Generation Loss (14 page)

"Summer
people," said Gryffin. "Suze's got a pretty good wine list too."

I
eyed the comatose Newfoundland. "What's with all the big dogs? I thought
this was golden retriever country."

"That's
Southern Maine. This is the Real Maine—Rotweilers and half-breed wolves. You
can ask Suze. Hey, Suze!"

A
petite woman walked out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She
was obviously Paswegas Island's groove supply. I pegged her to be about my age,
bleached blond dreadlocks streaked pink and green, windburned cheeks, pale blue
eyes, a front tooth with a tiny chip in it; gray cargo pants and a multicolored
cardigan over a T-shirt that read they call it tourist season: why can't we
shoot them? She had the kind of milk-fed face that would have seemed open if it
wasn't for a deep wariness in her eyes, the web of broken capillaries around
her upturned nose.

"Hey,
Gryffin. What's up?" She had a raw, husky voice, as though she spent a lot
of time shouting. When she noticed me she did an exaggerated doubletake.
"Whoa. Incoming stranger."

"No
shit, Sherlock." I went over to a beer case and grabbed a 16-ounce Bud.
Suze scowled. Then she started to laugh.

"Nice
manners." She turned to Gryffin. "She with you?"

"Kind
of."

"Figures."
She glanced at the counter. A set of keys rested beside a stack of paper
plates. "Shit. Tyler left his keys again. He's gonna be wicked pissed
if
he gets all the way over to town before he notices."

Gryffin
looked toward the harbor. "Want me to go yell at him?"

"Nah.
He'll figure it out. What you up to, Gryff ? Seeing your ma for the
weekend?"

"Maybe.
A few
days."

"Gonna
go see Ray?

"Yeah.
How's he doing?"

There
was a blast of cold air as the door opened. Two guys entered, eighteen or
nineteen, wearing Carhart coats and reeking of cigarette smoke. In the kitchen
a phone rang. Suze went to answer it. Gryffin followed her. So did the big dog.
The newcomers walked past me, heads down, and went to the beer case. One of
them looked curiously at my camera.

"Hey,
Suze, you got a pizza going yet?" he yelled.

Suze's
voice echoed from the kitchen. "Yeah, in a minute—"

The
new customers went into the back room and studied the beer cooler as though it
were a Warcraft cheat sheet. Otherwise the place was empty.

I
picked up a bag of Fritos and bellied up to the counter. Keeping an eye on the
back room, I palmed the forgotten keys, slid them into the pocket with the sea
urchin, then set my beer and the bag of Fritos where the keys had been. Then I
stepped over to the window and picked up a copy of the local paper.

It
wasn't that local—the
Bangor Daily News
—but at least it was that day's
news. With no mailboat, I figured Everett Moss must bring the papers over from
Burnt Harbor. I scanned the headlines—national news mostly, none of it good,
and some cautiously optimistic predictions about the state's deer season. I
flipped to the local section. A bean supper in Winthrop, an investigation into
welfare scams, more bad news for the Atlantic salmon fishery.

And,
at the bottom of the page, a brief item.

BODY
WASHED UP AT SEAL COVE

The
body of an unidentified man was found washed up on a private beach just north
of Seal Cove in Corea. The body was discovered just above the high-water mark
by an appraiser working on a neighboring house. Cause of death will be determined
following an investigation by the State Medical Examiner.

"'Hey,
Suze." One of the customers ambled back to the counter. He plunked down a
six-pack and a box of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls. "I'll take a couple
slices of pepperoni or whatever you got going."

I
replaced the newspaper and wandered toward the register. A glass case under the
counter held nothing but bottles of Allen's Coffee Brandy—pints, liters, big
plastic gallon jugs. The guy with the beers noticed me eyeing the case and shot
me a grin.

