The Sense of Reckoning (21 page)

And why should Loring be willing to share information with Ann that he was not willing to share with Garrick? He did seem to harp excessively on the topic of women, perhaps Ann’s gender was to her benefit. If only she were more skilled in understanding whatever information Loring was attempting to communicate.

Garrick drummed his fingers on the desk, then opened his desk drawer and removed a black leather address book and opened it to the K tab. After additional drumming, he picked up the handset of the rotary phone on his desk. He dialed a number and after a few rings the call was answered.

“Ann Kinnear Consulting,” said a male voice.

Garrick hung up the phone. “Drat.” Didn’t everyone these days give out their personal cellphone numbers?

He was standing to go to the kitchen and refresh his water when the phone rang. He looked at it suspiciously for a moment, then picked it up. “Yes.”

There was a pause on the line, then, “Masser?”

“With whom am I speaking?” said Garrick, fully aware of the identity of the caller.

“This is Mike Kinnear. Why did you call me?”

“I did not call you,” said Garrick haughtily.

“Of course you did. I just had a call come in from this number,” said Mike.

Double drat. “I was not calling you, I was calling your sister.”

“Don’t you have her cellphone number?”

“Evidently not.” There followed a long pause. “It would, however, be helpful to me to have that number.”

“Are you asking me to give you her cellphone number?”

“It would be helpful.”

Garrick heard a sigh on the other end of the line. “Let me check with her and I’ll call you back.”

“Very good. I will give you my number.”

“Obviously I already have your number.”

Triple drat. “Of course. I will await your call.” Garrick hung up the phone and sat down again, his eyebrows drawn together in an ominous V.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. Garrick picked it up. “Yes.”

“She said it’s okay to give you her number. Got a pen and paper?”

“I have no need for a pen and paper.”

“Well bully for you,” said Mike, and read off the number.

“I shall call her now.”

“Don’t mention it,” Mike said, and hung up.

Garrick replaced the handset on the phone and sat staring ahead for a moment, then took his fountain pen from the drawer and jotted the number in his address book. Picking up the phone again, he dialed the number and waited somewhat apprehensively. He was relieved when a female voice answered, “Hello?”

“This is Garrick.”

“Hi, Garrick! You’ll never guess who we just ran into.”

“Ellen Lynam.”

“How did you guess?”

“With whom else would you have an encounter on this island that would be of interest to me?”

“That’s true. Anyhow, we ran into her in the grocery store.”

“You and your driver?”

“Yes, me and my driver.”

“Did she recognize you?”

“Yes, she stopped to talk to me. I told her Scott—uh, the driver—was my fiancé.”

“Hmph,” said Garrick.

“So, did you go out to the hotel and see Loring?”

“Yes, he was most unhelpful.”

“So you still need me to try to find out the location of the painting from him?”

“As you say,” said Garrick grumpily. “We need to find an excuse to get her away from the hotel so you can follow Loring’s directions to the painting unobstructed. She has evidently run her errands for the day, and we can’t count on her being away from the hotel for very long, or on her going out again later.”

“Hey, I know—she thinks Scott is my fiancé and he played along with it. Maybe he can call her and say he wants to discuss that some more.”

“Without the prospective bride in attendance?” said Garrick skeptically.

“Well, Scott acted much more interested in the whole wedding-and-reception thing than I did—he could just tell her that he is in charge of arrangements and that I had other things to do this afternoon.”

“And why would he want to have this meeting somewhere other than the hotel?”

“Hmmm.” They were both silent for a few moments, then Ann said, “I know, Scott acted very excited about the idea of having a tent. He could tell her he wants to visit someone who rents out tents and wants her there with him to discuss ideas.”

“Is this a realistic scenario?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never arranged a wedding, but it seems plausible. Doesn’t it?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” said Garrick. “And you say your driver isn’t from around here? If he’s from the area, she might recognize him.”

“That’s right, he drove me up from Pennsylvania. He’s ‘from away.’ Not from Mount De-ZERT,” she added.

“How very colloquial of you. However, if you yourself were not ‘from away,’ you would know that the locals refer to the island as ‘MDI.’”

“Oh,” said Ann, somewhat deflated.

“In any case, I believe we should proceed as you suggest, if you think it’s a good idea.” Ann started to interject that she didn’t necessarily think it was a good idea, just the best she could come up with on the spur of the moment, but Garrick continued. “You would be able to arrange this yourself?”

“Sure,” said Ann uncertainly. “Let me talk with Scott.”

“The less he knows about the actual circumstances, the better,” cautioned Garrick.

Chapter 30

1947

On Wednesday, October 22
nd
, the Lynam Landing Hotel’s gardener, his neighbor, and their families, who had been evacuated from their homes north of Eagle Lake, arrived at the hotel. After a brief discussion between the gardener and Chip’s father, they unloaded their luggage into several of the guest rooms and the possessions they had brought with them onto the veranda. Then the men in the group said that they were going to head back to the eastern side of the island to help fight the fires.

When they had gone to the shed to get shovels, Chip said, “Dad, can I go?”

His father, who was rearranging things on the veranda, didn’t look up. “No, I need you here.”

“But it sounds like they need all the help they can get—”

“I said no. Probably every person on that side of the island is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, making things difficult for the professional firefighters. Plus, what if the fire comes this way? You need to stay here.”

Chip thought it unlikely that the fire would jump Somes Sound, but he knew better than to argue further.
 

