The red only deepened, though, and plumes of deep blue feathered up around it. Angie rode with Bubba in the van and I rode ahead of them in the Porsche as Lovell led us back through Hingham and onto Route 3 again, heading farther south.
It wasn’t a long ride. A few exits later, he pulled off by Plymouth Rock, and then, a mile later, turned down several smaller dirt roads, each getting dustier and less developed as we hung way back and hoped we didn’t lose him in any switchbacks or small lanes shrouded by thick vegatation and low tree limbs.
I had my windows rolled down and the radio off, and I could hear him occasionally, the crunch of his tires on rutted road up ahead, a strain of the jazz on his stereo flowing through his sunroof. We were deep in the Myles Standish forest, as far as I could tell, the pine and white maple and larch towering over us under the red sky, and I smelled the cranberries long before I saw them.
It was a sweet, sharp smell, hot with a secondary odor of fermenting fruit laid bare to a day’s sun. White vapors rose and drifted through the trees as the night cooled the bog, and I pulled over in the last clearing before the bog itself, watching Lovell’s taillights wind down the final small lane that led to the soft banks.
Bubba’s van pulled in beside the Porsche, and the three of us exited our vehicles and carefully shut our doors behind us so that the only noises they made were soft clicks as the locks caught. Fifty yards through thin trees we heard Miles Lovell’s door open, followed by the snap of it shutting. The sounds were hard and clear out here, traveling over the misty bogs and through the thin tree line as if they were occurring beside us.
We walked down the damp, dark lane that led to the bog, and through the thin trees we caught glimpses of the sea of cranberry, green at this stage of their growth, the knobby surfaces of the fruit bobbing in the moisture and white vapor, lapping gently against themselves.
Footsteps echoed off wood and a crow cawed in the deepening night air and the treetops rustled in a soft humid kiss of wind. We reached the edge of the tree line by the rear bumper of the BMW, and I peeked my head around the final tree trunk.
The cranberry bog lay wide and undulating before me. The white vapor hung like cold breath an inch over the crop, and a cross of dark plank wood divided the entire bog into four long rectangles. Miles Lovell walked up one of the shorter planks. In the center of the cross was a small wood pump shed, and Lovell opened its door, walked inside, and shut the door behind him.
I crept out along the shoreline, used Lovell’s car to block me, I hoped, from the view of anyone on the far side of the bog, and looked at the shed. It was barely big enough to qualify as a Porta Potti, and there was one window on the right side facing the long plank that stretched north across the bog. A muslin curtain hung down on the other side of the glass, and as I watched, the panes turned muted orange with light and Lovell’s muddy silhouette passed by and vanished on the other side.
Save for the car, there was no cover out here-just soggy shore and marshy ground to my right that buzzed gently with bees, mosquitoes, and crickets rousing themselves for the night shift. I crept back to the tree line. Angie, Bubba, and I worked our way through the thin trunks to the last group fronting the bog. From there we could see the front and left side of the hut and a portion of the cross that stretched over to the opposite shore and disappeared in a black thicket of trees.
“Shit,” I said. “Wish I’d brought the binoculars.”
Bubba sighed, pulled a pair from his trench coat, and handed them to me. Bubba and his trench coat-sometimes you’d swear he carried a Kmart in the thing.
“You’re like Harpo Marx with that coat. I ever tell you that?”
“Seven, maybe eight hundred times.”
“Oh.” My cool quotient was definitely slipping.
I trained the binoculars on the shed, racked the focus, and got nothing for my efforts but a clear view of wood. I doubted there was a window on the far side, and the one I’d seen on the right wall had been curtained, so it appeared for the moment that all there was to do was wait for the mystery man to appear for his meeting with Lovell and hope the mosquitoes or bees didn’t come out in force. Of course, if they did, Bubba probably had a can of repellent in his trench coat, maybe a bug light.
Around us, the sky bled free of red and gradually painted itself dark blue, and the green cranberries brightened against the fresh backdrop while the mist changed from white to mossy gray and the trees turned black.
“You think the guy Miles is meeting could’ve shown up first?” I asked Angie after a while.
She looked out at the hut. “Anything’s possible. He would have had to approach from another way, though. Lovell made the only tracks over there, and we’re parked to the north.”
I panned the binoculars to the southern tip of the cross where it disappeared in tall stalks of withered yellow vegetation rising out of a gaseous marsh teeming with mosquitoes. That definitely seemed the least appealing and most difficult direction from which to approach, unless you really dug malarial infections.
Behind me, Bubba snorted and kicked at the ground, snapped a few thick twigs off a tree.
I turned the lenses on the opposite shore, the eastern tip of the cross. There, the shore looked firmer and the trees were thick and dry and tall. So thick, in fact, that no matter how much I adjusted and readjusted the focus, I could see nothing but black trunks and green moss going back fifty yards.
“If he’s in there, he came from the other side.” I pointed, then shrugged. “I guess we get a glimpse of him on the way out. You got a camera?”
Angie nodded, pulled from her bag a small Pentax with built-in auto lenses and flash adjustments for night shooting.
I smiled. “One of my Christmas presents.”
“Christmas ’97.” She chuckled. “The only one I can safely show in public.”
I caught her eyes, and she held my gaze for a moment in which I felt a stab of sudden, overpowering yearning. Then she dropped her eyes, a flush of heat rose up my face, and I went back to the binoculars.
“You guys do this sort of shit every day, don’t you?” Bubba said after about another ten minutes. He took another pull from his vodka bottle and burped.
“Oh, sometimes we get car chases,” Angie said.
“What a godawful boring fucking life.” Bubba fidgeted, then absently punched a tree trunk.
I heard a muffled thump from the shed, and a line of lower shingles shook. Miles Lovell, stuck in a pump shed, kicking the walls, as bored as Bubba.