by Sarah Graves
He’d forgotten this stretch of shoreline was so desolate, and the crying of gulls as they wheeled overhead didn’t help, not even a little bit. Good place for a hideout, though, and now even in the wind he smelled cigarettes. A few more steps and he’d found the bowl-shaped depression that led into an open-mouthed cave about the size of a one-car garage.
The five young men hunkered around a sputtery driftwood fire in it looked up, eyeing him with heavy-lidded hostility. One lumbered to his feet.
“The hell you want?” Harvey Spratt demanded, flicking away his smoke. The medal on a chain around his neck glinted evilly. A Saint Christopher, Sam thought; what a joke. Harvey looked stoned as usual, only on him it didn’t translate to mellowness.
“Got a question for you.”
Behind Harvey, who wore his usual outfit of skinny black jeans, black sweatshirt, a pair of black pointy-toed boots, and a denim jacket whose sleeves didn’t quite reach his gangly wrists, the other four scowled.
Or rather, three of them did. The fourth, a slender youth in chinos and a warm-up jacket with a Red Sox logo on the sleeve, wore a look on his pale face that suggested he’d wandered in among these guys somehow and didn’t know how to get out.
“We ain’t answerin’ no effin’ questions, man,” one of the others declared belligerently. Sam recognized that one.
Harvey’s head snapped around quick as a snake’s toward his mouthy pal. “Shut up, Bogie.”
Harvey looked at Sam again, red-rimmed eyes narrowed sulkily. “Yeah? Like what, how to—” The activity he mentioned was not only disgusting, it was anatomically impossible.
Sam took a few more steps toward the cave. When dealing with guys like this, it was important to show that you were not afraid of them. Although he was, a little; anyone would be.
The fourth kid, the civilized-looking one, hung back, but the trio of tough guys stubbed out a cigarette apiece in the damp sand before advancing, glowering menacingly.
“No, Harvey,” said Sam, ignoring them. Wally Belknap, Todd Verdun, and Bogie Kopmeir were only the latest in a long line of Harvey Spratt wannabes. But unlike their hero, they were all too dull and lazy to start any trouble on their own, and too scared of Spratt’s unpredictable temper.
Well, all but Bogie, Sam realized. The Kopmeir kid had some possibilities of his own as a dangerous little dude: nastier than Harvey’s usual follower, for one thing, and smarter for another. A wild, unpleasant grin twisted the kid’s lips.
The kid in the Sox jacket looked worried and as if he still wanted to get away, but then a grimly determined expression filled his face. “Bogie,” he said warningly to the Kopmeir kid. “You don’t want things to get out of hand, do you? So maybe you should calm down a little and—”
Bogie spun hard at the same time as his fist shot out fast, stopping the kid’s mouth with a solid punch that broke the kid’s two front teeth. His other fist swung around, knocking the kid’s head sideways; Bogie punched it back the other direction, one-two one-two, finishing with an uppercut that lifted the now-woozy kid off his feet and sent him flying backwards.
His head hit the rocky overhang of the cave’s mouth with a wet-sounding crunch that turned Sam’s stomach. “Jesus,” he said to Harvey, “put a leash on that thing, will you?”
He reached for his cell phone. “You guys want to get out of here, that’s fine, but I’m calling an—”
Ambulance, he would have finished, but by then Harvey was advancing purposefully on him.
“Hey, look, all I wanted was to ask you about Karen Hansen,” Sam began, trying to wave Harvey away, possibly even defuse this situation, which, he was just now beginning to realize, was more fraught than he had at first understood.
“I mean, if you knew any—” Then Bogie was on him, the kid’s surprisingly strong arms wrapping around his shoulders and hauling him downward. His feet slipped on the weed-slimed rocks; in the next moment, Bogie knelt on his chest, gripping his throat in tough little hands that stank of nicotine.
And of something else. Bogie’s eyes were spark-spitting pin-wheels; too late, Sam realized that more than cigarettes were being smoked in the cave. More than pot, too.
“Whatta you wanna know about her for? We dunno nuthin’ about that, whatta you want? You try’na get us in trouble? Huh?”
