There were birds everywhere. Birds on the water. Birds in the air. Birds headed out to sea, and birds returning, their bills shining silver with fish to fill the mouths of their insatiable young.
Drawn by the sight, Stacey had quickened her strokes until she’d opened another gap between us. My left wrist was beginning to ache. I’d dislocated it over the winter—or rather someone had dislocated it for me—and I had only recently completed physical therapy to regain a full range of motion. Even healthy, though, I wouldn’t have been able to keep pace with her.
In addition to being a bush pilot, a biologist, an emergency medical technician, and a gifted photographer, she was a kayaking guide, too. Stacey Stevens was so good at so many things it made lots of men feel inadequate. I found it sexy as hell.
Half a mile from the island, the air bloomed with a musky odor that managed to be both pleasant and nauseating, like the perfumes one encounters in certain church pews.
“What am I smelling?”
Stacey threw a word over her shoulder that sounded like petrol.
“It’s not gasoline.”
“Not petrol,” she answered with a laugh, “petrels, as in Leach’s storm petrels. They spit out this funky-smelling oil to waterproof their feathers. Predators hate the taste, too. Maeve used to joke that if we ever got lost in the fog, we could find our way back to Baker by following the smell of the petrels.”
Now I could make out one of the observation blinds planted on a slab amid beach peas and bayberry bushes. It looked to be little more than an upright plywood crate, scarcely big enough to hold a single adult. The top half was open to the air on three sides so the researcher could watch the birds from a place of concealment. I thought I discerned the shape of a silhouette.
“Are those bullet holes in the wood?” asked Stacey.
Before I could answer in the affirmative, a woman emerged from the box with a shotgun in her hands.
She had strawberry-blond hair and an impressive tan you don’t often see in people with her coloring. She wore a stained T-shirt that clung to her abdomen, denim cutoffs that exposed bronzed thighs, and rubber boots that extended to her knees. A pair of heavy-duty binoculars hung from her neck.
The shotgun was a Remington V3 Sport. The improbably beautiful young woman didn’t point it at us, but the careless way she let the barrel wander made me uneasy. As a game warden, I had dealt with too many jittery, impaired, and untrained gun handlers.
“We come in peace!” said Stacey, raising her voice to be heard above the seabirds.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” said the woman, who looked genuinely abashed. For a moment I thought she might even drop the gun. “I hope I didn’t frighten you!”
“Were you scaring away gulls?” I asked. “We heard two shots on our way out.”
Under the circumstances, I decided scaring away was a better turn of phrase than killing.
Her nervous smile dropped. “No, not gulls.”
“I’m Stacey Stevens, and this is Mike Bowditch.”
The young woman shaded her eyes from the sun to study us. “Did you paddle out to see the puffins? We don’t get many kayakers this far from shore. There are some in the water behind you, and they roost near their burrows. The nests are all numbered on the rocks.”
“Actually, we’re friends of Kendra’s. She asked us to come out here this morning. Didn’t she tell you to expect us?”
“She didn’t say a thing to me.” Her offense showed so clearly in her expression. The barrel started to drift again. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to handle the gun; the problem was she didn’t respect it. “No one is allowed to come ashore on Baker Island without permission.”
“Yes, we know,” said Stacey with more patience than I was feeling. “I was an intern myself here about a thousand years ago. And Mike is an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. What’s your name?”
“Hillary Fitzgerald.”
She had a budget walkie-talkie, a Motorola Talkabout, clipped to her low-riding cutoffs, I couldn’t help but notice.
“Hillary,” I said, “maybe you can radio Kendra and tell her we’re here.”
“What’s this about?”
“It would be better if Kendra explains,” said Stacey.
I wondered if she saw herself in the intern; Hillary was probably the same age she’d been when she’d worked for Maeve McLeary.
“Can you wait here while I call?”
“Of course.”
Hillary Fitzgerald wandered off behind her observation blind, setting the shotgun down casually on the flat, guano-stained roof.
I brought my kayak alongside Stacey. “What do you make of Kendra not telling her about us?”
