The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  He closed his eyes and gave a brief, teeth baring groan of frustration when he heard the ringing tone stop and the line switch to the distinctive hiss of the answering machine. His own voice came on a moment later and he drummed his fingers, looking around; the message seemed endless. He wondered if Loren was home, or not. Sometimes she just ignored the phone and let the machine take care of business; she'd stand by and listen, but she wouldn't pick it up.

  "Loren?" he said. "It's me. It's Ross. If you're there, lock the doors and windows. Or better still, get out of the house. Don't leave a message or anything to say where you've gone, I'll phone around and find you. Don't be scared. I'll explain when I get back."

  An intense, reddish light under one of the doors told him that it was time to get out of there, and fast.

  He hung up, and he ran. He was coughing when he got outside. The building was lit from within now, like a shadow theatre, and it was almost as if he could see figures dancing across the big foyer windows.

  But he turned his back, and started away.

  He'd only one regret.

  And this was that he'd told her, Don't be scared.

  It was dark when he finally got there, but the outside light was on. Maybe Loren had only just arrived back from wherever she'd been. The side door to the house was on the latch but there was a window open alongside it. Village life had tended to make them lazy about home security. He went in and called her name.

  There was no response. The house gave back nothing but an ambience of emptiness.

  She'd heard the message, and had gone around to a neighbour. What else could she have done? But she should have secured the place behind her, at least. He went through into the small police office to check on whether the answering machine had been reset.

  It hadn't.

  It had been unplugged. Both cassettes had been removed, the one for the incoming messages and the looped cassette that carried his own voice. They were nowhere around. He looked at his desk. There was no definite sign, but he knew almost immediately that it had been searched and then set right again. It was still something of a mess, but it wasn't quite his mess anymore. He turned around and went out, intending to call Loren's name to the empty house once more.

  He found her on the stairs.

  She was lying just above the middle landing, around the corner where she couldn't be seen from the hallway. She was head-down, feet pointing back the way she'd apparently fallen. One shoe had come off and was sitting on the third step from the top. To his eye it looked too neat, too much as if it had been placed there for an effect rather than simply lying where it had landed.

  Aldridge sat down heavily on the lower stairway, and put his head in his hands.

  He didn't make a sound. He didn't do anything. His mind raced, but to no purpose whatsoever. He seemed to stand apart from his own thoughts, watching them go by like an out of control carousel too fast to be boarded. And all that he could say was a low, "Ohhh, shit," again and again.

  After a while, he sighed and straightened.

  She was still warm. And she was damned heavy.

  There had been a time when he could lift her like nothing. These last few years, he hadn't ever lifted her at all. They'd outgrown those kinds of games. Seemed to have outgrown everything, in fact, and nothing had come along to fill up the spaces. Their time in the Bay and the valley hadn't been their best.

  But, still…

  He managed to pull her to the top of the stairs and then, with a little more dignity, to lift her up and carry her through to the bed. He laid her on top of the covers and then went back for the lost shoe. But then he couldn't get it onto her foot, and so he took off the other one and set the pair on the floor next to her. He avoided looking at her face. Her face was a stranger's now, too relaxed, and with its lines wiped like a tape. He ought to cover it with something, really, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to do it. Too much of an admission of the end. Too final.

  He straightened her clothes. He crossed her hands and they fell into place quite naturally; by her hands, she might almost be sleeping. He kissed her once, on the forehead. Her body was warm, but the skin on her face was cool. The curtains were half open. He drew them shut.

  From the doorway, he looked back. The way he'd laid her out, she looked like a Pope or something. A sudden rage turned in him like a beast in the deep, but within a second he'd fought it down. The surface remained calm. He went along the upper landing to the linen cupboard, and got out a folded bedsheet. It wasn't one of those they'd bought for the nursery; that had all been cot sized stuff. He wasn't exactly sure at which point she'd got rid of it; like everything else it had just gone, with no mention from either of them.

  Like everything else.

  This time, he looked at her face. All hurts forgotten.

  And then he covered her.

  He walked down the stairs like a man of twice the weight. He felt sick and impossibly, impossibly weary. His mind took in the details but made very little of them. Nothing stolen, nothing interfered with; to the unsuspicious observer, it might well have looked like yet another accident. No drowning element this time, though. She was widening her scope. One death by fire, another by falling.

  For how long did the woman think she could go on like this?

  Forever, in her own mind, perhaps; because Aldridge could see no end to it. He thought of the others. He thought of the children. And now this.

  How was he going to tell anyone? You couldn't explain her. Not without looking into those eyes, and glimpsing what concealed itself behind them. Whatever it was, it was sharp and it was very, very clever. Whether it was really only a part of her, he couldn't say; expensive doctors argued over that kind of thing in courtrooms for days.

  Mad dog, he thought.

  According to procedure, he ought now to be calling his area sergeant. But he went back into the police office.

  And there, without anger and without any obvious trace of passion, he got out the keys to his gun cupboard.

  Ted Hammond's dream.

