They'd better get this mystery solved before winter set in. The island gave him a private base, a secret base, where he could watch the coast from Pratts' Neck to Morgans' Point, but the weather out here could turn damned nasty in a month or less. He couldn't stay in Stonefort and stay human, brown skin or pale — he'd grown up in the town, raised children in the town, and too many people would recognize a dead man walking down the street.
Ben could wander in and out unchallenged. He'd been "dead" for twenty years now. Not just time dulling memories, his face had changed with age. Neighbors would just see a generic Morgan cousin, one of dozens from out of town, checking on things while Gary was off to school. No need to wonder which cousin.
Daniel had taken another calculated risk, visiting Alice at the House. A minor risk, balanced against need, minor because hidden ways reached the House from three of the four winds. Nosy neighbors could only see the road approach. Even there, the side yard hedges screened any distant view of just who or what got out of a car. He'd never stopped and thought about it, but the Morgans and the Haskells were alike more ways than not. Both set great value in secrecy.
Secrecy. Like this island, off-limits since before the English came, a spirit land, Morgan property through dummy owners and now conservation easements to a coastal heritage trust, the "No Trespassing" signs reinforced by Federal endangered species teeth to protect nesting terns and puffins and a pair of bald eagles in the tall spruce at the center. And there'd been a tendency for trespassers to simply disappear, no trace.
Even the Pratts knew those legends, lived those legends. They were hoods, but they were Stonefort hoods. They lived inside the same shields as the Morgans. Stonefort closed ranks against outsiders and outside laws.
They wouldn't shoot at seals. And they wouldn't go around firing automatic rifles if they were hiding in the tunnels. Tom Pratt was smarter than that, smarter than making big noises from a burned-out house and abandoned estate. That sort of thing made cop-type people ask awkward questions.
Daniel shook his head. It had to be the Peruvians, the drug runners, and that said that Tupash had survived. Otherwise, the "muscle" would have cut and run. He needed to talk to Alice again, hand the problem back to her.
He followed the faint path farther through spruces and massed blueberry bushes and bracken to the seaward side of the hundred-acre island, followed it to a huge flat moss-crusted boulder squat between rugosa roses that was too square to be a boulder under its quilt of spruce needles and slowly rotting branches that spoke of decades undisturbed.
The far side, the sea view side, opened into the sinister black horizontal slot of a pillbox. Coast-watcher post, World War II, the army built it after two Nazi spies rowed ashore from a U-boat about twenty miles from here. They'd been caught within days, but someone high up got the shakes from the might-have-beens.
Daniel snorted at the overkill — sixteen-inch reinforced concrete walls and roof, mount for a .50 caliber Browning HMG. Even a bunkroom farther back, but that had two feet of stagnant mosquito-breeding rainwater on the floor. For a single civilian with binoculars and radio. Must have used a standard blueprint, "Build an A-5 out there." Military thinking.
And Granddad couldn't keep the army out without raising questions he'd known were better left unasked. Morgans had claimed the island for the same reason the army wanted it — a clear view half the way to Nova Scotia, and first warning of anyone who sailed there. But family lawyers had made damned sure Morgans got the island back after the war . . . .
He ducked and slid inside, tight through the gun slit, into damp musty shadows, and checked his gear. Food, water, gasoline camp stove and gas, scanner radio, bedding — all undisturbed. He needed to fetch more water, no drinking water on the island. But the mass of the concrete would hide him from any prying eyes, even from infrared snoops. He pumped up the stove and started to boil water for coffee. Damn place always held a bone-deep chill, and it was going to get much worse.
The coffee boiled and dripped and produced a mug of hot nectar that warmed his soul as much as his stomach. Daniel sipped coffee and sorted through his gear again, making a mental shopping list. And checked the damned aluminum case that protected Ben's precious flint. It irritated Daniel every time he saw it, the only bit of evidence that this wasn't some Ph.D. candidate ornithologist's research camp and bird-watching blind.
Ben had a thing about that flint, it seemed to go beyond fascination. He didn't want to keep the damned thing with the hidden guns or with the other loot. Hell, just a piece of stone, they could hide it on the sea bottom without taking any damage. Daniel hated leaving sore thumbs like that sticking out where any snoop could trip over them. But Ben insisted.
Back to business. Dan slid a tripod out through the gun slit, added the boxed Questar scope, and followed them into the cold sea breeze. Back through spruces and underbrush to the landward side of his island, he set the scope up in shadows and focused on the soot-blackened chimneys of the Pratt ruins far across the water, and then scanned rocks and cliff face below for any movement or changes. Nothing. Daniel settled on
