Murder With Puffins

Chapter 3

All My Puffins

No one answered. I waited briefly, then knocked again.

Another burst of laughter greeted my knock.

"What's going on in there?" I called.

Still no answer.

"Well, here goes," I said.

I flung open the door.--The cottage was empty. But someone, obviously, had been there, and not very long ago.

"I guess someone was expecting us," Michael said.

Evidently--but who?

We looked around. A fire crackled briskly in the fireplace. Enough candles burned in various parts of the room to cast a warm, romantic glow. Both sofas were piled high with down pillows and fuzzy afghans. Two teacups stood on the coffee table, and a hint of steam and a faint odor of jasmine indicated that the quilted cozy concealed a fresh pot of tea. A battery radio sat on the mantel; as we stood there gaping, a final burst of laughter signaled the end of a commercial and an announcer with a beautiful spun-silk baritone voice assured us that W something or other would now continue with its Friday-night light classical program. The strains of "The Blue Danube Waltz" filled the room.

"Hello?" I called.

I stepped inside. I could smell something cooking. Right now, my stomach objected strenuously to this, but, even so, I could tell that when I'd fully recovered from the ferry ride, whatever was going on in the kitchen would turn out to be intensely interesting. A bottle of champagne stood on the table, beads of sweat running down its sides, with a corkscrew and two glass flutes nearby.

"You know, this is a lot less primitive than you described it," Michael said, dropping his bags by the door. "In fact, now that we're off the boat, I think I'm starting to like this place."

He looked around appreciatively. The place did look its best by candlelight. The living room was two stories high, with stairs curling around one wall, leading to a balconylike upper hall, off which the three bedrooms opened. Downstairs, under the bedrooms, were a large bathroom and a larger kitchen. I remembered the place as tiny and cramped--which it usually was in the summer, with every bedroom filled, a carpet of sleeping bags in the living room, and a typical hour-long wait to use the bathroom. But for two people looking for peace and quiet and a place to get away from it all, the cottage suddenly looked like a palace.

"Let's worry about the luggage later," Michael said, sitting down on one of the sofas and patting the cushion beside him. I joined him, and for a few minutes we sat there in silence, enjoying the warmth, the music, the whole ambiance.

Although I did wonder who had opened up the cottage and set everything up for us. Had Winnie and Binkie made a quick call from the gift shop and sent some helpful neighbor over? Or had Aunt Phoebe noticed the missing key, done a head count, and decided to arrange a lovely surprise? Whoever it was, they had my thanks. In my exhausted state, I kept remembering the version of "Beauty and the Beast" in which the disembodied hands set the table and served dinner, and I wondered if something similar had happened here.

No matter, I thought, sinking back against Michael's arm. This is heavenly.

The door suddenly opened with a bang.

"I'm back!" caroled a voice.

Michael and I whirled about in astonishment.

"Dad?" I said.

My father stood in the doorway with a load of wood in his arms. Water flew everywhere as he shook himself like a dog.

"Meg!" he cried. He dumped the wood on the hearth with a thump, then enfolded me in a soggy bear hug. "What a wonderful surprise!"

"You think you're surprised," I muttered. "You have no idea."

"And Michael," Dad added. "How grand! Margaret, come look; it's Meg and Michael here to join us."

Mother appeared at the top of the stairway, delicately suppressing a yawn, carrying her embroidery and a European fashion magazine.

"Meg, dear," she cried. She floated gracefully down the stairs and bent over to kiss my cheek. "This is so nice! And how lovely to see you, Michael."

Not a single improbably blond hair had strayed out of place, and she looked, as usual, as if she could replace any of the models in the magazine on a moment's notice.

Just then, I heard a loud pop, and something whizzed past my nose and bounced off Michael's chin.

"Sorry about that, Michael," Dad said, waggling the champagne bottle. "Nothing broken, I hope?"

"No, I'm fine," Michael said, rubbing his chin.

"Here we go," Dad said, handing Mother a glass of the champagne and taking a sip from his own glass. "Would you two like any?"

"No thanks," Michael and I chorused. I closed my eyes. I wasn't quite ready to watch people eating and drinking.

The door slammed open again.

"Well, I see the ferry's in," said Aunt Phoebe, appearing in the doorway with a dripping canvas tote in each hand. "You've missed dinner, but there's plenty of leftovers. Smithfield ham, potato salad--"

"No thanks," I said.

"Maybe later," Michael added.

"Hell, they just got off the ferry; they're probably sick as dogs," cackled Mother's best friend, Mrs. Fenniman, appearing behind Aunt Phoebe with her own pair of tote bags. "Leave them in peace till their guts stop heaving."