  He's walking through the boatyard, while a mist is rising out over the lake. In the dream he comes across the dripping figures of Wayne and Sandy; they're down by the one of the docks, the one of the old dry docks that he's been cleaning out and restoring. Now that the boards are completely off, it's a square, dark pit that in certain light can look like an open grave. Although he's drained it now, in his dream it's still half filled by water and weeds. The two are stepping up out of the darkness of the pit.

  His appearance is a surprise to them.

  He says, "Wayne? Is that you?"

  And Wayne says, "Go back, dad. You're not supposed to see us."

  "But why, Wayne?" he says — the one, all encompassing question that he's been asking over and over since the day of their discovery. "Why?"

  "She wouldn't like it," Wayne says.

  "Come home," Ted pleads. "I'm sorry I got angry about your exams."

  "No, dad," Wayne says, and he turns to look out over the water. There might be something in his expression, but Ted can't actually make out his face.

  Sandy is beside him, saying nothing.

  "I've told you," Wayne says. "We can't come home. We're with her, now."

  FORTY

  It was getting late into the evening. Pete and Diane went to the restaurant, to see if Alina would be there. She wasn't, but Angelica explained how she'd borrowed the van and gone home. Diane glanced at Pete, and Pete said nothing. He hadn't seen Alina looking ill or unhealthy for some time, now; not since the evening of the big party. Then, she'd seemed to be struggling to hold herself together. After that night, it had never been an issue again.

  And then, pressing them to complete secrecy — as she'd already pressed five other people so far in the evening — Angelica told them about Ross Aldridge's sensational new theory about the serial killer who had set up covert operations in the valley. Set up around the same time that Tom Amis had put in an appearance, she hinted heavily, and added th
at Aldridge had gone to interview him.

  Again, Diane glanced at Pete.

  Again, Pete said nothing.

  Their next stop was at the yard for Pete to pick up his car; at this hour there shouldn't have been much of anything going on, just boat owners drifting in and out along the lakeside boardwalk or maybe using the laundromat or the vending machines. But the workshop lights were on, and Frank Lowry's car was still outside; for Lowry to stick around so late was pretty well unprecedented, and so Pete asked Diane to wait for a couple of minutes while he looked in to see if there was any problem.

  "Ted's over at the marina," Lowry told him. "But don't expect him to make a lot of sense."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Don't ask me. I've given up trying to make him out. You're his friend, you take over. Something's wrong with him, and I'm sick of asking him what."

  Pete went out between the workshop and the showroom, through an enclosed space that was crowded with big cruisers being stored out of the water. They'd been raised up on Valvoline drums and made secure with planks and wedges. They were crammed close together with a dozen well-used car batteries in the shelter under each of them, and the big hulls dwarfed anybody who walked through. He couldn't help feeling a little spooked. In daylight, he'd never given it a second thought.

  Or in darkness, before tonight.

  He could see Ted's lights out on the rough ground behind the house. They were the old incandescent gas-powered lamps with big reflectors that were hardly ever used, except in the winter time when they were handy for heating up the workshop. This part of the yard had always been something of a dumping ground for the relics of the trade — spare hulls and old skiffs, stacks of timber, cracked and useless celluloid windscreens, duckboarding… even an entire wooden building complete with windows, dismantled into sections and stacked for so long that they'd gone mossy and rotten. The lights were almost at the end of the property, where a row of fence posts and wire marched out into deep water to mark the boundary between the yard and the adjacent woodland.

  The old dry dock, Pete realised as he drew nearer. The reflectors on the lights were angled into it.

  All that Pete could see was the top of a ladder as he picked his way over the uncertain ground, but when he called Ted's name he saw the ladder move after a moment's delay. Ted appeared a few seconds later, clambering out of the dock as Pete approached. He stood looking flushed, slightly breathless, and — was Pete imagining this? — just a little wild.

  "Ted," he said. "You've got Frank so worried, he won't go home. What's going on?"

  "Nothing. I've told him as much."

  Pete was going to take a look over into the dock, but Ted was somehow blocking his way. It didn't look deliberate.

  Pete said, "So, what are you doing?"

  "Cleaning it out, trying to free up the gear. There's thirty years of seepage and slime in there, but it's basically sound."

  "Yeah, but at this hour…"

  "When else?" Ted said. "What am I going to do, sit in the house and think? No thanks. It's difficult enough. Tell Frank to stop being such an old woman and get himself home. And you do the same."

  "Are you sure you're all right?"

  "I'm all right. So get on with your life. Go."

  So Pete went. He glanced back once, in time to see Ted disappearing down the ladder into his pit. Ted didn't wave, or even look at Pete.

  Back in the workshop, he reported the drift of the brief conversation to Frank Lowry. "He looks a bit tired," Pete said. "But nothing weird."

  "He was down in that old dock, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Except that he isn't working on it. He's taken an old chair down and set it on a flat piece of board to stop the legs sinking in. He just sits there, like he's waiting for something to happen."

  "Like what?"

  "Try asking him," Lowry said darkly, "and see what you get."

