Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  “What’ll it do?” Victor asked. “How do we get out of this?”

  “Well, it could be complicated,” Mr. Ash said. “In order to activate the M14, the safety clip is removed and the pressure plate is rotated from its safety position to its armed position.”

  Somehow he seemed to understand that the details would calm Victor. He went on: “There are letters on it, A for armed and S for safety, on the pressure plate. You align an arrow to arm it.”

  “And then?” Victor demanded.

  “Once it’s armed, pressure can cause the mine to detonate. When pressure is applied it pushes down on the Belleville spring underneath the pressure plate.”

  “Oh,” Victor said faintly.

  “The spring pushes the firing pin onto the detonator which ignites the main charge. In this case, it’s probably tetryl.”

  “So what do we do?” Bob Arnold asked. It hadn’t escaped him: Lian Ash was smarter about high explosives than your average stonemason.

  Deep, contemplative breath from Mr. Ash. “Well. Nothin’ for it, I guess, but to get down there and undo it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Victor piped up, “I’m still not so sure I want you down here fooling around with this stuff.”

  “Dad,” Sam put in quietly.

  “How do I know,” Victor demanded argumentatively, “that you know anything about this at all, that you’re not just some fake with a big mouth and a fancy line of talk, just trying to impress people?”

  “Dad, shut up,” Sam said again as Maggie’s eyes, alert until now, drooped alarmingly.

  The sight sent a fresh pang of anxiety through me: What had that bastard dosed them with?

  “How do I know,” Victor ranted unstoppably, “you won’t blow all three of us to kingdom come?”

  Sam groaned, and for a moment I recalled being his age, and feeling so immortal. Being tied up over a bunch of explosives was bad enough, apparently, but now his father was embarrassing him.

  But Lian Ash didn’t seem the least bit affronted by Victor’s question. Instead, a beatific smile spread on his lined face as he bent to answer Victor’s question.

  “First sensible thing you’ve said since we all got here,” he replied. “And the answer is…”

  He stepped down onto the deck of the little boat, bobbling dangerously for a moment until he got his sea legs under him.

  “…the answer is you don’t. And till we’re sure I haven’t blown you up,” he added uncomfortingly, “neither do I.”

  He frowned at his task. Maggie was unconscious again, beads of sweat on her lip and not much color in her face.

  “Wade,” Lian Ash said, “can you come down here with me? It’ll take more than one pair of hands to untangle all this rat’s nest.”

  Despite the clear danger, Wade moved forward alertly. He’d have stepped in front of a freight train for Sam.

  “Just a minute,” Bob Arnold put in. The boat basin was empty now and the dock swept clean of people and vehicles, the barriers all up at the entry.

  “Bomb squad’s in Augusta. Take them a while to get here. But they’re coming, and what I want to know is this,” Bob told Lian Ash. “They’ve got the knowledge, experience to handle all this kind of stuff. No doubt that if we give ’em time to get here they can get these people out of the fix they’re in.”

  That last part for my benefit. There was plenty of doubt but he wanted to give me hope. “What I want to know is, are you that good? All by yourself?”

  It was the question he’d been putting together in his mind: Who was Lian Ash, that he could do it too? Was he, for instance, a man into whose background Bob Arnold should look deeply once this was all over? A man with odd secrets, even a wanted man, perhaps?

  Or, as Victor had suggested, was Lian Ash just going to make everything dreadfully worse? He looked up from where he crouched.

  “First of all we don’t have that time, for the bomb squad to get here. This clock, dynamite, they’re not the main show but the clock is ticking. It’s a timer. It’ll set the rest off, we give it the chance. I don’t know when.” He took a deep breath.

  He could say no. He could back out.

  He could stay free.

  “The answer to your other question,” he said, “is yes.”

  Bob digested this. “All right then,” he said gravely. “I’ll want to talk with you afterwards.” He turned away.

  Wade looked up at me. “Jake. Go on, now. You and Ellie, too, George. Get away from here, we’ll just do what has to be done and we’ll be with you shortly.”

