by Sue Henry
Tank didn’t usually bark when they were together, but she warned him anyway with a tap on the nose.
“Quiet, boy. No barking.”
Together, they slipped out, and she used the key to lock the door. No sense in providing an opportunity for…whoever…to hide or use the beach house for an ambush.
Cradling the shotgun across one arm, she stepped around the corner of the house. Wind-driven water instantly hit her in the face and began to soak her hair. With her free hand, she pulled up the hood on the slicker, found it impossible to hear over the roar of rain hitting it, and shoved it off again. So she would be wet—she could get dry later.
It was dark, but not quite as dark as it had been inside. She could differentiate shapes, which was all she needed; she was familiar with the route she would take. Like a shadow, she moved almost silently around the back of the house and across the plank that was laid as a bridge over the small stream of fresh water, Tank behind her. As she gained the opposite bank and started up the steeper part of the path, she heard the sound of the piano again—a few notes of a tune she did not recognize this time—before the wind, whistling in the spruce, whipped it away. Pausing to wipe her face and take a deep, even breath, she felt her hands tremble.
The shed was perhaps a hundred yards away. Looking up between the trees, she could barely distinguish its dark rectangle. The wall facing her was windowless, but as she moved up the hill, she could detect a glimmer of light shining from one of the shed’s front windows onto a nearby tree trunk. The tinkling of piano keys came again, louder as she approached, then faded away. The crash and thunder of the waves on the shingle of beach was louder, too, as she neared the top of the rise and drew close to a twenty-or thirty-foot dropoff that fell straight down to sand and driftwood invisible below. Though the sounds of the storm disguised any small noises she made, they were also a hindrance to her own ability to hear.
Cautiously, carefully, she crept up and around the corner of the shed, and now, mixed with the thunderous music of the storm, she could plainly hear what was being played. Another tap on Tank’s muzzle to remind him to be still, and she moved forward, toward the glow of what had to be a lamp that shone from the nearest of the two windows on either side of the closed door. Abandoning popular tunes, the pianist had shifted to classical, for Jessie recognized Debussy’s La Mer—how appropriate—and how odd. The player was accomplished, but the dead keys and out-of-tune condition of the piano gave the music a strange and ominous funhouse quality.
Focused on the lighted windows she was about to reach, Jessie didn’t realize she had lost her night vision until she stumbled over a half-buried rock. Pitching forward, she dropped the shotgun with a clatter and instinctively threw out her hands, which landed with a thud against the wall just under the nearest small square window. The advantage of surprise lost, she scrambled from her bruised knees back to her feet, ignoring the sharpness of a splinter in her palm, in time to see the light go abruptly out. Then she heard the dull pounding of feet on the wood floor within the shed as the phantom pianist dashed for a second door at the back of the building.
“Dammit!” Jessie swore under her breath, then grabbed the shotgun, snatched the flashlight from her pocket, and leaped to the door. Throwing it open with a crash, she raced through the library and workshop to the rear door, which she found swinging emptily wide on its hinges, and cast the beam of the light back and forth in a wide sweep across the trees and brush on the hillside.
The heavy flashlight was an exceptionally bright and far-reaching variety used by law enforcement, which Alex had given her for use in wilderness sled dog races. Halfway through its arc, she caught sight of a human figure in motion as it vanished into the trees behind the beach house, headed east. In that brief glimpse, she noted a tan jacket over jeans and what appeared to be gray hair pulled back into a braid at the nape of the neck.
Without hesitation, she followed, running when she could, fighting her way through brush and over irregularities in the ground, hurdling the narrow creek to land with one foot in a patch of mud, which staggered but hardly slowed her determined progress. Wet branches whipped at her, stinging where they hit her cold face and hands. There was no time to think, only to pursue.
