by Sarah Graves
The rickety little contraption, loaded with a concrete cube massive enough to anchor a fair-sized motorboat, stood poised at the top of the slope leading sharply down to the water. And to make the whole project even more of a challenge, the path to the water’s edge was bumpy.
Very bumpy: rocks, exposed roots, ragged jounces and jogs, any one of which could tip the cart. “But now he’s in a worse fix because the girl’s dad has a habit of blowing guys’ heads off. Or whatever it is,” I amended, “that Henderson does to the targets of his professional assignments.”
“Yup,” Ellie said. “And none of it would be happening at all if you weren’t here.”
Oh, terrific; now I was the cause of the whole mess. Or my habit of attracting Jemmy was to blame, anyway. So in a way I was responsible for the girl being here, too; the entire subject was starting to make my head hurt.
“Are those wheels strong enough?” Ellie asked dubiously, her brow furrowed as she eyed the setup. “Because once it hits those bumps on its way downhill…”
I spread my hands in a “who knows?” gesture. A shove would get the cart going and we’d learn the answer fast. Stopping it again would be another matter, but the lake would do that.
We hoped. “Grab the rope,” I said.
The plan was to control the cart’s speed by hauling on the rope handle from behind. And from in front I hoped I could also control its direction, since a concrete block careening wildly off into the forest wasn’t what we had in mind.
No point imagining the negative possible outcomes, however. For one thing, there were too many to think about all at once. I lifted the wagon handle. “Okay, push it.”
The vehicle began rolling, slowly at first and then faster. A lot faster; the spokes in the little blue wheels blurred. Ellie planted her feet in the gravel of the path to try slowing it down from the rear but the bright yellow boots she was wearing skidded ineffectually through the stones.
“Hey,” she protested. I leaned hard against the handle from below, also without much result.
“This hill,” I muttered as the makeshift cart built up even more speed, “is way steeper than I…”
Suddenly the little red wagon handle snapped off with a loud crack! and then the rope broke when Ellie’s feet hit a protruding root, stopping her abruptly.
Holding the rope’s end, she sat down hard on the path while the cart careened away from her. “Jake!” she cried. “Look out!”
Gripping the broken handle, I lost my footing on the path and hit the ground, too, as the loaded cart trundled straight at me with the massive concrete block wobbling and bouncing on it.
“Jake! Get out of the way!”
“I’m trying….” Scrambling aside as the murderously heavy vehicle rumbled past, missing me by centimeters, I landed in what had once been a thicket of old elderberry bushes. We’d cut them down the previous summer so that someday we could stack kayaks and canoes on the spot.
Now the whole area with the cut stems jutting up from it was about as comfortable as a bed of nails. Also our cart was still rolling, jouncing, and bumping while we sat staring.
At the water’s edge it bounced gaily over a boulder, two wheels exploding outward, their spokes and plastic parts flying in all directions, concrete block still perched miraculously atop the platform. And…
And then it soared. Out over the water it hung in thin air for a moment while Ellie and I watched openmouthed. Next with a dramatic splat! it splashed flat onto the lake’s surface, bobbled a bit…
And floated. The top-heavy post tipped the pallet platform precariously. But the block’s weight prevailed and the post at last straightened as the platform steadied itself bravely, small waves rippling around it.
“The styrofoam worked!” I cried, jumping up to dance around deliriously while Ellie still frowned at the thing.
“Genius!” I exulted, heedless of the cuts and scratches on my hands and arms and the many bruises, unseen but certainly not unfelt, in the process of developing on my legs.
“I am a genius,” I chanted as the pallet platform proceeded out onto the lake. Because the idea for the wheels had been Ellie’s, and she had supplied them. But the floating element of the project had been mine.
All mine. And it worked. I just stood watching it, grinning and reciting: “I am ab-so-lutely, a complete and thorough…”
“Jake,” Ellie said as the pallet went on floating away from the shore with our post and block on top of it. “Don’t you think we’d better…?”
