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Chapter One

Teddy Daniel's father had been a fisherman. He lost his boat to the
bank in '31 when Teddy was eleven, spent the rest of his life
hiring onto other boats when they had the work, unloading freight
along the docks when they didn't, going long stretches when he was
back at the house by ten in the morning, sitting in an armchair,
staring at his hands, whispering to himself occasionally, his eyes
gone wide and dark.

He'd taken Teddy out to the islands when Teddy was still a small
boy, too young to be much help on the boat. All he'd been able to
do was untangle the lines and tie off the hooks. He'd cut himself a
few times, and the blood dotted his fingertips and smeared his
palms.

They'd left in the dark, and when the sun appeared, it was a cold
ivory that pushed up from the edge of the sea, and the islands
appeared out of the fading dusk, huddled together, as if they'd
been caught at something.

Teddy saw small, pastel-colored shacks lining the beach of one, a
crumbling limestone estate on another. His father pointed out the
prison on Deer Island and the stately fort on Georges. On Thompson,
the high trees were filled with birds, and their chatter sounded
like squalls of hail and glass.

Out past them all, the one they called Shutter lay like something
tossed from a Spanish galleon. Back then, in the spring of '28, it
had been left to itself in a riot of its own vegetation, and the
fort that stretched along its highest point was strangled in vines
and topped with great clouds of moss.

"Why Shutter?" Teddy asked.

His father shrugged. "You with the questions. Always the
questions."

"Yeah, but why?"

"Some places just get a name and it sticks. Pirates
probably."

"Pirates?" Teddy liked the sound of that. He could see them -- big
men with eye patches and tall boots, gleaming swords.

His father said, "This is where they hid in the old days." His arm
swept the horizon. "These islands. Hid themselves. Hid their
gold."

Teddy imagined chests of it, the coins spilling down the
sides.

Later he got sick, repeatedly and violently, pitching black ropes
of it over the side of his father's boat and into the sea.

His father was surprised because Teddy hadn't begun to vomit until
hours into the trip when the ocean was flat and glistening with its
own quiet. His father said, "It's okay. It's your first time.
Nothing to be ashamed of."

Teddy nodded, wiped his mouth with a cloth his father gave
him.

His father said, "Sometimes there's motion, and you can't even feel
it until it climbs up inside of you."

Another nod, Teddy unable to tell his father that it wasn't motion
that had turned his stomach.

It was all that water. Stretched out around them until it was all
that was left of the world. How Teddy believed that it could
swallow the sky. Until that moment, he'd never known they were this
alone.

He looked up at his father, his eyes leaking and red, and his
father said, "You'll be okay," and Teddy tried to smile.

His father went out on a Boston whaler in the summer of '38 and
never came back. The next spring, pieces of the boat washed up on
Nantasket Beach in the town of Hull, where Teddy grew up. A strip
of keel, a hot plate with the captain's name etched in the base,
cans of tomato and potato soup, a couple of lobster traps,
gap-holed and misshapen.

They held the funeral for the four fishermen in St. Theresa's
Church, its back pressed hard against the same sea that had claimed
so many of its parishioners, and Teddy stood with his mother and
heard testimonials to the captain, his first mate, and the third
fisherman, an old salt named Gil Restak, who'd terrorized the bars
of Hull since returning from the Great War with a shattered heel
and too many ugly pictures in his head. In death, though, one of
the bartenders he'd terrorized had said, all was forgiven.

The boat's owner, Nikos Costa, admitted that he'd barely known
Teddy's father, that he'd hired on at the last minute when a crew
member broke his leg in a fall from a truck. Still, the captain had
spoken highly of him, said everyone in town knew that he could do a
day's work. And wasn't that the highest praise one could give a
man?

Standing in that church, Teddy remembered that day on his father's
boat because they'd never gone out again. His father kept saying
they would, but Teddy understood that he said this only so his son
could hold on to some pride. His father never acknowledged what had
happened that day, but a look had passed between them as they
headed home, back through the string of islands, Shutter behind
them, Thompson still ahead, the city skyline so clear and close
you'd think you could lift a building by its spire. "It's the sea,"
his father said, a hand lightly rubbing Teddy's back as they leaned
against the stern. "Some men take to it. Some men it takes."

And he'd looked at Teddy in such a way that Teddy knew which of
those men he'd probably grow up to be.

Excerpted from SHUTTER ISLAND © Copyright 2003 by Dennis
Lehane. Reprinted with permission by William Morrow, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.