and Revenue agents; half a dozen men on both sides had been killed, or had turned up missing and presumed dead. The way the bootleggers worked was to bring ships down from Canada outfitted as distilleries — big stills in their holds, bottling equipment, labels for a dozen different kinds of Canadian whiskey — and anchor them twenty-five miles offshore. Then local fishermen and imported hirelings would go out in their boats and carry the liquor to places along the shore, where trucks would be waiting to pick it up and transport it down to San Francisco or east into Nevada. Smuggler’s Island was supposed to have been a short-term storage point for whiskey that couldn’t be trucked out right away, which may or may not have been a true fact. At any rate, that was how the island got its name.

Just as I turned back to Pa and Abner, Handy came out of the processing shed with the tally clerk and the scales. He was a big, thick-necked man, Handy, with red hair and a temper to match; he was also one of the best mates around and knew as much about salmon trolling and diesel engines as anybody in Camaroon Bay. He’d been working for me eight years, but he wouldn’t be much longer. He was saving up to buy a boat of his own and only needed another thousand or so to swing the down payment.

Abner told him right away about this Roger Vauclain buying Smuggler’s Island. Handy grunted and said, “Anybody that’d want those rocks out there has to have rocks in his head.”

“Who do you imagine he is?” Davey asked.

“One of those damn-fool rich people probably,” Pa said. “Buy something for no good reason except that it’s there and they want it.”

“But why Smuggler’s Island in particular?”

“Got a fancy name, that’s why. Now he can say to his friends, why look here, I own a place up north called Smuggler’s Island, supposed to have treasure hidden on it.”

I said, “Well, whoever he is and whyever he bought it, we’ll find out eventually. Right now we’ve got a catch to unload.”

“Sure is a puzzler though, ain’t it, Verne?” Abner said.

“It is that,” I admitted. “It’s a puzzler, all right.”

If you live in a small town or village, you know how it is when something happens that has no immediate explanation. Rumors start flying, based on few or no facts, and every time one of them is retold to somebody else it gets exaggerated. Nothing much goes on in a place like Camaroon Bay anyhow — conversation is pretty much limited to the weather and the actions of tourists and how the salmon are running or how the crabs seem to be thinning out a little more every year. So this Roger Vauclain buying Smuggler’s Island got a lot more lip service paid to it than it would have someplace else.

Jack Kewin didn’t find out much about Vauclain, just that he was some kind of wealthy resident of southern California. But that was enough for the speculations and the rumors to build on. During the next week I heard from different people that Vauclain was a real estate speculator who was going to construct a small private club on the island; that he was a retired bootlegger who’d worked the coast during Prohibition and had bought the island for nostalgic reasons; that he was a front man for a movie company that was going to film a big spectacular in Camaroon Bay and blow up the island in the final scene. None of these rumors made much sense, but that didn’t stop people from spreading them and half-believing in them.

Then, one night while we were eating supper Abner came knocking at the front door of our house on the hill above the village. Davey went and let him in, and he sat down at the table next to Pa. One look at him was enough to tell us that he’d come with news.

“Just been talking to Lloyd Simms,” he said as Jennie poured him a cup of coffee. “Who do you reckon just made a reservation at the Camaroon Inn?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Roger Vauclain himself. Lloyd talked to him on the phone less than an hour ago, says he sounded pretty hard-nosed. Booked a single room for a week, be here on Thursday.”

“Only a single room?” Jennie said. “Why, I’m disappointed, Abner. I expected he’d be traveling with an entourage.” She’s a practical woman and when it comes to things she considers nonsense, like all the hoopla over Vauclain and Smuggler’s Island, her sense of humor sharpens into sarcasm.

“Might be others coming up later,” Abner said seriously.

Davey said, “Week’s a long time for a rich man to spend in a place like Camaroon Bay. I wonder what he figures to do all that time?”

“Tend to his island, probably,” I said.

“Tend to it?” Pa said. “Tend to what? You can walk over the whole thing in two hours.”

“Well, there’s always the caves, Pa.”

He snorted. “Grown man’d have to be a fool to go wandering in those caves. Tide comes in while he’s inside, he’ll drown for sure.”

