by Sarah Graves
The water tower at Pleasant Point loomed dead ahead. After that came Carryingplace Cove, Walker's Landing, and the summer-cottage-sprinkled green mound of Kendall's Head.
Just beyond them lay Gleason's Cove and above it Dog Island with its high, grassy bluffs, clusters of birch, mountain ash and raspberry cane, and a miniature red-and-white lighthouse perched at the edge of them among the masses of beach roses.
As the pale yellow dry grass of the highlands came in sight, she had a moment of hope; from them, it would be an easy walk to town, to people and help. But between her and any such refuge still boiled the Old Sow, turning and churning with chaotically tossing whitecaps. Anthony bent forward and pulled on the oars again, the skiff juddering as its prow struck the higher wave tops.
"Anthony," Marky began hectoring again. His nagging sounded panicked, though she could tell he was still trying to hide his fright.
"I'll get us out when we need to get out," Anthony panted in reply, leaning into his work.
And then she saw it: Jody Pierce's gun, the Glock he'd shown her. Its dull black grip peeked from the back of Anthony's waistband when his shirt hiked up; he must've taken it from Pierce's body back in the driveway of the house on Jiminy Point, she thought. Now the weapon was so close, she could almost reach out and—
Marky looked up. She yanked her hand back. "So you're some kind of freakin’ navigator, now?" he inquired evilly of Anthony.
He had straightened from fiddling with the uncooperative outboard and was in an even more foul mood than before; he hadn't noticed the empty spark plug socket.
"We get down there," he went on, "this damn current, it's gonna carry us under the damn bridge, right out into the freakin’ ocean."
And for once he was at least half right. If they didn't run aground by the concrete bridge pilings and get pounded to death by the waves there, or smash to smithereens on the rocks around them, they would end up adrift in the Gulf of Maine.
Which would not be a good outcome. "Hey. Switch places with me," Marky told her suddenly, giving up on the outboard at last.
Half a mile distant, the Deer Island ferry set out on its first run of the day, three cars and a handful of tourists with bicycles and backpacks on board. Pairs of porpoises played in the ferry's wake, their slick green backs reflecting the rising sun. But the ferry was too far off to be of help; at this distance, no one on it would even notice the skiff.
"These gas fumes are makin’ me sick." Marky had his own gun out and was waving it sharply at her. "Anthony, get those damn oars in. Now. I mean it."
He half stood, staggered unsteadily, then began making his way forward past Anthony to change places with her, heedless of the way the boat pitched dangerously under his uncentered weight. "Keep it steady, you punk," he spat as he went by.
"Jesus, Marky," Anthony protested, hastily hauling the oars in to get them out of his partner's way. But that made the little boat even less manageable; it heeled over, green water shipping the rail in a thick, sloshing surge.
Jake snatched the other life jacket from under the seat as Marky lost his balance. Pitching forward, he saved himself from toppling into the waves only by gripping the rail with one hand and Anthony's hurt shoulder with the other.
Marky's gun clattered down. Now, she thought, aiming her foot at it. But quick as a lizard his arm came up hard to smack her leg away, then swooped down to grab the weapon back.
Anthony's face went still, his hands on the shipped oars as a stray current turned the boat in a half-circle, then swung it back. Marky might do anything, Anthony's look said. But Marky was more interested in being seated again than in punishing her for the weapon-grabbing attempt.
"Funny," he said humorlessly, settling on the sailing thwart she'd vacated while she made her unsteady way to the transom. "You a comedian?"
"No," she replied flatly. Stay in the center, no fast moves, go where you're going and sit, said Sam from inside her head.
By following these instructions while holding her breath and praying hard to whatever gods took care of blithering idiots, she reached the transom seat by the outboard engine successfully and sat on it. But now that they'd switched places, Marky would spot Jody Pierce's Glock in Anthony's waistband as soon as Anthony began rowing again.
"Hey." Marky leaned forward, poked Anthony in the shoulder. "Hey, you moron, I said get us out of this freakin’ current. You hear me? And hurry up, we're goin’ in soon. Right over there."
