On Fire

“Bastard,” she muttered now. She’d never intimidated John Straker. That was for sure.

She scooted off her boulder and unstrapped her dry pack. Damn. She was supposed to be back in Boston tonight, at work in the morning. She’d come to Maine last Wednesday for a round of fund-raising dinners, meetings and informal lectures at the Granger summer home on Mount Desert Island. Caroline Granger, Bennett’s second wife and now his widow, had decided to end her year of mourning and invited the directors and staff of the Boston Center for Oceanographic Studies north, perhaps to indicate she was ready to take her husband’s place as the center’s benefactor.

No one had mentioned Emile Labreque, living in exile a stone’s throw to the north. Riley hadn’t even told her father, Richard St. Joe, a whale biologist with the center, that she was extending her stay a few days to visit her grandfather.

With a groan of frustration, she dug out her emergency thermal blanket. It looked and felt like pliable aluminum foil. She unfolded it section by section, telling herself it’d be worse if she’d been unprepared. There was no shame in having to use her emergency supplies.

Still, she felt self-conscious and humiliated. She blamed Straker. He enjoyed seeing her in this predicament.

She climbed up onto a different boulder and threw the blanket over her shoulders. It was effective, but un-romantic. A fire was a last resort. Fires on islands could be deadly, and even a small campfire could scar a rock forever. She’d have to find a sandy spot.

She clutched her crinkly blanket around her, her windbreaker already limp and cold from the dampness, and followed a narrow path along the top of the rock ledge. It was just past high tide, and below her only the water’s edge was visible through the shroud of fog. Her path veered down among the rocks. She took it, relieved to have a safe outlet for her restless energy.

Fog was normal, she reminded herself. It wasn’t like an engine explosion and a raging fire aboard a ship. This wasn’t the Encounter. This was a great morning on the water with an aggravating ending—but not a traumatic one, not a dangerous one.

The path came to an end at the base of a huge, rounded boulder that Riley remembered from hikes on the island in years past. In happier days, she thought. Her parents, her sister, and later Matthew Granger would pack a couple of coolers and head out to Labreque Island for the day. Emile and Bennett had seldom joined them. There was always work, always the center. Now Bennett was dead, Emile was living in exile, his daughter wasn’t speaking to him and his granddaughter’s marriage to Matthew Granger was in turmoil.

Her sister’s husband had made a brief appearance on Mount Desert Island, long enough to demonstrate he hadn’t put the tragedy of the Encounter and his father’s death behind him. Matt shared Sam Cassain’s belief that Emile should be in jail on charges of negligent homicide.

Riley shoved back the unwelcome rush of images and plunged ahead, leaping from rock to rock, heedless of the fog, her flapping blanket, the memories she was trying to escape.

She walked to the edge of a flat, barnacle-covered boulder below the tide line. At its base, water swirled in cracks and crevices with the receding tide, exposing more barnacle-covered rocks, shallow tide pools, slippery seaweed. Her Tevas provided a firm grip on the rocks, although her toes were red and cold.

Should have packed socks, she thought. Straker had probably noticed her bare feet and smugly predicted frozen toes. She pictured him sitting by the cottage woodstove, warm as toast as he waited for the fog to lift and his unwelcome visitor to be on her way.

She leaped over a yard-wide, five-foot-deep crevice and climbed up a huge expanse of rock, all the way out to its edge. At high tide, the smaller rocks, sand and tide pools that surrounded its base now would be covered with water, creating a mini-island. She stood twenty feet above the receding tide. Ahead there was nothing but fog. It was like standing on the edge of the world.

Straker could have given her five damned minutes to warm her toes by the woodstove and have a cup of hot coffee. He could have lent her socks.

“Never mind Straker,” she muttered into the wall of fog.

Something caught her eye, drawing her gaze to the left. She peered down at water, rocks, seaweed and barnacles. Probably it was nothing. Fog could be deceiving.

Not this time.

Riley felt her blanket drop, heard herself gasp. Oh God.

Amid the rocks, seaweed and barnacles, facedown and motionless in the shallow water, was a man’s body.

