1
The sound of a gunshot will travel miles over open water—especially when the bay is as calm as it was that morning.
“What was that?” Stacey said.
She paused in her paddling and let one blade hang above the surface, trailing a reddish-brown tendril of rockweed. The length of her tanned neck shone with perspiration although we’d only left East Boothbay twenty minutes before. She had managed to stuff most of her hair under a faded Red Sox cap and had secured her ponytail through the adjustable fastener. There was gray in the brown now, just a few strands of spider silk.
“Probably a lobsterman shooting a gull,” I said.
“It’s a little early for an execution, don’tcha think?”
An effervescent mist that was already burning off in the July heat was all that separated our kayaks. I had to dig in hard with my own paddle to prevent a rear-end collision. Our seagoing boats were sixteen-foot Lincoln Seguins and not made for tight turns.
My momentum carried me forward. As I slid alongside her, Stacey took hold of the grab-handle on my bow to keep us from drifting apart. I caught a whiff of coconut-scented sunscreen from her outstretched arm. The rising sun was a pale smudge behind her, like a yellow thumbprint left by a painter on a wet gray canvas.
“Didn’t you used to shoot gulls when you were an intern on Baker Island?” I asked. “Because that’s where it sounds like the shot came from.”
“Yeah, but we had a dispensation from the feds. It was the only effective method we had to protect the puffin and tern chicks from predators. We all hated it. The gulls were just doing what they evolved to do.”
“Maine lobstermen believe their dispensation comes from a higher authority.”
As if on cue, we slid past a fluorescent yellow buoy. The float was attached by a groundline to a lobster trap—or possibly a string of traps—that was resting on the bottom, fifteen fathoms below. It was just the suction of the outgoing tide, but the buoy seemed to be straining to pursue us the way a leashed dog might follow you on a sidewalk.
Near the Thread of Life Ledges, a sloop, running on its engine because there was no breeze, overtook us. A young family was on board. Stacey waved to a little girl, four or five years old, sitting beside her dad at the tiller, and she called back in a squeaky-toy voice.
“We’re going sailing!”
“You’re going to have so much fun!” Stacey replied as the boat’s wake sent us rocking.
I knew how nervous she was—about where we were going and what we might find there—and I admired how she’d been able to fake cheerfulness for the little girl’s sake.
“What did Kendra say exactly in her email?” I asked. “Tell me again.”
Kendra Ballard had been Stacey’s college roommate, and they had also worked together on Baker. She served now as Dr. Maeve McLeary’s project manager, overseeing the Maine Seabird Initiative’s restoration efforts on Baker Island. She collected the survey data, managed the project’s two interns, and almost never left the island between May and August, after the birds migrated offshore.
“It was short,” Stacey said, then recited: “‘Stevens, I don’t know what to do. Maeve has gone missing. She’s been away for two nights, and we have no idea where she went or why she isn’t checking in. Other weird shit is happening, too. Some lobstermen who were hassling us are getting more aggressive. Can you please come out here tomorrow with Mike? Make sure he brings his badge and gun.’”
The fact that she had memorized the email told me how rattled she was.
“Did you try calling her to find out more?”
“Baker Island is in a dead zone. On clear days, the researchers can sometimes get texts or send emails, but you know how spotty coverage is offshore. The nearest cell tower is on Ayers Island, but there’s a hill in the way and no line of sight.”
“The researchers don’t have a satellite phone?”
“Maeve must have taken it. Otherwise, Kendra would have used it to call.”
“But there’s a marine radio?”
“I tried to raise the island last night on my neighbor’s VHF, but Kendra and the others must have already turned in. The staffers sleep on tent platforms scattered around the cookhouse. I thought it would be easiest to head out at dawn and see the situation firsthand.”
“Maybe we should have taken my boat.”
“We had the kayaks all packed for our camping trip, and I’d reserved our site on Spruce Island. The irony is that I’d already been thinking of stopping at the seabird colony on our way out. I must have had a premonition that we would be needed on Baker.”
The statement would have sounded silly if it didn’t happen all the time. I had never believed in clairvoyance until I’d met Stacey Stevens and her mother, Ora.
“Did Maeve ever do anything like this?” I asked. “Did she ever disappear the summer you were an intern?”
“No! She was super-conscientious and hands-on. I guess you’d call her a micromanager, but I was nineteen and didn’t mind being bossed around for the cause. She was the most brilliant person I’d ever met. Steve Kress rightfully gets the credit for bringing puffins back to Maine, but Maeve McLeary established a larger colony, using different methods. The big-name ornithologists said the birds would never breed as far south as Baker Island. But she proved those men wrong.”
Another gunshot echoed across the water.
Trying to see through the mist was like peering through layers of gauze. The indistinct shape of a forested island loomed ahead and to port. The big ball compass on my deck said we were headed southwest, which meant that vague mass of land was Ayers Island since we’d already passed Thrumcap. Sounds do strange things at sea, but my meager powers of echolocation told me the shooting was coming from the seabird colony on Baker Island, two miles farther south.
“It has to be a lobsterman shooting gulls,” said Stacey, but with diminished conviction.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Maeve McLeary had a rule that we couldn’t commit ‘the daily murder’ until the last puffin-watching boats had left for the day. She didn’t want us to be photographed killing gulls.”
“But Maeve isn’t there, according to Kendra.”
Stacey had no answer except to increase her strokes until she had once again pulled ahead of me.
The wind was forecast to rise later, turning onshore in the afternoon, but so far, the air remained breathless. The sea was a sheet of hammered platinum. Every stir of my paddle brought the fecund smell of the ocean into my nose and mouth. It was as if I could taste the teeming life in the depths: the phytoplankton and the zooplankton, the oyster beds, the shoals of mackerel, and the deep-diving seals. The sensory stimulation left me feeling intoxicated.
It wasn’t just the sea air, either.
Copyright © 2022 by Paul Doiron
