Earl pushed back his chair and stood. “There’s always a chance none of this will come to anything. Maybe your skull isn’t even real; maybe it’s a leftover toy from a party last summer. Or maybe it’s an old Halloween prank. Stranger things have happened out here on Chappy.”

Annie wished he would stop calling it her skull. She stood and carried her glass and his mug to the sink. She couldn’t see very far down the beach from her kitchen window. But if she opened the window, she might hear voices talking in low murmurs. It was hard to believe that one small, solitary part of someone or something might impact so many innocent people.

“As the kids today would say,” she said, “this totally sucks.”

“Yup,” Earl replied. “In the old days, if somebody died and the family didn’t have a plot, or if the poor dead soul didn’t have a family, it wasn’t uncommon for a neighbor or a friend or even an acquaintance to roll the body in a rug—or maybe in a tarp if he was a fisherman—and stuff him in the back of somebody’s station wagon. Then they’d drive onto the boat and deliver him to a funeral home over on the Cape.”

As he was telling his tale—“spinning his yarn,” her dad would have called it—Annie felt her eyes grow wide. “That’s a joke, right?”

Earl shook his head. “Nope. Even back then it took a whole lot of paperwork and a lot of dough to get a body off this goofball island. It was easier to use a station wagon. And it meant that the dead guy would have a decent burial. ’Course, if he or she was cremated, the ashes were picked up later and brought back to the Vineyard for distribution off the cliffs or somewhere on his or her property. Back in the fifties, I remember my dad telling me that one guy wanted his ashes spread on the sidewalk outside The Ritz in OB.” He chuckled. “More than once, I’ve wondered if that was another island legend or if it really happened.”

If there was an appropriate comment, Annie couldn’t think of it.

“Anyway,” he continued, “we have a funeral home here now that takes care of everything. And, as for us, until I get the official word on what is or what isn’t going to happen, I’m going back to the main house. I can finish up painting the front bedroom. Nobody but us will know the difference. Besides, I’m better off being productive than standing around, staring at a bunch of sand and seaweed, playing armchair detective.”

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

“I need to tell Mom not to come,” Kevin said.