She followed his gesture out to the rocky tip of Dog Island, where a narrow, sandy inlet lay at the foot of a set of granite cliffs, dark gray and fissured by eons of heaving and weathering. The Knife Edge, it was called by kids who went trespassing there, close to town but out of sight of any houses, to party and dare each other to venture onto the promontory soaring into thin air.
Sam had done it once, reporting unfazed afterward that at its narrowest, the Knife Edge was about two feet across, and very unstable. And when she got done reading the riot act to him about that, he'd told her further that the view from the Knife Edge was amazing, all water and sky. Like you could float right up into it, he'd said, highly pleased with himself and, as ever, utterly fearless.
And of course Campbell would pick a dramatic spot.… Because maybe it was about money for the two yo-yos in the boat with her, she thought, but for Campbell this was about him. His loss, his pain…even the ruby earring he still wore like some twisted red badge of devotion.
The question was, what else was it about, she wondered as the shore—and whatever Campbell planned to have happen there—drew nearer. "Anthony," she ventured softly. "Where's Helen? The other girl you guys took, where is she?"
If she didn't find out soon, she might never know. And she owed it to Jody Pierce to try to find out. Not that it was likely she'd be able to do much about it, but…
Anthony looked up. She'd been wrong about him, she realized; seen close up, it was clear he wasn't in very good shape at all. His eyes had the dull, beaten glaze of a wounded animal, his face slack and a cut on his left cheek gaping raggedly. "Why should I tell you?" he asked.
Not "What girl?" or even simply "I don't know," either of which answers would have been much better, more self-protective for him. So either he was just too hurt and tired to be able to think straight or he didn't care anymore.
And neither of those things boded well for her and Lee, she thought with an inward shiver. But his next remark surprised her so much, she nearly fell out of the boat herself.
"Guy's nuts about you."
"Who, Marky?"
"Nah. Other guy. One we're going to see."
Behind Anthony, Marky leaned over the rail and lost whatever he'd eaten recently. So she wasn't the only one prey to what Sam called the green monster; good, it would keep Marky busy, while Sam's antiseasickness tip had cleared her own nausea completely.
Like old-house repair, she thought with the little part of her mind that wasn't scared absolutely witless. Just learn the tricks and tips of the trade, and use them.…
"What're you talking about?" she demanded. "How could you possibly know that about him?"
Anthony glanced over his shoulder to check on his progress; they were near enough to shore now that the red blobs of the rose hips showed against the deep green foliage tumbling down the edge of the cliffs.
"Carries your picture," Anthony said, looking back at the approaching beach, too.
Now she could see the steel cable that ran from the shore to the survey marker, a squat concrete pyramid sunk in a concrete foundation blasted into an offshore boulder. If she could reach it, she could use it to…
Carefully, Jake eased her arms into the straps of the second life jacket. "But… I don't understand. You've met him? He showed you some picture of me that he had?"
Still following Anthony's gaze toward land, she recalled the photograph these two were supposed to have shown Tom Godley, in Wadsworth's Hardware Store. But seeing the cliffs massed against the shore triggered another memory, too: tha
t near the beach was a set of caves.
Each opened from the rear of the previous one, their ancient depths hollowed out by hammering water over millions of years. From out here you couldn't see them, or from the top of the cliffs, either. But they were there. And they might make a good hiding place, should that turn out to be necessary…
Or possible. "Nope. Got a look at him a few times is all," said Anthony. "In that bar of his. And I saw the picture Marky got from him."
Hastily she buckled the final life jacket strap just as Marky peered around suspiciously. He looked almost as ghastly as his partner, but he was getting his wind back, his face less greenish and his eyes hard and unwavering.
Anthony frowned again at the rapidly approaching shoreline, then turned to face her once more. "Your hair was different in it. Longer, and you were wearing earrings. The guy's got one just like ‘em. Wears it, too."
Buoyed by the promise of dry land, his voice strengthened. "Carries the picture in his wallet, the guy does. Marky said so."
With her mind racing, she turned sideways enough to get the outboard's tiller arm into her peripheral vision. Below it, on the floor nearly under her seat, lay a green plastic tackle box.
