Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  But now if he didn’t find Sam and get a handle on the kid’s newly relapsed drinking habit—

  Well, if that happened, the only murder Wade would have to deal with was the bloody murder his wife, Jake Tiptree, would start screaming when she heard about her son Sam’s first alcoholic slip in a couple of years, last night with his new pals in the Rusty Rudder.

  If at first you don’t succeed …

  Perched on a marshy hummock at the edge of the beaver pond, about fifty yards upstream from the culvert, Dewey Hooper wiggled the big log blocking the stream’s flow.

  He wasn’t angry that his gravel-pit plan had failed. It was really no big surprise that his first attempt at killing the two women hadn’t worked out quite right.

  … try again. No doubt some witchy premonition of Marianne’s had let them escape, and this only confirmed his opinion: that she was dangerous, and had to be put down permanently as soon as possible. Besides, the avalanche in the gravel pit had been a hell of a lot of fun to create.

  This project he had embarked upon now was pretty enjoyable, too, actually. He wiggled the log again, finding it lodged very solidly there where it had floated and stuck. With its roots all still attached and wedged crosswise against the water’s flow, it made an excellent dam.

  But he could move it. If he wanted to, he could pull it out entirely. If he wanted a sudden flood, for example, just when the two women were driving over the culvert on a trip whose urgency he would also have to engineer …

  But he could do that part easily. Six inches … he’d heard Bob Arnold say that much flowing water was all it would take. After that, once their truck tires hit the drop-off by the edge of the road, the vehicle would roll over via its own momentum, into the drainage pond.

  There was of course the small matter of the truck that was supposed to be coming, town guys set to repair the road. But Dewey had already taken care of that first thing this morning, by sneaking back to one of the houses he’d stolen clothes from.

  Choosing one whose residents were at work all day—not a problem for a guy who’d been pulling burglaries since he was eleven—he’d used their phone to call the town offices. Claiming to be a local landowner, he’d said he’d repaired the flooded road himself, with gravel from the nearby gravel pit.

  No need for any attention from the city crew, he’d said; no doubt the guys’d be glad to cross that backbreaking job off their list, and the clerk he’d talked to had agreed.

  The one thing that bothered Dewey was that his voice had been shaking so bad when he made the call, he’d feared the clerk would know something was up. Nerves … hour by hour, it seemed, he was getting wonkier in the head, almost as if he missed his cell, the smooth featurelessness of it, and the safety of the prison’s locked doors and enclosing walls. But that—Dewey shook himself angrily like a dog, to rid himself of it—that was crazy talk.

  He would get over it. He wiggled the log again, careful not to dislodge it. Once removed, it would release lots of water, fast. Like a tidal wave over the road …

  Around him the marsh was still, the surface of the pond he knelt by as smooth as if it were frozen solid. Overhead, clouds went on thickening, but he didn’t care; after years in prison, it all felt like heaven to him. The whole thing was going to look like just some tragic, random act of nature, the kind of bad accident that happened sometimes out here in the woods.

  The pond’s surface began clouding intermittently with bursts of cold mist. No matter; soon he’d be warm and dry, and free of Marianne once more, too: her and the big-mouthed pal she had with her, that tattletale Jake Tiptree.

  And after that, neither one of them would be running their mouths ever again. He got to his feet, stretched the kinks out of his back, and picked his way easily from one marshy mound to the next until he got to the dirt road.

  Then, in the gathering dusk, he set off for the cottage the women were staying at, and for the last part of his preparations. In the near darkness he found where he’d hidden Bentley Hodell’s shotgun, which had turned out to be in good condition despite the drenching it had suffered. Bentley had ammo, too, plenty of it.

  And now so did Dewey. Ahead, the pale dirt of the road between the trees divided: one winding uphill, the other a narrow curving track through low huckleberry bushes. With the shotgun over his shoulder and the shells in his pockets, he chose the low path, alert for sounds and careful not to make any himself.