Thrashing sounds guided her into a particularly dense clump of devil’s club. As she thrust her way through it on a ragged path in the large leaves shredded by her quarry’s passing, she felt the spiny thorns tear at her clothing and bare hands. But the person she tracked had taken the worst of the wicked stabs and was slowed a little, for the desperate sounds of flight were a bit nearer when Jessie broke out into the open space beyond, which held a familiar trail. Rather than take what she recognized as one of the two paths that went up behind the beach house, the person had dashed across the paths and back into the brush on the other side.
She paused for an instant to listen, soaking wet from the waist down and the neck up. But as soon as the sound of her advance died, so did that of the fugitive she sought, and once again there was nothing but wind in the trees, pouring rain, and the roar of the surf to the right. Tank started forward, but she caught his collar and they both waited, listening hard. There was nothing for a long minute. Then a stick cracked from the weight of an incautious foot, farther along and up the hill. The sound suggested the pianist was headed almost directly up the steep hill she had climbed on her way to the other cove.
Rather than crash on through the undergrowth, advertising her position, she swiftly elected to go down one trail to Millie’s then cut back up the other. Shielding the light with her fingers so that only a thin beam showed her where to step, she went quietly along it and was almost to the intersection of the two trails when another sound stopped her. There was a crash, a thud, and the noise of a fall, accompanied by an involuntary cry of pain or surprise as a body hit the ground and, from the sound of it, tumbled, until stopping with a grunt loud enough for Jessie to hear from where she stood.
Immediately she was running up the hill toward it, shotgun held barrel skyward, without concern now for the flashlight’s beam, Tank a swift, dark, eager shape at her side. Reaching the area where she estimated the sound had originated, she stopped, and shone the light in a circle around her. Trail, spruce needles and cones on the ground, brush, tree trunks, and…a boot below blue denim, under a bush against the large stump of a fallen tree. Over the sound of her own heavy breathing, she could hear someone gasping, trying to catch limited breath. Evidently the collision with the stump had knocked the wind from the tumbling figure.
Cautiously, keeping herself behind the beam, she took a few steps toward the person on the ground, and, extending the barrel of the shotgun so it could be seen, moved the light to the man’s face. As it hit his eyes, he closed them and threw up an arm to deflect the brightness—or the threat of the gun.
“Don’t…shoot. Please…don’t,” he said breathlessly. “I won’t…move.”
“Hush,” she told Tank, silencing his low growl.
The man on the ground was probably in his late sixties. A tanned face bore the traces of years spent in the outdoors—a myriad of wrinkles and creases that were exaggerated with tension in the blinding light. Receding gray hair had widened his forehead, and as he squinted, trying to see who was confronting him, Jessie caught a glimpse of eyes the color of the bay on a day of scudding clouds: gray-green. She moved the flashlight beam a little to one side so she could examine him as he relaxed his face.
“Thank you,” he said, and his breathing eased.
He was clad in the jeans and tan jacket she had already seen; under the jacket he wore a blue-plaid flannel shirt, open at the collar, with a plain brown sweatshirt over it. She could tell he was short and spare of flesh, though his shoulders were wide enough for strength, and he did not appear frail.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
“Rudy. I’m just old Rudy Nunamaker. It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”
“Not likely. Not while I’ve got a shotgun poin
ted at the middle of you, anyway. What are you doing here, playing the piano in the middle of the night and running away from me?”
“You scared me. Can I sit up, please?”
“No. You stay right where you are and answer my questions.”
He sighed. “Really, I can’t hurt you. I just come here sometimes when there’s nobody home. I don’t hurt anything. Just like to spend a day or two, then I go back.”
“Back where? Where did you come from?”
He squirmed uncomfortably.
“There’s something sticking into my back,” he told her. “Could I please just sit up?”
“Okay, sit up, but keep your hands where I can see them, and don’t do anything stupid. I know how to use this, and I will—in a heartbeat.”
He used a branch of the bush to pull himself to a sitting position, kept his hands on his thighs, and looked up at her silhouette behind the light, sighing this time with relief. He didn’t look dangerous, but rather disturbed and leery of the gun she held steadily pointed at him.
