Part 3 (1/2)

'Do you mind if I say a prayer for him?' Knowles asked Bloom.

Bloom told him that she didn't mind at all. It wasn't like it would hurt the dead man. 'Just don't touch the body, okay?'

Knowles produced a rosary from his pocket and knelt by the corpse. Werner bowed his head, but said nothing. Bloom recalled that there was something in Lutheranism about not praying for the dead. Preston, who was Catholic, joined her hands, and crossed herself when Knowles was finished.

Bloom walked with Knowles and Werner back to the parking lot, and watched them leave. She made calls to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Augusta, and the state police in Bangor, as well as to the Was.h.i.+ngton County Sheriff's Department in Machias. Finally she spoke with Lloyd Kramer and arranged to have the body bagged and put on ice until the ME determined how it should be handled.

She then decided to return home and change into her uniform. It always paid to look official in these situations. She turned the Explorer and headed for the main road. The gradient upward from the beach was comparatively gentle, and the entire strand was visible to pa.s.sing traffic. As she prepared to make the turn, only one car was approaching, heading north to town: a Mustang that slowed almost to a stop as it pa.s.sed her. She caught a glimpse of the driver as he glanced first at her, then at the figures on the sand: Rainey and Stynes by the body, and Preston trudging back to her vehicle. He was wearing sungla.s.ses, but Bloom knew him by his car.

The detective, Parker.

She had spoken with him only once, when she spotted him at Hayman's General Store buying bread and milk. She'd introduced herself, and asked how he was settling in, as much to be neighborly as anything else. He'd seemed pleasant, if distant. She knew that he sometimes liked reading the newspaper in the Moosebreath Coffee House, although Bobby Soames had told her that he preferred the little seating area at the back of Olesens Books & Cards. Soames fretted a lot about Parker. He appeared to be under the impression that a gunfight could break out at any moment up in Green Heron Bay. Parker also ate at the Brickhouse a couple of evenings a week, although he usually didn't drink anything stronger than a soda. Mostly, from what she heard, he just walked on the beach by his house, and traveled twice weekly to the Brook House Clinic for physiotherapy.

Now she nodded at him, and he nodded back. He took one more look at the activity on the beach, and drove on. She stayed behind him through town until he pulled up outside Olesens. In her rearview mirror, she watched him take a copy of the New York Times from the rack by the door and head inside. Guess it's true then, she thought. She was curious about him. His presence in Boreas was incongruous, given his reputation. It was like having a grenade rolling around, one you had been a.s.sured was defused but hadn't had time to check out for yourself.

But she had other concerns today. She thought that she could smell the dead man on the plastic gloves she had discarded on the floor of her vehicle, or maybe she was just imagining it. When she pulled into her driveway, she took a pick-up bag from the supply that she kept on hand for the needs of her black Lab, Jodie, used it to dispose of the gloves, and tied the bag. Ron, her husband, wasn't home. He was working on a kitchen redesign in Eastport, and would be gone for most of the day. She let Jodie run in the backyard while she changed, then called her back inside and returned to the Explorer. Jodie's nose was pressed against the gla.s.s above the front door as she pulled away, a vision of abandonment. Bloom tried not to look. Sometimes, she was grateful that she'd never had children. She wasn't sure that she'd ever have been able to leave the house.

6.

Olesens which Larraine Olesen always felt should more correctly have been 'Olesen's', or even 'Olesens'' on the sign, since she and her brother Greg were joint owners had been a fixture in Boreas since the midfifties, when Larraine and Greg's parents opened the store while still in their twenties. They'd continued to run it until the turn of the century, at which point they decided that enough was enough, and it was time for younger blood to take over. Neither of their children was married. Greg was briefly engaged to a local woman, but the relations.h.i.+p had never really taken, while Larraine well, deep down Larraine probably preferred the company of women, but was too shy and too Lutheran to do anything about it. She wasn't bitter or unhappy, just a little lonely, but she loved her brother, and she loved books, and thus had found a measure of contentment in life.

