Free Seven Days Dead by John Farrow Page B

their horse-and-rider heritage, that the only way to deal with a fall is to get back in the saddle, Louwagie was given one last assignment, a do-or-die posting, where to everyone’s surprise he made significant progress. Given his success on Grand Manan, he’s been left in place and finds himself in command. If he’s never posted elsewhere again, he’s fine with that.
    He credits the sea. Arriving on Grand Manan, he did what tourists do, only in all seasons, walking the cliff trails and the forest loops, spending time on rocky beaches. The ocean seemed to soothe his inner panic, alleviate a deep malaise, and him a prairie boy whose only sense of water growing up was found in sloughs. He’s not fond of being in a boat and on the water—that doesn’t work for him—but the shoreline, the breadth of sea and sky, this foreign geography, helps his head. He doesn’t do drugs anymore, he’s not on the wagon but he drinks sparingly. He’s doubled down on cigarettes, although on the scale of things it’s a vice that might kill him, but slowly. The other options can be quicker. He also talks to Ora Matheson a lot, and to a few other young working women around the island. Only talk, but all of it is a comfort.
    What he’s seen, what led him to descend from being an idealistic recruit with a prizefighter’s physique to become an alcoholic basket case, is not something he’s willing to talk about, although the events are sufficiently torturous on his psyche that HQ cut him more than the usual slack, and is content now to cut their losses and leave him right where he is. Out of the way, doing himself some good.
    So he does not like hearing what he’s now being told, and must ask the man from Dark Harbour to repeat himself more than once to get his point across. He’s written his name down as Aaron Oscar Roadcap, a man who, he recalls hearing, derives from a criminal background and possesses a shadowy past. People whisper about him among themselves but say nothing openly to Louwagie, as if afraid to do so.
    “What were you doing out in the storm, exactly?” he inquires again.
    “I told you, I—”
    “You were walking out in the rain, in the wind, in the dark. You enjoy that sort of thing. Okay, I get that. I don’t understand it, but I’m taking you at your word here. But what were you actually doing ?”
    “I wasn’t doing anything. Except for what I said. Walking. Sometimes I was sitting. I was lying on my back when the sun came up.”
    “The sun came up.”
    “Yeah, it did, actually.”
    “That’s not what I meant,” Officer Louwagie attests. He’s feeling lost.
    “Then what did you mean?”
    “I mean, who goes out and lies on their back, probably on wet ground, when the sun comes up after a rainstorm?”
    “Besides me? I can’t say. But I do it, Officer. It’s a free country.”
    “Yeah,” Louwagie concedes. “It is.” In truth, he isn’t finding the idea so strange. Whatever floats your boat, he wants to tell the man, but doesn’t. He even thinks that he might try it himself sometime, just go out into the wind and the roar. “Was anyone else with you? Besides you and Reverend Lescavage?”
    “Yeah. A bunch of people. Not with me, but out there on their own.”
    “Out in the rain? Really? A bunch? What were they doing?”
    “Beats me. They had tents. They were camping.”
    “That’s not allowed up there.”
    “I’m not the police. You are. So I didn’t arrest anybody.”
    “Don’t be a smartass, all right?”
    “All right.”
    “So who were they? These campers. Are they still there?”
    “Can’t say. We didn’t stop for a chat. It was my impression that they were packing up.”
    “Your impression. Okay. Did you meet them before or after?”
    “You mean—before,” Roadcap concludes. “A bit before. They were in the vicinity.”
    “Okay.” Louwagie writes that down. “What word, sir, exactly what word did you use again? You know, to describe—”
    “Reverend