“Ahoy, mateys!” yelled the pirates of Eastport, seizing the freshly baked treats we’d set out for them and gobbling them down.
Toll House cookies, chocolate pinwheels, and date-nut brownie bites vanished down their hatches, followed by gulps of milk. Then, brandishing their aluminum-foil cutlasses and pushing aside black construction-paper eye patches, they peered around for more.
One little seagoing villain strode boldly up to the counter in The Chocolate Moose, a small, chocolate-themed bakery on Water Street in the remote island village of Eastport, Maine.
The young scallywag was perhaps six years old, with a wide gap-toothed grin, bright blue eyes, and a mess of blond curls peeping out from beneath the black skull-patterned bandanna tied around his head.
“Rum!” he demanded, so I gave him more milk, and he took it grudgingly.
“A man,” he remarked after he’d guzzled it, “can’t get a decent drink around here nowadays.”
He dragged the back of his hand roughly over his mouth, no doubt imitating the pirates in the movies they’d been showing at the arts center the week before the Eastport Pirate Festival, our little community’s last big bash of the summer season.
The first day of the annual festival was here, and on the sidewalks townsfolk and visitors alike paraded in the costumes they’d been assembling all year: leather jerkins and black leather boots worn thigh high over fishnet stockings, tricorn hats with ostrich feather cockades, black eye patches, and gold hoop earrings.
The little pirate shoved his milk glass at me again. I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from giggling at him.
Then my friend and bakery shop partner Ellie White emerged from the kitchen at the rear of The Chocolate Moose. She seized the pint-sized swashbuckler and eased him toward the door, where his crewmates had already exited.
“You hop along now with the rest of your buccaneer pals,” she told the youngster, “before your ship sails without you.”
Ellie and I had opened The Chocolate Moose two years earlier, baking and selling chocolate treats to local area residents and to the summer tourists who visited downeast Maine in droves. We didn’t often need a bouncer in the shop, but when we did, she was it.
“Nice work,” I said, taken aback by the number of used napkins and paper plates the junior pirates had left behind. The shop now looked as if real pirates had rampaged through it.
“Have a kids party, they said.” Ellie sighed. “It’ll be easy, they said.”
For the festivities, she wore a scoop-necked white blouse with puffed sleeves trimmed elaborately in red ribbons, a black satin vest with gold embroidery, and a red satin skirt with a frilly black petticoat peeping from below its hem, the skirt snugly belted with a black silk sash.
The bold little pirate tried stealthily to come in again; she took his shoulders in her hands and turned him firmly.
“Shoo!” she said, scooting him out once more and locking the door.
With her strawberry blond hair curling-ironed into ringlets and a pair of gold studs twinkling in her ears, she was definitely the prettiest pirate queen any of us in Eastport had ever seen. Even rowdy little rapscallions obeyed her, too awestruck to sass back.
Also, this one’s mouth had still been full of the chocolate snickerdoodle he’d grabbed on his way out the last time. It was among the sweets we’d baked for the children’s cookie-tasting party, an event that had turned out to be more like a plague of locusts descending on a field.
“There,” Ellie breathed in relief, leaning her back against the door. “Now we just have to clean up.”
“Yes,” I agreed weakly, taking in more of the party’s aftermath. With its tall bay windows, a vintage glass-fronted display case, and small black cast-iron café tables lined up against the two exposed brick walls, ordinarily the Moose looked neat, sweet, and complete.
Now, though . . . even a glass jar of raspberries in syrup meant for the inside of a filled chocolate sponge cake had somehow managed to get smashed. The pool of sticky red juice spread over the floor made it look as if a bloody pirate battle had happened here.
“Where can I rent a bulldozer?” I added. The whole place looked plundered, including the tipped-over toothpick holder by the cash register and the place mats scattered about.
Under the stamped-tin ceiling, the old paddle-bladed fan turned slowly, stirring the sweet smells of baking and fresh coffee and shifting the paper plates smeared with whipped cream, frosting, and more of those red raspberries from the jar that hadn’t gotten broken.
“Or possibly a steam shovel,” I said, plucking up a place mat that turned out to have half a chocolate whoopie pie mashed into it.
“Jake,” Ellie chided me affectionately, “don’t worry. You just run downstairs for the bucket and mop while I tidy up and sweep the floor. We’ll have it all put to rights in no time.”
