Granite Harbor, page 3
The clean line of the incision undulated. Something was moving beneath it. Inside Shane’s belly.
As both men stared, a tiny hand, almost humanlike, dark red with gore, protruded from the wound.
“Oh my Lord!” Mark said, louder.
A second hand thrust itself out of the wound.
Mark stepped back, lost his footing on a tree root beneath the leaves and fell backward. He got to his feet. He was breathing hard. “What in the good Lord…”
They both watched the hands waving, reaching out of the wound just above the belly button, and now the edges of the incision distended … pushed from inside …
“Oh … my…”
A small head, wide, flat, smeared with clotted blood, emerged. A protuberant golden eye closed and opened in a slow blink.
“What the—”
“It’s a frog,” said Alex.
“What the hell’s it doing in there?”
“That’s a good question.”
The frog’s arm reached farther along the incision, gripping the edge with the bulb-tipped fingers of both hands. The head quivered. A leg emerged—
It leaped, plopping onto the leaves between the two men.
“We need to get it, Mark!”
It jumped again, away from them, behind the frame, toward the trees.
As they stepped after it, the frog sprang again, away from Mark’s heavier footfall, clanking bulk—to land in front of Alex. He dropped onto his knees, fell forward onto his elbows, and closed both hands around the frog.
“Get a bag! And gloves.”
Mark was breathing fast. “Okay.” He ran off heavily, panting audibly, his belt jangling.
The frog squirmed. Alex kept his hands closed over it. He felt the wet thick blood on the cold reptilian skin.
5
Isabel slowed at the sight of the police car. Mark Beltz, one of Granite Harbor’s patrolmen, was standing near the yellow tape talking with Detective Alex Brangwen. Both turned to look in her direction as she came to a stop in the middle of the parking lot.
A second patrol car pulled up close behind her. Its flashing roof light strobed into her eyes through the mirror.
Crazy thoughts flooded her—Are they waiting for me? What have I done? Has something happened to Ethan? No, he was home in bed … she was sure.
Mark Beltz came forward and directed her to a parking space. She pulled in, and the other police car moved past and parked near the tape.
“Good morning, Mrs. Dorr,” said Mark as she got out of her car. “We’ll ask you to wait in the gift shop for now, please.”
“What’s going on? Why are you here?”
“We’ve got a situation. We’ll just ask you to wait in the gift shop, please.” He raised a hand toward the gift shop, as if directing traffic.
Isabel looked past him at the detective. He was talking with the stocky young patrolwoman, Becky Watrous, in a too-tight uniform, who had arrived in the second police car.
“Mrs. Dorr, please.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
As she entered the gift shop, a tiny, crone-like woman came swiftly forward and gripped her arm.
“Oh Isabel! Your first day.” Nancy Keeler peered up at her through crooked wire-rim spectacles.
Isabel hardly recognized her friend. Framed beneath the linen coif, the wizened face appeared almost a small accessory at the top of her voluminous Goodwife outfit. Nancy and her husband, Graham, had owned the Belvedere Inn, a bed-and-breakfast with water views on Bayview Street. After Graham’s sudden death at sixty-eight from cancer, Nancy sold the inn. But a year later, bored in retirement inside the small Cape she’d purchased on Sea Street, she joined the roster of players at the Granite Harbor Settlement. Nancy was Goodwife Howe. Her usual twenty-first-century appearance—thin, a white-haired bob, large round tortoiseshell glasses, black blazer, slim fashion jeans—was dramatically altered by her seventeenth-century threads, which emphasized her four-foot-eleven-inch height.
Isabel looked beyond Nancy at the other people in the room.
“Isabel,” said Chester Coffey, standing beside Nancy. Chester—Goodman Denham, the Settlement’s blacksmith—looked more like a forest creature than a Pilgrim father, with a dense beard that grew high into his red cheeks and down his throat, wispy hair beneath a shapeless felt hat pierced with a pheasant feather. His barrel chest was accentuated by a dark leather jerkin with many pockets that fell to shapeless woolen knee britches.
