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Another low groan came from nearby; this time she ignored it. Coldhearted, maybe, but too bad. Carolyn did not believe herself to be a nice person, even in the best of situations. And anyway, what could she do about it?

She wasn’t even convinced that she could save herself—the opposite, in fact.
Sorry, buddy
, she thought,
but you don’t sound like help to me. So sayonara
.

Meanwhile, she did at least have a plan: get this blanket off her face so she could see the son of a bitch who’d grabbed her. Maybe he would end up killing her anyway.

Probably he would. She’d seen enough crime-scene photos and other evidence not to have many illusions about that.

Still, before he did whatever it was he’d brought her out here to do, she meant to see him.

To look right at him, not crying, if she could help it—

… she might not be able to help it …

—and spit in his eye.

“STILL GOT THAT GREAT RIGHT ARM?” BACK IN THE CITY, IT
had been Chip’s ability to throw a baseball that first caught Sam’s interest.

Beside Jake in the car, Chip managed to look pleased and discomfited at the same time.

“Yeah. I guess. Haven’t used it a lot, lately. Few friends of mine, we get together in summer when we can.”

He fell silent for a moment, then went on. “Listen, I’m sorry about this.”

“Don’t worry about it. Not your fault.” Though whose it was she couldn’t imagine, either.

She and Chip Hahn had left the police station an hour ago, and since then she’d been calling everyone she could think of who might know where Sam was. But she’d reached only the guy who’d hired Sam the night before.

Down at the breakwater last night at about eleven-fifteen, Sam had finished cranking a twenty-two-foot Sea Ray onto a trailer, then signaled that the boat and trailer were good to go. The guy who’d hired Sam had pulled the trailer out of the water, stopped to pay Sam the twenty bucks they’d agreed on, and continued home.

He’d offered Sam a ride, he said, but Sam had his bike with him and said he’d be riding it. And that was the last the guy had seen of him.

Now it was late morning; beside Jake, Chip gazed out the car’s passenger-side window at the north end of town. Moose Island was only seven miles long by about two miles wide, not much territory at all for everyday purposes. But it was vast if you were searching for someone.

A gravel turnaround edged the grassy bluffs overlooking the Old Sow whirlpool and the U.S. geological survey marker. From here you could see all the way up the Western Passage.

On the Canadian side, the distant hills rising up out of the landmass
of New Brunswick had snow on them already, white between the dark stands of old trees. “I don’t understand,” she said.

They’d found Sam’s old red three-speed leaning against the rear wall of Rosie’s hot dog stand between the picnic tables and the trash barrels, not far out on the breakwater near the boat ramp.

“If he’d meant to ride his bike home,” she wondered aloud, “why’s it still there?”

“Someone could’ve picked him up in a car,” Chip said. “In which case he’s probably still somewhere on the island.”

She glanced sideways at him. “Because?” He’d been quiet for a while; now she recalled how smart he’d been, back in the city.

“Bob Arnold said he saw everyone who crossed the causeway late last night,” he reminded her. “I suppose Sam could’ve gone somewhere on foot, then got driven to the mainland later.”

“We’d still have heard from him by now,” she objected.

It hadn’t always been true. For the past ten years, Sam’s life had been an ongoing battle against the bottle, with as many skirmishes lost as won.

But just two nights ago she’d stood out in the yard with him and the dogs, watching a vee of Canada geese whistle south across the full moon. Sam’s face in the moonlight was bluish-white.

“I know why they fly that way,” he’d said in that grown-up man’s voice he had now. “What’s that vee remind you of, those two lines they make?”

She’d been working with him on Morse code and reading with him about its science: how it got sent and received.

“An antenna?” she guessed.

He nodded. “Got it in one. See, geese navigate by magnetic field. That’s how they migrate, and I think that vee shape they form when they fly is how they sense it.”

She’d turned, amazed. “You read that somewhere?” It knocked her out, sometimes, how much he was like his father, Victor.

The late great. Victor at his best. “No,” Sam said. “I just think so.”

They had followed the dogs back to the house, calling them when they strayed into the adjoining yards. “Not that a goose isn’t great all by itself,” he’d added. “But it’s when they get together that they can really do something special.”

It was the last time she’d talked with him. Now she scanned to her right and left for him as she drove slowly on Water Street past the assisted living facility, a long, low waterside building that had once been a sardine cannery.

There’d been fifteen of them in the late 1890s when Joseph Paducah Lang made the cans to supply them all, she recalled, mean while trying to stay calm, trying not to think about what might have happened to Sam. Fifteen canneries crowded along the island shore, employing some eight hundred people, cutting the small fish and packing them

Sam
, she thought.

“Bob Arnold also said there was a car stolen last night, but it got returned to its owner,” Chip said. “Remember?”

“So?” The day had brightened, then gone sour again. Weather in Eastport in November was notoriously fickle. She hoped Sam was not out in the cold somewhere, as sleet spattered the windshield; she ran the wipers again.

Sam, where are you?

“So the only safe place to leave a stolen car,” Chip said, “where the police won’t be able to draw any conclusions about you from it, is back where you got it. Someone knew that, and cared.”

She glanced again at him, surprised; he shrugged modestly in reply. “Hey, I told you I worked for a crime writer. I’m used to thinking about this stuff.”

But not to living it. No one ever was. Out on the water, the Coast Guard’s orange Zodiac and her crew practiced water rescues, tossing and retrieving a man-shaped dummy. Cold duty, but at least once a
year they did it for real, so they rehearsed. At the wharf by the Chowder House restaurant, closed for the season, a few lobster traps were being put onto the deck of a tubby little wooden boat.

It was the season for lobster fishing now that the creatures were done with their yearly molting. Soon the boats would be out in force, no matter the weather.

