The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  "I saw something," he said.

  What he'd seen proved to be the glint of a hubcap, lying in the grass beyond a gatepost a few yards back. The post itself was leaning, the wood splintered and showing fresh… as if somebody inexperienced in a big, unfamiliar car had taken the entrance too fast.

  "I'll call," Ivie said, reaching for the radio.

  "No," Marinello said abruptly. "Let's be sure we get to her before anyone else does."

  And so instead of calling, he hauled on the wheel to turn the heavy vehicle into the driveway.

  Ivie recognised the track. It led out to the old trap shooting range where Diane had sometimes come to practice. It was all overgrown now, but another car had been here ahead of them and it had passed by fairly recently.

  They came to the limousine about a hundred yards further on, around the bend and out of sight of the main track. Ahead of it was the clearing for the range with its group of small, weathered silver wooden huts. The limo's side had been damaged and its rear bumper had been torn halfway loose; the driver's door was wide open and at a strange angle.

  There was nobody inside it, or anywhere around.

  They stopped the Rover, and got out. The woodland was strangely quiet — no birdsong, even. Marinello didn't seem worried, but he took the shotgun anyway. He'd told Ivie that he was keeping the safety on, almost as if in concession to their shared doubts.

  "What's her name?" Marinello said. "Can you remember?"

  "Anna, I think."

  "Not Anna," Marinello said. "More unusual. Anya. No… Alina." And then he turned and cupped his hands and called through them to the entire forest. "Hey, Alina," he called, "You can come out, we're not going to hurt you. We know you haven't done anything." He waited for a while, and then carried on, "It's either us, or the others. You know what it means if they find you?"

  More silence.

  "She could be well away by now," Ivie suggested, half hoping.

  "Last chance!" Marinello called, almost shouting himself hoarse this time.

  And just as it was starting to seem that Ivie was right, she stepped out of cover.

  She'd been around behind one of the huts, not so far away; she was shoeless, looking lost and scared, and she was shivering in her lightweight cotton dress even though it wasn't particularly cold. Tony Marinello started toward her immediately. Glancing back over his shoulder, he said, "God, look at the state of her. Get that car rug out of the back, Bob."

  He was already striding out toward her. She looked every bit as bleak and as lost as that child back there in the Hall; Ivie was now thinking that his fears and his suspicions were showing themselves to be formless, finding no reflection in this reality at all.

  Marinello had reached Alina and put his arm around her shoulders. The shotgun was over his other forearm. He'd broken it open for extra safety, and the empty barrel was pointing at the ground. They were walking back toward the Rover.

  Ivie gave himself a shake. What could he have been thinking of? He turned away and reached into the back of the Rover for the checkered wool travelling blanket that lay folded on one of the vinyl benches. It would be musty, but it would do for now. As he was bringing it out, he glanced at the radio that was hanging from the mirror bracket.

  "No, I don't think so," Ivie muttered, and turned back to meet the others.

  Marinello was in trouble.

  He'd fallen to his knees after covering only half of the return distance, and now it was Alina who was showing concern for him. The shotgun lay on the ground where he'd dropped it, a few strides back. Ivie started to run forward. As he did Marinello looked up, purpling, eyes literally starting to bulge in a manner so unnatural that it was almost fascinating; he started to raise his hand in a gesture of appeal, asking for Ivie's help in something that he simply couldn't understand.

  Alina looked up, too.

  Ivie saw the green fire in her eyes, and a new and frightening intensity in her attitude; he knew then that everything had been a sham, that his first instincts had been the only correct ones, and that Aldridge had been telling the truth even though he hadn't been telling it all. Ivie realised all of this in the time that it took for Alina to cover the distance between them.

  She struck at him, her hand as hard and flat as a blade, but the rug that he was holding took the main force of the blow. He threw it at her and ran for the Rover, flat out and feeling his age. He'd wondered for maybe a half second about reaching the gun, but knew that he had no chance. Why couldn't he have bagged it way back at the very beginning? Fortunately the door was still open, and he dived straight for the radio and snatched it down with a force that snapped the bracket and brought the mirror along as well.

  He fumbled for the transmission switch. He tried to say She's here, we've got her…

  But instead it came out as, "She's got us!"

  A hand suddenly grabbed his collar, and in a show of immense strength he was hauled out of the Rover backwards. His head clipped the top of the door arch, hard.

  This was all that he knew.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Pete's heart started to sink when he heard the garbled call. He'd deliberately done his best to bag the lakeside part of the search, citing the Zodiac's condition as his reason but really believing that it would give him his best chance of finding Alina before Aldridge could. Now he realised that he was not only wrong, but he was also trapped; he had the lake on one side and a new wire fence on the other, and there wasn't enough road for him to make a turn.

  "Keep going," Diane suggested. "According to the estate plan, there's supposed to be a track somewhere ahead. It'll take us up to meet the forest road."

  "I just hope it isn't too rough," Pete said. "She weighs half a ton and she steers like a tank, but there the resemblance ends." And he put on as much speed as he was able, which wasn't much with the edge of the banking only inches away.

  After half a minute, Diane said, "Coming up. See it?"