“Goody Swaine,” Monte Glover—Goodman Clews, magistrate—greeted her gravely in a deep baritone that was the heart and ballast of the small but dedicated Granite Harbor Gay Men’s Chorus. “Roger’s made coffee.”
Roger Priestly—Goodman Bowles, the Settlement’s apothecary—slim, fortyish, close-cropped salt-and-pepper whiskers, held up a pot of fresh coffee behind the counter. The Settlement’s historian, Roger had determined the appropriate outfits and advised the players on the seventeenth-century details they shared with visitors. A fourth man, Jeff Block—Goodman Swaine, fisherman-boatbuilder, Hannah’s historical husband—sat in a chair in the back.
They were all looking at Isabel.
“Why are the police here?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
“Jeff found a body near the vegetable patch,” said Monte Glover. His deep voice sounded like an amplified theatrical announcement.
“Oh my God.” Isabel looked at Jeff and then quickly at the others in the shop. “Who?”
“A boy,” said Roger. “Probably one of the high school kids. About that age.”
“Oh my God! Who?”
“They haven’t told us.”
Ethan’s at home in bed, asleep, she told herself, again. He was always there in the morning now. But she hadn’t seen him since last night. She turned her back to the room, pulled her phone from the dangling pocket beneath the many layers of clothing, and tapped his number. It went to voicemail. “Ethan, call me when you wake up. It’s very important. Call me first thing. I mean it. Call me.” She sent the same message to him as a text.
“A kid,” said Jeff, shaking his head.
“Oh, Jeff.” Nancy walked quickly to the back of the room. She knelt before Jeff and took the hand that wasn’t holding the coffee mug. “Are you all right?”
Jeff shrugged. “I’m okay.… Thanks.”
They heard vehicles out on the gravel.
“More police,” said Chester at the window.
Isabel looked out to see two unmarked white windowless vans pulling into the parking lot. Men and women got out, pulled on white Tyvek suits and bootees and rubber gloves. Mark Beltz conferred with them.
Isabel saw Detective Alex Brangwen walking toward the gift shop. She backed away from the window.
The door hissed open again and Alex entered. He closed it behind him and turned to face the people in the gift shop.
“Morning.” He recognized Nancy. “Hello, Nancy.”
“Hello, Alex.”
He nodded at Isabel. “Isabel,” he said.
“Hello,” she said.
He looked at the four men. “Morning. I’m Detective Brangwen. I think we all know one another, by sight anyway.”
“Good morning, Detective. Roger Priestly,” said Roger.
The other three men identified themselves.
“Jeff, you found the body and called it in?”
“Yes, sir.”
Deep inside her costume, Isabel’s phone beeped. It was loud, they could all hear it.
“Do you want to get that?” Alex asked.
She was already digging it out. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Alex said.
What? Ethan had texted. He was safe. Her chest expanded, her legs felt weak with relief. But she could hear, in the single word and question mark, his tone of annoyance.
I’ll be home early. Stay there! she texted back.
The phone beeped immediately in response. Mom, chill.
Alex addressed them without looking at her again. “Our crew will probably be here most of the day. We have to close the place for now, today anyway. And I’ll need to interview all of you—is this everyone who works here?”
“Bill and Jan Conrad aren’t here yet,” said Roger. “And Sylvia Grinnell. She runs the gift shop. She comes in a little before ten.”
“All right. I have to leave now. Patrolman Beltz will come in here and talk with you. He’ll get your phone numbers and tell you when you can go home. I’ll call each of you later and set up a time, today preferably, when I can come and see you. So please don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave town.”
He pulled business cards from his jacket and placed them on the gift shop counter. “This is my phone number and email. Please take one before you go.”
“Do you know who it is?” Isabel asked.
He looked at her briefly and then around the room. “We don’t have any information on that yet.”
He turned. The door hissed open again and he pulled it shut after him.
