by Sarah Graves
“Excellent,” said Ellie. Then:
“So why d’you suppose Henry Hadlyme wanted to film in our store, particularly?”
I slid onto the other chair at the helm, trying to tell myself that this really wasn’t too bad. Owing to her excellent boat-handling skills, we were already two-thirds of the way home.
But now we were approaching the Old Sow. “No idea,” I said, eyeing the swirling turbulence on the water ahead. “He seemed upset, though, didn’t he?”
I braced myself as alongside us Tim kept bailing like a madman. Now I understood why Ellie had lashed him to our hull instead of towing him behind us: if he started sinking, she wanted to be able to cut him loose efficiently before his boat could drag us down, too.
“And he sure didn’t like it when I wanted to know why he’d come here,” I added, and then we hit it: the hugest, most boat-devouringly treacherous whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere.
Oh great, I thought, feeling the first tug of the massively powerful whirlpool currents. But Ellie only shrugged, unfazed as the water muscled us around like a giant bully.
“Something fishy about that guy,” she said, pushing the throttle again.
To get us through this quicker, I hoped. The Old Sow whirlpool was a no-kidding force of nature, and being in its clutches wasn’t fun unless you had a death wish.
“I mean, what did he think, that what he said at the Crab last night wouldn’t be all over town by morning?”
Which, of course, it had been; that’s how we’d heard about it.
Over on his own boat, Tim had switched from bailing to pumping with a hand pump. Unfortunately, the rough seas hurled water back into his vessel nearly as fast as he could remove it.
“I’m not sinking, though,” he cried defiantly, letting out a wild laugh. “So, you know, I’ve got that going for me!”
Ellie smiled slightly, not taking her eyes off the water ahead. Amidst the whirlpool’s swirls, a wide patch of unnaturally calm water stretched before us, small eddies in its surface turning lazily.
Deceptively. The first unsteady lurch of the boat made me grip my chair; the second slid me off it, down onto the deck.
Feet first, luckily. “Whoa!” yelled Tim from his boat, the grin spreading wider on his face. “Ride ’em, cowboy!”
Which was just about what it felt like. “Ellie?” I ventured as the Bayliner chugged through the turbulence, bobbing and weaving.
“Uh-huh,” she replied. “I know. We’ll be fine, Jake.” But then:
“About Hadlyme, though,” she said. “What should we do if he does try to come back into the shop, do you think?”
Another lurch delivered yet another shock to my poor nervous system.
“Because we can’t have his sourpuss act in The Chocolate Moose,” she went on. “He’ll scare off the customers.”
Personally, I was about a quarter inch from getting scared right off this boat; the only thing stopping me was that the alternative was so much worse. But then suddenly we were getting spat out of the whirlpool, finally, and all the lurching and swerving subsided.
“I really don’t want him filming in there,” I agreed, climbing back onto my chair as Ellie aimed us across the last half mile of the water toward the Eastport boat basin.
“So we can’t let him do it just to shut him up. He could make us look terrible in his podcast, too,” I added as we made our way back through the lobster buoys bobbing outside the breakwater entrance.
Tim’s boat was still tied securely to us, Ellie’s ropework holding fine, and to my surprise neither Tim nor his vessel seemed much the worse for wear. On the other hand, we still had to get him to the dock, and with that barge forming such a narrow channel just inside the boat basin it seemed impossible.
But Ellie took it in stride. The barge slid by on one side, so close that I could see the orange paint curls peeling off it, and the wharf with its ancient pilings all blackened and dripping slid by on the other, while beside us Tim sat cross-legged on the deck of his little motorboat, arms folded, lord of all he surveyed.
A hard right turn—starboard, Ellie called it—then a weave-and-a-bobble and . . . bump! He was up against his own dock, scampering off his vessel. We backed away, then pulled forward into Ellie’s own spot at the finger pier: easy-peasey.
That is, it was easy when she was doing it; despite her urging, I’d never overcome my nervousness about docking the Bayliner myself. She shut down the engine as I let out a relieved sigh.
