“How is it a kindness?”
“It would keep her from getting killed. It’s less a punishment, more like protective custody.”
Harper opened her mouth to disagree, then recalled Allie’s talk of finding the thief and yanking out her tongue. She closed her mouth and said nothing.
Three canoes were tied alongside the dock, bobbing in the sea. The Fireman lowered his burning left hand, put it under one flap of his turnout jacket, and smothered the flame.
“It’ll be safer and faster to go the rest of the way by water.” He settled into the canoe at the far end of the dock, slid his halligan into the bottom.
Ben frowned. “Um—John? Am I counting wrong, or are we at least a boat short? We’re rescuing two men, aren’t we? So . . . where are we going to put them?”
“You’ll have room for them. I’m not coming back by boat. I’ve arranged for other transportation.” The Fireman undid a rope and pushed the canoe into the Atlantic. It rode low in the water and Harper wondered how heavy a halligan bar really was.
Ben gestured at one of the other canoes. “Harper, I don’t know much about boats. Do you want to steer and I’ll—”
“Actually,” Father Storey said, “I have a private medical matter to discuss with Nurse Willowes. Do you mind?”
Ben did mind—for a moment the disappointment on his face was so bald it was almost funny. But he nodded, and climbed down into one of the other canoes. “We’ll see you when we get where we’re going, then. Watch out for icebergs.”
Harper untied them while Father Storey carefully climbed into the front of their canoe. As they pushed out into the water, Harper shut her eyes and inhaled deeply. The air was so clean and smelled so richly of the sea, it made her briefly dizzy.
“I like it out on the ocean. Always have,” Father Storey said, speaking over his shoulder. “You know, the camp has a nearly forty-foot sailboat stashed on John’s island. Big enough to—oh, will you look at that!” He pointed across the water with a dripping paddle.
Allie was in the front of the Fireman’s canoe with a paddle. She had sat up as soon as they were fifty feet from the dock.
“Do you remember what John said to her, back on shore? ‘If you want to have a row with me, it’ll have to be later.’” Father Storey did a voice that was a little like Paul McCartney in Yellow Submarine. Not a bad imitation of the Fireman at that. He said it again—“‘A row!’”—the British way, so it rhymed with cow, then repeated it once more, but in the American fashion, so it rhymed with low. “Ha! He was telling her we were taking the canoes, so she could run ahead and wait for us. Well. She comes by her go-screw-yourself streak honestly. I could never tell her mother, Sarah, a thing, either.”
The shoreline, bristling with firs, scrolled by on either side of them as they made their way out of the little harbor.
“What’s bothering you, Father? You said you’re not feeling well?”
“I believe I said I had a private medical matter. I don’t think I said it was anything to do with me. I guess I’m all right. A little sick at heart. You don’t treat for that, do you?”
“Sure. Take two chocolates and call me in the morning. I think Norma Heald has a few Hershey’s Kisses in the kitchen. Tell her I wrote you a prescription.”
He didn’t laugh. “I think I’m going to have to send someone away. I’ve been trying to figure out how to protect someone no one will forgive. It seems to me that sending her away is the only hope for her. If she stays here, I’m afraid of what the camp might do to her.” He cast a glance back at Harper and smiled a little. “Every time I see them sing and shine together I always wonder what would happen if they formed a lynch mob. Do you think the Dragonscale would like a lynch mob as well as a chorus? I do.”
8
He knows who the thief is, Harper thought. The idea was a sharp jolt, the mental equivalent of stepping on a tack.
“Why are you telling me this?” Harper asked.
He stared out over the prow of the boat. “The person of whom I speak would never leave willingly. Could you—if you had to—administer something? To pacify a person if she was—hysterical? Dangerous? To herself or . . . or others?”
Whatever Harper had been expecting to talk about, it wasn’t this.
“I don’t have anything strong enough in my supplies. To be honest, Father—”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he said, with a sudden bitterness. “I’ve never been ordained, not by any church. The only person who ought to call me Father is Carol. I never should’ve let that get started, but it satisfied my ego. I taught ethics and the history of Christianity at a prep school in Massachusetts. I’ve gone from old-fuddy-duddy-in-the-ivory-tower to high pope–Dalai Lama of the New Faith in five months. You show me someone who could resist that, I’ll show you a real saint.”
“Now, Father. If I heard someone sneering at you like that, I’d break something over their head. Don’t you know you give all these people hope? You give me hope, and that’s as magic as a whole church full of people glowing like Christmas lights. I’ve started to believe I might live to see my child born, and that’s because of you, and the songs, and all these wonderful people who have gathered around you.”
“Ah. That’s big-hearted of you, Harper. You just remember: I didn’t do anything to make all of you wonderful. You were that way when I found you.”
They swung out and around a headland into open water. The bank was forty feet away, a steep hill rising through scrawny bare trees and boulders.
“To return to your question, I don’t have sedatives of any strength whatsoever. God help us if I ever have to perform a surgery. The most powerful drug in the camp medicine cabinet is Advil. But even if I did have something stronger, I wouldn’t like to sedate someone as a punitive measure. I don’t do that. I help sick people.”
“This person—she is sick. And before you ask, no, I don’t want to say who I have in mind. Not until I’ve absolutely settled on what steps to take.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.” She had already noticed the way he was trying to avoid naming names.
He paused, considering for a time, then said: “What do you think of Martha Quinn’s island?”
“I think I’d feel a lot better about it if I knew someone who has actually heard the broadcast.”
Father Storey said, “Harold Cross claimed to have heard it. Once. And he was texting with someone in Lubec, which has been operating as the capital of Maine ever since Augusta burned to the ground.”
“Harold was texting with someone who said they were in Lubec,” Harper said. “I never knew him, but by the sound of it, Harold was a little too trusting.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Father Storey said, and again there was that caustic, nasty tone of bitterness that was so unlike him.
Harper could feel the ocean under the boat, the dreamy pull of it. If they stopped paddling, the current would catch the canoe and draw it to the east. In half an hour they would be far enough out to see all the lights of Portsmouth; in an hour, far enough perhaps to see all the lights on the New Hampshire coast. An hour after that they would be too far out to see any lights at all.
“We’re going to have to send someone away, I’m afraid. Force a woman from camp,” Father Storey said. “When that happens . . . well, I wouldn’t send someone, no matter how deluded, into exile, all alone. Sooner or later a Cremation Crew would catch her. No. I think I will go with her. Perhaps in the big sailboat out on John’s island. Myself and Don Lewiston. I’d like to go looking for Martha Quinn.”
“Who’ll take care of camp?”
“It would have to be John. He’s the only one I’m certain is up to the job.”