The Body in the Lighthouse (13 page)

Sonny Prescott, owner of a local seafood business and a friend from her first summer on the island, immediately put Faith to work shaping clam fritters. “Not too big, deah, but not skimpy, neither.”

Faith discovered she was starving for the first time since Friday night. The fritters were being deep-fried to a golden brown and she took time out to devour one. In addition to the chowder and fritters there was deep-fried haddock, as well as hot dogs and hamburgers for the kids and uninitiated adults—plus onion rings and piles of crisp fries. Mainers ate their fries doused in vinegar, and Faith grabbed a handful before going back to work. They were almost as good as Thelma the Fry Queen's at the Blue Hill Fair, the
standard against which Faith measured all fries anywhere, from Paris brasseries to North Carolina barbecue joints. For dessert, the island women had been baking pies all week, and Louella had contributed what looked like a pickup truck load of whoopie pies.

“I hope we have enough,” one of the organizers said, fretting. “There are two windjammers in the harbor, and I've never seen so many tourists on Main Street in my life. Last year, the chowder ran out at six o'clock and we had to go up to the School Street Rest”—no room over the door for the full name—“and throw together some more.”

“And this year, we'll have it left over,” a coworker commented dryly. “You never know with people.”

Which, Faith thought, was definitely an under-statement. But she couldn't imagine that there wouldn't be plenty to go around. As Sonny had handed her a hair net and plastic gloves, he'd proudly listed the grand total: 300 pounds of potatoes, 50 pounds of onions, 160 pounds of fish, and 15 gallons of clams. “Give or take,” he'd added.

There were a lot of children's games first—old-fashioned ones like three-legged and egg-relay races, blueberry pie–eating contests, water-balloon tosses. In between watching and participating, people ate—and then ate some more. Faith was kept busy making and frying fritters.

“Why don't you take a break,” said one of the women, who hadn't stopped for a minute herself.
“You look tired. Here, take a can of tonic and go sit down.”

Faith gratefully accepted the soda and went to find her family. The pier was jammed with people and it was hard to make much progress. Plus, every group on the island had something they were raffling, all trying to make money at this optimal time of the year, and their tables further encroached on the space. Before she'd gone more than a few yards, Faith had purchased tickets for a quilt (the library), a hooked rug (the Grange), ten pounds of lobsters, courtesy of Sonny Prescott (the Boy Scouts), and
Islands at Sunset
by Linda Forsythe. The latter wasn't for KSS; it was for the play, and Becky was selling tickets to the production, as well. Faith was sure she wouldn't have bought any tickets if the proceeds were for KSS, even though this was one of Linda's paintings she liked. No sign of green spray paint. No, Faith was not lending support to KSS in any way, and she regretted that she shared some of their opinions. What a bind this was—disliking the means, methods, and many members, but agreeing with many of their objections to change. If the island didn't do something to regulate itself, it
could
turn into another Bar Harbor or Camden—there were those names again—and nobody wanted that. Well, maybe Harold had. She sighed. She didn't want to think about Harold.

“How'd you like to go home with me, sweetheart?” a seductively smooth voice called out. “I mean with us?” Tom was carrying Amy on his
shoulders. She had the remains of what was probably a Klondike bar smeared around her mouth (all proceeds to the Fish Hawks, an island softball team). Equipped with Grandmother's sunshade
and
a broad-brimmed hat, Ursula was polishing off a crab roll (the Eastern Star). Ben was ahead of them, oblivious to his father's admonition not to get lost in the crowd. Faith scooped her son up, stopping him in his tracks.

“I want to see the lobster-boat races, Mom. We can stay till then, right? Sonny's going to let me go with him when I turn nine. That's not long. But I can enter the rowboat races next year. Dad said he'd do it with me. He says I'm a natural.”

Considering that a lot of the activity in the Wacky Rowboat races degenerated into rowing in circles, Tom was right.

“Of course you can stay to see the races. They should be starting them soon. Are you guys having fun?”

Amy had immediately reached for her mother, delighted to find a face she recognized in the crowd.

