Mrs. Liffey’s shaking had settled. Her eyes drooped, not open but not closed, either. The rims of her inflamed sclera glistened like veined crescent moons. Her mouth was still in constant motion, but Nate could no longer make out the words.
It was difficult for Nate to gather strength from the awkward angles of his arms. If only his hands had been in front of him instead of behind. If they’d been square against the small of his back and not looped around a wide support post.
But Nate had always been able to find strength when he needed it. He thought of Grams in her hospital bed. He thought of Lucy. He imagined her eyes bulging in her final moments, her cheeks purpling under the weight of Owen. Nate dug for anger, but all he found was anguish.
Maybe today was the day the lake finally claimed what had slipped from its grasp so many years ago.
Next to him, Pete was sniffling. Tears cut shining streaks down his face. The boy wasn’t looking at Nate anymore. He wasn’t looking at anything. Pete would die, too. So would the children in the Night Ship. When Nate thought of them gathered there, James and Tara and all the others, he tried not to think about what they’d done, but who they were. Kids with families and futures. Kids like Livvy. Kids just like he and Lucy and Tom and Johnny had been.
He leaned forward to press his left thumb against the curve of the post. As if in the clutches of a medieval torture device, he increased the pressure as he leaned forward millimeter by millimeter.
“Tell me what you planned to do to Owen after you broke in through the window upstairs,” Nate said. He visualized the first carpometacarpal joint. He shifted to tweak the angles, clenched his teeth, and forced himself forward.
“Huh? Oh. We were going to mess with his water filter. Add a heap of red dye concentrate to it so all the taps would run red like blood.”
The pain at the base of Nate’s thumb grew from an ache to a warning to an alarm. He felt things stretch in ways that they weren’t meant to stretch.
“But then we saw…her,” Pete said. “And he caught us. Then I think Maura made it upstairs, but he—he must have—”
Nate heaved all of his weight forward in a sudden lurch. He wasn’t sure at first if the crunch that resulted was audible or the kind of sound that only resonated within the body it originated from, but as his peripheral vision went black, Pete stopped talking.
The pain was incandescent. Nate sweated limply against the floor and marveled at how many shades of agony there were. Easily as many as there were of anger and sadness. But what about happiness? he inquired of the plastic drop cloth. Eating out of containers with Grams at her little kitchen table. He, Tom, and Johnny casting from the dock on a summer morning. Meg’s smile when he woke to find her looking at him. Livvy’s tiny finger when she pointed at something she’d never seen before. For him happiness arrived in one flavor, but that never made it less sweet.
“Um, Mr. McHale? Are you, like, okay?”
“Call me Nate.” His fingers quivered as he compressed them against his dislocated thumb. It was still a struggle as he slid his mangled hand out of the cuff. In his troubled years he’d dislocated this thumb twice before. He thought that maybe its history of trauma had made it easier to dislodge now. He thought that maybe the suffering you’ve already survived is sometimes the only thing that can keep you alive.
Nate was dimly aware of Pete swearing in awe as he got to his feet and cradled one hand in the other. It took a moment for him to find his balance. A wave of nausea hit him as he surveyed his askew digit. He attempted a clinical distance as he snapped it back into place. This time the adrenaline coursing through his system dulled the edge. If nothing else, the pain wiped aside most of the lingering effects of the chloroform.
“I’ll look for something to cut you out.”
“Don’t leave me here!”
“I won’t.”
The walls of the mirrored alcove were angled like a department store fitting room. A post like the one Nate had been bound to was near its center. Chained to it in her wheelchair, Mrs. Liffey would have no option but to see from a dozen angles what had been done to her. A second alcove, next to the first, had a small kitchen with a refrigerator and sink. The corner across from the fridge was tiled and had a showerhead. If it was possible, it smelled worse here than it did anywhere else in the fetid basement. This must be where Owen sometimes hosed his mother down. A bin piled high with solid blankets was nearby.
