Creature Discomforts

arsenic and... That was it! Not old ladies. But the ruffles were just ruffles. Gabrielle’s little white dog, Molly the bichon, was still where she’d been the last time I’d seen her, apparently joined to Gabrielle at the middle in the manner of a Siamese twin. Rowdy and Kimi behaved themselves a lot better than they had at our last encounter, only because I’d taken the precaution of stuffing my pockets with cubes of cheddar cheese I’d found, already diced, in a plastic bowl in the cottage refrigerator. I’d felt a stab of guilt. Was I chronically guilty of bribing my dogs? But I was weak and desperate, and the cheese worked wonders.
    “Wally is taking care of the lobsters for me,” Gabrielle went on. She threw one arm toward the side of the house. With the other, she supported Molly, who showed a happy interest in every word Gabrielle spoke. “I can’t bear to murder them, especially slowly. It’s one thing to plunge their heads in boiling water—you know they can’t survive long—but this is different. Grisly. Although, when you think about it, they’re just big insects. But I still don’t like doing it. And there are clams and corn and potatoes, and that’s going to be it, except for a salad and dessert. You can let the dogs go. The other dogs are running around. We’re all down at the water.”
    As I accompanied Gabrielle across the lawn, toward the ocean, she overwhelmed me with human names. A few minutes later, when we joined the other guests, Gabrielle performed cheerful introductions and reintroductions. As I’ve explained, the human names didn’t stick. Consequently, I’ll call by name only the people I got to know later in the evening or saw subsequently: Opal and Wally; Quint and Effie; Gabrielle, of course; and Malcolm Fairley, who hadn’t yet shown up. At least a dozen other adults, plus a gaggle of children, were sitting, standing, or, in the case of the children, cavorting around on the wet rock-and-pebble beach created by the fall of the tide. But I have leaped ahead of myself. I must take care, I find, not to inflict my disorientation on others.
    Gabrielle’s house, I should first mention, faced the ocean. A wide, generous porch ran across the front; it was a definite porch, a roofed veranda. Steps ran down to a front lawn punctuated with a few tall pines, their lower limbs removed to open up the view, which was ungodly spectacular: blue-green ocean, lobster buoys, barren islets that would vanish when the tide rose, and in the distance, tree-covered islands, the line of the mainland, and white-sailed boats. As the lawn crept toward the ocean, it gave way to great stretches of smooth rock. The coast of Mount Desert Island has those tremendous cliffs you see in pictures of Acadia National Park: Otter Cliffs, lots of others. This was a gentle stretch of shoreline. It was easy to find natural staircases that started as dry rock and became damp and barnacle-covered near the seaweed, tide pools, and stones of the beach. Here, directly in front of Gabrielle’s house, the rocks ran out into the water to form a point that probably had a name. Beamon Point? To the left, low cliffs rose to pine forest. To the right of the rocky point, the shore abruptly cut inward to form a large cove.
    A prominent sign demarcated the boundary between Gabrielle’s property and the grounds of the Beamon Reservation. The land directly in front of the house was private property; the Beamon Reservation began only a short distance to the right. In style, the rustic sign was identical to the one by the reservation parking lot, but this one limited itself to the words Beamon Reservation. Beyond the sign, on what was clearly conservation land, Gabrielle’s guests were engaged in a blatant, if merry, demonstration of how to break the regulations so conspicuously posted elsewhere.
    As Gabrielle and the dogs and I picked our way down to the shore, I could see that, for a start, the food was being cooked in genuine clambake fashion. Adjusting layers of seaweed and poking at hot stones with a stick was a man with a small, round head, a large, round middle, and puny limbs. His nearly hairless head and circular face were evenly tan, and he wore a yellow sweatshirt. Picture a little apricot atop a big golden apple.
    We’ll get back to Wally Swan, as the lobster murderer proved to be. I’d evidently met him and his wife, Opal, before. I didn’t remember them. Back to the rules of the Beamon Reservation. No