Suddenly I stopped chanting. Dancing, too. Because Ellie was correct. The thing was floating, all right.
Just as I’d hoped. But it was also moving fast, captured by a sudden offshore breeze whose force sent it speedily across the waves right out into the middle of the lake.
Where it flipped over and sank.
Maybe I should try talking to Henderson,” I said. “Before he gets a chance to do something to Jemmy.”
It was midafternoon and we were on our way home from the cottage, Ellie at the wheel again as we zipped hair-raisingly down Route 1 toward Eastport.
We’d already stopped at the gas station near the turnoff to the lake so she could call Bella. The conversation had confirmed her suspicions about who the missing boy was.
Now Ellie spoke as if she hadn’t heard me. “If Cory Trow doesn’t show up on his own and we don’t find him, Walt Henderson might. And if Jemmy’s right about what Henderson’s like, he might kill him.”
After the sinking incident we’d hauled a pair of kayaks out, paddled to where we thought the cart had gone under, and dropped a buoy attached to a weighted line over it to mark the spot.
Then Jemmy had returned with the pickup truck’s bed full of his purchases—including three six-packs of imported beer, a gasoline generator, and a portable TV—have I mentioned he was a city boy?—and once he arrived Ellie made it plain that she wanted to get out of there pronto.
“If something bad happens to her friend’s kid and we haven’t even tried to stop it, Bella will blame you,” she pointed out now.
Yes, and after that Bella would develop such a housecleaning mania, we’d all be lucky to escape with our skins. But for all I knew, Cory Trow might’ve returned home by now, ready to face the music.
Besides, Cory wasn’t my big problem. Jemmy was. And while we’d struggled with the cart I’d had plenty of time to absorb the true precariousness of his situation.
“Maybe Henderson didn’t see Jemmy downtown this morning,” I said. “But maybe he did. And he could’ve even followed us to the cottage turnoff.”
After that if he was in a car we’d have known he was there; you could hear a vehicle’s tires on the dirt road from miles away in the lakeside silence. Still…
“Never mind that Jemmy’s in the deep forest,” I added. “You feel so safe out there, you know? Like all of civilization is on another planet far away and you don’t have to worry about it. But a guy like Walt Henderson doesn’t care. He’ll crawl through the teeming jungle with a knife in his teeth to finish off the fellow he’s after.”
“So what would you do? If you did get the chance to talk to Henderson, what would you say?” Ellie asked, steering sharply to avoid a deer that had suddenly appeared in the roadway in front of us.
Because it wasn’t enough in Maine to watch out for the other drivers, many of whom apparently had trained at the same place where they teach people how to get shot out of cannons. You also had to negotiate through the animal kingdom.
“I’m not sure,” I replied as the deer faded into the trees and Ellie returned the truck to the proper lane with casual ease; my heartbeat only stuttered a couple of times. “But if it came right down to it I’d think of something.”
After all, I used to talk men in Henderson’s line of work into a lot of things. Health insurance, for instance; even in those days a major surgical procedure could wipe out a fortune, ill-gotten or not. I’d persuaded a couple of them into legitimate business careers, too; why wo
rk in an industry where a gunshot wound is a common cause of occupational injury when you can have a snazzy suite of offices on the fortieth floor of a major downtown landmark building?
While, of course, remaining just as crooked as ever; where do you think all those lost pension funds in the early nineties went?
“We’re assuming Jemmy’s assessment of Henderson is correct?” Ellie asked. We were approaching the causeway to Moose Island. A cop in mirrored sunglasses appeared to ignore us from behind the wheel of his parked squad car, the words Pleasant Point Police lettered in black on the side of it.
I felt his eyes on my neck like a couple of insects as we went by. “It is correct,” I said, then added, “Jemmy may be a tad flaky but he’s always been reliable on the topic of who wants to kill him.”
“Okay, then.” We passed the Quoddy Airfield with its freshly paved runway and bright orange airsock, then the Bay City Mobil Station, the firehouse, and the IGA.
