Murder With Puffins

Chapter 6

They Shoot Puffins, Don't They?

Another shot rang out. Wonderful, I thought; now I know what getting shot at sounds like. Michael flinched, and I thought for an awful moment he'd been hit.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"I'll be fine as soon as I know we're out of gunshot range."

"Excellent idea," I said. "Let me up; I can't get out of gunshot range with you on top of me."

"Right," he said. He jumped up, pulled me to my feet, and began dragging me up the path.

"Hang on a minute," I said, looking back over my shoulder when we got to the top of the hill. "He's not shooting now. Let's see what's going on."

"Keep your head down, then."

We both crouched on the path, peeking over the top of the rise at the lunatic below: a tall, gaunt man, all angles and elbows, with a bushy beard and long gray-streaked hair that looked as if he'd attempted, with limited success, to cultivate dreadlocks. He wore a baggy, shapeless, partially unraveled fisherman's sweater over paint-splattered olive corduroys. He stood with his left hand on his hip while his right held a long gun--a rifle or a shotgun, I supposed. He wasn't aiming it at anything, but he looked ready to. He stared up the path as if waiting for us to emerge again. If he planned on standing there with the gun, he'd have a long wait.

"He looks familiar," I said.

"Don't tell me he's one of your relatives?"

"Good heavens, no!" I said. "Do you really think my relatives would do something like that?"

Michael didn't answer.

"Okay, some of them might be crazy enough to shoot at the tourists, but none of mem would have the bad taste to build that house."

"You have a point there," Michael said, chuckling. "So what do we do now?"

"Good question," I said. "We could turn around and go back the way we came."

"God no," Michael muttered. Perversely, it made me feel a little better that he hadn't enjoyed the last few rain-soaked, mud-infested hours of hiking quite as much as he'd pretended to.

"Let's try to talk to him, then."

"Talk to him?"

Just then, the man started up the path toward us.

"Damn," Michael said, "We'd better turn back after all."

"Don't come any closer!" I shouted.

The man with the gun ignored me.

"Stay where you are! I mean it!" I shouted, and lobbed a baseball-sized rock down at him. Well, not directly at him--I could have hit him if I'd wanted to--but in his general direction. Close enough to get his attention.

The rock bounced and tumbled down, taking quite a collection of pebbles and sticks with it. The man stopped and then backed up a few paces. I grabbed another rock and held it at the ready.

"Why the hell are you shooting at us?" I yelled.

"This is private property," he yelled back. "You're trespassing!"

"Trespassing?" I shouted. I stood up, ignoring Michael's frantic gestures. Foolish, perhaps, but somehow I didn't think that the man was going to shoot us. Not in front of witnesses. I could see a flock of birders peeking out of the woods at the other edge of his property, snapping away with their cameras.

"Trespassing?" I repeated. "Excuse me, quite apart from the fact that this trail has been a public right-of-way for generations, and assuming you do have some legal claim to keep people out, which I very much doubt--and I assure you that I intend to investigate very thoroughly--quite apart from that, were you planning to post any signs, or were you just going to kill off anyone not psychic enough to guess that you don't want them hiking here?"

"Meg," Michael said. He tugged on the leg of my jeans. I shook him off.

"There's a sign right there--" the man began, raising his hand to point and then stopping when he saw there wasn't a sign after-all. "What the hell have you done with my sign?"

"Don't look at us," I said. "We just got here."

The man snorted in exasperation. He walked forward a few paces, then leaned his gun against a tree and reached down. He pried a battered sign out of the mud beside the path, picked up a large rock--possibly the one I'd thrown at him--and began hammering the sign back into the ground.

"I'm not kidding," he said, looking up from his work. "I'm fed up with people trespassing. And people knocking down my signs. I've served notice that this is private property, and I intend to enforce it."

"Well, serve notice a little more visibly from now on," I said, dodging Michael, who had despaired of making me crouch down again and was trying to put himself between me and the lunatic. "And speaking of serving notice, exactly who are you anyway? I'd like to know whom I'm going to ask the police to charge with attempted murder."

"You know perfectly well who I am!" the man shouted. He threw the rock in my direction, then reached for his gun. I quickly followed Michael's advice and we ducked behind the crest of the path, but instead of firing, the man stormed back toward the house. I suppressed a giggle; he was getting himself even grimier than before, stomping through the mud like that. And when he slammed the door, I burst out laughing: the huge, pretentious--and, no doubt, expensive--front door didn't fit quite right. Perhaps all the dampness had warped it. He had to spend several minutes wrestling it closed, his struggles clearly visible through the sweeping glass wall and slanted glass roof of the entrance hall.

"I'll refrain from saying anything about people who live in glass houses," Michael said. "But they shouldn't shoot rifles at people, either."

"And they definitely shouldn't live this close to the ocean," I said, giggling. A seagull had just flown in from the ocean, banked gracefully over the house, and landed, with a clumsy thud, on the glass roof of the entranceway, which was somewhat sheltered by the rest of the house from the full brunt of the wind. Several other gulls followed, and enough bird droppings coated the glass to show that this wasn't the first time the birds had discovered this refuge. The lunatic suddenly appeared behind the glass of the entranceway, causing both Michael and me to jump. The gulls, however, stared down unmoved as he thumped with a broom handle on the heavy plate glass beneath their feet.

"Serves him right," I said. "I hope that creep has to wash all those windows every day."

And he certainly had a lot of windows. In addition to the main house, we saw a smaller glass building nearby. A studio, apparently; while off-white curtains screened the lower six feet or so of its glass walls, from our place on the hill we could see the tips of several easels peeking over the top of the fabric. Even the nearby woodshed, while not made of glass, looked considerably newer, not to mention more expensive and stylish, than most of the actual houses on the island.

"Who on earth could possibly afford to build a place like this on Monhegan?" I wondered aloud. "Do you have any idea how much it costs to bring supplies and workmen over here?"

"Well, whoever he is, I'm sure he can afford to pay for a lawyer," Michael said. "Let's go back to the village and file charges against him."

"No sense tempting fate, though," I said. "Let's retrace our steps a bit; I think I can find a shortcut through the interior of the island."

As we retreated along the trail, I saw a flash of lavender disappear around a rock ahead of us. Somebody else watching our encounter with the mad hermit, no doubt. I nodded with satisfaction; it looked as if we'd have plenty of witnesses.

My shortcut didn't seem much shorter than going all the way back around the island, but at last we arrived at the village.

"I don't recall seeing a police station," Michael said. "Where are we going to report that lunatic?"

"There isn't a police station," I said. "They call the police over from the mainland when they need them. But a local resident acts as constable until the police arrive. Let's go into the general store and ask who it is."

We squished down the main drag until we reached the general store, then squelched up the front steps.

"I remember him," I said, pointing to a sign in the window that said JEBEDIAH BARNES, PROPREITOR. "His family's run this place for two or three generations now."

"That's good," Michael said. "Maybe he'll remember you; otherwise, we may have a hard time making him believe what just happened."

The store was blissfully warm inside; an old-fashioned potbellied stove burned full blast, and a small crowd of local residents sat or stood around the stove, drinking coffee and listening to what sounded like an all-weather radio station. Hurricane Gladys still hovered offshore, according to the announcer.

Michael headed for the coffeepot while I strode over to the counter where the storekeeper stood.

"Where do I find the constable?" I asked him.

"You're looking at him," he said. "Jeb Barnes. What can I do for you?"

"I'd like to report an assault," I said.