“What time’s he due in on Thursday?” Davey asked Abner.

“Around noon, Lloyd says. Reckon we’ll find out then what he’s planning to do with the island.”

“Not planning to do anything with it, I tell you,” Pa said. “Just wants to own it.”

“We’ll see,” Abner said. “We’ll see.”

Thursday was clear and warm, and it should have been a good day for salmon; but maybe the run had started to peter out, because it took us until almost noon to make the limit. It was after two o’clock before we got the catch unloaded and weighed in at Bay Fisheries. Davey had some errands to run and Handy had logged enough extra time, so I took the Jennie Too over to the commercial slips myself and stayed aboard her to hose down the decks. When I was through with that I set about replacing the port outrigger line because it had started to weaken and we’d been having trouble with it.

I was doing that when a tall man came down the ramp from the quay and stood just off the bow, watching me. I didn’t pay much attention to him; tourists stop by to rubberneck now and then, and if you encourage them they sometimes hang around so you can’t get any work done. But then this fellow slapped a hand against his leg, as if he were annoyed, and called out in a loud voice, “Hey, you there. Fisherman.”

I looked at him then, frowning. I’d heard that tone before: sharp, full of self-granted authority. Some city people are like that; to them, anybody who lives in a rural village is a low-class hick. I didn’t like it and I let him see that in my face. “You talking to me?”

“Who else would I be talking to?”

I didn’t say anything. He was in his forties, smooth-looking, and dressed in white ducks and a crisp blue windbreaker. If nothing else, his eyes were enough to make you dislike him immediately; they were hard and unfriendly and said that he was used to getting his own way.

He said, “Where can I rent a boat?”

“What kind of boat? To go sport fishing?”

“No, not to go sport fishing. A small cruiser.”

“There ain’t any cruisers for rent here.”

He made a disgusted sound, as if he’d expected that. “A big outboard then,” he said. “Something seaworthy.”

“It’s not a good idea to take a small boat out of the harbor,” I said. “The ocean along here is pretty rough—”

“I don’t want advice,” he said. “I want a boat big enough to get me out to Smuggler’s Island and back. Now who do I see about it?”

“Smuggler’s Island?” I looked at him more closely. “Your name happen to be Roger Vauclain, by any chance?”

“That’s right. You heard about me buying the island, I suppose. Along with everybody else in this place.”

“News gets around,” I said mildly.

“About that boat,” he said.

“Talk to Ed Hawkins at Bay Marine on the wharf. He’ll find something for you.”

Vauclain gave me a curt nod and started to turn away.

I said, “Mind if I ask you a question now?”

He turned back. “What is it?”

“People don’t go buying islands very often,” I said, “particularly one like Smuggler’s. I’d be interested to know your plans for it.”

“You and every other damned person in Camaroon Bay.”

I held my temper. “I was just asking. You don’t have to give me an answer.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What the hell, it’s no secret. I’ve always wanted to live on an island, and that one out there is the only one around I can afford.”

I stared at him. “You mean you’re going to build on it?”

“That surprises you, does it?”

“It does,” I said. “There’s nothing on Smuggler’s Island but rocks and a few trees and a couple of thousand nesting gulls. It’s fogbound most of the time, and even when it’s not the wind blows at thirty knots or better.”

“I like fog and wind and ocean,” Vauclain said. “I like isolation. I don’t like people much. That satisfy you?”

I shrugged. “To each his own.”

“Exactly,” he said, and went away up the ramp.

I worked on the Jennie Too another hour, then I went over to the Wharf Café for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. When I came inside I saw Pa, Abner, and Handy sitting at one of the copper-topped tables. I walked over to them.

They already knew that Vauclain had arrived in Camaroon Bay. Handy was saying, “Hell, he’s about as friendly as a shark. I was over to Ed Hawkins’s place shooting the breeze when he came in and demanded Ed get him a boat. Threw his weight around for fifteen minutes until Ed agreed to rent him his own Chris-Craft. Then he paid for the rental in cash, slammed two fifties on Ed’s desk like they were singles and Ed was a beggar.”

I sat down. “He’s an eccentric, all right,” I said. “I talked to him for a few minutes myself about an hour ago.”