  All of us, his eyes said. I had no choice but to believe it.

  Lian Ash whistled softly. “Huh. Look at that. It really is a Claymore. Don’t see those much anymore. And bags of ANFO pellets. Looks like about sixty pounds.”

  “Which means?” Victor quavered.

  “Powder factor, that’s how much it takes to do a job, is a pound of explosive per cubic yard of rock broken up enough so you can dig it with a front-end loader.”

  Victor did the calculation in his head. “Not,” he groaned, “what I wanted to hear.”

  Me either. Wade glanced at me. “Jake, unless you’ve got some practical activity to contribute here…”

  I understood. They weren’t going to do it until we left. And the longer we hung around the closer that clock got to zero hour. Whatever that was.

  “Right. See you later,” I told Sam more confidently than I felt. George was guiding Ellie up the narrow metal gangway to the pier. Turning away I felt an axe of misery chop through my heart, but I had no choice. Staying wouldn’t help anything.

  The gangway’s serrated metal steps were agony under my feet but by the top I felt weightless. As if, were I to let go of the rail, I might sail up balloonlike into the night sky: disembodied with fear, with the near-certain imminence of a final loss.

  Which was how I knew for the first clear time what Lian Ash had felt, all those years ago, when he was going away from me.

  On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in Halifax Harbor, a few hundred miles northeast of Eastport as the crow flies. It was during World War I and one ship carried benzine, TNT, picric acid, and guncotton. The other, a Belgian relief vessel, does not figure prominently; it could have been any ship. What mattered were the explosives.

  And the result: The blast killed 1,600 people outright, the munitions ship’s half-ton anchor crashed to earth two miles from the explosion, and a three-mile-high mushroom cloud rose over the emptied bay, the water blown away.

  The Halifax blast, still famous around these parts, was the largest human-caused nonnuclear explosion in history and back in my kitchen I tried very hard not to think about it.

  Instead I let Monday out of the workshop and she made a beeline for her water bowl; Cat Dancing followed, heading for the hall but coming back at once, shaking her paw at what she still smelled there.

  While we were out an ambulance had taken the body away. But I could still feel it there, too, as if it had been drawn on the floor with invisible chalk.

  The phone rang again and I took it off the hook. Everyone in Eastport wanted to know what had happened, how I was, and — this of course was the important part — what in the world was going on, down on that finger pier?

  But I didn’t feel like telling them.

  Numbly, Ellie and I began fixing dinner. I’d tried calling Maggie’s mother but there was no answer; now I stood rigidly at the counter peeling potatoes, feeling that if I stopped, I would probably fall to the floor screaming.

  The peeler slipped, taking a slice of skin from the end of my index finger. Two drops of blood. I put the peeler down. Outside the kitchen window: black sky.

  Please, I implored it. Oh, I am begging you.

  Ellie put her hand on my shoulder briefly, then went back to shaping Swedish meatballs and lining them up in a Pyrex dish: two dozen meatballs each the size of a toddler’s fist, enough for all of us and more, bless her heart.

  When the men went out on the water, y
ou never knew for sure that you’d see them again. Anything could happen: equipment. A rogue wave. A freighter. There was no end to the things that could go wrong. You dealt with it. I picked up the peeler and it took another thin skin-strip immediately.

  Monday came over and pressed against my leg. Please.

  “I think,” Ellie suggested, “twenty potatoes are probably enough.” She took the peeler from my hand, or tried to.

  After a moment I allowed my fingers to open.

  These two would be here, I realized. George and Ellie, no matter what. But that thought I absolutely could not allow myself to take any further.

  “Lian Ash seems okay,” George said expressionlessly. He was intuiting more than I would ever have expected of him. Now some of the notes and papers from Harriet’s house, that the impostor known as Harry Markle had left there, lay on the table in front of him as he frowned into a spiral notebook.

  “What’s this, do you think?” he asked. “I know it’s a map. But not of anything around here. I don’t recognize any of this.”