  This next part could be tricky. Easing along in silence, not even breathing heavily, he came upon their pickup truck backed in among the huge white pines that surrounded the cabin. From the windows came a warm yellow glow, and a fire in the woodstove scented the air sharply, as it had the night before.

  He sidled up alongside the truck until he reached its door. So far, so good. Both women were indoors; the dark-haired one doing something over the kitchen stove, Marianne sitting at the table, clearly visible through the window.

  At the sight of her, his hard-won calm fled and an icy fury seized him. There she was, mocking him by her presence, every breath she took an insolent slap in Dewey’s face.

  She couldn’t be alive. She couldn’t. He’d killed her. And yet there she sat: a travesty, an abomination. And a dangerous one, because who else could testify better to the circumstances of her death than the victim herself?

  So even though he knew what he was seeing couldn’t be true, he just couldn’t take the chance. She’d told him she’d come back, and she had; that was what he had to base his plans on.

  Because Marianne was beautiful, and maddening, and oh, so dead; he’d felt that with his own hands. But she’d been witchy: the kind of woman who might really manage to return, if anyone could. And that … that could mean absolute disaster for him.

  For one thing, if he could see her, then maybe so could the cops. She could go to them, start talking. Start telling …

  He knew he couldn’t be tried again for killing her. But he also knew enough about other people to feel certain that they would find some way of punishing him, even if the law couldn’t.

  By, for instance, trying him for the whole host of crimes he had committed while escaping, then sentencing him as harshly as possible for those. Everyone would be against him; Marianne would make sure of that, too. After all, she’d already gotten the hated Tiptree woman on her side, hadn’t she?

  Even though she was dead. Shuddering, Dewey didn’t even want to think about what nasty magic she must’ve done to make herself look normal and alive. Because what she really looked like …

  Well, after seven long years buried in her grave down there in New Hampshire, what Marianne must really look like by now couldn’t be good.

  Banishing the thought, he rummaged their toolshed swiftly, then worked the handle on the driver’s-side door of the truck. Careful, careful … because the dome light in the truck was going to be a problem, and he had to deal with it now, while there was still some faint background illumination from the evening sky to dilute its glow. Otherwise if one of them happened to look out a window when he opened the truck door, the jig would be up. So:

  Pull the handle until the latch clicked. Aim the shotgun at the dome light. Smash the dome light with the barrel’s end.…

  But when he opened the door, a dashboard light winked on. A chime began dinging; cursing silently, he lurched up into the cab to snatch the key out of the ignition, missing it on the first grab but grabbing it on the next.

  Wrong, this was all going badly.… The dome light glowed, the end of the shotgun’s barrel scraping but not breaking it; in a panic, lunging up, he shoved his bare fist into the light’s plastic covering as hard as he could, shattering it.

  Darkness. Silence. But the door of the cottage was already opening; no time to run. Gasping, he flung himself to the floor of the cab, yanked a blanket down over himself.

  And waited. “… heard something?” one of them said.

  Barely breathing, he listened as the women circled the truck and stopped on the driver’s
side. Don’t open the door, he thought at them, aiming the shotgun from under the steering wheel.

  Loading the weapon had been smart, in case of emergency. But what he wanted was for people to come later upon the scene of a tragic accident, not a double shotgun killing.

  Not if he could help it. The driver’s-side door opened a fraction; his trigger finger tightened. But at that moment from inside the cottage came a teakettle’s exuberant whistle.

  The truck’s door opened a little more. The last light of the evening blued the gun’s barrel. Then the door slammed shut again and he let his breath out, relaxing his grip on the weapon.

  The women went back inside, closing the cottage door behind them. Slowly he pushed himself up off the floor of the vehicle, relieved; they hadn’t noticed the broken dome light.

  They wouldn’t notice what he was about to do next, either, first to the driver’s side, then on the other side; not until it was too late. A boom of distant thunder from somewhere to the east rolled through the night; a breeze rustled the pine boughs overhead and subsided for now.

