The sound of a gunshot will travel miles over open water—especially when the bay is as calm as it was that morning.
“What was that?” Stacey said.
She paused in her paddling and let one blade hang above the surface, trailing a reddish-brown tendril of rockweed. The length of her tanned neck shone with perspiration although we’d only left East Boothbay twenty minutes before. She had managed to stuff most of her hair under a faded Red Sox cap and had secured her ponytail through the adjustable fastener. There was gray in the brown now, just a few strands of spider silk.
“Probably a lobsterman shooting a gull,” I said.
“It’s a little early for an execution, don’tcha think?”
An effervescent mist that was already burning off in the July heat was all that separated our kayaks. I had to dig in hard with my own paddle to prevent a rear-end collision. Our seagoing boats were sixteen-foot Lincoln Seguins and not made for tight turns.
My momentum carried me forward. As I slid alongside her, Stacey took hold of the grab-handle on my bow to keep us from drifting apart. I caught a whiff of coconut-scented sunscreen from her outstretched arm. The rising sun was a pale smudge behind her, like a yellow thumbprint left by a painter on a wet gray canvas.
“Didn’t you used to shoot gulls when you were an intern on Baker Island?” I asked. “Because that’s where it sounds like the shot came from.”
“Yeah, but we had a dispensation from the feds. It was the only effective method we had to protect the puffin and tern chicks from predators. We all hated it. The gulls were just doing what they evolved to do.”
“Maine lobstermen believe their dispensation comes from a higher authority.”
As if on cue, we slid past a fluorescent yellow buoy. The float was attached by a groundline to a lobster trap—or possibly a string of traps—that was resting on the bottom, fifteen fathoms below. It was just the suction of the outgoing tide, but the buoy seemed to be straining to pursue us the way a leashed dog might follow you on a sidewalk.
Near the Thread of Life Ledges, a sloop, running on its engine because there was no breeze, overtook us. A young family was on board. Stacey waved to a little girl, four or five years old, sitting beside her dad at the tiller, and she called back in a squeaky-toy voice.
“We’re going sailing!”
“You’re going to have so much fun!” Stacey replied as the boat’s wake sent us rocking.
I knew how nervous she was—about where we were going and what we might find there—and I admired how she’d been able to fake cheerfulness for the little girl’s sake.
“What did Kendra say exactly in her email?” I asked. “Tell me again.”
Kendra Ballard had been Stacey’s college roommate, and they had also worked together on Baker. She served now as Dr. Maeve McLeary’s project manager, overseeing the Maine Seabird Initiative’s restoration efforts on Baker Island. She collected the survey data, managed the project’s two interns, and almost never left the island between May and August, after the birds migrated offshore.
“It was short,” Stacey said, then recited: “‘Stevens, I don’t know what to do. Maeve has gone missing. She’s been away for two nights, and we have no idea where she went or why she isn’t checking in. Other weird shit is happening, too. Some lobstermen who were hassling us are getting more aggressive. Can you please come out here tomorrow with Mike? Make sure he brings his badge and gun.’”
The fact that she had memorized the email told me how rattled she was.
“Did you try calling her to find out more?”
“Baker Island is in a dead zone. On clear days, the researchers can sometimes get texts or send emails, but you know how spotty coverage is offshore. The nearest cell tower is on Ayers Island, but there’s a hill in the way and no line of sight.”
“The researchers don’t have a satellite phone?”
“Maeve must have taken it. Otherwise, Kendra would have used it to call.”
“But there’s a marine radio?”
“I tried to raise the island last night on my neighbor’s VHF, but Kendra and the others must have already turned in. The staffers sleep on tent platforms scattered around the cookhouse. I thought it would be easiest to head out at dawn and see the situation firsthand.”
“Maybe we should have taken my boat.”
“We had the kayaks all packed for our camping trip, and I’d reserved our site on Spruce Island. The irony is that I’d already been thinking of stopping at the seabird colony on our way out. I must have had a premonition that we would be needed on Baker.”
The statement would have sounded silly if it didn’t happen all the time. I had never believed in clairvoyance until I’d met Stacey Stevens and her mother, Ora.
“Did Maeve ever do anything like this?” I asked. “Did she ever disappear the summer you were an intern?”
