families, to live the rest of their lives—and to die—among strangers suffering with the same affliction. There was no coming back.”
“Penikese was one of them?”
“In 1905, Massachusetts created the Penikese Island Hospital on this lonely rock in the middle of the bay. Two doctors volunteered to staff it, and five patients—ripped from their homes and their children—were forced to be sent there.”
“How did they live?”
“The patients had to build their own shacks—small, wooden ones. They don’t exist anymore. Fishing boats would drop off fresh food from the mainland, once a week, depositing it at the end of the dock. Letters from home, that sort of thing. One-way service only.”
“And no one ever returned?”
“Not a single soul. The tombstones and crosses are proof of that. Most of the wooden markers have rotted away.”
“What scared you there, Coop?”
“As a kid it was the idea of plague pits. My older brothers would tie up the boat and we’d sneak ashore. I was afraid to go with them, and more afraid to wait alone. Everyone says the island has ghosts. Even a haunted mansion, way back in time.”
“Mansion? In a leper colony.”
“No, no. Before the state took it over. Long gone, but my brothers used to play in the old shafts and tunnels beneath it. That didn’t worry me—I was just too claustrophobic to go down into them—but the sad stories of the lepers really got to me.”
“Sounds like it.”
“The boys used to taunt me—tell me that if I stepped on one of the graves, the ghost of the leper would rise up and, well—kill me. When I was ten, eleven—I believed that.”
“You’ve been to ghost islands before.”
“Not so full of death as Penikese. Not with such a painful past. It’s one of the loneliest little outposts in the world.”
“How long did the hospital last?”
“Only about fifteen years. The government built a leprosarium in Louisiana. This pitiful place went out of business pretty fast after that. Then, about thirty years ago, someone had the idea to use the desolate setting as a school for delinquent boys—really dangerous ones. Kids who needed complete isolation to attempt to resocialize them. The success rate has been less than enviable.”
I could make out fog lights on the road ahead and I braked again, getting over to the right to avoid a pickup truck coming the opposite way. When I reached the traffic light in Falmouth, I could see that no one was approaching the intersection and I ran through the red signal. There was only one more stop sign between where we were and the harbor, then a twelve-mile boat run to Penikese Island.
“It’s biblical, you know,” Mike said. “Leprosy, I mean. Maybe that’s what’s haunting our killer.”
“It was considered a mark of God, wasn’t it? A sign to the priests that the leper was someone who had sinned.”
“Your boy Moses started the whole phobia, Coop.”
“I guess so. I remember in Leviticus, he directed the Israelites to exile lepers, to exile all those who had offended their God.”
Mike knew as much of the Old Testament as the New. “ ‘ Whosoever shall be defiled with the leprosy and is separated by the judgment of the priest ... shall dwell alone without the camp.’ ”
“Father Bernard might smile on you after all.”
The fog swirled around the car as we crested the hill that overlooked the Woods Hole ferry terminal. The sturdy old Islander was sheltered in its dock below us, dark and still, out of service until the first run of the morning.
Off to the right, in Quissett Harbor, the red bubble atop a police cruiser was spinning in the haze, setting off an eerie glow.
“There,” Mike said. “Head for that patrol car.”
“I see it,” I said, nosing the car past the row of stores and restaurants, beyond the scattered buildings of the Oceanographic Institute.
A solo officer was pacing the sidewalk at the end of the dock, talking to someone on his radio, when he saw us get out of the Rhode Island trooper’s car.
The device squawked as he waited for a reply. “You the New Yorkers?”
“Yeah,” Mike answered.
I walked beyond them to the shiny white truck that had been backed into a parking space, blocked from the view of traffic by a large RV that stuck out into the street.
“I was just calling this in to my office,” the cop said. “It’s the stolen vehicle from New Jersey. Got the broadcast a couple of hours ago.”