In the parking lot the high school kids were holding a car wash, some holding up hand-lettered signs while the rest squirted each other with hoses. “In that case…,” Ellie began.
She swung the steering wheel unexpectedly, taking us down County Road toward the south end of the island. “No time like the present,” she declared.
Five minutes later we were at the end of a road that terminated suddenly in a gravel turnaround. Beyond that a massive rock wall loomed like the perimeter of a fortress, sharp-tipped black iron spikes jutting from the wall’s capstones every couple of feet.
“Henderson’s place,” Ellie told me. “You’ll talk to him while I wander around keeping an eye out for Cory.”
She frowned at the rock wall. “Not that I really think he’s here. If he’s got any sense it’s absolutely the last place he’d go. But that way we can tell Bella we at least tried to find her friend’s fugitive son.”
Because you couldn’t lie to Bella. She sniffed fibs with the same unerring skill she used to ferret out household dirt; Victor used to say her first cranial nerve was overdeveloped.
“Kill two birds with one stone, huh? Good idea,” I said.
Assuming the dead birds didn’t turn out to be us. Bearding the lion in his den seemed a more apt description for what we were doing; privately I wasn’t so sure about Ellie’s notion.
Still, letting Henderson know I was aware of his plans might be enough to make him change or at least postpone them. And if I did nothing and something happened to Jemmy, I would never forgive myself.
So my choice was clear. Private, a sign announced from the closed iron gate. No one answered the intercom box mounted on it. I climbed back into the truck.
“Okay, you’ve had all the good ideas so far. Now what?” The property was a wildly scenic compound overlooking the whole bay. I didn’t know much about it but Ellie had spent her whole childhood on the island, and did.
“Now,” she said with determination, “we take the direct approach. Before he put this wall up there was a picnic spot on the water side of the property. Dirt road leading partway in.”
Great, another dirt road. She put the truck in gear and began nosing it down a barely visible track, parallel to the wall and away from the gate.
Sixty yards later she stopped again. This time we both got out. Ellie marched away from the truck; I followed, my misgivings increasing.
“And unless he also built a wall on the water side, which I don’t see why he would…,” she continued as we pushed through some bushes, then came out on the other side of them.
No kidding, and I wouldn’t exactly call the approach direct. The wall ended but what replaced it worked equally well; coming to an abrupt halt I reached back reflexively for a steadying handful of those bushes, all that kept me from a plummeting next step.
“You’re kidding,” I managed, though Ellie appeared unfazed. We were looking at a cliff with about an eight-inch path running along the edge of it. To the left, another massive rise of sheer granite swooped up, dizzying me; to the right was an apparently endless expanse of breathtakingly empty air.
“Nobody even knows you can do this except kids who grew up around here,” Ellie said blithely, stepping onto the path, which to me looked approximately as wide as a tightrope. I closed my eyes, decided that was a bad idea, and hastily opened them again.
“Remind me again why we can’t just come back when someone’s here to let us in?” Gulping, I crept forward.
If for some insane reason you wanted to invade Walter Henderson’s place, you’d be better off landing a helicopter on the back lawn.
“Because maybe they won’t let us in.” She moved limberly ahead of me, no hesitation at all; to her this was nothing. “And then we might not get to look for Cory Trow. You want to at least say we have, remember? And do it with a straight face?”
She stepped quickly away from me. “Besides, I want this Jemmy nonsense over and done with as soon as possible.”
Okey-dokey. I put my foot out. In response, my heart traded places with my tonsils. Crumbs of loose granite fell rattlingly away. “But once we get past this part we can just walk along the back end of the property and up to the front door,” Ellie called over her shoulder cheerfully.
Yeah, this part. A seagull sailed by, his beady eye fixing me contemptuously. Out over the water, ducks skimmed, wings whistling.
“What, then we ring the bell and say ‘Avon calling’?” In defiance of any possible inkling of common sense whatsoever, I shuddered a tiny bit farther out along the narrow cliff edge. A big chunk of granite broke off under my feet and tumbled to the rocks below.