  "Gotcha," Pete said, and made the turn.

  The track hadn't been used in years. It soon narrowed and became overgrown, with long grass in a mohican strip up the centre where tyres had never worn it down. It whipped at the underside of the car as Pete changed all the way down into first gear and still had trouble making the slope.

  After a while, he didn't have to worry about it. Because the track dead ended at a gate which had been secured with a rusty lock and chain, and the ground beyond it was fit for nothing less rugged than a farm vehicle.

  "It looked great on the map," Diane said hollowly. And Pete thought of Aldridge, tasting blood and driving hard to get there first.

  "Watch the back while I reverse," he said to Diane, "and cross your fingers."

  She had to climb around on her seat to see well enough to direct him as they went. Pete let off the brake and they started to freewheel backward, gathering speed and jolting hard.

  Too hard. He returned some pressure to the brake, but it was too late. They were sliding too fast and out of control, and as the wheels locked Pete found that the grass underneath gave his tyres almost no traction at all. They hit one bump, and then another which almost threw Diane up against the roof; and it was at this point that Pete felt a queasy slackness in the wheel which told him immediately that the Zodiac's steering rack had gone. The brakes weren't holding, the wheel was a useless ornament.

  They left the track, and ploughed into the undergrowth at its side. Diane took a dive over the seat and disappeared completely; for one awful moment Pete thought that she'd gone through the rear screen, but he turned and saw that she was safe in the back.

  The Zodiac plunged on backward, well out of control.

  There wasn't much that he could do until a fifteen yard depth of bushes slowed and stopped them, and the engine stalled. There was silence. Pete levered himself upright. Greenery pressed up against the windows on three sides of the car. Diane was trying to sort herself out in the rear seat.

  "You okay?" he said.

  "No," she said. "I caugh
t my leg between the seats as I went over. I think it's my ankle."

  He opened one of the doors and forced the brush far enough back for them to squeeze through, and then he helped her out. She tried to stand on her own. She couldn't.

  "Damn," she said, wincing. "How's the car?"

  "Shot. We're on foot from here. I'll check with Ross."

  She kept her balance with one hand against the car as he reached in and passed the gun out to her, and then reached for their radio. Diane upended the stock, and leaned on the shotgun for support.

  She said, "Will we be safe if we're not in the car?"

  "I don't know," Pete said. "If she's up there and we're down here, we ought to be okay for a while. I'll see if I can get Ross to pick us up."

  Awkwardly, Diane tested her ankle as Pete tried to raise Aldridge. It didn't seem promising. The slightest weight, and Pete could see how her face screwed up in pain. As for Pete himself, he was getting a response on the radio but it was made indistinct by a lot of howling and noise. Holding the receiver close and speaking as clearly as he could, he explained the situation and hoped that Aldridge would be able to hear.

  There was something from Aldridge that might have been Okay.

  Pete said, "Come down for us before you do anything else, all right? Don't try to go it alone."

  Another reply, this one completely unintelligible.

  Diane said, "You think he got that?"

  "Yeah," Pete said, knowing that he didn't sound entirely convinced, and then he looked all around. "Come on, he'll have no chance of finding us up here. I'll have to get you back down to the road."

  And with one last affectionate slap on the Zodiac's roof — scrap value only after a bang like this — he put his arm around Diane to support her, and they started to make slow progress downhill toward the lakeside track.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Pete was wrong in at least one detail.

  Aldridge wasn't heading down to collect them, nor was he tearing through the woodland to get to Alina. Instead he'd stopped the Toyota up on the edge of the olive green moor, and he was holding his radio out of the open window to get a fix on the signal that was messing up the frequency. Ivie's radio was still transmitting. That Ivie himself was dead, or at least close to it, was a matter on which Aldridge had little doubt.

  It was a rough method, but at least it gave him a direction. When he turned the volume all the way up as far as it would go, he thought that he could hear somebody breathing. It was impossible to be sure.

  He raised his window before he set off again. He'd been out of her reach in the generator cage and now he was out of her reach in the cab, and as far as Aldridge was concerned this was the best way to be. In an ideal world he'd be able to take her alive, but if he couldn't then he was fully prepared to run her down. He had four-wheel-drive, he had no witnesses. She might be full of surprises, but she surely couldn't argue with an oncoming truck.

  He followed the signal.

  Ten minutes later, he was at the scene.

  He came in slowly, watching all around. He could see the battered limousine, and the silent Rover with its far door open. He drove the Toyota all the way around almost in a complete circle, but there were no signs of life at all.

  He stopped level with the Rover. He could see inside from here. No bodies, just a tartan blanket half in the cab and half on the ground. It was a weird, deserted scene, looking like some aftermath of germ warfare — property abandoned, actions uncompleted — and the appeal of opening his door and stepping out would rank about the same in both cases.

  Something thumped on the Toyota behind him.

  He glimpsed a movement in his mirror, then it was gone. But then he turned in his seat, and he could see her; she was throwing back the snap cover and climbing into the pickup's load area, and it was too late for him to do anything about it. She was hauling herself up already, and she had what looked like a firm grip on one of the four diagonal bars protecting the cab's rear windshield.

