by Beverly Bird
He shot her a look. "I guess not. Cassie’ll have an extra set. Let me try the back door, and if it’s not open, we’ll just have to drive down to the big island again."
He dropped Josh’s hand and went around the corner of the deck. Maddie listened to his heels thump away, and felt a panicky moment of abandonment again. Almost before she could fight it, he opened the front door from inside.
"I opened one of the back windows," he said. "Open a few others, too, so I can hear you from the beach. And Maddie ..."
She looked at him.
"They gave it a swipe here and there, but it didn’t go a long way toward cleaning things up. It smells."
She felt herself sway a little. "I’ll be okay."
"And I’ll be as close as a shout." He took Josh’s hand
again. "Come on, sport. I need you to help me play cop."
He went down the driveway again, determined not to look back at her, knowing that he had to let her go, had to let her be strong and independent, and do whatever it was that she had to do.
By the time he and Josh reached the road, he thought it was one of the harder things he had done in his life.
Sheila scribbled down yet another message for Joe and cursed him six ways to Sunday. It was one thing for him to be having a little fun without Gina running interference—Sheila could understand him taking advantage of that, she really could. But, Sheila thought, he was carrying on like a lovestruck puppy. He was the chief of police, for God’s sake, and he had barely set foot in the office all week!
She liked Joe, she really did, even when he was being short and rude. And even though Zack Morgan was old enough practically to be her father, she’d been happily married to him for a good many years, so she didn’t feel that kind of tug for Joe. Mostly she just pretended to be annoyed with him. But this time, she was really getting mad.
She gathered his messages together and took them down the hall to his office. She cursed again when she saw his desk. It was piled with what looked like a thousand more of the little pink slips. Who had been on desk duty last night to leave a mess like this? Lou Paul, she remembered. She started straightening the desk. Then one of the top messages caught her eye.
"Oh, Lord." She wondered why Lou had just left it there, why he hadn’t raised the alarm. Then Sheila realized he had probably been drinking again. It was getting long past time that one of them ratted to Joe about how much he did it.
Sheila grabbed the telephone and punched in Joe’s home number. It rang and rang.
She hurried back to her own office and tried to raise the Pathfinder on the radio. Nothing. Joe wasn’t in it. Hector was there, somewhere in the station. She went looking for him and found him coming out of the bathroom.
"Hey-lo," he greeted her cheerfully.
"Listen, Hector, I need you to scoot around the island some and see if you can spot the Pathfinder. Tell Joe I need to talk to him ASAP." She thought briefly of just passing on the message through Hector that Gina Gallen had run away from the hospital on the mainland. Sheila decided she didn’t want to complicate things too much.
"Yeah, sure," Hector answered. "He’s probably at the diner this time of morning." He thought he could stop by there just as soon as he checked on things at home.
"Whatever. When you find him, tell him to call in. It’s urgent."
The man paused in the entryway to listen to the squeak-squeaking at the back of the house. He’d been doing it with utmost vigilance for days, while he tried to figure out what to do. The sound had become oddly soothing. Each time there was that rubbery-metallic sound, he was comforted to know that she was still safely at home.
She was probably wrestling with that old, gnawing hatred, but at least she was there, he thought. He went to his study. He would leave her alone, as always. He would just listen for a while.
It wasn’t until sometime near ten o’clock that he realized he hadn’t heard the squeaking in a while. He’d gotten absorbed in the ledger he was studying. The feeling that came over him was slow, cold, and faintly nauseating.
She wouldn’t, he tried to convince himself. Not now. Not when she knew he was listening for her, that he was right here at home. She would have seen his car outside.
But before he even went back out into the hallway, he knew that somehow, she had gotten away.
How? She was no longer able to drive. He should have heard a cab, something. She’d gotten out because she had been determined to be very quiet, he realized. Because she had known he would try to stop her.
The man made a sound of disbelief, of helplessness, of rage. He had one prayer, one chance. She hadn’t had that much of a head start. And she couldn’t easily get to The Wick without him.
The smell hit Maddie first. Joe had warned her, but she took a fast step backward anyway, moving instinctively away from it, turning her head to the side.
Death. She had never understood what it smelled like before, but as soon as it came to her she knew she could have identified it anywhere, under any circumstances. And she knew Joe was right.
Rick was dead. He had to be dead for there to have been so much blood that it smelled this bad.
She went back out onto the porch for a moment, gagging. From somewhere distant, she thought she heard a faint buzzing sound. She looked up vacantly and saw nothing that could account for it—except the truck. It must be Joe’s police radio, she realized. She wondered if she was allowed to answer it.
She took a hesitant step down off the deck. By the time she had decided she would, it had stopped buzzing.
She took another shaky breath, braced herself, and went back inside. This time she had the sense to breathe through her mouth. She carefully circumvented the dining room and went down the hall to Josh’s room.
It must have been her old room. The other one was bigger, and almost certainly her parents would have claimed it, just as she herself had when she and Josh moved in. It also had an adjoining door to the bath. They wouldn’t waste that on a kid. At least, she didn’t think Beacher Brogan would have.
