Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

I would say we liked each other at first sight.

Love at first sight, according to Priscilla. She likes movies with “feel good” endings and reads pure romance. Tarzan and Jane stuff. Sentimentality, hard to find these days. Larry the Lawyer was on my side. So was Tom Tipper and Deputy Dog. “Love is for the lovebirds,” the deputy said. “And they are birds, dammit,” Tom Tipper said.

Like at first sight. That was okay. We agreed. Except Priscilla, she had been married once. She knew about true love. Her husband died in Montreal during their honeymoon. Some say she squashed him.

Elizabeth moved into the cabin and the weather was fine for a week and we were mostly boating. I bought her a diving suit and cylinders and goggles and showed her where the last cod swims, and we saw two types of Maine seals, smiling at us from rocks overgrown with bright orange rockweed. We met with a bevy of harbor porpoises, and, briefly, with a thresher and a blue shark, both of them large, but not hungry, maybe it was too cold for them. She went ooh and aah spotting herons, ospreys, eagles, wild turkeys, turkey vultures, and listened to the lonely call of a loon. She also noticed the bleeding chair. There were cormorants (big black seabirds) on it, but they flew away as she pointed.

Elizabeth liked crime. She was also interested in the incident featuring the corpses on the Take It Easy. She kept asking around about what happened, even made notes, read newspaper clippings in the library, consulted charts.

And now this.

After she had climbed all over the giant buoy, she wondered whether we should contact the authorities.

I didn’t think so. Why meddle?

She found a camera in her bag and clicked away.

“What do you care?” I asked and she said she was a journalist, remember? Taking pictures of amazing events had become a habit. I told her our Bunkport friends wouldn’t like a write-up on easily misunderstood events, especially this close to home.

Why not?

I told her. The authorities like making a fuss. Anybody, any local body, who spotted the chair would know exactly what happened here. I mentioned fishing territory. Some fool lobsterman had broken the code. This was a Bitch Island Sisters reserve. The Sisters, I assumed, would have caught an intruding thief in the act and warned the trespasser, then, on another occasion, warned the fool again. And then, well, they killed him, created an example.

“Have anyone specific in mind, James?”

Me?

“So the Sisters shot this poor guy up?”

Well now...

“Tom Tipper was the victim?” Elizabeth wanted to know, which was a good guess, for Tom, who reads Nietzsche in German, and has become convinced that we’ve made up our own values and that, because we are wrong, the values are wrong too, may have been drawing the wrong conclusions. Amorality ain’t immorality. But Tom, he doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about nothing no more. The way he is going I have been thinking of persuading Tom to sign himself into a mental institution. Save Sheriff the trouble of dragging him, kicking and screaming. A dry-out place behind bars someplace. Get some peace and quiet.

“Tom who?” I asked.

It was true I hadn’t seen Tom Tipper for a while. I was sure Elizabeth — having gathered enough Down East lore during her investigations — might be guessing right. So the Sisters kidnapped the poor blighter, his recliner and all. They heaved the lot onto the back of the pickup truck and ferried the load to Bitch Island. They got their squeezes to help them maneuver chair and Tom on top of the giant marker. They tied everything up good, got back in their boat, and round and round the avengers go, firing away. Poff poff POFF.

All done now. Leave him up for a day to feed the vultures, then cut what’s left loose. Weigh him down with four fifty-pound anchors attached to durable steel chain, and there he goes, off Bitches Ledge where the sea is, what... five hundred feet deep?

“Sorry, Tom,” the Sisters would have said. But what the hell. Their law is the law.

Tom had it coming. Drunk out of his mind again, he had called the Sisters sexist names. He had been picking fights with big guys who felt embarrassed but hit him anyway, causing drunk-and-disorderly charges. Priscilla was about to ban him for messes made in the Dolphin’s bathroom. Even I had avoided him lately, after he applied Zen to the art of shooting, showing me how to become one with his shotgun, and missing the target, a fifty-five-gallon drum at short distance.

Sheriff had pulled Tom’s driving license. Tom, by now a habitual offender, still slammed his old truck around Bunkport’s alleys. He would soon have to be arrested. The jails around here aren’t known for comfort.

I drove out with Elizabeth to check Tom’s trailer that the bank was aiming to foreclose on. The door was locked. Tom’s dog, Cindy, wandered about outside, looking sickly. I offered her beef jerkies that I kept in the truck but her teeth were too weak. She snarled at Tillie, who wanted to play.