“You’re just on the other side of the church,” Eddie said. We passed the church, and then he gestured to a two-storey cottage. “Here it is!”
The new police station, though there was no signage that gave it away yet, overlooked the harbour. Its blue front door was bookended by matching shrubs with red flowers. It was two floors, with a sharply pitched tin roof and a chimney.
Eddie unlocked the door and pushed it open. “You’re probably going to want to get some new curtains.”
He moved aside and let me in.
The downstairs looked weirdly cosy for a police station, and I immediately saw what Eddie meant—the curtains in the windows were floral and chintzy and didn’t at all match the new station décor. The front room was a foyer, with a dull beige couch, the usual “Stop it or cop it!” and recruiting posters already tacked up. A laminate counter, obviously newly installed, looked totally out of place against the sandstone walls. Behind the foyer there was an office and a cell, and a small kitchen at the back of the cottage. The stairs to my private residence were between the cell and the kitchen. I climbed them to discover two bedrooms upstairs, a tiny living room, and an even tinier bathroom. The ceilings were low, and the stone walls were cool. The living room and one bedroom overlooked the harbour—down at the jetty, pallets and boxes were still being unloaded. The back bedroom and the bathroom overlooked my dilapidated garden, a sagging wooden fence, and the equally dilapidated back garden of the cottage behind mine.
I headed back downstairs to where the guys from the barge were unloading shit in the foyer.
“I’ll give you an extra fifty if you can get my bed upstairs,” I said. “Each.”
Eddie moved out of their way. “This used to be the mayor’s house,” he said.
“The mayor?”
“The ex-mayor,” he said. “Clarry. The current mayor is Red Joe. He was supposed to come and meet you, but he’s sorting out some issue with Katrina Finch’s chickens, because the dog got into one of the pens and ate a bunch of eggs.”
“That...that’s something the mayor has to deal with?”
Eddie wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, well, it’s his dog. Well, technically it’s Joe’s sister Amy’s dog, but because Amy’s up to her arse in fish all day—she’s starting up this whole aquaculture thing on the western side of the island—Hiccup hangs out with Joe instead, and this little guy”—he patted the baby’s head—“hangs out with me.”
The baby gurgled happily at him.
The guys from the barge, with a lot of swearing, got the bits of my bed upstairs. I wasn’t looking forward to putting it back together. My knuckles were still missing skin from when I’d unscrewed it all a few days ago. Both the guys looked pretty out of breath by the time they got downstairs again.
“I’d offer you a cup of coffee or something, but I don’t know where anything is,” I said.
“We’re heading back anyway,” one of them said, and gave me a pointed look.
I dug my wallet out of my jeans and paid them, and they muttered their goodbyes before heading back along the harbour wall towards the jetty. I was half tempted to run after them and beg not to be left behind.
Eddie must have seen it in my expression. He flashed me a reassuring smile. “Dauntless is a little, ah, quirky, but you’ll get the hang of it eventually.”
“Nobody on the jetty would even talk to me.” I felt exactly as pathetic as that sounded.
Eddie winced. “Oh. Yeah. I know that feeling. They take a while to warm up to outsiders—I think some of them are still warming up to me, actually. And they really don’t like authority figures. It’s in their DNA.”
“Because of the mutiny? But that was?—”
“Two hundred years ago, yeah.” He laughed. “I’ve had this argument before, believe me. I still have it, at least three times a week. And I lose it every time.”
I listened gratefully while Eddie gave me a rundown on how things worked at the island, like where the shop was—and there was only one—where to pick up a handy map—the tourist information place or the museum—and what to do if the power went out—tell some guy called Buzzy Pete from the power house.
“Busy Pete?”
“No, buzzy.” Eddie wrinkled his nose. “I think there was an electric shock incident a few years ago.”
“Seriously?”
“You’ll get the hang of it, I swear,” he said.
I really wanted to believe him, but what was that saying about protesting too much?
After Eddie left, I started to make myself at home. I unpacked my groceries first, and what had seemed like a shit ton of them when I was ten minutes from the closest supermarket suddenly seemed like a whole lot less. Especially since Eddie had warned me about island prices, and also about the temperament of the lady who ran the store. I figured she was the woman I’d seen down at the jetty haranguing the barge crew about broken jars.
I left the front door open as I worked, thinking that maybe someone would drop in and introduce themselves. Weren’t small places meant to be friendly? Or at least full of busybodies? But as the afternoon slowly wore on, nobody turned up except a scruffy looking long-haired cat with a torn ear and a murderous expression. It stalked into the kitchen like it belonged there, and I frankly didn’t have the balls to tell it that it didn’t.
