Cheating at Solitaire(41)
“Yes,” Gregor said.
The boat made a sudden, dramatic lurch and then seemed to glide, so slowly Gregor thought he could have walked faster.
Clara Walsh came to the windows and looked out. “Oh, good,” she said. “We’re on the water.”
2
Gregor would have said they’d been on the water the whole time, but he knew what Clara Walsh meant, and he distrusted himself when he began to be fussy over trivialities. Still, he found himself thinking that television had done a great disservice to real detectives in real police departments all across America. Television detectives were always strong and resolute and dedicated and clearsighted. When they weren’t, there was always some good reason why they were having a bad day, or something particularly spectacular to compensate. That was why Gregor truly hated the show Monk, even though he was forced to sit through it several times a week, since Tibor and Bennis and Donna loved it. He especially didn’t like it because they kept asking him whether it was anything at all like realhomicide detective work in a real police department, and of course it was nothing like it at all.
It was not a long passage from the mainland of Cape Cod to Margaret’s Harbor. Gregor could see the shore of the island almost as soon as they set off, and the closer they got the clearer it was that their dock would be deserted when they reached it. Gregor found this very interesting, in a case in which everybody went out of his way to tell him just how much press there would be watching his every move. Apparently, they weren’t watching it yet. He paced back and forth in front of the line of windows. He wondered what people usually used the ferry for, when it was running on full schedule.
“It can’t be a commuter route,” he said.
Stewart Gordon and Clara Walsh looked up. They had been talking about something else near the bar. They hadn’t expected him to speak.
“It can’t be a commuter route,” Gregor said again. “This ferry, I mean. If it were a commuter route, it would have to be operating pretty close to full schedule even in the winter.”
“Oh,” Clara said. “Well, it is a commuter route in the summer, when there are a lot of people on the island. There’s no point in making it a commuter route at this time of year, though, because nobody lives on Margaret’s Harbor year-round and commutes to work in the city.”
“Why not?” Gregor asked.
“It’s too long a way, I suppose,” Clara said. “It’s about ten to twelve minutes on the ferry to the mainland, and then it’s another hour into Boston at least, even with perfect traffic conditions, and traffic conditions are seldom perfect in Boston. Add that to the increased possibility of bad weather conditions during the winter and early spring, and I suppose most people find the idea just too much trouble. They come up for the summer though, and commute from the Harbor then.”
“But there are people who live full-time on the Harbor,” Gregor said.
“Of course there are,” Clara said.
“What do they do to make a living? The Harbor doesn’t have industry, from what I understand. There’s no manufacturing, or anything like that.”
“No,” Clara said. “Most of the people who live on the island work for the tourist trade. They run hotels or bed-and-breakfasts, they have lawn services and cleaning services, that kind of thing. And a lot of that runs year-round. You need your house looked after if you’re not going to be in it for several months at a time.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “But there must be other things, things that people would do on the island even if no tourists had ever appeared. There were people on the island before there were tourists, weren’t there?”
“There were people on the island all the way back to the American Revolutionary War, and before,” Clara said. “Fishermen, mostly. There are still a fair number of fisher-men. There were farmers here once, but I don’t think that there are any real working farms here anymore. We’ve got a couple of Potemkin farms, if you get my drift, the sort of thing rich men like to buy and have somebody else run for them, but not anything a real farmer could make a living at. And there are stores, of course, like groceries, that operate all year round. Body shops. But everybody makes more money when the tourists are here.”
Gregor looked out at the shore again. There really wasn’t anybody there. “So,” he said, “everybody is better off when there are tourists on the island, and in the winter there aren’t any tourists on the island, or not many. So this was a good thing, the movie coming to Margaret’s Harbor. It meant more people on the island in the winter, and that meant more money for everybody concerned.”