by Jen Blood
“Give me time—I’m sure I can do better.”
From the look on Diggs’ face, that was exactly what he was afraid of.
Chapter Two
Diggs and I followed Hammond to the town landing in my car, navigating roads virtually unchanged since I’d been there last. We passed rundown houses in need of paint; stacks of lobster traps and brightly painted buoys in muddy yards; a full parking lot of pickups at the general store, gun racks mounted in the back windows and right-wing propaganda on the bumper stickers.
It was still raining when I inched my Jetta down the steep grade to the landing. I parked, then leaned back in my seat at sight of a harbor filled with fishing boats bobbing on choppy black water. Diggs watched me from the passenger’s seat. I was transported back to afternoons at the newspaper with him, in the days when missing a deadline or misquoting the locals were my biggest worries.
“So, what happened to doing this next month, once spring has a firmer hold on things?”
And I had more time to recover is what he meant.
“I’m fine, Diggs.” I shrugged. “The divorce has been final for a while now—it’s time to move on with my life.”
“I don’t know that a month qualifies as ‘a while,’ technically. I think the boys at Wikipedia say it has to be at least two—maybe longer. And I wasn’t talking about the divorce.” He hesitated. “The baby…”
I looked up sharply. The look on my face must have told him the topic was off limits, because Diggs fell silent.
“I told you, I’m fine. Now, let’s get out there before Noel takes off without us.”
“Yeah, because that’d be a tragedy.”
I got out of the car before Diggs could stall any longer. He held out for maybe sixty seconds, silent and stubborn in the passenger’s seat, before he joined me.
Between the rain and the gray day, it was impossible to make out the shape of even those islands closest to shore. Payson Isle, just over ten miles north-northeast of us, was nowhere to be seen. Hammond got out of a rabid-looking Dodge Ram loaded down with lobster traps, its grill smashed on the left side, and Diggs and I followed him down the slick boards of the town wharf. He stopped at a behemoth fishing boat with Frankenstein’s Bride stenciled on the side in red letters, the body painted bright blue.
For the first time since leaving Boston, I felt something other than the staunch resolve that had fueled me night and day for the past several months. Hammond wasn’t a friend, and he wouldn’t be anxious to spill the secrets I knew he’d been keeping since the Payson fire. Somehow, I’d always pictured this interrogation happening somewhere more secure than on his boat riding stormy seas.
By the time I’d harnessed Einstein into his doggie life preserver—ignoring Diggs’ mockery and Hammond’s rolled eyes—and we’d loaded ourselves and our gear aboard, the storm had all but subsided. I pushed aside my growing unease. We motored out of the harbor with Hammond at the helm, his feet firm on deck and shoulder-width apart, riding the swells. He lit a cigarette and I breathed in the smoke, the smell diluted by the sweetness of the sea and the inescapable scent of bait soaked into the floorboards. I imitated his stance, standing in the doorway of the pilothouse with Diggs behind me.
“Are you really okay?” Diggs asked.
I leaned back and let him take my weight, just for a second or two. “Fine,” I said. “It’ll be good to get on with everything.”
I doubted he believed me—I certainly didn’t buy it. I was on my way to an island on which few had set foot since my father’s body had been discovered hanging from a beam in the old Payson greenhouse, ten years after the fire that had taken everyone else in the Payson congregation. My six-year marriage was over, my body still recuperating from a loss that I had, as yet, refused to even acknowledge. And as soon as I could talk to Hammond without the roar of a diesel engine to drown us out, I knew things would only get more complicated.
So, was I okay?
Somehow, that didn’t matter anymore. I was here. And, one way or another, I wouldn’t leave Littlehope again until I knew the truth about Payson Isle.
