Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  And then she'd dropped him. I searched for words, couldn't find any. Probably she'd had the .38 on her ever since she'd used it to kill Dibble.

  Good shot, too, from the way she'd turned Mac into a target. All that cop-job handgun practice she'd probably taken, I figured; another thing that didn't exactly make me feel confident about our situation.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said when my dry mouth had eased enough so I could speak.

  Weak, but it was all I could muster. Jenna hadn't blown our heads off yet, but that only meant some other plan must be on her agenda.

  Not a better one, though, as I soon discovered.

  Much worse.

  Jenna gestured sharply with the Bisley, gathering me, Wanda, and Ellie into a group around Mac Rickert's body.

  He was breathing, but I didn't know for how long. “He needs a doctor,” I said.

  Jenna laughed, not a pleasant sound. “Sure, what do you say we call an ambulance?” she asked sarcastically.

  Wanda dropped to her knees by Rickert, laid her hand on his forehead. But whatever odd powers of healing she had for animals, they weren't going to work here.

  Jenna spared her a pitying headshake, then addressed Ellie and me. “You two have been a real pain in the ass, you know that? The rest of them, too, Marge and Hetty and Greg—if they'd just come back a little later I could've finished her. . . .”

  Suddenly the whole thing spread out like a movie in my head: Wanda seeing Jenna shoot Gene Dibble. Then the others coming home so Jenna couldn't deal with the inconvenient witness.

  And even though Wanda had been at the time utterly language-deficient, a killer wouldn't want to depend on that. Oh, no; the girl had to be shut up permanently.

  “Why?” I asked Jenna, stalling for time in case one of us might think of something to get us out of this. But I wanted to know, too, and Jenna didn't disappoint; this was the only chance she would ever get to tell her side of it.

  “Greg Brand screwed my mother out of every cent she had. But that wasn't the worst part.”

  “Dibble,” I guessed. “When they were in jail together they'd cooked up a plan.”

  “You got it. Find a woman with money. One of them marries her, introduces her to the other one, who's supposed to be able to do all these repairs on the house. She'd never have gone for it if darling Greg hadn't said it was all right,” said Jenna.

  Another sad laugh escaped her. “That's what she called him. Gene was a little younger than Greg, all baby face and red lips. And his hands . . .”

  Her shudder clued me in to the rest. “And he—”

  She cut me off. “Let's not get into the gory details, okay?”

  Rickert moaned. She didn't seem to hear it. “For a while I thought I'd gotten over it. Got to be a cop, working for other victims. I was good at it, too,” she said.

  I'll bet. Dealing with the wreckage of other people's lives probably distracted her from her own.

  For a while. “I even started writing those how-not-to-get-screwed articles. A few of the smaller magazines bought them.”

  A wave of regret for her washed over me. She'd done so many of the right things: kept on going, made a life for herself. Trouble was, for all her energy and talent she'd still needed help.

  And hadn't gotten it. “But I always kept track of Gene. Greg Brand, too,” she continued. “And when Brand cooked up a witches-in-training scam and decided to bring it here, I knew it was my chance.”

  “You signed up,” I said. “Stole the drugs from . . . where? The evidence room where you worked?”

  She nodded agreement. “Right before I quit,” she said. “To make it look more like a drug deal gone bad. A few weeks ago I came up here to set it up in advance, asked around, then put it together with him.”

  Her tone hardened. “And just like I thought, he didn't recognize me any more than Greg did. I found him in the bar at the Mexican restaurant and got him talking.”

  She paused, remembering. “When I told him he wouldn't even need any money up front . . . well. Gene always was a greedy bastard.”

  “Why'd you need the drugs at all? I mean, if you were going to shoot him the minute he showed up . . .”

  I'd been right about the oxycontin tablet. She'd probably had the drugs hidden down in the crawl space, dropped one while transferring them to the paper bag. As for Dibble's body—well, just leaving it was safer than trying to dispose of it.

  Wanda's too, probably, if it had come to that. Heck, Jenna had been a cop, she knew how to arrange a murder scene.

