Body Search

by Jessica Andersen

  Anger tangled with hurt and desperation in one lonely, messy ball in Dale’s chest until he snapped, “He dares because he was a friend of my parents and because he helped me escape this awful place. He has every right because he’s the only one who ever gave a damn about me.”

  The moment the words were out, Dale wished he could call them back. But he could no more unsay the words than he could take back the shallow, self-absorbed things he’d said to his mother the night she died.

  He reached out a hand in the darkness. “Tans…”

  She turned away. “Never mind, Dale. It’s okay. Your emotions were one of the few things you never lied about. You didn’t believe I cared for you, and you sure as hell didn’t care enough for me.”

  Dale followed her in silence up the path to his boyhood home. Part of him wished he could tell her the truth, that of all the things he’d lied about—his past, his position, his very nature—pretending not to care for her had been the biggest lie of all. And the most necessary, because he had no intention of falling in love.

  Just look what it had done to his uncle.

  When they reached the house, he slid the key from the pocket of his borrowed jeans and swung open the kitchen door. Tansy brushed past him without a word, but the tense set of her shoulders shouted her hurt.

  Dale knew he should let her go. She was returning to the mainland the next day—whether she knew it or not—and it would be best for both of them if she hated him when she went.

  But he reached out a hand towards her. “Tansy.”

  She halted. Turned back. “Yes, Dale?”

  I’m sorry I lied about who I am. I’m sorry I didn’t let you in when you asked. I’m sorry I didn’t fight harder when you left. He cleared his throat. “You’re in the first bedroom on the left, in my old room. Lock your window and pull the curtains, okay?”

  She looked at him, and he worried, not for the first time, that she was seeing things he’d rather keep hid den. Finally, she took a breath. “What about what your uncle said? What if he has proof—”

  “He has nothing,” Dale interrupted. “The boat went down with all hands aboard. Period.”

  “But what if—”

  “There is no ‘what if,’ Tansy.” He took a deep breath, scrubbed a hand across his face and willed the headache away. Willed the heartache away. “Let’s just get some sleep. We both need it.”

  She looked at him for a long moment before she finally turned and climbed the stairs. Dale didn’t watch her go. He leaned against the bare hallway wall, closed his eyes and saw the shattered hull of an old lobster boat that had washed up on the barren southern claw, where not even the children ventured.

  It had been raining when Churchill had taken him to see the wreck—big, fat drops that heralded yet another storm.

  The rigging had been mostly gone and the familiar red, white and blue flag had been snapped from its pole, but there was no mistaking the name painted on her bow in crooked, childish letters. Curly Sue.

  Standing in the rain, eye throbbing with the eggplant-colored bruise Trask had put there the day before, young Dale had clung to Churchill and cried for his parents, for the favorite aunt he’d named the boat after, and for the uncle who’d gone from hero to monster in a night.

  Twelve hours later, Dale had been on a chartered plane to the mainland, with a few changes of clothes in a knapsack at his feet and a wad of cash in his pocket. He hadn’t watched the shape of Lobster Island disappear in the distance.

  Now, fifteen years after that, Dale pressed his fingers to his eyes and wondered, What if? What if he hadn’t left the island? What if he’d tied Trask to a chair and poured coffee into him until he sobered up and turned back into the man Dale remembered? What if they’d investigated the Curly Sue’s disappearance together?

  Then his thought process hit a dead end. At seventeen, he’d wanted to believe it had been something more than an accident. He’d wanted to blame someone for taking away his family. He’d convinced himself it was important that his mother never went out on the boat after dark. He’d seen evidence in the fact that his parents had said they were going for a walk that night, not a fishing run.

  At thirty-two, he knew plans changed, people changed, boats sank. He’d seen the wreck himself. The Curly Sue had gone down in a storm, there was nothing more to it.

  But a voice at the back of his head slyly insisted, What if there was more? What then?

  What if he’d let his parents go unavenged for fifteen years?

  UPSTAIRS IN HER BORROWED bed, Tansy finally heard the floorboards creak and held her breath, hating herself for the questions that she couldn’t suppress.