Like independent bookstores everywhere, Olesens had struggled to adapt to the new age of bookselling. A family argument had erupted between the generations when Larraine and Greg began selling 'gently used' books alongside new stock, which their parents regarded as a dangerous step down the slope toward not selling any books at all. But Greg had a good eye not just for a bargain, but for rare first editions, and the store's Internet presence, along with a nice sideline in greeting cards, wrapping paper, and other materials that generated the kind of markup that books could only dream of, was keeping the store not only in business, but in profit. It had been Larraine's decision to add the little coffee bar at the back of the store. It faced out over Clark's Stream, which ran through the town, and the somewhat unimaginatively named Clark's Bridge, a pretty thing of stone and moss that looked as though it came from many centuries past, but was not much older than the store itself. The coffee bar sold pastries and cookies baked by Mrs Olesen, and decent coffee. It turned out that no small number of folk, both tourists and local, enjoyed the ambience of the Nook, as it was called, and the markup on coffee put even greeting cards to shame. There had been some tension initially between the Olesens and Rob Hallinan, owner of the Moosebreath Coffee House further north on Bay, but it turned out that Boreas had just about enough customers for both of them, and more than enough in summer.

Charlie Parker had started coming in shortly after his arrival in town, because Olesens prided itself on carrying enough copies of the New York and Boston papers to satisfy demand year-round. The Olesens knew who he was almost as soon as he arrived, of course. Most everybody in town who was worth a d.a.m.n had an early inkling of the detective's presence out on Green Heron Bay, and without exception they had become strangely protective of him. Even Chief Bloom had expressed surprise at how little muttering there had been, given that people in Boreas complained if the Brickhouse changed one of its draft beer taps, even if they never drank beer, and had debated for weeks about repainting the town's welcome sign in a softer shade of white. Perhaps it was something to do with his past: he was a man who had lost a wife and child, and had suffered grievous injury just for doing a job which, as far as anyone could tell, largely involved putting his mark on the kind of men and women without whom the world was a much better place. The shooting made him one of theirs, and the town had quietly closed ranks around him.

In the beginning Larraine and Greg kept their distance, allowing him his s.p.a.ce to drink, and read newspapers, books and magazines, all of them bought at Olesens, with none of the books ever returned for a fifty percent trade-in, even though a big sign at the counter invited customers to do just that. But slowly they had tested the waters with him and found him to be gently, slyly funny, and aware of the strangeness of his situation in the town. Greg, in particular, got along well with him, and Greg was the archetypal dysfunctional independent bookseller. He gave the impression that he disapproved of most of his customers' book choices which he did and resented selling copies of books that he loved also true either because he wasn't sure that the buyer was worthy of the book or, in the case of the rarer editions, because he hated seeing them leave the store. The locals had become used to his ways, while Larraine tended to deal with the tourists. Just as there were broadcasters with faces made for radio, so too there were booksellers with att.i.tudes designed for the Internet age, which limited the possible misunderstandings that might arise from any personal contact.

Now, while Parker sipped his Americano and flipped through the Arts section of the New York Times, Greg approached him, carrying in the crook of his arm three hefty matching volumes a psychiatric a.n.a.lysis of marital and s.e.xual humor which he felt certain he could sell at a considerable profit to some visiting shrink during the summer, a.s.suming he could even bring himself to part with them when the time came.

Parker continued to read his paper. He did not look up.

'You ignoring me?' said Greg.

'Is it working?'

'No. You ever hear of a British band called the Smiths?'

'Yes, but you're too old for them.'

'Anyway,' continued Greg, now doing his best to ignore Parker's contribution to the conversation in turn, 'their lead singer, Morrison-'

'Morrissey.'

'-Morrissey, has a song called ”The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get”. I'm considering adopting it as a motto.'

'Does that mean if I talk to you, you'll go away?'

'No, that'll just encourage me too.'

He s.h.i.+fted the books to his other arm.

'You hear they found a body out at Mason Point?'

'Yeah, I drove by the beach on my way back into town.' Parker looked up at Greg for the first time. 'It seemed like Chief Bloom had only just got out there. News travels fast.'

'In this place? Fast doesn't cover it. There are people here who probably knew the guy was dead before he did.'

Greg thought about what he'd just said.

'I didn't mean that to sound, you know, like it sounded,' he said. 'Unless someone here killed him, but that doesn't seem likely.'

'Why is that?'

'Tides. I'd say he went into the water farther south.'

Parker returned to his paper.

'Well, it looks like Bloom has it all in hand.'

'She's good. We're lucky to have her.'

Greg remained hovering, his shadow falling slightly over the table.

'Can I ask you something?' he said.

'Sure.'

'Do you miss it? You know, what you used to do. What you still do, I guess, a.s.suming you'll go back to it. If you do.'

'No.'

Sometimes.

Yes.

'Just curious.'

'I understand.'