“Thanks.”
“Yeah, I saw John Stone go up there, and that state cop. It’s no surprise—you know that, right? She was a mean drunk; she got picked up a few times over the years when she’d go over to Burnt Harbor and drive. She finally had her license revoked. I think Gryff got the car.”
She went into the kitchen. A moment later I heard PIL coming from the boombox.
I wondered what she did for fun around here. Wait for people like me to show up? I drank my coffee and glanced down toward the harbor. Robert and his cronies stood beside an abandoned building, smoking.
“What’s his problem?” I said when Suze came back out.
“Robert? He thinks you had something to do with Kenzie taking off.”
“What?”
She raised her hands. “I know. But that’s Robert. He’s not the sharpest knife in the box.”
“She his girlfriend?”
“Nah, they’re just friends. All the kids here, you know—they fight like cats, but they look out for each other. And people from away, they’re not too popular here. I mean, the lobster fishery’s in trouble from shell disease, there was a red tide last year killed the clamming season. The Grand Banks are fished out. I saw some underwater pictures this guy took, an urchin diver? The whole bottom of the ocean’s scraped clean. Like a fricking desert—nothing’s there. Scallop trawlers did that. So the fish are gone, and the paper mills are shut down, and everyone’s buying their timber from Canada ‘cause it’s cheaper. You see those logging trucks heading south, they’re not from here. Ten years ago, MBNA came in, hired people to work as telemarketers, and everyone thought that was the best thing ever happened. Then MBNA pulled out and everyone’s out of work again, only now they’re carrying a shitload of credit card debt. It sucks. Meanwhile, the tourists come and think this is fucking Disneyland. You own property here or Burnt Harbor, doesn’t matter if your family’s been there for a hundred years. Our taxes went from one or two thousand bucks a year to ten or twelve thousand. A lot of people don’t make that much in a year. So they have to sell their houses for teardowns, or their land, and all of a sudden you have all these rich assholes complaining that they can’t get a moccachino.”
I finished my coffee and tossed the cup into the trash. “Your point?”
“We don’t like people from away.”
“What about you?” I leaned against the counter. “You don’t like me either?”
Suze set her elbows down and leaned forward until her forehead touched mine. I cupped her chin in my hand, speed fizzing in me like champagne, then kissed her, her mouth small and warm.
“I like you just fine,” she said in a low voice. “I was hoping you might stick around for a while. But now—”
She withdrew, glanced out the window and shook her head. “Those boys, they’d just hassle you. And me. And if Kenzie doesn’t show up soon, it could get ugly. If I were you, I’d split.”
“What, frontier justice?”
“Pretty much. Doesn’t matter what the cops say. If they don’t find her, they’ll start looking for someone else.”
“Seems like you’d have some likely candidates without going too far out of the gene pool.”
“We hang together here. Like, we beat our wives and kids and shit, but we still don’t like people from away.”
“What about those flyers? And people disappearing and washing up on the beach? Did they all run into someone from away?”
“Hey, it’s nothing personal.”
She turned and climbed up the ladder. She had a cute ass, what I could see in those cargo pants, anyway. I said, “While you’re up there, get me another pint of Jack Daniel’s.”
“Sure.” She stepped down and over to the register. “That it?”
I nodded. “I saw something back there by Gryffin’s place. In those woods leading up to the house, those pine trees? There was an animal up in one of them.”
“Did it look like Robert?”
“No. Really. I never saw anything like it before. It was about this big—” I held out my hands. “Dark brown fur. Kind of a long fuzzy tail. It was fierce. I thought it was going to attack me. It growled, and I could see its teeth, these white sharp teeth—it was mean.”
Suze frowned. “That’s weird.”
“I think it was a fisher. Toby told me about them—the ones that eat all the cats.”
“A fisher?” She slid my Jack Daniel’s into a bag and handed it to me. “If you were over in Burnt Harbor, yeah. But not here. Fishers never leave the mainland.”
“Toby said they can swim.”
“Technically, maybe. But they’re pretty big, and their fur is so heavy that if they swim, it just weighs them down. I know, ‘cause one of my uncles used to trap them. You take a rooster and cut its throat and hang it from a tree, alongside a steel trap. It’s illegal now. My uncle, he once saw one on the ground and it jumped, like, twenty feet. From here—”
She pointed to a far corner of the room. “—to there. Bang, like that. Jumped right into the tree. Those things are vicious as a wolverine. What you saw, that was probably somebody’s cat. Was it gray? Maybe it was Smoky.”
“This was big,” I said. “And it wasn’t a cat.”
“Well, maybe. But I doubt it was a fisher. I’ve been here my whole life, and I never heard of a fisher here. There’s nothing for them to eat—no rabbits or porcupines or anything.”
“That’s why it ate Smoky.” I picked up my bag. I was getting pissed off; I definitely needed something to slow me down a little. “Is Toby around? I need to talk to him about a ride back to Burnt Harbor.”
“He’s probably still in bed.” She peered down at the harbor. “Yeah, his boat’s there. You know where he lives, right? Just go round back and knock real loud. He’ll be bummed about Aphrodite—not for her, for Gryff. They’re good buds.”
I stuck the bourbon into my pocket and said, “Gryffin was telling me about that guy Denny Ahearn. He seems kind of weird. To me, anyway. Like, if this was the United States of America, Homeland Security or someone would be asking him questions about this girl, and not me.”
“Denny?” Suze smiled. “Nah. He’s pretty harmless.”
“Do you know him?”
“Sure. I used to hang out with all those guys when I was sixteen, seventeen. Denny was really charismatic. Plus, he always had the best dope.”
She laughed. “He was fucking crazy! The mirror game, that was one of his big things. When you were tripping. Some people totally freaked over that shit. I always thought it was fun. For a while, anyway. Then some sad shit came down, Denny’s girlfriend died. He never really got over that.”
“How’d she die?”
“Car accident.”
The door banged open and the same woman with two small kids barged in. “Listen,” I said quickly to Suze. “You have a phone I could borrow? It’s long distance, but I really need to make a call down to New York. Here—”
I started to pull out my wallet, but Suze stopped me.
“Don’t worry about it.” The kids started smacking the ice-cream cooler as Suze handed me a phone. “Here, go upstairs, it’s quieter.”
I hurried up to the second floor and dialed Phil’s cell phone. It rang, I heard the noise of downtown street traffic, then his voice.
“Phil Cohen Enterprises.”
“Phil, it’s Cass—”
“Hey hey! Cassandra Android! How’s it going up there?”
“Not good.” I paced the room nervously. “You sent me here. Why?”
“Why?” His voice edged up defensively. “Whaddya mean, Cassie?”
“I mean you told me that Aphrodite wanted me—that she specifically wanted me to come up here to interview her. Then I got here and she says she never fucking heard of me. Or you.”