Although Mrs. Fenniman was absolutely right, I wished she hadn't emphasized the word heaving quite so forcefully. My stomach gave a queasy lurch, as if to say, Okay, time to pay attention to me.

"Is the ferry going back tonight?" came a voice from above our heads. I looked up, to see my brother, Rob, standing on the upstairs landing, rubbing his eyes as if he'd just awakened.

"My God," I said. "Is everyone in Yorktown up here? Yikes!"

I jumped as something cold and wet touched my ankle.

"What the devil is Spike doing here?" Michael asked, looking down at the small black-and-white fur ball at my feet. Although Spike was Michael's mother's dog, he had never liked Michael. He looked up for a moment, curled his lip at Michael, and returned to his favorite pastime of licking me obsessively. He didn't seem to mind the mud.

"Your mother asked me to baby-sit him for the weekend," Rob said. "And when I had to drive up here, there wasn't anything I could do but bring him along. You want to take charge of him?"

"Thanks, but you'll probably get back to Yorktown before I do," Michael said. He didn't like Spike any more than Spike liked him. Of course, Spike didn't really like anyone but Michael's mother and me. And I'd never figured out why he liked me. The feeling certainly wasn't mutual.

"True, I'm heading home as soon as possible," Rob said. "Speaking of which, I'd probably better get my bag and head down to the ferry."

"I doubt the ferry's going anywhere tonight," I said. "And trust me, if it was, you wouldn't want to be on it. For a tropical storm that's heading out to sea to die, this one still has a lot of life left in it."

"That's because it isn't heading out to sea to die," Mrs. Fenniman said, pouring herself some tea. "It just went out to sea long enough to pick up steam. It's back up to a hurricane again and has turned around to take another run at the coast."

"What?"

"It's true; I just heard it on the radio," Mrs. Fenniman said with the good cheer she usually displayed when she had managed to scoop everyone else with news of a scandal or disaster.

"Oh great," Rob said. "I guess that means I'm stuck here for the duration."

He threw himself down on one of the couches and assumed a martyred air. Along with Mother's slender height and aristocratic blond looks, he'd inherited her talent for self-dramatization.

"Don't be gloomy," Dad said. He stood before the hearth, apparently trying to set the back of his pants on fire. His short, round form and the way the firelight played on his bald head made him look like a mischievous gnome. "Look on the bright side," he added. "After all these years, we'll finally get to see what really happens here during a hurricane!"

"Yippee," Rob mumbled without enthusiasm.

"Oh dear," Mother murmured.

"Don't worry, Margaret," Aunt Phoebe said. She had shed her dripping rain gear and was tying a green-and-orange-flowered apron over her stout khaki-clad form. "We've got plenty of food and fuel. We may have to rough it for a bit, but we'll come through just fine."

Mother looked relieved. After all, she knew better than anyone that Aunt Phoebe's idea of roughing it meant using the checked gingham napkins instead of the starched linen, and that the caviar might be tinned instead of fresh.

"Time we got busy," Mrs. Fenniman said. She had donned a flowered apron identical to Aunt Phoebe's, though it looked odd over her usual black clothes and scrawny frame. The two of them hefted their tote bags and disappeared into the kitchen.

"We can go out on the cliffs at Green Point and actually see the storm hit!" Dad went on. "Won't that be fantastic!"

"Oh, James, you mustn't!" Mother protested.

"Won't that be dangerous?" Michael asked. I looked at him with astonishment and more than a little dismay. He sounded as if he might actually be considering Dad's suggestion. Much as I adored my father, I'd always sworn never to get involved with someone who did the kind of crazy things Dad did. And yet, there it was again: I could see on Michael's face that same look of lovable but daft enthusiasm. Oh dear, I thought. Dad had spread a small map of Monhegan over the coffee table and was scribbling madly on it--apparently trying to calculate the best spot to await the hurricane's arrival. Michael leaned over to watch.

"Count me out," Rob said. "I have to work on Lawyers from Hell."

Mother sighed. The whole family was still anxiously waiting to see if Rob had, by chance, passed the bar exam in July. Since he and his bar exam review group had whiled away the summer inventing a role-playing game called Lawyers from Hell instead of doing anything that even vaguely resembled studying, the odds were slim.

"I really ought to be back in Yorktown working on it," Rob said. What he meant was that he wanted to be back in Yorktown talking about bits and bytes with Red, his new girlfriend, who was helping him turn Lawyers from Hell into a computer game.

"How on earth did you get here anyway?" I asked, taking Rob aside.

"We came over on the ferry yesterday," he said.

"Well, I figured out that much," I said. "I meant, what are all of you doing up here in the first place?"

