“Thanks very much. I like to walk,” Stewart said, and then he was off, striding across the boards of the dock, looking just the way he had on that silly television show. For a moment, all three of them watched him go.
“He’s the most remarkable person,” Clara Walsh said fi-nally.
Gregor tried to get them all back on track. “He opens up for regular ferry trips, and the ferry crosses, what, twice a day, in the morning and in the evening? Does it get much business?”
“Practically none,” Bram Winder said. “But the Commonwealth of Massachusetts insists. It doesn’t want the island cut off from transportation in case there’s an emergency. Although these days, you know, with medical emergencies, we’ve got the helicopters.”
Helicopters can’t fly in all weathers, Gregor thought. Or maybe he had that wrong. Once, Bennis had taken him to a movie called The Perfect Storm, and in that movie a he li-copter rescued two people off a boat in the Atlantic during a major hurricane. Gregor had really hated that movie. It had primed him to expect a heroic last-minute survival victory, and instead, everybody died.
“Okay,” he said. “What about times when there are likely to be lots of people on the ferry even on a not regularly scheduled trip. Isn’t that what was supposed to happen on the day of the storm? Kendra Rhode was having a party, and she got extra ferry trips to bring guests in from Boston. Would Harry Carter have opened the newsstand then?”
“I don’t know,” Clara said. “But even if he’d intended to, I’d be willing to bet he didn’t on the actual day. He is from around here. He’d know what a major nor’easter means. And nobody who knows would stand on the edge of the water with nothing but a space heater to keep him company.”
“I’m not too sure he’d have had any customers if he had,” Bram Winder said. “I mean, Kendra Rhode’s guests wouldn’t be the people who buy the tabloids, they’d be the people who are in them. Right?”
Gregor looked at the stand, and at the dock, and at the ferry. “What about people leaving the island?” he said. “These extra ferries that were put on for the party, would they have carried people away from the island and not just onto it?”
“Do you mean you think somebody left the island that afternoon on one of the extra ferry runs?” Clara Walsh said. Then she shook her head. “No, that’s not right. I told you. The ferry runs didn’t happen. The storm was too bad.”
“Did Harry Carter know they weren’t happening?” Gregor asked.
Clara Walsh looked nonplussed. “We can ask him,” she said. “But you know, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here. This was a major storm. The sea was horrif c. There were no extra ferry runs, in or out. It doesn’t matter if Harry Carter was here that afternoon, because nobody else would have been. He’d have had nobody to see coming in or going out.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. He went all the way back to the newsstand and looked it over, front and back. It was nothing much more than a tallish wooden box. The paint was peeling on its sides and the wood was so dry and brittle Gregor could have smashed through it with his fist without seriously hurting himself, and at his time of life there wasn’t much he could do that with. The fragility of the structure made the metal pull-down security window look almost poignant. Gregor wondered if Harry Carter had really had a problem with theft. What would a thief steal, and who would be that thief? If Harry Carter was leaving his cash in there—and Gregor was willing to bet he wasn’t—he was an idiot.
Gregor came away from the newsstand and went back to Clara Walsh and Bram Winder. “All right,” he said. “I’d still like to know. If you wouldn’t mind. Are all those manila envelopes for me?”
Bram Winder looked down at the envelopes in his hands. “Yes,” he said, thrusting them forward at Gregor. “Yes, they are. They’re the stuff. You know, forensics. The crime-scene report. The depositions. There are a lot of depositions.”
“And not much of anything else,” Clara Walsh said. “The Oscartown Police Department consists of Jerry Young and whatever two locals he can pick up and deputize for the season, and this isn’t the season. There was some talk in town about beefing up the force with the film people in town, but it was the oddest thing. We couldn’t get anybody to take us seriously. It’s almost as if they think these people are cartoons. As if they’re not real people. At any rate, the town declined to spend the money, and now they’re spending only enough to keep a couple of extra guards at the jail, to take the shifts, you know. I mean, you can leave the town drunk alone overnight in a place like that, but you can’t leave Arrow Normand.”