FOUR

It was midnight when the sheriff, with Reed Brockshaw, Ben Dorset and Russell Homer, left the lighthouse for their homes. They took Elias Johnson with them, to drop at his house. Craig Soaras stayed; he and Peter Hubbard would use cots next to the laboratory they had established.

The first floor of the lighthouse was of generous proportions and lent itself to the emergency. The building provided a pie shape of which the kitchen was one wedge. On one side, the big laboratory space waited for the apparatus that would accompany Dr. Lindstrom. On the other side of the kitchen, a rickety staircase spiraled to the unused second story. Beyond it, there was a good-­sized chamber where Elizabeth and Bonnie would sleep on cots this night, with room for Wanda Lindstrom when she joined the team the next morning. The last portion, completing the circle, was a cubicle Hubbard and Johnson’s mate were sharing. Beds for all would be brought out the next day to replace the temporary cots.

Only a dent had been made in the accumulated junk accreted in the old building over the years. Elias Johnson broached bringing some village women out to help, but Elizabeth reminded him they wanted as few people as possible to know anything at all about the laboratory. The old man was proud when she declared, simply, that she and Bonnie would get the job done.

Spirits were high with the thought that at least some preparations were under way to solve the Yarkie quandary.

The first assignment was Craig Soaras’s. He was to sail to Chatham to bring Dr. Lindstrom across to Yarkie. Considering the number of crates ordered by Peter Hubbard, and the delicacy of some of the apparatus, all agreed that the work boat, the Jessica, was a more suitable craft than Stephen Scott’s yacht, though it would be less comfortable for the woman scientist.

Elizabeth wondered whether the crossing might not be rough. She had noticed that gulls in the harbor had flown high that evening—a sure sign to islanders that a “no’theaster” was on the way.

Craig and Johnson had sniffed the air and glanced at the sky. The captain promised, “She’ll be a big blast, but she won’t start till afternoon anyway.”

Craig said laconically, “We’ll manage.”

Elizabeth heard herself saying, without knowing exactly why, “I hope Wanda Lindstrom has a strong stomach.”

When all the others left the lighthouse for the night, the “crew” of four adjourned to the kitchen for a beer. It was pleasant sitting around the table talking casually, but Hubbard pointed to the moonlight streaming through the cracked, dusty window. “How about a walk before we turn in?”

Outside, Elizabeth hesitated, but let him take her elbow and steer her away from Craig and Bonnie, who headed toward a bank of sand dunes fringed with salt spray, roses, and plume grass. Elizabeth noticed approvingly that Bonnie seemed to be enjoying Craig’s company. And vice versa. A summer romance could be pleasant, she thought, recalling how Craig had been her vacation companion when she was just becoming aware of boys. Craig had grown into a fine, strong man, as she always knew he would. Maybe it was too bad that Bonnie Taylor was so clearly headed for a law career and not marriage to a Portuguese fisherman. It was hard to know where the best chances for happiness really existed these days.

Meanwhile, Peter Hubbard brought her back to her own interests. He was asking her about Yarkie, and that was eminently safe for conversation. Just because the moonlight was invitingly romantic on the sand and the waves, Elizabeth was glad there was Yarkie to talk about. Hubbard was saying he needed to know details of the island’s flora and fauna before he started his work.

She answered enthusiastically, starting with the formation of the Cape by glacial moraines. The glacier had left a fairly flat surface of meadows and green marshes into which fingers of ocean reached on the eastward side and fingers of blue water on the bay side. “On Yarkie,” Elizabeth added, “we have a lot of what Cape Codders call ‘kettle holes.’ Some of them are shallow, but the glacier dug some very deep.” She mentioned one near Woods Hole that dropped one hundred twenty feet.

Hubbard nodded. “I’ve heard of that one, but I didn’t know that’s what they called it.” He repeated, “Kettle holes.” He smiled. “People think we Californians have colorful language, but it’s nowhere near yours in New England.”