  What would she do if Dale knocked?

  What would she do if he didn’t?

  His footsteps paused. Her heart thumped once. Twice. But he didn’t knock. The cut-glass knob didn’t turn. After a moment, the footsteps continued down the hall. A door shut in the distance.

  “Damn it!” She muffled her frustrated groan in a musty pillow. “I’m hopeless.”

  She was no better than her mother, still wanting a man even when she knew he wasn’t good for her. Dale liked fun times, surface relationships and cheerful women. Emotions made him uncomfortable.

  Not good qualities in a husband. Or a father. And though she hadn’t started out looking for such things, Tansy had changed over the two years they’d been together. Dale hadn’t. At least, not until they’d reached Lobster Island.

  Since then, she wasn’t sure who he was. He wasn’t the driven, almost obsessed field researcher she’d grown to love. He wasn’t the distant, cool urban doctor of Boston General she’d grown to hate. He was someone else entirely, a native islander with a past she knew nothing about and a family he seemed not to want. And that was the most telling fact of all.

  The look on his face when he’d seen his uncle lying drunk on the town common had almost broken her heart. The vulnerable mix of grief, regret and anger had touched her and made her want to soothe, but he’d made it clear he wanted nothing from her. No comfort, no emotion, and no questioning of Trask’s ‘proof.’

  Tansy knew what it meant to lose a parent, through distance if not death. She couldn’t imagine the pain of losing both mother and father at once. And then to speak of murder? It was too much.

  It was clearly too much for Dale, who dealt with it like he’d so often dealt with her emotions—by closing down and ending the conversation. And for the first time, Tansy understood that for Dale, sometimes shutting down was easier than feeling.

  The old pipes knocked in the bathroom, and his footsteps paced the hall again. They passed her room without faltering. Another door closed, and she imagined him slipping between the sheets.

  In the field, they’d both slept fully clothed and ready for action at a moment’s notice. When they were working out of their home hospital in Boston, they’d both slept naked, ready for a different sort of action. Which would he pick tonight? He was in the field, it was true.

  But he was also home.

  I was born here, his voice whispered in her mind as she curled up beneath the bedspread, fully clothed.

  Images jostled her mind, from the plane crash nearly forty-eight hours earlier to the sight of a small boy lying in a cheap motel bed, hooked to a respirator. A faceless shadow leered at her through shower steam, and Dale’s remembered touch seared her flesh with a heat that was akin to pain.

  Though her body begged for sleep, ached for it, her mind raced in overdrive, revving along at speeds unimagined even by the plane that had sunk in Lobster Bay.

  “Go. To. Sleep,” she whispered fiercely, but her eyes popped open and she stared out into the darkness. There were no streetlights, but the slim crescent moon provided enough light to pick out the silhouette of a lone photograph. She had noticed it when she’d entered the room and debated slamming the door. In it, a towheaded boy in a navy knit cap stood proudly beside an older, taller version of himself. A small, light-haired beauty had completed the family
picture.

  Though most of the furnishings in the room bore traces of long neglect and a recent dusting, the photograph, or at least the frame, looked brand new.

  Tansy stared at the dark oval, wondering who’d put it there. Mickey? Trask? And why? To welcome Dale home? To remind him? Chastise him?

  She yawned. And why, she thought as she tumbled toward sleep through a dizzying maze of images, did she care so much? They were on the island to solve an outbreak. Nothing more. Dale wasn’t her problem anymore, he’d made that painfully clear, time and time again.

  On that thought, she slid sideways into a warm dream…

  LOBSTERS SCUTTLED BETWEEN her feet. When she cringed and shrank away, one level of her mind reg istered the hot, sweaty sheets tangling her legs. The intimate touch made her think of Dale.

  She stretched sinuously on the bed, inviting him, rejecting him, feeling his hands burn her flesh wherever they touched. Just like it had always been between them.

  “Oh, Dale,” she breathed. “Yes.” And the air backed up in her lungs. She thought she might never breathe again. Then she did.

