Just after two o’clock, I was sitting on the deck of my beached kayak, eating a banana, when I heard and then saw a Marine Patrol vessel bucking the waves as it sped toward the island from the direction of Boothbay Harbor.
Rick Spinney had returned.
I had just been thinking about what I’d told Klesko about him. How Rick had changed for the worse since we’d met.
The Spinney I had met years earlier was one of the Marine Patrol’s rising stars.
His first year on the job, he had saved an elderly couple whose sailboat was going down off North Haven. They’d had no business taking their sloop out in a gale, but the man had been a lifelong sailor and misjudged how age had diminished his capabilities. The wife, also, had early-stage Alzheimer’s disease and was unable to follow her husband’s directions. When their boat capsized, they should have died.
But Spinney rescued them single-handedly and at great risk to his own life.
Not only did he save the couple, but he rescued their dog, too.
It was that footnote to the story that earned Rick Spinney the attention of the national media: the fact he’d plunged into the icy water for their Maltese. Taking advantage of the good press, the legislature recognized Rick with a special proclamation honoring his heroism.
The next summer, Spinney made the news again when he was first on the scene during an armed confrontation on Isle au Haut. One lobsterman shot and killed his cousin—they’d been unknowingly sleeping with the same woman—and he was preparing to put a bullet in his brain when Rick arrived. Somehow the Marine Patrol officer had persuaded the jealous shooter not to take his life.
The Spinney I had met was a jovial, self-effacing family man.
Until the stress of the job had eaten his soul from within.
People often lumped together the Marine Patrol and the Warden Service. It was true that our uniforms resembled one another’s (except that their shirts were khaki instead of olive) and our patrol trucks had been the same shade of green before we had been given a new fleet of black Fords and GMCs.
But game wardens dealt almost entirely with citizens engaged in recreational pursuits (hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, canoeing). Most of our interactions with the public were neutral if not always friendly. We didn’t stop lobstermen and scallop divers during their workdays with the implied rationale that they were violating commercial fishing laws or, worse, smuggling contraband in their holds.
The last time I’d heard Rick Spinney’s name was in connection with a fistfight he’d gotten himself into with a foulmouthed lobsterman whose boat he had boarded. After the guy had called him some choice names, Spinney had pushed him over the transom. Like a shocking number of Maine lobstermen, this one had never learned to swim. The man almost drowned. Worse, the episode was caught on video by a person on a passing boat. Spinney ended up being suspended without pay and ordered to take anger management classes, which only made him more volatile, I’d heard.
The thought of Rick Spinney becoming a bully saddened me, even more than learning that his wife was divorcing him or hearing about his pathetic flirtation with twenty-year-old Hillary Fitzgerald.
“I’ve been ordered to take you and Klesko over to Ayers,” he said as he expertly pulled his Boston Whaler alongside Plymouth Rock and manipulated his twin engines to hold it in place, inches from the stone. If he’d wanted to, he could have stepped onto the shore without getting his boots wet.
He was wearing heavy-duty sunglasses, and there was a white spot of zinc sunscreen in the nautilus of his ear.
“I’m ready whenever Klesko is.”
“I heard about Maeve,” he said without emotion. “What a sorry end for that woman.”
“When you two were together outside her tent, did she give any indication that she might take her own life?”
Now he grew hot. “What are you suggesting? That I encouraged her?”
“Relax, Rick. All I meant is it caught us by surprise.”
He studied me through his impenetrable sunglasses. Only the tightening of his mouth gave away his displeasure. I was aware again of what a hulking man he was. I would have hated being in a wrestling match with him.
“Can you tow my kayak?” I asked.
“Not at planing speed.”
“Well, I need to get it to the mainland. I was hoping to paddle it back from Ayers when I’m done later.”
“All right,” he said, and reached for a bottle of water to take a swig. “I’ll tow it for you. My reputation is already bad enough these days; I don’t need you bad-mouthing me, too.”
Klesko appeared, coming down the hill behind me. He had a nylon duffel over his shoulder bulging with the assorted gear homicide detectives carried. The hem of his still-soaked polo shirt had ridden up on that side, exposing his service weapon: a Heckler & Koch .45 Compact. Steve was a famously bad shot; every qualification test he took was a nail-biter.
“Grab anything you might need, Mike—an extra layer, boots, et cetera.”
“Rick has agreed to tow my kayak.”
Spinney grunted. “I’ve got to tie a floating line on it. Otherwise, it’s going to want to dive underwater like a porpoise. I’d been hoping to make this a quick trip, but c’est la vie.”
While the Marine Patrol officer rigged a line to my kayak, Klesko told me that Cruz would ride back to shore with the others aboard the Endeavor. She was currently arranging for a contractor to tow in the Selkie for a more thorough search.
Despite his protestations, it only took Spinney a few minutes to harness my kayak, and then we were off.
I immediately wished I’d put on my dry suit. Even on a hot summer day, it’s always colder than you expect on the open ocean. Klesko must have been freezing in his wet clothes.
Spinney goaded me by increasing speed until my kayak started jumping around atop the wake his boat left behind. I knew better than to tell him to ease up. When the joke got old, he slowed down.
I had expected that we’d follow the route Stacey had taken, back along the cliffs, but Spinney decided to give us a scenic tour around the southern end of Ayers Island. We came around a spruce-capped headland to see a vast field of weeds and wildflowers. At the tip of the point rose the candy-striped tower of Ayers Light.
“I thought West Quoddy Head was the only red-and-white lighthouse in Maine,” Klesko shouted over the outboards.
“It used to be all white, but Markham had it repainted,” said Spinney. “Imagine choosing to waste your fortune on something that trivial. But it’s his to deface as he pleases.”
In the 1990s, Congress had authorized the Coast Guard to dispense with its Maine lighthouses. Human tenders had been replaced by automated beacons and foghorns, and more importantly, the towers themselves had been rendered superfluous by advances in radar and other aids to maritime navigation. Nonprofit organizations had bought up most of the lights, others were demolished, and some were purchased by fanciful millionaires like Clay Markham.
“He owns the entire island?” asked Klesko.
“Ayers and Hatchet, too. That’s the next one over, across the channel. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I’ve heard about what goes on out here.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“And get sued for slander? No, thank you. I’m already paying my lawyer enough.”
“I was sorry to hear about your divorce, Rick,” I said.
But it was as if he refused to hear me, or maybe the thought of Markham’s millions had touched an exposed nerve.
“You wouldn’t believe the wealth out here,” he said. “These islands get listed for ridiculous sums, and they’re on the market for two days. They cut down the trees and build self-glorifying mansions.”
Spinney had worked himself into a state of agitation. In his anger, he began to push the throttle. The waves behind the boat —a V-shaped wake—grew higher and higher. A person could have surfed on those breakers. I worried my kayak would snap in two unless he eased off the gas.
“Would you mind slowing down, Rick?”
With a smirk, he throttled back the engines.
In the distance I could see westbound waves piling against the Brigands as the rising tide covered the ledges for the second time in twenty-four hours. If you didn’t know about the submerged rocks and only saw the spray exploding in the air, you might have thought it was a humpback whale breaching.
The sea air felt bracing in my lungs.
As we came around Ayers Light, the sun caught the Fresnel lens atop the restored tower, and it seemed as if the ghost of the last keeper had ignited the beacon to guide us into the passage. A flock of seabirds—terns and gulls—circled the lighthouse. Their wings shone blindingly white. On any other day, under any other circumstances, in any other company, I would have found it an awesome spectacle.