And that in a nutshell is my friend Ellie, so optimistic that if the universe should end some early morning in a sudden crashing together of suns and planets, she’ll be there eagerly looking forward to whatever comes next while the sky falls all around her.
“And while you’re there, grab another carton of napkins and some paper towels. Oh, and lock the door again, please. I opened it to let in the delivery truck driver earlier this morning.”
I added paper supplies to my mental cellar list; kids think that napkins grow on trees, naturally, and use them with wild abandon—to hurl at one another, not for their messy faces.
Or their hands. Everything in the shop was sticky, and the glass display case looked as if the FBI had been collecting fingerprints on it. Sighing while resolving never to do this again—but I would, of course, because the Eastport Pirate Festival was an all-hands-on-deck volunteer affair—I put a fresh bottle of spray cleaner on the list, made a mental note to lock that cellar door the way Ellie had asked, and turned to go. But—
“Well?” Ellie inquired brightly. “What are you waiting for?”
“Um,” I replied. “Just watching all the people outside.”
Peg legs and hooks, fake wounds bloodied with cranberry juice, artificial scars, and teeth blackened with licorice all testified to the many dangers of piracy as a career, but no one seemed to care. Even the babies sported skull-and-crossbones-patterned diaper covers, their strollers wrapped in black bunting and flying the Jolly Roger.
Beyond them, in the air over the fishing pier, small drones swooped and soared while emitting loud snarling noises, their operators onshore working the controls of the devices intently.
“You’re, uh, sure the mop and bucket are still in the cellar?” I said.
Across the street, a jester in a belled cap and curly-toed slippers expertly juggled grog bottles, gulping from each one as he caught it, then flinging it up again. Behind him in the early autumn sunshine, the bay spread wide and blue, sailboats skimming like white seabirds across it.
“Because I wouldn’t want to go all the way down there just to find out they weren’t . . .”
I unlocked the door and opened it, hoping those drones had the sense to stay away from the sailboats’ billowing sails. Festival food smells floated deliciously on the brisk sea breeze: pizza, cotton candy, and fried dough, with Italian sausages and hot dogs coming in a close second.
“Or maybe I should go out and buy a new mop bucket,” I went on, “seeing as lately we’re so popular and profitable. . . .”
We’d done well at the cash register lately. At first a struggling, not-likely-to-survive enterprise, The Chocolate Moose had become a beloved institution on Water Street, soon relied upon to supply everything from massive wedding cakes to a few cookies for an afternoon treat.
“Yes, we can afford new equipment,” Ellie agreed, but her violet eyes narrowed knowingly.
“Jake, are you still scared of that cellar?”
“Oh, of course not!” I retorted defensively, and it wasn’t a complete lie. I had no problem with the cellar.
What was in it, though: spiders and insects and mice, oh my! Not to mention some mangy wharf rats; we hadn’t the heart to trap them—or in my case, the stomach for emptying the traps afterward—so we used an electronic gadget that sent high-pitched sounds into their ears.
Of hungry cats meowing, I supposed, and it worked on the rats. But it had no effect on the dozen or so small brown bats hanging from the old beams down there, high-pitched sounds being their specialty, I supposed.
“I don’t care who says those bats don’t suck blood,” I grumbled. “And even if they haven’t before, there’s always a first time.”
“Hmm,” Ellie said skeptically, but before she could ask me if I wanted one of those little boys to come back and protect me with his aluminum-foil sword, the bell over the shop door jingled.
“Ladies,” said someone from behind me, and my heart sank. It was well-known food authority and TV personality Henry Hadlyme, his voice at once recognizable from his popular travel and food show, Eat This!
Suddenly I wished I was downstairs with the bats. He’d been in town only two days and already he’d made himself unwelcome pretty much everywhere with his oh-so-superior attitude and unpleasant remarks about everything, the restaurants especially. But there was no sense antagonizing him.
“Hello, Henry. What brings you in here this fine pirate-festival morning?”
He’d made sure to come in and introduce himself when he’d first arrived. From his pained tone and wrinkled nose as he’d eyed the place then, I’d thought we’d had ants in the display case, and his attitude hadn’t improved.