  Including how to create the victims. “You still don't get it,” she said impatiently. “Killing him wasn't enough. He took my dreams. I wanted him to be seeing that big stash, the score of his life, practically in his hands. And then I wanted him to see someone taking it from him.”

  She inhaled deeply. “It all had to be real. His dreams, like mine. I paid that son of a bitch back with interest. At last.”

  But once she did she'd had a problem. She hadn't realized the silent girl was even in the house. Still, Wanda was no immediate risk. Jenna would have to improvise . . . which she'd done.

  Rickert groaned again, weakly.

  “They'll know you rented a boat, they keep records,” I tried. That must've been how she got here. “And when they find us they'll realize . . .”

  But Jenna just laughed. “You don't think I actually signed it out, do you? Oh, please. I'm not stupid, you know. I copied a key, slid out of the boat basin. . . . I've been using that boat every day, no one's going to check the key rack if they even notice it's gone.”

  Her smile was triumphant. “And I can handle a boat without running lights at least as well as this dope,” she added, kicking at Rickert's body.

  “You did help me, though, Jake, for a while. Once you started snooping, all I had to do was follow you around. To that moron, Joey, for instance.”

  Poor Joey, I thought. About as attractive as a car accident, but still. “And he died because . . . ?”

  She shrugged dismissively. “Hey, he had a boat, too. I knew he could get the dynamic duo here out of the area. And I didn't want them skipping town at an inopportune moment.”

  So she'd murdered a little schmuck who'd done her no harm other than posing a mere threat of getting in her way. She pushed Wanda aside, then inspected Rickert's sheet-white face.

  “How'd you do it? I mean he wouldn't have just let you . . .”

  Jenna's grin turned scornful. “Faked being in distress. He let me aboard, I waited till his back was turned and put one in his head. Then I used a piece of gear you helpfully supplied.”

  “What? How did I . . . ?”

  “The ice-fishing stuff in the shed out at the rental house,” she answered with a smirk. “Handy-dandy.”

  At first I didn't get it, but then I did. Ice-fishing gear, including . . . the auger. You could drill a good-sized hole with it. In, for instance, the bottom of a boat. You could even do it from outside, when you were back in your own vessel.

  As she had. Mac Rickert's eyelids fluttered. “Guy's got a hard head,” she observed, and waved the gun at us again. “Toss me that bag of yours,” she ordered, and I didn't have much choice, so I did it.

  Then, “You two drag him,” she told Ellie and me. “I'll bring our witchy little friend.”

  And we didn't have much choice about that, either, so Ellie and I hauled the big man's limp body back to the boat, with Wanda following along disconsolately.

  “Put him in,” Jenna commanded. “And you, go get the cotter pin out of that engine propeller,” she added to Ellie.

  In other words, disable our boat; worse and worse. Ellie and I exchanged looks; somehow we had to slow her down.

  “How would you know anything about cotter pins?” I asked, putting a deliberate note of skepticism into my voice. “From what I've seen you're no expert mariner, whatever you say.”

  As I'd hoped, Jenna took the bait. But her response was not what I was hoping for at all.

&
nbsp; “I grew up,” she recited impatiently to me, “on Nantucket.”

  Get it? her face added. You dummy.

  Belatedly, the dummy did: island, water, boats . . .

  “The beach club we belonged to when my dad was alive had boats, and lessons for the kids. Contests, too.”

  By now I knew what must be coming, the reason for her lean, athletic build and the same kind of easy grace I'd seen in my son Sam and his friends, all of whom were as comfortable on boats as monkeys are in trees.

  But the details were even less reassuring than I expected. “I won my first sailing regatta division when I was seven,” Jenna bragged, “and my first overall at eleven. We had a cabin cruiser, too, I tooled around in that a fair amount.”

  She gave me a smug smile. “So yeah, I guess you could say I'm fairly okay on the water. And considering where we are . . .” She waved behind her at the bay. “I had a feeling there'd be boating stuff involved sooner or later.”