"Part of the earring," Anthony corrected himself. The second wind he'd gotten was making him chatty. "The round part, not the dangly part like you had on in the picture."
But by now she was barely listening to him, because in that tackle box were the cotter pins for the outboard's propeller, she was almost certain. That was where they kept extras in case one broke, not back in the house.
It was the way Sam did it in his boat, too. Plus—please-maybe an extra spark plug. Given the way they'd left gas in the tank to get all sludgy, she figured there was only about a fifty-fifty chance this boat's owners had done something so sensible as put a spare plug in the box. But…
She forced her mind back to what Anthony was saying; by now he was looking oddly at her, and she didn't want him to see any further hint of a plan in her face.
Crazy and unlikely to work, but the only plan she had. She would just have to worry about Helen later. "I don't get this," she began. "I've never worn the earrings you're describing."
Because her mother's ruby earrings were clearly what Anthony was talking about, but that didn't make sense. Her dad wore one, and the other-Campbell had it. A gift of love, he'd always insisted, claiming Jake's mother had given the earring to him long before her murder; it was how he explained how it came to him.
And then it hit Jake, whose photo Campbell must be carrying: not hers, but her mother's. The thought made her shudder, but just then the wind shifted, slamming them broadside; the skiff heeled over hard again and threatened to swamp as Marky cursed loudly, then leaned helplessly over the rail in renewed wretchedness.
Good, she thought, but now was no time for entertainment. "Pull hard on the left oar, get the bow into the wind," she told Anthony, who obeyed without question; the skiff settled. Now if she could only get the engine started, get the tackle box open and find a spark plug in it—
"Hey." Marky's voice was flat, his eyes blackly glittering as he pushed himself up from the rail, his face smooth with the realization of Anthony's betrayal.
He'd spotted the Glock. And whatever else the awareness of his partner's hidden weapon had done, it had definitely cured his seasickness. "Don't you move a freakin’ inch, you little punk." He plucked the gun from Anthony's waistband.
Not much time…"Sorry, kiddo," she whispered to Lee as she slid the child's unresisting body onto the boat bottom, fumbled the box open—no lock, thank heavens, just a plastic latch— and found—
A white, cylindrical spark plug. "You punk," Marky repeated. Gripping the Glock in one hand and his own gun in the other, he had no eyes for anyone but Anthony.
Hurry…Desperately she sank the spark plug into its socket and turned it down tight, found the ignition wire and attached it, and seized the pull-rope's spray-slick grip-Seeming suddenly to understand how big a disaster had just befallen him, Anthony dropped the oars with a clatter, turned in a smooth, catlike maneuver that surprised her with its ease and grace, and leapt at Marky in a fluid pouncing motion.
She pulled the starter cord. The engine coughed once, died with a metallic clatter just as Marky stuck his weapon like some short-bladed cutting tool deep into Anthony's ribs and fired. But with an already uncertain footing, the recoil was enough to knock Marky off-balance, and then the boat lurched really hard.
Start, damn you. Jake cursed silently at the outboard as, seemingly in slow motion, Marky began falling, put his hand out to catch himself, and missed. He fired once more on the way down, his second shot going wild as his head hit the skiff's rail with a sound like a melon splitting, the gun flying from his right hand in a shining, end-over-end arc out into the waves.
Just then the outboard caught and died again, as Marky's left hand came up still holding the weapon he'd had all along, the .38.
"Punk," he said thickly again as she braced her left hand on the outboard's chassis and with her right gave the mightiest pull of her life.
"Freakin’ punk." He seemed half stunned, his eyes slightly unfocused and his speech thickened. But his hand still worked and his finger tightened suddenly as Anthony grabbed for the .38.
Again… The engine caught, howling; Jake fell on the throt-tle arm, twisted the sleeve, shoved the tiller as hard as she could to the right. In response the wooden craft veered obediently toward Old Sow, whose wide, green whorls with the tide running hard now took on a knifelike edge.
