Summer on Sea Smoke Island.
Then Eric’s father got a new hunting rifle. Eric took them all to see it, although it was locked up in a glass case with the rest of his guns. They were planning a hunting trip in September, and all the Clyde cousins were looking forward to it. Stupidly, Jack revealed that he’d never been around a gun before. His parents didn’t hunt or keep a gun at home. Jessie in particular was afraid of guns.
Why had he told them any of that? Huge mistake. Eric got it in his head that Jessie needed to get used to guns, and the best way to do that was to start her off easy, with water pistols. No matter what Jack said, Eric refused to listen, and the next thing he knew, all of the Clydes and their friends were pouring into his grandparents’ expansive yard, hooting and hollering and shooting water pistols at each other.
His grandparents weren’t home; they were playing bingo at the community center. But Jessie was. He didn’t have to talk her into playing with them; shockingly, she came out on her own. Possibly she wanted to keep an eye on things. Eric presented her with a water pistol already filled with water.
“You can water your plants with it,” he told her. “But shooting people’s a lot more fun. Try it. Shoot me.”
She pulled the trigger and Eric made a show of falling to the ground as if she’d pierced him with a bullet instead of a hard stream of water. Just for fun, and possibly because she didn’t like him, she aimed more water at him, until he spluttered and yelled at her to stop.
At that point, things went completely haywire. Jack wasn’t exactly sure what happened, but their grandparents’ big Newfie, called Crash for his clumsiness, came lumbering out of the house and pounced on Eric’s fallen body. Clyde and Benny ran over to help, one of them shooting his water pistol at Crash. Jessie tried to tug Crash away by his collar, but he weighed at least as much as her, maybe more, so she didn’t get far.
Jack plunged into the middle of the melee. He hollered for Crash, yelled at the boys to stop aggravating him, and shouted at Jessie to back off. Crash rushed him and he got a face full of Newfie slobber. Eric, who was scrambling away like a crab going backwards, hit his head on a tomato planter.
“Don’t hurt my Granny’s tomatoes!” screamed Jessie. Around people she didn’t know, she was usually so quiet, so hearing her yell like that shocked the whole crew.
“Shut up, bitch!” Eric yelled.
“Take that back!” Jack got in his face, since the one thing he couldn’t tolerate was anyone being mean to Jessie—even if he and Jessie had their own fights on a regular basis.
“Bitch!” spat Eric.
That was it. Time to fight. By the time some adults arrived—neighbors who had heard the yelling—Eric and Jack were both a mess. Jack had a black eye, Eric a bloody nose and a gash on his head from the planter, and worst of all, Jessie had run away with Crash.
Eric’s father had to miss the rest of the day’s trap-hauling to take his son to town to get stitches in his head. Jack was given an ice pack for his eye, which hurt almost as much as the long lecture from his grandfather.
A few hours later, Jessie and Crash reappeared. Under patient interrogation, she revealed that she’d taken the dog to a hideout in the woods, the remains of a bunker left from World War II days. No one was supposed to play there because there were cracks in the old concrete and it was considered unstable.
When the dust had settled, Jack was grounded for a week and banned from playing with the Clyde clan for the rest of the summer. Not a terrible punishment, since he wanted nothing to do with them anymore. Eric had crossed a line going after Jessie.
Jessie’s punishment was that she was forbidden from walking Crash for a week, and her green water pistol was confiscated. Amazingly, she’d held on to it for the entire three hours she was in the woods with Crash, and their grandfather had to physically peel her fingers off it. Jessie, who had been so afraid of guns, had irrevocably bonded with that silly toy pistol.
26
“Quite a story.” Tina had been jotting notes the entire time he relived that incident, which he hadn’t thought about much since then. Summer had ended soon afterwards, they’d gone back home to Worcester, Massachusetts, and regular school life had taken over. The next summer, Granny was sick so they hadn’t gone to Sea Smoke, and the summer after that Jack got a job as a lifeguard. The next time they went to Sea Smoke, he’d barely seen the Clyde crew, who were mostly out on the water fishing all summer.
“I’d forgotten about it, to be honest. I guess Jessie saved that water pistol all those years. She’s funny about objects like that. She says they hold energy.”
A wave of longing for his quirky little sister swept over him. Where are you, Jessie?
“What energy do you think it was holding for her?” Tina asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe power? Protection?”
Tina got to her feet and prowled around the room. He’d learned that was her favorite way to brainstorm. She liked to move her body while she thought. “So is it a warning, then? She wanted you to know that Seth Baker is armed? That’s what Marigold suggested.”
He shook his head. “That might be part of it, but not all. For Jessie to choose this object in particular, it was very deliberate. I have a couple ideas. One, the Clydes. Benny Clyde was at the Bloodshot Eyeball the day of the shooting. They could easily be involved somehow. Two, those old bunkers. They were built during World War II and they have underground tunnels, an observation tower, storerooms. The land belongs to the Island Trust and there are ‘no trespassing’ signs everywhere, maybe even security cameras. Maybe something’s going on there.”
“Do the Clydes know about the bunkers?”
“I mean, do lobsters have shells? Of course they do. We used to sneak in there and play cops and robbers.”
“Maybe they’re playing cops and smugglers now,” Tina said thoughtfully. “That would explain the federal operation I’m not supposed to touch.”
Jack liked watching her mind work. “Yeah. Wouldn’t be surprised, knowing the Clydes.”
Lightkeeper Bay had always been a haven for smugglers, ever since the days of Prohibition, and even earlier. It was so easy to hide from the Coast Guard, although today’s technology made it more challenging. The Coast Guard couldn’t patrol all of the Maine shoreline, let alone the thousands of islands; that would be impossible.