  And it burned.

  “God!” Tansy jerked awake and sat up, clawing at the smothering darkness that wasn’t dark anymore but rather pulsed red-orange.

  The air above the bed clogged her lungs. She coughed and her heart jackrabbited. Smoke! It seared her lungs and raked at her nose and throat when she tried to scream.

  Only a thin mewling emerged into the foul, thick air, and the small sound was instantly swallowed up by the roar of the beast that surrounded her.

  Fire!

  A CRACKLING NOISE AND THE thump of footsteps woke Dale from a shallow, restless sleep. “What the—” His half-formed question dissolved in a fit of coughing and he lunged for the floor, instincts taking over before his brain caught up.

  Fire! he thought in a quick moment of sleep-dulled panic, then Tansy!

  His dream had been so strong, so real, that he reached for the bed before remembering she wasn’t there. They weren’t together anymore. She was down the hall. In danger.

  “Tansy!” he yelled over the serpent’s hiss of smoke and the lion’s roar of fire beneath. God, the whole place must’ve gone up. Footsteps. He’d heard footsteps. Maybe Tansy was already safe.

  Or maybe she was in even greater danger. Dale would have cursed himself, but he couldn’t waste the breath.

  Something crashed downstairs and the floor beneath him shook. Shuddered. Swayed. For an instant, he flashed back to huddling with Tansy in a crude doorway as aftershocks ripped through a broken village and sent ruined huts tumbling together. Then he was on his feet, ducking low and running for the door. He prayed the floor was still strong enough to hold him.

  It should have been dark in the hallway, but the very air glowed with an eerie orange light. The crackle of flames downstairs brought the image of a ski lodge fireplace gone mad, and the acrid smoke burning his nostrils reminded him of the dead and the dying he’d once helped pull from a torched nightclub.

  “Tansy? Are you in there?” he yelled towards his old bedroom. Something told him she was, told him those hadn’t been her footsteps in the hall. “I’m coming in. Get back from the door,” he shouted, hoping she could hear him. Hoping he wasn’t too late.

  There was no response over the rush of dry, burn ing wood and the voice of the fire. He ducked below the waist-high smoke and gulped a breath before testing the knob to his boyhood room. It was cool in comparison to the foul, blazing air that surrounded him, and he breathed a prayer as he yanked open the door and bolted inside the small room.

  “Tansy? Where are you?” The space was filled with dry, hot smoke. Through watering eyes and the eerie red radiance that bathed the entire house, he saw that the bed was empty, and his heart stuttered.

  Then he saw Tansy. She was lying on the floor in mid-crawl. Out cold.

  He dropped to his hands and knees, trying to find fresh air while he checked her vitals. She was breathing, thank God, and stirred feebly when he shook her. “Come on, babe. We’re out of here.”

  Half carrying, half dragging her, Dale got them both into the hallway, coughing and trying to stay low. The roar was deafening, and the heat drove him back two paces before his slitted eyes registered the sight before him.

  The stairway was an inferno.

  “Is there—” Tansy coughed against his shoulder and hid her face. Tears made sooty tracks down her cheeks, looking like blood in the red firelight. “Is there another way down?”

  “No. Just the stairs.” Heart pounding, fear drumming at his temples, Dale looked down into the yellow-black vortex that had once been the front hall. How long until the stairs collapsed? How long until the whole damn place came down around them? He sucked in a smoky breath and fought the urge to retch. Outside, he could just make out frantic shouts and the blare of the air horn mounted on the island’s only water truck.

  Too little, too late. They’d be better served by hosing down the trees near the house to keep the fire from spreading.

  The tree!

  “Come on!” he yelled. “Over here!” He pulled Tansy across the hallway and into the ancient bathroom, slamming the door behind them.

  The smoke was thinner there, filtering out through the open bathroom window. Dale waved toward the tree. “Out you go! One foot goes on the gutter there, reach your other leg out for that big branch, jump and grab on, okay?”