“That’s better, thanks. Now…I have a little place up at the end of Jakolof, built it myself back in the woods, before so many people moved over there. But a couple of times a year I go across the bay to Homer for supplies. Then, if nobody’s here, I usually stop for a day or two on my way back. I don’t hurt anything—just use the sauna and play the piano. Millie knows me. She knows I come over—leaves a key to the sauna where I can find it. Sometimes, when she’s here by herself, I stop in to see her.”
“Describe her.”
“Nice lady—medium build, brown hair turning white, good smile. Comes down mostly in the late spring or summer for a week or two at a time. She likes gin and tonic—or, once in a while, a martini. Fell on the beach rocks getting out of a boat a couple of years ago and broke her arm.”
It was Millie, all right. He knew her, and Jessie thought it unlikely her stalker would. Still, she was not absolutely sure. She paused to think for a minute, half soaked with rain dripping off her hair and down the neck of the slicker. She could smell the salty, iodine odor of the sea on wind that blew water from the nearby trees into her face. She was tired, wet, and the hand with the splinter was pulsing with a sharp, annoying pain. She needed to ask another question or two, however.
“So, Rudy, it was you in the sauna, night before last?”
“Yes, I used it. How’d you know?”
“You forgot to lock it and the stove was still wa—Never mind. How long have you lived there—in Jakolof?”
“Oh, must be almost thirty years now.” He half smiled, remembering. “Let’s see…I came in ’69, and…”
Jessie lowered the shotgun. This old man was no threat that she could discern. She felt weak all over as relief took the place of anxiety. Then she had to smile.
“So, I scared you, huh?”
“Yeah. Why’d you hammer on the wall of the library like that? Gave me a real turn.”
“I didn’t mean to. I tripped on a rock and hit it as I fell.”
“Well, I had no idea who it was in the middle of the night, so I skedaddled. Better to be safe than…you know.”
“Yeah, I sure do. You about scared me silly when I woke up and heard your music in between the gusts of wind. Really spooky. Gave me a nasty few minutes—then a chase through the woods that beat us both up. Are you okay? Oh…you can move now, by the way.”
He got to his feet, moving his arms and legs, checking to be sure they worked, rubbing a spot where his ribs had evidently come in hard contact with the stump. He would be stiff and sore for a day or so, but there didn’t seem to be anything broken or seriously damaged. He completed his inspection, tested the side of his head over his left ear, and grimaced.
“Ouch. Got a pretty good bump swelling up. Must have hit it on something on the way down the hill. A limb or something rolled under my foot and flipped me on my keester. Knocked the breath right out of me.”
“Can I see your head?” Jessie asked, stepping up with the flashlight.
He turned obediently. There was a swelling with an abrasion oozing a little blood into his gray hair.
“Let’s go down to the house where I’ve got some first-aid stuff and can see to clean this. I’m soaking wet, and we could use a cup of tea. There’s even a little apricot brandy, I think.”
Rudy agreed and they were soon ensconced in the chairs near the woodstove, drinking hot tea laced with the promised brandy, and chatting like friends.
“Where do you sleep when you stay here, Rudy?”
“Oh, anywhere, really—sometimes up in the shed behind the library.”
A grin spread across his face and suddenly he looked like an impish small boy with a secret.
“This time, though, I’ve been two nights in the old A-frame on the other side of the lagoon.”
“A-frame? In what lagoon?”
“Well, it used to be a lagoon a long time ago. It’s the meadow now, since it dried up. You know—that way.” He pointed to the west. “The A-frame’s on the hill on the other side.”
“I didn’t know there was anything but trees on that hillside.”
“Yeah, most people don’t. And it won’t be there for very long. It’s been empty for years and it’s falling apart. Still, what’s left keeps the rain off my head. The basement part of it’s still pretty watertight and snug, if you have a good sleeping bag—and I do.”
