And with a startled yelp Mitch awoke to discover his outdoor hunter, Quirt, standing on his chest in the halflight of dawn, licking his face.
“Hey… buddy,” Mitch gasped, his chest heaving as if he’d just run two miles with a fortypound pack on his back.
He had a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth, and he was drenched in sweat. None of which was the fault of Quirt. Or of his docile stayathome muffin, Clemmie, who lay curled at his feet, fast asleep. No, this was one of those awful panic attacks like he’d suffered in the weeks after his beloved Maisie died. Always, they came in the night as dreams. He and Maisie would be happy. Then she’d start begging him not to leave her. And then he’d wake up with his heart galloping, convinced he was having a heart attack. His doctor had explained to him that what he was experiencing was anxiety. That the metallic taste was adrenaline. And that it would pass-which it had. Mitch hadn’t had a Maisie dream since he’d come to Dorset and met Des.
So why had he had one now?
It was a few minutes past six, according to the alarm clock next to the bed in his sleeping loft. Snow was falling on the skylight above his bed. Shuddering, he got up and waddled down the steep, narrow stairs, Quirt dashing nimbly along ahead of him.
Mitch’s place was a twohundredyearold exposed chestnut postandbeam carriage house that once belonged to one of the grander homes out on Big Sister Island. The downstairs was basically one big room where Mitch lived and worked and made beautiful notquite music on his sky blue Fender Stratocaster. He had a big bay window that looked out over Long Island Sound in three different directions. He had a kitchen and bath. He had his sleeping loft. He needed nothing more.
He cranked up the heat and let Quirt out. The snowfall was very light. Some of it was coating the windshield of his truck but it was not sticking to the ground. According to the thermometer outside of his bay window, it was thirtyfour degrees. It was supposed to warm all the way into the upper forties by the afternoon. Mitch had become something of a weather nerd since he’d bought his little house on Big Sister. What the weather was doing really mattered out here. Plus, he was hopelessly addicted to the Weather Channel and the daring exploits of ace storm tracker, Jim Cantore.
He built a fire in his big stone fireplace and put a pot of coffee on in the kitchen. While it was brewing he shaved. Gazing at his reflection in the mirror, he found his mind straying back to that Maisie dream. He didn’t know what to make of it. Because he wasn’t leaving her-it was she who’d left him. He’d lost her to ovarian cancer when she was thirty. Maisie was his first love. She would always occupy a cherished place in his heart. He accepted that-as did Des, the woman who he intended to spend the rest of his life with. So why had this anxiety suddenly reared its ugly head? Was it because St. Patrick’s Day was right around the corner? It did so happen that March seventeenth was Maisie’s birthday.
Sure, that was it. Had to be.
He dressed in a fisherman’s knit sweater, baggy corduroys and his Mephisto hiking shoes. By now the snow had stopped, the clouds were breaking up in the southern sky over Long Island and Quirt was scratching to be let back in. Mitch put some kibble down for him. The sound of that brought Clemmie ambling slowly downstairs to join them, yawning hugely.
Mitch poured himself some coffee and topped it with two fingers of chocolate milk. Then he flicked on the fortyeightinch grow lights in his bay window and spent a few good minutes doting over his tender little charges in their leakproof modular seed trays. Tiny, bright green shoots were sprouting up out of the seed plugs. His early season lettuce, leeks and parsley. Mitch could not believe how devoted he’d grown to his vegetable garden. Not only had he sent away for a gazillion seeds but also enough gear to stock a small nursery, including propagation heating mats and a halfdozen clear plastic protective domes. These he’d taken to calling Clemmie Domes after he’d discovered that sweet, gentle Clemmie loved to dig her paws into the fragrant starter mix, gum his little seedlings and fling them around the room.
For breakfast, he put away a bowl of the Cocoa Puffs that he kept stashed in the cupboard under the kitchen sink behind the Drano. Des had no idea they were there. While he ate, he cranked up his computer and printed out the baseball stats that he’d downloaded yesterday. Mitch was in a fantasy baseball league with a gang of other film critics. Their talent draft was coming up and he was getting ready to stock his team, the Rocky Sullivans, with a roster of prime talent.