◊◊◊◊◊
It took just over an hour to reach the island. Hammond’s boat was too big to dock at the precarious-looking wharf, so he pulled alongside the mooring Diggs had set earlier and dropped anchor. A cute little speedboat waited for us in the water below, dwarfed by Hammond’s thirty-eight-foot Cadillac of a lobster boat, but I wasn’t interested in leaving yet. The engine hummed lower, idling in the waves. Fog hung over everything, the only sign of life a couple of lobster boats in the distance. Einstein sat on my foot. Hammond looked at Diggs, then at the horizon. After he’d avoided me for a solid minute or two, I cleared my throat.
“You’re not coming with us to the island, I take it?” I said.
He shook his head. “I’m on my way out of town—need to get packed.”
“You’re leaving?”
“For a couple weeks. I’ve got some things to take care of back home.”
Silence fell between us, thick with questions Hammond had yet to answer. Diggs watched our exchange curiously, but said nothing.
Finally, Hammond relented. “Maybe we can get together when I get back.”
“Or maybe we can do this now,” I said.
“Okay, I might not be the most intuitive man on the planet, but I’m sensing some tension,” Diggs interrupted. “You mind giving me a little background here?”
Hammond cocked an eyebrow at me. I shrugged. Diggs was bound to find out sooner or later, anyway.
“You remember the stuff I told you about why I’m here?” I asked.
“To retrace the final weeks before the Payson suicide and write a book about your findings.”
I considered that for a moment. It was definitely part of the story—just a fairly small part at this point. “Yeah, well…” I said. “I may have left a few things out.”
Once I’d gotten him up to speed, Diggs stared at me in confusion. I could hardly blame the guy—I’d been equally confused when I saw the photos Noel Hammond had taken at the Payson crime scene twenty-two years ago.
“So, Malcolm Payson leaves the island to you out of nowhere,” Diggs began.
I braced myself for the recap.
“And in with the junk Payson’s lawyer sends to you, you find an envelope with crime scene photos from the fire.”
“Crime scene photos nobody had ever seen before,” I said. “I’ve seen all the original files—they’re not with them.”
“And the name written on the back of a couple of these photos is Noel Hammond,” Diggs kept on. He looked at Hammond. “How do a police detective’s shots of a crime scene just disappear?”
“I guess that’s the question, isn’t it?” I said, shooting my own pointed glare at our noble captain.
“I told you,” Hammond said, his back up. “I wasn’t working the case—I was just on vacation. I used to volunteer with the fire department in town whenever I was up. I responded when the call came in. It was just professional habit to take shots of the scene—they didn’t have anything to do with the investigation.”
Hammond bent down and picked up a clam shell from the deck, absently rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger before he whipped it into the ocean with a flick of his wrist.
“I left a week later,” he continued. “My wife and I went back to Bridgeport, and I didn’t really follow the case after that.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “You never thought to check into it, considering the things you found at the site and the implications you must have known they had? They closed the books on the case after less than a month, saying it was coerced suicide with Isaac Payson to blame. Your photos would have proven them wrong.”
Diggs intervened. “Take it easy, Sol. What exactly was in those photos that was so damning?”
I waited for Hammond to respond. When he didn’t, I knelt and pulled a file folder from my backpack. Diggs studied the 8x10s I handed him.
“
What is that?” he asked, when he came to the second photo.
I looked over his shoulder, though I knew exactly which one had prompted the question. All the photos were black and white, the light good and the images sharp. Hammond had taken more than his share of crime scene photos, if these were any indication. The one Diggs held was of a charred wooden door.
“Is that a…?”
“Padlock,” I confirmed. “A locked padlock. On the outside of the door. Which means Payson’s congregation couldn’t exactly opt out of their little pact, since they probably didn’t lock themselves in from the outside.”
Suddenly, Hammond became inordinately interested in the landscape. He took a pack of Pall Malls from his pocket, then patted down his Carhartts until he found a lighter. Diggs continued studying the photos, but my attention had shifted back to Hammond. He offered me a cigarette, which I accepted. I waited.
Teeth clenched around his cigarette, he inhaled deeply, then spoke with the exhale. “So, what exactly do you want from me? You’ve got the pictures—you know as much as I do.”
