a gagging noise in her throat and ducked back outside. “I’ll for one be spending as little time in that place as I can manage, I’d say,” she announced.
Her roommate, Peg, passed all of three seconds in the doorway and turned away, disgusted. “It’s like a fire trap, eh?” she said to Roddy. He let the door swing closed, shoved his hands back into his pockets, and shrugged at the girl, nodding slowly, his mouth an unreadable line.
They stood outside the laundry shack, scuffing their shoes in the dirt amid patches of sad, dead grass. “Um,” Roddy began, and the girls looked at him eagerly. “If you all wanted I could take you around, show you the island some, if you want . . . ?”
The girls conferred wordlessly, shrugging, nodding. Like their spokeswoman, Peg turned back to Roddy. “That’d be grand, Mister . . .”
“Just Roddy’s good.”
“Thank you, yes, that’s grand, if it’s not like a bother to you?”
He drove them in a Lodge van down Sand Beach, that mile of crescent moon that never waxed or waned. Near the Lodge a few large homes sat on the bluffs overlooking the water, salt-stained old mansions whose grand lawns sprawled above the bay. They took the long route around the island, through town, and he showed them Ferry Street, Bayshore Drug, the Luncheonette, Tubby’s Fishhouse, all of which had been there when Roddy left Osprey twenty years before and were still there now, the prices higher, but otherwise pretty much the same.
At the ferry dock Roddy parked the van and climbed out. He slid open the side door and watched as the bevy of redheads and brunettes tumbled out onto the asphalt, chirping and twittering among themselves like a clutch of nestlings.
“This is just where we arrived yesterday, isn’t it?” said a tall, pigeon-toed girl with lank brown hair.
“Only way on-island,” Roddy said.
“Ever read that novel—Agatha Christie, was it? Where they’re stuck on the island, being murdered one by one?” the girl said, taunting a shorter, plumper girl beside her.
“For fuck’s sake—as if I needed reminding of it!” the girl cried.
“And Then There Were None . . .” warbled the instigator.
“Shut your hole,” scolded the other.
Roddy turned away, out toward the water. It was hardly more than a mile across the bay to Menhadenport on the mainland. Still, it was an important mile. It spanned more than distance.
At the edge of the beach stood an improbably tall pole with a platform affixed to its top on which an osprey had built its ramshackle nest, streamers of dried seaweed hanging down like decayed party decorations. It was a quirky twist of things that had an entire island of people standing in awe and reverence to a bird who built a nest like something out of Dr. Seuss. To judge from its nest, you’d imagine the osprey would be a motley-looking bird, tattered and discombobulated, with maybe a few absurdly placed, unnaturally colored bouffant feathers froofing it up like a show poodle. In reality, the bird’s elegance more than made up for its slovenly home. The osprey was a gorgeous creature—the majestic stretch of its wings, partly skeletal, like something prehistoric, but then plumed in contrasting black and white, alternating patterns like the ruffling skirts of a flamenco dancer. The white head with its black bandit’s mask seemed to make perfect sense when you looked at the osprey’s talons: four hooked claws on each foot, deadly as a dragon’s. With such weapons permanently affixed to its body, the osprey seemed smart to wear a mask. It was unquestionably a fearsome and magnificent creature, but perhaps even more so to the people of Osprey Island, who could not help but feel a sense of eminence as the chosen ones, the ones the osprey watched over, the ones who had named their home in the bird’s honor.
Three
THE RAPTOR IS A BIRD OF PREY
The literal translation of the osprey’s genus name, “Pandion haliaetus” is “Pandion’s sea eagle,” but it seems that the scientist who named it thus—one Marie Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de Savigny—was somewhat confused. You see, Pandion was the king of Athens in Greek mythology. Pandion had two daughters, Philomela and Procne. Procne married Tereus. Theirs is a lengthy and bloody story, but suffice it to say that in the end Philomela, Procne and Tereus are changed—as was the convention of Greek mythology—into, respectively, a nightingale, a swallow, and a hawk. If anything, the osprey should have been named after Tereus, as he was the