Murder With Puffins(18)

"Meg," Michael said. He tugged on the leg of my jeans. I shook him off.

"There's a sign right there--" the man began, raising his hand to point and then stopping when he saw there wasn't a sign after-all. "What the hell have you done with my sign?"

"Don't look at us," I said. "We just got here."

The man snorted in exasperation. He walked forward a few paces, then leaned his gun against a tree and reached down. He pried a battered sign out of the mud beside the path, picked up a large rock--possibly the one I'd thrown at him--and began hammering the sign back into the ground.

"I'm not kidding," he said, looking up from his work. "I'm fed up with people trespassing. And people knocking down my signs. I've served notice that this is private property, and I intend to enforce it."

"Well, serve notice a little more visibly from now on," I said, dodging Michael, who had despaired of making me crouch down again and was trying to put himself between me and the lunatic. "And speaking of serving notice, exactly who are you anyway? I'd like to know whom I'm going to ask the police to charge with attempted murder."

"You know perfectly well who I am!" the man shouted. He threw the rock in my direction, then reached for his gun. I quickly followed Michael's advice and we ducked behind the crest of the path, but instead of firing, the man stormed back toward the house. I suppressed a giggle; he was getting himself even grimier than before, stomping through the mud like that. And when he slammed the door, I burst out laughing: the huge, pretentious--and, no doubt, expensive--front door didn't fit quite right. Perhaps all the dampness had warped it. He had to spend several minutes wrestling it closed, his struggles clearly visible through the sweeping glass wall and slanted glass roof of the entrance hall.

"I'll refrain from saying anything about people who live in glass houses," Michael said. "But they shouldn't shoot rifles at people, either."

"And they definitely shouldn't live this close to the ocean," I said, giggling. A seagull had just flown in from the ocean, banked gracefully over the house, and landed, with a clumsy thud, on the glass roof of the entranceway, which was somewhat sheltered by the rest of the house from the full brunt of the wind. Several other gulls followed, and enough bird droppings coated the glass to show that this wasn't the first time the birds had discovered this refuge. The lunatic suddenly appeared behind the glass of the entranceway, causing both Michael and me to jump. The gulls, however, stared down unmoved as he thumped with a broom handle on the heavy plate glass beneath their feet.

"Serves him right," I said. "I hope that creep has to wash all those windows every day."

And he certainly had a lot of windows. In addition to the main house, we saw a smaller glass building nearby. A studio, apparently; while off-white curtains screened the lower six feet or so of its glass walls, from our place on the hill we could see the tips of several easels peeking over the top of the fabric. Even the nearby woodshed, while not made of glass, looked considerably newer, not to mention more expensive and stylish, than most of the actual houses on the island.

"Who on earth could possibly afford to build a place like this on Monhegan?" I wondered aloud. "Do you have any idea how much it costs to bring supplies and workmen over here?"

"Well, whoever he is, I'm sure he can afford to pay for a lawyer," Michael said. "Let's go back to the village and file charges against him."

"No sense tempting fate, though," I said. "Let's retrace our steps a bit; I think I can find a shortcut through the interior of the island."

As we retreated along the trail, I saw a flash of lavender disappear around a rock ahead of us. Somebody else watching our encounter with the mad hermit, no doubt. I nodded with satisfaction; it looked as if we'd have plenty of witnesses.

My shortcut didn't seem much shorter than going all the way back around the island, but at last we arrived at the village.

"I don't recall seeing a police station," Michael said. "Where are we going to report that lunatic?"

"There isn't a police station," I said. "They call the police over from the mainland when they need them. But a local resident acts as constable until the police arrive. Let's go into the general store and ask who it is."

We squished down the main drag until we reached the general store, then squelched up the front steps.

"I remember him," I said, pointing to a sign in the window that said JEBEDIAH BARNES, PROPREITOR. "His family's run this place for two or three generations now."

"That's good," Michael said. "Maybe he'll remember you; otherwise, we may have a hard time making him believe what just happened."