Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

Of the woods, she meant; in the truck. I snatched my bag off the countertop, hunkered back down. No sound came from outside, and neither did another shotgun blast.

  Keeping low, we crept quietly from behind the counter, past the chimney on one side and the steep open stairs leading to the cottage’s second-floor loft area on the other. At least whoever it was hadn’t caught us up there, where we’d really be trapped.

  Small comfort, but by that time I was willing to take whatever I could get.

  Putting my hands out blindly, I found the doorknob and turned it silently, then swung the door open, fast. “Go, go, go,” I chanted, and Ellie flew out with me right behind her.

  We scrambled into the truck, and I found the key in the cupholder and jammed it into the ignition. The engine roared and the headlights came on, a sudden blare of illumination: trees, boulders, and brush but nothing and no one else.

  I stomped the gas and we shot out of there like our hats were on fire and our tail ends were catching, as my dad would’ve put it, out through the open gate toward home.

  “Damn,” said Ellie as we bounced along the dirt road.

  “What?” I glanced over at her. She was frowning at her cellphone, which she’d plugged right away into the dashboard charger.

  “Battery’s dead again. Maybe it’s …”

  The truck’s glaring headlights turned the forest into the set of a low-budget horror movie, garish and stark. I flung my bag sideways at her, grabbed the wheel again as we hit a rut.

  “Use mine.” She took it; the familiar chimes tinkled as its screen’s greenish glow lit. Which was when I realized what it was that I hadn’t noticed when we first got into the truck.

  “Ellie—” Her scream cut me off; I slammed on the brakes. A man stood in the road smack in front of us, grinning.

  Holding a shotgun. The sudden stop jolted us both forward; I felt the steering wheel slam my rib cage, heard Ellie’s hands smack the dashboard’s hard plastic.

  And when I looked up again, the man was gone. “Ellie, when we got in the truck there were no …”

  Lights. The interior cab light hadn’t gone on. Neither had the two little bulbs by the rearview mirror.

  “I can’t find it,” said Ellie frantically, scrabbling around on the floor and then patting at the seat around her. “The phone, it fell when we stopped so fast, and now I can’t—”

  Great. I hit the gas again. “Well, we’ll just have to make it out of here on our own, then, won’t we?”

  From beneath the truck came a loud bang and then the clank-clunk of the muffler getting knocked off the undercarriage by a rock we’d have cleared if we hadn’t been going so fast.

  A bolt of fright went through me; at first I’d thought it was a shotgun blast. Luckily, though, by then my hands were clamped so tightly to the steering wheel that a bomb couldn’t have loosened them.

  So we managed to stay on the road. “Who the hell was that?” Ellie breathed, twisting around to peer out the back window.

  “No idea.” Actually, I did have one; I’d gotten a halfway decent look at him. But that wasn’t the important thing now.

  “Ellie, the cab’s interior lights aren’t working.” Outside, the night flew by; if I drove any faster, I risked losing control on the rough road.

  But we had to get out of here, to where there were people and … “He must’ve disabled them,” I said.

  A porcupine waddled out in front of us; I braced myself, but he made it across somehow. We were nearly to the culvert; past that there was still plenty of rough road between us and safety, though.

  Ellie found the broken dome-light plastic with her hand. “Why would he do that?” she wondered aloud.

  “No idea.” The headlights picked out the metal culvert’s rim and then the pond’s surface. I recalled Bob Arnold’s warning on the dangers of flooded roads.

  The road itself was dry, however, and we’d be across the culverted section in moments, slowing only for the gulley that the flood had cut in it earlier. And that would be no problem if I was careful, or so I thought, but then a number of things happened fast:

  First, in the reflection of our headlights off the pond, a dim shape upstream began moving, sliding sideways and then up out of the water entirely. That big log, I realized, that the Calais cop had said was damming the stream …

  He was removing it. But even before I understood this, water began pouring through; a lot of water, straight at us. A wave …

  And then we were in it. In the headlights the water roiled, swirling and gushing. The tires slipped, fighting for purchase on a road now turning liquid underneath us.

