Crawlspace

by Sarah Graves

  “He was nabbed for speeding.” She put it together. “While he still had only his real driver’s license in his possession.”

  Chip nodded once more. “Which wouldn’t have mattered. No one was looking for him then. But I was, later. I was trying to be really thorough before Carolyn and I put a whole lot of work into anything more. Otherwise, she would be unhappy about it. Very,” he emphasized, “unhappy.”

  Jake slowed for a black cat dashing across the street.

  “My heart nearly stopped when I actually found that ticket, though,” Chip admitted as they crossed the intersection at the top of the hill.

  Her own big old white house loomed ahead: white clapboards, green shutters, red chimneys, all wanting maintenance. And a pressing need for more insulation before the real winter arrived, she remembered again sinkingly.

  “And then later hearing from someone who kept hinting at actually being him,” Chip added, “that just topped it off. I was intrigued, and Carolyn was even more so.”

  “And that’s why you came to Eastport. To meet this person, see if it really was him.”

  He nodded tiredly. It hit her that he must have been up all night. “I didn’t want to. Finding the speeding ticket with his name, it didn’t mean the guy writing to us was him, did it?”

  No, of course it didn’t.

  “And anyway, why would he?” Chip said. “If he’d gone to all that trouble to be … well, dead to the world, I guess you’d call it. That was going to be our working title. But Carolyn said we had to come,” he finished resignedly.

  He stopped, seeming to hear how foolish the whole thing must sound. She turned into the driveway, pulled to a stop.

  “You’d have to know Carolyn,” he said finally. “If there was even a chance that it was true, it would make her next book another big success. And she wanted to check out the area, the background, too.”

  At this, the energy returned to his voice. “The place, the people. Mostly people—survivors, what they feel about it all.”

  He turned earnestly to her. “Carolyn always says it’s not the crime that makes a book a big hit. It’s the emotions.”

  Which both of you planned to exploit. Grief, guilt, revenge—the old saying “If it bleeds, it leads” was as true for books as it was for news coverage, Jake supposed.

  Although maybe that wasn’t fair. She’d never read a Carolyn Rathbone book. She decided to change the subject.

  “Sam’s dad passed away a few years ago,” she said, turning off the car. “I don’t know if you’d heard.”

  He stared out the car’s side window at the big old houses lining this part of Key Street, where ship captains and lumber barons had built their homes in the early 1800s. The architecture ranged from vast, elderly Queen Annes to narrow Carpenter Gothics with pointy roofs and elaborate gingerbread.

  The plain four-square Federals, like Jake’s house, were the oldest, built right after the War of 1812 when the British had decamped from their loyalty-oath-demanding occupation and people decided it might be safe to come back.

  “No. Dr. Tiptree died? I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Chip said. “And … how’s Sam?”

  “He’s okay. He’s had a few bad times, in and out of alcohol rehab, mostly.”

  Ordinarily, she’d have hesitated about saying this. But Chip already knew Sam’s life was no rose bed in the substance-abuse department.

  Back when Chip started coming around, Sam’s pals had been introducing Sam to the fun of aerosol-propellant huffing. Things had only gone downhill from there.

  “The troubles didn’t end when we moved here. For a while it was pretty grim. But it’s better now,” she added.

  Fluffs of insulation lay on the lawn where they’d landed a few hours and a lifetime ago. She laid both hands in her lap.

  “Why did you do it, Chip? Why were you such a good friend to Sam? I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

  His lips pursed. “I don’t know. I just liked him, I guess. I’d always wanted a kid brother, and …” His voice trailed off, perhaps at some painful memory. “And you know, at the time I wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity myself,” he added wistfully.

  “Right. Well, I guess a lot of us weren’t at that age.” They sat in silence a moment. Then it hit her again why he was here.

  “How’d you get yourself into this?” she asked.

  He gazed at the huge white house with its wide lawn and big garden areas, the pointed firs widely spaced along the rear lot-line. It wasn’t a mansion, but from the outside it could be mistaken for one.