"Dad called to say they were flying home from Paris and could I meet them at Dulles Airport," Rob said. "Their plane got in very early yesterday morning. And Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman hitched a ride up to Washington with me so they could catch a flight to Maine to go birding. But the flight got canceled because of the hurricane, and instead of going back to Yorktown, Aunt Phoebe convinced Mother and Dad to come up here with her. What are you doing here?"

"Looking for a little privacy," Michael put in.

"Good luck," Rob said with a snicker, and slipped out of the room--probably to call Red and indulge in a little long-distance whining. Or heavy breathing.

Well, Rob isn't the only one doomed to disappointment in his love life for the immediate future, I thought, glancing at Michael as I sat back down beside him. Here I was, sitting with the man of my dreams on an overstuffed sofa by a roaring fire, just as I'd imagined in my fantasies about this weekend. But having to share the experience with my entire family took a lot of the fun out of it.

I felt guilty about resenting their presence. They were all trying so hard to make us feel better. Of course, this meant that every five minutes one of them would pop up with either a new remedy for seasickness or a new tactic for preventing pneumonia. And I'd taken a head count and compared it to the number of bedrooms and figured out that I'd probably be sleeping on one of the sofas.

"Now the phone's out," Rob announced, shuffling back into the room and throwing himself on the other sofa.

"Usually happens in a storm," Aunt Phoebe said, shoving a cup of herbal tea into my hands.

"I wouldn't mind so much if I could just use my laptop," Rob said.

"Can't you just ran it on battery?" Michael asked.

"I could, except the battery's old; it only holds about a fifteen-minute charge," Rob said. "And it takes me ten minutes to boot up and figure out how to open my word processor."

"I tell you what," Dad said. "Let's ran an extension cord up to the Dickermans' house. I'm sure they wouldn't mind."

Whether the Dickermans would mind or not was irrelevant; I doubted they could resist Dad when he got his mind set on doing something.

"Ugh," Rob said, and sneezed. A patently phony sneeze, I thought; obviously designed to serve as an excuse for not sloshing out in the rain with Dad. But it served its purpose. Mother, Aunt Phoebe, and Mrs. Fenniman immediately turned their full attention to medicating Rob. I took advantage of the distraction to pour my herbal tea into an already-moribund potted plant.

"Come on, Meg; you can help me ran the extension cord," Dad said, picking up a flashlight. "You, too, Michael. Fresh air will do you a world of good."

I didn't really want to go back out into the rain. I wanted to curl up someplace quiet and sleep for a few years. But it didn't look as if I'd get any peace and quiet in the cottage for a while, with Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman arguing about the weather and trying to pour their potions and philters into me. Not to mention the way my stomach reacted to the smell of all the food. Maybe fresh air was a good idea. I sighed, then got up and followed Dad and Michael to the coatrack beside the kitchen door, where we rummaged through a rather random collection of rain gear. We finally found slickers for all three of us, though Michael's was too short, mine nearly dragged the ground, and Dad's was glow-in-the-dark pink with lime green and yellow spots.

Then we repeated the rummaging, this time in the gardenshed. Underneath a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, a collection of antique life jackets, a gas grill, odd parts of three unmatched croquet sets, and several dozen mildewing stacks of Life magazines from the forties and fifties, we finally unearthed three bright orange industrial-weight extension cords.

"That should do the trick," Dad said, and we set off for the Dickermans' house.

I'd forgotten how dark Monhegan nights could be. In clear weather, you could see three times as many stars as in the city, and the sight of the moon rising over the ocean could inspire even me to poetry. But when clouds obscured the moon and stars, as they did tonight, you could really understand the deep-seated human tendency to fear the dark.

The darkness relented only slightly when we passed by our nearest neighbors, with whom Aunt Phoebe shared her treacherous, muddy little lane. Like Aunt Phoebe, they had only oil lamps and gas appliances. Some residents ran their own small electrical generators--including, apparently, the Dickermans--but these contraptions were noisy and generally less reliable man the old-fashioned alternatives--not to mention so expensive that their owners tended to keep their wattage low to avoid bankruptcy.

The flashlight wasn't much help, and I felt strangely comforted by the luminous glow of Dad's raincoat as he bobbed along ahead of us.

Suddenly, just as we reached the head of the lane, the glow disappeared.

"Dad?" I called, and hurried to reach the point where I'd last seen the glow-in-the-dark raincoat. I tripped over something large and hard and fell flat on my face in the gravel road.

"Your luggage is here," Dad said. The glow hadn't disappeared entirely, I realized; it was now--like me--horizontal.

"Are you two all right?" Michael said, coming up beside us.

"I will be if you take your foot off my hand," I said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't see a thing."