“I want to know how nobody ever heard about the padlock,” I said.
“I didn’t know they hadn’t—as far as I knew, they had all the information I did. Wouldn’t have been my place to fill them in on their own investigation.”
Diggs looked up at that. His eyes slid from mine to Hammond’s, his forehead furrowed. “You were a cop—isn’t that what cops do? I don’t care if it’s not your case. This was a key piece of evidence that somehow got missed.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hammond said. The hostility he’d barely subverted up to this point crept through. “I told you on that first phone call—this is ancient history. It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with you.”
“Doesn’t have anything to do with me?” I took a step toward him. “Are you nuts? You think this is just idle curiosity on my part?” The frustration that had been building for the past three months tightened like a corkscrew in my chest. I advanced on Hammond until he was forced to take a step back. “The past twenty years, everything I’ve done, every move I’ve made—”
I stopped. Hammond stared at me with something dangerously close to pity, while Diggs held me back with a hand on my arm.
“Thirty-four people died in a locked chapel that day,” I said. It took some effort to keep my voice even. “No one could do an effective tox screen because there was so little fluid left in the bodies to test, but they found traces of Scopolamine.” Diggs raised an eyebrow in question. “From henbane,” I explained, then hesitated. “My father grew it on the island—anyone would have had access.”
“One person in particular comes to mind,” Hammond said under his breath.
Our eyes met. I tried to read what he knew, thinking back to that day: my father and me racing through a forest of smoke, the church in flames, a pile of burned bodies and debris.…And the cloaked man I’d only told my parents about, repeating the story until my mother insisted I stop, convincing me that he’d been a figment of my imagination; just more fallout from the Payson fire.
“You have a theory you want to share?” I pressed.
I thought for an instant that Hammond would tell me whatever it was he was holding back, but a second later he broke our stalemate and glanced at his watch.
“I need to get back.”
When you’re interviewing someone for a story, there inevitably comes a point when you hit a wall. At that point, no matter how much you plead, how often you rephrase the question or bribe or cajole, the interview is over; your source has dried up. After fifteen years as a reporter, I’d learned to recognize the look in someone’s eyes when they hit that wall. That was the look in Hammond’s eye. Short of handcuffs and water boarding, there wasn’t a thing I could do to get him to stay put and keep talking.
I pushed away everything but the cold, clean air around me. Silence reigned on deck for another few seconds before Diggs spoke up.
“All right—so, we have the story…A very small part of the story, but it’ll get us started. Now what?”
“Now, I find out what really happened,” I said. Hammond wouldn’t meet my eye. “And we start on the island.”
The boat rocked on the waves. Payson Isle was closer to me than it had been since I was a teenager, fog blurring its edges, a study in gray landscape and blue-black sea. Wind-worn evergreens and birches lined the granite shore. From where I stood, just above sea level on a boat that was not my own, the island forest looked impenetrable.
I turned my back on Diggs and Hammond and wrapped my hands around the cold, steel boat railing. The water below was too dark and too deep to see anything in its depths. It made me think of sea monsters and shipwrecks and hauntings—all those things I’d left behind when I graduated high school and abandoned Littlehope. I was older now, ostensibly wiser, but it turned out those superstitions hadn’t completely released their hold on me.
Diggs and I transferred Einstein and my things to the speedboat, and Hammond pulled up anchor and piloted away.
From the mooring, it took Diggs and me all of five minutes to reach Payson Isle. We tied the boat off at the neglected dock and climbed wooden steps that had been driven into the side of the island’s rocky ledges back when my father still called this place home. It was an easier climb than I remembered, and a newly liberated Einstein scrambled past us. Another few yards of rocky terrain and we reached the top, where I found myself at the foot of an overgrown path leading into the woods.
