Just like the Coast Lights might have been reflections on the clouds…or somethin secret the Air Force was testin that got sent up from the air base in Bangor…or who knows, maybe itwas little green men droppin in to see if the kids from Hancock Lumber could turn a double play against the ones from Tinnock Auto Body.”
“Mostly what happens is people make up a story and stick with it,” Vince said. “That’s easy enough to do as long as there’s only one unknown factor: one poisoner, one set of mystery lights, one boat run aground with most of her crew gone. But with the Colorado Kid there was nothingbut unknown factors, and hence there was no story.” He paused. “It was like a train running out of a fireplace or a bunch of horses’ heads showing up one morning in the middle of your driveway. Not that grand, but every bit as strange. And things like that…” He shook his head. “Steffi, people don’t like things like that. They don’twant things like that. A wave is a pretty thing to look at when it breaks on the beach, but too many only make you seasick.”
Stephanie looked out at the sparkling reach—plenty of waves there, but no big ones, not today—and considered this in silence.
“There’s something else,” Dave said, after a bit.
“What?” she asked.
“It’sours,” he said, and with surprising force. She thought it was almost anger. “A guy from theGlobe, a guy from away—he’d only muck it up. He wouldn’t understand.”
“Do you?” she asked.
“No,” he said, sitting down again. “Nor do I have to, dear. On the subject of the Colorado Kid I’m a little like the Virgin Mary, after she gave birth to Jesus. The Bible says something like, ‘But Mary kept silent, and pondered these things in her heart.’ Sometimes, with mysteries, that’s best.”
“But you’ll tell me?”
“Why, yes, ma’am!” He looked at her as if surprised; also—a little—as if awakening from a neardoze. “Because you’re one of us. Isn’t she, Vince?”
“Ayuh,” Vince said. “You passed that test somewhere around midsummer.”
“Did I?” Again she felt absurdly happy. “How? What test?”
Vince shook his head. “Can’t say, dear. Only know that at some point it began to seem you were all right.” He glanced at Dave, who nodded. Then he looked back at Stephanie. “All right,” he said. “The story we didn’t tell at lunch. Our very own unexplained mystery. The story of the Colorado Kid.”
5
But it was Dave who actually began.
“Twentyfive years ago,” he said, “back in ’80, there were two kids who took the sixthirty ferry to school instead of the seventhirty. They were on the Bayview Consolidated High School Track Team, and they were also boy and girlfriend. Once winter was over—and it doesn’t ever last as long here on the coast as it does inland—they’d run crossisland, down along Hammock Beach to the main road, then on to Bay Street and the town dock. Do you see it, Steffi?”
She did. She saw the romance of it, as well. What she didn’t see was what the “boy and girlfriend” did when they got to the Tinnock side of the reach. She knew that MooseLook’s dozen or so highschoolage kids almost always took the seventhirty ferry, giving the ferryman—either Herbie Gosslin or Marcy Lagasse—their passes so they could be recorded with quick winks of the old lasergun on the bar codes. Then, on the Tinnock side, a schoolbus would be waiting to take them the three miles to BCHS. She asked if the runners waited for the bus and Dave shook his head, smiling.
“Nawp, ran that side, too,” he said. “Not holdin hands, but might as well have been; always side by side, Johnny Gravlin and Nancy Arnault. For a couple of years they were all but inseparable.”
Stephanie sat up straighter in her chair. The John Gravlin she knew was MooseLookit Island’s mayor, a gregarious man with a good word for everyone and an eye on the state senate in Augusta. His hairline was receding, his belly expanding. She tried to imagine him doing the greyhound thing—two miles a day on the island side of the reach, three more on the mainland side—and couldn’t manage it.
“Ain’t makin much progress with it, are ya, dear?” Vince asked.
“No,” she admitted.
“Well, that’s because you see Johnny Gravlin the soccer player, miler, Friday night practical joker and Saturday lover asMayor John Gravlin, who happens to be the only political hoptoad in a small island pond. He goes up and down Bay Street shaking hands and grinning with that gold tooth flashing off to one side in his mouth, got a good word for everyone he meets, never forgets a name or which man drives a Ford pickup and which one is still getting along with his Dad’s old International Harvester. He’s a caricature right out of an old nineteenforties movie about smalltown hoopdedoo politics and he’s such a hick he don’t even know it. He’s got one jump left in him—hop, toad, hop—and once he gets to that Augusta lilypad he’ll either be wise enough to stop or he’ll try another hop and end up getting squashed.”
“That isso cynical,” Stephanie said, not without youth’s admiration for the trait.
Vince shrugged his bony shoulders. “Hey, I’m a stereotype myself, dearie, only my movie’s the one where the newspaper feller with the armgarters on his shirt and the eyeshade on his forread gets to yell out ‘Stop the presses!’ in the last reel. My point is that Johnny was a different creature in those days—slim as a quill pen and quick as quicksilver. You would have called him a god, almost, except for those unfortunate buck teeth, which he has since had fixed.
“And she…in those skimpy little red shorts she wore…she was indeed a goddess.” He paused. “As so many girls of seventeen surely are.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Dave told him.
Vince looked surprised. “Ain’t,” he said. “Ain’t a bit. It’s in the clouds.”
“If you say so,” Dave said, “and I will admit she was a looker, all right. And an inch or two taller than Johnny, which may be why they broke up in the spring of their senior year. But back in ’80 they were hot and heavy, and every day they’d run for the ferry on this side and then up Bayview Hill to the high school on the Tinnock side. There were bets on when Nancy would catch pregnant by him, but she never did; either he was awful polite or she was awful careful.” He paused. “Or hell, maybe they were just a little more sophisticated than most island kids back then.”
“I think it might’ve been the running,” Vince said judiciously.
Stephanie said, “Back on message, please, both of you,” and the men laughed.
“On message,” Dave said, “there came a morning in the spring of 1980—April, it would have been—when they spied a man sitting out on Hammock Beach. You know, just on the outskirts of the village.