Bad Men

Dupree looked back at Marianne Elliot’s house. Danny had already gone inside, but his mother was standing on the doorstep, watching the dark sea and the white plumes upon it, like shards of sunlight glimpsed through stormy skies. He tried to recall how often he had encountered her in this fashion. At first he had thought her hypnotized by the sea, as those who came to the island from away sometimes became, unfamiliar as they were with its rhythms. But once or twice he had caught her unawares and had been struck by the absence of peace in her face. Instead, her expression was one of concern, even fear. He wondered if she had lost someone to the sea yet still found herself somehow bound to it, like the widows of drowned fishermen unwilling to leave the side of the great grave that refuses to relinquish their loved ones to them. Then she seemed to realize that he was watching her, for she turned to him, raised her hand in farewell, and followed her son indoors.

Dupree started the Explorer’s engine and drove toward the coast road, heading east along it. The road did not make a full circuit of the island. There were areas to the northwest, at Stepping Stone Hill, and southwest down by Hunger Cove, that were virtually inaccessible by car, but since nobody lived in those areas, the absence of roads was no great burden. Still, each spring Dupree would lead a group of volunteers over to Stepping Stone and Hunger and they would cut back the trees and brush that had begun to colonize the dirt trails leading down to the sea, just in case access was ever needed from the main road. It was a tiresome job, but far less irksome than having to build a new trail in a few years’ time, or being forced to hack a way through in the event of an emergency.

About seven hundred people lived on the island year-round, a figure that tripled, at least, during the summer months. The island was large, five miles long and almost two miles wide, one of over 750 islands, islets, and exposed ridges scattered throughout the two-hundred-square-mile vastness of Casco Bay. It was bigger and more populous than its nearest rival, Great Chebeague, but its size meant that most people still lived in relative seclusion, apart from the community that had built up around the main ferry landing, known only as the Cove. The population increased during the summer, but not to the same extent as on the other Casco Bay islands nearer the mainland, like Peaks or Chebeague or Long Island, for Dutch lay much farther to the east, and was more exposed than the rest. In winter, only the old families remained. Their history was entwined with that of the island, and their names had echoed around its woods for hundreds of years: Amerling and Tooker, Houghton and Hall, Doughty and Dupree.

The heat was turned up high in the Explorer, for it was fiercely cold, even for January. There was talk of storms coming, and Thorson, the ferry captain, had posted a warning of possible suspension of the ferry services over the coming week. Already, Dupree had been forced to break up some heated arguments that had arisen at the ferry landing over accusations of excessive timidity on Thorson’s part. It was hard for occasional visitors to the island to understand the importance of the ferry link to year-round residents. Casco Bay Ferries, which ran regular services to a number of the islands, did not do so to Dutch Island due to the distances involved and the relative paucity of passengers, although its mail boat did make daily stops. Thorson’s family had been providers of the island’s ferry service for over seventy years, taking kids over to high school, students to college, grandparents to visit grandchildren, workers to their offices, patients to the hospital, boyfriends to their girlfriends, children to aged parents who had been consigned to homes…the list was endless. If you needed to buy a new TV, you parked down in the lot by the ferry, climbed onboard with a hand trolley, headed over to Circuit City, then used a bus or a cab to get your new TV back to the dock in time for Thorson to help you bring it home again. That also counted for stoves, machine parts, new tires, medicines, ammunition, new clothes for the kids, toys for Christmas, and just about any other item that you cared to mention, apart from the general foodstuffs available in the Casco Bay Market. Thorson’s ferry was mainly a people carrier. For larger purchases, like a new car or a piece of serious farm equipment, Covey Jaffe had a construction ferry that could be hired out, but without Thorson’s ferry to take care of all the little day-to-day things, life on the island would go from occasionally difficult to damn near impossible. Whether or not to run the ferry in the face of a storm warning was Thorson’s call, but Dupree figured he’d talk to the old man over the next day or two and maybe remind him that where the ferry was concerned, being overcautious was nearly as bad as being reckless.