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Without another word she turned off the burners, arranged our food on plates, and poured the strawberry concoction into two glasses.  We sat on stools at the granite center island, eating in silence.  "You can visit me in Rio or Buzios," she said finally.
    "Buzios," I said.  "As soon as I can get there."  I meant it.
    She took another bite, pushed her plate away.  "This is a waste of time," she said.
    I figured she was upset about my abrupt departure.  I expected a scene.
    She shrugged.  "I don’t even like eggs."  She peeled off her shirt, tossed it on the floor, and walked over to the bed.
    I followed.  I could not have predicted how close to losing everything the Bishop case would bring me, but I must have sensed it.  Because as my eyes and hands and mouth traveled over Justine, I felt more than passion.  I felt the need to tap her spirit, to somehow use her aliveness to inoculate myself against death.

Chapter 3
     
    Anderson and I took the forty-five-minute Cape Air flight out of Logan at 1:15 P.M.   The nine-seat, single-pilot Cessna bounced a little in the wind, but gave us no big trouble and a pretty view of the sapphire blue Atlantic on approach.  We came in low enough to glimpse the surfers at Cisco Beach and got an eyeful of the island’s sprawling, gray-shingled estates.
    Nantucket, nicknamed the ‘Gray Lady,’ is actually three islands shaped like a fat boomerang, with a couple spits of land broken off one end.  Legend attributes its formation to ashes which floated out of the pipe of the Indian giant Moshup, mythic guardian of the natives living on Cape Cod.  But if Moshup was charged with protecting his creation and his people, he failed.  During the 1700s, Quaker settlers from Massachusetts prevailed upon the kindly Wampanoag Indians to teach them who to fish Nantucket’s waters, hunt its fowl, and farm its soil.  In turn, the settlers taught the Indians just enough reading, writing, and arithmetic to sell their land.  The Indians learned so well and conveyed so many tracts that their livestock had nowhere left to graze.  That loss, together with mainland imports of whiskey and tuberculosis, left Abraham Quary as the last male Nantucket Indian, when he died in 1854.
    Whaling was the life blood of Nantucket through the 1800s.  Herman Melville used the tragic voyage of Nantucket captain George Pollard, whose ship was rammed by a whale in 1820, as the basis for his masterpiece novel Moby-Dick .  Though perilous, whaling was well suited to the Quaker work ethic — and very profitable.  Money poured into the island, fueling a building boom that stripped most of its trees, but lined Main Street with mansions, one of the later and most prominent of them being Jared Coffin’s three-story home of English brick and Welsh slate.
    In every chapter of its modern history, commerce has driven Nantucket’s growth while extracting bigger chunks of its soul.  So it should have come as no surprise when the decline of the whaling industry, accelerated by the fleet’s heavy losses during the Civil War, was followed by the ultimate devil’s bargain:  the growth of tourism.  The island slowly evolved into a playground of leisure, wealth, and reverie — enough to make any Quaker blanch.  Captain George Pollard’s home became the Seven Seas Gift Shop.  Jared Coffin’s mansion was turned into an inn filled with Colonial-style reproduction furnishings.
    The working soul of Nantucket, the part that churned with native instinct and courage at sea, was buried under so much glitter as to be, for all intents and purposes, dead as the last Wampanoag.
    On the flight over, North Anderson had told me that Darwin Bishop purchased his Nantucket estate in 1999, just after the IPO of Consolidated Minerals and Metals netted him $1.2 billion.  With that kind of windfall, $9.6 million for an eighteen-room spread on about five acres off Wauwinet Road, with views to the ocean and the harbor, must have seemed like