Bad Men

He’d always thought Meyer was smart, and relatively unsentimental. It was all money with her, and he guessed that the woman had given her a big share of Moloch’s stash in return for her help. It must have been a lot to make her risk crossing Moloch. He hoped that she’d had a good time with it because, in those final minutes in her basement, she had paid in spades for what she’d done.

“Did you find someone?” asked Moloch.

“Yeah. He’ll cost us five Gs to our friends Boston, plus a straight ten percent of whatever is on the island and some favors in the future.”

“He’d better be worth it.”

“They threw in a bonus, as a sign of goodwill.”

Moloch waited, and Dexter smiled.

“They gave us a cop.”

The changeover went smoothly. Lockwood and Barker came out on the first ferry and started the weekly test of the medical and fire equipment at the station house. At eleven A.M., Dupree checked in with them, then drove down Main Street to the post office, parking the Explorer in the lot on the right-hand side of the white clapboard building. He had called Larry Amerling that morning to tell him that there was something he wanted to talk to him about. It struck him that Amerling might have been expecting the call.

Amerling knew more about the island than anyone else, maybe even more than Dupree himself. His home was filled with books and papers on the history of Casco Bay, including copies of his own pamphlet, printed privately and sold at the market and at the bookstores over in Portland. Amerling was a widower, and had been for ten years. His children lived on the mainland, but they visited regularly, little trains of grandchildren in tow. Dupree usually spent Thanksgiving with Amerling, as it was his family’s tradition to return to the island and celebrate the feast together. They were good people, even if it was Larry Amerling who had first christened the policeman Melancholy Joe. Only a handful of people used that name, and few of them used it to his face, although among the cops assigned to the island the name had stuck.

Dupree thought that Amerling would be alone when he called, as the old man usually took a half-hour’s time-out at eleven A.M. to get some paperwork done and drink his green tea, but the postmaster had company that morning. The painter, Giacomelli, was standing against the wall, drinking take-out coffee from the market. He looked troubled. So did Amerling. Dupree nodded a greeting to them both.

“I interrupt something?” he asked.

“No,” said Amerling. “We’ve been waiting for you. You want some tea?”

Dupree poured some of the green tea into one of Amerling’s delicate little Chinese cups. He held the cup gently in the palm of his hand. The three men exchanged pleasantries and island gossip for a time before lapsing into an uneasy silence. Dupree had spent the morning trying to put his concerns into words, to explain them in a way that did not make him sound like a superstitious fool. In the end, Amerling saved his blushes.

“Jack’s here for the same reason you’re here, I think,” Amerling began.

“Which would be?”

“There’s something wrong on the island.”

Dupree didn’t respond. It was Jack who spoke next.

“I thought it was just me, but it isn’t. The woods feel different, and…”

“Go on,” said Amerling.

Jack looked at the policeman.

“I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re thinking, least of all not enough for this.”

“I didn’t think that at all,” said Dupree. There was no way to tell if he was lying or not.

“Well, you may reconsider when you hear this. My paintings are changing.”

Dupree waited a heartbeat.

“You mean they’re getting better?”

There was a burst of laughter that eased the tension a little and seemed to relax the painter slightly.

“No, smart-ass. They’re as good as they’re go

“You think someone is sneaking into your house and painting in figures on your work?”

He tried to keep the disbelief from his voice. He almost succeeded, but Jack spotted it.

“I know it sounds weird. The thing of it is, these figures aren’t painted on.”

He reached down to the floor and lifted up a board wrapped in an old cloth. He removed the cloth, revealing one of his seascapes. Dupree stepped closer and saw what looked like two men in the shallows. They were little more than stick figures, but they were there. He reached out a finger.

“Can I touch it?”

“Sure.”

Dupree ran his finger over the board, feeling the traces of the brush strokes against his skin. When he came to the figures, he paused, then raised the tips of his fingers to his nose and sniffed.

“That’s right,” said Jack. “They’ve been burned into the board.”

He picked up a second painting and handed it to Dupree.

“You know what this is?”

Dupree felt uncomfortable even looking at the painting. It was certainly one of Jack’s better efforts. He sucked at sea and hills, but he did good trees. They were mostly bare and in the background of the picture, almost hidden by mist, Dupree could make out a stone cross. It was definitely a departure for the painter.

“It’s the approach to the Site,” he said. “I have to tell you, Jack, you’re never going to sell this painting. Just looking at it gives me the creeps.”

“It’s not for sale. I do some of these for, well, I guess out of my own curiosity. Tell me what you see.”

Dupree held the painting at arm’s length and tried to concentrate on it.

“I see trees, grass, marsh. I see the cross. I see-”

He stopped and peered more closely at the detail on the canvas.

“What is that?”

Something gray hung in the dark place between two trees, close by the cross. He almost touched it with his finger, then thought better of it.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “I didn’t paint it. There are others, if you look hard enough.”

And there were. The closer he looked, the more apparent they became. Some were barely blurs, the kind of smears that appeared on photographs when someone moved and the shutter speed was kind of slow. Others were clearer. Dupree thought he could distinguish faces among them: dark sockets, black mouths.

“Are these painted on?”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “They look painted to you?”

“No, they look like photographs.”

“You still afraid I might be drinking too much?”

Dupree shook his head. “I’d say you’re not drinking enough.”

Amerling spoke.

“You going to tell me you came here because you’re worried about raccoons, or have you felt something too?”

Dupree sighed. “Nothing specific, just an unease. I can’t describe it, except to say that it’s a sensation in the air, like the prelude to an electrical storm.”

“That’s about as good a description as I’ve heard. Other people have felt it too, the older folk, mostly. This isn’t the first time something like this has occurred. It happened before, in your daddy’s time.”

“When?”

“Just before George Sherrin disappeared, but it wasn’t quite like this. That buildup came quickly, maybe over a day or two, then was gone again just as quickly. This one is different. It’s been going on for longer.”

“How long?”

“Months, I’d say, but it’s been so gradual most people haven’t even noticed it until now, if they’ve noticed it at all.”

“But you did?”

“I’ve been feeling it for a while. It was the accident that confirmed it; the accident, and what the Lauter girl said before she died.”

“She was in pain. She didn’t know what she was saying.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do either.”

“She was talking about the dead.”

“I know.”

Dupree walked to the window of the little office and looked out on Island Avenue. It was quiet, but it wasn’t peaceful. Instead, it was like a community awaiting the outbreak of some long-anticipated conflict, or perhaps that was just a tormented policeman, a drunk, and an old romantic trying to impose their own interpretation on an i