one
friday, april 18

The Gremlin grunted. Not exactly a death rattle, but pretty close. I gave the car about two weeks or two miles, whichever came first. At this point, I’d be thrilled if it made it across the grass field to a parking spot at Cold Spring Harbor’s Earth Day celebration, a three-day environmental extravaganza. It would be hard to say goodbye to the thirty-year-old clunker, but Big Bob, the king of the town dump, assured me last week that he had a guy willing to part with a 1982 Chevy Nova for less than $500. I recalled the conversation from my regular run to the dump as I rolled the Gremlin into an empty space.

“Can you get him down to $75?” I’d wheedled.

Bob’s chuckle had started below his ears and reverberated south, settling in his third chin. His Dumpster-diving cronies coined it “the pinball tilt,” because once Bob got to laughing, he was a goner. It appeared my low bid had pushed him over the edge.

I’d ignored Bob’s convulsing and handed over a bag of dismembered doll parts I’d been collecting from the non-recyclable plastics bin for the past year.

“Holy cow.” Bob’s laughter ground to a halt as he withdrew a severed head. “A Dawn doll? I haven’t seen one of these in years.”

I swung a miniature torso no more than five inches in length in front of Bob’s face. His eyes, mere slits at his current peak weight of three hundred pounds, lit up like torches.

“Two-fifty for the car. It’s my final offer,” I’d said as I handed over the matching body.

Bob reassembled the doll and pushed it deep into his pant pocket for safe keeping. “This baby is not going anywhere,” he said as he patted his hip.

“Talk to your car guy. For now, Dawn’s on loan. If you can’t cut me a deal, I’m selling her on eBay.”

Big Bob will come through, I thought. My life literally depends on it, I thought, as I jammed a rock behind the Gremlin’s rear wheel in place of the broken emergency brake. The doll parts were a great find for an avid collector like Bob. If I was lucky, and Bob worked his magic, I’d be tooling around in a different automotive relic within days. I manually released the hatchback and loaded trays of jelly jars onto a Radio Flyer red wagon.

“Don’t move,” a shrill voice called from across the parking lot. An overly-sunbaked woman with impossibly blond hair signaled me from an SUV window. “Are those Kat’s Kans jellies? I have to have a jar.” The woman pulled up behind the Gremlin in a car built like a tank. She climbed out and produced a purse that exceeded the airport weight limit for carry-ons.

“Ten dollars a jar.” I smiled, doubling the price. Katrina, my housemate, best friend, and business partner, would be pleased. It was Friday, the first day of the Earth Day festival, and at this rate, we might sell out of our inventory before Sunday. “Fifteen percent off if you buy a case,” I added.

“A case? That’s a lot of jelly.”

“I dig that sticker on the window.” I pointed to the cartoonish cutout of a family with three kids affixed to her rear window. “Homemade jellies make great teacher gifts.”

“Oh, you are so right,” the woman agreed eagerly as she popped her trunk. “Don’t you just love Earth Day?”

“I just do,” I responded. I deposited a tray of jelly in the rear of the SUV, a hunk of metal and plastic named after a group of Native Americans that hadn’t roamed North America in over three centuries. “You ever take this off road?”

“Off road? Why would I do that?” the woman replied as she climbed back into the driver’s seat.

I simply smiled and waved her off, then stuck the cash in my jeans pocket and headed over to the park entrance, wondering if SUV really stood for Suburban Useless Vehicle. I put the thought aside and tried to remember how much I really did love Earth Day. The venue for the three-day weekend festival, the Cold Spring Harbor State Park, was a forty-acre spread tumbling precariously down to the shores of Long Island Sound. I took in the field of colored tents sprinkled across the open green. Swarms of visitors had dug deep in their closets to recover their one tie-dyed shirt reserved for the holiday when we could all be hippies.

“Thar she blows,” I said, spotting my own home across the bay. Harbor House, a rambling nineteenth-century building, had been in my family for generations, and I had spent the last ten years renovating the property. Today it was a self-sustaining organic farm managed by me and my housemates—Katrina, her boyfriend Jonathan, and Charlie.

My great-great-great grandfather was Cold Spring Harbor’s first harbor master, and I had inherited the home as part of my trust fund. For a century our Prentice family lineage was as pure as the waters the early settlers fished. Now, of course, the sound was a polluted waterway with glowing sea animals weaned on toxic sludge. And, sadly, the Prentice family name too was no better than mud, thanks to my father. Close to my house was another sad sight: the world-renowned Sound View Laboratories. My brother, Dr. Theodore Prentice, was murdered there just twelve months ago. My father, had he the ability to scale down his own ego, could have prevented it.

I shook off the memory of Teddy’s death with a shimmy of my shoulders and a shake of my butt.

“Hey, hot stuff!”

“Charlie,” I said, steering the wagon his way, “take these to the booth. Katrina is probably running low.”

“That’s it? I call you hot and you give me a job to do?”

I leaned in and pecked Charlie. “Sorry, I left my sketchbook in the car.”

Charlie knew better than to step between me and my sketchbook. Some people are addicted to their cell phones, but my vice was a pad with sheets of empty paper. Portraits, my specialty, supplemented my subsistence living, and thankfully there was still the occasional wealthy patron who insisted on a mantel show piece. Or the occasional police matter that hinged on an accurate likeness. A year ago, I’d never have guessed my talent would be the deciding factor in a criminal investigation. I was just as surprised as the police when my sketches had provided crucial evidence in my brother’s murder case.

“Go on,” Charlie said as he led the wagon toward the entrance.