The opposite, in fact. “Mmph,” he replied now, glancing around disdainfully at the mess left by the pirate party. “Keeping the shop in good order as usual, I see.”
Hadlyme was in his forties, I estimated, with frizzy yellow hair, pale gray eyes, and a jaw that could’ve doubled as the Rock of Gibraltar. He wore a black turtleneck, bleached-out jeans, and a blood-red leather jacket that looked as if it cost a mint, plus the sourest expression I’d seen since Ellie forgot to put sugar in the lemonade.
With a moue of distaste, he gingerly plucked a crumpled napkin from one of the tables and dropped it atop the already overflowing wastebasket.
“Really, ladies, I don’t see how my people are going to make a podcast segment here in your shop if you won’t bother cleaning up this—”
“Wait, what?” I’d heard nothing about any podcasting in here, and Ellie looked puzzled, too.
But yanking the door open yet again, I spotted his production crew outside, a half-dozen young people in green tee shirts with the phrase Eat This! silk screened onto them, waiting on the sidewalk.
“We’re putting together an episode of my new Eat This! video podcast,” Hadlyme explained. “An online version of—”
“No.” I yanked the blinds down in the front windows, turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED in the door, and stood in front of it.
“Not a chance, Henry. You’re just going to make fun of us the way you did last night at the Happy Crab.”
The popular Eastport eatery specialized in deep-fried seafood, which to hear Henry tell it—as everyone in the Crab had, including the owner—was only a slightly better choice than dumpster diving.
Also while he was there, he’d had a few remarks to make about the Moose: that we used carob instead of chocolate when we could get away with it, for instance. And margarine instead of butter. At his words, I hadn’t charged up out of my seat in one of the Crab’s blue leatherette booths to throttle him, but it was close.
“You’re not doing any podcasting or anything else in here,” I repeated. “Or in any of the other food places in Eastport, either, I’ll bet. We all know what you’re up to now, and we’re not having any.”
At this point, the scornful remarks he’d made were all over town, and I wasn’t the only one who’d had it right up to the eyes with him. Actually, considering that there was a pirate festival going on in Eastport, I thought Henry Hadlyme was lucky not to be getting keelhauled right this very minute.
Oblivious to this, or more probably just not caring, he wagged a finger at me. “Now you listen to me, missy . . .”
I just love being called “missy.” And finger wagging is a big favorite of mine, too; somehow he apparently thought that because he was a TV personality—and not even a beloved one like that well-known world-traveling fellow—he could do whatever he liked.
“Forget it,” I said flatly. “Not a chance in the world.” He opened his mouth again to protest.
I put a hand up. “I mean it. And before you pull out your ‘I’m a celebrity’ card, let me just get it on record for you very clearly that, first, you’re not really very famous, you know. Half the folks here in Eastport have never heard of you.”
Which was true. That was another thing he exaggerated: his own importance. “And second, I don’t give a flying—”
“Jake,” Ellie interrupted sweetly, but I knew it was the kind of sweetness that she hoped would put him into a diabetic coma. “Why don’t you and Henry step outside so that I can start cleaning up in here?”
Right after I lock him out again, her look added, and if I have to swat him with this broom to get him going, I’ll do it.
She wouldn’t. Ellie was peaceful to a fault. But I’m not, and I wasn’t the only one in Eastport who was mad at him. After last night at the Crab, the only place he was welcome to see the inside of around here was a lobster trap, just before it descended into fifty feet of cold salt water.
Still, there was no sense getting hit with an assault charge. “Come on, Henry,” I muttered, urging him out ahead of me.
As we emerged, his half-dozen TV crew minions gathered around like vultures. They were young, eager, intelligent-looking vultures dressed in what I thought of as hipster uniforms: plaid shirts, too-short stovepipe trousers, beanies and fedoras, lots of piercings, and fancy tattoos.
They were predatory, and at the moment I was the prey. Feeling their eyes on me, I blinked at the absence of cameras and recorders until I remembered that nowadays they could do it all with their smartphones.
“Now,” I told Henry, gesturing at them, “you can tell them to go away, or they can stay and capture footage of famous foodie and TV guy Henry Hadlyme getting his nose flattened by a local shopkeeper.”
He looked appalled. “You wouldn’t,” he breathed, while his young crew members glanced expectantly at one another.