Straker heard Riley yelling bloody murder and figured he had no choice. He had to see what was up. He walked out onto his rickety porch, where a pale, white sun was trying to burn through the fog. With any luck, the stranded Miss St. Joe could be on her way in less than an hour. She had always been…inconvenient.

He heard her thrashing through the brush alongside the cottage, heedless of the maze of paths that connected all points of the small island.

“Straker—Straker, my God, there’s a dead body on the rocks!”

He made a face. A dead body. Uh-huh.

He went back inside. His two rooms were toasty warm. He had a nice beef stew bubbling on the stove. The fog, the cold, the shifting winds were all reminders that summer was coming to an end. He couldn’t stay out here through the winter. A decision had to be made. What next in his life?

“Straker!”

Riley didn’t like sharing her island with him. She wasn’t above conjuring up a dead body just to get back at him for leaving her out in the cold fog. He’d known her since she was a precocious six-year-old who liked to recite the Latin names of every plant and creature she pulled out of a tide pool.

She pounded up the stairs onto the porch. She didn’t bother knocking, just threw open the door. “Didn’t you hear me?”

He stirred his stew. The steam, the rich smells were a welcome contrast to the cold, wet presence of Riley St. Joe. She was small and wiry like Emile, with his shock of short dark hair, his dark eyes, his drive and intensity. She had her mother’s quirky laugh, her father’s straight nose. She was difficult, competitive and a know-it-all. And she seemed to have no idea how much he’d changed since he’d left Schoodic Peninsula.

It was a great stew. Big chunks of carrots and red potatoes, celery, onions, sweet potatoes, a splash of burgundy. Not much meat. Since getting shot, he’d tried to be careful with his diet. His FBI shrink had urged him not to isolate himself, but his FBI shrink hadn’t grown up on the coast of Maine. Two hours out of the hospital, John had headed home. When Emile caught him camped out on Labreque Island, he’d offered him use of the cottage. There was no telephone, no mail, not much of a dock and the only power source an old kerosene generator and wood. Straker had accepted.

As a consequence, Emile’s younger granddaughter was in his doorway. He glanced at her from his position at the stove. She was pale, shaking, eyes wide.

“I heard you,” he said.

“Bastard—why didn’t you come? You know more about…oh, damn.”

She turned even paler. Straker put down his slotted spoon. Hell. Maybe she had seen a dead body. “Finish your sentence. This is good. I want to hear what it is you think I know more about than you do.”

“Dead bodies.”

It was almost a mumble. He said, “The fog can fool you.”

“Damn it, Straker, you don’t need to tell me about fog. I saw his—his—his hair and his hand—” Her eyes rolled back in her head. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

He sighed. Damned if he needed that. “Bathroom’s in there.”

“I know where the damned—”

She interrupted herself with a curse and lurched across the linoleum floor to the short hall that led straight to the bathroom. It was in an ell tacked onto the cottage. In the old days, there’d just been an outhouse. Straker had locked her into it once when she was eight or nine and especially on his nerves. Emile hadn’t been too pleased with him. Riley, the little snot, had screamed and carried on far more than was necessary. Straker had it in the back of his mind that was what she was doing now. Exaggerating, going for the drama.

He followed her, although not with great speed or enthusiasm. Still, if she choked on her tongue or something it was a long trek to an emergency room.

Between moaning and swearing at him, she got rid of the contents of her stomach. She managed fine. Straker, leaning in the doorway, found himself noticing the shape of her behind as she bent over the tank. He grimaced. He’d been out on his deserted island longer than he’d thought.

Leaving that realization for later pondering, he went out to the kitchen and checked the kettle he kept on the woodstove. The water was bubbling. He got down a restaurant-style mug Emile had probably lifted from a local diner a million years ago, dangled a tea bag in it and poured in the hot water.

Riley staggered back into the main room. She was trembling visibly and had a wet washcloth pressed to her forehead. Her color had improved, if only from the blood rushing to her head from pitching her cookies.

“It was the brownie,” she said, dropping onto an ancient wooden folding chair at the table.

Straker shoved the mug in front of her. The table was in front of a big picture window overlooking the bay, still enveloped in fog. “I thought it was the dead body.”

“I wouldn’t have thrown up if I hadn’t eaten the brownie.”

But she didn’t smile. There was no spark in her dark, almond-shaped eyes.

