Spinney kept massaging his sore wrist while he steered the boat toward the islands.
“What you guys did, I would never have done to a fellow officer.”
“I wasn’t going to let you shoot him, Rick,” said Klesko in a clear, penetrating voice.
“Don’t use my first name. We’re not friends, especially after today. I’ll taxi you around because I was ordered to, but if we ever see each other off duty—”
“Do not finish that sentence, Rick,” I said.
“Fuck you, Bowditch. Throwing me under the bus like that. You realize I’m going to be out here tomorrow and every day, and you won’t be around the next time I stop the Persuader and decide that Bear Goodale needs to lose his license and a few teeth.”
“There’s another sentence you shouldn’t have finished,” I said, steadying myself against the Whaler’s speed across the choppy water. “What’s gotten into you, Rick? You’re better than this shit.”
“Am I?”
Between Ayers Island and its smaller neighbor, Hatchet Island, there was a sheltered channel, perhaps fifty yards wide, that served the residents as a harbor. A sailing yacht, the Fūjin, all gleaming mahogany and polished brass, was moored in the center of the passage. Nearby floated a gleaming Hinckley picnic boat, the Solitude, that must have cost a mint to commission.
The only other vessel in the “harbor” was a lobsterboat pulled alongside a half-submerged “lobster car,” into which a fisherman was dumping his day’s catch for safekeeping. He was a great ruddy man with a white goatee and scrolls of white hair falling down his sunburned neck. I felt certain this old salt was the person Stacey had mentioned: Skip Ayers, whose family had settled the island before the arrival of the granite magnates and celebrity photographers. The name of his boat was the Frost Flower.
“They pretend this is a working waterfront,” said Spinney, “as if two lobsterboats make a fleet.”
I was eager to be away from the man and his anger at a life that hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned. Whose life ever does?
As we maneuvered past the yachts, I spotted Stacey’s kayak tied to the backside of the wharf, bow to stern with the Spindrift. I’d wondered where that launch was hiding.
On the green hillside above the public landing was a cluster of houses, barns, and outbuildings, perhaps as many as twenty receding into the spruce forest that seemed, from the water, to cover most of the island. There were roads of a sort running between the buildings and down to the wharf, but they were not paved, and close-cut grass grew between the tire ruts. Each of the homesteads had bright, blooming gardens of daylilies—mostly orange and yellow—globe thistle, and coneflowers. Apple trees that must have been planted within the same year, being all the same height, but were not yet mature enough to yield decent fruit, grew along stone walls that were square and true; unlike most of the tumbled boundaries you find in the Maine woods, where farms and pastures are only memories of a long-vanished era.
The houses were boxy Colonials of the kind you see in northern New England fishing villages. They all had granite chimneys and were shingled with cedar shakes or clad in clapboards. Among the homes were a few smaller crofts constructed entirely of quarry stones. With sod roofs, these crude structures looked like they belonged on the coast of Scotland and not Maine.
It was one of the prettiest places I’d seen, and it was fake from start to finish: a Potemkin village.
A real lobstering town would have had stinking traps stacked in the yards to be repaired, coils of multicolor ropes, and buoys strung up on lines for repainting. There would have been busted appliances dragged out into the weather to rust and also lawn mowers abandoned in mid-mow while the homeowner took a coffee break, got drunk, or decided the job could wait.
Moreover, the place would have smelled—not unpleasantly, except near the traps. Diesel exhaust, baking bread, hot tar, paint, freshly laundered sheets flapping on lines: odors that carry the message, “This place is inhabited by human beings living their curious, wayward lives.” But all my nose could detect from the shore were the blossoming flowers and the resinous evergreens on the hill above the town.
“This place looks like a movie set,” said Klesko, as if reading my mind.
“Here come a few of the extras now,” said Spinney.
The sound of his engine had lured a handful of souls from their houses. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them in nineteenth-century costumes, but they wore the same blue jeans, tees, and coveralls you’d see inside any Walmart.
Where was Stacey?
One young guy was wearing a short-sleeve neoprene wetsuit, the kind favored by long-distance swimmers, and drying his blond hair with a towel.
“Hola!” he said, giving himself away as a nonnative Spanish speaker in one word.
Spinney said, “You still swimming around the islands, Heath?”
The man kept drying his locks. He had a too-white smile. “Every day. Got to be ready for the qualifier.”
“You must have heard there are great white sharks off the Maine coast.”
“We have them back in San Diego, too.”
“In that wetsuit, you couldn’t look more like a gray seal if you tried. Those are their favorite snacks.”
“If a shark bites me, a shark bites me. Life happens. No point thinking too hard.”
This Heath character was the only one who seemed jovial. The other islanders carried their sadness like a weight.
In all, seven people met us at the wharf.
The man who caught Spinney’s bowline and tied it off looked to be pushing sixty with a belly that reminded me of Bear Goodale’s. He wore his receding hair in a ponytail, and his face was heavily stubbled. His outfit consisted of boat shoes with holes in the toes, a loose cotton shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, and bell-bottomed jeans fraying at the hems.
“We’ve been expecting you, Rick,” he said in a perfect imitation of Bear’s voice.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We heard the detectives were coming over from Baker. And it made sense that a Marine Patrol boat would bring them. You’re the local patrol officer so it stands to reason…”
Spinney spat into the harbor.