“Eccentric?” Abner said, and snorted. “That’s just a name they give to people who never learned manners or good sense.”

Pa said to me. “He tell you what he’s fixing to do with Smuggler’s Island, Verne?”

“He did, yep.”

“Told Abner too, over to the Inn.” Pa shook his head, glowering, and lighted a pipe. “Craziest damned thing I ever heard. Build a house on that mess of rock, live out there. Crazy, that’s all.”

“That’s a fact,” Handy said. “I’d give him more credit if he was planning to hunt for that bootlegger’s treasure.”

“Well, I’m sure not going to relish having him for a neighbor,” Abner said. “Don’t guess anybody else will either.”

None of us disagreed with that. A man likes to be able to get along with his neighbors, rich or poor. Getting along with Vauclain, it seemed, was going to be a chore for everybody.

In the next couple of days Vauclain didn’t do much to improve his standing with the residents of Camaroon Bay. He snapped at merchants and waitresses, ignored anybody who tried to strike up a conversation with him, and complained twice to Lloyd Simms about the service at the Inn. The only good thing about him, most people were saying, was that he spent the better part of his days on Smuggler’s Island — doing what, nobody knew exactly — and his nights locked in his room. Might have been he was drawing up plans there for the house he intended to build on the island.

Rumor now had it that Vauclain was an architect, one of those independents who’d built up a reputation, like Frank Lloyd Wright in the old days, and who only worked for private individuals and companies. This was probably true since it originated with Jack Kewin; he’d spent a little time with Vauclain and wasn’t one to spread unfounded gossip. According to Jack, Vauclain had learned that the island was for sale more than six months ago and had been up twice before by helicopter from San Francisco to get an aerial view of it.

That was the way things stood on Sunday morning when Jennie and I left for church at 10:00. Afterward we had lunch at a place up the coast, and then, because the weather was cool but still clear, we went for a drive through the redwood country. It was almost 5:00 when we got back home.

Pa was in bed — his lumbago was bothering him, he said — and Davey was gone somewhere. I went into our bedroom to change out of my suit. While I was in there the telephone rang, and Jennie called out that it was for me.

When I picked up the receiver Lloyd Simms’s voice said, “Sorry to bother you, Verne, but if you’re not busy I need a favor.”

“I’m not busy, Lloyd. What is it?”

“Well, it’s Roger Vauclain. He went out to the island this morning like usual, and he was supposed to be back at three to take a telephone call. Told me to make sure I was around then, the call was important — you know the way he talks. The call came in right on schedule, but Vauclain didn’t. He’s still not back, and the party calling him has been ringing me up every half hour, demanding I get hold of him. Something about a bid that has to be delivered first thing tomorrow morning.”

“You want me to go out to the island, Lloyd?”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” he said. “I don’t much care about Vauclain, the way he’s been acting, but this caller is driving me up a wall. And it could be something’s the matter with Vauclain’s boat; can’t get it started or something. Seems kind of funny he didn’t come back when he said he would.”

I hesitated. I didn’t much want to take the time to go out to Smuggler’s Island; but then if there was a chance Vauclain was in trouble I couldn’t very well refuse to help.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

We rang off, and I explained to Jennie where I was going and why. Then I drove down to the basin where the pleasure-boat slips were and took the tarp off Davey’s sixteen-foot Sportliner inboard. I’d bought it for him on his sixteenth birthday, when I figured he was old enough to handle a small boat of his own, but I used it as much as he did. We’re not so well off that we can afford to keep more than one pleasure craft.

The engine started right up for a change — usually you have to choke it several times on cool days — and I took her out of the slips and into the harbor. The sun was hidden by overcast now and the wind was up, building small whitecaps, running fogbanks in from the ocean but shredding them before they reached the shore. I followed the south jetty out past the breakwater and into open sea. The water was choppier there, the color of gunmetal, and the wind was pretty cold; I pulled the collar of my jacket up and put on my gloves to keep my hands from numbing on the wheel.