“No! She was super-conscientious and hands-on. I guess you’d call her a micromanager, but I was nineteen and didn’t mind being bossed around for the cause. She was the most brilliant person I’d ever met. Steve Kress rightfully gets the credit for bringing puffins back to Maine, but Maeve McLeary established a larger colony, using different methods. The big-name ornithologists said the birds would never breed as far south as Baker Island. But she proved those men wrong.”
Another gunshot echoed across the water.
Trying to see through the mist was like peering through layers of gauze. The indistinct shape of a forested island loomed ahead and to port. The big ball compass on my deck said we were headed southwest, which meant that vague mass of land was Ayers Island since we’d already passed Thrumcap. Sounds do strange things at sea, but my meager powers of echolocation told me the shooting was coming from the seabird colony on Baker Island, two miles farther south.
“It has to be a lobsterman shooting gulls,” said Stacey, but with diminished conviction.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Maeve McLeary had a rule that we couldn’t commit ‘the daily murder’ until the last puffin-watching boats had left for the day. She didn’t want us to be photographed killing gulls.”
“But Maeve isn’t there, according to Kendra.”
Stacey had no answer except to increase her strokes until she had once again pulled ahead of me.
The wind was forecast to rise later, turning onshore in the afternoon, but so far, the air remained breathless. The sea was a sheet of hammered platinum. Every stir of my paddle brought the fecund smell of the ocean into my nose and mouth. It was as if I could taste the teeming life in the depths: the phytoplankton and the zooplankton, the oyster beds, the shoals of mackerel, and the deep-diving seals. The sensory stimulation left me feeling intoxicated.
It wasn’t just the sea air, either.
Despite all odds, I’d found myself back together with Stacey Stevens after more than two years apart. Our break, when it occurred, had seemed irreparable, absolute, and it had shattered the hopes of her parents, Charley and Ora, who were mentors and friends to me. Now the wheel of time had come full circle, and somehow, I was again courting the woman who had been my live-in girlfriend and almost my fiancée. From my perspective, our relationship was simultaneously thrilling, familiar, awkward, and terrifying. We had become different people during the hiatus. Intimate strangers.
We’d been planning this kayaking trip for weeks. I had thought it would give us the chance to take our relationship to the next level. But that was before Kendra called for our help.
The sound of a motorboat, approaching us at a high speed in the fog, caused me to sit upright, which in turn caused the kayak to wobble. I steadied myself by pressing my hips into the seat and bracing my paddle against the water.
“They’re in a godawful hurry,” I said. “They must be going thirty knots. I’m glad we’re not in the channel or they might run us over.”
“Godawful? You’ve been spending too much time with my dad. Fortunately, Parson’s Ledge is between us and the boat lane. But their wake is definitely going to drench us, so get ready.”
Just then, the bow of the boat broke through the fog, a hundred yards to starboard. Strangers to Maine might have mistaken it for the working lobsterboat it had once been. But the white paint job was too perfect, and there were no traps stacked on the deck. Mainers called these remodeled vessels picnic boats because their owners took them island-hopping for lunches and cocktails. This one was towing an inflatable dinghy that was practically skipping like a stone across the water.
I got only the briefest glimpse of the speeding boat before it lost all detail in the haze. Because of the windscreen, I couldn’t make out the foolhardy person at the helm other than that she seemed to be a woman. But I did catch the name of the vessel on its transom.
In this fog, at that speed, they might kill someone, I thought.
“Get ready!” said Stacey. “Turn your bow into the wave or you’ll be swamped.”
We watched the massive wake crash over the barnacled peaks of Parson’s Ledge, the sound as loud as a thunderclap.
Soon Stacey’s kayak began to rise and fall on the approaching swell. Then I felt a stomach-lifting sensation as I climbed my first real wave of the day. The front half of the boat seemed to hang suspended for an eternity, then it went crashing down into the trough. Icy water washed up the spray skirt all the way to my chest. I pushed with my left foot on the pedal that controlled the rudder until the wake had moved past.
“Thanks a lot, Selkie,” I said.
Stacey whipped her head around. Polarized sunglasses hid her jade-green eyes, but I could feel the alarm that had come into them. “What did you say?”
“The name of that boat was the Selkie.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because the Selkie is Maeve’s boat.”
