Murder With Puffins(9)

"I wouldn't mind so much if I could just use my laptop," Rob said.

"Can't you just ran it on battery?" Michael asked.

"I could, except the battery's old; it only holds about a fifteen-minute charge," Rob said. "And it takes me ten minutes to boot up and figure out how to open my word processor."

"I tell you what," Dad said. "Let's ran an extension cord up to the Dickermans' house. I'm sure they wouldn't mind."

Whether the Dickermans would mind or not was irrelevant; I doubted they could resist Dad when he got his mind set on doing something.

"Ugh," Rob said, and sneezed. A patently phony sneeze, I thought; obviously designed to serve as an excuse for not sloshing out in the rain with Dad. But it served its purpose. Mother, Aunt Phoebe, and Mrs. Fenniman immediately turned their full attention to medicating Rob. I took advantage of the distraction to pour my herbal tea into an already-moribund potted plant.

"Come on, Meg; you can help me ran the extension cord," Dad said, picking up a flashlight. "You, too, Michael. Fresh air will do you a world of good."

I didn't really want to go back out into the rain. I wanted to curl up someplace quiet and sleep for a few years. But it didn't look as if I'd get any peace and quiet in the cottage for a while, with Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman arguing about the weather and trying to pour their potions and philters into me. Not to mention the way my stomach reacted to the smell of all the food. Maybe fresh air was a good idea. I sighed, then got up and followed Dad and Michael to the coatrack beside the kitchen door, where we rummaged through a rather random collection of rain gear. We finally found slickers for all three of us, though Michael's was too short, mine nearly dragged the ground, and Dad's was glow-in-the-dark pink with lime green and yellow spots.

Then we repeated the rummaging, this time in the gardenshed. Underneath a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, a collection of antique life jackets, a gas grill, odd parts of three unmatched croquet sets, and several dozen mildewing stacks of Life magazines from the forties and fifties, we finally unearthed three bright orange industrial-weight extension cords.

"That should do the trick," Dad said, and we set off for the Dickermans' house.

I'd forgotten how dark Monhegan nights could be. In clear weather, you could see three times as many stars as in the city, and the sight of the moon rising over the ocean could inspire even me to poetry. But when clouds obscured the moon and stars, as they did tonight, you could really understand the deep-seated human tendency to fear the dark.

The darkness relented only slightly when we passed by our nearest neighbors, with whom Aunt Phoebe shared her treacherous, muddy little lane. Like Aunt Phoebe, they had only oil lamps and gas appliances. Some residents ran their own small electrical generators--including, apparently, the Dickermans--but these contraptions were noisy and generally less reliable man the old-fashioned alternatives--not to mention so expensive that their owners tended to keep their wattage low to avoid bankruptcy.

The flashlight wasn't much help, and I felt strangely comforted by the luminous glow of Dad's raincoat as he bobbed along ahead of us.

Suddenly, just as we reached the head of the lane, the glow disappeared.

"Dad?" I called, and hurried to reach the point where I'd last seen the glow-in-the-dark raincoat. I tripped over something large and hard and fell flat on my face in the gravel road.

"Your luggage is here," Dad said. The glow hadn't disappeared entirely, I realized; it was now--like me--horizontal.

"Are you two all right?" Michael said, coming up beside us.

"I will be if you take your foot off my hand," I said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't see a thing."

"Damn that little weasel," I said. "He might at least have run the luggage up to the house."

"Maybe he was scared of getting stuck in the mud," Michael suggested.

"Well, we can take it up on the way back," Dad said. "Let's get up to the Dickermans' house before they go to bed."

The Dickermans, to my surprise, were thrilled to have Dad run a power cord down to our house. Of course, Dad had forgotten to mention that this was a commercial arrangement, the Dickermans being the founders and owners of the Central Monhegan Power Company.

"I didn't know Monhegan even had a central power company," I said. "Of course, it's been several years since I've spent much time on the island," I added hastily, seeing the hurt look on Mr. Dickerman's broad, friendly face.

"Well, really it's only one generator," Mr. Dickerman said. "Quite a bit larger than the ones individual households and businesses use, of course."