When I neared the island I swung around to the north shore and into the lee cove. Ed Hawkins’s Chris-Craft was tied up there, all right, bow and stern lines made fast to outcroppings on a long, natural stone dock. I took the Sportliner in behind it, climbed out onto the bare rock, and made her fast. On my right, waves broke over and into the mouths of three caves, hissing long fans of spray. Gulls wheeled screeching above the headland; farther in, scrub oak and cypress danced like bobbers in the wind. It all made you feel as though you were standing on the edge of the world.

There was no sign of Vauclain anywhere at the cove, so I went up through a tangle of artichoke plants toward the center of the island. The area there was rocky but mostly flat, dotted with undergrowth and patches of sandy earth. I stopped beside a gnarled cypress and scanned from left to right. Nothing but emptiness. Then I walked out toward the headland, hunched over against the pull of the wind. But I didn’t find him there either.

A sudden thought came to me as I started back and the hairs prickled on my neck. What if he’d gone into the caves and been trapped there when the tide began to flood? If that was what had happened, it was too late for me to do anything — but I started to run anyway, my eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t trip over a bush or a rock.

I was almost back to the cove, coming at a different angle than before, when I saw him.

It was so unexpected that I pulled up short and almost lost my footing on loose rock. The pit of my stomach went hollow. He was lying on his back in a bed of artichokes, one arm flung out and the other wrapped across his chest. There was blood under his arm, and blood spread across the front of his windbreaker. One long look was all I needed to tell me he’d been shot and that he was dead.

Shock and an eerie sense of unreality kept me standing there another few seconds. My thoughts were jumbled; you don’t think too clearly when you stumble on a dead man, a murdered man. And it was murder, I knew that well enough. There was no gun anywhere near the body, and no way it could have been an accident.

Then I turned, shivering, and ran down to the cove and took the Sportliner away from there at full throttle to call for the county sheriff.

Vauclain’s death was the biggest event that had happened in Camaroon Bay in forty years, and Sunday night and Monday nobody talked about anything else. As soon as word got around that I was the one who’d discovered the body, the doorbell and the telephone didn’t stop ringing — friends and neighbors, newspaper people, investigators. The only place I had any peace was on the Jennie Too Monday morning, and not much there because Davey and Handy wouldn’t let the subject alone while we fished.

By late that afternoon the authorities had questioned just about everyone in the area. It didn’t appear they’d found out anything though. Vauclain had been alone when he’d left for the island early Sunday; Abner had been down at the slips then and swore to the fact. A couple of tourists had rented boats from Ed Hawkins during the day, since the weather was pretty good, and a lot of locals were out in the harbor on pleasure craft. But whoever it was who had gone to Smuggler’s Island after Vauclain, he hadn’t been noticed.

As to a motive for the shooting, there were all sorts of wild speculations. Vauclain had wronged somebody in Los Angeles and that person had followed him here to take revenge. He’d treated a local citizen badly enough to trigger a murderous rage. He’d got in bad with organized crime and a contract had been put out on him. And the most farfetched theory of all: He’d actually uncovered some sort of treasure on Smuggler’s Island and somebody’d learned about it and killed him for it. But the simple truth was, nobody had any idea why Vauclain was murdered. If the sheriff’s department had found any clues on the island or anywhere else, they weren’t talking — but they weren’t making any arrests either.

There was a lot of excitement, all right. Only underneath it all people were nervous and a little scared. A killer seemed to be loose in Camaroon Bay, and if he’d murdered once, who was to say he wouldn’t do it again? A mystery is all well and good when it’s happening someplace else, but when it’s right on your doorstep you can’t help but feel threatened and apprehensive.

I’d had about all the pestering I could stand by four o’clock, so I got into the car and drove up the coast to Shelter Cove. That gave me an hour’s worth of freedom. But no sooner did I get back to Camaroon Bay, with the intention of going home and locking myself in my basement workshop, than a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up behind me at a stop sign and its horn started honking. I sighed and pulled over to the curb.

It was Harry Swenson, one of the deputies who’d questioned me the day before, after I’d reported finding Vauclain’s body. We knew each other well enough to be on a first-name basis. He said, “Verne, the sheriff asked me to talk to you again, see if there’s anything you might have overlooked yesterday. You mind?”

