by Sarah Graves
But she remembered once the door closed behind her and she stood alone in the dark. With trembling fingers, she snapped on her flashlight and forced herself down the hall, past the old staircase, whose carved mahogany banister, polished with beeswax and lemon oil until it shone, had been Anne’s particular pride.
Now it was hung with cobwebs. A gritty scrim moved under her feet as she crept on; the whole place smelled like a sour mop. She scanned the kitchen floor with the flashlight but found only a few hollowed-out acorns, brought in by squirrels through some hole that hadn’t been patched, she supposed.
It was hideous in here, and sad. She wished heartily that she hadn’t come back. Still, almost done. A few minutes more and she would know whether or not she’d lost her earring for good.
She started downstairs, to the cellar.
THE GREAT, FIERY WIND OF THE TALL SENTINEL PINE’S EX-ignition sucked the air up out of the pit where Chip Hahn lay. Waking in horror, he forced his face in under some rocks and clasped his hands over his head, struggling to breathe.
As the initial roar faded, a rain of fire began, burning embers and sizzling sticks showering all around him with a sound like hail clattering on a tin roof, the reek of smoke filling his lungs. A massive flaming branch thudded down, inches from him.
Everything burning … a swarm of hot coals bit through his pants and attacked his legs. He jerked up and swatted them off frantically, then doused the remaining ones with handfuls of the damp sand, heedless of the tiny burning bits in it, blistering his hands.
A sound made him look up just in time to see a ball of fire plum meting at him, a ball the size of a house… . It was the huge pine’s flaming top, broken off and falling to earth like a fiery comet. Run …
Gasping, weeping, shoeless and burn-flecked, he scrambled in terror halfway up the side of the sand pit. The massive fireball struck the ground with a concussive whoomph of renewed flame that hurled yet another spark-storm stinging and burning over his exposed skin.
But then it fell back. What remained collapsed into itself, burning more sedately as if, having demonstrated its unearthly power, the fire was content now with snapping and popping. A few remaining flaming branch fronds floated lazily down into it.
But the big event was over, Chip realized as he watched it. Already the yellow flames were subsiding to a mass of red coals, glowing in the dark.
He steadied himself as best he could on the unstable slope of the old sand pit. His streaming tears made the blisters on his face and hands sting like acid burns, and the smoke and hot gases he’d inhaled turned his breathing into torture.
And he was still bleeding, possibly a lot. He didn’t dare to check, but the waves of light-headedness he felt washing over him were probably not all from the fire and his terrified flight from it.
His ears rang like gongs. Gagging, he hacked up sour gobbets of soot. His voice was gone, only a faint croak emerging when he tried it, and his throat felt like pins were being stuck into it.
Christ, what a mess. But under all his pain was the exultant realization that he’d done it, he’d lit the damned thing on fire. Someone would see … .
Someone would come. Now if he could just get to the top of the pit, find Sam, and try to help him until their rescuers got here… . He dug his stockinged feet—where had his shoes gone? He couldn’t remember—into the sand slope. But when he did that, it started sliding again and he couldn’t hang on, to stop himself. So he slid with it all the way down to the bottom again.
And again. On his third try, or maybe his fourth, he was no nearer the top than before. His fingers bled stickily from digging into the stony, shifting earth, and every so often an ember from the fire still sulking at the pit’s bottom sailed up and zinged him; by now the exposed back of his neck felt like—and probably was, he realized—cooked meat.
He collapsed onto his face, spread-eagled on the steep hill. Again, he had to try again. Because the whole tree had exploded, for God’s sake—somebody would’ve seen it. Surely they’d be curious.
But not about Chip, because no one knew he was here. No one but Randy Dodd, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone. So people might come to find out about the fire, but they wouldn’t be here to save some poor injured fellow from out of this pit.
For all Chip knew, they’d never get anywhere near it. If they approached what remained of the sentinel tree from its other side, they might not even realize the sand pit existed.
