کتاب 03-08

8

He knows who the thief is, Harper thought. The idea was a sharp jolt, the mental equivalent of stepping on a tack.

“Why are you telling me this?” Harper asked.

He stared out over the prow of the boat. “The person of whom I speak would never leave willingly. Could you—if you had to—administer something? To pacify a person if she was—hysterical? Dangerous? To herself or . . . or others?”

Whatever Harper had been expecting to talk about, it wasn’t this.

“I don’t have anything strong enough in my supplies. To be honest, Father—”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he said, with a sudden bitterness. “I’ve never been ordained, not by any church. The only person who ought to call me Father is Carol. I never should’ve let that get started, but it satisfied my ego. I taught ethics and the history of Christianity at a prep school in Massachusetts. I’ve gone from old-fuddy-duddy-in-the-ivory-tower to high pope–Dalai Lama of the New Faith in five months. You show me someone who could resist that, I’ll show you a real saint.”

“Now, Father. If I heard someone sneering at you like that, I’d break something over their head. Don’t you know you give all these people hope? You give me hope, and that’s as magic as a whole church full of people glowing like Christmas lights. I’ve started to believe I might live to see my child born, and that’s because of you, and the songs, and all these wonderful people who have gathered around you.”

“Ah. That’s big-hearted of you, Harper. You just remember: I didn’t do anything to make all of you wonderful. You were that way when I found you.”

They swung out and around a headland into open water. The bank was forty feet away, a steep hill rising through scrawny bare trees and boulders.

“To return to your question, I don’t have sedatives of any strength whatsoever. God help us if I ever have to perform a surgery. The most powerful drug in the camp medicine cabinet is Advil. But even if I did have something stronger, I wouldn’t like to sedate someone as a punitive measure. I don’t do that. I help sick people.”

“This person—she is sick. And before you ask, no, I don’t want to say who I have in mind. Not until I’ve absolutely settled on what steps to take.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.” She had already noticed the way he was trying to avoid naming names.

He paused, considering for a time, then said: “What do you think of Martha Quinn’s island?”

“I think I’d feel a lot better about it if I knew someone who has actually heard the broadcast.”

Father Storey said, “Harold Cross claimed to have heard it. Once. And he was texting with someone in Lubec, which has been operating as the capital of Maine ever since Augusta burned to the ground.”

“Harold was texting with someone who said they were in Lubec,” Harper said. “I never knew him, but by the sound of it, Harold was a little too trusting.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Father Storey said, and again there was that caustic, nasty tone of bitterness that was so unlike him.

Harper could feel the ocean under the boat, the dreamy pull of it. If they stopped paddling, the current would catch the canoe and draw it to the east. In half an hour they would be far enough out to see all the lights of Portsmouth; in an hour, far enough perhaps to see all the lights on the New Hampshire coast. An hour after that they would be too far out to see any lights at all.

“We’re going to have to send someone away, I’m afraid. Force a woman from camp,” Father Storey said. “When that happens . . . well, I wouldn’t send someone, no matter how deluded, into exile, all alone. Sooner or later a Cremation Crew would catch her. No. I think I will go with her. Perhaps in the big sailboat out on John’s island. Myself and Don Lewiston. I’d like to go looking for Martha Quinn.”

“Who’ll take care of camp?”

“It would have to be John. He’s the only one I’m certain is up to the job.”

They swung around the headland to a narrow inlet, not more than eighty feet across, with houses on either side and decks built right over the water. Directly ahead was a short bridge, spanning the entrance to the small bay beyond.

She didn’t recognize where they were until they were gliding under the bridge itself, where their breath produced metallic echoes, ringing off the rusting iron gridwork above them. South Mill Pond opened up before her, a gourd-shaped body of water between a park . . . and the Portsmouth Police Department.

Most of the buildings around the pond were dark, but the police department and the parking lot alongside it were lit up like a football stadium on game night. From where she sat, Harper could see two big hills of waste burning in the lot. Each pile was almost twenty feet high. Harper wondered what they were destroying—contaminated clothing? A few fire trucks were parked nearby, the fire department managing the blaze. Harper spied men in helmets and fire jackets moving here and there about the bonfires. The burning mounds produced an evil-looking smoke that climbed into the night, blanking out the stars.

The Fireman began to paddle toward the police station.

“Oh, John,” Father Storey sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

The pond was no bigger than a soccer pitch and bisected by a causeway, which lay directly ahead of them. There was no crossing the causeway to the water on the other side without portaging the canoes. Harper wasn’t sure where the Fireman intended to beach them, but one way or another, they’d be on shore soon.

Harper leaned forward and hissed, “We’ll talk more when we get back to camp. Of course, though, I’ll do what I can to help you. If I had the proper drugs, I’d be willing to sedate the thief, after you confront her . . . but only as a last resort. I can’t believe it would come to that. If you and Carol approach this person together, privately, and show her the kind of empathy and understanding you were talking about in chapel—well, I can’t imagine anyone in camp who wouldn’t respond to that.”

Tom Storey turned his head to look back at her, his brow furrowed in puzzlement, a question in his eyes, forming on his lips . . . as if she had posed a very baffling riddle. Harper wondered at it. She felt she could not have been more direct or clear. She wanted to ask him what he didn’t understand, but there was no time. The Fireman was bringing them into shore, close to the causeway. Harper pointed with her paddle, and Father Storey nodded and turned away. Later, she thought, not imagining that there wouldn’t be a later.

Not for Father Storey.