Murder With Puffins Read Online Free PDF Page A

and yellow spots.
    Then we repeated the rummaging, this time in the gardenshed. Underneath a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, a collection of antique life jackets, a gas grill, odd parts of three unmatched croquet sets, and several dozen mildewing stacks of Life magazines from the forties and fifties, we finally unearthed three bright orange industrial-weight extension cords.
    "That should do the trick," Dad said, and we set off for the Dickermans' house.
    I'd forgotten how dark Monhegan nights could be. In clear weather, you could see three times as many stars as in the city, and the sight of the moon rising over the ocean could inspire even me to poetry. But when clouds obscured the moon and stars, as they did tonight, you could really understand the deep-seated human tendency to fear the dark.
    The darkness relented only slightly when we passed by our nearest neighbors, with whom Aunt Phoebe shared her treacherous, muddy little lane. Like Aunt Phoebe, they had only oil lamps and gas appliances. Some residents ran their own small electrical generators--including, apparently, the Dickermans--but these contraptions were noisy and generally less reliable man the old-fashioned alternatives--not to mention so expensive that their owners tended to keep their wattage low to avoid bankruptcy.
    The flashlight wasn't much help, and I felt strangely comforted by the luminous glow of Dad's raincoat as he bobbed along ahead of us.
    Suddenly, just as we reached the head of the lane, the glow disappeared.
    "Dad?" I called, and hurried to reach the point where I'd last seen the glow-in-the-dark raincoat. I tripped over something large and hard and fell flat on my face in the gravel road.
    "Your luggage is here," Dad said. The glow hadn't disappeared entirely, I realized; it was now--like me--horizontal.
    "Are you two all right?" Michael said, coming up beside us.
    "I will be if you take your foot off my hand," I said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.
    "Sorry," he said. "I can't see a thing."
    "Damn that little weasel," I said. "He might at least have run the luggage up to the house."
    "Maybe he was scared of getting stuck in the mud," Michael suggested.
    "Well, we can take it up on the way back," Dad said. "Let's get up to the Dickermans' house before they go to bed."
    The Dickermans, to my surprise, were thrilled to have Dad run a power cord down to our house. Of course, Dad had forgotten to mention that this was a commercial arrangement, the Dickermans being the founders and owners of the Central Monhegan Power Company.
    "I didn't know Monhegan even had a central power company," I said. "Of course, it's been several years since I've spent much time on the island," I added hastily, seeing the hurt look on Mr. Dickerman's broad, friendly face.
    "Well, really it's only one generator," Mr. Dickerman said. "Quite a bit larger than the ones individual households and businesses use, of course."
    "And a bit quieter, obviously, if you've got it anywhere around here."
    "Oh, it's noisy enough, but we've put it up on Knob Hill," Mr. Dickerman said. "It's pretty much out of the way up there, and the noise doesn't bother folks as much. Jim does most of the work on it; he's always been handy that way, Jim has."
    "And so nice that he's found something to do without leaving the island," Mrs. Dickerman put in. She was a sweet, motherly person; I never could figure out how she and her mild-mannered husband had managed to produce so many rowdy and unpleasant sons, at least half a dozen of them. "All my other birds have flown the coop, but Jimmy's happy as a clam, staying here with us, where he can tinker with the generator. Does you good to see how happy he is, up at the electric plant, when he's working on those machines of his."
    "Don't forget Fred," Mr. Dickerman put in.
    "Fred's only here between jobs," Mrs. Dickerman said. "You remember Jimmy, don't you, Meg?"
    I did, actually, with something that approached fondness--he was the one