Jessie remembered that there was a trail of sorts along that particular hillside, but much of it had caved away and she had never seen any sort of building. It had to be almost invisible.
“Long way from the piano in the shed.”
“Oh, not so far. I like it over there. When it’s stormy, like it is now, with all the trees blowing, it feels like flying, or like a ship at sea, everything in motion from the wind.”
She chuckled. “I guess it would, in this blow. Where’d you learn to play the piano so well?”
Rudy took a long drink of his tea and reached to adjust the position of his damp jacket, which was hanging on a railing by the stove to dry. He frowned a little, thinking, and a faraway, slightly nostalgic expression flitted across his face.
“Well…you see, I used to play before I came here—worked gigs in bars and hotel lounges for a living, back when people used to like to listen and sing along—before there was so much of this recorded music. I haven’t really played in years—couldn’t now, anyway, with my old hands—just on the old clunker here, now and then.”
“You were playing Debussy.”
“Oh, yeah. My favorite. I like some of the classical pieces, just for myself. That one seemed appropriate tonight.”
“I thought so, too.” Jessie had a sudden thought. “Do you play any other instrument?”
“I have a recorder that I taught myself to play after I came here and didn’t have a piano.”
“Were you playing it on Saturday around noon?”
“Yes, I was. It helps pass the time. Did you hear it?”
“I thought it was part of a dream I was having. Where were you?”
“In the A-frame. I saw you land, then come out for a walk, but thought you’d gone down the beach. I was playing very quietly. Surprised you heard me at all. But then, I thought the wind would drown me out on the piano, too. Have to be more careful.”
“Oh, don’t…please. I like it—a lot. Now that I know it’s you playing, I won’t worry about it.”
He looked at her closely, assessing the underlying tone of her voice.
“Why did it frighten you so much?”
She hesitated, finding it hard to explain the reasons for her fear, then gave up and told him about the stalker and why she was on Niqa. She found the story pouring out of her in a flood of words and feelings that she hadn’t even shared with Alex—her anger and resentment, the trapping of her sled dog, the horrible idea that someone had purposely caused the wreck of the truck, the threats, phone calls, leaving Knik. She talked for ten minutes, and Rudy didn’t interrupt or comment, ju
st nodded and listened carefully until she ran out of words and drifted into silence.
“The things people do to each other. No wonder you were after me like a bloodhound,” he said sympathetically. “Courageous—the way you stood over me with that shotgun barrel steady as a rock. I must have scared you half to death. I’m sorry, Jessie, but you were heroic, as I think about it again—a strong, brave lady to come right out after me, when you could have just cowered in here, panicked.”
Jessie had relaxed back into her chair from the rigid position she had assumed on its edge as she related her tale of harassment. She realized that now that it was all out, she felt better, as if a spring had unwound inside her. At his words of commendation and apology, tears began to run down her face without warning. Then she was coughing and sputtering to control them as it all caught up with her: the whole, taut week, the wreck, this night’s strain and apprehension—it was too much.
But in only a minute or two she was over and beyond it—drying her face, blowing her nose with a matted tissue from her pocket, and smiling at her own emotional response. He was right. She had taken care of it; had gone after what terrorized her, and knew she could do so again, if necessary. That knowledge was empowering, or would be when she wasn’t so exhausted.
“Will you come down for breakfast in the morning?” she asked Rudy as he was going out the door in the slicker she had loaned him from one of Millie’s hooks, heading for his sleeping bag on the other side of the meadow. He was limping a little stiffly and there was no doubt he would be sore in the morning. She had offered him one of the bunks in back, but he politely refused, saying that he liked his windy hillside perch among the tall spruce. Resisting the smile that tempted her lips, keeping her slight amusement to herself, she realized that there was a streak of chivalry in him that made sleeping under the same roof unacceptable.
“Breakfast? Sure.” He grinned. “I’m bribable. You have any sausage?”
She nodded. “And eggs, toast, cereal—whatever you want.”