6
Outside, Alex called Morgana. As usual, his call went straight to voicemail. “Hi! This is Morgana Claymore. I’m so sorry to miss your call.” The friendly, lilting tone of a Texan Realtor, or the secretary of a prosperity gospel church. “Please leave me a message and I’ll be sure to call you back.”
“Morgana, please call me. It’s urgent. You have to pick up Sophie from school, now. Take her home and don’t let her go out. Something’s happened that involves the local kids, her friends. It’s important that you call me as soon as possible.”
Alex turned to Mark Beltz, who was standing nearby, waiting for him. “Where’s the frog, Mark?”
“I put it in a bag. I put air holes in it. It’s in my car.”
“Give it to the medical examiner. Apart from him and the forensic team, no mention of it to anyone else. Nobody else knows about it except the killer.”
“Right. I took photographs of Shane’s face and sent them to Judy. She’s known Doreen and the family since grade school. She’s calling Cathy Fremont, Doreen’s cousin, to go out to Doreen’s house and tell her. She’ll text Cathy the photos, so Doreen can identify him.”
“I’m going there now.”
* * *
In the car, he called Judy Waite, the department dispatcher.
“Yes, dear God, that’s Shane, Doreen’s boy.”
“Can you text me the address, please, Judy? I’m going out there now.”
“They’re out on Cobb Road, I’ll text you the address now. That poor woman.”
He tried Morgana again—voicemail. He couldn’t shake the image of Sophie, strung up, a frog inside her. But he’d dropped her at school. He summoned the memory of her getting out of the car with Kendra at school. She’s safe—for now. Security at the high school had been beefed up in recent years in the wake of the cascade of school shootings they’d all seen on television. It could happen here, people said.
This too, apparently.
They had to keep Sophie at home, safe—after school anyway—until he caught the killer.
Good luck with that. In the last year, Sophie had discovered that she could do as she pleased. The final frontier of parental enforcement—coercion with threats, bribes, offers of special considerations—had crumbled when Sophie had discovered the power of “no.” And its equally dismaying sidekick—“I don’t care”—when threatened with grounding, loss of allowance.
How had this happened? Her friends, from what he could tell talking with other parents, were the same. They assumed an independence from parental authority unimaginable when Alex was a boy. His father would have thumped his ear if he’d talked back to his parents the way Sophie did to him. Alex had no control at all over his daughter now. When he tried laying down the law with what sounded to him like implacable authority, she demolished it with her own impregnable logic, or sheer refusal. Morgana was tougher—she was the bad cop. Through some mother-daughter connection or alchemy she appeared to have more sway with Sophie.
But they had to keep her close, for now. Home early. Monitor her as much as possible. He had to impress that upon Morgana. Death, horrible butchery, could be the consequence of misbehavior. No grounding would fix that.
His phone vibrated—Shane’s mother’s address from Judy. He tapped and it opened in maps.
* * *
Cobb Road ran uphill through woods away from the sea. It had been routed and laid to transport lumber and granite from inland forests and quarries to the midcoast, to be loaded aboard the great four- and five-masted schooners that once filled Granite Harbor.
Descending out of the woods, he drove through another Maine. Far from the vacationland of summer people, the leaf peepers, or winter’s cross-country skiers. Most of the older wooden farmhouses had been torn down and replaced with charmless, efficiently heated, vinyl-clad ranch designs, or double-wide manufactured homes.
* * *
Shane’s home was a white vinyl-sided raised ranch. It sat on the edge of the road in front of a small field hacked out of spindly woods. Parts of old cars, tractors, rusty snowplows, barrels, and two fiberglass boats growing gray mold lay scattered in the unmown grass. A sagging string of holiday lights was nailed above the front door.
