by Sue Henry
WHEN JESSIE REGAINED AWARENESS, SHE WAS FLAT ON HER back and her first thought was to wonder why she was so cold. Opening her eyes, she saw nothing but blackness—listening, heard nothing but silence. She tried to move, but pain, sharp as lightning, stabbed through her head and compelled her to immobility with its savage grip. Helpless, she groaned, and someone spoke near her in the dark.
“She’s coming to.”
“I’ve got her.” Don Sawyer’s voice this time from just above her. “Lie still, Jessie. You’ve got a nasty lump on your head—maybe a concussion.”
Closing her eyes again, she assessed the pulses of pain in her head.
“What . . .” she started to ask, but her voice came out like the air from a tired balloon, unfamiliar and whispery. The single word grated in her throat as dry as paper, making her cough, and with each paroxysm the pain struck again.
“Don’t try to talk,” Don’s voice admonished. “It’s okay. You’re safe with us.”
“But what . . . where . . . ?” It was easier this time, but just a breath of a question and she did as told and didn’t move.
“I’ll tell you, if you just be still and rest.”
“Okay.” Another breath.
“We’re in the tanks under the platform. You remember the tanks Jim told us about—for water and fuel? Well, they’ve put us in the maintenance space between them.”
“They?”
“Yeah—Curt and someone we didn’t know. We don’t know who the second one is, why we’re here, or what they want. But Curt, at least, has a handgun. The bastard caught Sandra in the basement yesterday, when we were all at the other end of the island, and put her in here. She was scared to death in the dark by herself all the time we were looking for her, and that’s why we couldn’t find her. Then last night he made me and Jim and Laurie climb down. He was waiting when I came back in from outside sometime after midnight. After that, he got Aaron.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know.”
“I saw you go down the basement stairs, but I couldn’t see who was with you,” Jessie told him softly. “Then I went out looking for Karen and heard Curt talking on a cell phone.”
“So that’s why he couldn’t find you—or Karen. We wondered. He tried to get us to tell him where you’d gone, but none of us knew. Where is Karen—and Whitney? We haven’t seen either of them.”
When Jessie tried again to sit up her head hurt, but not so badly, so she stayed where she was for the moment.
“Karen’s hiding,” she said, as the pain faded again, “but I left Whitney sleeping in her bed. Where’s Aaron?”
“I’m here,” Aaron chimed in from somewhere nearby in the dark.
“Didn’t you hear him on the phone?”
“Not a word. I was sleeping on the west side of the roof and didn’t know anything till Curt woke me up with a gun in my face.”
“How long have I been here?”
“They brought you over an hour ago. We’ve been really worried about you.”
As he had named the members of the work crew, she could feel the concern of them all gathered around her in the dark.
“You make six,” Don continued. “Karen and Whitney are still missing, like I said. So were you, until they opened that manhole cover and told us to come and get you, or they’d drop you. It’s at least ten feet to the floor, so Jim and I reached up and eased you down.”
“Thanks. I’m glad I didn’t know it at the time. Is anyone else hurt?” she asked.
“Banged around a bit—mostly in getting down here. I’ve got a sore ankle, but nobody’s really hurt like you. Did they hit you with something?” Jim asked out of the dark.
“I fell in the trail and hit my head, I think.”
She could feel that she was lying on something hard and cold, with her neck across one of Don’s thighs. He shifted his weight slightly at Jim’s question and there was a flash of pain in her head, but a quite a bit less this time—she could stand it without feeling she would pass out again. Carefully, slowly, she raised one hand to the side of her head. There was, as he had said, a sizable lump where she had hit something. She had no recollection what, but nothing felt broken, though her hair was sticky with drying blood from a cut about two inches long. Remembering the pool of Tim Christiansen’s blood that the seawater had washed off the rocks, she was grateful that it had not been worse.
“They know how many of us there are and they’ll hunt until they find Whitney and Karen, I think—if they haven’t found them already. But if they’ve been caught, why aren’t they here with us? That handgun worries me.” It was Jim’s voice this time, near at hand, with a bitter note of anger in it.
“Why put us in here?”
“We have no idea, but they obviously wanted to get us out of the way for some reason. Curt wouldn’t answer questions or tell us anything. But there’s no way to get out, so we can’t make trouble for them—though I’d like to make a lot of trouble for them.”
“And you don’t know who the second one is?”
“Nope. Did you get a look at him?”
She could remember nothing but standing in the trail talking to Joe Cooper. “No. I don’t think it was Curt who was running on the trail and caught up with me, but I couldn’t see him before I fell. It was dark—in the trees. But there’s someone else out there—Karen’s stalker.”
“So he’s real?” Jim asked, surprise raising his voice.
“Evidently. You thought she made him up?”
“It crossed my mind that she might have.”
“Me too, but she didn’t. I met him—Joe Cooper.”
“Well, if Karen’s still loose, maybe she’ll be able to help us.”
“She won’t know where to look, will she? And she won’t want to run into Cooper.”
“Unless . . .” someone said, then stopped.
