Here was the thing Stephanie loved best aboutThe Weekly Islander, the thing that still charmed her after three months spent mostly writing ads: on a clear afternoon you could walk six steps from your desk and have a gorgeous view of the Maine coast. All you had to do was walk onto the shaded deck that overlooked the reach and ran the length of the newspaper’s barnlike building. It was true that the air smelled of fish and seaweed, but everything on MooseLook smelled that way. You got used to it, Stephanie had discovered, and then a beautiful thing happened—after your nose dismissed that smell, it went and found it all over again, and the second time around, you fell in love with it.

On clear afternoons (like this one near the end of August), every house and dock and fishingboat over there on the Tinnock side of the reach stood out brilliantly; she could read the sunoco on the side of a diesel pump and theLeeLee Bett on the hull of some haddockjockey’s breadwinner, beached for its turnoftheseason scraping and painting. She could see a boy in shorts and a cutoff Patriots jersey fishing from the trashlittered shingle below Preston’s Bar, and a thousand winks of sun glittering off the tin flashing of a hundred village roofs. And, between Tinnock Village (which was actually a goodsized town) and MooseLookit Island, the sun shone on the bluest water she had ever seen. On days like this, she wondered how she would ever go back to the Midwest, or if she even could. And on days when the fog rolled in and the entire mainland world seemed to be cancelled and the rueful cry of the foghorn came and went like the voice of some ancient beast…why, then she wondered the same thing.

You want to be careful, Steffi, Dave had told her one day when he came on her, sitting out there on the deck with her yellow pad on her lap and a halffinished Arts ’N Things column scrawled there in her big backhand strokes.Island living has a way of creeping into your blood, and once it gets there it’s like malaria. It doesn’t leave easily.

Now, after turning on the lights (the sun had begun going the other way and the long room had begun to darken), she sat down at her desk and found her trusty legal pad with a new Arts ’N Things column on the top page. This one was pretty much interchangeable with any of half a dozen others she had so far turned in, but she looked at it with undeniable affection just the same. It was hers, after all, her work, writing she was getting paid for, and she had no doubt that people all over theIslander ’s circulation area—which was quite large—actually read it.

Vince sat down behind his own desk with a small but audible grunt. It was followed by a crackling sound as he twisted first to the left and then to the right. He called this “settling his spine.” Dave told him that he would someday paralyze himself from the neck down while “settling his spine,” but Vince seemed singularly unworried by the possibility. Now he turned on his computer while his managing editor sat on the corner of his desk, produced a toothpick, and began using it to rummage in his upper plate.

“What’s it going to be?” Dave asked while Vince waited for his computer to boot up. “Fire? Flood? Earthquake? Or the revolt of the multitudes?”

“I thought I’d start with Ellen Dunwoodie snapping off the fire hydrant on Beach Lane when the parking brake on her car let go. Then, once I’m properly warmed up, I thought I’d move on to a rewrite of my library editorial,” Vince said, and cracked his knuckles.

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.