'Your brother snores,' he said.
'So does Spike.'
'Spike doesn't talk in his sleep.'
'Did Rob say anything interesting?'
'No, and if I hear another word about Lawyers from Hell…'
'I'm really sorry,' I said. 'It's all my fault; I should never have suggested coming here.'
'Let's make a deal,' Michael said. 'I won't blame you for anything that goes wrong if you promise to stop apologizing for bringing me here. After all, if my damned car hadn't had those two flats, we might have spotted them before boarding the ferry the day before yesterday, and we could have changed our plans and found a bed- and-breakfast on the mainland.'
'It's a deal,' I said.
'So let's go down to the grocery store and see if they still have any of the things your aunt wants.'
'We should probably hit both grocery stores,' I said as we squelched down the road.
'Both grocery stores? How can an island this small possibly support two grocery stores?'
'The two of them together are smaller than a Seven-Eleven back home. And they serve slightly different clientele. There's the upscale grocery store--in that salmon pink building with the turquoise trim,' I said, pointing down the road. 'Caters more to the artists and the summer people; probably does a lot less business this time of year. Sells Brie and whole-grain bread from an organic bakery on the mainland. Nice selection of wines. The place that looks like a bait shop is the other grocery. More like a general store, really. Bologna and Wonder Bread, and a good variety of beers. They do a lot more steady year-round business, I should think.'
'Let's start with the down-to-earth place,' Michael said. 'There's something obscenely decadent about eating Brie in the eye of a hurricane.'
Decadent or not, it sounded perfectly lovely to me, but Michael was obviously getting into the spirit of things, roughing it here on the island, so I didn't argue.
'Actually, since we already have more food than we'll ever eat, I thought we could leave the grocery store till later.' I said. 'Maybe we should start with our other mission.'
'Other mission?'
'Finding you a room of your own. One without a roommate.'
'One where I might possibly entertain a friend without being interrupted every five minutes to drink another cup of herbal tea?' he said, raising one eyebrow.
'You've got the idea.'
'I like the way you think,' he said.
Chapter 5
These Puffins Were Made for Walking
We tried. We really did. The Monhegan House's three dozen rooms were filled with birders. The Island Inn was full, as well. Overflowing, in fact. I'd forgotten about the oversupply of birders.
'We've called up everyone on the island, trying to find rooms for them all,' the owner of the Island Inn explained. 'We even have a bunch of birders camping out down in the church.'
'Well, so much for peace and quiet and privacy,' Michael said. 'I assume on an island this size, everyone has a pretty good idea who has a vacancy and who doesn't?'
'On an island this size, everyone has a pretty good idea who's running low on corn flakes and toilet paper,' I said. 'I think we can take it as a given that there's no room at the inn. Any inn.'
So by 9:00 a.m.--an hour when I normally prefer to be fast asleep--we had already given up on our search. We sat for a few minutes on a soggy wooden swing on the front porch of the Island Inn and watched the pedestrians hiking up and down the streets. The rain had temporarily slacked off to a mere icy mist, and both birds and birders made the most of it. I only caught fleeting glimpses of the birds, but I was getting to know the plumage and feeding habits of the common New England bird-watcher pretty well.
Actually, at first glance, it was hard to tell the locals from the bird-watchers. Everyone had some kind of waterproof footgear, with the unfortunate exception of Michael and me. Rain ponchos and down vests were commonplace.
I wondered if it had occurred to any of them how many birds had given their all to fill those vests.
But while most of the locals scurried about with canvas tote bags full of supplies and bits of lumber for boarding things up, the birders carried enough waterproof surveillance hardware to equip a squad of Navy SEALS. Binoculars, telescopes, cameras, tape recorders, video cameras--you name it, they had it.
Every couple of minutes, a troop of birders would swarm up the steps of the inn and ask us where we'd been and what we'd seen and whether we'd spotted the kestrels up on Black Head yet. When we explained that we hadn't been anywhere or seen any birds and thought the kestrels up on Black Head had enough company already, they would look at us oddly and slip inside to refill their thermoses with hot coffee.
'Apart from going back to the cottage and listening to more Wagner, what else is there to do on the island?' Michael asked.
'We could stroll through the village and see the sights,' I said.
Just then, Fred Dickerman rattled by in his pickup truck, leaning on the horn, while a quartet of birders sprinted just ahead of his bumper. Monhegan has no sidewalks; any pedestrian walking in the road when a truck approached was expected to step aside to let the vehicle pass. Or jump aside, if the driver was Fred. Most truck drivers took it slowly when they went through the village, but Fred evidently enjoyed chivvying tourists into puddles and brier patches.
'Reminds me of running before the bulls at Pamplona,' Michael remarked as the birders finally reached a wide spot in the road and hurled themselves to safety.
'Oh, have you actually done that?'
'No, and I'm not about to start now,' he said. 'Doesn't look too restful, strolling through the village. Anything else?'
'Mostly healthy, outdoorsy things like hiking around the circumference of the island.'
'All right, let's hike,' Michael said, standing up and holding out his hand.
'You've got to be kidding. In this weather?'
'It's not actually raining now, and the weather's going to be a lot worse in a few hours,' he said. 'Let's go and see the sights before it gets bad.'
'You're serious, aren't you?'
'Why not? At least once we've done it, when the birders ask us if we want to go to the South Pole with them to see the penguins, we can say, 'No thanks, we've already circumnavigated the island.' '
'Okay,' I said. 'You're on.'
I could tell after the first fifteen minutes that circumnavigating the island was a lot less fun to do than to brag about afterward. But I wasn't about to confess that I couldn't handle it, so for the next hour or two, we squelched and slopped up and down the muddy parts of the trail and inched our way gingerly over the rain-slick rocky parts.
And invariably, every time we paused, panting, to catch our breath, a covey of middle-aged or elderly birders would breeze past us.
'I always thought bird-watching was a sedate pastime,' Michael said as we took temporary refuge beneath a rocky outcropping that sheltered us from the worst of the drizzle. 'These people could probably ace an Iron Man competition.'
'Yes. Stirs up all my deep-seated feelings of inadequacy,' I said, panting slightly.
'Oh, I don't know,' Michael said, putting an arm around my waist. 'You look pretty adequate to me.'
It wasn't exactly the tropical beach of my dreams, but this was the closest I'd gotten to being alone with Michael since we'd arrived on the island. I snuggled closer, and he bent his head down toward mine. Then he froze.
'Why are those people watching us through their binoculars?' he muttered.
