Off Season - Jack Ketchum [25]
“She going to make it?”
He frowned. “Minus maybe a leg or two. Doctors haven’t decided yet whether the right one has to go.”
Peters stood up and went to the wall map and ran his finger down the coastline. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You recall that little talk we had maybe a month ago over at the Caribou? ‘Bout how the missing persons stats from all along the northernmost coastline here over the past few years were just a bit higher than, say, from Jonesport on down to Bar Harbor? Just a little bit higher than you’d expect them to be? Even though you got a good deal more people to the south, bigger towns and all?”
Shearing nodded. Peters went on. “Now the fact is that most of these folks were small fishermen, lobstermen, and youngsters. And we said, well, the waters are a whole lot rougher up north here and that takes care of the first two groups; and since there’s nothing whatsoever to do up here, and since the unemployment rate for kids is so high, that takes care of the third, the teenagers. We got a runaway problem. But suppose we were wrong, Sam? Suppose that’s not the case at all?”
Shearing looked skeptical. “Kids, George?” he said.
“The drunk saw adults. Now look here. Here’s Dead River, and a mile across the water you got Catbird Island, where we lost that fishing party last year. Where did that fella see the kids now?”
“Just south of Cutler.”
“That’s not three miles away. Suppose we got something going along that coastline.”
“Like what?”
“Damned if I know. But I’ve been racking my brain all day now, trying to remember what the other thing was I associated with Catbird Island and that area. An hour ago I got it. Happened three years ago last July—boy by the name of Frazier. You remember?”
“Sure. Boy took a boat out there in bad weather.”
“Rough weather, Sam. And according to the father, the boat was sound and the boy—what was he, eighteen, nineteen?—the boy was a top-notch seaman. Should have made it in fine.”
“One mistake, George. That’s all you need. You know that.”
“That’s what we said at the time. And of course that could still be the right answer, and I could be howlin’ at the moon. But think how many of these missing persons stats over the years are associated with fishing or boating and it makes you wonder. They got boats down Bar Harbor way too, yet our stats are higher.
“And it occurred to me coming back from the hospital that maybe the reason we got so many more missing persons up here than we ought to have, proportional to the population that is, is that the population is so small. Along the coast or even on the island—hell, nobody goes there—folks could hide out pretty easy. And not get noticed for years, if they kept a low profile.”
“Like no survivors.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
Shearing thought about it. Peters was making a certain amount of sense, but to put it together you had to assume a pretty flexible M. O. Of course that was possible, especially if there were a number of people involved as there seemed to be here, especially if you had kids and adults working together. Kids and adults: he wondered what that was about.
There were so many small boats embarking from points all along the coastline during tourist season that some could be lost without being missed at all. And there were a lot of travelers hauling back and forth to Canada along the coast road down through Maine—just like Mrs. Weinstein, some of them on very long hauls, too. If they got lost along the way it would be hard to pinpoint where, especially if you ditched the cars somehow. A lot of local kids hotrodding along the highway: they’d be easy to spot and flag down, and we’d call it runaways. And then of course there was the beach where that drunk—what was his name?—had seen them. Beach parties, necking sessions late at night. Did kids still neck? Whatever. Yeah, a lot of people could have disappeared that way. It was wild. But maybe.
And he had long ago learned to trust Peters’ intuitions. For all George’s talk about Shearing wanting his job, it was a