Bogie’s hot breath stank. His fingers tightened their grip. Sam heaved his body but couldn’t break free.
“No! Jesus, Spratt, get him off me, what the freak is the matter with—”
Bogie drove a kneecap into Sam’s solar plexus. “Shut up!” he grated out, spit spraying from his lips. Without warning, he reared back, clenched a fist tight, high in the air, and punched Sam in the side of the head with it.
Everything went gray. Sam’s body felt floaty, as if he might just rise right up off the stony beach here and sail, cloudlike, into the sky. If only he could remember what direction up was …
Somebody kicked sand at him, his eyes painfully blinded all at once. One of the other boys protested. “Hey, come on, Bogie, don’t get us all in—”
Bogie released Sam suddenly and jumped up, pulling something from his belt. Sam couldn’t see what happened next but the other kid’s voice rose in a shout that thinned to a short, sharp cry, half shriek and half horrifyingly wet gargle.
Cursing foully, Spratt grabbed Sam by his hair, hauling him up, then kicked him hard in the chest with his pointy boots.
Once with each boot. Sam gagged, dropped back to his hands and knees, and swayed there, trying to summon something.
Anything … “Hey, what’s going on? Stop it, you … damn, let go of me! Get your … stop it—”
It was Carol’s voice and it sounded like she was in trouble. But he couldn’t do anything about it.
“Where’s Sam?”
It was ten in the morning and Bella was in the kitchen, scouring the insides of the cabinets. I’d told her that I would paint them anytime she liked, but she’d decided to clean them first; just knowing the grime was still under there would keep her up nights.
“Don’t know,” she said, wiping back a hank of her henna-red hair with a rubber-gloved hand. When she cleaned a cabinet, she really cleaned a cabinet. “And don’t,” she added, “you dare paint this until I’ve given it another going-over.”
It looked to me as if another going-over might reduce that cabinet to toothpicks. But I promised I wouldn’t, and went into the parlor where Wade was looking over the bills.
“I wish I did know,” he said when I asked if he knew where Sam was. “I’d tell him those cable movies he and Chip have been watching cost four bucks each.”
He looked at me over the half-glasses he wore for reading. I thought he looked adorable in them, but now was probably not the time to say so. “Expanded cable service,” he said, “sure costs us a lot of money.”
“But without it we wouldn’t get all the sports stations in the universe,” I replied, and left him to digest this while I tried the dining room.
“Nope,” said my dad, thin and wizened with a braid of gray hair tied in a leather thong, a ruby stud in one earlobe, and a face like a winter apple. He was frail since a car accident the previous year, but still cheerful in his chair by the fireplace, with his jackknife in hand.
Having given his answer, he smiled very sweetly at me and returned to his job of carving clothespin dolls for a craft shop downtown. Clothed in Maine-themed costumes sewn out of brightly colored remnants from Ellie’s scrap basket, the dolls had become a surprise hit, and he had orders to fill.
“How do you know Sam didn’t ask for his job back and then just go out there to the boatyard to do it?” asked Ellie, twenty minutes later when she picked me up out front.
We were going over to the church to see if any inspection progress had been made, or even was imminent; judging by the cop cars and other official vehicles still out front, though, I did not have high hopes for this.
“Because his boss from the boatyard called him,” I replied. “And he s
ays Sam’s not there.”
Ellie pulled to the curb outside the yellow crime-scene tape, now windblown into shredded tangles.
“He says that what with the second half of the storm coming and all, he’ll forgive and forget as long as Sam shows up for work this afternoon,” I said.
On the sidewalk, Ellie glanced up uneasily. What had been a nearly clear sky just an hour earlier was thickening to murk. A mean breeze, damp and penetrating, put its cold hand on my neck just as Paulie Waters came out of the church.
“Hey, you two,” he began angrily, hurrying toward us with a frown. Paulie was a nice enough guy, but he was not very sure of his own authority and that made him touchy.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going inside. We just want to know when the work can start.” I peered past him through the propped-open church doors.