“No, I don’t mind,” I said tiredly.

We went into the Inn and took a table at the back of the dining room. A couple of people stared at us, and I could see Lloyd Simms hovering around out by the front desk. I wondered how long it would be before I’d stop being the center of attention every time I went someplace in the village.

Over coffee, I repeated everything that had happened Sunday afternoon. Harry checked what I said with the notes he’d taken; then he shook his head and closed the notebook.

“Didn’t really expect you to remember anything else,” he said, “but we had to make sure. Truth is, Verne, we’re up against it on this thing. Damnedest case I ever saw.”

“Guess that means you haven’t found out anything positive.”

“Not much. If we could figure a motive, we might be able to get a handle on it from that. But we just can’t find one.”

I decided to give voice to one of my own theories. “What about robbery, Harry?” I asked. “Seems I heard Vauclain was carrying a lot of cash with him and throwing it around pretty freely.”

“We thought of that first thing,” he said. “No good, though. His wallet was on the body, and there was three hundred dollars in it and a couple of blank checks.”

I frowned down at my coffee. “I don’t like to say this, but you don’t suppose it could be one of these thrill killings we’re always reading about?”

“Man, I hope not. That’s the worst kind of homicide there is.”

We were silent for a minute or so. Then I said, “You find anything at all on the island? Any clues?”

He hesitated. “Well,” he said finally, “I probably shouldn’t discuss it — but then, you’re not the sort to break a confidence. We did find one thing near the body. Might not mean anything, but it’s not the kind of item you’d expect to come across out there.”

“What is it?”

“A cake of white beeswax,” he said.

“Beeswax?”

“Right. Small cake of it. Suggest anything to you?”

“No,” I said. “No, nothing.”

“Not to us either. Aside from that, we haven’t got a thing. Like I said, we’re up against it. Unless we get a break in the next couple of days, I’m afraid the whole business will end up in the unsolved file. That’s unofficial, now.”

“Sure,” I said.

Harry finished his coffee. “I’d better get moving,” he said. “Thanks for your time, Verne.”

I nodded, and he stood up and walked out across the dining room. As soon as he was gone, Lloyd came over and wanted to know what we’d been talking about. But I’d begun to feel oddly nervous all of a sudden, and there was something tickling at the edge of my mind. I cut him off short, saying, “Let me be, will you, Lloyd? Just let me be for a minute.”

When he drifted off, looking hurt, I sat there and rotated my cup on the table. Beeswax, I thought. I’d told Harry that it didn’t suggest anything to me, and yet it did, vaguely. Beeswax. White beeswax...

It came to me then — and along with it a couple of other things, little things, like missing figures in an arithmetic problem. I went cold all over, as if somebody had opened a window and let the wind inside the room. I told myself I was wrong, that it couldn’t be. But I wasn’t wrong. It made me sick inside, but I wasn’t wrong.

I knew who had murdered Roger Vauclain.

When I came into the house I saw him sitting out on the sun deck, just sitting there motionless with his hands flat on his knees, staring out to sea. Or out to where Smuggler’s Island sat, shining hard and ugly in the glare of the dying sun.

I didn’t go out there right away. First I went into the other rooms to see if anybody else was home, but nobody was. Then, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I got myself ready to face it and walked onto the deck.

He glanced at me as I leaned back against the railing. I hadn’t seen much of him since finding the body, or paid much attention to him when I had; but now I saw that his eyes looked different. They didn’t blink. They looked at me, they looked past me, but they didn’t blink.

“Why’d you do it, Pa?” I said. “Why’d you kill Vauclain?”

I don’t know what I expected his reaction to be. But there wasn’t any reaction. He wasn’t startled, he wasn’t frightened, he wasn’t anything. He just looked away from me again and sat there like a man who has expected to hear such words for a long time.

I kept waiting for him to say something, to move, to blink his eyes. For one full minute and half of another, he did nothing. Then he sighed, soft and tired, and he said, “I knew somebody’d find out this time.” His voice was steady, calm. “I’m sorry it had to be you, Verne.”

“So am I.”

“How’d you know?”

