stupid nor insensitive; she’d been perfectly aware that Mr.Hanratty hadn’t thought it was good enough. And yes, she’d known from his face that he’d heard it before in hisGlobe -funded wanderings up and down the coast between Boston and Moose-Look, and probably more than once.
Vince and Dave nodded when she advanced this idea. “Ayup,” Dave said. “Hanratty may be from away, but that doesn’t make him lazy or stupid. The mystery of thePretty Lisa —the solution to which almost certainly has to do with gun-happy bootleggers running hooch down from Canada, although no one will ever know for sure—has been around for years. It’s been written up in half a dozen books, not to mention bothYankee andDowneast magazines. And, say, Vince, didn’t theGlobe —?”
Vince was nodding. “Maybe. Seven, maybe nine years ago. Sunday supplement piece. Although it might have been the ProvidenceJournal . I’m sure it was the Portland SundayTelegram that did the piece on the Mormons that showed up over in Freeport and tried to sink a mine in the Desert of Maine…”
“And the 1951 Coast Lights get a big play in the newspapers almost every Halloween,” Dave added cheerfully. “Not to mention the UFO websites.”
“And a woman wrote a book last year on the poisonin’s at that church picnic in Tashmore,” Vince finished up. This was the last ‘unexplained mystery’ they had hauled out for theGlobe reporter over lunch. This was just before Hanratty had decided he could make the one-thirty ferry, and in a way Stephanie guessed she now didn’t blame him.
“So you were having him on,” she said. “Teasing him with old stories.”
“No, dear!” Vince said, this time sounding shocked for real. (Well, maybe, Stephanie thought.) “Every one of those is abona fide unsolved mystery of the New England coast—our part of it, even.”
“We couldn’t be sure he knew all those stories until we trotted em out,” Dave said reasonably. “Not that it surprised us any that he did.”
“Nope,” Vince agreed. His eyes were bright. “Pretty old chestnuts, I would have to agree. But we got a nice lunch out of it, didn’t we? And we got to watch the money go around and come out right where it should…partly in Helen Hafner’s pocket.”
“And those stories are really the only ones you know? Stories that have been chewed to a pulp in books and the big newspapers?”
Vince looked at Dave, his long-time cohort. “Did I say that?”
“Nope,” Dave said. “And I don’t believe I did, either.”
“Well, what other unexplained mysteriesdo you know about? And why didn’t you tell him?”
The two old men glanced at each other, and once again Stephanie McCann felt that telepathy at work. Vince gave a slight nod toward the door. Dave got up, crossed the brightly lit half of the long room (in the darker half hulked the big old-fashioned offset printing press that hadn’t run in over seven years), and turned the sign hanging in the door from open to closed. Then he came back.
“Closed? In the middle of the day?” Stephanie asked, with the slightest touch of unease in her mind, if not in her voice.
“If someone comes by with news, they’ll knock,” Vince said, reasonably enough. “If it’s big news, they’ll hammer.”
“And if downtown catches afire, we’ll hear the whistle,” Dave put in. “Come on out on the deck, Steffi. August sun’s not to be missed—it doesn’t last long.”
She looked at Dave, then at Vince Teague, who was as mentally quick at ninety as he’d been at forty-five. She was convinced of it. “School’s in?” she asked.
“That’s right,” Vince said, and although he was still smiling, she sensed he was serious. “And do you know what’s nice for old guys like us?”
“You only have to teach people who want to learn.”
“Ayuh. Doyou want to learn, Steffi?”
“Yes.” She spoke with no hesitation in spite of that odd inner unease.
“Then come out and sit,” he said. “Come out and sit a little.”
So she did.
4
The sun was warm, the air was cool, the breeze was sweet with salt and rich with the sound of bells and horns and lapping water. These were sounds she had come to love in only a space of weeks. The two men sat on either side of her, and although she didn’t know it, both had more or less the same thought:Age flanks beauty . And there was nothing wrong with the thought, because both of them understood their intentions were perfectly solid. They understood how good she could be at the job, and how much she wanted to learn; all that pretty greed made youwant to teach.
“So,” Vince said when they were settled, “think about those stories we told Hanratty at lunch, Steffi— theLisa Cabot , the Coast Lights, the Wandering Mormons, the Tashmore church poisonings that were never solved—and tell me what they have in common.”
“They’reall unsolved.”
“Try doin a little better, dearheart,” Dave said. “You disappoint me.”
She glanced at him and saw he wasn’t kidding. Well, thatwas pretty obvious, considering why Hanratty had blown them to lunch in the first place: theGlobe ’s eight-installment series (maybe even ten installments, Hanratty had said, if he could find enough peculiar stories), which the editorial staff hoped to run between September and Halloween. “They’ve all been done to death?”
“That’s a little better,” Vince said, “but you’re still not breaking any new ground. Ask yourself this, youngster:why have they been done to death? Why does some New England paper drag up the Coast Lights at least once a year, along with a bunch of blurry photos taken over half a century ago? Why does some regional magazine likeYankee orCoast interview either Clayton Riggs or Ella Ferguson at least once a year, as if they were going to all at once jump up like Satan in silk britches and say something brand new?”
“I don’t know who those people are,” Stephanie said.
Vince clapped a hand to the back of his head. “Ayuh, more fool me. I keep forgettin you’re from away.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
“Could do; probablyshould do. Clayton Riggs and Ella Ferguson were the only two who drank the iced coffee that day at Tashmore Lake and didn’t die of it. The Ferguson woman’s all right, but Riggs is paralyzed all down the left side of his body.”
“That’s awful. And they keep interviewing them?”
“Ayuh. Fifteen years have rolled by, and I think everyone with half a brain knows that no one is ever going to be arrested for that crime—eight folks poisoned by the side of the lake, and six of em dead—but still Ferguson and Riggs show up in the press, lookin increasin’ly rickety: ‘What Happened That Day?’ and ‘The Lakeside Horror’ and…you get the idea. It’s just another story folks like to hear, like ‘Little Red Ridin Hood’ or ‘The Three Billy Goats’ Gruff.’ Question is…why ?”
But Stephanie had leaped ahead. “Thereis something, isn’t there?” she said. “Some story you didn’t tell him. What is it?”
Again that look passed between them, and this time she couldn’t come even close to reading the thought that went with it. They were sitting in identical lawn chairs, Stephanie with her hands on the arms of hers. Now Dave reached over and patted one of them. “We don’t mind tellin you…do we, Vince?”
“Nah, guess not,” Vince said, and once again all those wrinkles appeared as he smiled up into the sun.
“But if you want to ride the ferry, you have to bring tea for the tillerman. Have you ever heard that one?”
“Somewhere.” She thought on one of her mom’s old record albums, up in the attic.
“Okay,” Dave said, “then answer the question. Hanratty didn’t want those stories because they’ve been written to rags. Why have they been?”
She thought about it, and once again they let her. Once again took pleasure in watching her do it.
