Murder With Puffins(5)

I pointed to the island's half a dozen pickup trucks lined up, fender-to-fender, on the dock, with their tailgates open toward the arriving crowds. Beyond the trucks, a steep gravel road, already swarming with birders, led up toward the village proper.

"The two hotels each have a pickup truck to take their guests' baggage," I said. "If you're staying at a bed-and-breakfast or a cottage, you hire one of the freelance pickups to haul your stuff."

"Just our stuff?" Michael said. "What about us?"

"We walk," I said. "Unless you want us to get a reputation as lazy city folks."

Michael and I stood back, though, until the logjam of birders cleared. Which didn't take long: As soon as the birders realized the ferry wasn't going anywhere, they all panicked and scurried up the hill. Birders who had planned to leave set out to reclaim the rooms they had recently vacated before the newly arrived birders checked in. The new arrivals hurried after them to wave their confirmation letters and credit cards before their stranded colleagues established squatters' rights.

Within minutes, the dock lay deserted. The few travelers, like Winnie and Binkie, who owned cottages and didn't have to worry about someone else displacing them had gone into the small shop at the foot of the hill to drink hot tea and catch up on the local gossip. Lucky that Michael and I weren't staying in a hotel; I didn't think I could have beaten even the oldest and most arthritic birder up the hill. We declined an invitation to join the Bumhams and found ourselves alone on the dock, surrounded by mountains of luggage higher than our heads.

"Are they all just going to leave their luggage here?" Michael asked.

"Why not?" I said. "Who would steal it, and where could they possibly hide it if they did? There's no getting off the island until the ferry starts running again."

We found a truck with room for our larger bags, and paid the exorbitant hauling fee. Despite my warnings, Michael tried to talk the driver into giving us a ride.

"No room," said the driver. His broad face looked vaguely familiar. He was about my age, which meant if he was a local, I'd probably played with him as a child. Or, more likely, beaten the tar out of him for picking on my much younger brother, Rob, if my memories of some of the other children we'd played with on the island were accurate. His clothes smelled of cigarette smoke and beer, and he had a seedy, furtive air that made me wonder, just for a moment, if letting him have our baggage was really a good idea.

"We could wait till you come back," Michael said.

"Not coming back," the driver replied. "Not for a while anyway. You could walk there sooner."

"I'm not sure my friend is up to the walk," Michael said, putting a protective arm around me.

I did my best to look frail and in need of protection as the driver peered at me. I could tell I wasn't succeeding. Which didn't surprise me; when you're nearly five foot nine, people tend to look at you and think, Sturdy. Unless you're model-thin, which I'm not. Even with Michael looming half a foot taller beside me, I obviously didn't look like the driver's idea of a damsel in distress.

"She's getting over a broken ankle," Michael said. "She's not supposed to overdo it."

I switched from frail to suffering stoically. The driver still wasn't fooled.

"Only a quarter of a mile," he said. "Ain't even uphill most of the way."

With that, he jumped into the cab of the truck and gunned the engine.

The truck took off, spinning its wheels a little before the tires got enough traction to climb the steep slope up from the docks. Little blobs of mud spattered us.

"Bloody little weasel," I snapped. "Bad enough he wouldn't give us a ride--"

"Don't worry," Michael said, wiping a bit of mud out of his left eye. "It'll wash off by the time we get to the cottage."

"Yes, it is beginning to drizzle a bit more heavily, isn't it?"

"We follow him?"

I glanced over. Michael was staring up the hill.

"Strange," I said. "The hill didn't seem as steep when I was a kid."

Michael chuckled.

"I remember it always used to drive me crazy how long it took for us to get to the cottage from the docks."

"Oh great."

"But that was mostly because Dad insisted on stopping to talk to everyone along the way. We'd take two or three hours, sometimes. But really it's only a fifteen-minute walk."

"The sooner we begin, the sooner we'll get warm and dry," Michael said, hoisting his carry-on bag to his shoulder. "Lead on, Macduff."

We trudged up the hill. Ahead of us, we could see the last two birders hiking stoutly toward the crest. The rest had no doubt reached their hotels or bed-and-breakfast lodgings long ago and were now watching whatever birders watch when the weather deprives them of their natural prey.