“You mean we found her?” I said, incredulous. “That was easy.”
“It would be if we had a clue why she isn’t answering Kendra’s hails or where she’s heading at warp speed.”
The sea was a chameleon; it changed color as the mist lifted. It had been a leaden gray when we’d pushed off from the boat launch. Now in the fullness of the sunlight, the water above the shoals was transmuted, as if by alchemy, from metal into turquoise. Out in the open ocean, it changed again, becoming as hard and blue as sapphire.
“Where do you think Maeve was going in such a rush?”
“In that direction? She could’ve been headed anywhere from Pemaquid Point to Maritime Canada.”
“That narrows it down,” I said, smiling because I wanted to reassure her. “At least we’ll be able to tell Kendra that Maeve hasn’t died in a shipwreck—yet.”
Ayers Island rose to our left now: forested and stone-faced. The cliffs were gouged as if by some great sea monster that had tried to claw its way out of the deep. Gray schist glinted with mica crystals. Water, tinted rust red by iron oxide, dripped down the cracks like trickles of blood.
“I thought Ayers was made of granite.”
“You’re thinking of Hatchet Island,” said Stacey, reaching to open her forward hatch. She brought out a water bottle. “That’s where the old quarry was. You can’t see it from here, but it’s just behind Ayers.”
I followed her example. It was hot, and my lips tasted of dried salt from when I’d been splashed with seawater.
“There’s a fault running between the two islands,” she said, between sips. “That’s where Ayers Village is—along the channel. It’s very shallow there. We can circle around tomorrow on our way home and see the Ayers Island Lighthouse, but Clay Markham is notoriously private, so we won’t be allowed ashore.”
The mention of Markham’s name made me frown.
“My mom had one of his photographs in our house. It gave me nightmares.”
“Let me guess. The one with the big wave?”
I could see the image as clearly as if I were standing in the hallway outside my bedroom.
The photo was titled Shipbreaker, and it showed a fishing boat on a storm-tossed sea. A wall of water thirty feet high hung over the wooden vessel. The photo must’ve been taken mere seconds before the rogue wave came crashing down. My first response to seeing this image was always wonderment: How puny and insignificant the man-made object looked before the power of nature. Only by looking closer did I notice the two doomed men on board the boat. Then my awe gave way to disbelief, confusion, and horror.
We were drifting now, letting the falling tide pull us out to sea.
“Does anyone know when or where that picture was taken?”
“Markham won’t say, but his biographer thinks it was off Kamchatka, based on where he was traveling that year.”
“I don’t see how he can keep something like that secret.”
“He took that picture back in the sixties, Mike. There wasn’t social media or internet detectives back then.”
“I was obsessed with those two fishermen,” I said. “My mom told me they had to have been rescued. Because the photo wouldn’t have become so popular if it showed two people about to die.”
“Markham is such an amazing talent,” said Stacey as if she hadn’t heard the irony in my voice. “I’d cut off my pinkie to talk photography with the man for an hour.”
Her admiration was so innocent, I decided not to say what was on my mind: that before I’d ever heard of a snuff film, I’d encountered its photographic equivalent in Shipbreaker.
My gaze moved to the photographer’s island. Along the tops of the cliffs ran a seemingly unbroken hedgerow of beach roses and barberry. Even if you happened to find finger- and toeholds up the rock face, you would still have had to pass through a thorny fence before you could enter the coolness of the forest. I saw no sign of human habitation. No cottages, no shacks, not even indications of a path.
“Wasn’t Markham involved in some sort of scandal?”
“He did an exhibition of photographs a few years ago of live children posed as corpses.”
“Sounds charming.”
“It got a bunch of people riled up, as you might imagine. Markham couldn’t have paid for better publicity. It ended up being the biggest show of the year at the Museum of Modern Art.”
“The thing I’m remembering was sexual.”
“Markham and his wife supposedly hire handsome young men to work on their estate. A former employee came forward with an accusation, but nothing was ever proven. The poor guy had a history of drug abuse and was basically painted as a pathological liar. He overdosed before he could tell his story to the district attorney.”
“That was convenient.”
“Not every death is a murder, Mike.”
The remark reminded me of a question I’d been meaning to ask. “Why do you think Kendra wanted me to bring my badge and sidearm?”
“You’re a game warden, ...
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