Crawlspace

by Sarah Graves

  So she thought he wouldn’t kill her; not yet. And not with a gun …

  He stomped down through the hatchway. First loud thumping, then the ugly sounds of choking came from it. Next came cursing and barked orders. Quit whining. Get up, on your feet.

  Or the man would …

  Killyoukillyoukill … Shivering uncontrollably, she fought to silence the murderous refrain, as constant now in her mind as the low thrum of engine from the boat’s diesel shack.

  It was still dark, and so cold she could see her breath. She tried getting up again, put her weight on her hurt hand and nearly screamed with the onslaught of pain that roared up her arm and shoulder.

  In the dim light from the boat’s control console, her swollen hand was a fat blue club. She couldn’t move the fingers, could barely even lift the arm, as she struggled to sit.

  She looked around, saw nothing. Where were they? And … what was he planning to do now?

  As if in answer, he returned. “Get up.”

  Gasping, she tried to obey. If she tried grabbing the gun, she would only drop it, one hand unusable and the other so cold she couldn’t feel it.

  She made it over onto her side, caught her breath as another stab of agony pierced her hand. She got both her legs underneath herself and pushed.

  There … She struggled to a shaky crouch, prayed that would satisfy him for now. But he seized her bad shoulder, ignoring her croaked shriek, and dragged her up the rest of the way.

  Then he shoved her against the boat’s rail, where she clung, too frightened even to weep.

  Too scared to fight. This was how they felt, the old Carolyn thought clearly from somewhere inside her, the part that could still think at all.

  The part who’d seen photographs of crime scenes and burial sites, and in her spoiled, safe stupidity had thought that she understood them.

  Pictures of girls in graves. Well, she understood now, all right. She couldn’t have known better what they were all about if they’d opened their eyes and looked at her, parted their ruined lips and spoke.

  Here we are, those broken girls seemed to say to her now. We had lives, too, like you. Blonde, brunette, redhead, students and cocktail waitresses. Soccer moms, nurses, doctors, lawyers, even a few priests, and whoever we were, we were … special.

  All of us were. This couldn’t happen to us. To other girls, maybe. Not us.

  But it did. It had. And now …

  The man grabbed her hair. He’d stuffed all the money into a bag like a doctor’s satchel, but he couldn’t get the top closed. The money stuck out like a funny illustration in a cartoon about bank robbery.

  But it wasn’t funny. She staggered and nearly fell as he hauled her along, a grunt of pain escaping her as he pushed her ahead of him up a low step stool to the boat’s opposite rail. She perched there, nearly losing her balance but not quite.

  “Don’t you move.” He backed away, toward the boat’s wheel again. From where she stood now, she could see down through the hatchway to a rough below-deck cabin furnished with a plastic lawn chair and a table made of a plank laid on two sawhorses.

  Something had changed; it took her a moment to realize what. It wasn’t dark anymore down there. Instead, in the sallow yellow light from a dangling bulb, a man stood bent over with his hands braced on the tops of his thighs.

  He was bleeding, fat red droplets falling from his lip onto his hands. He was young, in his early twenties, she thought, with dark, curly hair and a long lantern jaw.

  Tall, athletic-looking but not muscle-bound, he took slow, deep breaths as if trying to steady himself. She understood this just by looking at the young man, that he was trying to follow their captor’s orders, trying to catch his breath and get hold of himself.

  Trying to survive. He turned his head very slowly and saw her. He tried to straighten, grimaced as a spasm of pain hit him, then straightened some more.

  Still looking at her, as if the sight of her was helpful to him. She wanted to say something to him, something encouraging, and once, she could have.

  Back in that other life. Back when she didn’t belong surely and completely to the company of the girls with dead eyes, when a silent scream wasn’t the only thing she could think of.

  He moved toward the hatchway. His cheek had a bruise on it and his lip was still bleeding, but otherwise he didn’t look bad. She wondered why he’d stayed down there so cooperatively, not trying to escape.

