Murder With Puffins (4 page)

"Come on, Meg; you can help me ran the extension cord," Dad said, picking up a flashlight. "You, too, Michael. Fresh air will do you a world of good."

I didn't really want to go back out into the rain. I wanted to curl up someplace quiet and sleep for a few years. But it didn't look as if I'd get any peace and quiet in the cottage for a while, with Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman arguing about the weather and trying to pour their potions and philters into me. Not to mention the way my stomach reacted to the smell of all the food. Maybe fresh air was a good idea. I sighed, then got up and followed Dad and Michael to the coatrack beside the kitchen door, where we rummaged through a rather random collection of rain gear. We finally found slickers for all three of us, though Michael's was too short, mine nearly dragged the ground, and Dad's was glow-in-the-dark pink with lime green and yellow spots.

Then we repeated the rummaging, this time in the gardenshed. Underneath a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, a collection of antique life jackets, a gas grill, odd parts of three unmatched croquet sets, and several dozen mildewing stacks of
Life
magazines from the forties and fifties, we finally unearthed three bright orange industrial-weight extension cords.

"That should do the trick," Dad said, and we set off for the Dickermans' house.

I'd forgotten how dark Monhegan nights could be. In clear weather, you could see three times as many stars as in the city, and the sight of the moon rising over the ocean could inspire even me to poetry. But when clouds obscured the moon and stars, as they did tonight, you could really understand the deep-seated human tendency to fear the dark.

The darkness relented only slightly when we passed by our nearest neighbors, with whom Aunt Phoebe shared her treacherous, muddy little lane. Like Aunt Phoebe, they had only oil lamps and gas appliances. Some residents ran their own small electrical generators--including, apparently, the Dickermans--but these contraptions were noisy and generally less reliable man the old-fashioned alternatives--not to mention so expensive that their owners tended to keep their wattage low to avoid bankruptcy.

The flashlight wasn't much help, and I felt strangely comforted by the luminous glow of Dad's raincoat as he bobbed along ahead of us.

Suddenly, just as we reached the head of the lane, the glow disappeared.

"Dad?" I called, and hurried to reach the point where I'd last seen the glow-in-the-dark raincoat. I tripped over something large and hard and fell flat on my face in the gravel road.

"Your luggage is here," Dad said. The glow hadn't disappeared entirely, I realized; it was now--like me--horizontal.

"Are you two all right?" Michael said, coming up beside us.

"I will be if you take your foot off my hand," I said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't see a thing."

"Damn that little weasel," I said. "He might at least have run the luggage up to the house."

"Maybe he was scared of getting stuck in the mud," Michael suggested.

"Well, we can take it up on the way back," Dad said. "Let's get up to the Dickermans' house before they go to bed."

The Dickermans, to my surprise, were thrilled to have Dad run a power cord down to our house. Of course, Dad had forgotten to mention that this was a commercial arrangement, the Dickermans being the founders and owners of the Central Monhegan Power Company.

"I didn't know Monhegan even had a central power company," I said. "Of course, it's been several years since I've spent much time on the island," I added hastily, seeing the hurt look on Mr. Dickerman's broad, friendly face.

"Well, really it's only one generator," Mr. Dickerman said. "Quite a bit larger than the ones individual households and businesses use, of course."

"And a bit quieter, obviously, if you've got it anywhere around here."

"Oh, it's noisy enough, but we've put it up on Knob Hill," Mr. Dickerman said. "It's pretty much out of the way up there, and the noise doesn't bother folks as much. Jim does most of the work on it; he's always been handy that way, Jim has."

"And so nice that he's found something to do without leaving the island," Mrs. Dickerman put in. She was a sweet, motherly person; I never could figure out how she and her mild-mannered husband had managed to produce so many rowdy and unpleasant sons, at least half a dozen of them. "All my other birds have flown the coop, but Jimmy's happy as a clam, staying here with us, where he can tinker with the generator. Does you good to see how happy he is, up at the electric plant, when he's working on those machines of his."

"Don't forget Fred," Mr. Dickerman put in.

"Fred's only here between jobs," Mrs. Dickerman said. "You remember Jimmy, don't you, Meg?"

