Murder With Puffins

Chapter 4

A Portrait of the Puffin as a Young Man

In the sudden absence of Wagner, we heard Aunt Phoebe's voice bellowing in the kitchen.

"Never would have come out here in the first place if we'd had any idea we'd run into that son of a--"

"Sshh!" Mrs. Fenniman hissed, and then, a little louder, she called out, "What happened to the power?"

"Oh dear," Mother said, looking up from her magazine. "Not the generator already?"

"I hope I can save in time," Rob said, fingers flying over the keyboard.

"Maybe someone tripped over the cord," I said. "We should go see if--"

"Damnation!" came a voice just outside the windows.

"I don't think you'll have to go far," Michael remarked.

The music came back on, almost drowning out the loud footsteps stomping up the porch steps. Carrying Michael's and my suitcases, Dad appeared in the doorway with blood running down his face from a cut on the top of his head.

"James! What happened?" Mother cried, leaping up.

"Tripped over the extension cord," Dad said. "Don't fuss; it's not serious. Scalp wounds do bleed a lot."

"The suitcases," Michael said, rushing over to take our luggage from Dad. "I'm so sorry; I forgot they were there. I should have gone back for them."

"Not to worry," Dad said. He picked up his black doctor's bag and scurried off to clean up his cut, with Mother trailing in his wake.

Dad brushed off all our attempts at sympathy.

"I'll be fine," he said when he returned, sporting a picturesque dressing on his head. "I'll just sit here and listen to my Wagner and I'll feel better in no time."

After that, of course, guilt prevented us from even asking him to turn it down a little.

Dad hummed and conducted with his fork quite happily for what seemed like an eternity but must have been only an hour or two. Fortunately, before the neighbors showed up at our door bearing torches, like the villagers in a bad horror movie, the power went out again.

"Probably just someone else tripping over the extension cords," Dad said.

We waited for a few minutes, but no sounds of cursing came from the yard.

"I suppose I'll have to follow the line up to the Dickermans," Dad said with a sigh.

"I don't think so," I said, peering out a window. "The Dickermans' house is dark. And listen."

Everyone cocked their heads and listened intently for a few seconds.

"I don't hear anything," Mother said finally. "Just the wind."

"That's just it," I said. "I've heard this persistent rhythmic humming noise ever since we got to the island. I thought the hurricane was doing it but now I realize it's the generator."

"She's right," Aunt Phoebe said. "I've complained to the town council about that noise. You don't notice it as much when a hurricane's approaching, but in normal weather, it's a menace. Much more peaceful like this, when the generator stops."

Deprived of his Wagner, Dad decided he was tired, and Mother agreed that perhaps an early night would be a good idea. Since by my calculations they'd covered more than three thousand miles by plane, boat, and automobile over the last forty-eight hours, I wasn't surprised. And the thought occurred to me that if the rest of the family got tired and went to bed, Michael and I might still rescue some shreds of our romantic evening by the fire.

Unfortunately, no one else seemed the slightest bit fatigued. Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman were still out in the kitchen, cooking under the soft glow of the oil lamps. Rob wandered about restlessly for a while. Eventually, I could hear him opening the trapdoor and letting down the ladder to the attic. He scuffled around up there for a while, then reappeared with an armload of old volumes.

"What are those?" Michael asked.

"Photo albums that Aunt Phoebe likes to keep around at the cottage," Rob said. "She says when people have electricity, they're too busy with TV and computers and stuff to look at old photos."

"Well, she's right, isn't she?" Michael said. "What were you doing before the power went out?"

Rob shrugged sheepishly and picked up an album.

"Actually, Rob usually does spend time with the photo albums," I said. "It must be the charm of seeing variations on your own face, wearing so many old-fashioned hairdos and clothes, Rob."

"You could be right," Rob said. "Look at this. Great-Uncle Christopher."

He held up a picture. But for the handlebar mustache and dandified Edwardian clothes, you could easily have mistaken it for a picture of Rob.

"He looks rather dashing in the uniform on the next page, too," Michael said. "World War One?"

"Yes," Rob said, assuming a solemn air. "Poor Uncle Christopher!"

"He never came back?" Michael said. Rob shook his head and sighed, as if the whole thing were a tragedy from which the family had never recovered.

"Yes," I said. "Killed in a brawl in a French bordello, apparently; though they made up something else to tell his mother."

Michael laughed, and Rob looked as insulted as if I'd impugned his character, instead of that of our late and little-lamented great-uncle. He pointedly buried his face in the album. Michael picked up another volume and began to flip through it.