I stood at the top of the cliff looking down at the ocean below. It was just after one o’clock. The sun appeared as a distant white haze behind the fog. Einstein reclaimed his position at my side, while Diggs forged ahead. I had the feeling that he wasn’t satisfied with the answers he’d gotten from Hammond. More than that, though, I knew he was pissed that I hadn’t told him sooner about the pictures—about the real reason I was here. I let him go, hoping he’d burn off some of his anger before our inevitable discussion about all the ways I’d shut him out of my life in the past few months.
The path steepened as we continued our journey. The boarding house that had served as home to the Payson congregation had been built at the highest point on the island, to take advantage of a million-dollar view of the ocean below. The old three-story barn that had doubled as the Payson church, on the other hand, was built with good old-fashioned common sense in mind. It sat in the valley below, where it had been sheltered from high winds and torrential rain for over one hundred years. Its placement, combined with heavy rain the day of the fire, was the only thing that had saved the entire island from going up like a tinderbox.
We were on a dark path, thick with sharp-needled pines and scrub brush, when Diggs slowed his pace. I could tell he was cooling off when he took the time to hold branches out of the way for me. Einstein had his nose pressed to the back of my knee, and showed no inclination to stray. I was trying to see up ahead. Trying to focus. The deeper we got into the woods, the harder the simple act of breathing in and out became.
It wasn’t until we reached the rusted, wrought-iron fence at the head of the boarding house path that our situation sank in. The gate couldn’t have been six feet high—smaller than I remembered it as a child, but still impressive enough to inspire dread. It didn’t close all the way anymore; rather than trying to force it from the mud and partially frozen ground, Diggs and I just squeezed through the opening.
Once we were on the path to the house, Diggs actually tried to start a conversation a couple of times. I wasn’t in the mood for talking, though. I just wanted to move—to feel my legs, burn my lungs with the cold. Shut off my brain, even if it was only for a few minutes. There was a change in the air as we trudged up the steep incline—it seemed warmer, less biting somehow. I chalked it up to the physical exertion and the thick stand of pine and birch shielding us from the wind. Ignoring memories of ghost stories I’d been taunted with as a school kid (There’s a madman on Payson Isle who talks to God and lives
with ghosts…), I finally stopped to catch my breath.
I set my pack down and paused on the trail, doubling over at the waist with my hands on my knees. Diggs turned back when he realized I was no longer behind him. The bastard wasn’t even winded.
“So, I guess you won’t be joining me in the Littlehope Iron Man this year.”
“Not unless you’re carrying me.”
“And you’re smoking.”
I met his gaze with a hard smile. “And apparently you’re not. I’m thirty-three, Diggs. That’s a decade older than you were when you first took me under your well-muscled wing at the Trib. And maybe while I’ve been married you’ve forgotten the places we went and the things we did before I ambled down the aisle, but I haven’t. Don’t play big brother with me.”
My words hit their mark. Diggs’ blue eyes flashed and his strong jaw tensed as he worked to recover his cool. He closed the distance between us. “I haven’t forgotten a thing, ace,” he said quietly. There was something dangerous about the way he looked at me. Despite the cold, I felt my blood begin to warm. I looked away, a dozen memories running in a loop through my mind. Almost none of them were fit for underage viewers.
As though sensing my train of thought, Diggs took a step back. “Hammond’s pictures—those are the reason you went off the reservation three months ago?” he asked. “The reason you and Michael hit the skids?”
“Michael and I hit the skids because he was sleeping with every doe-eyed coed in greater Boston.”
“Okay,” he conceded. A hint of anger slid across his face. Diggs always hated Michael. “But the other stuff—the not sleeping and the not eating and the…thing I’m not supposed to talk about. That was because of the pictures?”
“I don’t want to do this now.”
“But you know we’re gonna do it sometime, right? Come on, Solomon. Twenty-two years, and nobody ever hears about a fairly obvious padlock on the scene of one of the biggest tragedies in Maine history? I’m not a paranoid man, but if that doesn’t scream conspiracy, I don’t know what does.”