The Colorado Kid   ::   Кинг Стивен

Dave glanced over at Stephanie from his perch on the corner of Vince’s desk. “First the back, then the knuckles,” he said. “If he could learn how to play ‘Dry Bones’ on his ribcage, we could get him onAmerican Idol.”

“Always a critic,” Vince said amiably, waiting for his machine to boot up. “You know, Steff, there’s something perverse about this. Here am I, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twentytwo and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.”

“I don’t believe yellow legal pads had been invented in Victorian times,” Stephanie said. She shuffled through the papers on her desk. When she had come to MooseLook andThe Weekly Islander in June, they had given her the smallest desk in the place—little more than a gradeschooler’s desk, really—away in the corner. In midJuly she had been promoted to a bigger one in the middle of the room. This pleased her, but the increased deskspace also afforded more area for things to get lost in. Now she hunted around until she found a bright pink circular. “Do either of you know what organization profits from the Annual EndOfSummer Gernerd Farms Hayride, Picnic, and Dance, this year featuring Little Jonna Jaye and the Straw Hill Boys?”

“That organization would be Sam Gernerd, his wife, their five kids, and their various creditors,” Vince said, and his machine beeped. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Steff, you’ve done a swell job on that little column of yours.”

“Yes, you have,” Dave agreed. “We’ve gotten two dozen letters, I guess, and the only bad one was from Mrs. Edina Steen the Downeast Grammar Queen, and she’s completely mad.”

“Nuttier than a fruitcake,” Vince agreed.

Stephanie smiled, wondering at how rare it was once you graduated from childhood—this feeling of perfect and uncomplicated happiness. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you both.” And then: “Can I ask you something? Straight up?”

Vince swiveled his chair around and looked at her. “Anything under the sun, if it’ll keep me away from Mrs. Dunwoodie and the fire hydrant,” he said.

“And me away from doing invoices,” Dave said. “Although I can’t go home until they’re finished.”

“Don’t you make that paperwork your boss!” Vince said. “How many times have I told you?”

“Easy for you to say,” Dave returned. “You haven’t looked inside theIslander checkbook in ten years, I don’t think, let alone carried it around.”

Stephanie was determined not to let them be sidetracked—or to let them sidetrack her—into this old squabble. “Quit it, both of you.”

They looked at her, surprised into silence.

“Dave, you pretty much told that Mr. Hanratty from theGlobe that you and Vince have been working together on theIslander for forty years—”

“Ayuh—”

“—and you started it up in 1948, Vince.”

“That’s true,” he said. “’TwasThe Weekly Shopper and Trading Post until the summer of ’48, just a free handout in the various island markets and the bigger stores on the mainland. I was young and bullheaded and awful lucky. That was when they had the big fires over in Tinnock and Hancock. Those fires…they didn’tmake the paper, I won’t say that—although there were those who did at the time—but they give it a good runnin start, sure. It wasn’t until 1956 that I had as many ads as I did in the summer of ’48.”

“So you guys have been on the job for over fifty years, and in all that time you’venever come across a real unexplained mystery? Can that be true?”

Dave Bowie looked shocked. “We never said that!”

“Gorry, you werethere!” Vince declared, equally scandalized.

For a moment they managed to hold these expressions, but when Stephanie McCann only continued to look from one to the other, prim as the schoolmarm in a John Ford Western, they couldn’t go on. First Vince Teague’s mouth began to quiver at one corner, and then Dave Bowie’s eye began to twitch. They might still have been all right, but then they made the mistake of looking right at each other and a moment later they were laughing like the world’s oldest pair of kids.



3

“You were the one who told him about thePretty Lisa,” Dave said to Vince when he had gotten hold of himself again. ThePretty Lisa Cabot was a fishing boat that had washed up on the shore of neighboring Smack Island in the nineteentwenties with one dead crewman sprawled over the forward hold and the other five men gone. “How many times do you think Hanratty heard that one, up n down this part of the coast?”

“Oh, I dunno, how many places do you judge he stopped before he got here, dear?” Vince countered, and a moment later the two men were off again, bellowing laughter, Vince slapping has bony knee while Dave whacked the side of one plump thigh.

Stephanie watched them, frowning—not angry, not amused herself (well…a little), just trying to understand the source of their howling good humor. She herself had thought the story of thePretty Lisa Cabot good enough for at least one in a series of eight articles on, tada, Unexplained Mysteries of New England, but she was neither stupid nor insensitive; she’d been perfectly aware that Mr.Hanratty hadn’t thought it was good enough. And yes, she’d known from his face that he’d heard it before in hisGlobe funded wanderings up and down the coast between Boston and MooseLook, and probably more than once.

Vince and Dave nodded when she advanced this idea. “Ayup,” Dave said. “Hanratty may be from away, but that doesn’t make him lazy or stupid. The mystery of thePretty Lisa — the solution to which almost certainly has to do with gunhappy bootleggers running hooch down from Canada, although no one will ever know for sure—has been around for years. It’s been written up in half a dozen books, not to mention bothYankee andDowneast magazines. And, say, Vince, didn’t theGlobe —?”

Vince was nodding. “Maybe. Seven, maybe nine years ago. Sunday supplement piece. Although it might have been the ProvidenceJournal. I’m sure it was the Portland SundayTelegram that did the piece on the Mormons that showed up over in Freeport and tried to sink a mine in the Desert of Maine…”

“And the 1951 Coast Lights get a big play in the newspapers almost every Halloween,” Dave added cheerfully. “Not to mention the UFO websites.”

“And a woman wrote a book last year on the poisonin’s at that church picnic in Tashmore,” Vince finished up.