There’d been no reek of desperation about her, no fear, just a kid’s longing for something she couldn’t put a name to yet. She was bored; she dreamed of waking up somewhere else. Her father might have been an asshole, but he didn’t beat her or abuse her.
That’s why she hadn’t interested me. No damage.
“Merrill’s wicked pissed off,” said Everett.
“Yeah. Now he’s got to clean the motel rooms,” Toby said. They both laughed.
“Well, he’s all worked up, no doubt ‘bout that.” The harbormaster slung his hands into his pockets. “John Stone told me Merrill called him this morning too, got him out of bed. John told him she aint’t back by sunset, then he should call. Or maybe little miss went on down to Florida, see her ma. Anyway, you see her, tell her to get herself home.”
He began walking down to the water, stopped and looked back at me.
“You too,” he said. His gaze wasn’t threatening. It was worried. “You see her, call me or John Stone, he’s the sheriff. Don’t like these kids running off.”
He lifted a hand to Toby and headed off.
“Come on,” said Toby. “We better get you up to Aphrodite’s house.”
We walked through the village. The bait shop, a mobile home with a bunch of large, scary-looking dolls standing in the window. The Island General Store, a clapboard building covered in flaking rust-colored paint, with a low wooden stoop and a gas pump with a trash bag tied over it. A bunch of flyers flapped from the store’s walls and screen door.
“That guy,” I said. I walked over and pulled at a faded piece of paper. “Martin Graves. I keep seeing these everywhere. What’s the deal with him?”
I glanced aside and saw another flyer, curled with damp and age. “Jesus. What’s the deal with all of them?”
I smoothed out the second flyer. This one was a color xerox of a smiling teenage girl, her face and hair bleached to a brown slurry between faded words.
“‘Heather Pollitt,’” I read aloud. “What happened to her?”
“She ran off.” Toby stepped up beside me. “Went down to Bangor, I think. She had a baby or something. That’s a real old flyer, that one; we should take it down—”
He tore it down and crumpled it, tossed it into a barrel by the door. “Oh, and look here—somebody’s cat is missing too. That’s a new one,” he added, tapping a handwritten sheet dated a few days earlier. “Poor Smoky! I hope they find him. But that guy—”
He pressed a scabbed-over thumb against the picture of Martin Graves. “I don’t know what happened. I heard he just took off or something. Supposedly he had a fight with his girlfriend, or maybe it was his wife? Anyway, his parents keep putting these up. You saw some driving up here?”
“Yeah. I think I read about him online too. This place has a high mortality rate for kids. And cats.”
We started back up the hill. Behind us gulls wheeled and screamed above the harbor. The road was dirt and gravel and ice, chunks of broken blacktop. After a few yards it curved and began to climb steeply between scrawny firs and birch.
“Fishers get the cats,” said Toby.
“Huh?”
“What you said about kids and cats. Fishers get them.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “They use them for bait?”
“Not fishermen. Fisher cats. That’s what they call them, but they’re really just fishers. They’re kind of like a wolverine, or a big mink, but they can climb trees. Usually they eat porcupines, but sometimes one will move into a neighborhood and start picking off all the local pets. Cats, small dogs even.”
“Kids?”
Toby laughed. “Not that I ever heard. They’re not that big—maybe the size of a big coon cat. I think that’s why they call ‘em fisher cats.”
“How do they eat porcupines?”
“They’re really smart. Smarter’n a porcupine, anyway. But you don’t find them on the islands, usually. Just the mainland. Here, let’s go this way.”
He turned off the narrow road into a pine grove. There was no path that I could see, but Toby moved confidently among the trees. The shrieks of gulls died into a muffled near silence; the sound of wind in the trees was louder than the ocean. The moss underfoot was so thick and damp it was like walking on soggy carpet, and the moss wasn’t just on the ground—it covered everything, rocks, logs, even an empty beer can. If I fell asleep on the ground, it would probably cover me, moss and this bright yellow mold, and something Toby said was old-man’s-beard, long stringy hanks of lichen that hung from tree limbs like hair. Unlike the rocks by the harbor, these looked soft and plushy with moss. They looked organic, like if you stared at one long enough you might catch it breathing.
It was a weird place; what you’d imagine a fairy tale would look like if you fell into one. They gave me a bad feeling, all those trees. When I touched one, the bark wasn’t damp but wet and slimy. It seemed to give beneath my finger, like skin.
It creeped me out.
I used to like that feeling. I used to hunt that feeling down. For a second, I thought of getting out my camera and hunting it again.
But I couldn’t. The island spooked me. I got the sense here that nothing you did could ever matter—not for long, anyway. You could build a house or an entire town and the island would just swallow it and you’d never know it had even existed. Everything would just be eaten away. I kicked at a boulder, and my boottip snagged in two inches of moss. I had to bend over to yank it out.
Toby stopped to wait for me. “Porcupines like pine trees,” he said. “Like fishers do. But porcupines are stupid. Porcupines and skunks. Ever notice how much road kill is porcupines and skunks? They rely so much on being obnoxious, they think nothing can kill them. But a fisher’s smart—vicious, but smart. And fast. They come up on a porcupine, bite it on the nose then flip it over and tear its throat and belly out. They’ll go right for its head, rip its whole face off, then eat it from the inside out.”
I made a face. Toby laughed.
“You don’t need to worry,” he said. “Like I said, they don’t come out here to the islands. And they don’t attack people. Not much, anyway. They go for smaller things. I saw one once, in the woods by Burnt Harbor. It was playing with a mouse, like a cat does.”
“But what if one did come here?”
“I don’t know.” He ran his hand along a branch covered with lichen that looked like peeling orange housepaint, snapped the branch off and tossed it. “They can swim, I think. Maybe one could swim over. I guess then it could swim back to shore. Or maybe they eat each other. There never seems to be a real long-term problem back on the mainland. People trap them.”
He began to walk again. “You getting tired?”
I shrugged. That hangover was starting to rage behind my eyes. It wasn’t even ten, and I was ready to crawl back to bed. “Just fried,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“The Lighthouse didn’t suit you?”
“It wasn’t that. Too wound up, I guess.”
“Last I saw, you were knocking back the Jack Daniel’s. That would unwind me pretty fast.”
We walked on. Now and then I’d spot sea urchins on the moss, their spines the same gray-green as the lichen. I stopped and nudged one with my foot. “How do these get here?”
“Sea gulls drop them on the rocks to crack ‘em open.” Toby glanced at me curiously. “So’d you see her last night? Merrill’s daughter?”
“Just for a few minutes.” I picked up the sea urchin. Several spines fell away at my touch, not sharp but soft and brittle, like burnt twigs. “She checked me in. And she came to my room after, to tell me about that place where we ate. The Good Tern. So I guess I can thank her for my hangover.”