I did, actually, with something that approached fondness--he was the one Dickerman of my generation who wasn't loud, extroverted, and an inveterate bully. The worst had been Fred, whom I now recognized as the driver of the truck and kidnapper of our luggage. But Jimmy had been a small, intense, bespectacled little boy, whose main interest in life was taking things apart. He and Dad got along well that way, although, unlike Dad, Jimmy could also put the things back together again. When he felt like it, which was seldom. I wondered how much time the Central Monhegan Power Company's generator ran and how much time it spent disassembled for maintenance, enhancements, and general tinkering.

"Maybe if she sees how useful the electricity can be, Phoebe might see her way clear to hooking on," Mr. Dickerman suggested.

"Maybe," Dad said. "But then again, you know what a traditionalist Phoebe is."

"She is that," Mr. Dickerman agreed. "We could have used her here this spring, when the town council was squabbling over what to do about Victor Resnick's new house."

"Victor Resnick? The landscape artist?" Michael asked.

"That's the one," Mr. Dickerman said. He didn't sound all that fond of the local celebrity, and I suspected Resnick was the Victor Winnie and Binkie Burnham had been so dismayed to see on the docks.

"Monhegan has quite a lot of famous artists," I said aloud. "One of the Wyeths lives here, too; or at least he used to. I forget which one."

"I thought Resnick had moved to Europe," Dad said, frowning.

"Came back last fall and built himself a new house," Mr. Dickerman said. "A real eyesore. Ought to run the bastard off the island."

"Frank!" Mrs. Dickerman scolded.

"Well, they ought to," Mr. Dickerman said.

Dad seemed unusually subdued as he and Mr. Dickerman finished hooking up the extension cord and making the arrangements for payment. He was deep in thought during the whole return trip to the cottage--which wasn't exactly a bad thing. Instead of returning by the road, we had to run the extension cord as directly as possible to Aunt Phoebe's--which meant slogging through the Dickermans' overgrown backyard, followed by a brier-filled gully, and then the cord barely reached the living room. Even in our debilitated state, Michael and I probably managed it much better by ourselves than we would have if Dad had insisted on taking an active hand.

Rob pounced on the cord with glee, hooked up his computer, and began tapping away on the keyboard--though whether he was doing useful work or merely composing an e-mail he could send to Red when the phone lines returned, I had no idea. Dad took advantage of the power supply to hook up his portable CD player and put on his beloved Wagner. And then he scurried out of the room again, after turning up the volume enough that he could hear it from anyplace in the cottage. From anyplace on the island, probably; lucky for us the phones were down, or ours would have rung off the hook with noise complaints.

I glanced at Michael to see how he was taking all this. At least so far, he seemed more amused than annoyed. That was one of Michael's charms: his tolerance for my father's eccentricities seemed as great as mine.

Possibly greater, I thought as the orchestra sank its teeth into a loud, rousing passage of the overture.

The opera was just hitting its stride when the music stopped in the middle of one of Briinnhilde's more appalling shrieks.

In the sudden absence of Wagner, we heard Aunt Phoebe's voice bellowing in the kitchen.

"Never would have come out here in the first place if we'd had any idea we'd run into that son of a--"

"Sshh!" Mrs. Fenniman hissed, and then, a little louder, she called out, "What happened to the power?"

"Oh dear," Mother said, looking up from her magazine. "Not the generator already?"

"I hope I can save in time," Rob said, fingers flying over the keyboard.

"Maybe someone tripped over the cord," I said. "We should go see if--"

"Damnation!" came a voice just outside the windows.

"I don't think you'll have to go far," Michael remarked.

The music came back on, almost drowning out the loud footsteps stomping up the porch steps. Carrying Michael's and my suitcases, Dad appeared in the doorway with blood running down his face from a cut on the top of his head.

"James! What happened?" Mother cried, leaping up.

"Tripped over the extension cord," Dad said. "Don't fuss; it's not serious. Scalp wounds do bleed a lot."

"The suitcases," Michael said, rushing over to take our luggage from Dad. "I'm so sorry; I forgot they were there. I should have gone back for them."

"Not to worry," Dad said. He picked up his black doctor's bag and scurried off to clean up his cut, with Mother trailing in his wake.