  Her voice hardened. “And I figured it might work out better if everybody thought Jenna was a klutz. Now get him into the boat and get the damned cotter pin.”

  When we'd obeyed she snatched it from Ellie's hand. “You all get in, too, and sit there,” she ordered. “I'll be back here in less than a minute and if you've moved I'll find you and waste three shots. Or,” she added chillingly, “as many as it takes.”

  She vanished into the woods. “Now's our chance,” I told Ellie when she had gone. “We'll take Wanda and . . .”

  I was already half out of the boat, wincing at the cold raindrops blown stingingly into my face by the rising gale. But Wanda didn't move, refusing to leave Rickert.

  No, her mute face expressed clearly. “Please,” I exhaled in frustration. But she wouldn't. I couldn't even pry her arms from around him.

  And we couldn't leave her. “It doesn't matter anyway, Jake,” Ellie said when I'd stopped struggling with the girl. “There's no place we can go.”

  She waved at the wild water. Through the sound of the wind an engine was already approaching, even as Ellie held our useless engine's propeller in her lap.

  That was what the cotter pin was for, to hold the propeller on. “Can we get anywhere without it?” I asked her, knowing the answer. And that it was probably already too late anyway.

  She shook her head helplessly. “No. And the tide's too high now to walk across the channel, or even swim. That current . . .”

  She didn't need to say more. By now the rushing water there was easily eight feet deep. It would have been like going over Niagara Falls without the barrel.

  “We could still try hiding in the woods.”

  Ellie made a face, gesturing at Wanda, who remained crouched by Rickert's sprawled body, glaring up fiercely again at the bare suggestion of abandoning him.

  And then it really was too late as the other boat came out of the storm at us, Jenna at the helm. As she'd implied, it was one of the day rentals from Quoddy Marine, a little smaller than Ellie's but with a bigger, more powerful engine; Deke Meekins didn't believe in underpowering his vessels.

  Hauling the engine up in an easy, practiced way, Jenna hopped out and ran a heavy line through the eyebolt jutting from the prow of Ellie's craft.

  “Seen the rest of it yet?” she asked conversationally as she worked.

  Metal strands threaded into the line glinted dully. So much for the Swiss Army knife I'd slipped into my inside jacket pocket along with the five grand before we left home. Mac hadn't taken the knife or the money, either. But neither would help us now.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “The rest of what?”

  In answer she angled her head sharply toward the inlet we'd walked across the night before. Something white showed there on the other side but I couldn't quite distinguish what it was.

  Jenna dug into her own jacket and came up with a small pair of binoculars, tossed them at me. “Have a gander,” she invited.

  So I did, and for an instant I thought it was as Victor had said at my kitchen table a few days—it felt like a few years—earlier: that they were all in it together. What else could explain the tenants' white van sitting there as if someone in it was watching?

  But as I turned the focusing wheel on the glasses I realized it was worse than that. Greg Brand sat slumped over to one side in the driver's seat, and I was pretty sure he wasn't asleep.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked Jenna in stunned disbelief. Because for someone who wasn't she was racking up quite a body count.

  “Oh, no,” she replied casually, putting a knot in the line and hauling it tight. “Just . . . careful.”

  Then she fastened something to the line, tightening it with a small screwdriver. I didn't know what it was, but from our point of view I doubted it could be anything good.

  “For one thing, I don't want Greg to ever be able to testify against me about anything,” she explained.

  She finished tightening the gadget. “Aside, I mean, from the pleasure it gave me to finally put a bullet in his head.”

  She slid off the bow of our boat, onto the beach. “Best case,” she added, brightening, “they'll blame the whole thing on him after I go back and put the gun in his hand.”

  I had the feeling it might not quite work out the way she expected; even for someone as well versed in the nuts and bolts as Jenna, what with modern lab techniques and so on, suicide's a harder thing to fake than it used to be.

  But she was doing okay so far. And self-doubt didn't seem to be a big feature of her personality.

  I let my breath out. “Jenna, you're a hard woman,” I said.

  Her face flattened until it looked barely human. “You have,” she replied expressionlessly, “absolutely no idea.”