Tim stuck out a hand. “Ellie, I thank you kindly.”
“Think nothing of it.” Her hand vanished in his grip.
“I know you’d do the same for me. That’s why Tim and I have each other’s cell phone numbers,” she added to me. “For just this kind of an emergency.”
I thought she deserved much more fanfare after what she’d done. But then I noticed the men on the various fishing boats and on the docks, too, shooting small glances of silent approval her way. And since this from a hard-to-impress downeast Maine mariner is the equivalent of a standing ovation, I felt satisfied.
Ellie shoved her sunglasses up onto her head, going through the Bayliner’s shutdown checklist: radio—it took another hand-smack to get it to turn off—battery, GPS, and finally the engine’s trim. As the dripping propeller rose up from the water, I ate another chocolate frosted doughnut and watched the pirates competing in the walk-the-plank contest, now going on over at the fish pier.
The narrow plank set up for the contest stuck straight out over the harbor; also, it was greased, to make the whole thing a little more sporting. A splash followed by laughter and applause signaled yet another dunking. Then a fiddle somewhere nearby began rollicking through a jig, with pennywhistle accompaniment.
“Hi, Mom!” My son, Sam, waved from shore at me; tall and dark-haired, physically he was the spitting image of his biological father but utterly unlike him otherwise, I’m delighted to report. With him were his pretty black-haired wife, Mika, and their son, Ephraim, now bouncing happily in his stroller and waving a stuffed toy.
“Hi, kids!” I called back, and then a cannon boomed, making me jump; it was a reproduction weapon without any cannonballs in it, I happened to know, on account of my husband, Wade Sorenson, being the festival’s firearms expert.
Still, it was loud. My eardrums were still fluttering from the noise when Ellie’s mouth started moving.
“What?” I cupped my hands behind my ears and squinted.
She leaned in. “I’m going home! Lee’s in the soapbox derby!” Like the greasy-plank contest, it was yet another Eastport festival tradition. “I said I’d watch!” she added.
The idea of the kids in their home-built carts rocketing down Washington Street and around the sharp turn onto Water Street at the bottom filled me with fright: they wore helmets, of course, but their little skulls were still as fragile as eggs....
I was happy to have an excuse not to witness it. “All right!” I shouted before I realized that she could hear me just fine. “I’ll go back to the shop, then, and clean up.”
And maybe make a few more sales, too, I thought as she departed, since the pirates seemed to like our bakery goodies a great deal.
But by now it was nearly noon, and the pungent aromas of hot dogs, french fries, and onion rings floated from Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand, a small red-painted hut located at the breakwater’s entrance.
Despite the doughnuts I’d eaten, I felt starved; these watery near-death experiences will do that to you, I guess. So I headed for the hut, brushing between buccaneers and rascals of all shapes and sizes, strolling the breakwater in their costumes.
But my hopes of refreshment were dashed when, as I approached the lunch joint’s wooden counter, a familiar voice sounded in my ear.
An angry voice. “Jake Tiptree?” it demanded.
A hand gripped my arm, turning me, and of course I didn’t wrench it away and shove my elbow into the nose of the voice’s owner; why, I just adore having my arm grabbed.
Because of course it was him. He knew it was me, too, and from the sound of him he wasn’t done with our fight.
“I want a word with you.” Still gripping my elbow, he marched me along, past the hot dog stand and up onto Water Street.
“Yes, and when I grow up, I want a pony,” I snarled, this time yanking away from him.
By now we were in front of the big old granite post office building on the corner of Water and Washington Streets. “I told you, you’re not filming in—”
The Chocolate Moose, I was about to finish, but his bellow of outrage interrupted me.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so difficult about it. I mean, who do you think you are, anyway, just a couple of foolish women with a silly little—”
People stopped to stare, murmuring in concern as Henry went on. “My production company . . . going to be top-rated . . . I have a right . . . you should be honored to be . . .”
A tall bearded pirate in black boots and satin trousers, belted with a jeweled scabbard and topped by a white pirate shirt trimmed in gobs of lace, stepped forward with a rakish bow.
