A Month at the Shore

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Long, straight, jet-black hair.

  "Ah, you found it," came his voice from behind her.

  She whirled around so fast that the room spun.

  ****

  Billy sat fidgeting in the same leather armchair that Laura had chosen when she and Corinne came to Chepaquit Savings to see about a loan. Ken had been thrilled to be able to free the two sisters from the clutches of a predatory lender—but he wasn't nearly so sure what he could do for Billy.

  "You want to know about ... getting a shot?" he asked, baffled by Billy's rambling request.

  "Like in the movies," Billy said, trying his best to explain. "I seen it where the guy got a shot, and right away he started telling all this stuff that he wouldn't even tell them when they were beating him up. It was because of the shot. The shot made him tell."

  "You mean, truth serum? But why would you want to get a shot of truth serum? You've already told the truth."

  "Well, I don't want to get a shot," Billy admitted. "I'm kind of afraid of shots. But if that's the only way ... unless ... could they give it to someone in cough syrup, do you know? Because that wouldn't be so bad. I could take it in cough syrup," he decided, nodding his big, teddy-bear head. "Especially if it was cherry."

  Aware that with the exception of Laura, Billy was the only witness who had come forward with information about that infamous night, Ken decided to probe a little further into his memory.

  He came around to the front of his desk and leaned ever so casually back on it. "Billy? You're not keeping anything from me, are you? You've told me everything that you can remember?"

  "I don't know!" Billy said in a pathetic wail. "That's why I want to have the—what do you call it?"

  "Truth serum?"

  "Yeah, that. Because maybe I know something else that I just forgot, and if I can just remember it, Snack will be okay. I got Snack into trouble," he said, pounding a massive fist into the palm of his hand for emphasis. "I have to try to get Snack out of trouble."

  With a pleading look at Ken, he said, "Why did he have to fight with Sylvia, anyway? Why couldn't he be like Gabe?"

  The muscles in Ken's thighs tightened with the effort not to jump up and grab Billy by the shirt. "Like ... Gabe?" he said, aware that his heart had just made a crashing attempt to break through his chest. "How do you mean?"

  "Well, Gabe was much nicer to Sylvia. He talked real soft to her. He laughed. He hugged her. He even kissed her. That's how much he liked her."

  God Almighty. "Yeah, a lot of people liked Sylvia. I guess Gabe was one of them. So ... Sylvia was in a better mood with Gabe than she was with Snack?" he asked carefully.

  Billy snorted, as if he were blowing milk through his nose, and said, "There's no comparison."

  "Yeah. And Gabe came over on the same day, did you say?" He hadn't said, but never mind.

  "In the morning. My mom says I'm a morning person," Billy volunteered. "Maybe Sylvia is, too. Used to be, I mean. And Gabe, he's always going off somewhere early. So he must be a morning person, too. But Snack! He overslept all the time. His dad was always getting on him about that."

  "Mm. I'll bet." From what Ken had learned about Sylvia, he wasn't surprised that she had Gabe under her thumb as well. Maybe the attraction for her was Gabe's naughty little secret. Obviously the councilman wouldn't be in a hurry to volunteer information that might make him look just as callow as Snack.

  If Billy was telling the truth and not simply fantasizing. After all, the golden boy of Chepaquit with the prettiest girl in Chepaquit: Billy's romantic heart might want to pair up Gabe and Sylvia, regardless.

  But if Billy were telling the truth ....

  "Billy, do you remember that foggy night you told me about, the one where you fell asleep in the delivery van listening to a song you liked? When you woke up, you saw someone dragging something heavy into the compost pile, right?"

  Billy nodded, but he was clearly nervous about being questioned.

  Ken said, "I want you to think very hard. Even without truth serum, I'll bet you can remember: was there any other vehicle in the parking lot when you woke up after your nap in the van?"

  "I don't even have to think, because there wasn't!" Billy said triumphantly. He'd aced the test, and he was very pleased. "That's why I thought it could be Snack—because he lived right there!" he explained with Watson-like enthusiasm.

