He put his shoe back on and began walking again “Mostly they got sold when the hippies went back to Wall Street or Julliard or wherever. Some people went native and stayed here. There’s three or four folks around Burnt Harbor. Here on Paswegas it’s just Toby and Ray, I think. One or two guys on the outer islands, but they’re not people you want to mess with. I’m talking about guys who live in old school buses and survive on blocks of government cheese.”
“And Allen’s Coffee Brandy.”
“And Allen’s Coffee Brandy,” Gryffin agreed. “Old Toby, now, he’s just a few steps ahead of them—he lives on rum and Moxie. He keeps an apartment here down by the harbor, but he stays on his boat until the weather gets really bad.”
“What about this guy Denny?”
He fell silent.
“He’s a burnout,” he said at last.
I waited, and after a minute he went on. “The winters were too hard for most of them, so they split. The ones who stayed tended either to be the most together, like Toby, or the most burned out. Like Denny. Lucien Ryel, he was together. Together enough not to live here year-round, anyway. You know who he is? He owns an island not too far off.”
“Yeah, I gather he’s a local celebrity.”
Gryffin laughed. “Who told you that? Toby? Around here, someone hires you and his check clears, he’s a celebrity. Lucien’s more like another has-been. We have a lot of them, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“What about you?”
“I’m a never-tried-to-be-something.”
We were high on the seaward side of the island now, near a line of misshapen firs that formed a bit of windbreak. They leaned away from the water crashing far below, as though trying to flee from it. Beside the trees were two huge boulders. Gryffin walked toward them and gestured for me to follow.
“See that?” He stopped and pointed across the reach to a long shadow that seemed to hover just above the water’s surface. “That’s Lucien’s island. Tolba Island. That means “turtle” in the Passamaquoddy language.”
I squinted, but distance and sea-haze made it hard to get a fix on the place. I popped the lens cap from my camera and focused, took a few shots then lowered it again. “It doesn’t look like a turtle to me.”
“Yeah, me neither. I guess when you’re on it, it does. I wouldn’t know—I’ve never been there. Toby says he’s got a whole compound—recording studio, main house, hermit’s cave…”
“A cave? Really?”
“No. That’s just what Toby calls it. It’s where the caretaker lives. Denny.”
“I thought Toby was the caretaker?”
“Toby? No. Toby did a lot of the work, but he’s never lived there. And Lucien lives in Berlin—he only comes here for a week or two in the summer. He wanted Toby to stay out on the island and watch the place for him, but Toby said no. So he got Denny to do it.”
“Better than living on a bus,” I suggested.
“Yeah, I guess.” Gryffin gave me a resigned look. “Denny was the guy started the commune. He was around our house all the time when I was little. He and my mother, they had a thing. It ended badly.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. When I was really little, I was always scared of him. When I got a little older he was gone, but by then I thought he was, like, Charles Manson. I could never figure out what the appeal was, for my mother and everyone else.”
I thought of Phil. This guy she was involved with, he and I did a little business, back in the day.
“Probably he had really good drugs,” I said.
Gryffin nodded. “I remember at Putney, this girl—big druggy—she died of an overdose. When they did the autopsy, the medical report said her brain looked like a Swiss cheese. And I thought, Christ, Denny Ahearn’s brain looks like that and he’s still alive.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to the girl from the motel.”
“Drugs?” Gryffin shook his head. “I doubt it. Not Kenzie.”
“No. This Denny guy. Maybe he kidnapped her or something.”
“Uh-uh. Denny never leaves the island. I mean, he might come over once or twice a year to get some groceries, but that’s it. Toby brings him whatever he needs when he’s out there provisioning Lucien. Denny’s a total hermit. I mean, he’s just sane enough to be on this side of AMHI.”
“AMHI?”
“Augusta Mental Health Institution. State loony bin. If he were down in Portland or someplace like that, he’d probably be on the street. But here—well, he’s pretty normal.”
“Normal?” I stared at him in disbelief. “Ever hear of Stephen King? I mean, you were the one who brought up Charles Manson.”
