by Sarah Graves
“That even if we find them—”
On a night like this, the only safe thing was staying home, huddling under the covers.
“All we can do if that happens, probably, is call Bob Arnold and tell him.”
“Hmmph,” said Bella communicatively.
Bob hadn’t been impressed by the soot smear she’d delivered to him, or by their invasion of the Dodd House. He’d warned Bella not to do such a thing again, though he’d promised to follow up.
According to Bella, who’d been quite indignant about it when she got home from the police station, Bob said that if it was a map they’d found, there was no proof Randy had drawn it.
Nor would their romping around down there clarify matters, he’d added. “Bob said if Randy did make it,” Bella declared now, “it could just be part of a plan that Randy had thought about and then given up on.”
Which Jake had to admit made some sense. Digby Island was about the least likely refuge in the bay, with not one single easy place to get out onto it by boat. Even helicopters couldn’t land there, Sam had said, because of the trees; also, there was nowhere flat.
And anyway, tracings from the pen grooves of a map—if it was one—weren’t much evidence of anything. This could be just a goose chase. But:
“If I were Randy Dodd,” Bella went on, “and I needed to find a hideout, I’d pick the one place that no one would expect me to go. If it were infested with poisonous snakes that would bite you to smithereens—”
Jake was pretty sure poisonous snakes only needed to bite you once, and that the result was rarely smithereens. But never mind; Bella continued:
“That is where I would go. I know Bob wouldn’t, but that boy has the failing of too much common sense.”
The other news Bella had brought home was that the Coast Guard had called back its search vessels until morning, and air traffic was grounded, too, on account of too much fog.
Shedding tamaracks’ gold needles made a slick, wet carpet of the winding two-lane. Twenty minutes later they entered Calais, the border town between Maine and Canada.
The officer in the border-crossing booth looked sleepy and uninclined to think they were either smugglers or terrorists. After rattling off his questions—where they were from, where they were going, what they would do there—
“My sister’s sick,” said Bella with a straight face.
—he let them through without a hitch. Coming out of customs into the small town of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, they turned right onto the main street, past the dark, silent duty-free shop and the currency-changing storefront.
It was still several hours before dawn; only an occasional car moved in the streets. “When I was a girl, we used to come up here for parties now and then,” said Bella. “We’d have bonfires on the beach. The boys brought beer and the girls … well, the girls brought themselves,” she added.
Jake hadn’t ever linked Bella with the notion of parties, or of being a girl. “Turn here,” Bella said. “It’s a shortcut.”
The narrow, rudimentary road was of pale gravel, angling in between old fir trees that crowded up on either side. The car’s tires on gravel made loud crunching sounds, and the headlights’s glow made Jake nervous.
More nervous, even, than she already was. Bella frowned. “Pull over and park. That’s what we used to do. It’s only another half mile or so to the beach.”
Jake tried imagining Bella with a gaggle of girlfriends, out late at night for a party featuring boys, a bonfire, and beer. Not being able to picture it at all made her feel sad, and what Bella said next didn’t help.
“You new people around here think you know what it was like back then, when no one had a penny and we were all we had. But you don’t,” she added as she got out. “You really don’t.”
In the pine-smelling darkness, the silence all around them felt huge, Eastport and home very far away. The only thing that kept Jake from turning back was the knowledge that Sam might be out here, too.
“All right,” said Bella. Her voice shook only a little bit. She began marching forward into the darkness. “Let’s the two of us just get this over with.”
After a moment, Jake followed.
CAROLYN RATHBONE LAY FLAT ON HER BACK ON THE DECK of the boat Randy Dodd had put her on some unknown number of hours and a whole long lifetime ago.
They had motored along very slowly through the fog for what felt like forever. Now with the sky clearing and her eyes fully adjusted to the dark, she could glimpse that the boat was pulled up against the side of a cliff rising out of the water.