“I don’t have a phone,” he said. “We can use the radio on my boat to notify the police. I’ll go have a look, make sure you weren’t seeing things.”

“I’ll go with you.” She tried a sip of the tea, the tea bag still dangling. “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

“If the guy’s dead, he’s not going to come crawling in here.”

That rallied her. She pushed her chair back so forcefully it almost tipped over. She was still trembling, but she squared her shoulders. “Just let’s go.”

She took a couple more quick sips of tea, wiped at her face once more with the wet washcloth and pushed past him to the door. She looked a little wobbly, but Straker kept his mouth shut. Riley wasn’t one to like having her weaknesses pointed out to her. He wondered if this was her first dead human. Her job put her in contact with stranded whales and dolphins.

Then he remembered last year’s tragedy. Five dead, a narrow escape with her own life. She hadn’t retreated to a deserted island to lick her wounds. Physically unharmed, she’d returned to her work at the Boston Center for Oceanographic Studies. Straker doubted she’d acknowledge any mental scars from her ordeal.

He followed her along a wet, winding path. She pushed hard, although her head had to be pounding and her energy drained from being sick. The fog continued to hang in, thick, damp and cold, reducing visibility to just a few feet despite the sun’s attempts to burn through.

Straker felt the familiar tightness in his chest and incipient sense of panic that had nothing to do with following Riley St. Joe to a corpse. Fog had come to make him feel claustrophobic, as if his soul had spilled out of him and claimed the rest of the world.

Maybe he should have picked a cabin in the Arizona desert.

“There.” Riley stood on a rock ledge and pointed toward the water, which Straker could smell but not see. But he knew this stretch of coastline, knew the rocks, the tide pools, the currents. She turned to him. Her skin, hair, eyes had all taken on the milky grayness of the fog. “He’s caught on the rocks. The tide must have brought him in. He might go out again with high tide, but I don’t think so. I can show you—”

“I’ll find him.”

Straker charged down the rocks. He’d grown up on this coast, was comfortable jumping from rock to rock in any weather. And his physical wounds were long healed. He was in better shape now than he’d been in the past two or three years. But he wasn’t ready to go back to work. He trusted his instincts, his training, his experience. It wasn’t that. He just didn’t have much use for people. In the past six months, he’d grown accustomed to life alone.

Now a body had washed onto his deserted island. Maybe it was an omen. If he didn’t go back to work, work would come to him.

Of course, Riley had said nothing about murder. It was probably some poor bastard who’d taken a header off his boat.

The tide had moved out, and he made his way over barnacles and slick seaweed. He came to the water, just a few inches deep now. A giant hunk of granite loomed to his right. Riley would have been up there, he reasoned, looking down at the water.

Gravelly sand shifted under him. He stepped up onto a flat brown boulder, still wet from the receding tide. Not far ahead, waves slapped gently against rocks and sand.

He sensed the body before he saw it. His muscles tensed as he called upon the discipline and professionalism his work had instilled in him. He’d seen dead bodies before. He knew what to do.

This one was still, bloated, soaked. He’d put on jeans and a red polo shirt for his final day. He was about five feet off, facedown, as if he’d tripped and fallen running in from the water.

The gulls had been at him.

Straker turned away.

Riley materialized a few yards behind him. “You found him?”

“Go to my boat. Radio the police. I’ll wait here.”

“Why? If he’s dead—”

He looked at her. She was ghostlike, smaller than he remembered. “I’ll fight off the gulls.”

Two

L ou Dorrman tied up his boat and tossed Riley’s pink kayak onto Emile’s dock. She thanked him, hoping he’d make short work of dropping her off, then head back to the island. But he climbed out onto the dock after her. He was the local sheriff, a paunchy, gray-haired, no-nonsense cop who’d said for years that John Straker would come to a bad end. Someone was bound to shoot him, run him over or beat him senseless. That a body had turned up on the island where he was recuperating was no surprise to Lou Dorrman.

That Riley was there, too, obviously troubled him. He glowered at her. “What’re you doing hanging around John Straker?”