  Unfortunately, it wasn't quite so elementary as that.

  Why did the chicken cross the road?

  To get to the other side.

  The riddle came and went like a flash of lightning, leaving Ken both dazed and jolted in its wake.

  Gabe walks across the road, tries to pick up where he left off earlier that day, gets rebuffed or, if she's a tease, even worse. A kid with hormones amuck—Ken could testify about hormones amuck at that age—he loses it, kills her, panics, hides her.

  Could the chicken cross the road and then go back without being caught?

  On a foggy night? All too easily.

  "Thanks, Billy. You've been a big help. You've been more than a big help."

  "Really?" No one was more surprised than Billy. "You mean I won't have to get a shot?"

  "Not at all." Ken slapped Billy on the back and shook his hand and got him moving up and out of the leather chair. He saw him to the door, then went back to his desk and, still standing, called Laura. He had plenty to say and he wanted to see her, his afternoon's schedule be damned. When there was no answer, he became uneasy. Unnecessarily so, because she and her brother and sister could have been working anywhere on the grounds, but ... he was uneasy.

  In the small anteroom to his office, his assistant sat in front of a computer monitor. "I'll be gone for an hour," he told her. "Call me on the cell phone if it can't wait. If Laura Shore calls—"

  "She did call," Nancy said, surprising him. "She asked me not to leave a message, it wasn't important, but—she did call."

  "Oh. Okay. Well ... hmm. In that case..." He shrugged and went back into his office.

  And in less than a minute, came back out again.

  "I'll be at Shore Gardens," he told Nancy on his way out the door.

  He was in the bank's parking lot when Andy Mellon hailed him over to the police station's parking lot.

  "I've got a bone to pick with you, pal," the chief yelled over.

  Ken had a strong hunch that the chief wasn't flagging him down to invite him to go fishing aboard his beloved boat.

  Chapter 31

  His knife was at her throat.

  Laura felt the bite of its flat blade against her skin; in a state of shock, she thought, He doesn't want to kill me, only to frighten me. Please, God. Only frighten me.

  Nausea swept over her; she was going to be sick.

  "Write exactly what I tell you to," Gabe commanded. His voice was taut.

  She had to slide the paper farther away from her on the kitchen table just to see what she was writing. She held her head perfectly straight, perfectly stiff. The pen he'd found next to the phone was poised in her hand.

  "Say: 'Snack didn't kill Sylvia. I did'."

  Laura did as she was told, but her hand was shaking so much, and the angle was so acute, that the crabbed handwriting barely resembled her own.

  Gabe was watching her progress. "Okay," he said, "now write, 'Sylvia was coming on to my father. We fought, and she hit her head on the greenhouse sink'."

  "D-did she?" Laura asked without moving her head a millimeter.

  "No. I strangled her. Write."

  She shaped the words in what seemed like slow motion.

  He said, "Now say, 'I panicked and buried her in the compost pile'."

  "Did y—?"

  "Yes. Write."

  Laura was giddy with fear, adrift in an adrenaline rush so strong that every pore of her skin felt needled with pain. She did as Gabe said, clinging desperately to the time she was buying.

  Still staring straight ahead, she pleaded, "Me? Gabe—me?"

  "Why not? Half the town h
ates you, anyway. And the other half will understand your dilemma: you want to save your brother, but you know you'll lose your lover. You decide to do something right just once in your sorry life—so you throw yourself on your sword."

  The simple poetry of his plan was enough to make her angry. Without moving a muscle, she said, "They'll never believe ... this bullshit."

  "You wish," Gabe sneered.

  "You're the one ... who hates us," she said, staring immobilized at Corinne's cheerful new valence.

  "Not anymore," he said. "Back then—oh, yes. I didn't think much of having to take a number for Sylvia after your brother—and your old man."

  "Not my father," she said, rejecting his twisted view.

  "Wrong. After I killed her—which I hadn't intended to do, incidentally—I told your old man that she'd boinked Snack in the toolshed. I knew there'd be war after that. I figured either Snack or Ollie would end up taking the blame for Sylvia, but I never dreamed it would take this long to find her." He let out a bitter snort, and she felt the knife again. "Only the Shores."