Above her, very near, spread a canopy of dead branches, made, she supposed, by a tree that had toppled off the side of the cliff as erosion took the edges of it.
Or something like that. Not much about her situation was certain, was it? she thought ruefully; only that she was in bad trouble.
And that Randy was gone … for now. She didn’t know where. But she knew that sooner or later he would return.
And then the trouble would get worse. She turned her head. Nearby, the young man whose name was Sam sat with his back to the rail.
He didn’t look good. “Hey,” she said.
His eyes opened. Grimacing, he held a hand to his side. It was still leaking blood. As the moon emerged from the thinning overcast, the blood’s dark wetness shone in the bluish light.
“Hey,” he said in reply, and managed a smile. But his lip trembled as he did it.
Hell, she thought. He didn’t even look able to get up, much less get off this stinking boat and walk.
And especially not with that anchor still chained to his leg. Which meant that as she’d suspected right from the start of this whole nightmare, she was on her own.
Still taped tightly in the blankets Randy had wrapped her in again, she wiggled to a sitting position and began straining against the tape strips. But it was no use. He’d wrapped them around and around her so no matter how much she twisted and flexed, nothing gave.
“Inch over here if you can,” said Sam. “Closer to me.” His voice sounded awful, like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. But she had no good plan of her own, so she obeyed.
“Ouch,” she said as her hip bones bumped the deck. After a long, painful slog across the damp, hard boards, finally she got to within an arm’s length of him. “Now what?”
“Get … your back close to my hands.”
She squinted doubtfully at him, then saw something gleam in his trembling fingers. It was a tiny penknife.
A thrill of hope went through her at the sight of it; maybe she wouldn’t die after all. A shaky grin creased Sam’s face.
“He was in too big a hurry,” said the young man who held her salvation in his not-very-steady grip. She recalled Randy’s rough, almost panicky rush as he’d seized her … .
You bastard, you made a mistake, she thought exultantly, and in the back of her mind she could hear the girls in their graves cheering about it, too.
Eagerly she bounced herself closer to Sam, angled her stiff, tape-wrapped torso near enough for him to reach it. Freedom …
He dropped the knife. It clattered to the deck. In the pale moonlight she could see it was bloodstained.
Sam’s blood. “Ouch,” he whispered softly, and let his head fall back. Or maybe it fell back without him realizing it.
“Sam?” Please, no, not now when she was so close … “Sam?”
His eyelids fluttered open. “Sorry. Maybe you can …” His head moved slightly.
Get that. Oh, yes. She definitely could get that.
She let herself fall onto her side, then inched like a worm toward the fallen blade, heedless of the pain the movement cost her.
Eyes on the prize, damn it. Because this was it, she had a strong feeling that this was her very last chance. She could get out of this tape somehow, get out of it and live, or stay in it and …
No. She shoved the thought from her head. The knife lay just inches away. Craning her neck, she touched her lips to i
t, tasted the blood on it, clamped her teeth around it, and pulled back.
It stayed between her teeth, though the blood taste made her gorge rise. Aching and feeling half dead with fatigue and terror, she began wiggling her way back.
“Hurry,” Sam whispered weakly.
Yeah, tell me about it. A little more … there. She thrust her chin up, poked the knife toward his searching fingers …
“Okay.” This near, she could hear the harsh hitching of his breath, smell the blood soaking his shirt. “Sit up, I can’t—”
Biting back pain-sounds, she struggled to comply and at last got herself turned around and sitting so he could reach her. The first shaky cut went through the blanket into her arm.
Startled, she cried out. “Shh!” he warned, and pulled the knife back. But the next cut was no less vigorous. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “But there’s no time for—”
“Just get the damned tape off me,” she grated out. “I don’t care if you cut my arms off. It surprised me, is all.”
At last the blankets fell away. Next he slit the tape from her arms, which produced an unpleasant surprise in a night that had already been full of them: She couldn’t move.