  “If I had it to do over again, believe me, I wouldn’t. I told Carolyn it could be dangerous, but …”

  They got out and walked toward the house. He kept looking up at it puzzledly. “But like I said before, she talked me into it, as usual. And I let her.”

  Also as usual, his tone said. For all their crime-writing experience-but none as victims, apparently—the two of them had been as innocent as Hansel and Gretel, Jake realized.

  Which was how they’d walked into a trap, and yet another reason why she meant to keep close tabs on Chip. Who knew what further foolish things he might do otherwise, and how they might make Sam’s situation worse?

  Seeming to be thinking the same, he made a face. “This is all my fault,” he said ruefully.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself.” Then, alerted by something in his voice: “Chip, do you have feelings for this girl? I mean, more than—”

  But to that he shook his head emphatically. “No, of course not. That is, we’ve worked together awhile, I think we know each other pretty well. But like I told you, Carolyn’s … difficult.” He craned his neck back, gazing up at the high front gable again. “A stone bitch, actually. Wow, this place is big.”

  Straightening, he peered around at the quiet street with its other huge old houses set far apart, all the stately gray-trunked maples lined up in front of them.

  A few white flakes drifted down. The peace and quiet here was as loud and unnerving as any Manhattan taxi horn, until you got used to it.

  Maybe more so. “So, you just came up here and started living like this?” he asked wonderingly.

  An iPod stuck out of his shirt pocket. Everything in Eastport was very different from the city he was used to, she realized. The space, the pace … She hadn’t heard a car horn in months.

  And when she had heard one, it had been getting leaned on by a tourist. An iPod wasn’t a common sight around here, either—too expensive … . Remembering all this, she made a mental note to take it easy on Chip Hahn, as much as she could.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why’d you do it?”

  He waved at the massive antique structure with its peeling paint and sagging shutters, its acres of clapboard and trim. She couldn’t see the crumbling red brickwork of the three chimneys from this angle, but the porch steps needed painting again, too.

  “Believe it or not, I thought it would bring order to my life,” she replied. And in many ways, it had. But at the moment she couldn’t remember any of them. Sam, she thought.

  “Come on,” she told Chip, starting up the steps. “We’d best get you situated. You should have something to eat and drink and maybe get cleaned up a little if you want to, and then we’ll go get your car.”

  He’d given up the idea of a rental cabin when he couldn’t find Carolyn anywhere, he’d said, and parked at the Motel East instead, without checking in. His things were in the car, too.

  It struck her as odd that a fellow like Chip, who’d seemed so capable and confident just now at the police station, had apparently been getting pushed around pretty thoroughly by his writing partner.

  But that also was a topic for later. “And we’ll talk about what else to do about Carolyn and Sam,” she added. Thinking, Sure, right after I jump off a tall building and learn to fly.

  Because what the hell am I supposed to do when—On the porch she turned. He was nowhere in sight. “Chip?”

  Inside, the phone began ringing. “Chip,
damn it …”

  The front door was unlocked. The kitchen shone spotlessly, smelling of soap and scouring powder. It meant her housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, had been here recently.

  But Bella wasn’t here now. A mixing bowl and spoon stood on the kitchen counter. The dogs looked up sleepily from their beds.

  “Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone home?”

  The phone kept ringing. She dashed to answer, but as she did, it stopped.

  The machine’s red light winked at her, though, signaling that a call had come in earlier. She pressed the “play” button—

  “I’m going to kill you!” a high, disguised voice promised cheerfully, followed by a giggle.

  Click.

  CHAPTER 4

  A MILLION DOLLARS.

  Chip Hahn felt ashamed even to be thinking about it as he shoved his way through the shrubbery at the back of the Tiptree house. A million in cash …

  Wincing as the thorns on some kind of red-berried bushes scratched at his hands, he cringed inwardly even harder at the kind of greedy jerk he knew he was being.