“At your service, ma’am,” he said, grinning wickedly.
But the only service I wanted was the kind that would make me disappear, so I waved him away and hurried on across the street.
Henry followed. “You’ll be sorry!” he shouted. “You and all the greasy spoons in this backwater burg, you’ll all be sorry you didn’t cooperate with me when you had the chance!”
I turned sharply, surprising him; he took a startled step back. “All right, now, damn it, you listen to me.”
I poked him in the chest with my index finger. It felt good, and his eyes widened satisfyingly at the gesture, so I did it again.
The people staring at us seemed to like it, too, their concern turning to amusement. “You,” I pronounced grimly, “aren’t going to make anyone sorry, do you hear me?”
Fifteen minutes ago I’d been out on the bounding waves, which as you may have noticed is not by any means a preferred location of mine. Now as a result I was so charged up with adrenaline, I felt as if I could bend steel with my bare etcetera.
I stuck my finger out again, and he backed off some more. “You’re going to shut up and leave me alone, that’s what you’re going to do,” I told him, “or you never know. . . .”
Just then, more loud applause and another splash came from the plank-walking contest at the fish pier. The fiddle bounced into yet another rendition of “Sailor’s Hornpipe.”
The first soapbox derby vehicle came flying down the Washington Street hill and careened around the corner, then swerved into a pile of hay bales amidst the shouts and cheers of the onlookers.
But a lot of them were still watching Henry and me. “If you don’t back off, something bad might happen to you,” I finished.
“Are you threatening me?” He turned to the gaggle of onlookers we’d attracted. “You heard it! All of you heard!”
He swung around toward me again. “Fine. I don’t need shots of your store’s stupid-looking interior. I can get what I need outside.”
Waving toward our sign, visible halfway down the block—the silhouette of a grinning googly-eyed moose stuck out nicely from its downtown surroundings, we’d found—he smiled nastily.
“I’ll do a whole show on the slop you call food around here,” he snarled. “Chocolate bakery,” he added dismissively. “In a burg like this one you might as well be selling deep-fried Mars bars. Dip some pork rinds in melted Hershey’s while you’re at it, why don’t you?”
He looked around scornfully at the lunches many of the festival attendees were enjoying: pizza slices, sausage rolls, fries sodden with ketchup. A few of the braver ones were even sampling that ever-popular local delicacy, smoked salmon on a stick.
Or steek, as Sam liked to pronounce it. Meanwhile, I’d already been thinking of chocolate-dipping some fried-crisp bacon strips, and now I was determined to do it—this afternoon, even, maybe.
First, though, I had to get rid of Hadlyme. “Look, Henry, you and I don’t have anything more to say to each other.”
I stepped around him and kept going. But he wasn’t finished.
“You’ll be sorry!” he yelled again. “By the time I roll out of Eastport, I’ll have all I need!”
By now he was hopping with fury. “Once people hear my show about you and the junk you sell, you’ll be finished, do you hear me?”
I surely did, all the way down the block, ranting about how he was going to destroy The Chocolate Moose while a slowly dispersing audience watched the grown man standing there raging until the veins stood out on his forehead and spittle flew out of his mouth.
I knew this because I turned and peeked. Then, under the moose-head sign, I rummaged in my bag for my keys, which was when I remembered dropping the bag on the boat.
“Drat.” They must’ve been among the things that fell out and I’d missed seeing them when I was retrieving items. Sighing at the idea of going back to hunt for them, I dug out my spare.
Then I unlocked the door and opened it to the bright, familiar jingle of the little bell mounted over the doorframe. Inside I locked it again, not wanting Hadlyme to barge in. The shade was still pulled from earlier, and we could open again once he’d wandered off to torment somebody else, I decided; besides, the whole place was still a mess.
Even amidst the chaos left behind by the youthful pirate crew, though, the shop felt like a refuge. Napkins were scattered everywhere and jelly-smeared plates still covered the café tables, my shoes still stuck to the floor, and that glass-fronted display case really was a disaster. But all of that I could fix.