Her teeth chattered. The fog had burned off, leaving behind a warm, sunny afternoon, but she couldn’t stop shivering. It was nerves and dehydration—and the lingering, horrible image of the man she’d found on the rocks. Straker had made her put on an overshirt after the police had arrived. She’d had to roll up the sleeves about six times to get them to her wrists. The heavyweight chamois smelled of sawdust and salt water.

“I was having a picnic,” she said.

Dorrman nodded without understanding. “Hell of a picnic.”

“Do you have any clues about the body—who it was—”

“Not yet. There was no identification on him. The medical examiner will do an autopsy. We should know more soon.”

Riley thought she saw something in his eyes. “What is it, Sheriff?”

“Nothing. We have to do this one step at a time.” He shifted, eyeing her with a measure of sympathy. “You going to be okay? I imagine Emile’s out and about somewhere. I’ll have to round him up before too long, seeing how that’s his island.”

Last summer, it was Bennett Granger and four members of the Encounter crew. This summer…a dead body on Labreque Island. Riley pushed back the nightmare, the familiar sense of unease. “I’ll be fine on my own, thanks.” She still couldn’t stop shivering. “Sheriff, you don’t think Straker had anything to do with this, do you? I know he was shot six months ago—Emile said it had to do with domestic terrorism.”

“Domestic terrorism. Hell, that’s FBI talk. Let’s just take this one step at a time, okay? You’ll be around awhile?”

“I’m supposed to head back to Boston tonight. I have to be at work tomorrow. I was planning to visit my mother and sister in Camden on the way. I gave your deputy numbers where you can reach me.”

“All right. Go ahead. I’ll let you know if CID has any other ideas.” CID was the Criminal Investigation Division of the Maine State Police; Straker had already explained they’d handle the investigation. Dorrman cuffed her on the shoulder. “Rough day, kid. Put it behind you.”

While he sped back across the bay, Riley half carried, half dragged her kayak up to Emile’s cottage, its dark-stained wood blending into the surrounding spruce-fir forest. This was his home now, not just his periodic getaway. It hadn’t changed in years. She welcomed the familiarity of the smells and sounds, even the exposed pine roots in the path as she returned the kayak to the attached shed.

Her legs almost gave out on her, as if she were climbing Mount Katahdin instead of a few porch steps. She collapsed onto an old Adirondack chair. The wind had shifted. There wasn’t even a hint of fog in the clear September air. It was cool up on the porch, out of the sun, which only made her shivering worse.

Emile’s door was shut tight. She doubted he’d have heard the news yet. She felt acid crawl up her throat at the unbidden images of bloated flesh, pesky gulls swooping down on the hapless body.

She sprang up out of the chair. “I should have skipped that stupid picnic.”

Then Straker could have found the body on his own. Or the sea could have had it back. She struggled with the same disconcerting feeling of helplessness she’d experienced at her first whale and dolphin strandings when she was a teenager volunteering on a rescue and recovery team. Their mission was to end the suffering of animals beyond help, get the healthy ones out to sea before they died on the beaches and treat the injured, taking them back to the center for rehabilitation and, whenever possible, their eventual return to the wild. Now it was her team—but she would never get used to the death and suffering.

The man on the beach had been long past suffering.

She decided to leave Emile a note. Sympathy, commiseration, allaying her fears, venting—such niceties wouldn’t occur to him. He would expect her to continue on to Camden and Boston. He wasn’t heartless; he was simply oblivious. The urge to share her woes with him arose more from the shock of the moment than any rational reasoning on her part. She’d arrived too late to do the man on the rocks any good, and now her experience felt unfinished, as if she should do more, know more.

Would Straker dismiss the dead man and resume his isolated island life without a second thought?

She found Emile’s spare key on the windowsill and let herself in. Even less rational than wanting to cry on Emile’s shoulder was trying to get into John Straker’s mind. Time to get her things and be on her way.

But when she set off, she ended up on the side street above the village harbor, where Straker’s parents lived in a serviceable house that was at once home, shop and project. It had been in a constant state of flux for as long as Riley could remember, with gardens going in and coming out and discarded house innards piling up in the yard as various rooms underwent renovation. The glassed-in front porch served as a catchall for yard sale findings Straker’s mother planned to fix up. She was clever at fixing things up, even if she tended to underestimate the time she would require. Summer people and locals alike employed her talents in furniture restoration and upholstery—they just knew not to expect quick results.

