Chapter One

In Provincetown, I felt enveloped in the shivery skin of a paranoid, all goosebumps and heartbeat. Everyone was a suspect in the brutal murders. Nothing seemed real but a sense of fear, fear as elemental and prevalent as the Cape Cod sand.

Provincetown is sand. It's just a sandbar really, washed together by glaciers and billions of tides—and slowly washing apart. Roots hold the whole of Cape Cod together, roots of grasses and shrubbery and trees. What man has done, building windmills and saltbox houses, Coast Guard stations and condominiums, the Pilgrim Monument and Route 6, is all secondary. Provincetown and all of Cape Cod is sand, no more stable than the sandbar at your favorite beach, the one that shifts, seductively, from summer to summer. That evangelist, who intruded into our lives that summer, was right about one thing, about the temporary nature of this coast ...

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A ship was the harbinger of disasters to come, a ship the otherworldly white of a piece of the moon, like the Flying Dutchman dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor. But everyone knew this wasn't the ghost vessel of maritime legend, but the Swedish tall ship, the Vasa, sailing down the coast from Boston to Annapolis, with a crew of blond cadets with sunburnt ears, dressed in wide-collared, old-fashioned sailors' suits. Everything that happened that hot, dry summer when the rain refused to come, when the drought inflicted a kind of malnutrition on the land, seemed to begin with the presence of that ship on the silvery stillness of Provincetown Harbor.

I teased my friend Arthur about the Va

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