A Face at the Window

by Sarah Graves

  Anthony nodded. "Like it said," he replied, angling his head at a spiral notebook on the dashboard. "I don't get why, but—"

  "Yours is not to reason why," said driver-guy "Just that you got it where the book said to put it, wiped the prints out of it good and got it covered up enough. But not too much," he added cautioningly

  "Yeah. I did all that. That's taken care of," said Anthony.

  They're talking about my car, Helen realized. Putting it somewhere; that must've been what happened during the hour or so she couldn't account for, while she was out cold. Hiding the car, but only partially, because they wanted it to look as if…what?

  They bumped through more ruts and potholes. She'd never been on this road with Jody, although in his attempts to befriend her after he married her mother he'd hauled her down just about every other lousy backwoods track in the whole county.

  Too wrecked, he'd said of this swamp-pocked, mosquito-ridden acreage. In fifty years, Mother Nature might fix it, but now even the ATVers didn't like wilderness areas this rough. Thin stands of popple and tiny pines pocked the tan soil, leaves yellowing with the end of summer and the pines like baby Christmas trees. Old gray cedar posts bore twists of rusted barbed wire, marking pastures long gone.

  No one would be out here. They were taking her here to kill her, and Lee, too, for reasons she would never know, and there would be no one to stop them. No one would know what had happened to them until someday, some hiker or hunter found their bones…

  "Jee-sus!" Driver-guy hit the brakes in a sudden panic stop, hurling Helen forward against the front seat. Beside her, Lee slid limply to the floor, her head down and her neck bent so her chin jutted into her chest and her body's weight kept her pinned there.

  A string of drool dangled from her lips, which began turning blue. Helen screamed, slamming herself against the front seat and jamming her elbow into it, shrieking against the slimy rag in her mouth.

  "Shut her up, will you?" driver-guy demanded, not taking his eyes off the thing in front of the car.

  Helen drove the top of her head against the seat back again, ignoring the driver's implied threat and the agony it cost her. A cut over her eyebrow opened, warm blood trickling from it.

  Looking pained, Anthony twisted around and saw the trouble. Hoisting Lee up by the back straps of the blue corduroy overalls she wore, he deposited her on the seat.

  The blue went out of her face. "Shut up," Anthony told Helen in a calm, unthreatening tone. But from the look in his dark eyes she knew that even if she obeyed, in the long run it wasn't going to make any difference.

  He just didn't want her freaking out again. With her breath still coming in shudders she nodded shakily; he turned away.

  Think, she could hear Jody saying. You get in a tight spot outdoors, you think about it and do something.

  Don't just sit waiting to get rescued, he would tell her.

  Had told her, about everything from an allergic bee-sting reaction to an overturned canoe. Because nature's a bitch. Not like in the cartoons, cute little talking animals you can reason with and they'll behave right.

  Eat or get eaten is nature's motto, Jody had emphasized. Kill or be killed. Remembering, Helen peered out the windshield through a haze of renewed pain. The side of her face where driver-guy had punched her felt as big as a watermelon, and the ache in her jaw was like a hammer that was threatening to burst that melon open.

  They'd stopped in a swamp, black water thick with rotting tree stumps bordering both sides of the road, which had narrowed to the width of a single car. Directly in front of them stood the reason that driver-guy had slammed on the brakes: a moose.

  A big one, with an enormous antler rack. "Holy Christmas," breathed driver-guy.

  It was about six feet high at the shoulder, with big, round, rolling eyes and a massively muscled, rust brown body atop long, improbably slender legs. Up close like this she could see the hide's coarse texture, ratty-looking from bug bites and from rubbing up against trees because the bites itched.

  Those eyes were as big as tennis balls, and from his voice Helen could tell that driver-guy was a little frightened by the animal. Good, she thought at him. I hope you have a heart attack.

  "Too bad we didn't bring a shotgun, huh?" he joked, trying to sound unfazed. "Bag ourselves some moose meat."

  Rifle, she corrected him mentally; a shotgun would destroy too much of the meat and pollute much of the rest with buckshot. Jody would want to shoot it, too, though, if it were in season. Afterward, he would hang it for a few days to age the meat, then dress it out and butcher it into steaks, chops, and burgers.