And with his voice gone, he couldn’t even yell to alert them. So he had to try to climb. Cold, hungry, thirsty, bleeding, burned—everything hurt now, banging and crashing with pain, so he had no way of knowing which parts of him were severely injured and which were just beat to hell—
Climb, damn it. It’s easy. Put a hand out, dig in. Push with the foot. Again. Up, big fella.
Chip smiled in the darkness, remembering how he used to tell Sam Tiptree that same thing whenever Sam fell—running for a fly ball or a long, spiraling pass—on the lawn in Central Park. Or when Sam tripped over his own feet trying to make an easy layup or return a marshmallow serve …
Back then, Chip had been the athlete, not Sam, and the clear admiration in Sam’s eyes when Chip knew how to throw a curveball, tie a slipknot, or get them both into a video game emporium with just one ticket had been, in Chip’s pathetically lonely, solitary adolescent life, worth a million bucks.
He’d have given a million to see it again, too. But he was never going to, he realized bleakly as a cascade of stones from above showered down on him, loosened by his efforts at climbing. Sam was dead, either from the gunshot wound he’d had or drowned by the rising tide.
And I’m the only one who knows. The thought triggered a fast mental snapshot of Chip’s mother, before she’d walked out on the Old Bastard.
Walked out on Chip, too. He grabbed another handful of sand. Walked, and never came back. His fingers seized a root clump as he went on thinking about when the cards from her stopped coming.
The Old Bastard’s sourly delivered explanation was that she’d gotten tired of them, but Chip never believed it completely. He feared something bad had happened, that something had simply erased her from the face of the earth.
Chip thought that if only he knew what specific disaster had befallen his mother, which terrible event out of the many that capered in his imagination—if indeed any of them had happened at all—he might not feel so bad about it.
The way Sam’s own mother was going to feel about Sam: just a big hole full of awful questions that would never get answered. Just nothing. Which plenty of people would say was probably for the best. Easier not to know the details.
But Chip knew better, and so did all the families of all those girls he and Carolyn had written about.
So maybe he wasn’t going to make it; the funny, thready feeling he had all over his body now made him think that probably he wasn’t.
That the bleeding he was doing might not be reversible, even if he got found. He’d probably be dead now if it weren’t for the life jacket, the thick metal buckle all smooshed from a bullet’s impact, flat and misshapen when he put his fingers on it.
It must’ve deflected the projectile just enough, he thought, when he finally felt it and understood what had happened. But the darkness all around him still kept shrinking and expanding with an effect like the wah-wah pedal on an electric guitar.
Another bunch of big stones clattered downhill at him. When they’d gone by, he stuck his hand up into the sand slope above him and dug his feet in again, and was rewarded with yet another six or eight inches of upward progress.
Reach, dig, pull. Repeat. He was beginning to feel now that it didn’t even matter if he died, if only he got to tell someone first what had happened. So that someone—Sam Tiptree’s mother, especially—would know.
And for that to happen, he had to reach the top of this pit.
Velvety blackness expanded all around him. It took all his will not to let himself relax into its warmth,
to lie down in the all-encompassing, utterly forgiving, and welcoming dark.
But he knew how it felt, not knowing. So he kept pushing and pulling and bleeding, sliding down and crawling up again. After a while he didn’t even realize anymore that he was doing it.
That his burned, bleeding hands and feet moved, twitching in the sliding sand but accomplishing nothing. That his raw, cracked lips twisted and his parched throat spasmed urgently with what he had to tell, making no sound.
Until he heard something, and did something. He wasn’t even sure what. Then suddenly everything was blinding light.
THE KNIFE POINT SNICKED IN JUST UNDER JAKE’S RIGHT EAR. A hot, liquid drip began trickling down the side of her neck. Not a lot of blood. But even a little felt like plenty.
She drove slowly down Key Street with Randy Dodd hunkered behind her in the back seat, past the small white wooden houses lined up on either side of the pavement like silent observers.