  Then she spotted the chain around his leg, fastened with a padlock and attached to … she squinted, trying to see through the gloom. An anchor.

  His leg was chained to an anchor. Stiffly he put one foot out, pulled against the chain with the other. The anchor didn’t budge. He looked at it, bent to it.

  Lifted it, heaved it up out onto the deck with a groan. The anchor hit with a dull thud and a rattle of chain. The man at the boat’s wheel looked over impassively.

  The guy with the chain around his leg climbed the steps on his hands and knees, crawled out onto the deck beside the anchor, and struggled to his feet once more.

  “You throw that thing at me and I’ll slit your throat right here and gut you like a fish, you understand me? Now get over there with her.”

  The man at the wheel spoke calmly, jerking his head in her direction. But he didn’t sound calm. Something had gone wrong, it was why she was still alive, she could tell by the way he held back, didn’t let himself get outwardly excited.

  Didn’t let himself do what he wanted to do, only on account of having something more crucial to deal with first. Because on the inside, he was very excited. When he looked at her, when he’d touched her …

  Shuddering, she concentrated on not losing her balance, poised at the rail. Beneath her the boat bumped and rumbled. The air all around smelled of salt water, fish, and diesel fuel, a mix that now made her feel nauseated.

  A bird flapped by invisibly, very near, with a wet-sounding rush of wings. Reflexively she flinched away, caught her breath, and nearly fell.

  The chained man had made it to her side; he reached out and caught her. His accompanying grimace of pain said it had cost him something to do it. She felt a rush of gratitude for him, warmth suddenly replaced by fear as she noticed that his lip wasn’t the only place he was bleeding from.

  His light blue chambray shirt collar poked out over a forest green sweatshirt with the word MAINE lettered on it in white. Between the N and the E, a small slit oozed. The cloth around it was sodden-looking and nearly black.

  Blood. He grinned weakly, then staggered as his face went abruptly pale and his eyelids fluttered. Putting out a hand, he fell against the rail and leaned there.

  “Okay,” he whispered. “You’re gonna be okay now. Just hang in there.”

  Talking to himself, as well as to her. And that was good, that was …

  But then he coughed; white foam flecked with darkness came onto his lip. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, dragged in a breath that sounded like wet cloth ripping.

  Their eyes met. His look, amazingly, was apologetic, as if he knew his being hurt was terribly inconvenient for her.

  From somewhere inside herself she managed to produce a weak smile. “You don’t look so good.”

  His eyes smiled back, though his face wasn’t quite able to go along. “You’re no oil painting yourself.”

  The man stopped what he was doing, strode over to them as if to confront them, hands on hips. “Sam, meet Carolyn.”

  He turned. “Carolyn, meet Sam.”

  She wondered with a fresh burst of fright how he knew her name, then realized that she knew his, the face she’d seen in old newspaper photographs popping clearly from behind all the clumsy work he’d had done somewhere on his features.

  Panic made her heart flutter, because with the realization, she knew something else, too: He didn’t just want to kill her. He had to.

  Because seeing his face and knowing what he’d done to her was one thing. But knowing why he’d done it was another, and no
w she understood that he hadn’t just taken her off the street at random, or because she was a long-haired brunette, or for any of the other crazed, obsessively personal reasons men like him did things like this to women like her.

  No, this time he’d targeted her specifically, because he knew she knew—or suspected, which as far as he was concerned was nearly as bad—that he was alive at all.

  It was Randy Dodd there at the boat’s wheel, she was certain of it. “Now,” he went on, “unless you want me to tie the both of you to that anchor and drop it overboard …”

  He looked levelly at them. “Shut the freak up,” he said.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT WAS TWO IN THE MORNING WHEN JAKE HEARD BELLA come down the hall stairs in the dark, in the big old house on Key Street. Jake lay on the parlor sofa with the dogs dozing beside her on the floor and the TV turned on, the volume set very low.

  She didn’t speak as Bella passed by in the hall. The dogs looked up, then went uneasily back to sleep.