  He said, "Too bad I lost my watch. Or none of this would be necessary. I looked everywhere. Where did you find it?"

  He actually seemed curious enough to expect Laura to answer, so she gasped, "The greenhouse."

  "I looked there," he said, surprised and almost petulant that he'd missed it.

  She thought he might be replaying the fatal struggle in his mind, because there was a pause before he abruptly said, "Let's wrap this up. Write: 'Whatever I've done, I'm sorry.' That should leave a good taste in everyone's mouth."

  It was an incredible effort to keep on going. Four sentences; she could have been writing four chapters.

  And then her scrawl stopped altogether.

  Almost in a faint, she said, "I'm out of ink."

  "I can see that!" he snapped.

  He began to look around, his motions sending shivers of horror through her. One bad nick, that's all it would take. She was close to passing out from a runaway heartbeat.

  Apparently he spotted a pen, because he grunted and turned to take the step or two to the counter to grab it.

  It was the chance Laura needed to break free and run. She bolted like a rabbit out of a hole, knocking over the chair in her panicky flight. She heard Gabe trip and curse behind her as she ran out the kitchen door and down the steps onto the grounds. The fog was soupy enough to hide her, if she could just get far enough away.

  Her panic gave her speed, but her sandals slowed her down. The sandy, gravelly road that led from the house back down to the shop and the road beyond it made for hard going. Where were the cars? Where were the damn customers? She caught a stone the wrong way and slid, falling with a twisting wrench of her knee to the fog-damp ground. Did it hurt? She didn't know. She scrambled back to her feet and took off again, afraid to look behind her in her flight.

  Which is why she had no idea that he'd got close enough to grab her arm and yank her violently to a halt. She opened her mouth and started to scream but nothing came out, because a tidal wave of blackness suddenly washed over her, carrying her off in an easy rush to oblivion.

  ****

  Town scion or not, Kendall Barclay III had very nearly ended up in the cell next to Snack's. The chief was hot, hotter than Ken had ever seen him.

  Snack knew about the knife. While it was true that Snack had not divulged his source, it didn't take a rocket scientist (said the chief) to figure out that in a colossal betrayal of trust, Ken had rifled through the file on his desk. If it hadn't been for the fact that Andy Mellon himself had earlier leaked information to Ken, the situation might have been even dicier than it was.

  Ken apologized profusely. As compensation, he offered the chief what he had just learned from Billy.

  "Gabe too, now? Come on. Billy is seeing boyfriends behind every bush, don't you think?"

  The chief, in short, was not impressed, which wasn't surprising. It was easier to suspect the devil you knew than the councilman you didn't. Fair enough. You had to go with the odds.

  But as Ken drove out to Shore Gardens, he found himself conjuring up a compelling profile of a small-town golden boy, deprived of both his parents and his burning ambition in one fell swoop, who might be nursing a serious grudge against life. Who might not take kindly to being toyed with by a transient nothing, no matter how blindingly beautiful she was. Who might lose it altogether in an act of violence, and who was strong enough and lucky enough and hardworking enough to hide the deed for a good half of his life.

  Psychological profile be damned. Gabe had the motive, and Gabe had the opportunity: as part-time help, he wouldn't have looked any more out of place on the grounds than a family member.

  But when he came right down to it, Ken was zeroing in on Gabe for the simple reason that he was being overrun by an eerie, creepy feeling. At that moment, he felt a little the way he had at Miss Widdich's place, as if there were forces at work that he didn't know and didn't understand but did have to face down. When he had Laura in his arms again, that's when he'd feel reassured.

  He speeded up as he approached the nursery. He couldn't help himself; the pull of Laura was too great. Corinne had left her sister behind in her rush to get to the station, and since the only taxi he saw had a group of passengers inside when Ken passed it, it was clear Laura hadn't gone that route. Hitching a ride from a local was her only other option, and Ken had been watching the few cars he passed on the way; she wasn't in any of them.