“Mrs. Wisner,” Alex said when the door opened. “Detective Brangwen, Granite Harbor Police. Has your cousin—”
“Yes, she’s here. I’ve heard. Come in.” Doreen Wisner met his eyes briefly. Her face was impassive, her mouth a pinched, downturned slit. Though she was stooped, shoulders hunched forward, she might have once been tall, five eight or nine. She was thin, almost emaciated inside a too-large PATRIOTS sweatshirt above loose jeans. Lank hair beginning to gray. Fifties, Alex thought. But then he realized Shane, her oldest child, was only sixteen.… Forties, late thirties? She was already adrift in the wilderness of her middle years.
She wore slippers and dragged them as she walked. He followed her into the open kitchen.
“My cousin Cathy,” she said.
Another PATS sweatshirt, also gray, but this one XXL, over a pillow mound of breast and stomach. Cathy’s eyes ranged sullenly over him as if to say, What are you going to do about it?
Doreen sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. Cathy was already smoking. Stale cigarette air filled the room. The kitchen was decorated on the same principle as the rest of the property: nothing once used could be discarded. Shelves and countertop crammed with old birthday and Christmas cards, small plastic animals, more than a few Bob’s Big Boy figurine piggy banks, catalogs, Uncle Henry’s classifieds.
“Mrs. Wisner, I’m so sorry for your loss.” The words were perfunctory, but he had no others. And he meant them. “Have you seen the photo we sent over?” He glanced at Cathy.
“It’s him,” said Doreen.
“If you don’t mind, I have to ask you a few questions.”
“Go ahead.” Doreen pulled on her cigarette and looked dully out the kitchen window at a backyard that reminded Alex of the swap-shop section of the town’s landfill. Shane’s mother looked bored. Or drugged. She’d moved slowly, like sleepwalking, through the kitchen. Maybe she’d already arrived at some extremity that this latest tragedy couldn’t dent further.
“Okay if I sit here?” He indicated a chair.
“Help yourself.”
Alex pulled that chair away from the table, sat down, pulled out a pad and pen. “When did you last see Shane?”
“Couple of days ago. Tuesday, I think.”
“Two days ago? He was missing for two days?”
“He wasn’t missing. I just didn’t see him. He must’ve been over to friends’ houses. He stays with them sometimes.”
“What friends?”
“Ethan—Ethan Dorr. Jared McKinnon.”
“Did you call over there? The Dorrs or the McKinnons?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Like I said, I thought he must’ve been there. He’s always with them.”
“You weren’t worried about him?”
“Nope.”
“How many of you are in the household here, Mrs. Wisner?”
“Five. Me, my husband, Dennis—that’s my second husband, he’s not Shane’s father—so there’s us, and Dennis’s son Brian, and Dennis’s and my little girl, Skye—she’s sleeping.”
“Where is Shane’s father?”
“Somewhere in upstate New York last I heard.”
“Have you been in touch with him yet?”
“No.”
“Do you have his contact information?”
“Somewhere.”
“What is his name, please?”
“Derek Carter.”
“Are he and Shane close?”
“No. His father hasn’t been in touch for a while.”
“What’s a while?”
“Ten years, maybe.”
“He hasn’t seen his father in ten years?”
“Nope.”
“Do you ever look at Shane’s phone?”
“No.”
Alex wrote in one of the small pads he bought in bundles of ten from Renys. Apart from getting down the basic and usually irrelevant details, writing notes gave him something to do with his eyes as he asked people questions. He could look up and down, from his pad to the face of the person he was talking to, and look away, as if thinking, and take in everything he saw around him. People expected him to take notes and to look thoughtful. They looked away too, eyes settling on things around them, or they looked at him when they thought he wasn’t looking, and he saw when they did that.
At the other end of the table, Cathy sat gazing at him with unconscious curiosity, like a child, as if waiting to hear what he would ask next. Her eyes shifting from Alex when he asked his questions, to Doreen when she answered, as if watching a tennis match.
Alex had a sense of life here already blasted into pieces, long ago. A crater full of knickknacks to fill a bottomless emptiness.
“Are there any other adults he’s had particular contact with, now or in the past?”