Gryffin looked exasperated. “You’re from away, so you don’t get it. Half the guys in Maine look like Charles Manson. Especially here down east. There’s a lot of survivalist types living off in the woods; you can’t go arresting them every time someone wanders off the Appalachian Trail. If you could even find them.”
“But you know right where Denny is.”
“Yeah, and it’s a good place for him.” He stared out at the bulk of Tolba Island. “Guys like Denny, maybe they know what’s best for them. Stay away from the rest of us. Some people just don’t play well with others. If they want to hide and waste their lives, that’s their business.”
I didn’t say anything, just stood beside him, gazing at the water. After a minute I peered at his face.
“What?” he demanded.
“The green ray.” I extended my finger. He flinched, and I stopped, my finger hovering an inch from his cheekbone. “There—in your eye. That weird speck of green. I’ve never seen that before.”
“Pigment. Too much melanin. Like a freckle, only in my iris.”
“It’s weird. It’s kind of beautiful.”
“That’s your beer talking. Come on, I’m starving.”
We walked to Aphrodite’s house. The day suddenly felt old. The sun was already sliding down toward the western horizon, and as we approached the house it all seemed plunged in shadow. I was hungry now too, and tired.
“I’m going to crash after I eat,” I said as we went into the kitchen. The house was silent, with no trace of Aphrodite or the dogs. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“I’ll get you set for a nap after lunch. Sit.”
He cleared aside the papers on the table by the window. We ate without talking. When we were done he cleared the plates, then said, “Okay. I’ll show you the guest room. Then I’ve got to make some phone calls and do some work.”
“What about your mother?”
“What about her? She’s either schnockered or out in the woods with the dogs. She’ll be back at some point. Maybe after you have your little nap the two of you can trade hangover remedies,” he said angrily. “She drives me nuts. She always has. We’ve never really gotten along.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “You want to know the truth? If I were you, I’d just leave and go back to the city. Even if she’d known you were coming, even if you had brought a tape recorder—she would have found some way out of it. And that—?”
He pointed at my camera. “Not in a million years.”
I stared at the table. I still hadn’t paid Toby for bringing me out; it couldn’t cost much more to have him bring me back to Burnt Harbor. If I left early the next morning, I could be home by tomorrow night. I wouldn’t be out much more money, or time, and I’d have the rest of the week to—
To what? Scream at Phil? Drink myself to sleep or shuffle around the clubs looking for music and someone to go home with?
That wasn’t going to happen. The clubs were gone. I had a better chance of getting laid here in Bumfuck than on the Lower East Side. I had the Rent-A-Wreck for the rest of the week, but not enough money to do something interesting with it.
And there was still the minor matter of Phil Cohen. No matter that he’d screwed this up, he would give me grief and almost certainly do his part to make sure everyone within the T
ri-state radius thought it was my fault.
“Shit, I dunno.” I looked up at Gryffin. “Listen, would there be a problem with me staying overnight? I mean, this editor arranged this for me, and I don’t really want to bail and go back without anything to show him. I’ll keep a low profile,” I added. “Just for a day or two.”
Gryffin sighed. “I guess we can see what she says. Get your stuff, and I’ll show you the guest room; you can sleep or read or whatever. Check how your Nokia stock’s performing.”
He led me back upstairs. We went past the room with Aphrodite’s islandscapes, into a narrow ell that led to one of those jerry-built additions, its floor uneven and the windows mismatched.
“Remember what I was telling you about the folks at Oakwind having no idea what they were doing when it came to architecture and building? This is Exhibit A.” Gryffin waved in disgust at the walls. “Denny built this—my wing of the house, including the guest room. And if you think it’s bad now, you should have seen it back then. Snow blew right through the cracks in the walls; there’d be two-inch drifts in here. Nothing was plumb—you could set down a bowling ball at one end of the hall and it would roll to the other. Toby had to come in and basically rebuild it. So it’s still kind of funky, but—”
He stopped and opened a door. “You will find no snow in your sleeping quarters.”
No heat, either, that I could detect, but I was afraid to push my luck by mentioning that. The room was under the eaves. There was a bed with a white coverlet, a nightstand and lamp, a ladderback chair and small chest of drawers. Braided rug on the floor, a window overlooking evergreens and gray rocks.