She stepped slowly inside and sat down on Josh’s unmade bed. She sat in silence for a while, not really trying to feel anything. Her gaze coasted. There was only the small single bed and a dresser. A closet. And a high window, depressingly small. It didn’t let in much light.
She looked down at the bed again, at the crumpled covers wadded up beneath her.
She got up, walked around it, and realized suddenly what might be wrong. She slung the camera around her neck and pulled the bed out from the wall. It had been sitting flush against the back one, and she turned it outward so that the headboard was there and the foot thrust into the room.
Maybe, she thought. Close.
She struggled with the dresser, pushing it out of the way, and moved the bed again so that it stuck out from the southern wall. Then she nodded almost to herself, and put her camera to her eye.
She moved around, clicking, lowering the camera, thinking, her head cocked to the side. But if anything was going to jog her memory, she thought again, it really would be after the film was developed, when she
saw the pictures and how she had taken them. She went back out into the hallway and passed beneath the attic door in the ceiling before some instinct made her look up.
She considered the possibility that her parents had left something behind, something that might still be there. Doubtful, she thought, but worth a shot.
She pulled the stairs down and climbed up cautiously. It was cold in the attic. She sat on the rim of the opening and looked around. There was a vent at the far northern side. Light seeped in there, just barely enough to tell her that there was nothing up there, nothing at all, just clouds of pink insulation and frigid, dusty air.
She wondered who had cleaned the place out, if it had been Aunt Susan. She started back down the stairs again, not willing to think about that.
She was eye level with the attic floor, fishing for the next step down with her toes, when she saw something. It stuck
out from beneath the insulation near the opening. Her heart started pounding, booming hard enough to make her feel faint.
She reached for it.
It was a photograph, an old one. It was black-and-white, and it had the sort of scalloped edges that developers had used a good many years ago. Maddie wiped the insulation dust off on her jeans and went back downstairs.
She took it to the front of the house. Even though the smell was stronger there, the light was better. She held her breath and studied the picture.
It was her mother.
Her throat closed as hard and suddenly as if someone had wrapped a rope around it and jerked. Her mother, and easily twenty other people, were gathered on the beach just outside. She recognized the rocks that
formed the promontory to the south of the house. A man worked over a pit in the sand—were they having a clam bake?—and Maddie studied the bony lumps of his spine for a moment. Like everyone else, he wore a swimsuit.
There was no mistaking Annabel. She was beautiful, and looking into her face was close enough to looking into a bizarre, dated mirror that it took Maddie’s breath away again. Annabel’s golden hair was very long, pulled back by a comb or a barrette or some such thing over each ear. She smiled easily for the camera. A man stood on either side of her, one with his hand on her shoulder, the other with an arm around her waist.
Maddie herself was nowhere in evidence.
She frowned down at the other faces. None of them really seemed familiar, but there was a face in the background, most of its chin obscured by the shoulder of one of the men in the front. Something about that man scratched at her memory.
She was sure it was someone she had met on the island. But there wasn’t enough expression, enough of his features, for her to be able to identify him. He just gave her a nagging feeling of recognition, of ... unease.
The man was looking directly at her mother, and there was something in his eyes that made her belly roll over. There was adoration there. And one of the women was watching Annabel, too, as though she had just glanced up from the man in the sand. Her face was only half-tilted toward Annabel’s, but it was etched with resentment and fury.
Mildred Diehl? On The Wick?
Maddie understood suddenly why she herself wasn’t in the picture. She flipped it over, looking for a date. There wasn’t one, but it didn’t matter. This type of paper had been common in the late fifties, early sixties.
She wasn’t in the picture because she hadn’t been born yet.
She would have to show it to Joe, Maddie thought. She hoped he could make sense of it, could identify the other people, and the half face of that man in the back.
She slid the picture into her jeans’ pocket, turning around. The kitchen, she thought. She knew that if she was going to find memories anywhere, it would probably be in the kitchen. She went the long way, avoiding the dining room.
It looked just as it had when they had left it days ago. There were still plates in the sink from the sandwiches they’d eaten when the three of them had sat in the living room, playing cards. They gave her a poignant ache, a sudden, real need to find Joe and hold on to him for a moment. She wanted badly to go back to the living-room window, to look out and see if she could spot them on the beach. Just to look at them for a moment. She started taking pictures instead.
She didn’t wait to see if she felt anything in there. She clicked away, methodically and steadily. She shot from the back door looking in. From the back door looking out. She photographed the stove and the refrigerator and the barren area where a kitchen table should have been.
And the pantry door.
She lowered the camera slowly, staring at it. Leslie had said she’d been found in there.
She moved toward it, feeling foolish for the idea that was creeping into her head. She opened the pantry and looked inside, then looked back over her shoulder although she knew there was no one to watch her and judge. If Joe came in and found her scrunched down inside, she would die of embarrassment. But Joe wouldn’t come in. He might stand outside and shout for
her, but he wouldn’t bring Josh inside, and he wouldn’t leave him alone to come in and find her.