  With that she reboarded her own boat, lowering the engine and starting it in a brisk, confident series of motions.

  Then we were floating. Jenna had our boat under her power.

  And she was towing us out to sea.

  Chapter

  13

  Jenna Durrell motored steadily into deeper water, towing us behind.

  She'd taken our life vests. “We should just jump in anyway,” I said as Tall Island receded behind us. “At least we'd have a chance.”

  “No we wouldn't,” Ellie replied. “Please don't. It doesn't matter how badly you want to swim in it, Jake. It's just too . . .”

  Cold. The memory of it won Ellie's argument; reluctantly I sat as Wanda uttered a mute sound of distress from where she sat by Rickert, her hand groping up for Ellie's hair.

  It was coming out of its pins, red wisps flying. “It's okay, honey,” Ellie tried reassuring the girl.

  But it wasn't. A wave smacked the boat, nearly capsizing us as Wanda went on insisting, her small fingers fastening on two of the loosened hairpins and yanking them out.

  She thrust them at Ellie urgently. “Thank you,” Ellie began as if humoring a younger child, then stopped and stared at them.

  “You know,” she told the girl, “you might just have a . . .”

  And then, carefully, she slid the hairpins together through the hole in the propeller where the cotter pin belonged.

  Ahead, unaware of the navigational hazards, Jenna barely missed a clutch of jagged rocks local mariners called the Boar's Tits. My heart clogged my throat as she skimmed their tops.

  But she probably wouldn't miss the next bunch, or maybe the ones after that. And if we were still tied to her when it happened, sooner or later neither would we.

  “Okay,” said Ellie decisively. Sliding into the stern, she stood up and reached out to the rear of the upraised engine, and fit the propeller onto its stem.

  “Ellie, what're you . . .” Next she squeezed hairpins together and stuck their ends through the hole in the propeller stem, to hold the propeller on.

  “. . . doing?” I demanded. A puddle of bloody water had pooled around Mac Rickert's head.

  “I can't put the engine down,” Ellie said, “while she's towing us. But in a minute . . .”


  Finally I understood. The makeshift cotter pin wouldn't last forever, but it might just be enough for now. And now was all we had; once Jenna towed us far enough out to satisfy herself, she'd cut us loose. After that, the rocks around Tall Island would rip our boat's guts out, if the waves didn't overturn us first.

  Jenna's boat slowed, came around facing us. The line went slack; we were effectively adrift. Instantly wind and currents captured us, slewing us sideways.

  “Brace yourselves,” Ellie shouted.

  No kidding. But suddenly . . . whack! A hole sprang open in the side of the boat. A round hole, as if someone were . . .

  Smack! Another hole, spurting water. “Hey, she's shooting at us!” I shouted.

  “Bail,” Ellie ordered Wanda grimly, tossing a coffee can at her. Wanda complied as Ellie's green eyes narrowed coolly and in a way I knew very well. The rest was bad enough, that look said.

  But now she was mad. “Whoa,” she said, peering ahead. “Jenna doesn't know about the Nun's Head.”

  It was a boulder shaped like a head and upper torso, rising at low tide twenty feet over the surrounding water. Now only a low dark mound revealed where it lurked.

  And only if you already knew where it was. Jenna's course aimed her straight for it. “Okay,” Ellie said, “get ready . . .”

  The prow of Jenna's boat lurched up suddenly. “Now,” Ellie grated out. Dropping the engine down over the stern, she gave its ignition button a mighty push.

  “Start, damn you,” she implored it, and it roared to life.

  Whereupon we were the ones under power while Jenna's boat, still tied to ours, zigzagged in a wild, impossible attempt to climb the Nun's Head.

  “Yes!” Ellie shouted exultantly, and dropped the outboard into reverse. The gear engaged hard, drawing the line taut. In response Jenna's boat slithered at a sharp angle backwards into the roiling water, swamping the transom instantly.

  The impact knocked Jenna off her feet. Her head smacked the rail with a dull, melon-thumping sound I could hear even over the rising storm. She went over the side.