The Portal

by Russell James

  The front door had barely swung shut when Deborah Deering marched through it. She carried her ever-present miniature white poodle, Precious, against her shoulder. The doughy old woman with the gray pageboy haircut had her lips pursed and chin raised, a look that made Scott sigh. She was here to complain.

  “Selectman Tackett!”

  “Deborah, don’t call me that.”

  “Well, you are a selectman, aren’t you?”

  He was. His regular customers had convinced him to run last year when old Darrin Pierce hung it up after a decade. Scott liked the idea of giving back to Stone Harbor.

  “I’m one of three,” he said, knowing Deborah would miss the attempt to direct her to another.

  Deborah tucked Precious up under her breasts as if about to defend her. The dog had taken the place of immediate family in widow Deborah’s life. Watching the two of them made Scott understand why her grandchildren never visited.

  “Well, someone needs to do something about the Harrimans’ vicious dog! It chased poor Precious and nearly gave her a heart attack.”

  She pointed the panting little dog at Scott. Its eyes wept something black onto its curly white fur. The dog shuddered in her grip. The nervous little thing looked like it was always on the verge of a heart attack, with or without the Harrimans’ German shepherd going after it.

  “Deborah, the Board of Selectmen doesn’t take care of that kind of thing. We keep the dock repaired and get the village green grass cut. You need to contact Chief Scaravelli.”

  “That worthless sack? Lot of good he’ll do me.”

  In a more combative mood, Scott would have agreed with her. Scott regularly went head to head with the police chief over some lax law enforcement. The other two selectmen saw things differently and thought the world of the retired New York City cop. Leaving Scott a steaming, frustrated minority.

  “Deborah, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Well…can’t you make the Harrimans buy a muzzle for that wolf of theirs? You sell those things here, don’t you?”

  “Seriously. Go right down the street to the police station and fill out a complaint. Ask for Milo to take care of it if that makes you feel better.”

  Deborah’s face screwed up in disgust at the mention of young officer Milo Mimms. “Like that child’s any better!” She gripped Precious so tightly that the dog squeaked. She turned on her heel and tromped to the door. “If my Precious ends up dead, it’s on your head.” The bell tinkled as the door slammed behind her.

  Scott couldn’t shake the mental image of her dead dog draped across his head and laughed. His dislike of Scaravelli made him kind of glad to wind Deborah up like a clock spring before sending her his way.

  But aggravation like Deborah Deering and Chief Scaravelli weren’t anywhere near enough to turn him off about Stone Harbor. Anxious as he had been to leave at seventeen, it was comforting to be back at twenty-nine. He belonged here now. The town grapevine still ran through the hardware store as it always had. He knew every detail of the harbor oil spill last March and the Dickey girl who drowned falling off the ferry last summer, not to mention the lesser news of new mainland grandchildren. He was part of the fabric of this little society, and that meant a lot to a man stripped of his roles as son and husband.

  He headed to the back of the store to unwrap a shipment of new snow shovels. Today would end up sunny after the fog burned off. But winter was just around the corner, bringing with it the threat of an old-fashioned nor’easter blizzard on the island. Stone Harbor Hardware was still the ‘go to’ place for the practical necessities, and it was Scott’s responsibility to be ready. Even if that meant unpacking snow shovels in the warmth of September, and roofing tar during a January freeze.

  Chapter Six

  Business was slow through the morning. Just before noon, Scott took a broom to the hardwood floors near the entrance. A cold tingle sparked in his feet.

  He stopped sweeping. The odd sensation felt like something between the prickle of pins and needles and a vibration from the floor. He reached down and touched the hardwood slats. He felt the same thing, a line of cold energy that made his fingertips pulse, like there was a refrigeration line running under the boards. He swept his hand in a semicircle. The charge was stronger near the register.

  He stood and walked to the counter. The tingling grew stronger with each step. So did a weighty sense of dread. Whatever energy he felt beneath him was more black hole than bright star. He stepped behind the counter. The sensation peaked.

  The bell rang the arrival of a customer and broke Scott’s concentration on the phenomenon. A squat, bald man with a goatee stepped in, dressed in black head to toe, with a ropy gold chain around his neck.

  Scott caught his breath. A sensation of evil radiated from the man like heat from a sunlamp. So powerful was the feeling that Scott completely forgot his search. Instead, he had to fight to keep from running out the back door. Everything about the man’s appearance screamed Mafia hit man, but Scott felt something even darker than that about him.

  “How ya doin’? I’m Joey Oates.” Oates’ face betrayed no emotion. He surveyed the store and locked his eyes back on Scott. “This was Gary Tackett’s place.”

  “I run it now,” Scott said. “I’m his son. He passed away.”

  Oates gave him a no-shit-Sherlock look. “No foolin’, huh?”

  Oates stepped closer. The air seemed to thicken. The boards under Scott’s feet nearly buzzed with power.

  “I’m an old pal,” Oates said. “We done some business a while back.”