Silent and dark. Most were vacant at this time of the year, their original families long migrated away for better economic prospects or more pleasant climates, the current seasonal tenants now taking their ease at their winter places in Florida.
The few houses with any lights on inside shone like beacons in the gloom, but their shades were drawn and their porch lamps turned off; there would be no help from them, either.
At the foot of Key Street, Randy jerked his head to the left. “Park downtown, near Roger’s,” he said as she waited at the stop sign.
The late school bus rumbled by, taking the high-school kids home from club meetings and basketball practice.
“Okay,” she managed, nodding while considering a variety of possible strategies. Gun the engine, shoot straight out across Water Street into the bay, for example. Lean on the horn until—
The knife point dug in again. “Don’t try to be smart.”
His voice was expressionless. She turned left past the library, the Happy Crab Bar and Grille, the glass-doored police station with its lights on inside but no squad car idling in the angled parking spot Bob Arnold reserved for himself out front.
“Pull in,” Randy said after another few hundred feet, past Wads-worth’s hardware store and the Commons Gift Shop, both closed for the evening. The pizza place was still lit, but no customers were inside; as they passed, someone turned the sign in the door to Closed and the lights went out.
Jake pulled the car up under the tall fisherman statue that loomed over the parking lot in a plastic-composite yellow slicker and sou’wester, bearing a plastic cod in his arms. Ellie White’s car was already there, but there, was no sign of her.
Out on the water, the lights of a lot of small boats showed faintly like a swarm of distant fireflies, away toward Canada. On the horizon beyond, an orange glow flickered, diminishing as she looked at it. “Why are you doing this?” The question came out a tight-throated whisper. “You could have gotten away. Why are you still—”
Here. Like a nightmare she couldn’t wake from. Sam, she thought. But Randy Dodd’s answer was no answer at all, or not one she understood. “I just want what’s mine.”
Out on the breakwater the sodium arc lights shed tall cones of swirling yellow-tinted mist. She turned off the ignition.
“So I came back for it,” he said. Then: “If you scream or run, I’ll catch you and cut your throat.”
Getting out of the car, she believed him. And now it occurred to her what he meant about wanting what was his.
He must’ve found out the money was fake. Which meant that despite the coincidence, Roger’s call might have been genuine and Sam might still be inside the bar.
She quickened her step. On the sidewalk he moved up beside her, put his arm casually around her, knife in hand. No one else was on the street.
The front door to the Artful Dodger was open. Randy stayed right with her as they went in; she heard the door lock behind them.
A lamp burned low behind the bar. Small red lights glowed on a few of the sound system’s electronic components in the room with the dartboard and the karaoke stage, with all the gear Sam had worked so hard setting up and testing.
The system’s ready lights were all on, the control panel a bank of red and green LEDs. Seeing them, she knew the call from Sam had been a trick.
Roger had cued up one of Sam’s test recordings and played it into the phone, and she’d fallen for it. Simple as that, she realized bleakly as Randy urged her toward the rear of the small stage.
At the back of it, stairs led down. When she hesitated, he shoved her. The stairwell was lit by ceiling-hung fluorescent tubes. At the bottom, a concrete-block-walled hall with a green linoleum floor stretched away.
He hustled her along it. The linoleum gave way to unfinished planks. At the hall’s dead end, the concrete blocks changed to rough wooden paneling, and a massive trapdoor with an iron ring in it was set into the planks.
The trapdoor was open. At the sight of it, a doomed, drowning feeling came over her, but it was too late to do anything about it. Randy shoved her toward the opening and the wooden ladder sticking up through it.
With trembling hands she seized the ladder and stepped onto it, noticing the slide bolt in the trapdoor as she proceeded down the rungs. He followed, kicking out with one foot as she reached the bottom to knock her off balance and away from him while he finished descending.