"Damn that little weasel," I said. "He might at least have run the luggage up to the house."

"Maybe he was scared of getting stuck in the mud," Michael suggested.

"Well, we can take it up on the way back," Dad said. "Let's get up to the Dickermans' house before they go to bed."

The Dickermans, to my surprise, were thrilled to have Dad run a power cord down to our house. Of course, Dad had forgotten to mention that this was a commercial arrangement, the Dickermans being the founders and owners of the Central Monhegan Power Company.

"I didn't know Monhegan even had a central power company," I said. "Of course, it's been several years since I've spent much time on the island," I added hastily, seeing the hurt look on Mr. Dickerman's broad, friendly face.

"Well, really it's only one generator," Mr. Dickerman said. "Quite a bit larger than the ones individual households and businesses use, of course."

"And a bit quieter, obviously, if you've got it anywhere around here."

"Oh, it's noisy enough, but we've put it up on Knob Hill," Mr. Dickerman said. "It's pretty much out of the way up there, and the noise doesn't bother folks as much. Jim does most of the work on it; he's always been handy that way, Jim has."

"And so nice that he's found something to do without leaving the island," Mrs. Dickerman put in. She was a sweet, motherly person; I never could figure out how she and her mild-mannered husband had managed to produce so many rowdy and unpleasant sons, at least half a dozen of them. "All my other birds have flown the coop, but Jimmy's happy as a clam, staying here with us, where he can tinker with the generator. Does you good to see how happy he is, up at the electric plant, when he's working on those machines of his."

"Don't forget Fred," Mr. Dickerman put in.

"Fred's only here between jobs," Mrs. Dickerman said. "You remember Jimmy, don't you, Meg?"

I did, actually, with something that approached fondness--he was the one Dickerman of my generation who wasn't loud, extroverted, and an inveterate bully. The worst had been Fred, whom I now recognized as the driver of the truck and kidnapper of our luggage. But Jimmy had been a small, intense, bespectacled little boy, whose main interest in life was taking things apart. He and Dad got along well that way, although, unlike Dad, Jimmy could also put the things back together again. When he felt like it, which was seldom. I wondered how much time the Central Monhegan Power Company's generator ran and how much time it spent disassembled for maintenance, enhancements, and general tinkering.

"Maybe if she sees how useful the electricity can be, Phoebe might see her way clear to hooking on," Mr. Dickerman suggested.

"Maybe," Dad said. "But then again, you know what a traditionalist Phoebe is."

"She is that," Mr. Dickerman agreed. "We could have used her here this spring, when the town council was squabbling over what to do about Victor Resnick's new house."

"Victor Resnick? The landscape artist?" Michael asked.

"That's the one," Mr. Dickerman said. He didn't sound all that fond of the local celebrity, and I suspected Resnick was the Victor Winnie and Binkie Burnham had been so dismayed to see on the docks.

"Monhegan has quite a lot of famous artists," I said aloud. "One of the Wyeths lives here, too; or at least he used to. I forget which one."

"I thought Resnick had moved to Europe," Dad said, frowning.

"Came back last fall and built himself a new house," Mr. Dickerman said. "A real eyesore. Ought to run the bastard off the island."

"Frank!" Mrs. Dickerman scolded.

"Well, they ought to," Mr. Dickerman said.

Dad seemed unusually subdued as he and Mr. Dickerman finished hooking up the extension cord and making the arrangements for payment. He was deep in thought during the whole return trip to the cottage--which wasn't exactly a bad thing. Instead of returning by the road, we had to run the extension cord as directly as possible to Aunt Phoebe's--which meant slogging through the Dickermans' overgrown backyard, followed by a brier-filled gully, and then the cord barely reached the living room. Even in our debilitated state, Michael and I probably managed it much better by ourselves than we would have if Dad had insisted on taking an active hand.

Rob pounced on the cord with glee, hooked up his computer, and began tapping away on the keyboard--though whether he was doing useful work or merely composing an e-mail he could send to Red when the phone lines returned, I had no idea. Dad took advantage of the power supply to hook up his portable CD player and put on his beloved Wagner. And then he scurried out of the room again, after turning up the volume enough that he could hear it from anyplace in the cottage. From anyplace on the island, probably; lucky for us the phones were down, or ours would have rung off the hook with noise complaints.

I glanced at Michael to see how he was taking all this. At least so far, he seemed more amused than annoyed. That was one of Michael's charms: his tolerance for my father's eccentricities seemed as great as mine.

Possibly greater, I thought as the orchestra sank its teeth into a loud, rousing passage of the overture.

The opera was just hitting its stride when the music stopped in the middle of one of Briinnhilde's more appalling shrieks.