Do it. Just do it. Who’s to know? And it could work.
She put her camera down on the counter and went to squat down in front of the open door. She looked into the little space beneath the lowest shelf. No way in the world would she be able to fit in there anymore. She didn’t see how she could even have done it then. Unless ...
She pulled out the canned goods she’d stacked upon it what seemed like a lifetime ago. Something almost frenzied took her over. She hurled them over her shoulder and they clunked on the old linoleum floor, rolling with a spiraling, metallic sound. When the shelf was clear, she pushed up against its underside.
It came loose. It hadn’t been there twenty-five years ago, she realized. Tony must have added it to give more shelf space to his rental property.
She set the wood aside, looking around the kitchen one more time. Then she crawled inside, grimacing. She pulled her knees up to her chin, then reached out, worked a finger under the door, and eased it gently, not-quite-closed again.
Her heart started hammering. After a moment, she realized that sweat had broken out on her brow. A thin line of it trickled down between her breasts.
I did hide. No one put me in here. I was hiding from someone, maybe Beacher, but probably someone else. Who? Dear God, who?
She couldn’t quite reach it. She put her forehead to her knees and realized she was humming the song again. She looked up and did it more slowly, putting words to it, the words she had always thought were right.
"Dance, little baby, dance up high. Never mind, baby, your buddy is by. Crow and caper, caper and crow, there, little baby, there you go!"
Baby ... buddy ... caper ... crow.
She shook her head, moaning softly. If it was wrong, then she really didn’t know how.
She wasn’t going to get anywhere in there. It had been a ridiculous idea, although she wasn’t sorry that she had tried it. She’d take pictures of it. Maybe they would close the gap that just sitting there hadn’t been able to breach.
She got to her knees again and pushed the door open.
The woman was in a wheelchair, and she spun its wheels to look at the pantry. She was clearly stupefied to see someone come out of such a place, maybe even frightened by the absurdity of it.
Maddie cried out and leaped instinctively to her feet. Her shoulders slammed painfully into the other shelves. Memory shrieked, fitting into her head with almost-audible little clicks.
She knew. She finally remembered. She had come into the kitchen to find someone here that day, too.
She screamed for Joe.
Chapter 33
Joe led Josh back down the road. They walked along the cracked macadam, and he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but then, he’d never really expected to. No matter what he’d told Maddie, he really had only one purpose. He was—how had she put it?—getting out of her face.
Well, he was out. And he didn’t much like it.
They reached the bridge, then they climbed down the rocks on the south part of the promontory. They slipped and slid onto the beach. There was nothing in the sand, either, but if Graycie had come over by boat, Joe figured that it would have been on the west side, and the county guys would have found it already. Or one of his own officers would have noticed it. Or it could be that the tide had taken it out again if the guy had just beached it. If that was the case, then the sea had erased any and all traces of his passage.
He thought he’d walk that side of The Wick anyway when Maddie was done. He started back up toward the house to wait for her, and that was when he heard her scream.
The hairs on his nape literally stood up. His heart seemed to leap over an entire beat. What the hell had happened? he wondered, even as he started to respond.
He’d seen Zack Morgan drive by a little while ago, but the cab hadn’t stopped. M
aybe someone had come up on the house from the back. Or maybe the cab had stopped. Maybe it just hadn’t done it directly in front of Maddie’s house.
"Ah, Jesus," he groaned. "Jesus Christ!"
He grabbed Josh’s hand, and they began running. Then he heard another sound, behind him this time. He stopped, and Josh took another few steps without him. The boy came up short, crying out when his arm jerked backward.
Joe turned around.
Gina.
Gina?
She was scrambling down the promontory. He could see a car—Cassie’s car?—parked up on the crest. Gina hit the sand and ran at them, her long hair streaming. Her eyes had a glint to them.
She had a butcher knife in her hand.
Joe was hit by a deadly moment of disassociation, of unreality. As she closed the distance between them, she brought the knife up. She was sobbing raggedly. Her face was contorted. It took him a moment to assimilate everything, a moment longer to accept that she wasn’t in the hospital as she was supposed to be.
She fell once, and that saved him, because it took her a moment to get to her feet again. She stumbled and wove, coming toward them again, and he let go of Josh to intercept her.
"I’ll kill you!" she screamed. "You bastard! You can’t—"
"Shut up, Gina," he panted. He snagged her knife
arm, holding on. "Let it go! Drop the goddamned knife! What the hell are you doing?"
He wrenched her arm upward behind her. Gina howled in pain. He finally twisted the knife out of her hand and dropped it in the sand, and the feeling of unreality ebbed.
"What the hell do you think you’re doing?" he snarled again. "What are you doing here?" Then true rage filled him. Jesus, don't let Josh see this little scene.
He craned around to look over his shoulder for the boy. He felt Gina wrench the service revolver from the holster at his waist.