Wanting to punch Hadlyme wasn’t exactly a rare idea among them, either, I gathered from their expressions. Too bad I was going to disappoint them; I really did need all those cleaning supplies, and I really didn’t want to get arrested for clobbering him.
Besides, as I spoke I spotted one of the crew members trying to aim an actual camera at me, and I’m not sure what I dislike more—confronting sourpuss TV guys or having my picture taken sneakily.
Or having it taken at all, for that matter. “Scram!” I told the bunch of them, and they stepped back warily, then gave up and eased away until I was alone facing Hadlyme.
“You,” I accused him, “have a motive for being here. And it’s not a good motive, whatever it is.”
“That’s ridiculous.” He was defensive, looking over his shoulder for someone to agree with him and finding no one.
All around us, throngs of happy visitors went on enjoying the clear sky, bright sunshine, and tempting food offerings of another successful Eastport Pirate Festival.
A kid on a skateboard went zigzagging by, munching a hot dog. Hadlyme winced, no doubt imagining how much happier and better off that kid would be with a saucer of fresh caviar and a lemon wedge.
I could’ve told him what to do with his lemon wedge, but instead a new thought struck me.
“What’re you doing in Eastport, anyway?” I waved around at the people blocking the sidewalk. Quite a few of them were my friends and neighbors, and they liked deep-fried seafood as much as I did.
More, even. “I mean, what the heck were you expecting,” I went on, “some kind of hotbed of cordon bleu?”
In reply he shoved a professionally produced flyer at me. Eating on the Edge! was the name of his podcast, it said, and then it listed a half-dozen small New England towns where the first six episodes of the new production would be set.
I frowned at the flyer just as Ellie came hurrying out of the shop looking vexed, locking the door behind her and testing it, and turning to me with her car keys already in her hand.
“Jake, I just got a call from Timmy Franco.”
She headed for her car, which was in one of the angled spaces in front of the shop. I followed, pleased to be leaving Henry Hadlyme sputtering on the sidewalk behind me. Whatever he was up to, I figured I’d have time later to put the kibosh on it.
But in this, as in so much else, I was incorrect.
Eastport, Maine (pop. 1,200) is located on Moose Island, three hours from Bangor and light-years from everywhere else, or so it often seems. Reachable from the mainland by a long, curving causeway, the town and its bustling waterfront are also accessible to boats ranging from tiny skiffs and tubby fishing vessels rigged for lobster hauling to the vast, ocean-going freight carriers that visit our deep water cargo port regularly.
“Ellie,” I gasped, hustling after her down the steep metal ramp leading to the floating wooden piers in the waterfront’s boat basin.
Fortunately, the ramp’s surface was serrated, so I didn’t just slide down it like a human bobsled. “Ellie, what are we doing?”
Behind us onshore rose the old red-brick storefront buildings of Eastport’s downtown, where distant music and laughter indicated that the pirate celebration was still in full swing.
Down here among the fishing boats tied up to the finger piers, though, the creak of rigging and clank of anchor chains mingled with the cries of seagulls overhead, drowning out the festival’s din.
Ellie scampered ahead of me; I rushed to keep up with her while trying hard not to fall into the waves slopping the dock pilings. On either side of me, forty-foot fishing vessels floated, neatly slotted into their assigned spaces and secured to nearby pilings by lines as thick as my wrists.
“Ellie?” She was already aboard her own little vessel, a twenty-three-foot fiberglass Bayliner with a black canvas bimini awning, a small cuddy cabin, and a walkaround deck.
From the Bayliner’s stern hung a 225-horsepower Mercury outboard engine I’d nicknamed The Beast. “Ellie, d’you by any chance feel like telling me what we’re doing here?”
I put one uncertain hand on the bimini’s aluminum-tube frame and one foot on the Bayliner’s narrow fiberglass rail. Then I pushed with my other foot: up, over, and suddenly I was aboard, and as always I felt absurdly proud of myself that I’d accomplished this.
“Very nice,” said Ellie approvingly. “You’ll be taking her out on your own before you know it.”
It was among her fondest fantasies that she would turn me into a skilled mariner who could get the Bayliner not only out of the boat basin alone but back into it again, too.