There was a tense pause full of consideration. Then Laurie spoke softly out of the darkness beside Jim and put words to the question Jessie could feel them thinking. “We can’t help wondering, Jessie. Could she be in on this with them? Could he?”
It was something Jessie had not really considered, but her head ached too much to give it much serious thought. Still . . .
An hour later she felt better, still shaky and a little nauseous, but was on her feet and feeling her way carefully in the dark along the cement walls of the room beneath the lighthouse platform. The walls were cold and slimy, dripping with water in places. The whole space smelled dank and moldy. Periodically she felt one of the isopods that so revolted Sandra and Aaron move beneath her fingers or heard one crunch underfoot. The space seemed lousy with them. She imagined them everywhere, crawling on the walls, the floor, even the ceiling for all she knew, and hoped none would drop off into her hair.
It was a confusing space with standing water in some places and felt almost like a maze, with walls that started and stopped unexpectedly and turned corners that didn’t make sense in the dark. The floor was uneven, with unexpected raised sections like some kind of footings for walls that no longer existed, or never had, and over which it was easy to stumble and fall if incautious. She couldn’t seem to be able to get hold of a mental map of the place, even after going over it twice.
Though he hated “the bugs” as he called them, Aaron had tried to help, but had not done much better and finally went back to sit with the others. Jim, more familiar with the space, having seen and explored it with lights in the past, was more able to make his way through without running into walls or losing his footing on the parts of the floor that were wet and muddy. But even he had trouble with orientation in the dark.
“Isn’t there any way out of here except for that round hole that goes up to the platform?” Jessie asked.
“Nope. And when we tried raising it awhile back we found that they must’ve dragged something heavy over it to keep it there. There’s only room for two at a time to reach it anyway and, whatever it is, I doubt all of us together could shift it now.”
/> “Any place we can see out?”
“There is one pipe through the wall on the cove side—maybe a drain, I don’t know. But you can’t see anything but a little light at the other end because it’s either angled down on purpose or bent. I’ve never really paid attention because it didn’t matter.”
He took her over to peer through the pipe at the small amount of light that told them it was now daylight outside.
Crouching there, with the width of the room between the two of them and the rest, Jessie lowered her voice to ask Jim his opinion of something that had been running through her mind.
“Do you think the cocaine we found last night has anything to do with this?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” he answered. “I haven’t said anything, but maybe we should ask Sandra about it and get it out into the open. If none of them knows where it came from it might tell us something, even if there isn’t much we can do about it.”
“And if someone does? It’s possible, you know?”
He sighed. “I don’t know—just don’t know.”
Finished searching the walls, they felt their way back in the dark and sat down with the other four.
“Sandra,” Jim said.
“Yes?”
“What was it you wanted to talk to me about last night—when you came back upstairs with that bottle of wine? You said it was about something in the basement, remember?”
There was a long moment of thoughtful silence from Sandra. Then, before she could answer, Don spoke up from beside her.
“She found something down there, Jim, that maybe you don’t want shared with everyone. Something that—”
“I can tell it, Don.” With a little good-humored irritation, Sandra interrupted him. “I should have said something earlier anyway.”
“What,” Jim asked, “did you find?”
“I didn’t mean to snoop, Jim, honestly I didn’t. I was just looking around. You know—it’s interesting how the lighthouse is built, so I walked back in that narrow space that extends south from the cooling room to get the wine you asked for and then a little farther, just to see how it all fit together. It was kind of dark with just the light from the cooling room and I didn’t have a flashlight, so I didn’t see that something stuck out beyond the wine boxes, and stumbled on it.
“In the dark I couldn’t tell what it was, but I felt around and there were two packages, one half on top of the other. Each one was over a foot square and maybe eight inches thick, and it felt like they were wrapped in some kind of plastic. I’d knocked the top one partway off and it was heavy and kind of soft when I picked it up to put it back. Then I felt that the corner was torn where I’d hit it with my foot, so I took it out into the light to see about that.
“When I saw what it was—and I’ve seen it before, so I knew what it was—well, I didn’t know what to do. So I found some electrical tape in Curt’s toolbox and used it to fix what I’d torn. Then I put it back and went upstairs. On the way up I debated whether to say anything, or not. When you were busy talking to Jessie, I decided to just keep my mouth shut, that it was none of my business. So that’s what I did, except I told Don and we both thought it best to just keep still about it.
“I really didn’t mean to get into anything that belongs to you, Jim—honestly. I’m sorry.”
Jim’s voice was tense coming out of the dark.
“I didn’t know it was there. And it doesn’t belong to me or Laurie. No way.”
“What the hell did you think it was?” Aaron asked from a few feet away.
“Cocaine,” Jim and Sandra said together.
“A lot of cocaine,” Don added. “I went down and had a look, just to be sure, and there’s more than just for recreational use.”
Everyone was silent for a minute, considering the ramifications of that.
“How did you know I found it?” Sandra asked. “I put it back.”
“You spilled just a little on the floor in the cooler,” Jessie told her. “Probably when you took it out to look at it and fixed the wrapper. I found it later, when I went down for the salad, and showed it to Jim.”