And the man—Randy, his name was, Randy Dodd—could appear again at any moment.
Suddenly she began sobbing, hating it, hating herself, but unable to stop, because she’d gotten so far, she’d gotten free, and now none of it was going to make any difference.
“I can’t move,” she wept. “They’re all …”
“Hey,” said Sam. “They’re asleep, that’s all. Your arms and legs are just …”
A cough cut his words off as he slid down, tried to sit up again, and gave up the effort, collapsing with a hand pressed to his middle. Creased with pain, his face went even whiter. In the moonlight, his lips looked nearly black.
The sight shut her tears off abruptly. Was it just a few hours ago that she’d written him off because he wouldn’t be able to help her? Yet now, suddenly, keeping him alive felt almost as important as surviving herself.
Because they were together against Randy, and an ally in that fight seemed desperately required; she didn’t see why that should be, but it was. It just was. That Randy shouldn’t win. “Sam?”
The feeling was coming back to her arms and legs, ferocious prickling and tingling that was much worse than not being able to feel them at all. But they moved.
Tentatively she lifted one arm and then the other, flexed her fingers as much as she could, tried getting her feet under her. Up, big fella, Chip Hahn used to say whenever he hauled himself out of a chair after a long session at the computer. Chip … She hadn’t thought about him in hours, not since she looked for him outside the bar.
A fine assistant you turned out to be, she thought at him, with a flash of the old irritation she used to feel when he screwed up. Which, she had to admit now, he almost never did.
But that thought seemed so irrelevant, she dismissed it almost at once. Because wherever he was, he wasn’t beat up and captive, held by some guy who would kill you as soon as look at you.
Another burst of resentment made her lips tighten, then all thought of Chip was gone, along with everything else back in her old life, the one she’d been snatched out of.
Because now everything was different. “Sam?” she said again, then got to her feet and managed to totter a few steps.
The boat moved gently in the water, the wind had gone down, and the sky, fully cleared now, spread overhead thick with stars.
Still no sign of Randy. What he might be doing, she had no idea; digging graves, maybe. The thought sent her to Sam’s side again, where she crouched urgently.
“Sam? Listen to me. Do you know how to run the boat? How to start it?”
No reply. She shook his shoulder gently, drew back with a little gasp when even that slight motion produced fresh blood on the front of his shirt. He roused with difficulty.
“Can’t go … now. Tide’s too low. Can you … water?”
She got up. Everything hurt, her wrist most of all, but now she thought maybe it wasn’t broken, because she could move it and the swelling at least wasn’t getting any worse.
And water was a good, a wonderful, idea; her tongue felt like a dry bone. “Cabin …” Sam muttered.
Turning, she confronted the dark hatchway. The notion of going down there at all repelled her; if he returned and shut her in there …
But of course that’s where the water would be. Food, too, although the idea of eating was disgusting. The thought returned that if Randy came back while she was down there, he could trap her there.
The fear of what he might do with her then made her stomach roll lazily and her throat close with fright. On the other hand, there might be more than food and water down there.
Randy might’ve stashed a weapon, maybe even a gun. Carolyn didn’t know how to shoot a gun, had in fact never even held one. She was afraid of them.
But he didn’t know that. Swallowing past the cottony-thick terror that was so all-consuming it felt like it might smother her all by itself, she put both hands on the frame pieces around the hatchway opening and started down quickly, before she could lose her nerve.
The cabin was a tiny, low-ceilinged enclosure with a small filmy plastic window, a low cupboard, and the table on sawhorses. Moonlight through the square of window plastic showed a crumpled bag of Cheetos and a half-eaten pack of Ring Dings on the table.
Despite her belief that she wasn’t hungry, she crammed one of the Ring Dings into her mouth. Chemical-tasting fake sweetness clogged her throat, but she forced it down.
