Maybe where he hit his head, she thought, but what about inside?
Garve stood away from the window, half expecting the plywood to fall. When it didn't, he crossed to his desk, picked up the phone, dialed and scowled.
"Goddamned thing's out."
Suddenly the wind stopped, and Peg held her breath. Her eyes were half closed when she heard, faintly, the explosion. She looked to the others, and saw they'd heard it too.
"What?" Montgomery asked.
Garve swore and raced out to the car, was gone before anyone could choose to join him.
"I don't believe this," Peg said, more to herself than the others in the room. "I don't believe this."
No one answered her; Matt stirred in Colin's lap.
And before they were able to begin speculation, Tabor was back, his face red and his mouth set tight. "The ferry," he told them when he slapped his hat hard on his desk. "The goddamned ferry's gone."
"But why?" Montgomery asked, bewildered.
"It figures, doesn't it?"
"How?" Peg said.
"How else do you get off this island?" No way else, she thought… except the fishing boats.
Garve saw her expression, and he grabbed for his hat again. "Yup. I think I'll make a quick run to talk to Alex. He must've heard the ferry go, too."
"Wait," Colin said, and Matt shifted in his arms.
"Look, Col-"
"No. Just listen a minute. You're going out there to warn Alex, right? Well, would you mind telling me what you're going to warn him about?"
The chief stammered a moment before saying, "Lilla, who else? She's obviously crazy, she probably killed Warren, and now she's doing things like that," and he gestured in the vague direction of the bay.
"You don't know for sure she did it."
"She was heading that way."
Colin squirmed to get more comfortable. "And what about Tess, Garve?"
No one said a thing.
"I think before you leave, we'd better decide exactly what it is we're really facing out there."
"You have an idea?"
He stroked Matt's hair, and Peg wanted to cry.
"Yeah. Yeah, I think I do. I didn't know before, but after what I saw and heard back there in the cell, I have a fair idea."
"If it has anything to do with ghosts," Garve said, half joking, half angry, "I don't want to hear it."
"Then don't listen, friend, because that's all I have."
***
Rose Adams sat in the living room and stared mournfully at the brown class register on her rolltop desk. So many names there, she thought as she brushed a finger over her own name embossed in gold on the flexible cover. So many names. She tried to run through each of her classes for the past ten years, a trick she'd learned from an older teacher long since gone, a trick that was supposed to help her remember the new students.
It had never worked, but whenever she was feeling depressed, whenever her family got too rambunctious and rebellious, she tried to remember every name she could. Like counting sheep, it would dull her mind to the demands it made on her.
Not today, however.
The wind was screaming something fierce outside the window, and Mitch hadn't returned from his search for baby Frankie, and Denise had somehow managed to sneak out of the house without her seeing. My God, when would they ever wake up and really appreciate all the things she did for them, all the sacrifices she'd made just so they could have clothes on their backs and food on the table. God knew, if she left it to Mitch they'd be on welfare by tomorrow.
Now here it was Saturday, and tonight-she looked at her watch and realized with a silent gasp it was less than four hours away-tonight at seven there was the big party at the Clipper Run. If they didn't get home soon, they wouldn't have time to make themselves presentable.
She sighed loudly, slapped her hands wearily against her thighs and pushed herself out of the chair. She was still in her bathrobe, but there'd been little incentive so far to get into a dress. With no one around to care how she looked, even on a weekend, why should she bother?
She looked to the sideboard, then, and the cabinet beneath. A drink, maybe. A fortification against the battles she knew would come when they returned. No, she thought with a decisive shake of her head and a deliberate glance away. It was too soon for that, and she hadn't clung to the wagon this far with Hugh's help to fall off now. Though God knew she needed a good toot now and then when Frankie started acting up and Denise refused to listen to her advice. My God, she'd say, I'm a teacher, don't you know that? A teacher! I know things. I know life, for God's sake!
