Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (30 page)

“I tripped over a dead body.”

“It’s been a while, so it’s going to hurt. But I think I can do it on the first try. Why don’t you look away?”

She didn’t dally. As soon as my head turned, she clutched my finger in her fist and pulled it straight out.

The pain drove me to my knees. I moaned. When I was a boy, the men in the movies never moaned in pain. Their jaw muscles twitched when it got really bad. I buried my face between Crystal’s breasts, hugged them around my face, a fine place to be when the next wave of pain landed…But it didn’t.

“It’s in,” she said.

The pain was gone! I peeked out. Was it going to stay gone? She stroked my hair. “It’s in!” I giggled. I could feel my grasp on reality slipping away. I could let it go now, what the hell, my loved ones were safe from the devils in the dark.

“Good, good, there’s no pain now, is there?”

“None.”

“Artie?”

“Hmm?”

“You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you? You knew the boat would explode.”

“Yes.”

“Did you cause it to explode?”

“It might have exploded anyhow.”

“But you intended for it to explode?”

“Yes. How do you feel about that?”

“I feel okay about it. But I want to go now. Okay?”

TWENTY-SEVEN

W
e said our good-byes to Hawley and Clayton. Clayton still had the gym bag in his grip as we cleared the cove and turned for Micmac aboard Sheriff Kelso’s boat. This last crossing of Cabot Strait was rough and cold, though the sky was so clear it seemed we could see the curvature of the earth.

Nobody spoke much on the way across. Out of sight of land, Jellyroll hooped in the stern. I wiped it up. I loved that he was still around to hoop, but that was only my perspective. He had just disgorged this nasty puddle of yellow bile in the back of Kelso’s boat, and Kelso’s gaze at me was as chilly as the sea. He was probably glad we were going. I guess I couldn’t blame him. Although on another level, depending on how you wanted to look at it, we had solved his Micmac murders for him. Of course, on the other hand, we had brought the killers to his neighborhood in the first place.

I put my arm around Crystal’s shoulder, after I’d thoroughly wiped my hand, and we let the wind slap our faces. Only the wind kept my head up, I was so tired. Crystal, too.

“Remember those country inns?” said Crystal in my ear.

“Sure.”

“Let’s stop at one.”

Most of the Jesus people had dispersed. Here and there small groups remained on the hillside, packing their belongings. Others, singly or in family units, were walking out of town. They didn’t seem particularly dispirited. They seemed like folks
heading home at the close of the company picnic, weary and spent but not disappointed. Sleepy boys and girls rode like lemurs on their fathers’ shoulders. Mothers and daughters walked hand in hand. Two of their number were dead, and it didn’t seem that anyone had been saved, at least not to me. Where would they go now? Did they have other prospects and possibilities?

Dockside, the town went about its business. Fishermen in black rubber boots threw crates of ice from their decks to colleagues up on the dock. A lobster boat backed off the dock, another took its place. Several people from away ate on the porch at the Cod End, gulls circling. The guy from the marine store wheeled a barrowful of heavy gear out to a big rusty commercial fishing boat at the end of the dock. He nodded to us.

“Sheriff, have you seen the face in the lichens?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“…I just wondered. I was thinking of having a look. What’s it like?”

“I’ll show you if you want.”

“Thanks. Do you want to see it, Crystal?”

“No, I don’t. I think I’ll stay down here.”

I could understand that position, but I still wanted to see. It seemed important, a kind of closure. I helped him tie up the boat. Then we started up the hill.

A few people, volunteers perhaps, had stayed to pick up the litter. They were spearing it into garbage bags tied to their waists. Where the incline was still shallow, we passed a white-haired man of retirement age wearing a multicolored jogging suit trying to spear a soda can. It kept rolling from under his point. We said good afternoon. He stamped it flat, then speared it up.

I looked back over my shoulder as the hill steepened near the top. The setting didn’t look real from here, a perfectly round harbor with Round Island right outside, white light shimmering on the surface all the way to the horizon. It was a place out of time, yet there were Crystal and Jellyroll, waiting.

“It was right here,” said Kelso, pointing to a vertical crag of the same pink granite that formed Kempshall Island.

About the size of a suburban garage door, the exposed rock was fissured and crinkled. It had been exposed to the elements for thousands of years. Now it was almost covered with a growth of tan, olive, and yellow lichen. The short, coarse plants somehow found sustenance here. Did they draw nourishment from the rocks themselves? If so, they were the smartest creatures around this coast.

“It’s gone.” Kelso put his hands on the rock as if to summon it up again. He turned to me with a stricken look on his face.

“Gone?”

“Yeah, the goddamn thing’s gone. It was right here!”

“What did it look like? Did it look like a face?”

“Well, yeah. I saw it when somebody pointed it out to me. Yeah, you could say it was a face in profile. You see a lot of things in the lichens if you look. I know. I sat here and tried it. But the face was right here, I’m certain.”

“It’s gone.” It was the man who’d been spearing trash. He stood below us cradling his weapon in the crook of his arm, his bag hanging from his belt. He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand.

“Where’d it go?” asked Kelso.

“Stolen.”

“What do you mean, stolen?”

“Yep. Last night. Somebody stole it. Just took the face with them when they left. Most people left, you know, because of the murders.”

“How’d they take it?”

“Scraped it off with a pocket knife, put it in their pocket, probably. You can see the marks. That ruins it for everybody. I think you should arrest him.”

This whole matter seemed to depress Kelso as if it affirmed some darkly held vision. He stared at the place where the face had been.

“Last night it happened. We discovered it at dawn. I think you ought to arrest him,” the man insisted.

“Arrest him?” snapped Kelso. “On what charge?”

“Yes.
That’s
the problem.” The man turned and continued spearing his way down the hill.

“Well, I guess I’ll be going,” I said. “If you have no objections.”

“No, none.”

“Would you give this check to Dwight—for the boat?” I asked. I would have asked Hawley to give it to Dwight, but I forgot.

He took my check, folded it into his shirt pocket. “Say, just between us, you didn’t set that up, did you, the explosion?”

“He neglected the sniff test. That’s what Dwight called it, the sniff test.”

“Artie, I’d just as soon you don’t come back.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, I know none of this was your fault, but I think it’d be best for everybody concerned if you didn’t come back. No hard feelings?”

“No.”

“Take care, Artie.”

“You too, Ted.”

I looked down the hill at Crystal and Jellyroll. She was leaning against a dock piling, and he was lying at her feet. They seemed small and vulnerable. I wanted to enfold them in my arms, and my chest ached with love as I watched.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edgar Award nominee Dallas Murphy is a novelist, a nonfiction writer, an essayist, and a journalist.

His hugely popular Artie Deemer series follows the fast-paced, rollicking adventures of the reluctant sleuth Artie and his celebrity dog Jellyroll—who foots all the bills as a star of screen, TV, and dog-food boxes.
Lover Man
, the first mystery in the series, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year. It was followed up by the darkly-funny thrillers
Lush Life
and
Don’t Explain
.

He also wrote the wild crime novel
Apparent Wind
about the antics of an ex-con and his unlikely entourage as they dodge bombs, corrupt cops, and crazy killers in Florida. The book earned him well deserved comparisons to John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut.

In his nonfiction career, Murphy contributes articles about sailing to a number of magazines. He also writes nonfiction books about the ocean, including
Rounding the Horn, To Follow the Water, Plain Sailing
, and most recently,
To the Denmark Strait
. He lives in New York City.