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him.
    ‘I don’t recognize him,’ said Knowles, ‘but then, he’s been in the water. Do you, Axel?’
    Werner shook his head. ‘No, he’s not familiar.’
    ‘Do you mind if I say a prayer for him?’ Knowles asked Bloom.
    Bloom told him that she didn’t mind at all. It wasn’t like it would hurt the dead man. ‘Just don’t touch the body, okay?’
    Knowles produced a rosary from his pocket and knelt by the corpse. Werner bowed his head, but said nothing. Bloom recalled that there was something in Lutheranism about not praying for the dead. Preston, who was Catholic, joined her hands, and crossed herself when Knowles was finished.
    Bloom walked with Knowles and Werner back to the parking lot, and watched them leave. She made calls to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Augusta, and the state police in Bangor, as well as to the Washington County Sheriff’s Department in Machias. Finally she spoke with Lloyd Kramer and arranged to have the body bagged and put on ice until the ME determined how it should be handled.
    She then decided to return home and change into her uniform. It always paid to look official in these situations. She turned the Explorer and headed for the main road. The gradient upward from the beach was comparatively gentle, and the entire strand was visible to passing traffic. As she prepared to make the turn, only one car was approaching, heading north to town: a Mustang that slowed almost to a stop as it passed her. She caught a glimpse of the driver as he glanced first at her, then at the figures on the sand: Rainey and Stynes by the body, and Preston trudging back to her vehicle. He was wearing sunglasses, but Bloom knew him by his car.
    The detective, Parker.
    She had spoken with him only once, when she spotted him at Hayman’s General Store buying bread and milk. She’d introduced herself, and asked how he was settling in, as much to be neighborly as anything else. He’d seemed pleasant, if distant. She knew that he sometimes liked reading the newspaper in the Moosebreath Coffee House, although Bobby Soames had told her that he preferred the little seating area at the back of Olesens Books & Cards. Soames fretted a lot about Parker. He appeared to be under the impression that a gunfight could break out at any moment up in Green Heron Bay. Parker also ate at the Brickhouse a couple of evenings a week, although he usually didn’t drink anything stronger than a soda. Mostly, from what she heard, he just walked on the beach by his house, and traveled twice weekly to the Brook House Clinic for physiotherapy.
    Now she nodded at him, and he nodded back. He took one more look at the activity on the beach, and drove on. She stayed behind him through town until he pulled up outside Olesens. In her rearview mirror, she watched him take a copy of the New York Times from the rack by the door and head inside. Guess it’s true then, she thought. She was curious about him. His presence in Boreas was incongruous, given his reputation. It was like having a grenade rolling around, one you had been assured was defused but hadn’t had time to check out for yourself.
    But she had other concerns today. She thought that she could smell the dead man on the plastic gloves she had discarded on the floor of her vehicle, or maybe she was just imagining it. When she pulled into her driveway, she took a pick-up bag from the supply that she kept on hand for the needs of her black Lab, Jodie, used it to dispose of the gloves, and tied the bag. Ron, her husband, wasn’t home. He was working on a kitchen redesign in Eastport, and would be gone for most of the day. She let Jodie run in the backyard while she changed, then called her back inside and returned to the Explorer. Jodie’s nose was pressed against the glass above the front door as she pulled away, a vision of abandonment. Bloom tried not to look. Sometimes, she was grateful that she’d never had children. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever have been able to