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in for the winter? Do you need a place to live?”
    “I was waiting for the off-season rates to start before I looked around,” she said.
    “I can help you with that. I have a rental house, nothing fancy. In fact, very far from fancy. And the off-season rates just started this minute.”

Chapter 3
    Isaiah opened the door and a terrible whiff of dead fish hit them. His nostrils flared and his eyes squeezed shut, the opposite of what was needed. “Damn! The last renters left their garbage under the sink. Whatever’s there has been building steam for a week.” It was the smell of death, rotting flesh, and Rocky reeled backward, lost her footing, and fell down the three steps of the deck stairway. She dusted herself off while Isaiah flew to her assistance. “This is no way for my new dog warden to start. Don’t take this as an omen. Just look at it as the best introduction you could have to summer people.”
    The cottage was the last on the dirt road. Beach grass, stiff and breeze worthy, surrounded it. “Most people don’t winter here; you’ll see that for yourself. You’re not that far from some of the year-round people. But the back of the house is up against wetlands, so it can’t be built up. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in June and on days when the wind drops off, the mosquitoes will drain every ounce of pleasure along with most of your blood. Stay here while I go grab that maggot-filled garbage and open the window.”
    Rocky gratefully stood on the small deck, bleached silver by the salt and sun. The front of the house faced south and east and stared directly out to the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Between the house and the ocean was a quarter mile of thick vegetation, held together by a cross-hatching of vines that looked like honeysuckle. A hobbit-sized path wound through it to the rock-covered coast.
    Isaiah cursed and Rocky said that the last renters of the season left more than fish garbage. Rocky pulled her eyes from the ocean and headed into the house to give him a hand. She prepared for a disaster within the cottage. She was relieved that disasters were not the sole domain of her life; even good men like Isaiah had unexpected calamities. “Did you bring garbage bags? Let’s just haul all this stuff outside,” she said.
    He stood in the midst of a kitchen covered with crumpled papers, cups half filled with butter that had once been melted for lobster, bowls with the hard unpopped kernels of corn on the bottom, paper bags filled with slightly crushed beer cans. “At times like this, I think the whole human race is going to hell,” said Isaiah. The refrigerator revealed bowls filled with chili and sticks of butter left on crumb-coated saucers, an open juice container, and a Tupperware container filled with contents that neither of them chose to investigate. The couch pillows were on the floor and every dish in the house was in the sink, covered with food gone stiff. It was a mess, all right. Rocky hadn’t seen a mess this big in long time.
    “I hope you got a huge deposit from these people. Who were they anyhow, small-time drug lords?”
    “You wouldn’t believe it. They drove a new Volvo and said they were teachers. That was either not true or our educationsystem is being sabotaged. And the deposit was not worth the stink that they left. But they won’t ever rent on this island again.”
    Rocky and Isaiah opened all the remaining windows, hauled out the trash, and set the dishes to soak. Rocky ran an ancient vacuum cleaner over the floor. She shook the few scatter rugs outside and made a mental note to take them to the Laundromat. The place began to look like someplace where she might be able to take off her shoes. Isaiah left with his truck brimming with black plastic bags of garbage, mumbling about the world ending because of people who can’t wipe their behinds.
    Rocky scrubbed the countertops in the kitchen and the bathroom. Isaiah’s wife Charlotte delivered a box of