  It was even worse than last night, when he’d actually been thinking about doing something bad to Carolyn. Only this time, he wasn’t stopping at thinking about doing a bad deed. This time …

  In his mind he recited again the coordinates Roger Dodd had written down, where he said he’d floated the money: 44.91 N, 67.02 W … For once, Chip thought grimly, his good memory had come in handy.

  And with any luck, maybe Roger Dodd’s brother, Randy, hadn’t gotten to the cash yet. Hurry …

  He pulled his trusty iPod from his shirt pocket and thumbed his playlist on without looking at it, Blondie’s classic “Heart of Glass” with its pulsing bass and crystalline vocals urging him forward. The big white house behind him loomed over the expansive yard like an observation tower.

  Next, he cut through a dormant rose garden put neatly to bed for the season, row upon row of low, perfectly spaced bushes covered with burlap and tied with twine.

  He darted between the bushes, careful not to disturb the loose mulch heaped around them. The house they belonged to was a low, white cape with two stone lions on the front steps, a wide center chimney, and a massive copper beech in the front lawn.

  A curtain twitched in an upstairs window of the cape. A burl as big as his head seemed to stare ominously at him from the beech tree’s rough bark. Chip hustled across the frozen lawn to the sidewalk beyond, looked up and down it.

  One way led into a warren of small streets, frost-browned yards with boats on rusty trailers, and dirt driveways containing older-model cars and trucks. The other way, downhill toward the water, lay a stretch of larger homes featuring Andersen windows, prepainted siding, and red-brick front walks.

  He recognized them, or at least he understood instinctively the impulse they represented:

  Keep your things nice.

  The banal phrase encompassed what he’d been taught from the time he was a very small child. Your house, your car, the parts that other people could see of your body … It was a class thing, he knew, this obsession with personal maintenance.

  It said you deserved your wealth, that you had been born or had become the sort of person who was inclined to preserve and defend capital, and Chip knew that drill only too well. After all, he’d been rich himself once, and at a level that made the well-kept dwellings he was rushing past look like the most abject poverty.

  But deciding to be a writer instead of going to Yale Law and joining the family’s generations-old firm as an associate, wading in hip-deep, as his father had so delicately put it—Hahn & Associates was a global concern that hid its bloodlust for courtroom victory, along with its dodgier clients (of whom there were many), beneath a stodgy exterior—had taken care of that. In the Old Bastard’s opinion, not wanting to be a lawyer in his firm was like wishing you had horns and a forked tail. Or actually having them …

  Hurrying downhill toward the water that glittered at the foot of the street, Chip recalled the night he’d broken the news. The Old Bastard had glared at him, all wattled and lizard-eyed, from the far end of the dining room table.

  Between them, there had been about an acre of white linen covered with china, crystal, and silver. The meal had been roast beef, bloodily dripping. There was no one else in the room. A bell sat by the old man’s right hand.

  “Screw you,” the Old Bastard had said, and, ignoring the bell, had thumped the table to demand more cabernet.

  Chip had been only eighteen then, and had believed the Old Bastard might change his mind. He hadn’t, though, which mostly accounted for Chip’s financial situation right now. People who refused to do what he wished, the Old Bastard thought, deserved what they got.

  Which of course had been nothing. At the corner in front of the long, low Motel East overlooking the bay, Chip made a beeline for the Volvo in the lot, grabbed his topcoat from the back seat, and pulled it on. Glancing around guiltily, though he wasn’t sure why, he headed downtown, trying not to think about where Carolyn might be right now and what might be happening to her.

  Serves her right, a mean little part of his brain said. But she didn’t deserve this—whatever this was—and Chip couldn’t go on pretending he felt that way for long.

  Because even as the harsh thought died, the rest of his mind went on pondering what Sam Tiptree’s mother had asked:

  Do you have feelings for her?

  Of course not, he replied silently again. Or anyway, not the kind Sam’s mother meant. But he didn’t hate Carolyn the way he’d thought, either. Instead, in her sudden absence he felt as if something sharply painful had stopped hurting, and he missed it.