  By the time he’d completed his task with the small hacksaw he’d stolen from their shed and was slipping away unseen, the first cold spatters of rain were falling and thunder rumbled in long, rolling booms, approaching from the northeast.

  Dewey’s heart pounded. Without at all wanting to, he thought of his bed back at Lakesmith, the coughs and snorts of the other men in their cells all around him, the dull, featureless, utter predictability of the prison.

  Warm, dry, safe. While out here in the free world …

  Out here, it was going to be a bad night.

  “I don’t care,” Bella Diamond insisted. “We should go up and check on them. Ellie should’ve been home hours ago.”

  It was past seven-thirty, pitch dark outside with another big storm brewing. Ellie wasn’t answering the phone at her house, and Sam and Wade hadn’t come home for dinner, either, all these being circumstances that put Bella’s nerves on edge even more than they were already.

  “Why should Ellie be home?” Bella’s husband, Jacob Tiptree, inquired with his usual infuriating reasonableness. “No one else is home. George and the little girl won’t be back till tomorrow.”

  He looked up from the pipe bowl he was carving from a beech burl, in the rocker by one of the kitchen’s big, bare windows. A bolt of lightning split the night outside. “Maybe,” he added with a touch of asperity, “all she wants is a little peace.”

  “Hmph,” said Bella, bracing herself for a crack of thunder, and when it was over turned back to the stove, stirring the batch of spiced grape jam she’d begun making to try taking her mind off everything. But even the exotic smell of cinnamon and cloves mingling with the pungent grape aroma did nothing to ease her mind now.

  Bella … The voice echoed in her head, and she couldn’t stop seeing that face in the mirror upstairs, either, melting like a wax mask held over a fire, and so familiar …

  Jacob was a long, lean man whose face, sweet and wrinkled as a winter apple, belied the hardness of the life he had led until coming to Eastport. Years ago he’d been a fugitive on account of some things he’d done, and some he hadn’t; life on the run had kept him away from his daughter, Jake, and his grandson, Sam, for more than three decades. Then, just a few years ago, he’d found Jake once more, settled his law troubles, and married Bella.

  So he had a family again, and now it was clear that all he wanted was a quiet existence, the daily doings of the extended household, and his whittling tools.

  While she, Bella had to admit as she added sugar to the pot, was always spoiling for a fight. She pulled on an oven mitt to protect her arm from hot jelly splatters, and began stirring again.

  “Why don’t you just call them?” Jacob asked, removing more wood shavings from the burl he was carving. “Jake’s got a cell.”

  The surface of the jelly moved sluggishly with the heat coming up through it. “Because she’ll either not answer”—Jake had a habit of turning off her phone; Bella suspected it was to ward off calls like the one she was contemplating—“or she will answer, and she’ll claim that she’s fine whether she is or not. You know how she can be.”

  Stiff-necked, independent, stubborn … The old man frowned over a particularly tricky bit of his carving, not looking up. “Ayuh,” he said.

  The jelly came up all at once into a rolling boil; she set the stove timer and kept stirring, glancing out the window again as rain slashed the glass. “And where are Sam and Wade, anyway?” she fretted.

  Jacob sat straight. “Listen, old girl, you’ve got yourself all worked up over nothing. Unless”—he peered closely at her—“there’s more you’re not telling me?”

  Oh, but he was a wise one. Ordinarily, his perceptiveness might have comforted her, but now at his inquiry she felt herself closing up inside, tight as a clam. Women seeing ghosts, talking to them—and even worse, getting answers—might be fine in the stories on the television, the scary movies that Sam, especially, liked to see. But just try it in real life and the next thing you knew, Bella felt unhappily sure, your family would be setting up an appointment with the doctor for you, whether you wanted to go or not.

  Bella had already talked to one doctor today. The trouble was that while she was talking to him, she could see through him.

  Jacob put his tools down and set the burl with the half of a face carved into it—oh, why couldn’t he carve something else for a change?—on the table beside him. He clasped his hands in his lap, sat back, and commenced rocking back and forth, back and forth, all the while mildly gazing at her.