“You know,” said Aaron, with a note of wicked humor in his voice, “you can tell us about it, if it is yours, Jim. We’re all friends here, right? But it sounds like a lot of stuff for two people to me.”
“Look, Aaron.” Jim’s voice was sharp with anger as he swung toward the younger man. “I don’t care if you believe me or not, but that stuff does not belong to me and I’m really pissed that someone was careless enough to bring it to our island.”
“Hey!” Aaron said, hearing the implied accusation in his words. “You got no reason to think . . .”
“Hey yourselves—both of you.” Laurie broke in with an attempt at peacemaking. “There’s nothing we can do about any of this now. There’s nothing to show that anyone here had anything to do with it, so let’s let it go for now and concentrate on figuring out if there’s anything we can do about being down here, shall we? Any ideas?”
The silence that followed spoke louder to any practical solution to their confinement than the prior echoes of Jim’s angry voice.
In her search of the space, Jessie had stumbled over several pieces of junk metal on the floor, including a couple of pieces of rebar approximately six feet long.
“Any possibility we could use some of that stuff to pound or scrape a hole in the wall?” she asked to fill the dispirited stillness.
Jim’s laugh held no humor coming out of the blackness.
“That wall,” he told her, “is more than a foot of solid concrete. I don’t think so! Do you?”
Discouraged, head still throbbing, Jessie felt her way to one of the raised footings and, bugs or not, sat down and leaned back against a section of the wall, turning her face to one side so she didn’t strike the lump on her head against the rough concrete. Even damp and slimy, it was a cool against her cheek, the only relief she had; she longed for some of the Tylenol she carried in the daypack she had left in the hole in the trail.
She wished for water too. Damp as it was, there was nothing that was safe to drink and her mouth felt lined with cotton. It was absurd to be sitting next to a tank that was full of water they couldn’t drink without boiling.
She hoped Karen would stay hidden and not do something foolish like try to come and find her. It still seemed out of character that the woman had been so willing to hide under the body of a man she called her friend. She had more than half-expected Karen to refuse with revulsion and had been surprised when she had not only agreed to the hiding place, but had helped to create it.
And where was Whitney?
It was very quiet in the maintenance space between the tanks, one full, the other empty. The seven had gathered together near the overhead opening that they couldn’t even see, except for the small amount of light that filtered through a few drainage holes, and were barely visible. Jessie could place them by the sound of their voices and movement—Sandra huddled next to Don, Jim and Laurie together nearby. Aaron had stretched himself out on his back on top of the footing beyond Jessie’s feet, probably hoping the isopods would stay below it on the floor.
For a long time no one said anything. Then, out of the dark, came the singular and reverberating snore. Aaron, against odds, had dozed off and the evidence of this all but echoed off the unseen walls.
Sandra giggled, a slightly hysterical sound in the dark.
Laurie joined in.
And suddenly they were all laughing.
The unexpected noise of their mirth woke Aaron and his snoring stopped abruptly as he sat up.
“What’s going on?”
The question simply boosted their amusement into hilarity and made an answer impossible.
“What’s wrong with you people?” he asked.
Sandra, who had started it, finally regained enough self-control to sputter out, “You snore.”
“Yeah. So?”
“No,” Don told him, still chuckling. “She
means you really snore. We thought there was a foghorn in here.”
There was a pause, while they waited.
Jessie heard him recline himself again before his response came through the dark, with a grin in it.
“Why do you think I’m still single—and have been sleeping upstairs?”
The incident relieved a little of the tension and brought them back together as a group, but it was clear that there was nothing to do but wait for—whatever. There was not a sound from above them, but the heavy layers of concrete were such effective sound blocks that Jessie doubted they could have heard anything that was not loud and directly overhead. Even then it would be questionable.
Leaning back against the wall again, she wondered how Aaron could possibly sleep. What about Karen? How was she faring at the other end of the island? Would she remain in her hiding place when so much time had passed? Could she really be part of what was happening to the rest of the work crew—one with the two men who had entombed them in the dark of these tanks? Where was Joe Cooper? She wondered, suddenly remembering their conversation. He seemed tough and agile enough to have escaped in his sprint for the south end, especially if they didn’t know he was on the island. But they might have heard him running. If they found him would he try to fight it out with would-be murderers? She recalled the gun that had been missing from the freezer upstairs, now probably in Curt’s hands, and hoped not. But, knowing where they were, maybe he would be of some assistance to those in the tank.
This small island seemed so odd a place for what had happened to them all. What was behind it? Somehow the cocaine must be involved. Could Cooper be this unknown person Don and Jim had referred to, the one who was helping Curt? If so, why would he have run away? Was this merely a way for him to finally catch up with Karen? It seemed extreme but he had been very determined about it. Still, getting the rest of them out of the way had to be factored in as a possibility. Could he have killed Tim Christiansen himself and, if so, why?
Her head throbbed and she gave up trying to figure it out. Once again she wished for water, achingly thirsty though surrounded by the huge amount of water that was Frederick Sound—undrinkable as well, but water nevertheless.