The room was about ten feet square, with a low stone ceiling reinforced by massive old beams, and stone walls carved out long ago from the island’s bedrock. One whole side of it facing the bay was a massive old wooden door held shut by a rusted iron bar; it was obvious even at first glance that the door might’ve moved at one time to gain access to the water.
But not anymore. Time and rust and the settling of the old building had rendered it permanently shut. More iron bars cross-hatched two high window openings in the door; through them a cold breeze blew in off the water. She could hear the waves out there, slopping against the granite riprap that protected the shore side of the boat basin from erosion.
A kerosene lantern hung from a hook in the ceiling. Ellie White lay beneath it, bound with cord. Unconscious, her red hair the color of flame in the lamplight. Jake rushed to her and checked her pulse, which was strong but slow.
At Jake’s touch Ellie opened her eyes, tried to get up but couldn’t. Jake tore at the cord around Ellie’s arms and legs, looked around for something to cut it with.
Randy wasn’t even bothering to stop her, seeming to know there would be nothing here that would help her. And there was nothing, only a few heaps of discarded junk: an old mop bucket with an ancient mop in it, a heap of broken vacuum-cleaner parts, plus the vacuum attachments, piles of old stained rags.
Jake’s searching gaze fell in horror on the small stream of water leaking across the stone floor. Each time a wave hit the shore outside, some splashed in through the window openings. And it wasn’t even high tide yet … .
She scanned the stone walls, saw no high-water mark … which could mean only that when it was high tide, this chamber would be filled. Entirely filled, not even an air space at the top …
Silently, efficiently, Randy grabbed Jake’s arms, yanked them back, and wrapped a length of cord around them, pulling it tight. He leaned down and tied more of the stuff around her legs.
Then he surveyed the room again as the trickle across the floor widened to a rivulet. This was where the Dodd House tunnel must come out, she realized suddenly, the one Roger hadn’t wanted revealed because it spoiled his alibi. Its opening must be way back in the shadows somewhere, where the lamplight didn’t reach.
Once upon a time a lot of cans had come down that tunnel, on a cart or wagon. Probably it had been some poor guy’s job to haul the cart all the way back uphill again, too, to the Dodd House.
Long ago … She looked around the grim stone room again, its floor slimy and its walls greenish with algae. When the place wasn’t being used for a distribution point, probably someone cut fish down here, or did some o
ther hard, filthy work. And then the tide came in, to clean the mess up and wash it out to sea.
As it was doing now. Jake’s throat closed on a hard lump of anguish. “What did you do to Sam?”
The nylon cord he’d used to bind her didn’t stretch at all, the way cotton or hemp would have. It bit in, cutting her. But that could be a good thing, because blood was slippery … .
Trying not to let him see her moving, she rocked her wrists back and forth. “Hey, you didn’t answer my question,” she prodded as Randy approached the ladder again.
“Coward,” she taunted. “You did something to him. And you’re too chicken to tell me what. Big man,” she mocked him abrasively.
Deliberately. She had to keep him here somehow. Because when he was gone …
“Scared,” she accused. “Scared of a woman you’re going to kill. What a loser.”
Risky, like teasing a wild animal … but if he left, it was all over. Soon this room would fill with water, and that would be that. So, she had to keep him engaged, keep him—
Anger whitened the scars around his eyes and tightened his artificially plump lips. Glancing around, he spotted a loose rock on the floor under one of the window openings, and crossed to it.
Now all she needed was to actually have an idea of what to do next before he picked that stone up and bashed her with it.
“Now, now,” she temporized. “Let’s not be …”
Hasty, she’d have finished; getting knocked unconscious with a rock before drowning might ease the latter predicament.
But neither of them was on her wish list. Before she could figure out just what was on it, though, two more events occurred swiftly, one after the other:
First, Randy Dodd bent to pick the rock up, turning his back on the doorway to do so.
And second, Randy’s brother, Roger Dodd, appeared suddenly and without warning, slipping expertly and silently down the ladder with a huge iron skillet in his hand. His raised hand …