“Work?” He looked at me like I was nuts, and this, to be honest, I suppose was not a completely unreasonable notion on his part. He’d once had to get me off the top of an extension ladder by calling in a utility crew, complete with forty-foot bucket truck.
I’d been trying to unclog the gutters at my old house at the time; the episode accounted for both my ongoing fear of ladders and Paulie’s ongoing doubts about my mental stability. Anyway:
“No work going on here.” He shot an unhappy look back over his shoulder. “Unless you mean top-secret state police work, too super-confidential for a low-on-the-totem-pole guy like me.”
Oh, so that was the trouble. Paulie felt dissed, not a good mood to find him in if you wanted any cooperation out of him. A man in a sport jacket and tie appeared in the church doorway.
“Hey, Waters! Go find us a hacksaw or something, will you? DA wants a piece of that ladder.”
Interesting; I supposed he meant the one that went up to the belfry, too large and cumbersome to bring in whole if only a part of it was needed for evidence. Skin shreds were snagged in its splintery rail, maybe, I thought. Or hair, or …
“Yeah, yeah.” Paulie’s voice didn’t hide his scorn as he turned back to me. “Those guys. They’d haul the whole building away if it wasn’t attached to the ground.”
I looked up, awed as usual by the sheer, soaring height of the spire, no great shakes in a big city but still so tall within the context of a small Maine village that its perspective seemed off, almost as if it was …
Leaning. The really high part, where the steeple soared up to a point from the bell enclosure was …
“Paulie.” I caught his sleeve. Alerted by my expression, Ellie gazed up at the steeple, too.
“Jake?” she said uncertainly. “Jake, is it just me, or is that thing—”
“It’s not just you. Paulie, you go in there and tell those guys that if they cut one more piece out of that church …”
In my own old house, over the years everything had become so shakily dependent on everything else that you could take out a curtain rod and a ceiling would fall down, drain a radiator and the furnace could explode. For all I knew, the belfry ladder was the only thing keeping this whole building from collapsing.
“… it could come down on their heads,” I finished. “I’m not kidding, the place is termite food.”
I wasn’t sure Paulie was familiar with carpenter ants. “They should at least be wearing hard hats,” I said. “Really, you go on in there and see the sawdust piles everywhere, that’s what those insects spit out.”
I took a breath. “And from how big those piles are, you just imagine how much of that place those bugs have eaten.”
“Jake,” said Ellie urgently, “it’s moving. When the wind blows hard up there, it’s actually—”
Paulie looked unconvinced. But then his gaze followed hers. “Holy jeebus,” he breathed. “Holy criminy jeebus.”
He ran for the church. “You guys? I think you better …”
The sky blackened as we got back into the car. “What next?” said Ellie, since obviously we weren’t going to accomplish any more here; if the state guys treated Paulie like a gofer, it was a certainty that they weren’t about to be taking advice from a couple of snoopy local women.
Besides, it was not my ambition to die by having a two-hundred-year-old church steeple squash me. “Next?”
I settled back into the passenger seat. “Next,” I grated out as premonitory spatters of rain washed a maple leaf down the windshield, “next we’re going to find my son, the job quitter.”
Ellie wisely decided not to say anything. “And then,” I said as a particularly harsh gust of wind flung the leaf away, “then he’s going to tell me just what the …”
I paused. Crude talk, Bella always said, was unladylike and unbecoming; an intelligent woman could surely find some other way of expressing herself besides uttering filth.
“… what the freak he thinks he’s doing,” I finished.
Uncrudely. Unprofanely. Unfilthily, even.
But very, very sincerely.
11
“Where’re we going?” asked Dylan.
They passed a small wire paddock with two ponies in it, across the road from a tiny airfield whose apron sported a fuel system, a small wood-frame office, and a handful of Quonsets.
“That was Bob Arnold on the phone, back in the room just now,” she said. “Asked me if I’d take a drive, keep an eye peeled for that Hansen guy. The dead girl’s father, he’s gone AWOL, apparently.”