  All of which she hated, especially the days when the moose carcass dangled practically right outside her own bedroom window, strung up from a tree branch in the yard. Also, moose meat was gamy and tough. Why can't we go to McDonald's? she would complain when it appeared on the table, while her mother tut-tutted and Jody sat there, slowly shaking his head at her.

  This moose stood calmly, white dripping roots of water grass from the swamp dangling out of the side of his mouth as he slowly pulverized them with his huge yellow teeth. Twitching his tail he brushed away some of the insects pestering his rear end.

  The two guys from the city sat silently staring at the moose with their own mouths hanging open, forgetting about Helen and Lee for the moment. It was like the scene from the movie Jurassic Park, she thought, where the people in the cars sat waiting for the dinosaurs to spot them, and bust through their windshields to get at them.

  She wished the moose would do that. But it wasn't going to. In mating season, the males were irritable and would charge you, and later in the year females would defend their calves.

  This one, though, was just munching along placidly. "Honk the damn horn at it," Anthony said impatiently, reaching for the wheel.

  Driver-guy slapped his hand. "What're you, nuts? Just wait. Maybe it'll…"

  As he spoke, the moose ambled unconcernedly away along the edge of the swamp. After twenty yards or so, it stepped off the dirt road into the underbrush and vanished.

  "There, see?" driver-guy snapped, and started the car. "You and your bright ideas," he groused as they moved forward again. "You'll get us killed out here."

  Helen hoped so. Meanwhile, though, hearing them talk about shooting the moose—and knowing that Jody would really have done it—had given her an idea. The driver had a gun, and though Jody had never shown her how to shoot a pistol, she knew how to pull a trigger, all right.

  She definitely could do that. "How much farther?" Anthony wanted to know. Then a partridge rocketed up from the road just in front of them with a loud whir of wings, startling him so he gasped.

  Driver-guy laughed. "Hey, whoa, there, cowboy. It's only a freakin’ bird," he teased Anthony, who reddened in silence.

  The first time she'd fired a rifle, the sound had been like a thunderclap, the weapon's concussive kick against her shoulder surprising her and sitting her down hard. She'd started crying and when Jody tried helping her, she'd swung out at him blindly, hitting him in the face with the back of her hand.

  Later, though, she'd sucked it up defiantly and let him show her. Being able to shoot the rifle, however inexpertly, felt like proving something, that she chose not to be the kind of girl who went hunting and fishing and ate moose meat.

  That she wasn't a weakling, that she could do it if she wanted. She'd learned a lot of things, in fact, just to wipe that "She's only a girl" look off his smug face. Cold-water swimming had come pretty naturally to her, kayaking was flat-out easy, and righting an overturned canoe wasn't so bad once you got past the fear of overturning it in the first place. Besides, and this she'd have never admitted to Jody, once she'd started dating Tim Barnard, being able to shoot a gun seemed only prudent.

  But she still didn't enjoy any of those things. She just did them to shut Jody up. She liked clothes, music, hanging out with her friends, and kids.

  Little kids. Lee's eyes drifted open, her lips moving. Mama, sh
e murmured silently Then her lids fell shut again under the effect of whatever they'd given her, some licorice-smelling stuff whose sharp, medicinal scent still clung faintly to the child's breath.

  You poor little thing, Helen thought. You're having a bad day, too, aren't you? First your doll and then this.…

  "Couple more miles yet," Anthony told the driver.

  The gun was in the driver guy's inside front jacket pocket; she knew from the way he kept patting it every so often without seeming to know he was doing it. Reassuring himself, she guessed, that he had the upper hand.

  But if she got the gun, which she thought maybe she could if she moved fast enough, then the shoe would be on the other foot, wouldn't it?

  Soitanly! Jody would have agreed, imitating Curly from the Three Stooges. He had all their movies and shows on DVD and never tired of them.

  She hated the Stooges. But thinking about Jody going Woo! Woo! in that silly way made things now seem a bit less hopeless. And she needed hope, because from the sound of it she had only a few minutes left to get her hands on that weapon.