  Wade hadn’t called, and there’d been no word at Ellie’s house, either. That meant either that the men had spent the night in the woods and didn’t know what was happening here at home or that they did know and they were still trying to get here.

  Neither theory accounted for their silence, or why not even a guide or warden had sent any message from them. Jake tried not to worry, instead lying there being tortured with it.

  Enduring it, and waiting for the time to go by. An hour or so before low tide, she figured, was about when she should leave. She’d readied her supplies: flashlight, rain gear, warm gloves, an extra pair of sneakers since the first pair would surely get wet.

  She’d thought about asking Ellie to go along, then decided against it. There was no one to care for Lee without going to some trouble about it, and anyway, Ellie had a child’s life ahead of her now, and a responsibility to make that life good.

  So, Jake would do it herself. She rose and padded into the hall, then paused vexedly at the sound of Bella moving around out in the kitchen. She hadn’t bargained on Bella being up and about. Now it would be a project, trying to get out of here unnoticed.

  She didn’t want anyone trying to dissuade her, and in any case she hadn’t left time for an argument. The tide paused for no man, and no woman, either, and in an hour it would be just right.

  Much after that would be too late. She didn’t want to get stuck on the far side of the sandbar leading to Digby, assuming it appeared at all; even now she had only Sam’s casual word that it would.

  She made her silent way to the cellar door, moved the light switch quietly, and for once got the door open with no betraying squeak of old hinges. The steps were bare wood, steep and liable to creak, but at least she wouldn’t put a foot through one.

  The memory of the rotten step over at the Dodd House sent a pang through the deep gash she’d found on the inside of her thigh when she got home. A half-inch higher and she would be in the hospital now, but if that was all the injury she ended up suffering tonight, she would count herself lucky.

  In the cellar she remembered to keep her head low so as not to smack it against an old ceiling beam. Crossing silently to the northwest corner of the old foundation, she paused.

  A stream of water trickled down the drainpipe passing by her head: Bella, still busy in the kitchen. To the right of the pipe, a foundation stone was loose.

  Bracing herself, she lifted it with both hands and set it on the cellar floor, then reached into the hole it had covered. A wooden box met her searching fingers.

  Inside were two handguns: a .32-caliber semi-auto and a .22 pistol. In happier times, she’d handled them both enough on the target range to feel comfortable with either of them; it was yet another benefit of her marriage to Wade, being okay with guns.

  She chose the .32 and two boxes of ammunition for it. If all went well, she would not have to touch the weapon. If not, she meant only to wound the man who’d taken Sam, to slow him down so that she could get her son and Chip Hahn’s friend, Carolyn, away from him safely. And maybe Chip, too; she wondered again where he had gotten to and didn’t like the possibilities she came up with.

  So if she had to use a weapon … well, best not finish that thought now, she told herself, tucking the weapon and ammunition boxes into her sweater pocket.

  It had always been this way, through the snooping she’d been doing with Ellie White in Eastport and surrounding towns, and sometimes on her own. A few of those episodes had ended badly.

  Not many, but a few, and in those she’d had to face what she faced now, without liking it a bit. She replaced the loose stone and turned back to the cellar stairs, then gasped in startlement.

  Bella stood there. “Good morning,” she said.

  Jake leaned against the cold stone wall. “Bella, you—”

  Scared me. More startling, though, were the clothes Bella wore, and the look on her face.

  Bella approached, ducking automatically under the ceiling beam, and reached past Jake to push the loose stone into the wall a little farther.

  “No sense letting anyone notice what’s there. Hidey-holes should be hidden,” she told Jake with a complicit glance.

  She wore thick pants made from the kind of heavy-duty stuff men put on for cold-weather construction jobs. Over them she had on a gray sweatshirt, a blaze-orange quilted vest, and the shirt from Jake’s dad’s new set of white insulated underwear, peeping out from the sweatshirt’s heavy ribbed collar.

  Her face in the dim cellar light was like a gargoyle’s, long and bony and without any friendliness in it at all, her eyes flat with purpose. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Jake followed her upstairs. Bella had hiking boots on her feet. Jake hadn’t known that Bella even owned hiking boots. In the hall the smell of fresh hot coffee floated.

