The girl behind the counter stared at me. “That’s right.”
I bought a pair of heavy yellow work gloves. They made my hands feel clumsy and thumbless, and they weren’t even very warm. But they were better than nothing. I bought a beer, too, then started for the door. There were a bunch of notices tacked to it: snowplowing, firewood, Little Munchkins childcare, along with numerous photocopies for Lost Cats. Beneath the missing cats, someone had taped another photocopy, of a young man in a Nike T-shirt and woolen watch cap.
HAVE YOU SEEN MARTIN GRAVES?
LAST SEEN AUGUST 29 SHAKER HARBOR
REWARD FOR INFORMATION
PLEASE CALL 247-9141
I returned to the car, sat inside and drank my beer, watching as two guys in orange vests wrestled a buck from their pickup and weighed it on a hook outside the store.
“Supposed to have snow up to Calais,” said one of them.
His friend lit a cigarette. “Good place for it.”
I set my empty bottle on the ground and drove off.
The road began to veer east. After two wrong turns, I realized the MapQuest directions Phil had given me were useless. I pulled over and opened my map.
On the page, the road appeared to hug the coast. In reality the sea seemed distant and ghostly, hoving in and out of sight like mist. Now and then I saw the raw wood scaffolding of a McMansion-in-progress, its mammoth exoskeleton dwarfing the trailers and modular homes beside it, or mobile-home churches with signs reading don’t wait for 6 strong men to take you to church. to be almost saved is to be totally lost.
But after a while, even these reminders of the encroaching world disappeared. I finally found the turnoff and passed through a town consisting of a general store with a single gas pump, a shuttered antique shop, and an abandoned gas station. Two boys in baggy pants and T-shirts were riding a Toro lawn mower down the middle of the street. The boys pulled over to let me by, and I turned onto a pocked road with a sign that said paswegas county line and another marked burnt harbor.
That was when I really began to feel like I was driving off the end of the earth. Now, at last, there was the ocean. The coast fell away and the sea opened like a huge blue eye, lashed with black islands and rocky outcroppings. I switched the car radio on and picked up a weak signal that seemed to come and go with the waves, an alternative station playing snatches of odd music, requests, pleas for information about lost pets.
And that light! It gave a merciless clarity to everything, clapboards the color of dirty snow, trailers banked with trash bags, pyramids of lobster traps hauled out for the winter. Spruce and pines that looked like they’d been knapped from flint. The orange flare of a hunter on the horizon, the woods behind him black, endless.
It was as if layers of ash had been blown away until the true sky was revealed, a sky so pure a blue that it no longer seemed a color at all but an emotion, a desolation that tipped over into joy. The cold was like that too, the numbness in my gloved hands no longer something I felt but something I was, a character trait like stubbornness or generosity. I could see the peninsula before me, a ragged, four-fingered hand thrusting into the Atlantic. I hunched over the steering wheel, frozen but exhilarated, and headed toward the sea.
It was nearly four by now; nightfall. Burnt Harbor, the village at the tip of the peninsula—that was where I was supposed to find the guy who would bring me over to Paswegas Island. Everett Moss, the harbormaster. I didn’t own a cell phone, so I drove until I found a gas station with an ancient pay phone outside. I hunched against the peeling vinyl siding and tried to keep my teeth from chattering as I fed coins into the slot.
There was another torn flyer taped beside the payphone. No photo on this one, just the words have you seen martin graves? last seen august 29, shaker harbor, please call with any information. I shoved in the last coin and prayed the harbormaster was still around. The wind roared up from the sea so loudly that I could barely hear when someone answered.
“Is this Everett Moss?” I shouted. The phone reception was for shit.
“Hay-lo.” The voice was brusque but cheerful. “Yes, it is.”
“This is Cassandra Neary. Phil Cohen spoke to you about taking me over to Paswegas this afternoon?”
“Oh yes.”
“I’ll be there in about half an hour. I’m in—” I craned my neck. “Well, I don’t know where I am, exactly, somewhere past Bealesville. Collinstown, I guess this is. So maybe fifteen miles away?”
“Oh yes, Collinstown, that’s about fifteen miles. Well, that’s very good, but I can’t take you out today.”
“What? Why not?” Cold and desperation made my voice crack. “I’ll be there in what? Half an hour?”
“Well yes, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do it then, neither. It’ll be dark. Could probably do it first thing tomorrow. How’s that?”
“Tomorrow?” I shivered, staring to where the ocean darkened from indigo to scorched steel. “Jesus! I don’t even know where I am! Is there a place to stay between here and Burnt Harbor?”
“Well, yes there is,” Moss boomed genially. “You just keep on heading this way, and when you get to just before the bridge, you’ll see there on your right the Lighthouse Motel. He’s open year round. Then first thing tomorrow, you come down here to the harbor and we’ll get you taken care of. Say, six o’clock. All right?”
“What if he’s not—”
“All right then!”
Click.
I stormed back to the car. My little by-blow of crank had long worn off. I wasn’t hungry or tired yet, but I knew the crash was coming, and I didn’t want to be stuck in a rented Ford Taurus when it did. That crystalline blue sky was now nearly black. Wind rattled the bare trees and sent dead leaves skittering across the parking lot.
I clambered back into the car and drove on. Once I crossed the bridge spanning an inlet of Hagman’s Bay, I was officially on the Paswegas Peninsula.
Even in the near dark, I felt a wild sense of space, of sky, the smells of salt and balsam and rotting fish. Wood smoke pooled like fog above the marshes. I peered vainly through the twilight for any sign of the Lighthouse Motel. It was hard enough to see any houses, and when I did spot one it wasn’t reassuring—a small, raised ranch house with what looked like a dog hanging above the garage door. That was weird enough, but it got weirder when I passed the next house and saw three dead dogs hanging alongside a shed. I slowed the car to get a better look.
They weren’t dogs but coyotes. Big ones too. I decided that if the Lighthouse didn’t show up in the next five minutes, I was going to turn around and drive back to Manhattan.
And then it appeared on a spur of land overlooking a small harbor, your basic American motel circa 1962. A one-story mockup of a lighthouse, minus the light, stood beside a neat white clapboard building with green shutters, lamps lit within, a neon office sign. Three cars were parked in front of a row of attached motel units. A sign hung from a denuded maple.
LIGHTHOUSE MOTEL
BEST RATES IN MAINE ALWAYS
YOUR HOST MERRILL LIBBY
NO PETS NO GUNS FREE COFFEE
VACANCY
That last word was the only one I cared about. I parked alongside the office, pulled my leather jacket tight against the cold, and went inside.
It was about what I expected, a room furnished in Early Knotty Pine, well-worn but clean. I couldn’t tell if someone had repeatedly spilled coffee on the carpet or if this was a design decision that had never caught on in the lower forty-seven. Still, it was warm. Heat blasted from a propane monitor. I was so cold, I would have slept on that carpet. I hoped I wouldn’t have to.
There was a little alcove at one end of the room, and here in a swivel chair a teenage girl, maybe fifteen, sat hunched over a computer. I drew close enough to catch a glimpse of a screen full of IM dialog bubbles. Then the girl looked up. A heavyset gothy kid with cropped hair dyed black, black-rimmed eyes, white skin beneath a flaking layer of pinkish foundation. She had a stud beneath her lower lip and what appeared to be a bunch of three-penny nails stuck through one earlobe. She wore a necklace made of the tabs from soda cans laced together on a leather thong and interspersed with bits of sea-glass, a flannel shirt over jeans wide enough to double as body bags, disintegrating lowtop sneakers.