On Hurricane Island Page 3

  One flight down, Henry pauses at the foot of the staircase and listens for the airplane. Still nothing. Hopefully the two soldiers assigned to capture Dr. Cohen are competent; he hates working with personnel from other agencies. You don’t know their capabilities and can never be certain where their loyalties lie. And Austin Coombs, his new civilian employee on this mission, isn’t a known quantity yet either. But what choice does he have? When his only female guard quit suddenly, he had to hire and quickly. The previous guard said the pay was good, but the idea of the camp just didn’t sit right with her. Hopefully the generous severance package and gag agreement will keep her mouth shut.

  At least Ms. Coombs is Three Sisters born and bred, even if her father was from away, and her mom left her for the grandparents to raise up. The grandmother is a Carter, a distant cousin of Cat’s, which counts for a lot. Henry’s own family is from Bangor, so he’ll always be “from away” even though he moved to the island in ninth grade and graduated from the three-room schoolhouse where Austin’s grandmother taught. The girl seems strong, compact and sturdy, and the role is mostly babysitting. Once he insisted that she remove the nose ring and pin her hair back, she looks respectable enough, but why would a girl like Austin want a job like this?

  A distant mosquito whine emerges in the southwest sky and deepens into engine noise. Henry hurries by the staff barracks and mess hall to the gravel road, passing the abandoned steam engine used to drill granite a hundred years ago. He slows, out of respect or something, as he walks by the ruins of the old quarry office, destroyed by an anarchist’s firebomb and now blanketed by vines. At the top of the hill is the narrow airstrip, slashed from the granite spine of the small island. He argued against that too; there is a perfectly good airport on Storm Harbor. But Army, Homeland Security, and FEMA all insisted that the camp needed its own secure and private landing strip.

  Henry stops in the shadow of the spruces at the edge of the field. The day lilies are shriveled brown stalks, but fireweed is in bloom and the season’s last raspberries are ripe. He appreciates the natural beauty of the place, but that doesn’t mean he forgives the Bureau for this posting. They refused to listen six months ago when he tried to explain that heading up a civilian detention center is not a lateral transfer from running the Bangor office. It’s a demotion, pure and simple.

  “It’s your assignment, Henry,” the Regional Chief said. “You know the island. You know the people. We need you there to get things running smoothly, and keep them moving securely.”

  Remembering the brief, nasty flicker of a smile at the right side of the Regional Chief’s mouth reignites the gnawing behind Henry’s breastbone. He’s probably being paranoid; none of the Bureau guys has ever said anything to suggest that they know, except that one time at the Bangor Tavern. They were celebrating the joint case with the Mounties and the Regional Chief let the nickname slip, spoken in a rude tone: Hen. Female, chicken, and full of innuendo.

  The plane is now eagle-sized, visible above the treetops to the south. Henry burrows two fingers under his tie, into the space between his shirt buttons, and rubs the gnawing ache behind his sternum. Female detainees pose all sorts of logistical challenges. That’s why he had to hire Austin, but maybe the girl isn’t up to it. Whatever it is, when he figures out what the Bureau needs from the Cohen woman. They will sure tell him PDQ if he doesn’t get the info they want. This crap sure isn’t what he anticipated when he joined up thirty years ago during graduation week, at the job fair table the Bureau shared with military recruiters.

  As the twin-engine plane bumps down the runway to a stop, Henry waves to the mechanics waiting with the portable stairs. No, this assignment isn’t what Henry wants, or what he deserves, but he damn well isn’t going to screw it up.

  He joins Tobias at the edge of the airstrip. Tobias was his second-in-command in Bangor, and Henry brought him along as camp facilities manager. Sometimes the man’s zeal makes Henry uneasy, but there’s no one he trusts more, which isn’t saying a whole lot. He wishes he had a good friend at work, someone to really talk to and depend on.

  Together they watch the hooded prisoner start down the metal steps escorted by the two soldiers. Having her hands cuffed behind her back throws her off balance, and she teeters on each step, tapping her bare foot tentatively before trusting her weight to it. It’s asinine to keep the hood in place, but it’s protocol. Henry probably would do the same himself.

