“Stay close to me,” he said. “They won’t fire as long as we’re together.”
I decided that he was crazy but friendly. We marched down the trail, David in my arms, Andrea at my side. As we approached the cleared space where the hall had been, a stout man wearing a khaki uniform and a Nelson Eddy hat advanced. He raised a bull horn.
“Put your hands on your heads!”
I looked at Andrea and smiled. It was all so ridiculous. But we did what he said, as one humors a child.
“Move away from the woman and the kid” said the fat guy in khaki.
I realized that he was talking to me. I started to explain who we were and what we were doing. Then I noticed that every officer present had a gun that was aimed in my direction. Everyone seemed very tense.
“Just do what he says!” shouted the man who had run up the trail to meet us.
I obediently took several paces sideways.
“Lie down on the ground,” continued the man with the megaphone. “Real easy now. No sudden movements. Just keep calm and nobody’s going to get hurt.”
Again I obeyed, sensing as I did so that I had already surrendered some considerable part of my constitutional rights. My arms were dragged behind my back and handcuffed securely together.
“Better Miranda him,” said a voice above me. “This one’s going to be huge. Watch some slick lawyer try and make a career by springing the son of a bitch on a technicality.”
Strong hands hauled me to my feet and patted every inch of my body while I was told I was under arrest and my rights were recited. I was not really paying attention, but I remember that the charges included assaulting a police officer. For the first time it occurred to me that this was not just a silly mistake which would all be cleared up in a few moments.
“This is ridiculous!” I said. “We’re innocent victims. They would have killed us if they could.”
The character in the hat cut me off.
“You can do all the talking you want back at the courthouse, son. No need to rush things. We’re operating on island time here.”
He turned to another man, also in a khaki uniform.
“Take him across, Lorne. Pete, you go along too. Keep him cuffed the whole time, and don’t take your eyes off of him.”
Other policemen surrounded Andrea and David as I was led away. I protested loudly that David was my son and begged them not to separate us, but no one paid any attention. It was as though I hadn’t spoken, as though I weren’t there. The man called Lorne gripped my arm and pushed me along. I noticed that there were dead bodies everywhere. I recognized Melissa, the blond woman who had kidnapped David. Her face and hands were badly burned and she had a terrible gaping wound in her back. As I surveyed the other corpses, strewn across the ground all around the burned-out shell of the hall, the full scale of what had occurred became apparent to me, and the gravity of my presumed involvement in it.
The two policemen steered me down the trail to the pier, holding me in a tight, impersonal grip. They kept up a bantering dialogue about the number of reporters and television people who would shortly descend on the islands, but neither spoke to me. I felt that I had been reduced to the status of an object to be moved from place to place, some large piece of furniture which no one wanted.
“Shit, it’ll be worse than a long weekend in August,” said the one called Lorne. “They’ll be crawling all over Friday. Show your ass on the street, someone’ll shove a microphone up it.”
“And the ferries? Forget it. Still, I guess it’s a two-way street. I was supposed to visit my sister tomorrow, over in La Conner, but now …”
“Looks like you got lucky, Pete. You might get over there with the car OK, but westbound? No fucking way.”
The scene at the landing was transformed out of all recognition. There were boats everywhere, some by the pier, others anchored offshore, maybe ten in all. Most had their engines running and their searchlights on, illuminating the scene in a weird pattern of intersecting beams. Two men in overalls and another wearing shorts and a polo shirt were bending over Andy’s body. The civilian nodded to the two deputies.
“What the hell happened here?” he asked in a shocked tone.
The one called Pete gestured up the trail.
“You think this is bad, wait’ll you see what’s waiting for you up there. This thing’s a regular massacre.”
“Guess I can forget about that cookout, then.”
“You get through here, Dick, you won’t want to eat charbroiled meat for a long, long time, I promise you that.”
We walked down the pier and boarded a launch marked SHERIFF. My handcuffs were fastened with another set to a guardrail support. The launch was lying between the pier and a red fire boat, and it took a few minutes to re-rig the mooring lines and back the launch out. Then we did a high-speed turn and scudded off over the dark waters.
Despite my humiliating and painful position, I felt an enormous sense of relief just to be off that island at long last. Whatever happened from here on in, the worst was over. It looked as though Mark and his two allies had torched the hall, maybe using gasoline from the generator shed. If one of them had approached the south end of the hall, where there were no windows, he would have had all the time he wanted to start a serious blaze. And since there was no source of water inside the hall, once the timbers caught there would be no way to put the fire out. If the people inside stayed put, they would be overcome by the smoke and flames. If they tried to leave, they would be shot down. Mark, Rick and Lenny would have had no compunction about this. Every killing validated their contention that they alone were fully human, empowered to mete out life and death.
We rounded a headland and turned into a sheltered bay with the lights of a town at the far end. As we drew closer, I saw that it was a sizable pleasure port, with a large marina and a loading dock where a car ferry was tied up. The police launch cut up the channel to the landward end of the marina. One of the two deputies unfastened the handcuffs securing me to the rail. We disembarked, walked up a gangplank to the street and drove off in a police car.
After my enforced exile, I greedily took in every detail of the scene. There was a main street back of the harbor and a few smaller ones off those. We went about three blocks, pulling up in a parking lot before the courthouse annex, a long one-story building from the fifties with an overhanging flat roof. There were lots of pretty trees, shrubs and flowers planted in front. The sheriff shared the office space with the county’s Building and Planning Department, as well as the Public Health and Community Services.
Inside the front door was a cardboard box with a slit and a handwritten sign reading COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS, a large plastic recycling bin, and a set of gray metal lockers marked WEAPON DEPOSIT BOX. In my heightened and febrile state, they seemed to symbolize the essential trinity of American life: democracy, idealism, violence. We entered a warren of cramped offices where I was formally placed under arrest. My name and other details were recorded and my fingerprints taken. I was allowed one phone call, which I used to contact my parents. It was the middle of the night on the East Coast, but they were very sympathetic. My father told me that he couldn’t fly out immediately because my mother was too sick to be left alone, but that he would get in touch with people he knew in Boston and hire the best defense lawyer in the Northwest. They both said they loved me and that everything would be all right. I wanted to tell them about David, but it didn’t seem the right moment.
The deputy called Lorne had meanwhile broken out a first aid kit which he used to clean and dress the cut on my forehead. Then I was taken to a holding cell at the end of the block, a small bare space with a bunk bed and a window of opaque glass bricks. My handcuffs were finally removed and I was locked in. I paced up and down, thinking about David and Andrea. I wanted so much to see both again. Although it sounds absurd, I had come to think of us as a family. The intensity of the experiences we had been through together seemed to constitute a lived history at least as substantial as the one I had shared with Rachael. But time dragged by and no one appeared. Eventually I lay down on the bed and fell asleep.