"Don't you enjoy the albums, too?" he asked. "Seeing your face through history and all that?"

"I suppose I would, but apparently I look like Dad's side of the family," I said. "None of the pictures look much like me."

I didn't mention the other reason: that looking in the albums usually triggered a temporary but acute resurgence of the inferiority complex I'd fought all my life. Far too many of my female ancestors had been tall, thin, aristocratic blondes, like Mother, and the albums contained far too many pictures of them surrounded by the swarms of beautiful, wealthy, and sometimes famous men who'd courted them.

The album Michael had picked up, for instance. Looking over his shoulder, I could see that it held hundreds of photos from the late forties and early fifties, all neatly arranged and held in place with old-fashioned black paper photo corners. The early pictures, featuring the angelic preadolescent Mother, were bad enough. But looking at her at thirteen, when she'd already acquired a figure and a flock of admirers, I could feel myself fighting off those old feelings of inadequacy.

It helps a little that none of the men were as gorgeous as Michael is, I thought, looking fondly at him and curling a little closer. And that many of them ought not to have allowed themselves to be photographed in swimsuits, although I suppose I was applying today's fitness standards to bodies not considered unattractive fifty years ago. Perhaps the kind of lean, tanned, muscular body modern women consider attractive in a man would have been a dead giveaway, back in those more class-conscious times, that its owner earned his living from some kind of badly paid manual labor.

But still; seeing picture after picture of Mother surrounded by half a dozen obviously smitten men--well, it got depressing. And the occasional suitor whose face appeared a little too often, who always wangled a place right beside Mother in the group shots, who occasionally managed to ditch the crowd and have his picture taken with Mother, as a couple--for some reason, they made me anxious. I couldn't help wondering if but for some strange accident or other, she might have married one of them. And where would I be then?

"I think some of them have fallen out," Michael said, coming to a page with several empty sets of corners.

"More likely, they're pictures Mother considered unflattering," I said. The other nearby pictures were all of Mother posing in a two-piece bathing suit. While the suit looked demure enough by today's standards, I suspected that forty-odd years ago, it had been daring enough to give my grandfather conniption fits.

We stayed up for a while, looking at the albums--at least Rob and Michael were looking, and I was half-dozing against Michael's shoulder. Even after Rob yawned his way upstairs with an album under his arm, Mrs. Fenniman and Aunt Phoebe kept bustling in and out of the living room at frequent intervals to make sure Michael and I weren't getting ill. Michael finally said good night. He found about a dozen excuses to pop back downstairs when everything seemed quiet, but we finally gave up trying to find a few moments alone together and said an awkward good night, with Mrs. Fenniman at our elbows, pressing cough lozenges into our hands.

If I hadn't been doomed to spend the night on the sofa, I'd have felt very sorry for Michael. He was sharing with Rob what we referred to as "the children's room"--a former walk-in closet fitted with a set of rickety bunk beds half a foot too short for either of them. Far from ideal, but since no one could reasonably expect Aunt Phoebe or Mrs. Fenniman to scramble into an upper bunk, they were stuck with it.

I made a bed for myself on the less lumpy of the two living room sofas. But I didn't get to sleep right away. Mrs. Fenniman and Aunt Phoebe continued their culinary efforts until well past midnight. Either they planned to invite the whole island over very soon or they expected to be stranded for a very long time. Both prospects appalled me.

They kept trying to talk me into sleeping on a floor pallet in their room. Since Aunt Phoebe's snoring had helped inspire my flight from Yorktown, and Mrs. Fenniman was just as bad, I resisted their suggestions with every argument I could muster, including the pretense that I still felt dizzy from the ferry and didn't want to risk the stairs, which let me in for another round of foul-tasting herbal remedies.

They finally tramped up to bed, still arguing about whether Hurricane Maude or Hurricane Ethel had been the most devastating storm to hit the island in previous years. After another hour or so of people stumbling in and out of the bathroom, dropping their flashlights, barking their shins on things, and swearing with varying degrees of verbal ingenuity, the house finally settled down and I dropped off to sleep.

I'd probably gotten a whole hour's sleep by the time the Central Monhegan Power Company's generator started up again. And I'd have slept through that easily if Dad, while trying to turn his Wagner off, hadn't turned the CD player's volume dial the wrong way and cranked it up to the maximum.

My second awakening of the morning was quieter, although no less nerve-racking. I woke up realizing that I needed to go to the bathroom. Luckily, before I leapt off the sofa, I noticed a small, warm weight lying on top of me. Spike.