  “Orders are, not too rough with this one.” Henry wishes he didn’t have to say that out loud.

  Tobias clears his throat. “Where do you want her?”

  “Room 4, Women’s Wing.”

  “Next door to the black bitch?” Tobias says. “But they’ll talk to each other.”

  “Curb your mouth and use your brain. I want her to contact Ms. Levinsky.”

  “Then why not put her in Room 3? Roomies.”

  “Because then she’d know we wanted them to talk.” Henry turns away, disgusted. Tobias seems incapable of subtle thinking.

  On the bottom step the prisoner stumbles, falling to her knees on the rough tarmac. The soldiers jerk her upright. Henry walks towards her.

  “Bring me her shoes,” he orders the soldiers. “We’ll take her from here.”

  The prisoner’s voice is muffled through the hood. “Where am I? No one will tell me anything.”

  “Their orders were to bring you here. Not to answer your questions.”

  “Are you in charge?” she asks. “Can you tell me where I am?”

  Henry smiles, even though she can’t see it. Being the boss is the one saving grace of this despicable assignment.

  “Yes, Dr. Cohen.” He grips her arm. “I’m in command of this facility. You’re on Hurricane Island.”

  4. GANDALF, 12:22 P.M.

  Her knees sting like crazy, but she forgets the pain when he says Hurricane Island. The name does not ring any geographic bells, but the irony is not lost on her: she has spent most of her professional life studying hurricanes. Where is this place? It is impossible to know for certain without her watch, but the flight must have been three hours. Putting the point of an imaginary compass on JFK and scribing a guesstimate circle on a mental map, she must be in northern New England or upstate New York, on the coast or a lake big enough to contain Hurricane Island.

  She rubs the bottom of one bare foot against the other shin to dislodge an annoying pebble and breathes deeply. Even through the hood the air smells moist and vaguely marine. The coast then: probably Maine.

  She turns in the direction of the man holding her arm, wishing more than light and shadow were visible through the weave of the fabric. Someone else is standing nearby; she can sense the dark shape of his presence. And the man in charge said “we” a moment before, indicating at least one other person. She inhales and exhales slowly, trying to banish the terror constricting her throat.

  Footsteps thump on the rough asphalt, then Troll’s gravelly voice. “Her shoes, sir.”

  “Thank you. Dismissed,” the man in charge says. When the footsteps fade, he unhooks the Velcro fastening and lifts the front edge of the hood so she can see the asphalt runway. He drops her shoes.

  “You can put them on.” His voice is quiet, not unkind.

  She slips her feet into the sandals and crouches down to adjust the straps. That makes her knees burn again, and she glances at the speckles of blood. Just a scrape, nothing to worry about. Not now, when there is so much worse that can happen.

  She turns towards him. “Why have you brought me here?” She tips her head back to peek at him and glimpses an ordinary face, not particularly cruel or vicious.

  “Hey. You can’t do that,” yells a new voice, an angry voice. A hand grabs her shoulder and another yanks the hood down, pulling the Velcro tight around her neck. Her shoulders tense, and her throat constricts again. What if she can’t breathe?

  “Take it easy.” The man in charge loosens the fastener.

  She does not need vision to perceive the tension
between the two men; it ignites a silent electric charge in the air. She waits, very still, alert and listening, feeling the hairs on her arms standing erect. When the angry man’s shadow steps back, she turns towards the man in charge.

  “Please,” she asks. “What is going on? What is this place?”

  “A civilian detention center.” He drops his grip on her elbow, and she feels him turn away. “No more questions.”

  A rough hand grips her arm and tugs her along the tarmac and down a long hill. Her escort does not speak to her; she does not ask him anything either, knowing he will not answer. Her throat aches too much to speak anyway. They enter a building, climb one flight of stairs, then stop.