  We hit the gulley before I could brake. Suddenly the water was much deeper; the truck began moving sideways. “Ellie, we’ve got to get out.”

  She was ahead of me, already reaching for the passenger-side door handle. But it wasn’t there.

  Mine, either. I could feel the sharp edges where it had been sawed off; we’d have heard him doing it, maybe, but we’d had that music on, so … As I thought this, the tires caught on a low scrim of brush lining the road, and the rushing water carried us over.

  Headlight beams strafed the sky; then we were pressed together against the passenger-side window, which unfortunately had hit a rock or something when it landed.

  Something hard enough to break the window. The truck was on its side in the part of the pond that the culvert drained into, I realized, and a thud of real fear hit me; that part was deep. Cold, muddy water began gushing in, filling the cab. I hauled my weight off Ellie as best I could by grabbing the steering wheel.

  But that wasn’t going to work for long. In the few instants we had been down here, the cab was half full and the water level in it was still rising fast. “Ellie …”

  She snapped on a flashlight she’d miraculously managed to snag out of the glove compartment. A blessing; at least we were not going to drown in the pitch dark. But my relief was short-lived; the water was freezing cold, stinking of swamp muck, and still bubbling up through the broken window with a force like an out-of-control fire-hose.

  Too bad that safety glass was smashed enough to let water in but not enough to let us out.

  “Okay,” gasped Ellie. “Okay, okay …” She hauled herself up and over, into the truck’s vestigial back seat, feeling around for …

  “Got it,” she managed triumphantly, coming up with a red plastic toolbox. I recognized the cordless drill’s carrying case. “Here,” she said, shoving it at me.

  “Oh, Ellie.” My heart sank, knowing how useless that drill was going to be, how I was going to disappoint her. She thought I was handy with tools, a notion I’d done little to discourage; it was fun, having people think I was good at something when mostly I was just stubborn and lucky.

  She thought I could do something useful, like maybe drill us out of here somehow by using my handy-dandy, mostly self-taught house-repair skills, or maybe my deck-building abilities, which to tell the truth weren’t any great shakes, either.

  Real tools might’ve made a difference, a sledgehammer or a pipe wrench. But the drill bits were tiny compared to what we’d need to cut that windshield. And while I thought this, another huge bloop of muddy water came in.

  “Okay, gimme that,” I said. With shaking hands I slotted in the biggest drill bit we had and tightened it. “Here goes …”

  The sound was ear piercing, as if the dentist had to go in through your eardrum to reach your wisdom tooth. But it wasn’t windshield piercing.

  And then the drill’s battery died.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no …” The water was to my waist, and as the truck’s weight sank it deeper and deeper in the mucky pond’s bottom and more water came in, the cab would soon submerge.

  She grabbed the drill.

  “Ellie, the battery is—”

  Ignoring me, she shoved past me. “Get back.” I’d never heard that tone out of her, before: deadly, and utterly focused.

  She gripped the drill by its nose, the heavy battery pack sect
ion aimed like a hammerhead. And then she swung it—

  But not at the windshield; at the driver’s-side window above us. And although it didn’t break out completely, it shattered, spiderweb cracks spreading through it.

  Wiggling around, she braced herself against me, drew her knees up, and—

  Wham. The weakened safety glass made a harsh ripping sound as it tore; she kicked it again for good measure and it tore out in one flexible piece, like a sheet of rubber.

  “Go!” With me pushing, she wiggled up and out through the opening, and I tried to follow, but instead the truck gave a mean lurch sideways, then sank suddenly much deeper.

  Water boiled up into the cab, up over my head so fast that I lost my bearings; flailing, I tried to find the window, couldn’t, and got panicky, grabbing around but not finding anything.

  Then something grabbed my hair, yanking and tearing at it. I reached around wildly, trying to free myself from something that gripped back. It was Ellie, and she was yelling at me.

  “Don’t fight. Just let me pull you! Get your face up here!”