But Frankie would only shrug and look sullen, and Denise would just smile and wiggle her ass out of the house.
Rose looked at her watch. Not time for the first drink yet, but what she should do is take a shower, be ready when Frankie or Mitch or Denise finally came home. That would show them. That would teach them a lesson, that planning in the home is just as important as planning in the classroom. She'd be all ready and sitting properly in the living room while they were all running around swearing and screaming and working up a sweat that would stain their good clothes.
Oh, God, she thought as she headed up the stairs, isn't it bad enough I got this sickness without having this family, too?
A hour later she wrapped a pink terrycloth towel around her and scuttled out of the bathroom, laughing to herself as she stumbled into the bedroom and switched on the vanity light. God, she loved that massage thing Mitch had installed at the beginning of the summer; it did things to her she thought were almost sinful.
A look at the gold watch placed carefully on the dresser, and she went to the closet to choose the dress she would wear. At the window, however, she stopped and looked out. She expected to see the fog that was giving her a case of nerves she didn't need.
What she saw was Mitch, Denise, and Frankie standing in the middle of the backyard.
She rapped a knuckle on the pane.
They looked up, one by one.
Thank God, she thought in relief and annoyance, and turned to hurry from the room when something about them made her look out again. It was Denise; she was naked, and there was a stick or something clinging her to shoulder. Oh, God, she prayed in furious resignation, what are they doing to me now? What if the neighbors… she clenched her fists until the spasm of rage subsided, then rushed to the stairs so she could give them all hell when they came in to explain.
The wind toppled a patio chair and tore a shingle from the roof.
She changed her mind and headed straight for the kitchen, where she could face them squarely, the queen of this damned house and they'd better not forget it.
Denise was the first to come through the door.
PART FOUR
OCTOBER: SATURDAY
ONE
TWILIGHT
Colin stood in the front of the boarded window, a lighted cigarette in his right hand, his left jammed into his hip pocket. Crushed butts littered the floor at his feet, and his hair was a slick tangle over his brow from constant tugging and violent shakes each time the enormity of what he was saying thrust itself home.
"We saw the signs of what was happening a hundred times." He stopped, changed his mind, "f saw them, but didn't know what I was looking for, so didn't know what I was seeing. But they were all there-Lilla's reluctance to have Gran buried in the usual way, her insistence that he was furious at us for imaginary evils… I kept assuming her grief had mixed up her time sense. What else was I going to think?
"But at my place yesterday, just before Peg came over, Lilla was telling me straight out he'd not died at all, or he'd come back somehow, and he was out to get what he believed was his due. He was using some… some power of his to get what he thought we had cheated him out of.
"He was dead, and now he's back.
"Needless to say, I didn't believe a word. Power like that belongs in dreams and movies."
"It doesn't exist," Montgomery said simply. Seated at El's desk, he l
ooked at Garve first, then at Peg and
Matt who were in a chair at the back of the room, Matt still asleep and sprawled in her lap.
"It does exist," Colin insisted without heat. "I don't know what's behind it, how it does what it does, but it damn well exists and Tess Mayfair's walking is the proof. What Garve and I saw there in the cell block was just icing on the cake.
"And now that I think about it, I'm sure that what I saw at the shack was Gran's shroud. After the funeral, after she was sure we were all in bed, Lilla went into the water and brought him out. She had to have done it, she must have-there was no one else to help her."
An hour had passed since he'd begun, speaking quickly, not giving himself a chance to think, and therefore backtracking several times. But the more he argued, the more he believed-and the horror of it was, he could see them believing as well.
And then he had offered what, for him, was the best argument outside any physical evidence: If he had been able to convince himself that the entire world had misunderstood him, had stacked deck and arrayed enemy against him to the extent that the only way he could win would be by ending it, why couldn't someone like Gran hate just as much? And it had been hate. Hatred for those fools who should have known, and didn't; hatred for those so-called friends who should have cared, and didn't. Colin had hated without understanding that his self-pity was blinding and the people he railed against were the very people trying to help him. His hatred had created a world beyond the real, and the only person who inhabited it was him.