Far below; a hundred feet or more to where deep water moved sullenly. I averted my eyes, battling a sudden attack of vertigo. Part of the trouble was that in my case vertigo usually won. The other part, however, was my current actual position on the planet, commonly known as Too High Up.
“I don’t know what you’ll tell him,” Ellie replied with a grin as her foot slipped; nimbly she recovered her balance. “You said you’d think of something.”
Me and my big mouth. Meanwhile the farther we got along the cliff’s edge, the less sure I felt about what had turned suddenly into an extreme hiking adventure. On the other hand, I was not going back over that awful path; not without a parachute.
And a life raft; even if I were to survive the fall, the water below looked deadly. So I forged ahead, we reached the end of the trail at last, and after a further ten minutes of bushwhacking through brush thick enough to repel battle tanks, we approached the house.
It was a big, modern-looking octagonal structure of cedar and glass, with the emphasis on glass. My first thought was that calling it a McMansion was inaccurate; this wasn’t the crap people built when they had more money than God but no taste to go with it.
This was the real thing, a house so perfectly proportioned and in keeping with Maine’s bold coast that it looked as if it had grown there. Plantings of box hedge, rhododendron, and bay laurel increased the serenely organic feel of the place. Even the pea gravel in the driveway somehow managed to look naturally deposited.
The cedar steps led up to a free-form deck. There, more huge plants stood in massive unglazed clay pots. The only sound came from a heavy-looking set of wind chimes tuned to produce a low, vaguely Asian-sounding series of hollow clunks, a far cry from the jangly sour-note clangers I usually despised.
There wasn’t so much as a single dead leaf on the driveway. Imagining my own place, all I could think was that keeping this one so pristine took lots of maintenance, probably professional; I couldn’t imagine Walter Henderson doing much raking. But it seemed nobody was here; I hoped Henderson wasn’t already out hunting Jemmy.
Maybe he’d given all the help the day off, I thought, but at a sound from behind me I turned and revised my opinion abruptly. Because two very helpful-looking Irish wolfhounds were indeed on the job; helpful, that is, if you wanted someone torn limb from limb.
“N-n-nice doggies,” I managed through a sudden clog of fear in my
throat. They’d come around the side of the deck in silence like a pair of trained assassins until the click of their toenails betrayed them.
Big toenails, to match their big bodies. And big teeth. Slowly the animals advanced, one step at a time, blank-eyed and deadly. From the corner of my eye I saw Ellie’s hand reach very slowly for the door. “Get ready,” she said.
Yeah, get ready to die. Grrr, the dog on the left said with menace unparalleled in canine history.
Urr, the dog on the right agreed gutturally, and then wuff! Which I guessed translated to Let’s get ’em!
“Go!” Ellie cried, yanking open the screen door, shoving the inside door open and flinging herself past it. I scrambled after her, feeling the unmistakable tug of teeth on the cuff of my right jeans leg.
The moment lasted forever while a set of madly munching canine incisors chomped their way up toward one of my calves. But luckily those pants had been sent through the washing machine a million times and the amount of bleach Bella used on clothes of all colors was enough to rot wire mesh.
So I got in while the cuff of my pants stayed out, a trade I was delighted to make under the circumstances, and Ellie slammed the door. “Oh…my…God,” I exhaled slowly while she leaned on the stairway banister, panting.
Silence from outside. “Good thing it was unlocked.” My heart thumped in my rib cage as if trying to escape. Then came an awful thought: “You don’t suppose they can get in here, do you?”
Because we wouldn’t necessarily hear them coming if they did. Around us the floors were mostly covered with the silky-soft Persian carpets that always look so excellent on polished wood, while muffling stealthy footsteps with such superb efficiency.
“I’m not sure,” Ellie replied nervously. “I’d better look around for dog doors.”
The beautifully crafted Thomas Moser furniture and framed Diane Arbus photographs weren’t half shabby either, nor were they reproductions. Back in the city I’d had a client who collected such stuff, and under his expert tutelage I’d learned to tell the difference.