Without sinking, I mean. “But never mind that now,” she added. She opened the battery hatch next to the engine, reached down into it to snap on the battery switch, slapped the hatch shut, and latched it.
“Tim needs our help,” she said, and I noticed that she was still moving along rather briskly.
“Why?” I asked, and in reply she waved at the vacant spot ahead of us in the water, next to the finger pier.
The spot that usually had a familiar boat parked in it.... Then I got it. “Wait a minute, wasn’t he out of town? You mean he’s . . . ?”
Tim and his little motorboat were a familiar sight in the boat basin, where Tim spent his days doing chores and running errands for the fishing crews.
“Uh-huh,” Ellie agreed. “I haven’t seen him around for a few days. And before he left, I noticed he was wearing new jeans and a new pair of sneakers.”
“So he must’ve gotten work.” Tim’s clothes were usually thrift shop specials, ragged but serviceable.
“Right. That’s what I thought at the time, but he hasn’t been around to ask,” said Ellie. She switched on the radio, then smacked it sharply with the top of her hand until static blared from it.
“I ordered the new wires for this thing two weeks ago,” she complained as she dialed the volume down. “One of these days, it’s not going to turn on at all.”
But she had better luck with the navigation electronics. On the helm near the steering wheel and the engine gauges, a screen jumped to glowing life at her touch, its display showing among other things that at the moment we were in twenty-three feet of water.
“Anyway, I guess he’s back, because right now he’s stuck out in Head Harbor Passage and he needs a tow,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s inconvenient. What’s he going to do?”
She pushed a small lever on the throttle, lowering the engine’s propeller, then squeezed a rubber bulb on the fuel line a few times to put a dose of gas into the carburetor.
She’d taught me all this just in case I ever fulfilled her hopes by deciding to . . . And then it hit me, what she was saying.
“Wait a minute. Oh no. Don’t tell me you mean we’re going out there to—”
Not that Ellie didn’t have plenty of boating experience, and she’d taken so many Coast Guard navigation and boat-handling courses that she probably could’ve taught one herself. But . . .
She turned the ignition key, starting the engine: vroom-vroom, etcetera. “Take the wheel,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I repeated, but she didn’t. Instead she hopped out onto the dock, untied the lines, tossed them aboard, and hopped back onto the boat again.
So the engine was running, and we were untied, and . . . “Okay, now pull the shift lever backward,” she said. “Turn the wheel. Back us out. Come on, Jake, it’s just like a car,” she advised me kindly.
Sure, but a car wasn’t swerving and swaying each time a puff of breeze got caught up in that bimini awning. The canvas was intended to provide us with shade, but at the moment it was acting more like a sail.
“Ellie,” I grated out, gripping the boat’s wheel nervously as the dock slid rapidly by. We were in reverse, approaching the granite boulders lining the boat basin to our rear.
Or “just off our stern,” as these insufferably boaty types like to say. At least I hadn’t hit any of the boats around us. Yet.
“You’re fine,” said Ellie. “Straighten the wheel, put it in forward gear, and give it a little gas.”
So I did all that stuff, the alternative being to jump directly overboard, and have I mentioned yet that the water here is very cold?
Even in summer it’s only about sixty degrees, which sounds fine but if you’re swimming it feels as if ice cubes are floating around with you. And if you’re in it for very long, even with your head above water, you’ll soon be a floating ice cube, too.
“Get the life jackets out, please,” I managed as I cautiously eased the Bayliner out between a crumbling wharf and a barge with a construction crane perched on it, parked just far enough offshore to create a channel.
A narrow channel... “More throttle.” Ellie draped a life jacket over my shoulders. “Remember, if you’re not moving, you can’t steer.”
Against my better judgment I eased the throttle forward, and the boat’s handling did improve; Ellie looked satisfied. I snaked one arm and then the other through the life jacket’s armholes, meanwhile keeping an eye on our port and starboard sides, our bow, and on the depth gauge displayed on the glowing GPS screen in front of me.
“Now start your turn,” said Ellie as we emerged from between the barge and the wharf’s dilapidated corner, thankfully without hitting either of them; I attributed this mostly to beginner’s luck.
Dead ahead, though, lay the fish pier, where the boats unloaded their catches: scallops, those lobsters I mentioned, and sea urch. . .
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