The Ghost

swung wildly, before settling contentedly over the yellow route.
    Exactly what I thought I was doing I still don’t really know. I couldn’t even be sure that McAra had been the last driver to enter an address. It might have been some other guest of Rhinehart’s; it might have been Dep or Duc; it could even have been the police. Whatever the truth, it was certainly in the back of my mind that if things started to get remotely alarming, I could stop at any point, and I suppose that gave me a false sense of reassurance.
    Once I was out of Edgartown and onto Vineyard Haven Road, I heard nothing more from my heavenly guide for several minutes. I passed dark patches of woodland and small white houses. The few approaching cars had their headlights on and were traveling slowly, swishing over the water-slicked road. I sat well forward, peering into the grimy morning. I passed a high school, just starting to get busy for the day, and beside it the island’s set of traffic lights (they were marked on the map, like a tourist attraction: something to go and look at in the winter). The road bent sharply, the trees seemed to close in; the screen showed a fresh set of evocative names: Deer Hunter’s Way, Skiff Avenue.
    In two hundred yards, turn right.
    In fifty yards, turn right.
    Turn right.
    I steered down the hill into Vineyard Haven, passing a school bus toiling up it. I had a brief impression of a deserted shopping street away to my left, and then I was into the flat, shabby area around the port. I turned a corner, passed a café, and pulled up in a big car park. About a hundred yards away, across the puddled, rain-swept tarmac, a queue of vehicles was driving up the ramp of a ferry. The red arrow pointed me toward it.
    In the warmth of the Ford, as shown on the navigation screen, the proposed route was inviting, like a child’s painting of a summer holiday—a yellow jetty extending into the bright blue of Vineyard Haven Harbor. But the reality through the windscreen was distinctly uninviting: the sagging black mouth of the ferry, smeared at the corners with rust, and, beyond it, the heaving gray swell and the flailing hawsers of sleet.
    Someone tapped on the glass beside me and I fumbled for the switch to lower the window. He was wearing dark blue oilskins with the hood pulled up, and he had to keep one hand pressed firmly on top of it to prevent it flying off his head. His spectacles were dripping with rain. A badge announced that he worked for the Steamship Authority.
    “You’ll have to hurry,” he shouted, turning his back into the wind. “She leaves at eight-fifteen. The weather’s getting bad. There might not be another for a while.” He opened the door for me and almost pushed me toward the ticket office. “You go pay. I’ll tell them you’ll be right there.”
    I left the engine running and went into the little building. Even as I stood at the counter, I remained of two minds. Through the window I could see the last of the cars boarding the ferry, and the car park attendant standing by the Ford, stamping his feet to ward off the cold. He saw me staring at him and beckoned at me urgently to get a move on.
    The elderly woman behind the desk looked as though she, too, could think of better places to be at a quarter past eight on a Friday morning.
    “You going or what?” she demanded.
    I sighed, took out my wallet, and slapped down seven ten-dollar bills.

    ONCE I’D DRIVEN UP the clanking metal gangway into the dark, oily belly of the ship, another man in waterproofs directed me to a parking space, and I inched forward until he held up his hand for me to stop. All around me, drivers were leaving their vehicles and squeezing through the narrow gaps toward the stairwells. I stayed where I was and carried on trying to figure out how the navigation system worked. But after about a minute the crewman tapped on my window and indicated by a mime that I had to switch off the ignition. As I did so, the screen died again. Behind me, the ferry’s rear doors closed. The ship’s engines started to throb, the hull lurched, and with a discouraging scrape of steel we began to move.
    I felt trapped all of a sudden, sitting in the chilly twilight of that hold, with its stink of diesel and exhaust fumes, and it was more than just the claustrophobia of being belowdecks. It was McAra. I could sense his presence next to me. His dogged, leaden obsessions now seemed to have become mine. He was like some heavy, half-witted