Randy Dodd had gone overboard in November. If he had.

Funny thing about work in Eastport, that somehow the best season for it was always the worst weather for the people who did it. Warm day, though, she recalled, when Randy went over.

“A car you used to transport someone … or something?” Chip mused aloud. “To a boat, maybe? That’s the only other way to get off this island efficiently, right?”

She nodded. “Which brings us to the guy in the mask.”

On the dock the night before … Because if you knew from personal experience, as Randy would have, that local kids hung out on the dock at night, and if you wanted to be prepared to get rid of them if you needed to, so they wouldn’t see something—or see you—that’s what you’d bring along. A fright mask, or something like it.

“Maybe Sam did see someone on the breakwater,” Chip said. “While he was helping to haul the boat, or afterwards. Did he know Randy Dodd? Would he have recognized him?”

“He used to crew for Randy,” she replied. “A few years ago, before he went away to school. So yes, Sam would know him if he saw him.”

But then it hit her how ridiculous she was being. She wanted an answer to where Sam was, and in the absence of anything else she was fastening on to Chip’s theory.

Trouble was, Randy being alive still didn’t make any sense. The fingernails that had been found stuck in his trapline showed that, even if nothing else did.

She bit her lip hard, drew warm blood before she trusted her voice enough to speak. For almost a year now, Sam had been as sober and as reliable as the tides.

He could’ve fallen off the wagon again. But she didn’t think he had. Something had happened to him, something bad. She wished her husband, Wade Sorenson, was home.

For a moment she pictured Wade, tall and solid with brush-cut blond hair and pale eyes that were blue or gray, depending upon the weather. Wade was calm and silent, a man prone to doing things instead of talking about them.

A native Mainer, he knew everyone in the county, too, and if he was here he would be calling them, thinking of more things to try, and trying them. And perhaps most usefully of all, they could lean on each other.

But he wasn’t here. He’d left that morning to go on a deer-hunting trip, before she was awake. She didn’t know if she could even reach him.

“Randy Dodd’s dead, Chip. I don’t know what happened to your friend, Carolyn”—
Sam, where are you?
she thought helplessly—“but Randy’s not lurching around here like some zombie, kidnapping people.”

When they were boys, Chip and Sam had been fans of all things horror-related: books and comics, films and video games. Probably one or both of them had owned a scary mask like the one the guy had been wearing on the breakwater last night.

“Zombies don’t kidnap people,” Chip said with a small smile, seeming to follow her thought. “They eat ’em. Vampires just drink your blood. Shape-shifters might kidnap you, or ghouls. But—”

She smiled back in spite of herself. “You haven’t changed much, have you? Are you still interested in strange music, too, the way you used to be?”

“I am. I might even try writing about it,” he added, clearly gratified
that she remembered. “And I have a bigger project in mind to do, too.” He hesitated. “But there are some things I have to clear up with Carolyn first.” At this, he looked miserable again.

“What is it, Chip? No,” she added, “don’t bother denying it. I know you, remember? And I know that look on your face.”

She’d last seen it when she’d tried asking about his family, years earlier in New York. He’d given her a brief, useless answer whose unspoken message was
Don’t ask me again
.

So she hadn’t. “Spill it,” she said now.

Whereupon he broke down and revealed to her how much work he’d done on Carolyn Rathbone’s books, and how little credit he had received.

“People want to think she does it all,” he said simply, “so we let them. It’s just good business.”

They passed the massive granite-block post office on Water Street, and across from it the Moose Island general store. “Even those strange e-mails I got,” Chip said. “I replied in her name, not mine. I’m supposed to be invisible.”

“And you resented that?” She pulled over in front of the bar Roger Dodd ran, on the first floor of a two-story brick building a few doors down from the store.

With its side window overlooking the length of Water Street, the Artful Dodger had a view of nearly the whole downtown.

“No,” Chip said. “That’s what I signed on for, I knew what I was doing, so how could I have resented it later?”

He sighed. “But she’s not an easy person, Carolyn. And right after we arrived …”

His hands made those washing motions again; the guilty look returned to his face. “She’d stolen an idea of mine. I found out last night. We argued about it.”

“I see. And did anyone hear you?” The sleet had stopped, but the gray sky over the water was still wintery and the air damply penetrating.

“The bartender heard. I guess it must’ve been Roger Dodd,” Chip replied.

She parked the car and they got out. “And there was another guy at the bar, too,” Chip added, sounding as if he was only now re calling this. He zipped his thin cotton jacket, which was in no way adequate for the day’s nasty weather. “Just some local, I think. I remember he had kind of a limp. But he had his own troubles, it looked like.”

He paused. Then: “I thought about it,” he blurted. “About hurting her. Just for a minute, she’d made me so angry, it felt like being rid of her would make things better.”

He gazed unhappily at the asphalt parking lot adjacent to the fish pier. “But I’d never really have done anything to her.”

Just then Bob Arnold drove by in the squad car, flipping one hand up in a curt wave as he passed. If he’d learned anything about where Sam was, he’d have stopped to say so.

“He was right, wasn’t he?” Chip said, meaning Bob. “It was stupid of me to let Carolyn come here. And now Sam might be in trouble because of it, too.”

But Jake was still mulling Chip’s previous remark, that he’d thought about harming the missing woman. That admission, plus his being the last person known to have seen her …

“Do yourself a favor, Chip. Don’t volunteer more information to anyone but me, okay?”

Because nothing good could come of it. She didn’t think Chip had done anything dreadful.

But he could still get his name on a warrant by talking too freely; she sensed in him once more a kind of youthful naïveté, a too-honest softness about him that could make him easy pickings for a tough prosecutor.