The body of water that surrounds the island in this corner of Cape Cod Bay is called Billingsgate Sound, and stretches around the sunken island from Eastham on the south to the entrance of Wellfleet Harbor on the north. This is because Billingsgate is a sunken island and is visible only briefly, in all its soggy splendor, twice a day at tide's farthest ebb. It appears on nautical charts in a color between that of either land or sea. Two and a half miles directly offshore from our cottage in Eastham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, lies Billingsgate Shoal. It looked like a Winslow Homer watercolor… It was just sitting out there on the sand flats. If anyone had told me that all the pain and killing would begin with my sneaking a look at a stranded fishing boat I would have called them nuts. The operation was a success because the patient died. I cut a human head in two, right down the middle. My most interesting recent operation was quick, spontaneous, and without benefit of surgeon's tools or anesthetic. I'm an oral surgeon, a cross between a doctor and a dentist, who performs tooth extractions and general and cosmetic surgery of the lower face and jaw. I'm Charles Adams, a doctor who lives with his wife, Mary, and two almost-grown sons in Concord, Massachusetts.
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