usually get dragged out by the current, but I’ve seen what was left of the few jumpers we recovered. Trust me, it’s not a pretty sight.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Okay, Sheriff. That’s good enough for me. I have to make a lot of calls, but I’ll get back to you as soon as I get transportation lined up. Call in forty-five minutes.”
“There’s one other thing, Mr. Harper…”
Jonathan detected a new note in the man’s voice, a reluctance that instantly caught his attention. “Go ahead.”
“This man, Kealey… How well do you know him?”
“Pretty well. He’s been a good friend of mine for a long time. Why?”
“What was it between him and this Donovan woman?”
It was the last thing Harper wanted to think about. He was about to snap at the man, but Tynes seemed to be going somewhere with this. “They were engaged. Just a few weeks ago.” He wasn’t sure what the sheriff was looking for. “Apart from the usual couple stuff, things were good between them. Really good.”
Tynes carried on, more sure now of what he was about to say: “The reason I ask, sir… I think he saw what happened to her. When we found him, he was turned over on his stomach. The bullet went in about four-and-a-half inches right of his navel, and the wound was…”
“Was what?” Jonathan didn’t feel good about this particular line of inquiry.
“…leaking a lot faster than it would have been if he’d been lying on his back.” Another long pause. “And he had a cell phone, sir, but he didn’t call anyone. Do you see what I’m saying?”
Harper felt cold, despite the relative warmth of his bedroom. “Oh, no… Jesus.”
The longest pause yet, what seemed like minutes on end. Tynes maintained a respectful silence, waiting for the deputy director to continue.
“I’ll be there in three hours,” he finally said.
Harper put the phone down and looked at his wife.
“What?” she asked.
The storm lingered over Cape Elizabeth for a very long time, raging from Portsmouth to Bangor, although those two cities did not define the outer limits of its wrath. The perimeter of this particular hell was not marked by geographic features or the opinions of overpaid meteorologists.
When it was done, many hours later, there were estimates of more than 130 million dollars in total damages, although some of those figures were padded in anticipation of the forthcoming inquiries from the insurance companies.
As always, it was the oceanfront properties that sustained the worst damage.
There were exceptions, of course. Some structures managed to remain largely unscathed due to the quality of their building materials, or to their particular placement on the erratic coastal landscape. One such home belonged to Richard and Brenda Cregan, a retired couple who had moved north after selling their modestly successful landscaping company in the Boston area four years earlier.
The house was everything they had been looking for: quiet, secluded, comfortable but not lavish at four bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths. It was smaller than most of the other homes in the area, but the vast quantity of land that came with the property more than made up for the lack of square footage. The Cregans were avid outdoorsmen, and the trails leading back through the heavily wooded lot behind their home had factored heavily into their decision to purchase the property.
An argument could be made that the trees were more important than the trails, as they served as a natural buffer between the house and the destructive power of the ocean.
The Cregans loved the trails, though, as they made for an easy quarter-mile walk through the heavy woods that came to an abrupt halt just 15 feet over the lapping surface of the Atlantic. In a mild squall, the waves sometimes made it more than two-thirds of the way up the rocky precipice. The cliffs were considerably closer to sea level than those of Cape Elizabeth, which could be found less than a half mile to the north.
In this particular storm, however, the ocean merged seamlessly with the land, as though the 15-foot barrier had never existed to begin with.
The Cregans were not disturbed by the wind and rain that pummeled their home, or by the sudden drop in temperature that had accompanied the elements; after more than four years on the coast, they had already seen more nor’easters than they could remember. They knew, with the same hard hearts of the natives, that there was little they could do, other than to wait it out and assess the damage in the morning. They also reminded themselves that they were not in any danger from the trees surrounding the house, as most of the towering pines within several hundred feet had been cleared the previous year.
Reassured that the sturdy walls of their home represented safe refuge, they were not concerned when the phone lines went dead and they lost power. It was a commonplace occurrence in such weather, and though they had access to a powerful generator, they chose instead to make an early night of it, and headed off for bed.
They slept lightly, but they did sleep. Their house was surprisingly well insulated from the crashing sound of the storm by heavy brick and mortar, and expensive windows whose stout wooden frames had been well installed by local contractors.
As midnight approached, the trees farthest from their home seemed to grow out of the ocean. The writhing limbs bowed and swayed with the force of the wind and the water pounding against and swirling about their trunks.
The trails also emerged from the gray depths. As they moved farther inland, they began to take on more distinct shapes. Some of them were lined by fence posts, but all were marked to some extent by their previous travelers.
Smaller prints, such as those left by deer and some of the forest’s smaller occupants, were soon washed away by the pounding rain.
Others lasted longer, such as the deep tracks left by the considerable weight of Richard Cregan, and the lighter, distinctive tread of Brenda Cregan’s Timberland hiking boots.
There was a third trail that would have confused them had they seen it. It was a trail marked by uneven footprints of varying depths. Strange dragging marks followed each solid mark in the mud.
They were spaced in unusual increments, and each varied widely in depth and integrity. The differences were obvious, but the combined marks in the earth left no doubt as to the injured man’s destination.
The footprints cut a straight path, leading directly from the tortured swells of the Atlantic to the calm, darkened exterior of the house that Richard and Brenda Cregan shared.
They were unaware as the storm raged on.
They slept lightly, and they did not dream.