Nate found a knife in a drawer. The blade was one step up from a letter opener, but he was able to use it to cut Pete’s ties. The boy gasped as he clutched his arms to his chest and began rubbing the blood back into his hands. To get to his feet, he had to grapple his way up the post to which he’d been bound.
“I’m going to piss myself. I’ve had to go for, like, a day.”
“There’s a sink in the back.”
“Do you think it’s okay?”
“I won’t tell.”
As Pete staggered away, Nate bent to whisper into Mrs. Liffey’s ear. “We’re going to get you out of here.” The woman seemed half asleep, but at least one word was still on her lips.
“No, no, no—”
Nate went up the steps to test the door to the main floor. It felt more substantial than the average interior door, and the locks and chains further reinforced it. Nate could hear them jangle as he battered his shoulder against it. Each jolt sent voltages of pain up his arm from his damaged thumb. It was back in its socket, but he must have torn something along the way.
Even if the steps hadn’t offered such a poor vantage, Nate didn’t think he’d be able to knock down the door.
He heard the rustle of Pete padding across the plastic-draped floor.
“Better?”
Pete’s mouth twitched into the bud of a smile. It sat there for only a moment, but long enough for Nate to glimpse the boy underneath the terror. “What’s the deal with the door?”
“It’s solid, and there are a ton of locks on the other side.”
An ax or sledge might get them through the door, but Nate doubted they’d find such tools down here. The basement was huge, but except for the kitchen with the shower, it was mostly empty.
“See if he left your phone—or Maura’s—down here somewhere. Keep an eye out for anything we can use on that door. Weapons, too,” Nate said. The dull knife he’d used to free Pete wouldn’t be any use against Owen, but with the right weapon they might have a chance.
Pete looked at him in alarm. Nate didn’t like the idea of having to fight Owen, either. The big guy had lost weight since their high school days, but he still had dozens of pounds on Nate, and it was all muscle.
They circled the basement in opposite directions. Far from the mirrored alcove and overhead lights, some nooks were almost entirely hidden by shadow. Under his palms, the soundproofing material fixed to the walls and most of the ceiling felt almost organic. He groped and probed and hoped, but didn’t find anything useful.
“I’m sorry about the other night, you know?” Pete said when they both returned to the center of the room. “We were going to tag your grandma’s house. I mean, nothing really bad, I guess, but we shouldn’t have. So…” Pete trailed off and stared at his feet.
Nate waved away Pete’s apology. It was hard to imagine he’d spent a moment worrying about graffiti or broken windows.
“There’s nothing good down here,” Pete said. “Nothing to even fight him with. I mean, there are a couple forks and things in the kitchen. But—”
“There’re a lot of unhealthy-looking foods in the cabinets, and probably more in the fridge. See if you can skim off some fat and spread it on the drop cloth at the base of the stairs. Cream from those snack cakes could work, too,” Nate said. “Maybe he’ll lose his footing when he comes down and we can jump him from the sides.”
Pete appeared to like this idea and hopped into action. At least it gave the kid something to do. Nate supposed that Owen might indeed slip on something greasy, but this wasn’t the clumsy oaf Nate reca
lled from high school. Perhaps Owen had never really been like that in the first place. Nate remembered him only through the eyes of a raging, narcissistic teenager, and that boy had already been proved wrong about so much. He’d thought he could do as he pleased and not reap the slightest consequence.
While Pete tore through the kitchen, Nate returned to the mirrored alcove and kicked at the gleaming walls. He earned decades of bad luck before he knocked loose a long, glittering shard that he liked the look of. It might not do much to slow someone the size of Owen, but if Nate aimed for an artery or key tendon…It wasn’t ideal, but it was something.
Nate took off his suit coat, bundled it around the base of the makeshift weapon, and rolled up his left sleeve. He traced the letters from the crook of his elbow to halfway up his forearm. Then he dug in with the tip of the shard. It was a clumsy blade for such work and Nate sliced as shallowly as he could, just into the dermis so that the lines and curves of the letters slowly filled with blood. The pain was noticeable but only a ghost of the torture reverberant from his torqued thumb.