I
nodded at him, hoping this wouldn't be misconstrued as part of a Maine courting
ritual, then crossed to the other side of the room and pretended to look at a
shelf of rental videotapes and DVDs. A darkened doorway opened onto a set of
stairs. Beside it a curling bit of cardboard read PASWEGAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY. I
peered up the steps, but it was too dark to see anything.

A
few other customers entered and made a beeline toward the back room. I waited
to see if one of the newcomers was keyless Tyler. So far, no. After several
minutes Gryffin reappeared.

"I
ordered us both a turkey sandwich. That okay? She's making them now."

"Yeah,
sure. Thanks." I inclined my head toward the little crowd around the
counter. "Lunchtime rush?"

"You
got it."

The
door opened again. A young woman came in with two small children. The kids ran
over to the ice-cream freezer and began rooting around inside it. The woman
walked over to one of the young guys.

"Hey,
Randy. You seen Mackenzie?"

Randy
shook his head. "Kenzie Libby? No. What's going on? I heard she was
missing or something."

"Her
father hasn't seen her. Someone said she was down to Burnt Harbor last
night."

"At
the Good Tern?'

"I
don't know." She looked over at the kids. They were both facedown in the
ice-cream freezer, their feet dangling behind them. "Brandon! Zack! Get
your butts outta there—"

The
kids extricated themselves and ran to their mother. Suze came back out of the
kitchen, carrying sandwiches and slices of pizza. The woman with the kids bought
a pack of cigarettes and left. The remaining customers filed over to the
register, paid for their food, and did the same. When they were gone, Gryffin
placed a bottle of apple juice on the counter.

"You
hear about that? Mackenzie Libby's gone missing," said Suze.

"I
heard," said Gryffin as he paid for the sandwiches. "I saw her last
night, at the Lighthouse. She checked me in. She was there too," he added,
cocking a thumb in my direction. "Not with me, though."

"You
see her?" Suze said to me. "She's usually in the office there after
school gets out."

"Yeah,
I saw her. Gothy little Suicide Girl type?"

"Yup.
That's Kenzie." Suze took note of my camera. "You from a
newspaper?"

"No."
I looked at her T-shirt. "I'm a tourist. But I'm out of season."

"Always
open season on tourists." Suze shook her head. "I just hope she
didn't get messed up with one of those kids running a meth lab over by
Cutler."

"You
get a lot of that?" I asked.

"Yeah.
It's all over the state these days."

"Any
around here?"

"Here
on the island? God, I hope not."

"Hey,
never hurts to ask," I said.

Suze
snorted. "Nice." She bagged our sandwiches, a bottle of juice for
Gryffin, and my beer. "Well, have fun. That may be work if you're hanging
out with Gryffin."

We
went outside. "What, you're no fun?" I said.

"Not
much." The door banged shut behind us. Gryffin set down the bag and
buttoned his jacket. He raised an eyebrow as I snagged my beer. "Isn't it
a little early for that?"

"Beer.
It's what's for breakfast." I cracked it and took a sip. "Your mother
would know."

We
trudged back uphill. "What's with all the coffee brandy?" I asked.
Looks like Suze is stockpiling the stuff."

"That's
Aliens Coffee Brandy, the Maine drug of choice. It's lethal— 70 proof. That's
how a lot of people up here get their Vitamin D—they mix it with milk and get
an extra buzz from the caffeine. Kills more people than heroin does."

I
took another pull at my beer. "That's disgusting."

"Pot
kettle black."

"I
hate sweet shit," I said.

He angled
off toward the path I'd first taken with Toby. I let him get a few steps ahead
of me, then slid my hand into my pocket. I found the keys Id nicked, felt
around till I located the hole in the bottom of the sea urchin. The keys just
fit, though a bit of the shell broke off as I poked them inside. I removed the
sea urchin from my pocket and held it, a spiky little fist in my palm. Then I
set it down at the edge of the road a few yards from the store.

It
blended in nicely with gravel and rocks and dust-covered moss.
"Bye-bye," I said and hurried after Gryffin.