It gagged her, but she made it stay there. The stink in the cabin was hideous, even with the hatchway door open. Squinting around, she saw why:
A plastic bucket on the floor was coated with ancient fish scales. Unidentifiable stuff stained the rough table. Cleaning and gutting tools, some with toothed blades and others with edges so sharp they glinted even in the thick gloom, hung from nails.
A plastic gallon jug stood in one corner; she grabbed it and cautiously sniffed its spout. Water … She drank greedily, then spied a quart bottle of Wild Turkey by one of the sawhorse legs.
Thank you, God. … She tipped the bottle up and took a long, warming swallow, felt the alcohol hit her and spread out through her nerve endings, and took another.
Then she caught sight of the scrapbook. Sticking out of a large canvas duffel, its corner looked at first like a sheet of cardboard; she almost missed it.
Even as she approached the bag, she thought only that it might contain a gun, or perhaps a cell phone. Her own phone was missing along with the rest of her bag’s contents, and the bag itself.
Still in the car trunk, maybe, or in a trash can somewhere. She didn’t care. Hastily she rummaged in the duffel.
A tattered sweater came out, some socks and underwear, a can of mosquito repellent. A few T-shirts, threadbare jeans, sneakers, and … a black official-looking folder.
She opened it, found papers in an envelope. A Canadian passport, the name on it unfamiliar, the photograph recognizably Randy Dodd.
There was a driver’s license, also Canadian. And a bankbook in French, which Carolyn neither read nor spoke.
She tucked them away again, not wanting Randy Dodd to know she’d been down here, and reached out for the scrapbook to put it back where she’d found it, as well.
As she did so, it fell open. A clipping slid out. Stapled to it was a photograph.
Not a newspaper photograph. Carolyn glanced at it and felt her gorge rise; reflexively, she grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle again. The alcohol made her eyes water, blurring the face of the girl in the picture.
Unfortunately, it didn’t obscure the rest of her body. Or what was left of it …
Hideously, Carolyn felt her working instincts kick in with a cold surge of excitement. The clipping was a year-old story from a small-town newspaper in Georgia, detailing the disappearance of a local girl.
FAMILY IN
LIMBO AS VANISH ANNIVERSARY LOOMS, yelled the headline. Carolyn didn’t bother reading the rest. She didn’t have time, and anyway, she knew what it would say, so much so that she could have written it herself.
It said what they all said. It said everyone still hoped the girl had just run away, that after all this time she was alive.
Even though they knew she wasn’t. Carolyn flipped through the rest of the scrapbook, knowing what she would find: girls in graves, girls who were about to be in graves, girls who had been in graves but who’d been removed from them.
Six in all. Two in Georgia, three in South Carolina, one in Alabama, all vanished over a period of eighteen months. The last one had disappeared in a Wal-Mart parking lot, in broad daylight.
All had long black hair like Carolyn’s, except for one whose hair color could not any longer be determined by anyone who hadn’t already known her.
Not from the photograph, or in any other way. Carolyn closed the scrapbook with hands she would positively not allow to tremble, put it back in the duffel, picked up the water jug and the Wild Turkey bottle.
She stumbled back up on deck and crouched by Sam, tipped the jug to his lips. In her mind’s eye, all those dead girls watched her carefully, waiting to see what she would do.
For them. For herself. Sam drank thirstily, then gasped and signaled enough. She broke off a piece of the chocolate snack and showed it to him.
“Can you eat? Maybe you should …” But to this he shook his head firmly; she hesitated, then ate the other Ring Ding herself.
“Do you want some of this?” She held up the Wild Turkey.
He hesitated, licking his lips, but refused this, too. “Maybe I shouldn’t,” he said with a strange little laugh. “I might have something kind of … important to do.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. She took another sizable swig herself, capped the bottle, and put it aside. “Sam, we’ve got to get out of here.”
He frowned, said nothing. “While he’s gone, Sam,” she said urgently. “We’ve got to move the boat out of here, or get off it before he comes back.”