  Scott’s father, Gary Tackett, had been as straight-arrow as they came, a deacon in the church, an honest businessman, Scott’s idol. Scott knew the store’s financials inside and out. Oates wasn’t in them. He couldn’t think what business his father might have had with someone this creepy. Scott stepped back until his butt hit the counter.

  “No, can’t say that he mentioned you,” Scott said.

  “Yeah, most of my business partners don’t.” Oates looked Scott up and down the way a butcher appraises a side of beef. “Good to meet ya. We may do some business ourselves. I’ll be in touch.”

  Oates left the store and it felt like a suffocating cloud left with him. Scott sighed and realized how tense every muscle in his body had become. He sagged against the countertop.

  Whoever that guy was, and whatever business that guy did, Scott wasn’t about to have any part in it. He couldn’t imagine that his father ever had.

  * * *

  The weak, waning sun dipped down over the harbor. Closing time was hours away, but Scott had a delivery of shingles to make outside town. So he made the executive decision as Stone Harbor Hardware’s CEO to call it a day early. He flipped the deadbolt on the front door and switched off the neon open sign in the window.

  As he turned back to the counter, he remembered the strange sensation he’d felt that morning, that near-electric hum through the floorboards that sent a terrifying chill through his system. He’d tracked it back to behind the counter, then Oates’ disconcerting arrival derailed his investigation. He hadn’t thought about it again because whatever he felt had disappeared after Oates left the store.

  The rational side of him made a list of practical reasons to resume his investigation, ranging from damaged water pipes to faulty wiring, any of which would be bad news for the store. Emotionally, he needed to find the source of the sensation that had filled him with dread, a darkness only bested by Oates’ unwelcome appearance.

  He moved to the same spot where the tingling had been the strongest. The stillness of the closed, empty store eliminated all distractions, but he still felt nothing.

  As a kid, he’d been the one to shimmy into the crawl space under the store whenever little emergencies demanded, so he knew every wire and pipe under the floor. None ran under here.

  He knelt and traced his fingers along t
he seams in the uneven hardwood floor. He flashed back to being fifteen and having his winter chore be refinishing the surface, a tedious hands-and-knees task that consumed a lot of sandpaper, varnish, and sweat. His father told him that his grandfather had pounded many of those nails in with his own hands. At the time, Scott hadn’t cared. As he ran his finger over the countersunk nail heads now, the image made him proud.

  No missing nails, no loose boards, no weak seams. Nothing looked out of place and he was sure that there was nothing underneath the boards but gravel and dirt.

  But something looked wrong with the lower trim of the display case to his left. The battered, two-inch-high painted trim ran uniformly from one end to the other, except for the two-foot-long piece next to him, where the chipped edges exposed bare wood and two crooked Phillips head screws replaced the finishing nails that held the other pieces in place. The trim hadn’t looked like this when he’d slaved over the floor around it.

  Scott raised an eyebrow. Crooked screws were his father’s hallmark. He might have run a hardware store, but his personal home improvement skills had been meager at best. He’d never seen the man cut a board’s edge straight. And he sure wouldn’t use screws when he could use nails, unless he was going to unscrew them later.

  Scott grabbed the powered screwdriver from the drawer under the register. He fit the tip into the screw’s head. The right side of the screw slots were damaged, but not the left. The screws had gone in, but perhaps never come out. He switched the driver to reverse and backed out both screws almost all the way. He grabbed the screwheads and pulled the panel free.

  Inside lay a flat, hexagonal granite slab, the same dark gray so commonplace on the island. Scott slid it out. An odd design was etched in the stone’s unpolished surface. Two isosceles triangles lay superimposed on each other, one pointed up, one down, but the three sides of each were radically concave. A circle circumscribed the resulting six-pointed design. In the dead center were two recessed handprints, like a grade school kid would make in plaster.

  Scott had never seen anything like it before. But in the same way that a biohazard symbol or a swastika carried an inherent, ominous evil in it, so did this simple collection of three shapes. Upon closer inspection, he saw that strange words edged the circle, some with letters outside the English alphabet. He bit his lower lip.

  Whatever this thing was that his father found, he’d thought he had to hide it from everyone, including Scott. The stone was old, but the engraving wasn’t. The carving’s edges flickered with the sparkle of fresh-chiseled rock. Scott leaned back with the granite slab between his feet.

  Confusion swirled inside him. He would have sworn upon a stack of Bibles that he knew his father better than anyone else did. After Scott’s return to Stone Harbor, they’d spent most of every day together, whether it was at the store or at some time-consuming medical treatment. They didn’t ignore that his father’s end was near. They went over the hardware store’s books, the family finances, the family history. His father told him hundreds of stories about Scott’s grandparents, about growing up on the island, about meeting and marrying Scott’s mother. In all of that, how could a secret like this never have come up?

  Oates’ cryptic comments grew even more disturbing. If this secret stone existed, what secret business had Gary Tackett and Oates contracted? How much more of his father’s life was out there for Scott to discover? All he’d unearthed today hinted at a man far darker than Scott ever thought possible.