When he was done he climbed into his C.C. Filson redandblack checked wool packer coat, grabbed his binoculars and notepad and trudged on out.
A dusting of snow still coated the meadows and trees, but the sun was starting to break out. It would melt very fast. Mitch poked around in his flower gardens and found snowdrops and snow crocus. In the slushy mud beneath some dead leaves there were daffodil shoots. The birds were returning. He could hear the cardinals, and see the robins poking at the limp, pale grass beneath the trees. Chipmunks scampered about.
Mitch filled his bird feeders, then plodded down the sandy path toward the narrow beach, feeling incredibly fortunate to be here. Mitch was the only island resident who wasn’t a Peck by birth or marriage. Most of the Pecks were still down in Hobe Sound for the winter. There were five houses on Big Sister, not counting the stone lighthouse keeper’s house and its decommissioned lighthouse, the second tallest such landmark in New England. There were forty acres of woods, a tennis court, a private beach, a dock where Evan Peck kept his J24 tied up during sailing season. A narrow, quartermilelong wooden causeway connected the island to the mainland. It was Yankee paradise.
Spring didn’t arrive gradually on Connecticut’s Gold Coast-it lurched in. The giant chunks of ice that had floated downriver from the frigid north and washed ashore here still said winter. And yet those slick, shiny harbor seals that were basking out on the rocks in the morning sun positively cried out spring. Mitch watched them for a few minutes before he trained his binoculars on the osprey platforms out in the river on Great Island. He was on lookout duty for The Nature Conservancy. On this particular morning, he happily spotted his first osprey circling slowly around the raised platform. It was a blackish raptor with a white head and a wing span of nearly six feet.
Lowering his glasses, Mitch dutifully marked the date, time and location of the spotting in his notebook, tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth as he wrote. Then he noticed a long black feather stuck in the sand next to him. He reached down and picked it up. It was white on its underside. Not an osprey feather. It was the wing feather of a greater blackbacked gull.
Nevertheless, Mitch tucked it carefully in his pocket for future use.
There was a big wooden bin next to the exit door of the A amp;P where customers could leave donations of canned goods and other nonperishables for Dorset’s Food Pantry. Some guy with a truck would come by every couple of days to pick them up and deliver them to the Fellowship Center of the Congregational church. Lately, that guy with a truck had been Mitch.
He idled in the fire lane while he piled the bags into the back of his kidneycolored Studebaker halfton. Then he headed over to The Works, Dorset’s upscale gourmet food emporium, to pick up the frozen dayold artisan breads that the bakery contributed, along with dozens of those round, doughy things that Dorseteers chose to believe were bagels. From there Mitch rolled his way into the Dorset Street Historic District, with its towering maples and its dignified twohundredandfiftyyearold colonial mansions. Anchoring the south end of the Historic District, set back behind a deep lawn, was Dorset’s stately old Congregational church.
The Congo church-as most everyone called it-was the very embodiment of a smalltown New England meetinghouse. It was white. It was unadorned. There were two full stories of mullioned windows to let in the sunlight. A towering steeple with a working clock and a bell tower topped by a gleaming brass weather vane. It was not, in fact, Dorset’s original Congo church, which burned to the ground in the 1840s. This one had been erected in its place soon thereafter. Supposedly, it was an exact reproduction, inside and out.
The rather sterile Fellowship Center, which had been added on in the 1970s, was connected to the church by an office annex. It had a full kitchen, space for lots of long tables and folding chairs. The center was in constant use by support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, by singles groups and senior citizens groups. The blood bank was held here. The visiting nurse gave flu shots here. And the Food Pantry was here. It was a known fact that Dorset boasted more millionaires per square mile than East Hampton. But to live here year round, as Mitch did, was to discover that there were plenty of havenots, too. A lot of the men were in seasonal trades like roofing and landscaping. Winters were especially tough. To make ends meet, they relied on the Food Pantry. For those who wanted one, there was also a hot meal.
