Sheila scooched to the edge of the sofa, trying to wrap her mind around it. If Dr. Mulligan was seventy-three and Ruby Savage was older than the two than two of them, it would make her over one-hundred and ten years old at the absolute youngest.

That would put her in the running for oldest person in the world, let alone America.

"And I tried," Dr. Mulligan said. "Believe me, I tried to wedge myself between these people and their false gods. Even tried to get the local religious man involved. But Reverend Atkins turned on me at the eleventh hour, the coward. I suspect they had something tawdry to pin on him, seeing as the only thing he's ever had to lose was that congregation of his, what little there is of it."

He glanced at the crucifix on the wall between the mantle and the rifle with a look of abandonment. As if to ask, Why hast thou forsaken me?

"And your mother's colleagues, Martin—this was while your mother was still Away, you understand. I don't suspect she would have stood for such dealings on her watch. Those harridans accosted me at my house in the middle of the night. Scared the living hell out of my wife. And so, with very little reluctance, I promised to stay out of their business if they would leave me to mine."

He flashed a bitter sneer. "Not a day goes by I don't regret not sticking to my guns. Oh, Barbara and I had eight more years together after that, some of them better than any we'd had before. Cancer took her in May of two-thousand. Ovarian. Doesn't that beat all? As if God were playing a sick joke on old Ry and Barbara Mulligan."

His eyes goggled behind the pair of bifocals strapped around his neck. "Wasn't a damn thing I could do about it, either. It'd already made a mess of Barbara's insides before we knew it'd burst through the door. I tell you, I felt just as impotent as the husbands of some of my former patients, if you'll pardon the somewhat clumsy metaphor."

Martin chuckled.

"There's a part of me, however small, who can't help but think what happened to my Barbara might have been a kind of revenge for sticking my snout where it didn't belong. I was born here, that much is true. But I didn't live here my whole life. I moved Away. Like you did. Some might say I fled, and I wouldn't argue that. We came back when my father passed on. Barbara knew nothing of this island nor my bitterness toward it. She'd fallen in love with the old farmhouse. Said we'd raise chickens when I finally opted to close up shop. I retired when I found out she was sick. The very week. It was barely six months 'til I had to bury her. I regret that, too. Not retiring sooner. Never raising those chickens with her."

"Looks like you've done a good job with them," Sheila said. "I'm sure she'd have been proud."