It was why Paulie Waters had been looking for her, she guessed, but she’d managed to annoy him enough to make him forget his errand, confirming again her doubts about the hotheaded young cop. Meanwhile, this was not at all what she wanted to be doing, but she meant to stay in the Eastport police chief’s good graces if she could.
Besides, reacquainting herself with this territory was not a bad idea. The road S-curved along the edge of an inlet where the tide was just now beginning to turn inward, the sloping shore littered with storm-flung driftwood and clots of dark green seaweed. Coming out of the turn, she put her foot on the accelerator, then had a new thought and slacked off again.
“I should take you back to your own crime scene soon, though, right? I mean, you have your own work to do, I shouldn’t have assumed—”
But he was already shaking his head. “Those guys don’t need me, they know their jobs. And they sure as hell don’t want me in their faces, either. To them, I’m just a spy for the bosses.”
He half-turned to her. “So, you really think somebody faked those Eastport postmarks just to get us here?”
Lizzie shrugged. “Can you think of any other explanation?”
She could, but she didn’t want to tell him about it. Not yet.
He settled back against the seat. “I guess not. Weird, though. I’m going to have to cogitate a little on this one.”
Yeah, she thought. You cogitate on it. Ahead another Quonset hut, this one long abandoned, bore a rusted sign proclaiming that it had once sold FRESH C-FOOD!
“So, what’s this Hansen guy look like, d’you know?” Dylan asked. “I only got a little glimpse of him at the scene the other night.”
Uphill away from the water, the road ran straight between stands of scrubby trees, their slender trunks and bare, spidery branches silver-gray in the weak sunlight. Lizzie remembered this stretch from back when she was here looking for Nicki, right after Sissy died.
It hadn’t changed. Neither had Dylan, relaxed in the passenger seat, unaware of her suspicions.
“Me too. But I’m guessing he looks like someone whose last living relative is gone,” said Lizzie.
She didn’t know if it was true about Hank Hansen or not. But it was about her, and Dylan knew it.
Let him cogitate on that.
“What are you doing here?” Sam whispered. Carol lay beside him at the rear of the cave that faced onto the beach.
“What are you doing here?” They were tied hand and foot with lengths of the plastic rope that floated in on the tide all the time around here, from salmon pens, fishing boats, and renegade lobster bu
oys.
In the gloom at the back of the cave, he could just make out Carol’s lips tightening. It would’ve been darker except for his penlight, which while plundering Sam’s pockets Harvey Spratt had at first mistaken for drug paraphernalia.
Eyes narrowing with sudden interest, Harvey had closed his hand around the pen and clicked it on, then flung it away in disgust when it proved itself to be not smokable or shootable. Now it shone brightly from where it had landed and rolled, clinging precariously at the edge of a granite ledge, above and behind Sam and Carol.
“What I’m doing here is none of your business,” she snapped in reply to his question. “Honestly, Sam, I don’t see why you act like you’re my father all the time. It’s a real drag.”
Sam was against hitting women, or hitting anyone in fact. But at the moment he felt lucky that his hands were tied. “You came back here with money, didn’t you? You wanted Harvey to sell you something, but he wouldn’t front it to you.”
Let her have it on the promise of payment later, in other words; something like marijuana or pills. Carol liked fun, the kind that made her forget where she’d come from and what sorts of things she’d done prior to meeting Sam. And sometimes, that kind of fun needed a little help.
Meanwhile, you could yell your head off inside this cave and no one outside it would hear you over the wind and waves. Carol sighed heavily.
“Yes,” she conceded. “But what do they want with us now?” She’d clocked that little idiot Bogie a pretty good one when he’d lost his grip on her for an instant. But the blue-green shiner above her left cheekbone was Bogie’s reply, and seeing it gave Sam a bad feeling.
Icy water oozed down the granite behind his head, and into his collar. “Where’d you park your car?”
“Why?” Carol snapped back at him. “You want to criticize how I did that, too?”
He rolled hard toward her. “Where’d you park it, damn it?” If it was nearby, someone looking for him might draw a connection and get the idea that he might be around here.