We
walked without speaking, skirting the pine grove and taking a different path
toward the water. I finished my beer, reached over to tuck the empty into the
paper bag Gryffin carried. A flicker of distaste crossed his face, but he said
nothing.

"So,"
I said. I was feeling better. The beer made me feel warmer, and everything had
that benign, soft-focus look it gets when you drink in the middle of the day.
"This commune everyone talks about. Any of those guys still around?"

"Oakwind?"
Gryffin stopped to shake a stone from his shoe. "Not really. Most of them
were clueless as to how to actually build a house, so their places fell apart
over the years. There's a couple of them left."

He
put his shoe back on and began walking again "Mostly they got sold when
the hippies went back to Wall Street or Julliard or wherever. Some people went
native and stayed here. There's three or four folks around Burnt Harbor. Here
on Paswegas it's just Toby and Ray, I think. One or two guys on the outer
islands, but they're not people you want to mess with. I'm talking about guys
who live in old school buses and survive on blocks of government cheese."

"And
Allen's Coffee Brandy."

"And
Allen's Coffee Brandy," Gryffin agreed. "Old Toby, now, he's just a
few steps ahead of them—he lives on rum and Moxie. He keeps an apartment here
down by the harbor, but he stays on his boat until the weather gets really
bad."

"What
about this guy Denny?"

He
fell silent.

"He's
a burnout," he said at last.

I
waited, and after a minute he went on. "The winters were too hard for most
of them, so they split. The ones who stayed tended either to be the most
together, like Toby, or the most burned out. Like Denny. Lucien Ryel, he was together.
Together enough not to live here year-round, anyway. You know who he is? He
owns an island not too far off."

"Yeah,
I gather he's a local celebrity."

Gryffin
laughed. "Who told you that? Toby? Around here, someone hires you and his
check clears, he's a celebrity. Lucien's more like another has-been. We have a
lot of them, in case you haven't noticed."

"What
about you?"

"I'm
a never-tried-to-be-something."

We
were high on the seaward side of the island now, near a line of misshapen firs
that formed a bit of windbreak. They leaned away from the water crashing far
below, as though trying to flee from it. Beside the trees were two huge
boulders. Gryffin walked toward them and gestured for me to follow.

"See
that?" He stopped and pointed across the reach to a long shadow that
seemed to hover just above the water's surface. "That's Lucien's island.
Tolba Island. That means "turtle" in the Passamaquoddy
language."

I
squinted, but distance and sea-haze made it hard to get a fix on the place. I
popped the lens cap from my camera and focused, took a few shots then lowered
it again. "It doesn't look like a turtle to me."

Yeah,
me neither. I guess when you're on it, it does. I wouldn't know— I’ve never
been there. Toby says he's got a whole compound—recording studio, main house,
hermit's cave .. ."

"A
cave? Really?"

"No.
That's just what Toby calls it. It's where the caretaker lives. Denny."

I
thought Toby was the caretaker?"

"Toby?
No. Toby did a lot of the work, but he's never lived there. And Lucien lives in
Berlin—he only comes here for a week or two in the summer.

He
wanted Toby to stay out on the island and watch the place for him, but Toby
said no. So he got Denny to do it."

"Better
than living on a bus," I suggested.

"Yeah,
I guess." Gryffin gave me a resigned look. "Denny was the guy started
the commune. He was around our house all the time when I was little. He and my
mother, they had a thing. It ended badly."

"What
happened?"

"I
don't know. When I was really little, I was always scared of him. When I got a
little older he was gone, but by then I thought he was, like, Charles Manson. I
could never figure out what the appeal was, for my mother and everyone
else."

I
thought of Phil.
This guy she was involved with, he and I did a little
business, hack in the day.

"Probably
he had really good drugs," I said.

Gryffin
nodded. "I remember at Putney, this girl—big druggy—she died of an
overdose. When they did the autopsy, the medical report said her brain looked
like a Swiss cheese. And I thought, Christ, Denny Ahearn's brain looks like
that and he's still
alive."