A Butterfly in Flame Read Free Page B

like their much larger sisters further south, Long Island and Cape Cod. The town of Stillton occupied the hill.
    “What is this, a joke?” Fred marveled. “It can’t be real.” Stillton was like a movie set for a story, perhaps set in the innocent 1950s, in which some dreadful things are going to happen to quaintly unsuspecting salt-of-the-earth New Englanders. With maybe one foreigner—perhaps of undefined Jewishness—whom everyone suspects until he or, perhaps, she, turns out to be the one who saves the day.
    “Not even a McDonald’s?” Fred expostulated. He’d counted on a mess of hamburgers, along with something crisply greasy. Beer he had with him. Most of the town’s buildings were cottages, two stories, sided with clapboard or gray weathered shingles. The small Main Street offered two places to buy groceries, two cafés, a gas station, “J & J Service,” and the Stillton Inn. Its faded “Vacancy” sign did not project optimism. The sign swung dismally although there was no wind. Perhaps the people who had designed this movie set had wired it to swing. Maybe it could creak as well, when things got tense.
    At the far side of the town’s commercial district, after the “Co-Ed Hair Salon,” Main Street ended abruptly at a cross street, Academy Lane, on the far side of which the academy’s main buildings—apparently three in all—occupied the frontage overlooking the shingle beach and the long gray ocean. It was an unimpressive spread. Two long buildings, one of which was identified as Stillton Hall, were of a single story in white clapboard, and a third, more cottage-like, had, in the shade of its porch, a sign saying
Admissions.
    If joke it was, the town was, in its simple way, a lovely joke. An overall sense of shabby seediness gave it an air of honesty, as if the only reason for its buildings was protection from the weather, rather than ostentation. At either end of the town, circling the hill that ended the promontory, small cottages, not the monstrosities Newport calls cottages, but the kind Hansel and Gretel lived in, had small bare yards sloping to the beaches, where lobster traps were piled, or buoys, hunks of Styrofoam. Overturned dinghies waited out of reach of high tide. The smell was salt and gradual marine decay; the sky raucous with birds.
    Fred parked his car near Stillton Hall and strolled. The place had everything: just enough people of assorted ages were in the streets. Not many. The weather was unpleasant and you would only be out in it if you had good reason. Around the academy buildings, the visible people tended to be of student age, but in motion, not just hanging around. As he moved away from the academy’s buildings, and toward the edge of town, the right number of pickup trucks was waiting for the last trumpet in side yards. A causeway—this was too much!—led to a little white lighthouse whose photo-electric mechanisms, as Fred stared at it, caused its light to begin its revolving flash, accompanied by a reassuringly mournful hoot of foghorn. At rickety small pilings, and the town dock, below the academy buildings, both honest fishing boats and pleasure craft bobbed side by side.
    It was too good to trust. “It’s too much,” Fred grumbled. “All it lacks is the ‘lone seagull.’” There were so many seagulls, and they were so insistent, it was impossible to believe that any one of them had ever known a moment’s peace, or solitude. Except in evocative literary pleas for sympathy, a lone seagull is a rare bird indeed. “Bring this set to Paramount, they’d laugh at you. They’d tell you—and it’s true—‘Nobody’d buy this.’”
    Except—and the obvious truth of the observation followed him, and filled him with misgivings—anyone
would
buy all of this. Why hadn’t they? Something was terribly wrong here. It was unnatural. The entire town of Stillton, Massachusetts, should long since have been bought by developers and ruined. There should be motels,