  Ellie and I peered over his shoulder at the neatly drawn diagram on a sheet of blue-lined paper. “A cemetery,” Ellie said, pointing at the sketch of an old-fashioned grave marker, the letters RIP inked in miniature on it.

  But no other markers. And the topography did look familiar to me. Brooklyn, I thought, and there was Manhattan, and the shoreline of New Jersey. “No, not a graveyard,” I said. “Will you get out the atlas, please, Ellie?” She hurried to fetch it.

  “George.” A new thought hit me. “Will Bob know he needs to get people away from the windows? The glass?”

  I left the rest unspoken: Halifax. All these years after the event, most people in the United States didn’t even know that it had happened. But in Halifax, just a few hours away via ferry, an army of people had been blinded by flying glass that day.

  George nodded seriously, not wanting to say it either. “Bob knows,” was all he said as Ellie returned with the atlas.

  But suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m going to the third floor, maybe from there I can see…”

  What? But I couldn’t just sit. The stairs creaked ominously, each riser groaning an alarm echoing the ones in my heart. The third floor windows, their ancient panes wavery antiques, looked out over the rooftops of town to the harbor.

  Traceries of new eaves obscured my view of the dock, but the boat basin was visible under the big lights, empty now except for Sam’s boat, its little mast like a finger pointing at heaven. The boat was moving away from the pier, coming around in the basin between the dock pilings and the big concrete mooring dolphin jutting from the water. Due east; I couldn’t see who was at the helm or what was happening on the small vessel.

  But someone must be there. Human hands turned the rudder, ran the throttle of Sam’s little Evinrude, kept her heading steady in the glare of the big dock lights.

  I stared, transfixed, my fingers grazing the windowpane. All the other boats were moving away, out into deeper water, all speeding at full throttle, I could tell by the faint disturbance of their wakes. Footsteps creaked up the stairs behind me, but I dared not turn away. Who was on that boat?

  I glanced at my wristwatch. It was just past seven o’clock. Or as Sam would have put it, 1900 hours, now going on…

  1905. “Dear god…” Harry Markle’s badge number.

  Turning back to the window as George and Ellie came into the room behind me, I had a final, mercilessly clear view of a small boat bobbing ghostlike in the fading illumination of the dock lights behind it. Something went over the side, quick as a fish.

  Then, without warning, a ball of orange flame expanded from it in the ghastly millisecond before the boom arrived, a sound from some vast, damned thing’s yawning maw, like a roar of defiance rumbling up straight out of the bowels of hell.

  The windowpanes bulged inward. Shingles flapped and sailed from the roofs of the houses nearest Water Street, flew away like startled birds. My heart gave a thud in my chest.

  When the flash faded, Sam’s boat had vanished and bits of stuff floated down through the dock lights.

  I sat slowly down on the floor of the attic room, my face in my hands. If I moved, it would be true.

  So I didn’t move. I don’t know for how long. Not until…

  “Hey.” A hand touched my hair. I looked up, disbelieving.

  It was Wade. Behind him stood Sam.

  “You’d better come downstairs,” Ellie told me. “Victor’s here, too.” I stood shakily, still unable to believe my eyes.

  “And,” Ellie added, smiling through her tears, “he’s in the kind of bad mood I’m afraid only you can do something about, Jake.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a drink around here,” Victor asked bitterly, rummaging in the cabinets.

  Ellie went to find him one as Sam looked on. He was chomping at the bit to get back to Maggie, who was still at the dock being looked at by the paramedics. But I needed him here where I could see him as Monday danced joyously around us, toenails clicking, and even Cat Dancing gazed down benignly — well, benignly for her — from her perch atop the refrigerator.

  “How did he know?” I whispered into Wade’s shoulder. “The badge number…” I’d explained what must have happened.

  “Not sure,” Wade replied. “He got them out of the det cord first.” Sam, Maggie, and Victor, tied up with the explosive, red “clothesline.”