John Straker, Sr., was a lobsterman, his pots piled up outside the garage. It was a hard, good life, and if he regretted not having his son around to share it, he would never let an outsider like Riley St. Joe know about it.

She went around back, and Linda Straker called her into her cluttered kitchen, where she was elbow deep in one of her craft projects. She had an unlit cigarette tucked between her lips. She was a strong, stubborn, imaginative woman with hair that frequently changed color—today it was brunette—and a few extra pounds on her hips.

Her son had inherited her gray eyes. They settled on Riley. “You’re here about that dead body?”

“You heard.”

“Not much happens around here I don’t hear about. Where’s Emile?”

“I don’t know. On the nature preserve, I expect. I’m on my way back to Boston.” Riley dropped into a chair; she felt awkward, as if she were twelve again and Mrs. Straker would offer her a glass of Kool-Aid. “Actually, I’m not sure why I stopped by.”

“Because you’re afraid that body’s got something to do with my son and it’s going to come back and bite you in the behind.” She took a breath, made a pretend drag on her cigarette. Her eyes were serious, experienced. “It could, you know.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because that’s the way it’s been with John since he saw the light of day thirty-four years ago. He’s an FBI agent now, Riley. He’s seen and done things since you nailed him with that rock when you were twelve. If I were you, I wouldn’t mess with him.”

Riley fiddled with a length of twine. “Too late.”

“You couldn’t have just pretended you didn’t see that body and gone on your way?” She gave a long sigh. “No, I suppose not, and if you had, John would have known it and come after you. No way out of this one, Riley. If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with him again, don’t rely on luck. That’s my advice. Take good aim, and if you do hit him, run like hell.”

In spite of her tension, Riley managed a laugh. “I have no intention of seeing your son again, never mind throwing rocks or anything else at him.”

The back door banged open, and Straker glared in at the two women. If Riley had still had any doubts he wasn’t eighteen anymore, they would have been dispelled. He radiated hard-edged energy, the kind of raw intensity she’d expect from a man who’d gotten himself shot twice.

“Speak of the devil,” Linda Straker said, unperturbed.

He kicked the door shut behind him. “St. Joe—damn it, what the hell are you doing here?”

Riley groaned. “I’m talking to your mother. I’m allowed. Aren’t you supposed to be holed up on the island?”

“He comes into town every now and then for supplies,” his mother answered for him.

He turned to her. “I thought you quit smoking.”

“I did. It’s not lit.”

“Then what are these for?” He picked up a package of matches that Riley hadn’t even noticed and tucked them in his jeans pocket. “You’ll be puffing away the minute I leave.”

She dropped her cigarette into a brass ashtray shaped like a lobster. “There. Nazi. I deserve a cigarette after hearing you found a dead body.”

“I didn’t. Riley did.”

“You could have taught school like your sister,” his mother said, “or taken up lobstering like your father. You could have opened up a law practice in town. But no, you have to join the FBI and get shot, bring dead bodies to town.”

“That body has nothing to do with me.”

“Then it has something to do with Emile Labreque. Either way, you’ll get involved. You’ve always had a soft spot for Emile. He believed in you when no one else did. Even I had my doubts.”

“Mrs. Straker,” Riley said carefully, “just because the body was found on Labreque Island doesn’t mean Emile—”

Straker didn’t let her finish. He fingered a paper doily. “What’re you making?”

His mother bit off a sigh. “Your Christmas present. Keep your mitts off.”

“I stopped by to reassure you. I knew you’d hear what happened.” He shot Riley another nasty look, as if she’d been the one who squealed. “It’s nothing to worry about, probably just some poor bastard who fell off his boat.”

“No one’s been reported missing. You’d think—”

“Don’t think, Ma. Just let the police handle this one. And I’m fine, in case you were wondering.”

She glowered at him. “The hell you’re fine. You’ve been sitting out on that island for six months. Half the town thinks you’re a raving lunatic.”

His jaw set hard. “I’ve said my piece.”

He about-faced and walked out. Just like that. Linda Straker snatched up a huge pair of scissors. “That terrorist didn’t do half the job on him I could do right now.”