  In the kitchen Bella poured two cups without asking, thrust one at Jake, and began drinking the other herself.

  “I figure it’s about an hour from here, where we need to go,” Bella said without preamble. “And low tide is in about an hour.”

  She put her cup down. “I didn’t wake your father.” Because he wouldn’t have liked this, either, and Bella knew it.

  She plucked a pen from the mug full of them on the kitchen counter, a pad of paper already on the table. “If he gets up, or if Wade comes home, they’d better know where we are, though.”

  Or if we don’t come back. “Bella, now listen to me. I can’t be dragging you into—”

  Bella’s hand paused on the notepaper. “If I’m not going, then you’re not, either. I can still wake him, you know.”

  The words sounded implacable but her tone didn’t, her voice faint and shaky. She was frightened, and forcing herself to do this, Jake saw. Only that she felt she had to.

  Me too, Jake thought. I don’t know what will happen, and I’m as scared about it as she is.

  Still, going alone wasn’t the brightest idea in the world. She just hadn’t been able to think of anyone else; at least, not anyone who wouldn’t try stopping her.

  Bella finished the note and propped it against the sugar bowl. “So, which is it?” asked Bella. “Me or us?”

  “All right,” Jake gave in. “It’s getting late.”

  In the car, Bella settled in the passenger seat. “I set your cell phone on vibrate.”

  Jake glanced over in surprise. She hadn’t examined the phone before tucking it into her bag.

  “You don’t want it ringing at the wrong time,” said Bella matter-of-factly.

  But the look on her face was anything but matter-of-fact. She looked like a Christian getting ready to meet the lions, her head high but her eyes wide, anxiously determined.

  “I put some food in a bag, just snacks to keep our energy up, and the rest of the coffee in a thermos,” she added, as if she were in the habit of sneaking up on murderous men hiding on desolate islands every day of the week.

  “Thank you,” Jake said, trying to keep the smile out of her voice as she backed the car
out into the dark street.

  Maybe this expedition was just as crazy as Bob Arnold would say it was, if he knew about it. Maybe it was insane.

  But she was suddenly very glad to have Bella riding shotgun on it with her. “What’s your plan?” Bella asked as they drove out of town.

  “We’ll drive up to where Sam said the sandbar to Digby is at low tide,” she began. Her own voice was as shaky as Bella’s.

  Bella didn’t notice, or if she did, she decided to make no comment. “We’ll get as close as we can, maybe even right out onto the island,” Jake went on.

  In the predawn hours, Eastport’s streets full of antique mansions and small wooden bungalows slumbered peacefully; only the fog and their own vehicle moving through them.

  “The rocks there are probably very slippery, and it’ll be dark, so we’ll have to be careful. We can’t turn on a light, and we’ll need to be very sure we don’t—”

  Slip, fall, cry out, make a commotion, or in any other way get injured or react to an injury, she did not finish. But Bella just nodded once, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap.

  They passed the bank and the IGA, took the long turn in the foggy murk past the Mobil station and Quoddy Airfield, its runway lights pinpricks in the streaming dark. Bella spoke again when they’d crossed over the causeway to the mainland and turned onto Route 1 headed north.

  “I’ll warn you if need be,” she said calmly, as if Jake had been inquiring as to Bella’s job description on this trip. “Or I will bonk someone, if that needs doing.”

  She reached into the back seat and came up with her bonking tool, which she’d apparently placed there while Jake was down in the cellar. “With this.”

  It was an iron crowbar from Jake’s workroom, curved at one end, flat at the other. As a bonker, it could not have been more satisfactory. Still …

  They sped between the trees and thickets lining Route 1 on both sides. “You know we’re probably just reconnoitering, though, right?” Jake asked her.

  The headlights were flat white cylinders in the fog ahead. Jake slowed, trying not to drive into what she couldn’t see. But it was no use going so slow that it felt safe.