  The angry man unlocks a door and kicks it open with his foot. Unfastening the Velcro, he pulls the hood from her head quickly while shoving her into the room, then slams the door closed, all without speaking a word. She has no chance to see his face but does catch a glimpse of the number four on the doorframe, a gold-plated number that could have come from a bin in the Home Depot, designed for a small house on a tree-lined street instead of a prison.

  What is a civilian detention center?

  She leans back against the door and looks around, but Room 4 does not divulge any answers. It is bigger than a jail cell, at least the ones on television, with a cot and chair on the left-hand wall, a toilet and sink to her right. A pink plastic trashcan is tucked under the sink; she despises pink. Opposite the door, the outside wall has a single barred window. She drags the chair against the wall and climbs up, but can see only blue sky and puffy clouds.

  The view is not exactly up to bed & breakfast standards, but she is getting a good rate. She hugs herself, rocking back and forth to interrupt the shaking. “Nurture your sense of humor,” she whispers.

  She can do that, but she must also keep track of everything, so that she will be able to make a full report to the authorities, later. She has not gathered much data yet. There are two military guys, Blue Eyes and Troll; the female guard, Apricot; the kind-voiced man in charge with his ordinary face; and his subordinate, Angry Man. Not much to go on yet, but she will not let them get away with this.

  She walks in a tight circle around the room. Three strides from door to sink, another two to the chair at the window, three more to the bed, and a final three return her to the door. She repeats the circuit. Her brain is sharper when her body moves, and it relaxes her, though it drives Jess crazy. In the evenings, Jess likes to read curled up on the sofa next to Sundance, in a nest of pillows and purring fur. Gandalf paces the apartment, back and forth, her mind racing.

  The ache in her throat returns. Right now she would give anything to cuddle with Jess and Sundance. She regrets all the times she was less demonstrative than Jess wanted, wishes she had been able to make Jess happier, maybe even gotten married. If only she could talk to Jess right now. Jess might even know something about civilian detention centers, since she tends to see conspiracies in the random malicious and ill-considered acts of the government. Or maybe it is an occupational hazard; Jess is a literature professor, and she appreciates a well-crafted narrative arc with a strong plot.

  Gandalf stops pacing to rattle the doorknob, to examine the heavy-duty hinges and the small heat vent in the ceiling. Climbing again to the window, she grabs the bars and shakes hard, but there is no give. The window is too small to fit through anyway, even if she could remove the grating.

  There is no way out of this room, and she will never see Jess again.

  No, she tells herself, do not go there. She breaks off her pacing and probing to sit on the narrow bed. She lets her head sink into the cushion of her hands, tries to stop their trembling.

  She must figure this out: who are these people and why did they bring her here? It is all an error, of course, and there must be a logical explanation, such as mistaken identity or a computer glitch. But how can she convince her captors of that fact?

  5. RAY, 12:25 P.M.

  Coffee cup in one hand and Fig Newtons in the other, Ray Coombs waits in the shade of the carport off the kitchen door, even though his granddaughter won’t be home for hours. Deep blue with puffy clouds, the sky offers no hint of the storm barreling up the coast. He lived through Edna in ’54, so he knows how bad it can be. But today his worry-thoughts are stuck on Austin, not the weather.

  The mail jeep sputters to a stop in front of the house and Jeannette half-lifts her fingers off the steering wheel in greeting. He walks across the yard while Jeannette digs around in the plastic carton on the seat. She passes a slim pile of envelopes through the open window.

  “How’re you and Nettie?” Jeannette asks.

  “No complaints. You folks?” Jeannette is married to his wife Nettie’s cousin Cyrus who’s a sergeant in the Army. Ray isn’t crazy about career military types, but Cyrus is family and he’s stationed at the whatever-it-is out on Hurricane.

  “Hanging in there,” Jeannette says.

  “Good.” Ray looks away. It’s not nice to pump her for information, but he’s got a bad, bad feeling about that place. Maybe Cyrus has talked to Jeannette about the facility.

  “And that granddaughter of yours?” Jeannette asks.

  “Fine, I guess. You know she’s working out on Hurricane?”