And now I could do it in peace, just as soon as I got two dozen double-chocolate mint cookies baking, some chocolate-chip nut bread in the mixer, and a batch of chocolate croissants on the rise.
So back in the kitchen I got out the butter, softened it briefly in the microwave, and began creaming it together with the sugar, then beat in two eggs and a teaspoonful of vanilla extract, plus another of mint liqueur. Adding the dry stuff—flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt—I felt myself relaxing into the work and especially into the solitude, an unusual luxury for me lately.
I mixed in the chocolate chips; then the cookies got popped into the oven. Next came the banana bread, which I mixed up while the butter for the cookie frosting was softening and the croissant dough was thawing.
Finally I checked the cooler for the semisweet chocolate chunk I thought was in there, since if you’re going to dip bacon, it seemed to me you might as well use the good stuff. Shaving it took just moments, and I put the result into a storage bag so it would be ready when I wanted it—that is, after I’d fried the bacon.
By then the croissant dough was ready and the first batch of the cookies had baked. I shaped the croissants and set them out on a parchment-lined pan, then took the cookies out of the oven and put a second batch in.
While I worked, happily oblivious to all but the tasks in front of me—my favorite situation—the radio on the shelf out front played softly. Randy Newman, I think it was, maybe Little Criminals.
Something, anyway, that would’ve sounded ominous if I’d thought about it. But all I did think, safe in the sanctuary of the locked bakery after a wildly eventful boat ride and a loud public shouting match with a hostile near-stranger, was that no matter how angry he was, Henry Hadlyme couldn’t do any actual harm to the Moose.
Sure, he was well known to his own audience of food enthusiasts, I thought as I folded the chopped nuts and more chocolate bits into the banana bread batter—I’m pretty sure banana-nut bread can’t have too many chocolate bits, aren’t you?—but he wasn’t famous famous; no one on the street just now seemed to recognize him, for instance. So his podcast wouldn’t really affect us much, it seemed to me.
Heck, I hardly knew anyone who followed any podcasts, or for that matter even realize
d that they existed. Way out here at the back edge of beyond the way we were, we were lucky even to have cable TV.
Also, he’d mentioned that he was set to leave Eastport soon—the flyer he’d shoved at me earlier had said he’d be elsewhere in two days, actually; hallelujah!—and I was pretty sure that I could duck him, meanwhile. So with any luck I’d never see him again.
Sadly, though, I was wrong about almost all of those things, as I would learn only a few minutes later.
When it was too late.
Two
My name is Jacobia Tiptree—Jake to my friends—and when I first came to Maine I thought pie-making, cookie-baking, and the whipping together of the perfect cream-filled chocolate éclair were all subcategories of rocket science.
Where I came from, baked goods arrived in Entenmann’s boxes, the ones with the clear plastic windows in the top so you could see inside. Monkey see, monkey want was the theory behind this packaging scheme, I suppose, or at any rate it worked that way for me.
But then I found Eastport, soon after leaving behind my serially cheating ex-husband—his name, appropriately enough, was Victor—and hustling my young son, Sam, out of the big city and away from his—oh, all right, our—impending doom.
Sam should’ve been a middle school student. Instead he spent his days playing online video games and his nights riding the tops of subway cars with his equally unhinged young pals while taking drugs so sophisticated that they didn’t even have names, just strings of numbers and letters assigned to them in basement chemistry labs.
Amateur labs, and there’d been no way I could stop him; by then he was too big to restrain physically and too defiant to reason with. In the end, I think it was only the sight of my face after I’d walked out on his dad that got him into the car on that last day.
“Mom?” he’d whispered frightenedly from the back seat, all the fight suddenly gone out of him.
Meanwhile, we made our way north through heavy traffic to the 125th Street on-ramp and out of the city.
“Mom, are you okay?” he asked, but he knew. I’d loved Victor so much it’d nearly killed me ever since I’d laid eyes on him fifteen years earlier. The day I left, I couldn’t even speak until we were halfway through Massachusetts, and even then I could only manage short blurts, trying hard not to weep in front of my kid.