Dad brushed off all our attempts at sympathy.

"I'll be fine," he said when he returned, sporting a picturesque dressing on his head. "I'll just sit here and listen to my Wagner and I'll feel better in no time."

After that, of course, guilt prevented us from even asking him to turn it down a little.

Dad hummed and conducted with his fork quite happily for what seemed like an eternity but must have been only an hour or two. Fortunately, before the neighbors showed up at our door bearing torches, like the villagers in a bad horror movie, the power went out again.

"Probably just someone else tripping over the extension cords," Dad said.

We waited for a few minutes, but no sounds of cursing came from the yard.

"I suppose I'll have to follow the line up to the Dickermans," Dad said with a sigh.

"I don't think so," I said, peering out a window. "The Dickermans' house is dark. And listen."

Everyone cocked their heads and listened intently for a few seconds.

"I don't hear anything," Mother said finally. "Just the wind."

"That's just it," I said. "I've heard this persistent rhythmic humming noise ever since we got to the island. I thought the hurricane was doing it but now I realize it's the generator."

"She's right," Aunt Phoebe said. "I've complained to the town council about that noise. You don't notice it as much when a hurricane's approaching, but in normal weather, it's a menace. Much more peaceful like this, when the generator stops."

Deprived of his Wagner, Dad decided he was tired, and Mother agreed that perhaps an early night would be a good idea. Since by my calculations they'd covered more than three thousand miles by plane, boat, and automobile over the last forty-eight hours, I wasn't surprised. And the thought occurred to me that if the rest of the family got tired and went to bed, Michael and I might still rescue some shreds of our romantic evening by the fire.

Unfortunately, no one else seemed the slightest bit fatigued. Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman were still out in the kitchen, cooking under the soft glow of the oil lamps. Rob wandered about restlessly for a while. Eventually, I could hear him opening the trapdoor and letting down the ladder to the attic. He scuffled around up there for a while, then reappeared with an armload of old volumes.

"What are those?" Michael asked.

"Photo albums that Aunt Phoebe likes to keep around at the cottage," Rob said. "She says when people have electricity, they're too busy with TV and computers and stuff to look at old photos."

"Well, she's right, isn't she?" Michael said. "What were you doing before the power went out?"

Rob shrugged sheepishly and picked up an album.

"Actually, Rob usually does spend time with the photo albums," I said. "It must be the charm of seeing variations on your own face, wearing so many old-fashioned hairdos and clothes, Rob."

"You could be right," Rob said. "Look at this. Great-Uncle Christopher."

He held up a picture. But for the handlebar mustache and dandified Edwardian clothes, you could easily have mistaken it for a picture of Rob.

"He looks rather dashing in the uniform on the next page, too," Michael said. "World War One?"

"Yes," Rob said, assuming a solemn air. "Poor Uncle Christopher!"

"He never came back?" Michael said. Rob shook his head and sighed, as if the whole thing were a tragedy from which the family had never recovered.

"Yes," I said. "Killed in a brawl in a French bordello, apparently; though they made up something else to tell his mother."

Michael laughed, and Rob looked as insulted as if I'd impugned his character, instead of that of our late and little-lamented great-uncle. He pointedly buried his face in the album. Michael picked up another volume and began to flip through it.

"Don't you enjoy the albums, too?" he asked. "Seeing your face through history and all that?"

"I suppose I would, but apparently I look like Dad's side of the family," I said. "None of the pictures look much like me."

I didn't mention the other reason: that looking in the albums usually triggered a temporary but acute resurgence of the inferiority complex I'd fought all my life. Far too many of my female ancestors had been tall, thin, aristocratic blondes, like Mother, and the albums contained far too many pictures of them surrounded by the swarms of beautiful, wealthy, and sometimes famous men who'd courted them.

The album Michael had picked up, for instance. Looking over his shoulder, I could see that it held hundreds of photos from the late forties and early fifties, all neatly arranged and held in place with old-fashioned black paper photo corners. The early pictures, featuring the angelic preadolescent Mother, were bad enough. But looking at her at thirteen, when she'd already acquired a figure and a flock of admirers, I could feel myself fighting off those old feelings of inadequacy.