  Jeannette nods.

  Maybe Cyrus can keep an eye on Austin over there. Family matters, even when folks aren’t close. It’s supposed to be a secret, but everyone knows that something big is going on over there and everyone has an opinion. Some folks welcome the jobs, saying that having a government project out there will erase the stain of the little island’s history. Others hate the feds building something ugly on the land their great-grandfathers quarried, the place where fingers and arms and lives were lost. They argue that the facility is only located in their backyard because no one else wants it. “We’ll regret this,” they predict.

  Behind him, the screen door squeaks. “Jeannette,” Nettie calls from the stoop. “Can you take your lunch break?”

  Jeannette glances at her watch, then nods, and turns off the motor.

  Following her to the house Ray thumbs through the mail, by habit checking every return address for one of their daughter Abby’s rare notes. He tosses the envelopes onto the kitchen table, then leans against the counter where he can watch the women. Nettie moves the mail, then pours two cups of coffee from the percolator, and tops off Ray’s cup. She fills the china creamer with milk from the fridge.

  “You ready for the bulb sale?” Nettie sits across from Jeannette. Ray thinks his wife is relying more on lip-reading these days.

  “Working on it.” Jeannette takes a sandwich from her lunch bag and unwraps it. “You hear anything recently from Abby?”

  Ray’s hand freezes on the mug handle, mid-air. Can letter carriers mind-read what people are searching for in their stacks of bills and junk mail? No. Jeannette and Abby went through school together and they used to be friends, that’s all. He watches Nettie’s face, hoping she’ll talk about it. Maybe if he leaves the room, he thinks, and starts to push away from the counter but Nettie stops him with a glance.

  “Not recently,” he says.

  “I miss her.” Jeannette sips her coffee. “How’s Austin doing with the new job?”

  Nettie shakes her head. “Don’t know. She says she’s not allowed to talk about her work. I don’t like it. It just tears me up, that she spends every day out there.”

  Ray tries to remember if Jeannette and Cyrus weighed in about the Hurricane Island facility one way or the other when it was being built. Cyrus usually has plenty of opinions and likes to share them. And he’s ambitious. But he’s probably forbidden to discuss Army business.

  “What about Cyrus?” he asks. “What’s he told you about that place?”

  “Not a word,” Jeannette says. “And you know that’s not like Cyrus.”

  Ray opens the refrigerator. While the women’s conversation turns back to the bulb sale to benefit the Land Trust, he eats leftover tuna salad from the plas
tic tub and tries to picture his girl as a prison guard.

  Austin acts like she’s doing him a favor, taking the job on Hurricane, but the opposite is true. He wishes she never signed on with those people. Nettie is mental about the island, even if half her family works over there. She blames him for Austin taking the job. True, he showed Austin the ad in the weekly paper, but he also pointed out the ad for a dishwasher at the new lobster restaurant for tourists out by Saperstein Neck, and the listing for a part-time clerk at the Historical Museum, even the one for a live-in nanny on Lily Haven. Austin turned up her nose pretty quick at that one. “Won’t catch me wiping runny noses and butts for rich folks,” she said in that snotty voice she started with at age four and perfected at puberty. Course there’s worse jobs than mopping up after kids’ messes, but she doesn’t know that yet. And she’s strong-willed, his girl. His granddaughter actually, but Nettie and he raised her after Abby walked out. Austin is more their daughter than her mother ever was. No, that’s not quite true, but maybe raising Austin gave them a second chance, an opportunity to do a better job than they did with her mom.

  Jeannette gets up to leave, and Ray walks her out. When he returns, Nettie still sits at the kitchen table, elbows planted on the placemat with drawings of scenic Maine lighthouses, a look of deep worry on her face.

  Nettie wore that exact same expression a month before, after Austin announced that she’d accepted the job on Hurricane. Nettie went pale and squeezed her lips together until they pretty much disappeared, the way she does when trying to keep from saying what she’s thinking. The way she does whenever Hurricane Island is mentioned.