“I forgot you had company,” he said to Gryffin. “Well, I just needed to escort the sheriff over here. Marine Patrol will take over, I guess, when you need to get back. And other arrangements—”
He shook his head. “I guess State Office’ll deal with that. I’m sorry for your loss, Gryffin. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”
He left. Gryffin restlessly smoothed back his hair. He looked young and vulnerable. Frightened.
“I’m so sorry about all this, Gryffin,” said the sheriff. He nodded at me. “I’m John Stone, Paswegas County Sheriff.”
He was short, gray-blond hair, slight paunch, a worn face with a kindly expression. The kind of cop who, after retirement, becomes a school bus driver and remembers everyone’s birthday.
“I know this isn’t the ideal time to ask you questions,” he said, “but I’ll have to do that.”
He took out a notebook and a pen, set a camera on the table.
“Go ahead,” said Gryffin.
“It shouldn’t take too long. I was coming over anyway to question you about Merrill Libby’s girl. Which I’ll have to get to after this.”
He sighed. “The dispatcher’s already called in about your mother. They’re sending down someone from Machias, but it’ll be a little while before he gets here. So I’ll try to finish this up as fast as I can.”
“Who’s coming from Machias?” asked Gryffin.
“Criminal investigator. Homicide. I’m sorry, but this is all routine, Gryffin. What you have here is what we call an unattended death. So we have to do this. I’m real sorry. I’ll start with you, then your friend.”
He sat at the table and began filling out a form. I took a seat and drank my coffee, trying to stay calm as he went down his list: Who was there, Where did Gryffin find the body, What time. Had her doctor been notified.
“Any sign of forced entry?”
“No.”
“Purse missing? Any money missing? Any valuables?”
“No. No. No.”
“Keys gone?”
“Sheriff, I have never seen a set of keys in this house.”
John Stone leaned back. “Well, you know, yesterday Tyler Rawlins had a set of keys disappeared down at the Island Store. So these things do happen.” He glanced at his clipboard again. “You said you were here last night.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see your mother?”
“No. Not since sometime in the afternoon.”
“Do you usually see her?”
“No. Usually she takes the dogs out, she’s gone most of the day. We’re not close. I was just here on business. You know she drinks, Sheriff.”
The sheriff gave a brief nod. “But you were here last night?”
“No. We went to Ray Provenzano’s for dinner.”
“Your mother with you?”
“No. Just me and her—” Gryffin indicated me. “You can check with Ray.”
“Okay, I will. What about when you got home? You do anything? Go right to bed?”
“Yes.”
“Your bedroom’s upstairs? Did you hear anything unusual? Before you went to bed. Or later. Did you look into your mother’s room?”
“No. I don’t come up here much. I—”
He stopped. John Stone wrote down something then asked, “Were you by yourself? When you went to bed?”
For the first time Gryffin hesitated. “No.” His face reddened. “I was—she was with me.”
He pointed at me. John Stone sucked at his upper lip, made another mark on his sheet. “Okay. Anything else you can think of? Anything out of the ordinary? Those dogs—”
He looked out to where the deerhounds ran along the rocky beach. “Did they bark?”
“No.” As quickly as he’d blushed, Gryffin paled. “Excuse me, I’m not feeling well. I—”
He bolted from the room. John Stone drew a long breath then looked at me. “Boy, I really hate this. Now I have to do the same with you.”
He put a new sheet onto his clipboard. “Can you spell your name, please.”
A flicker of panic went through me. But as the minutes passed I felt more confident. The Adderall kicked in with its laboratory glow of invincibility, and I had to remind myself that this was police procedure and not a job interview. The dogs chased a seagull on the beach. John Stone’s radio crackled. He checked it, turned to me again.
“So, why’d you come here?” He sounded genuinely curious.
“To interview Aphrodite Kamestos. For a magazine.”
“That’s right, she was supposed to be famous at some point, wasn’t she. I never knew her.” He frowned. “You knew her, then?”
“No. Not personally, not before I came here yesterday. Someone set it up—an editor. At the magazine.”
“What about Gryffin? You know him? He a friend?”
“No. I never met him. Not before yesterday.”
“What about Mrs. Kamestos? She seem sick to you? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“I never met her before yesterday. She seemed fine, I guess. She seemed … drunk.”
“So I gather. They’ll do a toxicology report, we’ll see what that says.” He made another mark on his clipboard and put down his pen. “I guess that’ll do it. Unless you can think of anything else?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t you go far, now,” Stone went on. “I still have to question you about this other thing. That girl from the motel you stayed at the other night. But I got to finish this matter here first.”
A shadow fell across the table. I looked up to see Gryffin. His hair was wet, he’d shaved and changed into a white oxford-cloth shirt and corduroys, a brown jacket.
“You finished?” He slid into the chair next to mine.
“Just about,” said John Stone. There was another crackle from his radio. He picked it up, spoke briefly before turning back to us. “That was the dispatcher. Marine Patrol just left Burnt Harbor, they should be here in a few minutes.”
Gryffin toyed with his coffee mug. “Then what?”
“He’ll ask you some more questions and take a look around. They’ll arrange for someone to bring the deceased over to the funeral home, and the State Medical Examiner will take over.”
“Christ.” Gryffin closed his eyes.
Stone glanced over his notes. “Well. What I need to do now is take a look at the deceased.”
They went upstairs. I poured the rest of the coffee and drank it, slung on my jacket and went outside. The dogs ran over to me then raced off into the pine grove.
“Nice display of grief,” I said, and threw a stick after them.
The sky was gray and unsettled, not a brooding dark but a bright pewter haze that stung my eyes. I shut them and bright phantom bolts moved behind the lids, shapes that became a face tangled in dendrinal knots, branches, blood vessels, Kenzie Libby running along the road.
I opened my eyes. Wind hissed through dead leaves, a sound like sleet. A few tiny white flakes blew past my face.
Who could live here? I wondered.
I thought of Kenzie, of Aphrodite dead, and the flyers I’d seen everywhere. Dead cats. Missing kids. A new one now.
HAVE YOU SEEN KENZIE LIBBY?
I shivered. Maybe this was one of those places where people weren’t meant to live, like Love Canal or Spirit Lake.
Yet it was beautiful. Not just the trees and water and sky, all those things you expect to be beautiful, but the rest of it—stoved-in clapboards and flyspecked modular homes, beer bottles in the harbor, houses cobbled from stuff that everyone else threw away, a light that seemed to leak from another world.
I could live here, I realized. It wasn’t exactly a comforting thought.
There probably isn’t a bigger way of blowing a story than what I’d just done. Like, if you were to take a photograph of Paswegas at that moment and ask, What’s wrong with this picture? the answer would be pretty clear. There was no way I could stay.