Free Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery by Dallas Murphy

went on in silence for a while. I scanned the horizon all around. It was bereft.
    “Christ, looks like somebody killed her for the hell of it. I mean, she weren’t robbed. There was money in her wallet, Teddy said, a watch on her arm. You’d almost feel better if there was a crazy husband, or she was killed by the mafia ’cause she was a stool pigeon, or…some foreign death squad killed her ’cause she pissed off a mucky-muck in Peru. Something sensible.”
    “Have you seen the face in the lichens?” I asked.
    “The Virgin?”
    “The Virgin? I heard it was Jesus.”
    “Oh. I heard it was one of the Virgins. Who’d you hear it was Jesus from?”
    “The guy who owns the marine supply store.”
    “People around here tend to let others do pretty much what they want, ’specially when it comes to religion, unless of course they go to sacrificing house pets or declaring themselves the Deity. But now, with this killing, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Whoever did it could still be up on that hill. Could do it again. To anybody. That changes things. It ain’t from away no more. It’s here.”
    A flock of herring gulls followed above our wake screaming invective at each other. I scanned the water again with my binoculars. That kind of magnification took some getting used to on a moving platform. It made me a little bilious.
    Dwight said something I couldn’t hear.
    “What?”
    He pointed straight ahead with his thick, scarred hand— “Kempshall Island.”
    What? It was fully formed, close enough to identify individual features. I looked at Dwight. Had he played some kind of tenderfoot joke on me? But how could he have? You can’t make an island appear when a moment ago there was no island in sight, not even the hazy hint of one. That’s what happened, however. I had
looked
…Maybe it was some kind of atmospheric anomaly caused by refraction or something, like those fiery sunsets overNew Jersey, caused, you soon learn from the cynics, by particles in the polluted air reflecting the sun. Maybe one grows so used to seeing the world through tailpipe smoke that its sudden absence dazzles the eye and brain. Maybe it was my new binoculars, maybe I needed some practice, or maybe they were defective in this rare, weird way that causes island myopia. I wished Crystal were here to tell me what she saw. I looked over at Dwight. He didn’t bat an eye.
    Dwight was saying something about the island. He pointed over the bow, then left the wheel to show me on my chart, but at that very moment, Jellyroll drew himself inboard and began to retch. His whole body convulsed and jerked. It’s a disgusting thing to watch, and it seems to go on forever, as if his gut were thirty feet long. Dwight watched openmouthed, never making it to the chart. Finally Jellyroll curled back his lip and expelled the usual yellow bile. I wordlessly swiped it up with a paper towel I’d brought for the purpose and tossed it over the side. Jellyroll watched me do that, licking his lips.

NINE

    W e turned sharply around a rocky point and I saw the boathouse for the first time. Until my eye caught the straight-line roof, I didn’t realize it was a man-made thing because it nestled so gently into the forested hillside at the top of the cove. It was roofed and sided with spruce shingles painted forest green, and the foundation was made of shoreline stones cemented together. The window and door frames and the railings of the porch were painted the russet of autumn leaves. A wooden porch cantilevered out over the water.
    Dwight slowed the boat, once inside the cove. He said something, but I didn’t catch it.
    “What?”
    “Sunkers.”
    “Sunkers?”
    “See, over there.” He pointed just off to the left where dromedary humps of black rock roiled the surface. Leathery kelp and black weed sloshed back and forth. A sunker.
    “‘Nother off there to starboard.”
    This sunker didn’t even break the surface, but I could see its menacing presence. I