  By now the swamp was behind them, the track curving uphill between huge granite boulders, then down again and over an old log bridge running across the still water of a beaver pond. A fat black snake sunning itself atop the lodge flickered its tongue at them.

  If she did it fast, she could get the gun from the guy's pocket before either of them could react. Fire it right into the driver, maybe, pull the trigger as soon as she got her hand on the thing. But first—

  First things first, she could hear Jody saying to her as she regarded her bound wrists.

  First, she had to get out of these ropes.

  This look familiar?" Bob Arnold asked Jacobia, handing over the sodden object.

  Jake nodded dumbly, staring down into the painted, button-eyed face of a Raggedy Ann doll with yarn hair, a stuffed muslin body and head, and a red-checked gingham dress with a white apron tied around the doll's middle.

  Black cloth shoes covered the doll's feet. "It's Lee's," she managed. "Who…who found it?"

  They stood on the weed-strewn beach at the foot of Jefferson Street, with the old sardine cannery building to their right and a granite cliff shouldering out into the water on their left. It was almost high tide, waves lapping up over the stones nearly to where the lush patches of sea lavender and saw grass began.

  "Tourists," Bob said. "Looking for beach glass."

  A cloud bank sat motionless on the horizon, high and solid as if somebody had piled it there with an ice cream scoop. She looked down. There'd been a bonfire here last night, driftwood and charred chunks of old railroad ties beginning to float. Kids at the end of summer, she thought; school started next week.

  The sand-polished pieces of antique bottles in aqua, green, and red littered some of the sandy stretches around Moose Island, along with bits of antique china and clay pipe stems. But not here; the tourists had come to the wrong place. By some trick of the current, only light stuff washed up on this stretch of the shore; buoys, Styrofoam pieces, driftwood. And cloth dolls…

  "I guess even they'd heard about Lee being missing," Bob went on. "So when they spotted this…"

  "Uh-huh," she said, still barely able to speak. Until now she'd been able to keep thinking that maybe against all odds she had it wrong. That Lee and Helen would reappear.

  That it had been a misunderstanding. But no more. "Did Helen Nevelson ever bring Lee down here?" Bob wanted to know. "Trip to the beach, play in the sand…"

  "There's no sand here," Jake pointed out. At high tide, there barely was a beach at all, and when the water was low the space between it and the shoreline was covered with rockweed, the kind you had to pick your way gingerly across to avoid slipping.

  "Anyway, the answer is no," she said. "As far as I know, she never brought Lee here. Or any of the kids she took care of."

  They walked through the waving, sharp-edged grasses growing between scattered heaps of old red brick rubble at the edge of the water. Once, workers summoned by a whistle had come here to start their shift in the cannery building, a long, low wooden structure built out over the water on a massive wharf.

  Cutting the fish and packing them, sealing the cans, sticking the labels on…

  "There is one other possibility," Bob said reluctantly.

  Nowadays what fish processing there was got done in Canada, and the old cannery building was being remodeled for condos. Blue tarps covered the roof, their edges flapping, and pallets of new lumber loomed by the front entrance, covered with more tarps. A Realtor's sign tacked to a post advertised Ocean! Views!

  Jake wondered why, when you lived on an island, you needed an ocean view, or in winter the gale-driven leaks and constant, howling winds that went along with it. People around here paid good money to get away from those things, and for the heavy-duty sheets of plastic that substituted so poorly for vacations in Florida.

  "Anything that goes in the water up by the causeway ends up here," Bob said unhappily.

  She looked up at him. "But that would mean…"

  "Yeah. They got that far, they're not on the island, now."

  She absorbed this in silence. It meant they could be headed anywhere. By now, Lee and Helen could be hundreds of miles away. Or their bodies could be in the water just as the doll had been. It meant that one or both of them could wash up here any minute.

  Like the doll. "Did you ever get hold of George or Ellie?" she asked finally.

  Bob shook his head. "I left a message at the hotel. They're already out on a bus tour of Rome. Turns out you need a special cell phone to get international calls, did you know that?"