  Waiting. Not talking, not questioning or accusing. But he could, his expression and posture suggested, wait right there in the old wooden rocker until she told him what was bothering her. And he would, too, unless she spoke up about it this minute.

  “All right,” she gave in crossly when she had filled ten half-pint jelly jars with boiling-hot jelly, screwed the lids on, and turned them all upside down on a clean linen dish cloth she’d spread for the purpose.

  When the scalding jelly had been in contact with the insides of the jar lids for three minutes, killing any germs that might be there, she turned them right side up again. Soon each jar, wiped clean and set to cool on the fireplace mantel before being stored away in the butler’s pantry, gleamed dark purple in the kitchen’s lamplight like the old-fashioned jewel that it was.

  And by that time, Bella was well into her story. She told him the whole thing, from the anxiety that had begun tormenting her weeks earlier to the final event that morning.

  “… thin air,” she finished. Because that was how what she’d seen had gone unseen again: wispily, dissolving as if hinting it had never really been there at all. It was what she feared Jacob would believe, too.

  But: “Well,” he said slowly, then got up, plucking the keys to his old pickup truck from the hook by the door. “I don’t suppose it would hurt to take a ride up there and check on them.”

  Outside, he took her arm. “We’ll go just to ease your mind,” he said, because he was much too levelheaded a man to believe in apparitions, warning or otherwise.

  Of course he was. “All right,” Bella said, reaching out for his strong arm again, holding even more tightly to it than usual as they went down the steps together into the rainy night.

  Minutes later they were on the long, curving stretch of Route 190 that led to the causeway onto the mainland. Wind-whipped branches in the bare trees crowding in on either side of the pavement gleamed wetly in the headlights. Rain sluiced the windshield and the wipers fought to keep up.

  Suddenly from between the trees a shape bounded, too fast for Bella to warn Jacob. She put her hands up reflexively, shrinking back from the animal already in the act of leaping.

  Then came the crash.

  “Oh, come on, Sam. It’s not like anyone’s going to know.”

  It was twenty-four hours since he’d had his woozy spell in the restaurant. Afterwards he and Carol Stedman
had walked arm in arm all over town, under the streetlights and along the dark breakwater, drawing gradually closer until their shoulders at last snugged companionably together against the night’s chill.

  Companionably and a little more; only her brother’s probable presence back at her motel room had kept Sam from pursuing a plan of perhaps going there with her himself.

  And now, on the following evening, he was there and Carol’s brother wasn’t. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the queen-sized bed at the Motel East, Carol held out her glass invitingly. But when he shook his head, her smile turned to a pout.

  “I thought you were going to be more fun,” she complained, draining the glass and reaching for the wine bottle on the bedside table, to pour herself another.

  I thought so, too. But this whole thing had been a mistake, he saw now, maybe a big one.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. What she’d just told him was stunning. “How’d you guys ever think you were going to get away with …?”

  Outside the motel room’s big sliding glass doors leading to the deck, it was dark. He’d worked all day, driving to Bangor to pick up some parts a boatyard customer needed, then helping to install them.

  After that, he’d come over here to pick her up; the plan was for the three of them to have dinner together once more at the Rusty Rudder, before the pair of siblings left town.

  Richard was supposed to be here now, but he hadn’t arrived yet. And while they waited, she’d unloaded this information on Sam, about them being con artists, her and Richard. Con artists, thieves … the list just went on.

  Carol patted the bedspread. She was still very pretty, like a tennis star who modeled for a cosmetics company or something.

  But now everything was different. He was so disappointed, he didn’t know what to say. Scared, too, a little bit.

  “Come on, get comfortable and have a glass of wine with me. It’s not like it’s whiskey or gin, for heaven’s sake.”

  And when he still didn’t move, “Boy, they’ve really got you brainwashed, haven’t they?” She shook her head sadly, took a big swallow of the dark red, fruity liquid.