  The unearthly brightness of the fire surrounded them, making the outside world seem darker and colder than inside the little room. But Tansy, never flinched. She looked up at him, pupils huge in the flickering light. Unable to resist, he leaned down and kissed her, hard.

  The flare of heat could be blamed on the flames surrounding them, but the desperate kick of his heart was Tansy. Only Tansy.

  Shaken, afraid, Dale pulled back and shoved her toward the window. “Go! Get the hell out of here!”

  And then she was gone, into the darkness, leaving him in the flames.

  There was a shattering crash from the front of the house, and the whole structure trembled. Dale could swear the tiles beneath his feet swayed. Or maybe it was the smoke getting to him. With Tansy safely away, it was suddenly harder to breathe. The heat didn’t seem so bad anymore. In fact, he thought it might be nice to sit on the floor for a moment before he attempted the climb down. He was tired. So tired.

  His knees buckled.

  “Don’t you dare, Dale Metcalf,” Tansy yelled through the open window. Damn her, she was still in the tree!

  He struggled to his feet, wheezing. “Tansy, get down from there right now!”

  “Just as soon as you get out here with me,” she countered. Her eyes were wide and scared. Her mouth worked when another crash sounded from the front of the house and a few of the nearest branches burst into flame. “Come on. Just like you told me. One foot on the gutter, the other on the branch. Come on, I’ll catch you.”

  The simple knowledge that she wasn’t leaving without him was enough to propel Dale across the room and out the window.

  Where he discovered the gutter was gone.

  “Just jump and grab!” Tansy screamed. “There’s no time. Jump and grab!”

  Flames detonated through the bathroom door with a sound like a nuclear explosion, and Dale jumped. He caught a midsized branch with one hand, a knot hole with a toe. He teetered for a moment, flailed with his free arm.

  And felt a delicate hand close over his wrist.

  “I’ve got you,” she yelled. “Hang on!”

  Together, they worked their way down the tree that had provided him an escape from the dreary boredom of homework so many nights in the distant past, when he’d gone down to the water, watched the stars and dreamed of being a lobster captain like his father. And his uncle.

  “Are you okay? Damn, your pa’s house burnt down!” A lobsterman in a firefighter’s hat pulled them away from the house just as the tanker truck began spraying seawater across the hellish inferno. “There’s
nobody else inside, is there?”

  “No,” Dale replied between coughs, bracing Tansy as she clung. But he thought, Not unless the bastard who torched the place is still in there.

  “Did you leave the bathroom window open?” Tansy asked, her voice rough and raw.

  He shook his head. “No. And I heard footsteps.” Needing the contact and the reassurance, even though he didn’t deserve it after dragging her to this awful place, Dale hugged Tansy and breathed in the smoke that clung to her hair. He felt her arms creep around his waist and closed his eyes.

  He had to get her out of here. She’d be safe on the mainland.

  “Dale! Tansy! Are you okay?” Hazel arrived at a dead run with a portable first-aid kit slung over her shoulder. Behind her, the island’s entire population gathered in shifting, murmuring knots of people.

  Hazel reached for them, her eyes going to the house, which was engulfed in flames. “God! What happened?”

  At the stark terror in her expression, Dale felt something shift in his chest. He’d been gone for a long time, but some connections seemed to have survived whether he wanted them to or not.

  “We made it out,” he assured her. He rubbed a hand along Tansy’s arm and repeated, “We got out.”

  He glanced back at the house. It hurt to look at it, both because the yellow flames had burned through and were shooting brightly into the sky, and because it just hurt, somewhere deep inside him. The old house had withstood his parents’ deaths and his escape from Lobster Island, but it hadn’t survived his return. Or an arsonist who didn’t want him back.

  But who? And why? Was it because of the outbreak, or because of past history?

  Tansy shivered and he tightened his arms around her, drawing as much comfort as he gave. He could have been killed. She could have been killed. And she was worth two of him.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” he murmured into her hair, wishing he had the guts to take the risk that caring brought. But he didn’t. Instead, he promised, “We’ll get you off the island tomorrow.”