  Of course, Jake realized; no wonder trying to call Ellie on her cell hadn't worked. "They meant to rent an international cell phone over there," she put in. "Instead of buying one."

  But maybe they'd forgotten, or the process had turned out to be more complicated than they'd thought.

  "I said to have them call me as soon as they get in," Bob went on, "but the guy I told, his English wasn't so good, and my Italian—"

  Bob speaking Italian was about as likely as one of those beach stones speaking it. He sighed heavily, pushed his thinning hair back off his forehead. "Meanwhile Helen Nevelson's boyfriend says from his hospital bed that he ain't got nothin’ to do with the bitch bein’ missing. Those are his words," the police chief added scathingly.

  "And," he continued, "Jody Pierce hasn't said anything because I still can't find him. Although when he hears Helen's missing he'll turn up, Jerrilyn says. Jail's the least of what he'd go through for his stepdaughter, ‘ccording to his wife."

  They reached Jefferson Street near where it dead-ended at the back gate of the Coast Guard building. He got into his car.

  "The ladies from the churches are busy printing up flyers. They're gonna post ‘em around town, out along Route 1, everywhere they can think of. Jerri got a clearer picture of Helen for them to use, and I went in George and Ellie's house and found ‘em a better one of Lee. Studio portrait, she's all face in it so you can really recognize…"

  His voice trailed off while they both remembered the day the studio portrait was taken, Lee in a frilly dress she'd had to be coaxed and finally bribed into wearing. Then, "As for you…"

  "I know. Stay out of it. It's okay to think of it, though, right?" she added, unable to keep the anger from her voice. "Sit around and torture myself about it, that's allowed?"

  Thinking Jesus. Her doll was in the water.

  The cold water. His face tightened, then relented. "Yeah, Jake. It's allowed. Required, I guess. Except the sitting around part, I don't think that's a very good idea. Which reminds me, Clarissa wondered if maybe you could do her a favor."

  Jake never spoke that way to Bob. He was just trying to help, the way he always did. "Sorry. I just lost my…"

  Temper. Composure. Mind. Choose one, or take all three. He waved her outburst away before she could even finish apologizing for it.

  "Forget it. I hear wo
rse'n that most days before breakfast." Bob looked out at the water and the long, low reach of Campobello Island beyond. "Sam get that dory hauled okay?"

  The question was both an olive branch and a genuine inquiry; he was fond of her troubled son and well versed in the ups and downs of the young man's life, many of which he had witnessed.

  Or been involved in, when the downs were really bad. "Yes," she said. "After the lessons he gave me, he thought I might use it when he's away. But I told him I need more practice before I take it out alone, so it's out at the boatyard under a tarp."

  Bob smiled indulgently. "Still kind of a landlubber, aren't you?"

  That was putting it mildly. "Yeah. I don't know where he got his seagoing tendencies from, but it wasn't me. And anyway, he's got lots of boats to think about in Portland. No sense him having to worry about the one here at home."

  "I guess," Bob allowed. "Good move, him going down there," he added. "Plenty of work year-round in Portland for a fellow who knows boats. And even here, I never saw a kid take to the water like he does."

  Bob paused. Then: "Going to meetings, is he?" he inquired mildly.

  AA meetings, Bob meant. "Says he is. I mean, yes. At least once a day, sometimes more. But you know how that is."

  That going today didn't mean he'd go tomorrow, she meant. Sam fell in love with being sober all over again each time he got that way. Sometimes she wondered if the falling in love part of it wasn't what he liked most.

  "Yeah. He's going to meetings until he isn't," Bob said. Not disapprovingly, just realistically. "But you never know, Jake. It could be different this time.…"

  She said nothing as he let the sentence trail off. Sam was at heart a good kid, and he was sober now, this minute.

  She hoped. "So, this Campbell fella," Bob changed the subject again. "You still really believe he's—"

  "I do," she cut in gratefully. "He does, and—"

  "Not from around here, though," Bob interrupted. They'd been through all this already. But he wanted to be sure. "No local connections, no relatives in the area, nothing he's ever done or been in on around here, that you know of," Bob said.