Without warning, he dropped to the sand and tugged Elizabeth down beside him. For a moment, she thought he was about to put his arm around her, and she was prepared to pull away, but the man was only reaching for his pipe. When he motioned to the moon and the sea it was to talk about the weather, not romance. “It’s so calm and clear,” Peter Hubbard said. “Is it really going to storm tomorrow?”

Elizabeth was relieved to talk weather. She pointed up to some very high clouds, just a few, but the harbingers. “That’s the start, right there.”

“Hard to believe.” His eyes dropped from the starlit sky to her face. “Like the way you have changed, Elizabeth,” he said as he had earlier that day.

Elizabeth got to her feet quickly. “I was telling you about Yarkie,” she spoke in a guide’s neutral voice. She pointed eastward toward Bonnie and Craig now sitting atop a distant dune, outlined against the light sky. “Past Bonnie and Craig there, about a mile due east along this north shore, we have a whopper of a kettle. It was covered over years ago, like the Yarkie pirate caves people talk about.”

“Interesting,” Hubbard allowed. There probably had been pirates on Yarkie, he considered. It was a swashbuckling thought for a Californian sitting on this New England shore with this lovely New England young woman so obviously avoiding anything personal between them. Her perfume mixed tantalizingly with the salty air of the sea. From this strand, Peter Hubbard thought, the Atlantic would be stretching north, past Newfoundland to the arctic, if he remembered his geography. To the east, the waves would be rolling in non-­stop from Europe. It brought home again the vastness of the sea and land, and the inseparability of everything on the planet, inorganic and organic alike. As a biologist, this break in his university routine was doubly welcome, Peter Hubbard considered. It was good to get out of the classrooms and museums and into the air—this air, this moonlight, with this beautiful woman. But he had better not think of that. He was on Yarkie Island for other reasons.

To turn his mind, he asked, “What’s a lighthouse doing so far back from the water?” The sand spit before them did indeed run a good quarter of a mile out into the sea.

Elizabeth answered with the assurance of a local. “Everything keeps shifting all over the Cape shores. You can have a beach one year, and nothing the next. Over at Nauset, they had to build four lighthouses to keep ahead of the ocean.”

“So this light was once at the edge of the island?”

“It was once hundreds of feet out there on rocks you can’t see anymore.”

The man turned to look back at the building. It seemed haloed in the moon, tapering gracefully upward to the walkway with its spidery platform circling the old glass.

“It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said. “When I’m on Yarkie, I sometimes think I never want to go back to Cambridge . . .”

He nodded. “I can understand the peace and quiet.” Then he asked, “But isn’t it fierce in the winter?”

She shook her head. “The Gulf Stream runs along here not far off the east shore. It keeps the weather quite moderate. We hardly ever get much snow.”

The man noticed her identification with the “we” of the Yarkie residents. “I suppose that’s why your trees and vegetation are so thick.”

Elizabeth chuckled. A typical Cape Cod tale had come to her mind. “I don’t mean it can’t get bad. You’ll prob­ably see a tree twister tomorrow. There’s a weather story my grandfather once showed me in an old New Bedford paper. It seems a man named Al Higgins was being interviewed about an unusual storm. Higgins told it this way: He had no sooner got to his hen house when the wind blew the door open and his best rooster hopped out. Next came a gust so fierce it whipped off all the bird’s feathers and bounced the rooster up against the chopping block—which the bird hit so hard that the axe dropped down and cut off its head. So there the rooster was—killed, picked, and ready to clean for eating. And Mr. Higgins wound up saying, ‘I don’t believe there ever was such a gale before!’ ”

Elizabeth enjoyed Peter Hubbard’s explosion of hearty young laughter. “Great characters, your Cape Cod people!” he said.

“They must be doing something right. Did you know that more people live to eighty or ninety in these parts than anywhere? Stephen Scott wants to can Yarkie air so people can take it home. They do that on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, you know.”