  She gave him an evil-looking, sharp toothed grin.

  "I said I'd come back for you," she said through the glass.

  "You won't get me this time, either," Aldridge said, wondering how he could best throw her off and run her down with minimal risk. "I'm all locked in."

  "You're forgetting the obvious," she said, and Aldridge found himself looking out into the dark O of Bob Ivie's shotgun. That would have been the thump that he'd heard, the sound of the gun being slung in ahead of her; and he could only sit and gape at his own lack of foresight as he contemplated the more prominent one on the Winchester.

  Alina squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  The safety was on; Aldridge realised it with a heartsurge of glee. Alina was turning the gun in puzzlement, unsure of what to do next.

  He had a chance.

  He hit the accelerator and let out the clutch, and as the Toyota spurted forward he turned the wheel hard in an attempt to catch her off balance and pitch her out. But then he glanced in the mirror and saw her hand, again grabbing the strut as the pickup spun around. He gunned the engine again, wrenched the wheel over the other way…

  And, watching his mirror more than the ground ahead, slammed sideways into the Land Rover. The Rover shook, but it barely moved.

  Aldridge was thrown sideways across the passenger seat. His head bounced on the door padding. The pickup was out of gear with its engine still running, and Aldridge was almost on the floor; he scrambled up again, and looked into the back. He couldn't see her… and he thought, Have I done it? Was that enough, the woman dead and not even a shot fired?

  A hand came up, and its fingers curled around one of the bars. She hauled herself up after, inches away on the other side of the laminated glass. She was still grinning.

  Aldridge slammed the pickup into gear again.

  The engine raced, but the pickup didn't move.

  He'd killed the rear transmission. He was going nowhere.

  He wondered if there wasn't some way; there was always a way, wasn't there? Could he perhaps switch the drive to the two front wheels and drag himself out of there like an injured dog? But even as he glanced again in the mirror he knew that his time had run out, saw that the shotgun was being levelled again, understood that nothing he could do was going to alter anything now.

  He saw the windshield craze before he heard the blast.

  Rachel, he thought miserably.

  But then he never got to hear the blast at all.

  FORTY-SIX

  "He should have reached us by now," Diane said. "The bastard, he isn't coming."

  "I've got to get up there," Pete said.

  The implication of this was obvious. With Diane more or less hopping along and Pete having to support her, they'd been making only minimal progress. They were barely a quarter of a mile from where they'd started, and they were getting slower and slower. They'd nearly reached the boat house, which marked no more than a fraction of the distance they'd have to cover. Pete had tried the radio again a couple of times, but neither Aldridge nor anybody else had replied.

  "On your own?" Diane said. "Come on, she'll be getting desperate now."

  "I know her better than anybody."

  "You thought you knew her yesterday, Pete, but then look what you learned. You don't know her at all."

  "She owes me, and she knows it. She said she'd never hurt me."

  "She killed her lover and burned him in his own car. The lady isn't noted for her scruples."

  There was silence for a while as they limped on, a three-legged twosome getting wearier by the minute. It was a stubborn silence, and there was only one way that it could come to an end.

  "Go on, then," Diane said with a sudden flareup of anger, getting free and pushing him away, and she almost lost her balance in the process. "Go to her. Go running to her, if she's the one you really want. See if she treats you any better than the others."

  Pete stopped, and looked at her. Diane's cheeks were bright and streake
d with tears, and she made an ineffectual attempt to rub them away with the sleeve of her jacket. Her eyes were blazing and steady.

  "I've never touched her," Pete said.

  "No, but she's the one you dream about. Isn't she?"

  There was an opening, a hint of uncertainty in her look now, and he went for it.

  "No, I never have," he said.

  She watched him, and perhaps they both knew that there was some part of the truth, some part of a lie in what he was saying, and that whatever was to happen between them from now on would depend on what she chose to believe.

  She said, "Then, why do this?"

  "Because I brought her here. She hurt the people closest to me and I'm responsible. I can feel sorry for her. But I know she's got to be stopped."

  Diane looked down.

  "At least take the gun," she said.

  He put his arm out to support her again, and she let him slide it around her.

  "I wouldn't know how to handle it," he said. "Do you still have the key to the boat house?"

  He passed close behind the Hall on his way upslope, climbing over gates and wire fences to take the most direct line that he could. Aldridge wasn't going to meet him, halfway or any other way, so there was no point in watching for his car. By going across country he could pick up the middle track a lot faster, and follow it along until he found some trace of the others. At one point he tried the radio again, once more turning the volume up all of the way and once more getting the strange effect that he hadn't wanted Diane to hear.

  It was the sound of breathing. Or something very like it.

  He was climbing through coniferous woodland now, so dense that there was permanent twilight underneath with bare ground where nothing was growing. Daylight and the rest of the world could be dimly glimpsed as a distant filigree pattern of branches, leaves and silver sky in the middle distance. He had to duck frequently because many of the lower branches were at head height; some trunks were streaked with birdlime, and one or two that he saw had been rubbed bare of bark by animals. Deer, at a guess, although he couldn't be sure.