When he was finished, he watched his final words weep crimson across the newborn skin on the underside of his forearm.
O’S BSMNT
A message written in flesh was one that could not be ignored. Owen might kill him and all the others, but he wouldn’t get away with it. The lake returns what it takes, and if it drowned Nate, it would also deliver this last message for him.
Nate considered leaving more notes across the canvas of his body. He could tell Tom and the chief that Owen had killed Lucy, and Mr. Liffey and Mr. Vanhouten, too. He could apologize to Tom and Johnny for every way in which he’d poisoned their lives. He could pare missives of love to Meg and Livvy and Grams onto skin that might not have the time to scab, much less heal.
The burn of the cuts caught up to Nate, and he rolled his head upward with a grimace. When he did, he noticed that an edge of foam soundproofing material had come loose from where it met the ceiling. One corner of it dangled like an earmarked page. He walked to it and ripped it aside. He tore loose a panel six feet long and three feet high. When the last foot of the section fell away it revealed part of a window. A curtain of rain rippled down its glass.
The window was small: not more than a foot high. Nate’s rib cage wouldn’t fit through, but Pete was all height and no width. They’d break the window, clear aside all the glass, Nate would boost Pete up and through, then Pete would get help.
He should have been happy, but instead Nate cursed himself. He’d never in his life been in a basement without any windows. Even Just June’s shack had them. Looking for them should have been the first thing he’d done. People depended on him, and he couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes.
Nate set aside the shard, and wrapped his hand in his coat. He hammered his fist into the glass. If the children at the Night Ship were still alive, they had little time left.
Twenty-three
Night had taken the town along the shore.
The only light was the electricity that flickered among the ranges of Medea’s clouds and a few generator-powered homes that struck out from the black like ships at sea. The storm’s percussions of thunder and rain were so loud that Nate couldn’t hear his own steps as he waded through the flooded streets running for Tom’s house. They had to go to the Night Ship. They had to finally face the debts of their youth.
After clearing the narrow basement window of glass and lifting Pete through it and into the muck of a brimming flower bed, Nate had spent long minutes waiting for the boy to reenter the house and unlock the basement door. He and Pete hadn’t known each other long, and their history before the basement was not encouraging. The teen might decide to leave Nate to Owen, and maybe Nate would deserve it.
“He’ll come back,” Nate told Mrs. Liffey as much as he told himself. “Then we’ll all get out of here.” Whatever future waited for Mrs. Liffey beyond this stinking basement would be an improvement, though how much of one, Nate didn’t know.
Though he’d been waiting for it, Nate was startled when noise came from the door to the kitchen. He crept to the side of the stairs, as the locks were disengaged, releasing a held breath only when he heard Pete call to him. He was lucky Owen had secured the basement only to keep people in and not keep them out.
“What about her?” Pete asked, pointing down the stairs.
“We won’t be able to get her up the stairs on our own,” Nate said. He turned back toward the wheelchair-bound woman. “We’re getting some help, Mrs. Liffey. Don’t worry. We’ll get you somewhere safe.”
She was fully awake again, and shaking so hard that at first Nate thought she might be having a seizure.
“He will kill you, he will kill us, he will kill everyone—”
“We’ll be back,” Nate promised. He climbed the last of the stairs and stepped back up into the kitchen.
“Start knocking on doors,” he told Pete. There was no reason to whisper, but he did anyway. His limbs still carried extra weight from the chloroform, but this lightened with each breath of fresh air. “Get someone to call the police. Tell them about Owen and about the kids on the Night Ship. If the landlines and cells are down, have them drive you to the station.”
“What if they don’t believe me?” Pete asked as they reached the foyer.
Nate looked at the boy. Eyes bloodshot from crying, skin matted with pallor, his clothes and hair filthy with mud and soaked with rain. Words were only one kind of language, and Pete exuded a fluent dialect of pure distress. It was easy to forget that the Lake was mostly just a normal town filled with normal people. If this boy appeared at their door, none of them would doubt the story he told.