“It’s sort of fun, I suppose.” Hubbard had been trying to light his pipe, but the breeze was too much for his matches, and he gave up.

“We can go back in if you like,” Elizabeth said.

He shook his head. “Much too nice out here, Liz.”

Her heart bumped despite herself. It was the first time Peter Hubbard had ever called her “Liz.” She wasn’t at all sure she wanted him to, especially with Wanda Lindstrom soon to appear. She said, “It’s late, Dr. Hubbard,” and started back to the lighthouse.

Hubbard stopped her before she reached the door. “I don’t really have a clear picture of how Yarkie lies. Please fill me in.”

With some stiffness, Elizabeth halted and acquiesced. “Well, to orient you, we’re standing on the northwest corner. Think of the island as sort of a rectangle. If we go straight east along this north shore, in about two miles we come to the northeast corner. There’s a point of land there that runs out a way into the ocean. It’s where Yarkie has the garbage dump we’ve been talking about all day.”

Hubbard nodded grimly. “I see.”

Elizabeth went on. “Turning south from that corner, we run along the eastern shore. That’s a mixed bag. It’s mostly woods and cliffs until you get down to the southern part—where the best beaches are.

“Moving around the south end in a westward direction, you start picking up a lot of the Yarkie houses. The houses get pretty thick as you come up the west side of the rect­angle, because the big harbor and the village are on this side, just about in the middle between the south end and where we are at the north end.”

“Got it, and thanks.” The scientist’s voice asked, “You say the forest is heaviest around the northeast section?”

“Yes, and then up across the center of the island. That’s the ‘bowler hat,’ the section called ‘High Ridge.’ ”

“So the houses along High Ridge are close to the forest?”

“Mostly they’re in cleared land, but the trees do edge in very close on some, yes.”

“And where does the forest begin in relation to the dump?”

“The trees come right down to the place.”

“So if rats are coming out of the dump, they could pass right into the woods?”

“Yes. But as you know, the sheriff has men out there tonight with flares and guns.” Being with Peter Hubbard on the beach, Elizabeth had almost forgotten the sick feeling the talk of the rats now evoked with fresh impact.

He was going on. “What about the island roads?’

“There aren’t many. Most houses are just off sort of dead ends. The main driving is Harbor Road. That runs the western length of the island, north-­south. It goes from this lighthouse down through the village and the south end where it turns eastward and loops to join High Ridge Road. That runs along the top of the bowler, with the woods to the east. To the west; of the road, the island slopes down toward the village.”

“Got the picture.”

“At the north end of High Ridge Road, there’s just a dirt track.” Elizabeth pointed beyond the lighthouse. “It picks up right here, as you see, and runs along the north shore. It’s the access to the dump, the way Russell Homer gets over there.”

“I see.”

“That’s it,” Elizabeth said. “No mighty road map needed.”

“I’ll try to drive around tomorrow.”

Elizabeth’s hand went halfway to her cheek. “Oh, I forgot. It’ll be terribly messy. They just freshly tarred High Ridge the other day, and the sun still keeps melting it. There have been a lot of complaints. Some summer people by the name of Tinton, especially.”

Peter Hubbard shrugged. “It’ll keep. I’ll be busy with Wanda tomorrow anyway . . .”

Elizabeth turned from him quickly and hurried inside. He took a step after her, then thought better of it. He was on Yarkie Island for one thing only—a mission that could mean life or death for these people, for the entire future of the community. It might turn out not that serious, but if there was any possibility of such a danger, he needed to keep all his concentration and attention on the job. Whatever he was finding he felt about Elizabeth Carr in this rediscovery of the girl—the woman, he corrected himself—would and should wait.

Peter Hubbard knocked his pipe out, being careful that the wind blew no sparks toward the lighthouse. Walking along the beach in the moonlight alone, he told himself there was time to know what, if anything, he wanted to do about Elizabeth Carr.