“It’s fine.” I dumped my bag on the bed. “Thanks.”
Gryffin bent to feel the baseboard heater. “This isn’t on. And I forgot the space heater. Well, you’ll be okay for a while. If you stay, I’ll bring you the heater before you go to bed tonight, how’s that? But now I have to get some work done. Bathroom’s down the hall, there should be hot water. See you later.”
He left. I grabbed a change of clothes and found the bathroom. More mismatched windows, a cracked skylight that had become a morgue for moths and flies, clawfoot tub, rust-stained sink.
But there was a nice Baruch rug on the pine floor, and expensive Egyptian cotton towels, and a block of Marseille soap in a brass holder by the tub. All of which led me to peg Gryffin as a closet sensualist.
I took a long bath. There was plenty of hot water. When I was done I dressed, keeping my expensive jeans but upgrading to a clean black T-shirt. Then I went back to my room, crawled under the blankets, and passed out.
It was late afternoon when I woke. The light seeping through the windows had that trembling clarity you get in early winter, when there are no leaves to filter it and the clouds are the same color as the sky. I exhaled and watched the air fog above my mouth. Then I got out of bed, went to the bathroom and washed my face. I raked my fingers through my hair and confronted the mirror.
I looked like shit. For the last few decades I’d coasted on good bone structure and good teeth. Right now those were the only things I still had going for me. With my ash-streaked hair and sunken eyes, I looked like a bad angel scorched by the fall to earth. I bared my teeth at my reflection and stepped back into the hall.
The door to Gryffin’s room was shut. I knocked on it softly. No reply. I went inside, closing the door behind me.
The room wasn’t bigger than mine, though less monastic. There was a more elaborate rug on the floor, a nice Mission-style bed, carelessly made with plaid blankets and a heap of pillows. Dark curtains, half drawn. A small desk with the now-empty computer case I’d seen in his motel room. An open suitcase holding flannel shirts and jeans. A few framed photos on the walls—a fishing trip, friends from Putney, graduation from Bowdoin College. On the desk a heavy old brass candlestick with a thick pillar candle and a Gauloises matchbox; on the windowsill some smooth gray rocks and the carapace of a box turtle.
I went to the bed, pulled back the covers, and ran my fingers across the sheets. No protective plastic here—the bedding was fancy cotton, soft as suede, or skin. Christine had loved expensive sheets too. She’d tried to buy some for me, but I wouldn’t let her.
“Why?” she demanded. “This is crazy, Cass. Your sheets are like sandpaper! You sleep on nice sheets at my place.”
I hadn’t said anything. She wouldn’t have understood. It was crazy. It was like not having a cell phone or a digital camera. The discomfort, the annoyance, reminded me that I was alive. It kept me from feeling completely numb, even as it kept me detached.
Christine had kept me human, barely. I knew that, and it scared me. Sometimes when she’d touched me I’d felt like I was burning, like her bed was on fire. I still felt like that sometimes when I thought of her.
I picked up one of Gryffin’s pillows and buried my face in it. It smelled of some grassy shampoo, and faintly of male sweat. It had been a long time since I’d been close enough to a man to smell him. I stood for a moment with my face pressed against the pillow. Then I lay on the bed, pillow crushed to me so I could breathe in his scent, and masturbated, thinking of the way he’d looked in the photo, that green-flecked eye.
Afterward I smoothed the coverlet and headed back to my room. I thought about getting my camera, decided to leave it. I hadn’t brought much film with me. I pulled on Toby’s sweater and went downstairs.
The house had a strange, late-afternoon calm. Chilly hallways, dead bluebottles on the windowsills; the dull ache, somewhere between anticipation and disappointment, of knowing night was almost here. In the living room a deerhound curled on the couch like a gigantic dormouse, snoring. No other dogs. No Aphrodite. Not much heat coming from the woodstove, though I could see a dull glow through the soot-covered window.
I found Gryffin at the kitchen table, bent over his laptop. He waved tersely at me without looking up. I crossed to the refrigerator and peered inside.