  He was tense, no doubt about it. Billy had set him on edge, and the thick, chill fog was keeping him that way. Houses and hedges alike were shrouded in a ghostly gray vagueness that perfectly echoed the mystery that had pervaded all of their lives.

  Uncertainty. Bankers, of all people, did not like the feeling.

  He was about to turn into the nursery when he saw Gabe's new, monster SUV come roaring out of his drive, sending sand and gravel flying before heading down the road.

  It was Gabe. Without Laura. Going too fast. In a split-second, instinctual decision, Ken turned the wheel hard, crossing the center line, and aimed his little Boxster squarely at the nose of the giant SUV in a head-on crash. He hadn't felt so outsized since the day he took on the eighth-grade bullies attacking Laura in the woods. His air-bag activated instantly, stunning him with its speed and force; he sat pinned behind it, trying to recover his wits.

  He squeezed out of the crushed Porsche in time to see Gabe Wellerton running toward his house nearby. Ken started on foot after him, and then—heeding the same instincts that had guided him this far—turned on a dime and headed for the nursery. He had no doubt that Gabe had left Laura there; the only question was, had he left her for dead?

  His heart was galloping now as he barged through the main shop, screaming her name. The house, the greenhouses, the outbuildings, the well—she could be anywhere or nowhere at all.

  Gabe ran. She's somewhere.

  He ran up the incline to the house, breathing hard, shouting her name. The sense of panic he felt was profound. He burst through the front door, racing through the rooms, calling her name, up and then down the stairs again. He was about to exit through the kitchen when he pulled up short: there was a note on the table in her handwriting, throbbing for his attention.

  He scanned it, incredulous. His heart seemed to stop altogether. Taking out his cell phone, he punched in 911 as he dashed outside, trying to re-enact a crime he couldn't be positive—didn't want to be positive—had taken place.

  Where?

  The operator answered, and he fought with her. No doubt he was incoherent, but he vowed he would pay any costs, and the upshot was that they were sending an ambulance.

  He called Laura's name, over and over, cranking up the volume each time as he ran through the greenhouses and across the grounds; it seemed to him that the fog was hushing his rudeness, as if he were acting like a yahoo in a sacred place.

  He stopped and listened.

  Yes. A diesel engine; he knew the sound of it fro
m his father's old Mercedes. Only it wasn't a classic sedan, but a classic John Deere tractor. Just as old, just as venerable; just as lethal. He ran to the shed where he knew they kept the Deere, hardly able to hear the engine anymore over the thundering thumps of his heart.

  The swing-out doors were barred from inside. He threw his shoulder into them repeatedly, but they withstood the fury of his assault.

  If Gabe got out, Ken could get in. He raced around the side of the building and found a single-paned window that swung horizontally on center pivots. The closed window was tucked under the eave, ten feet off the ground; easier to climb out of than to climb into. He looked around and found an old wooden ladder with missing rungs at one end. Propping it against the wall with the broken end at the bottom, and keeping his feet on the outside edges of the remaining rungs, he began his climb.

  A rung broke anyway, sending him crashing down to the next one. But that one held, and his only harm was a jolt to the knees. He scrambled through the window with a contortion of legs and dropped onto an old scarred workbench beneath it, noting the upended stool that Gabe had kicked out in his escape.

  There was no one in the tractor's seat. Ken circled the machine and found Laura lying under the exhaust pipe, semiconscious and in acute distress.

  How long has she been here? was his single thought. He scooped up her limp form and carried her to the wide swing doors, never imagining that not only would they be bolted, but padlocked.

  Padlocked. The concentration of carbon monoxide was enough to have his head already aching; they had to get out. He laid Laura to one side on the cement floor of the shed and climbed the tractor, aware of dizziness as he did so. It was dark in the shed, and the knob of the gearshift was worn smooth; but reverse was reverse. He found the right gear and floored the aging beast, heading with abandon for the locked doors, gambling that Laura would stay where she was. The old tractor crashed through the doors with ease, clearing the air, freeing them both.