  He felt … confused. Which he wasn’t a bit used to feeling. And thinking about Carolyn just made it worse. A lot worse, he thought. Painfully worse.

  So don’t. Think about the money.

  He hurried on. Downtown in the old red-brick buildings some of the shops were open now: a hardware store, a pizza joint. An old, battered pickup truck went by—not the one he’d seen last night—hauling a load of firewood.

  Late morning, and the day’s business was going on all around him, as if he and Carolyn had never been here. As if somebody hadn’t grabbed her.

  But something might still be happening to her now, or might already have happened, that he didn’t even dare imagine.

  He stared at the space in the lot where the Volvo had been last night, willing her back unharmed. Suddenly even her thieving of his idea didn’t seem so bad.

  It was just Carolyn, trying to make something of herself and not wanting to go on doing what she had been. Like me. She could have his precious book idea, he realized suddenly, plus the money from the ones they’d already written together.

  Anything she wanted. If only she was okay. To his horror, his lip began trembling. A million, he thought, swallowing the lump in his throat.

  But it just wouldn’t work. A million dollars, ten million … Who did he think he was kidding, anyway? He might fantasize about being the kind of guy who would steal it.

  Fantasy, though, was as far as that idea would go. Because if money was all he wanted, there were easier ways to get it. Like for instance sucking up to the Old Bastard.

  So, what are you really doing, buddy boy? he asked himself. For that, though, he didn’t have an answer, only a painful sense of urgency that made him want to writhe. Or run … but not away from anything. Toward it, rather, whatever it was …

  The iPod finished Blondie, started on the Boss. “Born in the U.S.A.” blared its anthem-like opening bars into Chip’s earbuds. He’d accidentally pushed the oldies list, not what he’d wanted. But he didn’t feel like fooling with it now, as from the parking lot he hurried along a path behind the old waterfront buildings overlooking the boat basin.

  A riprap of pink granite boulders formed a low, slanting wall that continued down to the waves. Beyond, the breakwater was an L shape; inside were floating piers in a wooden maze, to which dozens of
boats were secured by heavy lines.

  Big, beat-up fishing vessels with lobster traps stacked on their decks bobbed cheek-by-jowl with broad-beamed rowboats, oars shipped and gear stowed neatly. Scanning the marina for any sign that Carolyn had been here, he made his way past the boat ramp, past the shuttered hot dog stand where Sam’s bicycle still leaned lonesomely, and beyond, out onto the wide concrete breakwater itself.

  As soon as he left the protection of the buildings, the wind began biting at him again. And not just wind …

  You wanted her dead, a cruel voice in his mind tormented him. You thought about it, you wanted to …

  But he hadn’t done anything. He’d been so angry, was all. The whole long, conflict-filled evening atop the tiring drive, his ongoing worry over who their mysterious next-day’s interview subject would turn out to be …

  It had all been too much. But he still felt just hideously bad about it, as if he’d willed something to happen to Carolyn and then it had. And if he hadn’t stepped out of sight between those buildings, he might’ve seen it, been able to stop it.

  Now, though, maybe he could make up for it. As he stepped onto one of the metal gangs leading down to the finger piers, an even more elaborate fantasy than the one about money rose in his mind: rescuing Carolyn. Sam too.

  And then maybe the million, which would come to him in some hazy but completely justifiable way that he couldn’t yet imagine. As a reward, sort of.

  Not that any of that made sense. The icy wind, high waves, and unfamiliar waters around here put any such notions into the realm of impossibility.

  Yet here he was, walking out along a wooden dock section. Half a dozen smaller, plank-built finger piers branching off from it were each home to three or four boats floating alongside, all rafted together by more lines.

  Mostly they were diesel-engined working vessels. He’d have had no notion of even how to get one of them loose from its neighbors, much less how to pilot one. Fifteen minutes aboard and he’d accomplish a shipwreck, most likely, get himself towed in by the Coast Guard, but nothing more.