Gran had hated the same way.
The difference had been in the final step.
Colin had slashed his wrists, and the pain had shocked him into the recognition of folly, into the realization that his so-called beliefs were false and falsely based. Gran, however, found himself dying and took a claw-hold on all those ancient beliefs and rituals he had brought from a home that had exiled him summarily. He took hold and refused to release them, and in that refusal made them as tangible as the shack in which he was ending his life-his rage had shredded the fragile curtain between the supernatural and the present.
"The point is," Colin said-he paused and looked at Hugh-"the point is, we're not in our world anymore. We're in Gran's now. And for the moment he's calling all the shots." His expression was grim. "All bets are off now. The rules we used to know aren't the rules anymore."
"What about Lilla?" Garve asked, though he needed no convincing.
"I don't know. I wish I did, but I just don't know."
"She isn't Lilla anymore," Peg said quietly, and they turned as one to stare. "She's not. Not the Lilla we used to know, that is. Maybe not Lilla at all. She was when she tried to warn us, she was when she tried to talk with Matt at the marina. But not anymore. Something happened, and if that business in the cell is any indication, she's… not. Right now, I don't know any other way to put it.
"Matt was right all along, too," Peg continued. "It was the songs. The ones we heard every night. She must have been using something-spells, maybe, or whatever you call them-that Gran taught her, to… I don't know, to bring him back, do something more? But I do know I'm right. She's either been driven crazy by Gran's influence and is doing these things without knowing what she's doing, or she's totally possessed.
"But whatever it is, Lilla is lost to us. We can't go to her for explanations. She just can't help us anymore."
"She's right," Colin said, crushing one cigarette beneath his sole while lighting another. "And we don't know enough. If we're going to get out of this, we have to know more. Jesus, we've got to know these new rules."
"And we have to tell the others," Garve reminded him, and looked angrily at the dead telephone. Hugh only shook his head sadly.
Colin strode to the desk and leaned over it, glaring. "What is wrong with you now, for God's sake?"
Hugh met his gaze with a glare of his own. "You're talking about Lilla being crazy, but have you been listening to yourself lately? Jesus Christ, Colin, I mean… really! Have you heard what you've been saying?"
He forced himself not to reach over and grab the doctor by the throat. "Look, Hugh, not one hour ago you were telling Peg about what happened with us and Tess. By God, you sure as hell believed then. What the hell happened?"
"Your so-called explanation," Montgomery said simply. "It's fantastic."
"Literally," Colin said. "You got a better one?"
"Give me time."
"Well, how much time do you think we have?"
The plywood shuddered, the venetian blinds on the outside clattering like musket fire.
Colin pointed toward the door. "The storm is starting to push in the tide. If we don't do something soon, we're going to be wading hip-deep in the damn ocean."
Hugh rubbed his eyes, pushed a hand across his lips. "You accept it all so easily."
"No," Colin assured him, "it isn't easy at all. But I don't have to meet more than one Tess Mayfair, or hear Lilla with Gran's voice, or see another demonstration like we did in the cell before I decide that evil isn't just another word in the dictionary. I'm a grown man, Hugh, but I'm scared shitless because there's a damn nightmare out there, and it ain't going away just because I say it isn't real."
The ceiling lights dimmed, grew bright again, and Garve stood and reached for his hat.
"Where are you going?" Hugh asked fearfully.
"If the phones don't work, I have to find out who's left in this place on my own, right? In the car."
"Crazy," the doctor whispered. He took hold of the ends of his handlebar mustache and begin to twist them, muttering to himself, sighing, jumping when something slammed into the plywood.
Garve left without a word, and Peg watched as he slid into the patrol car. He fussed with the sun visor, reached into the glove compartment, and stopped moving. She held her breath and waited, staring, until he left the car and returned to the office. He said nothing. He only threw a crumpled, soiled file card onto the desk. Colin frowned and smoothed it open.