A container of skim milk, another of V-8 juice; eggs and a bag of coffee. Breakfast wasn’t just the most important meal of the day around here. It was the only meal.
“I’m going to the store,” I announced. “You want anything?”
“Me? Uh, no,” Gryffin said distractedly. “Thanks.”
Outside, chickadees fluttered in the trees. Something rustled in the dead leaves of an oak then made a loud rattling sound as I passed. It didn’t seem as cold, despite looming shadows and a steady wind off the water.
Or maybe it was like my grandmother always said: You can get used to anything, even hanging. I remembered Phil’s words—all that bleak shit you like? Well, this is it.
He was right. It made me feel the way the Lower East Side used to make me feel, before the boutiques and galleries and families moved in and the clubs closed and the place became just another sewage pipe for American currency and overpriced clothes. I loved the way it used to be, loved that edge, the sense that the ground beneath me could give way at any time and I’d go hurtling down into the abyss. I had fallen, more than once, but I’d always caught myself before I smashed against the bottom. Back in the day, of course, I was out there taking pictures of people who weren’t so lucky. It was terrifying, but it was also exhilarating.
Now all that had changed. Now there were clean wide sidewalks over the pit. Making my chump change last from week to week for twenty-odd years was no longer a sign of being a survivor. It was further proof, not that any was needed, that I was a fuckup.
I was still managing to be a fuckup here, of course. But I was starting to like it. It seemed a good place to be, if you needed something to slice through the scar tissue so you could feel your own skin. At the moment, the cold was doing a pretty good job of that. I zipped my jacket and shoved my hands into my pockets, wind at my back. That beer had been good. Some Jack Daniel’s would be better.
I walked through the woods. A small animal burred angrily from a tree. I stopped, thinking of the fisher Toby had mentioned, looked up and saw a red squirrel glarin
g down at me. I chucked a pine cone at it and went on.
There was no one in the Island Store when I arrived, just the big Newfoundland lying in front of the counter. The air smelled good, garlic and tomatoes cutting through the underlying odors of beer and pizza. Dub music thumped from the kitchen. The dog stood and yawned then followed me as I went to the back room and got another beer from the cooler. When I returned to the counter Suze stood there. She slid a carton of cigarettes behind a Plexiglas window, then locked it.
“Going for another pounder?” She pronounced it poundah. At my blank look she picked up the beer and held it in front of my face. “Sixteen ounces?”
“Yeah. And two pints of Jack Daniel’s.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’m on the South Bend Diet.”
“Too quiet for you here?” She dragged over the ladder and got my bottle from the shelf. “Coming from the big city?”
“Seems busy to me. That girl disappearing. Bodies washing up on the beach.”
“Aw, that happens all the time. The bodies, I mean. Often enough, anyway. The hungry ocean, it’s a dangerous business.” She took my money, put the bottles in a paper bag and pushed it across the counter to me. When I started to remove the beer, she shook her head. “You can’t drink that in here.”
Before I could retort, she motioned behind her. “But you can drink it out here.”
I followed her into the kitchen. She grabbed a coffee mug then kicked open a battered wooden door, letting in a blast of wintry air and revealing a rickety set of steps. One of the rails was broken, and there was only room for two people to stand side by side. But it had a commanding view of a dumpster and a propane tank and, past a ragged scrim of stone buildings and faded clapboard, the harbor. Suze leaned against the intact railing, leaving me to stand with my back to the door.
“Yeah, Mackenzie.” She cupped the mug in her hands. “John Stone called me a little while ago—county sheriff—I guess they’re waiting till tomorrow to officially call it a missing persons case.”
I popped my beer. “Isn’t that kind of a long time to wait? If they’re really worried?”
“That’s what I said.” Suze nodded vehemently. “I asked him why this wasn’t an Amber Alert—they practically shut down 95 and close the Canadian border if that happens—but he said she’s too old. Under fifteen, that’s the cutoff date. Older’n that, you’re screwed. And the local authorities, they don’t have a lot of manpower. So they don’t like going off on a wild-goose chase, which is what John Stone thinks this is.”
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