Tom grabbed a kiss. “Eau de Fritter, very sexy,” he murmured in her ear, then announced proudly, “Ursula and Ben came in third in the three-legged race.”

Faith had wondered why Ursula and Ben each had a bright green ribbon with a fish stamped on it safety-pinned to their shirts.

Ursula smiled. “We've been practicing, and we'll keep on. We're hoping for second next year.”

Or Carnegie Hall, Faith thought.

“I've got to get back to my post,” she said. “Come and get some food before the races start.”

The Wacky Rowboat races attracted a big crowd. Faith had a clear view from the food concession and found herself cheering madly along with everyone else. Whoever dreamed up this idea? she wondered. They'd been doing it forever, of course. The originator—and he or she must have been intoxicated at the time—had long since disappeared into the mists, or fog, of time. The object was simple: row out and around a distant buoy; fastest time wins. But the catch was that you had to do it blindfolded. This was where the wackiness came in. The only guidance you had were instructions from your partner in the stern. These instructions—“Now left!” “Straighter!” “No, go right!”—were complicated by loudly voiced comments from the onlookers. It was hard to tell who was saying what—or who was laughing the hardest. One contestant, overcome with mirth, ripped the cloth from his eyes and threw it into the water, declaring he'd wet his pants if he continued. His brother, in the stern, promptly took care of that for him by throwing him overboard, much to the crowd's approval. Roland and his guest had dressed up as old salts, complete with pipes and beards, painting their dinghy with rainbow stripes like the
Tidely Idley
in Robert McCloskey's
Bert Dow, Deep-Water Man
. They won the prize for best costume but lost the first-place trophy to a ten-year-old and her
mother, who calmly rowed out, never saying a word, but relying on prearranged taps on the rower's knees to steer. It wasn't hard to figure out the system. A tap on the left meant “go left” a tap on the right, “Go right” taps on both knees, “Go straight.” Faith was impressed.

The sky had cleared to a mottled blue by the time the lobster-boat races were due to begin. As the various classes—their winners and losers—came and went, tension on the pier mounted. Everyone was waiting for the showdown between the Prescotts and the Hamiltons, who had gathered in two very large, very distinct groups, with a uniformed Earl planted smack between the two factions. Raffle sales and the food concessions were abandoned and a wave of onlookers swelled behind them. Tom whistled a tune from
West Side Story
softly, and Faith wished she could smile. It was the last race. Sonny Prescott, all thoughts of fritters far from his mind, was revving his souped-up boat, his pride and joy, the
Misteak,
complete with 500-hp Cummings engine. He'd won last year
and
the year before, but Junior Hamilton, popularly known as “June,” had a new boat,
Down East Girl.
He'd sworn she could take anything on the water, including Sonny's sorry excuse for a vessel. Testosterone and gas fumes filled the air. Faith mused for a moment on the incongruity of two men who would never see forty again, each weighing as much as the entire Fairchild family altogether, still being referred to by their little-boy names. Then the starter's gun
ripped her from her thoughts and the crowd roared, certain that their decibels would influence the outcome.

Faith couldn't get a line from the song Tom had been whistling out of her mind: “We're gonna rumble tonight…” Amy was on Tom's shoulders again, clapping her hands. Ben had wiggled up to the front of the crowd, standing precipitously close to the water. Faith called out to him, but it was hopeless. She started to snake through the solid mass of people in front of her, her repeated “Excuse me” so inaudible that she soon stopped. She reached Ben just as the Hamilton boat crossed the finish line a hair ahead of Sonny's.

“Hot damn!” the man next to her said, while the man on her other side seemed ready to throw a punch. She looked wildly around for Tom, Earl, anybody. With a firm grip on Ben, she eyed the water. If worse came to worst, they'd jump in. But it didn't. Someone had the foresight to start the music and the “Beer Barrel Polka” began to blare from the loudspeakers—the familiar cadences of the Melodic Mariners, one of the island's musical mainstays. Hamiltons and Prescotts retreated—some grumbling, some elated. “Get you next year!” “In your dreams!” And then it was over. With a sigh of relief and legs like rubber, Faith delivered Ben to Tom and returned to her fritters.

