The Colorado Kid

6

“A murder victim shows up on the island’s only public beach and the local law calls the editor of the local newspaper?” Stephanie asked. “Boy, that reallyisn’t likeMurder, She Wrote.”

“Life on the Maine coast is rarely likeMurder, She Wrote,” Dave said in his driest tone, “and back then we were pretty much what we are now, Steffi, especially when the summer folk are gone and it’s just us chickens—all in it together. That doesn’t make it anything romantic, just a kind of…I dunno, call it a sunshine policy. If everyone knows what there is to know, it stops a lot of tongues from a lot of useless wagging. And murder! Law! You’re a little bit ahead of yourself there, ain’tcha?”

“Let her off the hook on that one,” Vince said. “We put the idea in her head ourselves, talkin about the coffee poisonins over in Tashmore. Steffi, Chris Robinson delivered two of my children. My second wife—Arlette, who I married six years after Joanne died—was good friends with the Robinson family, even dated Chris’s brother, Henry, when they were in school together. It was the way Dave says, but it was more than business.”

He put his glass of soda (which he called “dope”) on the railing and then spread his hands open to either side of his face in a gesture she found both charming and disarming.I will hide nothing, it said. “We’re a clubby bunch out here. It’s always been that way, and I think it always will be, because we’ll never grow much bigger than we are now.”

“ThankGod,” Dave growled. “No friggin WalMart. Excuse me, Steffi.”

She smiled and told him he was excused.

“In any case,” Vince said, “I want you to take that idea of murder and set it aside, Steffi. Will you do that?”

“Yes.”

“I think you’ll find that, in the end, you can’t take it off the table or put it all the way back on. That’s the way it is with so many things about the Colorado Kid, and what makes it wrong for the BostonGlobe. Not to mentionYankee andDowneast andCoast. It wasn’t even right forThe Weekly Islander, not really. Wereported it, oh yes, because we’re a newspaper and reporting is our job—I’ve got Ellen Dunwoodie and the fire hydrant to worry about, not to mention the little Lester boy going to Boston for a kidney transplant—if he lasts long enough, that is—and of course you need to tell folks about the EndOfSummer Hayride and Dance out at Gernerd Farms, don’tcha?”

“Don’t forget the picnic,” Stephanie murmured. “It’s all the pie you can eat, and folks will want to know that.”

The two men laughed. Dave actually patted his chest with his hands to show she had “gotten off a good one,” as island folk put it.

“Ayuh, dear!” Vince agreed, still smiling. “But sometimes a thing happens, like two high school kids on their mornin run finding a dead body on the town’s prettiest beach, and you say to yourself, ‘There must be astory in that.’ Not just reporting—what, why, when, where, and how, but astory — and then you discover there justisn’t. That it’s only a bunch of unconnected facts surrounding atrue unexplained mystery. And that, dear, is what folks don’t want. It upsets em. It’s too many waves. It makes em seasick.”

“Amen,” Dave said. “Now why don’t you tell the rest of it, while we’ve still got some sunshine?”

And Vince Teague did.