He spent the morning getting the evacuees settled in. Then women—much to his father’s consternation, Chip guessed—decided that food and drink should be provided for the men fighting the fire, so they commandeered the hotel truck, along with Chip as a driver, and made a run to Southwest Harbor for supplies. Back at the hotel, they assembled several dozen sandwiches, fried up a pile of doughnuts, and brewed gallons of coffee with which they filled the hotel’s coffee urns. Chip secured the urns, the bags of food, and a box of coffee mugs in the back of the truck. His father climbed into the driver’s seat, muttering about “do-gooders.”

“Dad, I’ll go,” said Chip.

“I already told you I need you to stay here.”

“Okay,” said Chip agreeably. “When more people start showing up, I’ll get them settled in.”

His father narrowed his eyes at Chip suspiciously. Finally, with a sigh, he said, “I guess I’d better stay.” He climbed stiffly out of the truck and Chip was struck by how old he looked.

Chip climbed in, his father standing next to the car, his face pinched with discontent.

“Best fuel up in Somesville. Go to Fernald’s, they’ll fill it on credit.”

“Okay, Dad.” Chip started up the truck.

“Don’t you spend a lot of time over there—and don’t you drive into anywhere where the fire’s burning. There’ll be plenty of men just standing around guarding where the fire has already come through or keeping an eye on fires that have been put out—you can give the sandwiches to them. The men busy fighting an active fire won’t be able to take time out for a meal.”

“Okay, Dad.” Chip pulled away.

“And keep a count of the mugs, make sure you bring them all back!” his father called after him.

Chip waved out the window to him.

He wound his way back to the eastern “claw,” going north to Town Hill and then east, following a convoy of Army trucks coming in from the mainland.
 

When he entered the burn area, the devastation was like a punch to the gut. In some places, the fire had left the jagged stumps of tree trunks stabbing up through a blanket of gray ash—in other places, not even stumps remained. In the distance, black smoke boiled up, so thick that if Chip didn’t know better he might have thought that the earth had belched up a new mountain overnight.

He found a group of men in a burned-over field, swatting out flare-ups. A few had Indian tanks holding a few gallons of water strapped to their backs, but most were armed with nothing more than shovels and water-soaked brooms. There were more men than equipment, so the extra men rotated out to Chip’s truck for food and coffee.

“Is it going to Great Hill?” Chip asked a boy about his age.

“I hear they stopped it at Duck Brook,” said the boy, “but now it’s burning north and south.” He pointed to a billow of smoke to the east. “That’s Youngs Mountain.” He pointed further to the south. “And that’s the fields west of Eagle Lake. If they can hold it there, Bar Harbor should be okay, but Hulls Cove might get it. That’s where I’m from.”

Chip scuffed his toe in the dirt. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Hasn’t gotten there yet,” said the boy stoutly. “Maybe the wind’ll turn. Maybe it’ll rain.”

They both turned their eyes to the still smoke-laden but cloudless sky.

“Or maybe not,” said the boy.

When the sandwiches were gone, the urns empty, and the coffee mugs accounted for (one having broken when a tired firefighter fumbled it), Chip started back to Lynam’s Point, then pulled to the side of the road. His father didn’t really need him at the hotel—all those evacuees could take care of themselves. Heck, he probably wouldn’t even be missed. But he could help at Jardin d’Eden. He turned the truck around.

He took the northerly route he had taken the previous day, through Salsbury Cove and Hulls Cove, coming into Bar Harbor via Eden Street, which was lined with the “cottages” of the Furnesses’ fellow millionaires. Most of them only summered on the island, and would now be gone to wherever they spent their winters. He wondered what they were thinking right now, opening their newspapers in Palm Beach or Charleston or Havana or, if the lines were up, maybe taking a phone call from their own Pritchards about the situation on Mount Desert. Would they be frantic as the flames closed in on their castles or would they, as his father sometimes suggested, be relieved to be rid of the responsibility?

When he got to Jardin, he found half a dozen men, ladders propped on the sides of the house, wetting down the wooden shingles of the roof.

“Lynam! Over here!” Pritchard had discarded his clipboard and was wrestling with a length of hose, trying to give the man on the ladder some extra reach. Chip ran over and helped haul the hose.

Pritchard stepped back and brushed dirt from his hands. “You give these guys a hand. Mrs. Furness called, she wants a fur coat sent down to Palm Beach.”

“She needs a fur coat in Florida?” asked one of the men, hauling on the hose.

“What I want to know is why she thought she needed a fur coat here in the summer,” said one of the others.

“Just because we’re baking now doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes get cold in the summer,” retorted Pritchard.

“The telephone’s still working?” asked Chip.

“So far. I’ll pack up the coat and then you can take it down to the Express Office.”

“The Express Office is still open?”

“Jeez, Lynam, you sound like an old lady,” muttered Pritchard as he hurried inside.

As soon as the door closed behind Pritchard, one of the other men—a young man named Sean who had been glancing nervously at the smoke drifting over Great Hill—dropped the hose.

“I’m going—I got a baby at home and a wife who’s expecting another and I’m not going to hang around here hosing down the Furnesses’ roof hoping my own roof isn’t going up in flames with my family under it!”

“I’m with you there,” said one of the other men, Mel. “My uncle’s got a couple of boats in Northeast that he wants to get out on the water and I’m going down there to give him a hand.”

“It’s not going to get to Northeast,” scoffed the third man.

“I ain’t waiting to find out,” retorted Mel.

“I wouldn’t want to be out on the water with the wind like this,” ventured Chip.

Mel shrugged. “We might get banged around a little but it’s better than just sitting by waiting for the fire to get it.” He turned to Sean. “Can you give me a lift out that direction?”

“Sure thing.” Sean scanned the rest of the group. “Sorry about this, fellas, but we’ve done what we can here—I recommend you let Pritchard worry about Jardin and you go home to look after your own.”