You want a boat ride? she thought grimly at the men still struggling over the weapon. I'll give you a boat ride. And then, irrele-vantly, I wonder what Sam would say if he could see me?
Seizing the .38, Anthony fell on his partner and punched him, just as the skiff hit the first of the Old Sow's innocent-appearing ripples. While she'd been working on starting the engine and the men had been busy fighting, they'd drifted away from shore again. Gripping the tiller, she swung away from the seductive swirl of the sinkhole at the monster's vortex; the skiff's bow whipsawed wildly.
"Anthony, do this," the taller man recited as he hit Marky again. "Anthony, do that"
Without warning another slowly rotating depression opened up in the water, a good two feet deep with a blackish-green spot at the center of it, the color of a bruise. The bow dropped before she could steer away from it; the stern rose up abruptly and the prop screamed, lifting out of the water still spinning.
Lee's blanket-wrapped body slid forward on the wet boat bottom, stopping only when Jake slammed her heel down onto the corner of the fabric. At the hard thump near her head, Lee's eyes drifted open; groggily, she looked around.
"Mama," she whimpered, trying to escape the blanket.
"Oh, baby, don't do that," Jake begged. She couldn't let go of the tiller or the whirlpool would swallow them; she'd gotten them in too far and now the water surged and pummeled them with a force that was purely geological, uncaring and blind. If she stopped steering for an instant or the engine failed, it would suck them down into its netherworld. Forever and ever…
Anthony hit Marky again. He'd been doing so for some time now, Jake realized belatedly. His fist made a wet, pulpy-sounding smack on what had been Marky's mouth. "Punk? I'm a punk?"
Marky made an answering sound. It was by no stretch of the imagination a word, or anything like one. Nor did there seem to be any meaning behind it. It was just one of the sounds a human body could make when it had not yet finished dying.
Not quite. A sudden upsurge hit the skiff amidships, heeling it over with a vicious lurch and popping the bow up out of the sucking hole in the water. Jake dropped the tiller and snatched Lee's sleeve just as the child was about to go over the nearly horizontal rail. And then…
Then the real thing was upon them. Eerily silent, dead ahead and devoid of mercy, the Old Sow turned majestically, its surface mirror-bright. A bit of flotsam bobbled toward it like a leaf in a storm drain, popped un
der like something being yanked hard from below, and vanished with a small wet thup!
Anthony slammed his bloodied fist a final time into Marky's limp form and straightened, just as Lee escaped Jake's grasping hand and began crawling determinedly toward him under the rowing thwart.
Anthony turned, steadying himself on the heaving rail with the .38 still in his other hand and his face deathly pale, as if in the aftermath of some terrible seizure. His glance fell on Lee, and on the life jacket still wrapped tightly around her.
"No!" Jake cried, and dropped the throttle to idle for the barest instant before cranking it again hard, shooting the skiff forward and knocking Anthony sprawling.
The gun flew; she leaned down and snatched it before it hit the puddle of water pooling freshly in the boat's bottom—Where had that come from? she wondered for an instant—then grabbed up the tackle box, popped the weapon inside, and snapped the box shut.
"Give it to me." Anthony pulled himself halfway up onto the rowing thwart. Behind him in the bow lay Marky, unconscious.
Or dead. Jake kicked the tackle box behind her under the seat. "No, Anthony. I'm not giving it to you. It's over, don't you see? If we don't want to drown, we've got to try to—"
She waved at the devouring monster ahead. Even despite the remarkably helpful little two-and-a-half-horse Evinrude, the wooden skiff had begun turning, sucked inexorably toward that green mouth.
"Anthony," she began again, but then the obvious dawned on her: Water. In the boat. She looked down; the puddle was already an inch deep, and at the center of it a fountain bubbled merrily.
Marky's second shot had gone wild, all right.
Just not quite wild enough. He'd blown a hole in the bottom of the boat.
And now they were sinking.
For a moment everything was quiet. Calm before storm, Jake thought as the whirlpool crept steadily nearer like a predator sneaking confidently up on its prey.
She met Anthony's gaze. "Unless you want to die," she told him, "sit down and shut up."