  For once, I obeyed without an argument, noticing a sudden improvement in my situation once my head was up out of the water. Cold, wet, and more scared than I’d ever been in my life … but I could breathe, and once my arms and shoulders were out, I could wiggle onto the truck’s door, and from there to the pond’s edge.

  There I collapsed. Beside me, Ellie fell, too, catching her breath. Around us, everything was quiet and dark. No owls hooting or animals scuttling … nothing at all, as if the night itself was holding its breath, waiting.

  “Ellie,” I whispered, “we can’t stay here like this.”

  Unarmed, I meant, and with nothing between us and whoever it was who was trying to kill us. Walking two miles out to the paved road, soaking wet in the freezing dark, wasn’t an option I liked, and especially not with that guy-with-gun factor added in.

  But from here we might be able to make it through the brush in the other direction, stay off the road and maybe out of his sight long enough to get—

  “We should try to get to the cottage,” Ellie said, echoing my thought; God, it was cold out here.

  “Upstairs,” she managed through teeth now practically together, they were chattering so hard, “and push some furniture over onto the landing, to block it …”

  The gun I’d brought along was still up there, too, since of course I hadn’t thought fast enough to get it as we fled.

  “Come on,” I whispered, hauling myself up. My back felt as if fire ants had set up housekeeping in it and were biting their way out. Everything on me was cut, scraped, or torn; parts of my scalp felt as if Ellie had used a razor knife on it; and my nose, mouth, eyes, and ears were clotted with stinking mud.

  Also, probably a very bad guy was still around here, wanting to kill us; with each soggy-shoed step through the weeds, bushes, and brambles between the pond and the cottage clearing, I expected another blast from a shotgun to explode out of the dark at us.

  But none did.

  For now, anyway.

  CHAPTER 8

  At the Motel East, Sam Tiptree hitched himself and the chair he was duct-taped to across the floor to the motel room’s door. The room was on the first floor, so if anyone went by outside they’d be able to hear him.

  Next he tipped the chair over, banging his head quite hard on the door frame as he did so. But seeing stars didn’t matter to him; what mattered was that when he stopped seeing them, he was as near as possible to the door itself.

  He couldn’t kick it, or pound on it with his fists. The tape took care of that. He could’ve hammered on it with his head, but the way it still felt after hitting the door frame made him think it was probably a better idea to save that tactic for later.

  After all, he couldn’t make any sound at all if he was out cold. “Mmmph! Gnrr! Mmmph!” he yelled, hearing footsteps outside.

  Or it would’ve been yelling if the duct tape weren’t tightly covering his mouth. “Gnnr! Gnrr!”

  As he’d hoped, whoever was out there paused. Maybe it was a housekeeping person or a motel guest. But what he heard next was not what he had hoped to hear.

  Not at all. “Hello?” Hewwo? It was a small child’s voice. Sam stepped up the urgency on his grr-ing and mmmph-ing as well as he could.

  From outside: “Mama, the monster is in there.” Monstew.

  From a distance came a woman’s voice, harried and impatient: “Crosley, get over here. Whoever’s in there doesn’t want—”

  Yes! Yes, I do! But it was no use; the child let himself be summoned away. Moments later everything was silent again.

  Outside the sliding glass door on the other side of the room, the sky was dark. From where he lay on the floor, Sam could see through the railings on the deck outside—the motel was built into the side of a steep hill, so the deck was thirty feet off the ground—all the way to Campobello Island across the bay.

  Lamps came on in the houses over there as people got home from work and began fixing dinner. Headlights flickered along the shoreline road. But then, after a while, the lights went out again one by one; TVs, too, and the headlights along the road grew more infrequent until there were hardly any.

  Sam tried to kick the door—or anything, really—with his bound-to-the-chair feet, but all he could produce was scuffling, not loud enough to be heard by anyone more than a few feet away.

  It might have been enough to alert tenants in the rooms on either side of this one, if any had been in them. But business was thin at the Motel East that night, so the rooms were vacant.