"My God!"
Peg looked a question.
"This is a fingerprint card, from Flocks." He looked to Garve. "Is this what El went for?"
Garve nodded.
"Well, what?" Hugh demanded. He snatched the card away instead of waiting for an answer, and examined it. "Jesus. It's Gran's fingerprints," he said to Peg. "It was Gran's fingerprints on Warren's wallet."
"That son of a bitchin' old man," Garve said intensely. "That goddamned old man." He set himself in front of Peg, and she could barely meet his gaze. Colin wanted to intervene, but he waited instead. "You were closer to that family than any of us," the chief said tonelessly. "Can you help? Did Lilla ever tell you anything about Gran?"
She shrugged weakly. "I don't know. Not much. He… he wasn't from Haiti or any place like that. He was from one of the smaller islands, the Caicos, I think they were. Lilla told me once they're somewhere north of Haiti." She pursed her lips. "Haiti. Lord, you don't suppose this has anything to do with voodoo or something like that? It couldn't, right? I mean, it just couldn't." No one responded. Her voice lowered. "He had to leave there in a hurry, as I understand. A big hurry."
"Yes," Colin said, looking toward the cells. "When Lilla came to the cottage, she said something about him having to leave where he was. She said he did things wrong, and claimed they weren't wrong at all."
"Maybe he was a dissident," she said, looking at Hugh to be sure he was listening. "Or a blasphemer, something terrible like that. Voodoo's a religion, you should know that, and every religion has a few grumblers who think it's being done all wrong. Gran might have been one of them, and when he came here and didn't get rich right away… well, it's just like you said, Col. He got angry for all the wrong reasons."
"Great," Garve said. "Then he's still alive."
"No," Colin contradicted. "At least I don't think so. But he's still around, and he's using Lilla to help him."
"But how?" The chief grabbed at his hat and holster. His frustration was running high. "Je
sus Christ, how?"
"Hattie Mills," Peg said then.
Garve turned and frowned. "What?"
"Hattie Mills, Garve. Hattie, for heaven's sake. We need to know more, and maybe she can help us. Good Lord, we've all gotten enough lectures from her about this god and that beast and what all the hell else. If anybody knows something about what's going on, she certainly has to."
"I saw Tess shot," Doc said helplessly, more to himself than Colin. "Shot twice, run over, she fell over a cliff." Still leaning against the desk, he took off his glasses and lay them on the blotter. One finger pushed them around until he could poke at the front of the lenses. "She's dead."
"She is," Colin said gently.
"Then we can't kill her again, can we?" He looked up and blinked. "My God, Colin, do you hear what I'm saying? That Gran has hold of the dead, and he's making them-"
"I hear you. And I can hear me, too. Don't you think I'm wondering if I've lost my mind? But I know what hate can do to a man. I know."
Though no one said a word, there was no silence. The wind had taken their voices and set them screaming.
Garve strapped on his gunbelt and pulled a box of cartridges from a drawer. He shoved it awkwardly into his pants pocket, and unsnapped the holster's flap. A hitch at his belt and he started for the door. "I better get moving."
"The Run," Peg said then.
He paused, staring.
"If you do find anyone, have them go to the Clipper Run."
"Right," Colin agreed. "It's bigger than this place, and it has fewer windows. If it comes to that we can… we can hold out until the storm's over." He grabbed for his jacket and pulled it on. "I'll get Peg and Matt over there now, then Doc and I will see what Hattie can do for us."
Without asking permission, he went to the gun cabinet and pulled down a rifle, turned and looked at Hugh. The doctor pushed himself wearily to his feet and retrieved his glasses. He blew on the lenses, examined them, put them on. Then he stroked his mustache and looked around slowly. When he saw Colin waiting, he nodded, and Colin tossed him the weapon and a cartridge box. Then he turned around and took a shotgun for himself.
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