“There’s a good reason for it, I’m certain.”
She doesn’t trust her own intern, I thought.
“If Hillary wasn’t shooting gulls, what was she shooting at?”
“I have literally no idea.”
The current was carrying us toward the granite berm that served as a buttress around the island. The ebb tide had raised up a few boulders, shaggy with ocher rockweed, into the open air. More boulders shimmered, out of focus, through the green water beneath our hulls.
I couldn’t hear anything Hillary was saying into the radio, but the way she was gesticulating told me the conversation with her supervisor was not pleasant.
“Is there a pocket beach where we land?” I asked.
“No.”
“How do the researchers get ashore?”
“There’s sort of an oblong boulder over there.” She gestured to the west. “We used to call it Plymouth Rock. Maeve and her crew tie up the Selkie to a mooring in the cove and use a skiff to row in. If the tide is right—which it isn’t—you can nudge your kayak in next to Plymouth Rock, but you need someone to pull your bow out of the water.”
Successful seabird nesting colonies are characterized by their inaccessibility. But I couldn’t believe this one rock was the only place to gain access to Baker Island.
“Is it really the only landing?”
“Not if you believe Maeve,” Stacey said. “She claims to have been alone here one night and woke up to see a strange man outside her tent. She chased the intruder, she says, but lost him in the fog. Maeve McLeary is the most fearless woman I know.”
The waves were nudging me toward the rocks. I back-paddled to hold my position. “I’m surprised you didn’t go looking for the secret landing when you were an intern.”
“I did look for it! One afternoon, I spent a couple of hours circumambulating the island. There’s an abandoned lifesaving station at the south end—built during the age of the dory men—but its pier burned a long time ago. I couldn’t figure out how you could safely land a boat there now.”
Hillary snatched the shotgun from the observation blind and approached the edge of the rock wall again. “You need to wait here. Kendra’s on her way.”
“Can’t we just paddle over to Plymouth Rock?” Stacey asked.
“I’m sorry,” said Hillary, “but I’d prefer you didn’t move until we get this straightened out.”
We bobbed in the water. The young woman watched us. None of us spoke.
At last, Stacey decided to make another attempt at winning over the suspicious intern. “How many nesting puffin pairs do you have this year, Hillary?”
“Six.”
Stacey looked like she’d been gut-punched. “We had twenty-seven the summer I worked here.”
At the moment, a short, muscular woman came limping up the path. She was clutching what looked like an antique walking stick, carved from some twisting black tree.
Kendra Ballard had cropped hair that looked like it had been dyed with India ink. She was wearing dusty zip-off pants and a faded T-shirt from the Pogues’ reunion tour. Her gray-tinted sunglasses were too large for her small, cleft-chinned face. Kendra was not unattractive, but she seemed to belong to a different species (as did we all) from the redheaded sylph.
“Stacey, thank Goddess! I wasn’t sure you got my message.”
“Kendra, what’s going on?”
“I’d like to know myself,” Hillary said acidly.
Her supervisor ignored her, choosing instead to address us. “Paddle around to the cove and clip up to the mooring ball. I’ll have to pull you ashore in the skiff since the tide’s wrong for the kayaks.”
Hillary started gesticulating again. “You don’t have the authority. Maeve is the only one who can approve visitors.”
“But Maeve isn’t here,” said Kendra. “Which is why I called my friends. We need their help, Hillary. You know how desperate the situation is. Please cut me some slack. I’m clutching at straws.”
The younger woman’s face fell. “Why couldn’t you have just trusted me?”
“Because everything’s gone to shit, and I’m not thinking clearly.”
At last, Stacey spoke. “If it’s any consolation, Ken, we brought four pints of Ben & Jerry’s for you in our cooler.”
“Chunky Monkey?” said Hillary, beaming for the first time since we’d arrived.
“And Cherry Garcia for Kendra.”
Her friend seemed to be blinking back tears. “Stevens, you beautiful bitch. Come ashore so I can kiss you.”