They didn’t have time to waste, but Nate found himself cupping the boy’s chin in his hand as if Pete were his own son. “I’m sorry about what we did to your dad.” A lifetime ago, Nate and his friends had felled a tree against the Corsos’ house. A DUI and job termination and divorce had followed. It was impossible to say how closely these events were connected. Life grows one bad thing upon another. But in a universe where small things could destroy whole worlds, Nate and his friends had made people’s lives worse and not better. “I didn’t know anything back then. If I could take it back, I would. I’d take it all back.” He wasn’t thinking only of the Corsos or the Jeffers, but of Lucy and Tom and Johnny and even Owen. They’d thought Nate was their friend, and he’d brought them nothing but pain.
Pete pulled Nate’s hand away. “Just save them, okay?” He wasn’t whispering anymore. “Save my friends.”
Rivers of torn leaves lit by the flaring sky guided Nate’s descent to the shore. He abandoned the streets as soon as he could, cutting through lawns and climbing fences to speed his way. His left hand felt like it was the size of a catcher’s mitt. It throbbed with his pulse and screamed with each clench of his loose thumb.
Tom answered the door already dressed in his outdoor gear. His friend’s ramshackle house was in between Owen’s place and the Night Ship. Nate hadn’t been sure if Tom would be home, but he was so glad that he was.
“The hell happened to you?” Tom asked. He didn’t look so great himself.
“We have to go to the Night Ship.” Nate was out of breath and shaking from cold. How far and how long had he run through the storm? How much farther must he go? Would he ever reach home? “Owen, he’s been—he’s the one who—” How to even begin.
“I’ve been on Wharf duty since you left. I came back for a dry uniform, but dispatch just called. They’re sending me to Owen’s. Pete Corso turned up and he’s been saying some crazy—”
“It’s all true. But you can’t go to the Liffeys’. We have to go to the Night Ship.”
“The—but why?”
“He’s going to kill the kids. He’s going to trap them in the Night Ship and then burn it all down.”
“You gotta get out of the rain. You’re shaking. Come on.” He beckoned Nate into the house. “I’ll get you some dry clothes and—holy Chr
ist, what happened to your hand?”
“Please, Tommy. Please. He killed Lucy. He killed her while he raped her and hid her body in the headlands.”
This seemed to get through to Tom. He threw his hood over his head and pushed past Nate, through the front door, and into the storm. Nate followed him to the treeless backyard where a sliver of the old pier could be spied through the dark silhouettes of neighboring homes and countless veils of rain.
An unmistakable orange glow wavered by the landward windows of the promenade.
They were already too late.
Twenty-four
The ragged shape of another downed oak blazed in the headlights.
Next to Nate, Tom swore as he stomped on the brakes. The tree was so massive that not even driving across adjacent lawns would have let them clear it. All routes to the Strand were blocked.
With the promenade already in flames, the only way to the Night Ship was through the old pier’s boat launch, and they’d need one of Johnny’s boats to get there. The Vanhouten mansion was no more than two blocks away, but every moment mattered.
They abandoned the car and scaled the tree’s slick bark. Medea fought them through every step.
Tom had called the station from the cruiser as they tried to find a clear path to the shore. Another unit was already on its way to the Liffeys’ house, and Tom alerted them to the blaze at the Night Ship. The dispatcher would summon the fire boat docked at the Wharf, but with the streets in the state they were in, there was no way to know when the Lake’s volunteers would be able to scramble a crew.
Two fences and five lawns later, they reached the Strand within sight of the chimney pot arrays of the Vanhouten mansion.
They cut through the hedges and onto the slate walkway that flanked the veranda. Johnny would still be at the hospital, and the place looked as lifeless as the rest of the town.
Either Johnny or his father had commissioned the construction of a floating boat shed along one end of their dock. Two motored watercraft were moored there with an assembly of kayaks mounted at the shed’s far end. The boats shuddered among their bumpers in the lake’s onslaught. The structure’s roof shielded them from the rain, but the waves surged over and between the planks at their feet.
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