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the skull, until he could see the orbs of her eyes from above, then he had reattached her facial structure to her skull, using four small titanium plates. The weight on her five-foot, eight-inch frame was down from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and three pounds.
    Liz opened the car door and stood on the doorsill, the better to see the island. They were in Cumberland Sound, part of the Inland Waterway, and the island was showing its narrow southern tip, the bone end of the typical leg-of-lamb shape of an Atlantic Seaboard barrier island. The mouth of the St. Marys River opened to her left, and the sinister, black silhouette of a United States submarine could be glimpsed as it made its way upstream toward its new base at St. Marys. To her right, the Atlantic Ocean began to slip from view behind the low-lying island.
    Beyond a small sea of waving marsh grass and a stand of trees, a gaggle of chimneys rose, hinting at something imposing under them. That would be Dungeness, the main house, Liz thought, remembering the map in her pocket, and, as they made their way up the sound, Dungeness Dock appeared in the distance.
    Liz felt thirsty, and she moved toward the rear of the Cherokee, where a cooler rested. As she reached the back of the car and started around it, a shaft of timber appeared, rushing toward her face. She spun out of the way, suddenly terrified, holding her fragile new visage in her hands, trying not to tremble.
    “Hey, I’m sorry, didn’t see you,” a pleasantlooking young man said, hefting the two-by-four onto his other shoulder.
    “It’s all right,” she replied, leaning against the Jeep for support, trying to slow her heartbeat.
    “You must be Liz Barwick,” a woman’s husky voice said.
    Liz dropped her hands and looked at a fortyish, statuesque woman wearing a cotton shift, her salt-and-pepper hair falling loose about her shoulders.
    “Yes,” she said, feeling somehow cornered.
    “I’m Germaine Drummond,” the woman said, sticking out a hand. “I run Greyfield Inn.” “Hi,” Liz replied, struggling to smile.
    “Ray Ferguson told me you were coming, asked me to look out for you.” Her brow furrowed. “You seem a little shaky.”
    “I’m okay; just a near collision with a piece of lumber.” She nodded at the young man, who was making his way aft.
    “Oh, that’s Ron; he’s a summer waiter at the inn. I’m sorry he scared you.”
    “It wasn’t his fault.” Liz moved to the rear of the Jeep again and opened the tailgate. “Would you like something to drink?”
    “You could force a beer on me, I guess,” the woman replied.
    Liz opened two beers and handed Germaine one. “Ray told me about the inn. It sounds like a nice place.”
    Germaine nodded. “We try. Sometimes I wish it was in a populated place, so we wouldn’t have to do things like run a daily ferry to Fernandina, and go over there once a week for groceries. By the way, give me a list the middle of every week, and I’ll add it to your trip; charge you ten percent for the service.”
    “More than fair,” Liz said. “How long have you owned the place?”
    “I don’t own it,” Germaine said. “My grandfather does; charges me rent. I’ve been running the place since I kicked my husband off the island ten years ago.”
    “Your grandfather is quite old, isn’t he?”
    “Ninety-one. Still drives a jeep all over his island. We had to make him stop riding horses awhile back.” She nodded at the chimneys above the trees. “There’s his house.”
    “It looks big.”
    “Forty rooms. I know, we counted them once, when I was a little girl. My two brothers and I spread out and each took a chunk, then compared notes. The place had a staff of three hundred in the old days, toward the end of the last century.”
    “Three hundred?”
    “They grew their own vegetables, raised and slaughtered their own cattle and hogs and chickens, did their own building and blacksmithing, ran a school, had a doctor and a dentist in