Murder With Puffins(10)

"And a bit quieter, obviously, if you've got it anywhere around here."

"Oh, it's noisy enough, but we've put it up on Knob Hill," Mr. Dickerman said. "It's pretty much out of the way up there, and the noise doesn't bother folks as much. Jim does most of the work on it; he's always been handy that way, Jim has."

"And so nice that he's found something to do without leaving the island," Mrs. Dickerman put in. She was a sweet, motherly person; I never could figure out how she and her mild-mannered husband had managed to produce so many rowdy and unpleasant sons, at least half a dozen of them. "All my other birds have flown the coop, but Jimmy's happy as a clam, staying here with us, where he can tinker with the generator. Does you good to see how happy he is, up at the electric plant, when he's working on those machines of his."

"Don't forget Fred," Mr. Dickerman put in.

"Fred's only here between jobs," Mrs. Dickerman said. "You remember Jimmy, don't you, Meg?"

I did, actually, with something that approached fondness--he was the one Dickerman of my generation who wasn't loud, extroverted, and an inveterate bully. The worst had been Fred, whom I now recognized as the driver of the truck and kidnapper of our luggage. But Jimmy had been a small, intense, bespectacled little boy, whose main interest in life was taking things apart. He and Dad got along well that way, although, unlike Dad, Jimmy could also put the things back together again. When he felt like it, which was seldom. I wondered how much time the Central Monhegan Power Company's generator ran and how much time it spent disassembled for maintenance, enhancements, and general tinkering.

"Maybe if she sees how useful the electricity can be, Phoebe might see her way clear to hooking on," Mr. Dickerman suggested.

"Maybe," Dad said. "But then again, you know what a traditionalist Phoebe is."

"She is that," Mr. Dickerman agreed. "We could have used her here this spring, when the town council was squabbling over what to do about Victor Resnick's new house."

"Victor Resnick? The landscape artist?" Michael asked.

"That's the one," Mr. Dickerman said. He didn't sound all that fond of the local celebrity, and I suspected Resnick was the Victor Winnie and Binkie Burnham had been so dismayed to see on the docks.

"Monhegan has quite a lot of famous artists," I said aloud. "One of the Wyeths lives here, too; or at least he used to. I forget which one."

"I thought Resnick had moved to Europe," Dad said, frowning.

"Came back last fall and built himself a new house," Mr. Dickerman said. "A real eyesore. Ought to run the bastard off the island."

"Frank!" Mrs. Dickerman scolded.

"Well, they ought to," Mr. Dickerman said.

Dad seemed unusually subdued as he and Mr. Dickerman finished hooking up the extension cord and making the arrangements for payment. He was deep in thought during the whole return trip to the cottage--which wasn't exactly a bad thing. Instead of returning by the road, we had to run the extension cord as directly as possible to Aunt Phoebe's--which meant slogging through the Dickermans' overgrown backyard, followed by a brier-filled gully, and then the cord barely reached the living room. Even in our debilitated state, Michael and I probably managed it much better by ourselves than we would have if Dad had insisted on taking an active hand.

Rob pounced on the cord with glee, hooked up his computer, and began tapping away on the keyboard--though whether he was doing useful work or merely composing an e-mail he could send to Red when the phone lines returned, I had no idea. Dad took advantage of the power supply to hook up his portable CD player and put on his beloved Wagner. And then he scurried out of the room again, after turning up the volume enough that he could hear it from anyplace in the cottage. From anyplace on the island, probably; lucky for us the phones were down, or ours would have rung off the hook with noise complaints.

I glanced at Michael to see how he was taking all this. At least so far, he seemed more amused than annoyed. That was one of Michael's charms: his tolerance for my father's eccentricities seemed as great as mine.

Possibly greater, I thought as the orchestra sank its teeth into a loud, rousing passage of the overture.

The opera was just hitting its stride when the music stopped in the middle of one of Briinnhilde's more appalling shrieks.





Chapter 4





A Portrait of the Puffin as a Young Man




In the sudden absence of Wagner, we heard Aunt Phoebe's voice bellowing in the kitchen.

"Never would have come out here in the first place if we'd had any idea we'd run into that son of a--"

"Sshh!" Mrs. Fenniman hissed, and then, a little louder, she called out, "What happened to the power?"