Because I'd once rescued him from dire peril, Spike had decided I was the one person in the world he liked, other than Mrs. Waterston. Unfortunately, since his memory was as bad as his temper, Spike periodically forgot who Mrs. Waterston and I were. Which made him more dangerous to us than to the people he didn't like. At least they could keep their distance. He was always trying to climb into our laps to be petted, which brought us within easy chewing distance when he suddenly decided to mistake us for the dreaded mail carrier.

Mrs. Waterston took this a lot more philosophically than I did. Why couldn't Michael's mother have adopted a cat, for heaven's sake, instead of an overbred nine-pound dust mop?

I knew from experience that Spike was a lot more likely to bite you if you woke him up suddenly than if you let him wake up at his own pace. And you learned to give him a wide berth for the first hour or two, until he'd had his walk and his breakfast.

I lay there, growing increasingly uncomfortable as Spike slumbered, unbelievably loud snores issuing from his tiny pushed-in nose. Finally, around dawn, he heard Aunt Phoebe rattling pans in the kitchen and ran off to see if it was raining food in there.

"You look tired," Michael said over breakfast.

"'The Ride of the Valkyries' is not my idea of a lullaby," I said, frowning at Dad. "It's a wonder I have any hearing left, as loud as that damned thing was."

"Remarkable speakers, aren't they?" Dad said.

"Hurry up with breakfast," I whispered to Michael. "We need to talk."

"Okay," Michael said--a little too loudly, for he found he'd agreed to a second helping of Mrs. Fenniman's undercooked grits.

"Well, the damned storm's stalled again," Mrs. Fenniman announced.

"Is the ferry running?" Rob asked.

"I said stalled, not gone away," Mrs. Fenniman replied. "Just close enough to keep the ferry from running, but not close enough to bother us much. Not yet anyway. Looks like we'll have good weather for another day."

I glanced out at the gray sky and the faint but steady drizzle. Yes, this would be Mrs. Fenniman's idea of good weather.

Michael and I managed to escape the house without anyone else tagging along, although Dad insisted that we each shoulder a backpack filled with several pounds of survival gear that we might need if we got lost for a few weeks. And Aunt Phoebe gave us a long list of errands she wanted us to run down in the village.

"You'd think the village was in Siberia," I complained as we finally escaped down the lane. "It's not as if it would take them ten minutes to walk down here themselves."

"If it keeps them happy," Michael said. He looked a lot more rested than I felt, and when he shook the water out of his hair, he resembled a hunk from a commercial for deodorant soap. I could feel my hair, initially frizzy from the damp, being matted down by the rain; no doubt I'd soon resemble a drowned rat.

"How did you sleep?" I asked.

"Your brother snores," he said.

"So does Spike."

"Spike doesn't talk in his sleep."

"Did Rob say anything interesting?"

"No, and if I hear another word about Lawyers from Hell…"

"I'm really sorry," I said. "It's all my fault; I should never have suggested coming here."

"Let's make a deal," Michael said. "I won't blame you for anything that goes wrong if you promise to stop apologizing for bringing me here. After all, if my damned car hadn't had those two flats, we might have spotted them before boarding the ferry the day before yesterday, and we could have changed our plans and found a bed-and-breakfast on the mainland."

"It's a deal," I said.

"So let's go down to the grocery store and see if they still have any of the things your aunt wants."

"We should probably hit both grocery stores," I said as we squelched down the road.

"Both grocery stores? How can an island this small possibly support two grocery stores?"

"The two of them together are smaller than a Seven-Eleven back home. And they serve slightly different clientele. There's the upscale grocery store--in that salmon pink building with the turquoise trim," I said, pointing down the road. "Caters more to the artists and the summer people; probably does a lot less business this time of year. Sells Brie and whole-grain bread from an organic bakery on the mainland. Nice selection of wines. The place that looks like a bait shop is the other grocery. More like a general store, really. Bologna and Wonder Bread, and a good variety of beers. They do a lot more steady year-round business, I should think."

"Let's start with the down-to-earth place," Michael said. "There's something obscenely decadent about eating Brie in the eye of a hurricane."

Decadent or not, it sounded perfectly lovely to me, but Michael was obviously getting into the spirit of things, roughing it here on the island, so I didn't argue.

"Actually, since we already have more food than we'll ever eat, I thought we could leave the grocery store till later." I said. "Maybe we should start with our other mission."

"Other mission?"

"Finding you a room of your own. One without a roommate."

"One where I might possibly entertain a friend without being interrupted every five minutes to drink another cup of herbal tea?" he said, raising one eyebrow.

"You've got the idea."

"I like the way you think," he said.