  There seemed to be nothing more that he could do at the yard. So Pete drove home in his own car, and Diane followed in the pickup. He could see in the mirror that it was a bumpy climb for her. The Zodiac had put down ruts over the months, and the Toyota didn't fit them. They both had to brake hard when a rabbit dashed out into the lights and froze, something that Pete had found to be a regular hazard when night-driving along this stretch. He felt as if his life had begun to spin so fast that it was in danger of tearing itself apart. He felt as if he'd become accountable for responsibilities that he wasn't even aware of. He felt as if he was beginning a long slide into one of his own nightmares

  And when they finally reached the old wooden cottage, they found it closed-down and dark.

  "She's not home," Pete said.

  "She could be sleeping."

  "I don't think so. The van would be here. We'll have to wait for her. Can you do that with me?"

  "Of course," Diane said.

  They got out of the pickup. The porch steps creaked as they climbed them.

  She said, "Let's be careful anyway."

  "She once said that she wouldn't ever want to hurt me. This could be her chance to prove it."

  He went inside, and switched on the hall light. Within moments there were a couple of craneflies and a moth dancing around the shade, lured in from the darkness outside. Pete led the way down to Alina's room. Her door was slightly ajar, no light inside. He gave the door a push, so that it swung inward.

  A single, metallic click.

  "If you were shorter and better looking," a man's voice said, "I'd have blown your head off."

  FORTY-ONE

  Alina's bedside reading lamp came on, revealing Ross Aldridge in the act of reaching across for the switch. He was in a chair that had been positioned so that it faced the door square-on, and the lamp was beside him. His free hand held a rock steady shotgun that was pointing directly at Pete.

  Pete said, "Is this how the police say welcome home?"

  Aldridge didn't smile. He didn't show any inclination to lower the shotgun, either; it was as if he considered himself to be in a strange land where there are no certain allies.

  He said, "Where is she?"

  "Gone, by the look of it."

  "Until when?"

  A good question, and one that Pete wouldn't have minded the answer to; but then he found it in a single glance around.

  "Quite possibly for good." He pointed toward the empty dressing-table. Aldridge didn't even move his eyes to follow. "Her scrapbook of home, it isn't there. It's the dearest thing she owns. It's just about the only thing she owns. She wouldn't be without it."

  Diane moved into the room behind him now, as Aldridge said, "So the next question is, why?"

  "I think the next question ought to be what do you think you're doing, sitting here in my house with a loaded gun ready to blast anyone who walks in. Or is that the latest trend in rural policing?"

  "I can think of one reason," Diane said quietly from behind Pete. "That it's all true, and he's seen what she can do."

  Nothing moved for a while. There was no sound, other than that of the death dance of the craneflies in the hall behind them.

  But finally, Aldridge lowered the shotgun.

  "I think we need to trade some information, here," he said.

  When the sun came over the Step the next morning, it found the three of them still talking. In all that time Alina didn't come home, as Pete had guessed that she wouldn't.

  Aldridge told them about what he'd seen up at the ski lodge, and what had happened to him there. He said nothing about anything else. Diane showed her cuttings and repeated Pavel's story, and Pete finally found a release in pouring out everything that had been troubling him about Alina since those first days when he'd brought her to the valley. He'd been afraid that some of it might sound stupid and trivial. But nobody seemed to think so. Their accounts all meshed together with a kind of quiet perfection… and it all traced a line back to that one moment in the motorway services, when he'd looked up into those grey eyes and made a choice instead of an excuse.
>
  She'd even warned him, in her way.

  But he hadn't listened.

  Aldridge was the one that he couldn't quite make out. He'd no car, and apparently he'd scrambled all the way up to the house the previous night, stalking its windows like a raider until he'd realised that there was no one around. Then he'd broken in.

  "Any ideas on where she might have gone?" Aldridge said, standing at the window and watching the dawn light as it filled out the sky beyond the ridge.

  "I don't know," Pete said. "But I don't think she'll have left the area completely." This made the most sense to him. He'd watched Alina's growing love affair with the valley, one that had become deeper and darker with every midnight tryst, and he didn't think that she'd ever be able to tear herself away.

  And what was a Rusalka, after all, without a lake to call its home?

  "Did she make any friends?" Aldridge said. "I mean, anyone she might run to who'd hide her?"

  "I can think of someone," Diane said.

  Aldridge said that he wanted to pick up some equipment before they went up to the Hall, and so they stopped off in the village. He didn't seem to want them to go with him into the house; seemed to make a point of it, in fact. So they waited with the vehicles at the end of the close. Pete was frowning as he watched Aldridge walk away. "What's wrong?" Diane said, but he made as if to brush the worry aside.

  "Nothing," he said. "Unless you count the obvious."

  "Well, the obvious ought to be enough."

  "I know. But I'm not so sure about him, Diane."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that we spent all last night hammering out what we knew about Alina, and what's he doing now? He's planning for the three of us to go looking for her. That's not my idea of a police response. He ought to be calling someone."