Bad Men

“We used to have a golf cart as well, but it broke down. I live about two hundred feet from here and I’ve got my own Jeep if we need another vehicle. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and introduce you to some people.”

As Macy followed him from the building she rubbed her fingers together, feeling the oil on her skin. She couldn’t be certain, but from the smell of the shotgun it had been fired recently.

Somebody had been practicing.

Dupree introduced her to the folks at the market, to the Tooker sisters at the diner (Nancy Tooker half-jokingly warned her to stay away from “her” Berman), to Dale Zimmer and Jeb Burris, and, finally, to Larry Amerling. By then it was time for lunch, and Dupree suggested to Macy that she take the Explorer and drive around the island in the company of the postmaster while he made some calls. Amerling, the old Lothario, was quite content to spend his lunch hour in the company of an attractive young woman, especially one who had read his book.

“If he tries anything,” Dupree warned her, “shoot him.”

“What if she tries anything with me?” Larry protested.

Dupree looked hard at Macy. “You get that desperate, shoot yourself.”

There was no road leading directly to the Site, which was surrounded on three sides by patches of bog. Instead, Dupree parked at the top of Ocean Street, which ran north from Island Avenue almost to the center of the island, and walked along the trail toward the burial ground. The forest was mainly evergreens, but there were also scattered maples and beech and hemlock. Amerling was right; the trail was obscured by the fallen branches and the last dry leaves, but tan winter maleberry had also encroached, some of its round seed capsules cracking beneath his feet, along with gray-black winterberry bushes and tattered larches. Within ten minutes, Dupree was in trouble. The trail had virtually disappeared, and only his own knowledge of the island enabled him to continue in what he thought was the right direction. It came as a shock to him when he found himself approaching a stretch of road and realized that, somehow, he had walked southwest instead of southeast, and was now back on Ocean Street, except maybe half a mile below where he had started.

Frustrated, he retraced his steps and found that he had mistaken a secondary walking trail for the main path, for bushes and briers had obscured the principal artery so effectively that there was no way to distinguish it from the rest of the forest unless one knew where to look. He hacked a way through using his Maglite and continued along the path, almost losing his way twice more when it once again began to disappear. As he drew nearer to the Site, he noticed that more and more trees were dying, and that the patch of bog at the island’s center appeared to be increasing in size. Still water lay like a black mirror, almost level with the narrow causeway formed by the trail as it crossed the marsh. If heavy rains came in the spring, the trail would be submerged. Here the greenery was at least understandable, leaf retention being reasonably common among bog plants. Bog rosemary, bog laurel, and labrador tea grew steadily beside green tubular pitcher plants, the remains of insects still trapped in their inner pools. The trees here appeared stunted, their trunks lost beneath the encroaching bog. Others had their shallow roots layered with a dark green sphagnum moss and lush, creeping vines. The life here was hidden, visible only to those who were patient and knowledgeable enough for it to reveal itself: back swimmers and beetles, dragonfly larvae and mayfly nymphs, and smaller mammals like voles and squirrels moved busily through this world. What seemed quiet and dead was secretly alive; wary, but alive.

And yet there were no birds. Increasingly, Dupree was aware of the silence created by their absence. It was so quiet that the snapping of the twigs beneath his feet rang like small-arms fire in the forest, and his breathing sounded loud enough to be heard offshore. He continued to walk, leaving the bog behind him and entering the deepest part of the forest. At last, he could see ahead of him the shapes of stones through the trees. Once again there appeared to be some recent growth of briers and shrubs along the trail, but these were not green. In fact, their branches broke dryly in his hand when he touched them. They seemed dead, and long dead, yet somehow they were still growing.