After what seemed like a short time, Faith looked at her watch and was amazed to find that it was almost five o'clock. Her family had reappeared. Tom and Ben were consuming one last
fritter and one last hot dog, respectively. Amy was talking to a little boy she'd met, who was now her new best friend, announcing firmly to her mother, “I want to play with Bobby.”

“That sounds like a good plan, but it's time to go home soon.” Faith prided herself on her parenting skills. “Soon,” not “now,” even if “now” was what was going to happen.

“Ursula's meeting us at the car, so we have to be going. Do you want to duck out, honey?” Tom asked. “You look tired.”

Faith wasn't tired, not really, yet she figured she must be, since people kept telling her she was. Sure, she wasn't feeling as perky as she might have, but it had been pleasant to turn her mind off and concentrate on the fryer, all the while listening to the banter back and forth between the customers and the cooks. “Sure you can handle two of our fritters?” Sonny had asked, teasing a skinny brunette. “Don't want to be responsible if you can't budge an inch afterward.”

“No, I want to stay,” Faith said. “Besides, the dancing starts at seven.”

Tom loved to dance. She'd learned early on not to laugh at his Ichabod Crane–like motions and the fact that he was apparently dancing to a different drummer. Marriage was nothing if not tact.

“Okay, then I'll get these guys settled and come back.”

She gave them all hasty kisses and pushed them along before her offspring could object to leaving. Another paradox, like the whole KSS
thing: You wanted your kids to be independent and strong-minded, but absolutely not with you.

The crowd was thinning as parents took weary children home. The teenagers had not arrived yet, considering it much too early to be cool. She left the stand and wandered toward the end of the pier. Granville was
not
Bar Harbor. It was still very much a working fishing village. On this summer Sunday night, the harbor was packed with fishing boats of all sizes and shapes, waiting for dawn and another day's hard labor. Sanpere Island had never been a resort. Off to the right, past the Sanpere Thoroughfare, she could see the skeletal derricks on Crandall Island, whose granite quarries had supplied the stone for New York skyscapers, museums, memorials, and jobs for several generations of island men. Shut down in the 1960s, it caused a major exodus, and attempts to start the business again in other, smaller quarries on the island had failed, too.

“My father worked there all his life. He'd never have believed that all that would be left was some rusty pieces of metal and big holes in the ground.” It was Ken Layton, the island's historian. He sometimes wrote a column in the paper and had written a short history of Sanpere. He planned a longer one when he got too old to fish, which he hoped would be never.

She wondered what he thought about Sanpere's recent history. Most specifically Friday. Besides total recall of the past, Ken didn't miss much of what was going on in the present.

“What do you think about Harold Hapswell's death?” she asked him, realizing as she spoke that all day it had never been far from her mind, despite the fritters, the races, the roar of the crowd. She blurted the question out directly. As with Lyle and all the other locals she knew, it was pointless—and rude—to beat around the bush. They could always tell. They might not answer, but at least they wouldn't be offended.

“I think it was an accident. A terrible accident. Man was only in his fifties. Had another fifty left,” Ken said firmly. “You found him, so you know there wasn't any sign of foul play.”

“That's true. It just seems too much of a coincidence that he should die the day after a major blowup at the Planning Board meeting.”

“What would be odd woulda been if it'd happened after a Planning Board meeting when there wasn't a major blowup. Those are as rare as hen's teeth. You think about it, now. How could it have happened? You'd have had to get Harold out to the lighthouse to start with, and he was nobody's fool. Then you'd have had to push him just so and get him to conk out in the exact spot for the tide—which would run ten, maybe eleven feet or so high—to cover him and hope nobody decided to have a picnic there before it did. Nope, it was an accident.”

“Did you know him?”

“Course I knew him. We all knew him. He's been here more than thirty years. Liked him better when he fished and took pictures, but I had no
grudge against him. He made some money and wanted to make a whole bunch more. Lot of people around here feel the same way.”

As if on cue, Persis Sanford moved into view, her mountainous frame clad in a bright pantsuit the color of ripe eggplant.