“You left a cake of white beeswax out there,” I said. “Fell out of your pocket when you pulled the gun, I guess. You’re just the only person around here who’d be likely to have white beeswax in his pocket, Pa, because you’re the only person who hand-carves his own meerschaum pipes. Took me a time to remember that you use wax like that to seal the bowls and give them a luster finish.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Couple of other things too,” I said. “You were in bed yesterday when Jennie and I got home. It was a clear day, no early fog, nothing to aggravate your lumbago. Unless you’d been out someplace where you weren’t protected from the wind — someplace like in a boat on open water. Then there was Davey’s Sportliner starting right up for me. Almost never does that on cool days unless it’s been run recently, and the only person besides Davey and me who has a key is you.”

He nodded. “It’s usually the little things,” he said. “I always figured it’d be some little thing that’d finally do it.”

“Pa,” I said, “why’d you kill him?”

“He had to go and buy the island. Then he had to decide to build a house on it. I couldn’t let him do that. I went out there to talk to him, try to get him to change his mind. Took my revolver along, but only just in case; wasn’t intending to use it. Only he wouldn’t listen to me. Called me an old fool and worse, and then he give me a shove. He was dead before I knew it, seems like.”

“What’d him building a house have to do with you?”

“He’d have brought men and equipment out there, wouldn’t he? They’d have dug up everything, wouldn’t they? They’d have sure dug up the Revenue man.”

I thought he was rambling. “Pa...”

“You got a right to know about that too,” he said. He blinked then, four times fast. “In 1929 a fella named Frank Eberle and me went to work for the bootleggers. Hauling whiskey. We’d go out maybe once a month in Frank’s boat, me acting as shotgun, and we’d bring in a load of ’shine — mostly to Shelter Cove, but sometimes we’d be told to drop it off on Smuggler’s for a day or two. It was easy money, and your ma and me needed it, what with you happening along; and what the hell, Frank always said, we were only helping to give the people what they wanted.

“But then one night in 1932 it all went bust. We brought a shipment to the island and just after we started unloading it this man run out of the trees waving a gun and yelling that we were under arrest. A Revenue agent, been lying up there in ambush. Lying alone because he didn’t figure to have much trouble, I reckon — and I found out later the government people had bigger fish to fry up to Shelter Cove that night.

“Soon as the agent showed himself, Frank panicked and started to run. Agent put a shot over his head, and before I could think on it I cut loose with the rifle I always carried. I killed him, Verne, I shot that man dead.”

He paused, his face twisting with memory. I wanted to say something — but what was there to say?

Pa said, “Frank and me buried him on the island, under a couple of rocks on the center flat. Then we got out of there. I quit the bootleggers right away, but Frank, he kept on with it and got himself killed in a big shootout up by Eureka just before Repeal. I knew they were going to get me too someday. Only time kept passing and somehow it never happened, and I almost had myself believing it never would. Then this Vauclain came along. You see now why I couldn’t let him build his house?”

“Pa,” I said thickly, “it’s been forty-five years since all that happened. All anybody’d have dug up was bones. Maybe there’s something there to identify the Revenue agent, but there couldn’t be anything that’d point to you.”

“Yes, there could,” he said. “Just like there was something this time — the beeswax and all. There’d have been something, all right, and they’d have come for me.”

He stopped talking then, like a machine that had been turned off, and swiveled his head away and just sat staring again. There in the sun, I still felt cold. He believed what he’d just said; he honestly believed it.

I knew now why he’d been so dour and moody for most of my life, why he almost never smiled, why he’d never let me get close to him. And I knew something else too; I wasn’t going to tell the sheriff any of this. He was my father and he was seventy-two years old; and I’d see to it that he didn’t hurt anybody else. But the main reason was, if I let it happen that they really did come for him he wouldn’t last a month. In an awful kind of way the only thing that’d been holding him together all these years was his certainty they would come someday.

Besides, it didn’t matter anyway. He hadn’t actually got away with anything. He hadn’t committed one unpunished murder, or now two unpunished murders, because there is no such thing. There’s just no such thing as the perfect crime.

I walked over and took the chair beside him, and together we sat quiet and looked out at Smuggler’s Island. Only I didn’t see it very well because my eyes were full of tears.