Klesko and I introduced ourselves, and the man gave his name as Jonathan Goodale as he extended a calloused hand.
“And this is my wife, Lisa,” he said.
Bear’s mother was a tall woman, six feet at least. Her hair was brown, streaked with gray, and cut shorter than her husband’s, but she was dressed in similarly worn jeans and a sleeveless top that revealed a lifetime of sun damage below her neck and on muscled brown arms.
“We heard what happened,” she said. “I have always been afraid for those researchers, being so young and isolated.”
“Maeve is old,” said a little Goodale girl. She had to be the one Stacey had spoken with: Juniper.
I wondered exactly what the islanders knew of the killings. Little Juniper, at least, didn’t seem to know that McLeary was dead. I had a hunch, from their blank expressions when Maeve’s name was invoked, that the adults hadn’t heard about her suicide, either.
“If there’s anything we can do to help,” said Lisa Goodale.
Klesko nodded kindly. “We appreciate your cooperation.”
“Do you know why he killed them?”
The voice had come from the back of the wharf.
“He?” Klesko said.
“Garrett Meadows.”
I recognized the speaker immediately, although I’d only glimpsed the captain of the Spindrift from a distance. Stacey had identified him as Justin Speer. He was of medium height but so long in the torso it gave him the illusion of being tall. The plastic brim of his swordfishing cap was cocked above a smug face that narrowed to a pointed chin.
“We heard some lobsterman found him adrift,” Speer said. “Did he have some sort of psychotic break like the kid did last summer?”
The kid? Does he mean Evan Levandowski?
“I wouldn’t put stock in what you’re hearing over your radios,” said Klesko. “We haven’t named any suspects.”
Justin snorted in disbelief. “Oh, I’m sure it’s a coincidence that Meadows survived.”
Lisa Goodale scowled at Speer. “Who’s to say that young man wasn’t also a victim? Is it because of the color of his skin, Justin, that you assume he had to be the one who murdered those girls?”
“I hope you’re not accusing my husband of being a racist, Lisa,” said a young woman with brown bangs and a tiny bundle in her arms. Brenna Speer wore blue overalls and leather sandals.
“I’m trying to explain why the police might be reluctant to immediately name a Black man as a suspect.”
Listening to the islanders debate, I formed the idea that these were mostly educated people. Nor did they have a trace of the Maine accent I would’ve heard on any of the state’s working waterfronts.
Klesko stepped forward, assuming an attitude of command that even I found intimidating.
“Folks, I know you’re upset by what you’ve heard, much of which I guarantee isn’t true. Please keep in mind that it’s early in our investigation. We have forensic technicians on Baker Island collecting evidence that will be carefully examined. We’ll also be conducting interviews to get a fuller picture of the situation at the refuge prior to the attacks. That’s why Warden Bowditch and I are here—to speak with you.”
“I can’t imagine what we’d be able to contribute,” said big-bellied Jonathan Goodale. There was something of the Key West barfly about the sloppy, sunburned man. He had the squint of someone who’d spent years at sea, and his leathery skin would have given a dermatologist nightmares.
“You didn’t know any of the staff there?” I asked.
No one spoke at first. I noticed Jonathan take and squeeze Juniper’s hand.
“Maeve McLeary has visited Ayers over the years,” Lisa Goodale said carefully. “But the other researchers…”
“Over the years,” I thought. Not “yesterday.” Why would they play dumb about Maeve just having been here?
Lies are like mice, I have found. Where there’s one, there are always many.
Spinney had remained standing beside his boat with his thick arms crossed the whole time. I’d almost forgotten about him until he said, “They haven’t had time to get the official story straight.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Justin Speer.
“Your lord and lady haven’t told you what you’re supposed to say.”
The islanders fell silent again.
Heath, the worry-free swimmer, laughed and threw his towel over his shoulder and began striding up the grassy hill as if none of this concerned him. I felt an impulse to call the man to task. But I had no authority to do so.
“We’re not Clay Markham’s serfs,” said Jonathan Goodale. “Whatever people might say about us on the mainland.”
His wife jumped in. “And as someone who’s been here as much as you have, Rick Spinney, it’s shameful for you to be repeating that kind of slander.”
“Officer,” he said. “Officer Spinney.”
“Oh, please,” said Justin Speer. “Get over yourself.”
Spinney pointed his index finger at Speer. “Don’t.”
“Or what? You’ll arrest me?”
“I’m only telling you once.”
“Hey, Justin, be cool,” said Jonathan Goodale. “The officers are just doing their jobs. Don’t take it personally.”
“I have a question,” I said, hoping a change of subject would restore order. “The woman who paddled here for help, Stacey Stevens. Where is she? I see her kayak tied up to the dock. I believe she was waiting for us at the Ayers’s house.”
“Oh, she’s up at the manse now,” said Brenna Speer. “When Clay heard a woman had come here from Baker, he sent a cart for her.”
And Stacey, being Stacey, had jumped at the chance to meet the legendary photographer.
“Mr. Speer, we’d like to speak with you first,” said Klesko, removing his windbreaker and folding it over his arm so that the gun on his belt was in plain view. “I have a feeling you know why that is. Somewhere private would be best.”
“That’s my place right there.” He indicated the second house up from the water. It had a magnificent flower garden. “We can talk in my studio. It’s a little cramped. Officer Spinney will have to wait outside.”