  Scott slid the stone back under the counter and screwed the panel back in place, as if he could just reverse all he’d done, and make the disturbing discovery dissolve from his memory. His world was sure a lot simpler about eight hours ago.

  Chapter Seven

  Scott drove back toward town after delivering the load of shingles to a contractor’s site. Sometimes running the store all by himself made him feel like a one-man band. But he was happy for this end of day diversion. Oates’ visit and the strange object under the counter had changed the whole sense of being in the store. He’d always been more than comfortable there. He’d felt at home. Now he didn’t know how to feel. He drove back into town on some kind of internal autopilot, all conscious thought consumed with conflicting thoughts about his father.

  About a mile out of town, an unfamiliar sun-faded blue Toyota sat parked askew along the side of the road. Scott let off the accelerator. He pulled in behind it and popped on his emergency flashers. The window tint made the interior indistinct, but he could see a dark-haired woman inside, looking back between the front seats, her hand shielding her eyes from the low sun.

  An out-of-towner with a broken car was a regular island thing. Given the low miles the locals drove, Willet’s Automotive downtown made most of its revenues off visitors’ rolling rust piles. Scott got out to do his civic duty for the visitor. After all, he was, as Deborah had reminded him, a selectman.

  He walked alongside the car.

  “Do you need a hand?” he asked, a bit louder than usual to get through the raised window.

  “Scottie?” replied a muffled voice.

  The window rolled down. Scott caught his breath and his heart did a little sprint as he recognized the woman at the wheel. Unlike the rest of the world, he didn’t see the famous Allison Layton, star of Malibu Beach. He saw Allie, his date to the senior prom. He’d heard that she was renting a place on the far side of the island.

  “Allie Cat,” he said. Her old nickname slipped out before he realized he’d even thought it.

  Allie hopped out of the car and gave him a quick little hug, more a crush of two coats than anything else.

  “I should have known when I had car trouble, you’d be the one to arrive on the scene. Always the white knight.”

  He had to force himself to stop staring at her and answer. “Well, once a Boy Scout, blah, blah, blah. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. Stewie just revved really high, and died.”

  “Stewie? You still name your cars?”

  “They name themselves. They just share it with me.”

  Scott leaned into the car and twisted the key in the ignition. The dash lit up. The gas gauge needle lay on dead empty.

  “I hate to ask,” he said, “but could you be out of gas?”

  “Maybe? I’ve driven so little I haven’t paid attention.”

  “Hop in. I have a can up at the house. We’ll gas him up and go from there.”

  Indecision crossed her face. “Yeah, okay. Good plan.”

  They got into Scott’s truck and he headed up the road. Allie had been the center of Scott’s life the last time he lived on the island. Now, seeing her, he felt a strange combination of familiarity and raging discomfort. This was the person he grew up with, but she couldn’t possibly be the same Allie from so long ago. Allie had become a Hollywood star, then a national personal train wreck. What did he say after so many years?

  “I guess you heard that I’d come back,” Allie said.

  “You know Stone Harbor. The grapevine buzzed with it before you drove off the ferry. Hollywood star comes home isn’t everyday news here.”

  “More like prodigal daughter, I’ll bet. You can tell me the truth.”

  He had no intention of doing that. “No, not really.”

  “I still love it when you lie to me,” she said.

  Scott turned right into his driveway.

  “No way!” she said. “You live in the same house?”

  “Inherited it from my parents. It came with the family business and I didn’t want to break up the set. Be right back.”

  Scott left the truck idling and went to the garage. He returned with a two-gallon gas can and tucked it into the truck’s bed. Allie looked wistfully at the front of the house.

  “This house always had the best porch,” she said. “What happened to the swing?”

  Back in high school, a canvas-ba
cked porch swing faced the street. At night, the shadow of the overhang put it in darkness. The two of them used to sit there on summer evenings and dream of the future.

  “Sun and salt air did it in,” Scott said. He pulled out of the driveway. “I haven’t gotten around to replacing it, I guess.”

  “You should so you can sit outside and just breathe. Living in LA gave me a whole new appreciation for Stone Harbor’s fresh air.”

  “If you came back for fresh air, you botched your timing. We’re about two weeks away from locking ourselves indoors until May.” He dropped into a fake Maine accent. “You remember we got winter up in these parts.”

  “Yeah,” she said with realization. “I’ll need to buy a heavier coat, won’t I?”

  That admission relieved Scott of having to pry into her personal schedule. She planned on staying awhile. He liked that.

  They returned to her car. He gassed it up. Two long starter cranks later, the car revved to life. Allie smiled in the front seat. Scott knelt down and looked in the open window beside her.

  “And remember,” he said. “The E on the gauge doesn’t stand for enough.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  The moment was about to pass. Good deed complete, they were about to part ways. Scott didn’t want that to happen. A surge of adrenaline hit his system. He bit his lower lip.