  The glowing red numerals of the clock on the table between the room’s pair of queen-sized beds read 11 p.m., the last time he looked. After that, having had no luck in attracting attention to his plight and feeling that he might as well resign himself to waiting for the maid to come in here in the morning and find him, he decided to try to sleep.

  But the nightmares he began having as soon as he succeeded jerked him awake again. There was a chilly draft coming under the door, too, and his head hurt, not to mention the fact that he had to use the bathroom rather badly; also, he was hungry.

  A surge of frustration overwhelmed him. Damn, how had he let himself get hornswoggled so thoroughly, as his grandfather Jacob would have put it?

  And all over a woman. Let that be a lesson to you, he told himself wryly, feeling his muscles begin cramping as he lay there tied up on the cold floor. Quit thinking with your …

  The motel room door opened suddenly, smacking him in the head. The sound he made caused whoever was on the other side of the door to pause, then open it again more cautiously.

  A hand came in, flipping on the light switch. A face peered down, grimacing in consternation and surprise. “What the—”

  It was Sam’s stepfather, Wade Sorenson. “Oh, Christ.”

  The big man pushed on the door, sliding Sam’s taped-to-the-chair body just far enough back so he could squeeze inside. A few minutes later they were leaving the motel room, Sam staggering a little on legs that were still stiff and prickling.

  They got into Wade’s pickup. But they didn’t turn up Key Street toward home, instead heading through heavy rain on down Water Street past the fish pier.

  “Where are we going?” Sam asked finally. In the glare from the lights out on the pier, big waves slopped the pilings. Wade seemed angry, his eyes intent on the street ahead and his face expressionless. He hadn’t even asked Sam how he’d managed to end up bound and gagged in a motel room.

  “Hospital,” Wade replied tersely. “Bella and your granddad were in an accident.”

  They headed out of town, Wade squinting past the wipers into the streaming dark. “Are they all right? What happened, what kind of accident?”

  Wade pulled to the side of the road, put the flashers on, and pointed wordlessly to a set of tire tracks leading from the pavement through some brush and into the trees. In the darkness the marks were hardly noticeable unless you knew where to look. Hoof pri
nts in the soft shoulder told the rest of the story.

  “Looks like your grandfather must’ve swerved to avoid a deer in the road.” Wade still sounded angry; Sam thought it was because he was upset about the accident, until another thought hit him.

  “You’re not up there with them. At the hospital.”

  They reached Route 1, turned onto it. Wade hit the gas hard. “That’s right, Sam, I’m not. I was out looking for you, instead.”

  In the dimness of the truck’s cab, he turned furiously. “So, was it a fun evening, Sam? Was it worth it to you?”

  And when Sam must’ve looked puzzled, Wade added, “What, do you think you can drink in this town without people talking about it?”

  Enlightenment washed over Sam, followed by anger of his own. But then he realized: of course. Why wouldn’t they think that?

  They sped in silence down the dark, rain-swept highway, hemlocks and white pines looming on either side, Wade frowning as he drove, alert for wildlife: moose, deer, even bears, although it wasn’t common to see them out near the road. Finally:

  “Wade. It was lemonade. I went back and told the bartender not to put gin in it. No one else knew, though.”

  Wade said nothing. But he was listening. It didn’t escape Sam, either, that Wade had spent a long time looking for him.

  That he’d cared. Then, “Okay, let’s hear it,” Wade said, and added, “There’s a can of Coke on the floor there somewhere.”

  Sam found it, guzzled gratefully from it. “See, there was this girl,” he began when he’d slaked his thirst somewhat.

  The whole complicated story of Richard and what happened on his boat Courtesan … all that could wait, he decided.

  The girl was the important part. “I didn’t want to tell her that I don’t drink. I don’t know why.…”

  Yes, I do. He started again. “I was embarrassed. To say so, I mean, that I don’t drink alcohol. I should’ve known what a bad sign that was, that if I couldn’t tell her, then …”

  Then it was hopeless. Once Sam had blurted that part out, the rest of the story poured forth until the next thing stopped him.