  “…and up off the pier.” Wade went on. “Bob Arnold grabbed them, took them past the traffic cones, he’d gotten everyone else back, too, by then.”

  Another benefit of small town policing as performed by Bob Arnold: he never lied, not even to the bad guys. So when he said move, everyone had, and he’d gotten people away from the glass hazard, too.

  “No eye injuries that we know about so far,” Wade confirmed, avoiding the main issue, which was what had he been doing all that time, he and my father, while Sam, Maggie, and Victor were being whisked to safety.

  “Every window on Water Street’ll need replacing, and lots of them uphill,” he said. “Guess folks getting ready for the weather taped a lot of the old glass, though. Guy must’ve been stockpiling those explosives. Probably stolen.”

  Sure. It was why he’d been traveling, I supposed: a gravel pit here, a road project there, a National Guard storage depot somewhere else. All the loot piled up in the U-Stor-It he’d mentioned, on the mainland till he needed it. Wade came across with the rest of the story.

  “I stayed to help defuse the stuff, we thought we were going to be okay with it,” he said. “But all of a sudden he—”

  Lian Ash. Jacob Tiptree.

  “—he asked Sam what time it was, Sam told him, and a funny look came on his face,” Wade went on. “Next I knew he was shoving me off the boat, firing the engine up. Said to tell you he’d see you later, and he was outta there like grease through a goose.”

  Military time. And Harry Markle’s badge number. No fool, my old man. He was a professional.

  And he knew his bombs. “He didn’t say anything else?”

  “Um, yeah. He said, ‘Shame on me.’ ”

  Fool me once, shame on you. My heart clung stubbornly to the memory of that shape going over the side, just before the blast. So quick, I barely glimpsed it, but surely it had been there.

  Surely it had. Not that going overboard would guarantee anything.

  “I’m sorry, Jacobia,” Wade said. “The Coast Guard guys went in there just as fast as they could afterwards, got the searchlights on to see if maybe…”

  If maybe he’d survived, by some miracle I didn’t deserve. I clung to Wade, torn between gratitude for what had been saved and a kind of grief I’d never known before.

  And then we heard it: Bob Arnold, calling as he came up the back steps. “Somebody want to take a damned fool off my hands?”

  The back door opened. Bob marched in, looking about as angry as any of us had ever seen him, before. “I got things to do, you know, every god da
mned alarm in this town is goin’ off like blazes, bunch of bomb experts be here any minute now, full of pee and vinegar and mad as all hell ’cause there is not one freakin’ thing left for them to do about anything…”

  Oh, he was wired, our police chief, his round face pink with a combination of fury, exertion, excitement, and remembered terror, little round beads of sweat standing out on the skin above his rosebud lips.

  Behind him, dripping wet and resembling the ghost of some ancient shipwreck, stood my father. “Won’t go to the hospital,” Bob told us disgustedly. “I figured maybe Victor would take a look at him.”

  His eyes were huge and haunted, his face full of pain, and he kept shaking his head as if trying to clear it. But when he saw me he rushed toward me and in the next instant his cold arms wrapped around me, his body shaking with chills from the icy water and with his emotion.

  Fool me twice, shame on me. “Coast Guard fellows found him floating,” Bob went on. “His eardrums are broken, they think. Anyway, he can’t hear. Blast, probably. I don’t know what else.”

  He shrank from my embrace, wincing. “Broken ribs, I’ll bet,” Victor diagnosed, seeing this.

  Wade nodded. “Shock wave broke ’em,” he agreed. “Or slammed him against some ledge. Drove him right down against it, I would imagine.”

  “Lucky it didn’t slam his skull on it.” Victor took a large swallow of his whiskey. “C’mere, let me see him.”

  Now that he wasn’t in danger of being blown to kingdom come, my ex-husband was getting his wind back. He led his patient to the dining room where the light was better, bending solicitously to him, and I recalled again how kind Victor always was to his patients, as if their need were the medicine he needed himself.

  I turned to Bob. “I don’t get it. How’d he live?”