"You hear that?" he said, tilting his face into the rain and speaking directly into the impenetrable darkness. He'd never been a believer, not in the way other people usually defined it, but right now he'd take whatever help he could get. Or maybe he was just out of his mind. "You hear that, up there? Just help me out a little. This one time, that's all I ask."
As if in answer, the rain turned into a furious torrent, and a fierce wind roared out of the west.
Chapter 24
"Janet?"
The word had barely fallen from his lips when a fiery explosion—an outline of a yacht briefly visible within the most intense oranges and yellows he'd ever seen—lit up the western sky.
For a fraction of a second, no longer than it took to flinch, Gage thought he also saw the profile of his long-dead wife mixed with the silhouette of the ship. The spread of her hair in the wind. The slope of her nose and her chin. But then she was gone, maybe never there at all, and the boom of the explosion finally caught up with the light and hit him like a battering ram.
The force of it, the sharp, ringing pain, was so great that Gage cupped his hands over his ears. It also brought him back to himself. The wild ride over mountainous ocean swells, Heceta Head Lighthouse shining its beacon through the worsening storm, the mental dalliance with ghosts from his past—all these had been fragments from some discombobulated dream. But the explosion, this was real.
The boat, with his hands off the rudder, drifted to the right, and a particularly large wave nearly capsized him. The explosion disappeared behind the wall of water. At the last second he managed to get his hands on the rudder and veer hard to the left, throttling into the wave. With icy water spraying him from every direction, he didn't know he'd caught air until he felt it in his stomach, a precipitous drop. Water sloshed in from all sides. Too much water. It was pooling at the bottom of the boat.
It wasn't until he again saw the black, burning hulk of the ship—when the waves parted in front of him like a curtain—that he finally had a chance to react, emotionally, to what he was seeing.
Nora.
Nora was in there.
Plus whoever else was on board. He didn't give a rat's ass about Elliott, but what about her crew? And little Lady Luck. The dog would have died, too. He felt an anguished rage, both at Elliott, for inflicting such needless harm on the world, and at himself, for being incapable of intervening in time.
Yet maybe there was hope. It was such an all-consuming fire that the rational part of his brain doubted anyone could have survived, but maybe some had jumped ship before the explosion. It was possible.
He guided the boat toward the explosion, up a wave, down another, the fiery reds and yellows ahead of him bouncing in and out of view. Salt water stung his eyes. There was so much water in the air he might as well have been underwater; it was difficult to take a breath without choking. Her boat had seemed so close, but it took an eternity to get there. The boat couldn't take much more of this. Yet he couldn't turn back. She might be out there.
Fifty yards from the fire, he passed the first debris, a white chunk of the hull. It bumped against his boat when he came off a wave. A foot to the left and he would have hit it dead on, probably sinking him. After that, debris littered the ocean everywhere: a half-melted plastic chair, a shredded orange life preserver, lots of twisted plastic and metal that could have been anything.
Twenty yards away, the heat from the fire pulsed and pushed at him. Even in the swirling wind, the air was choked with smoke. He smelled gasoline, burned wood, seared plastic, and something that could only have been the terrible, acrid odor of charred flesh. He saw someone reach out of the water and turned toward it, his hope rising until he saw that it wasn't someone at all … only a dismembered arm.
It got worse after that. As he rode the swells up and down, running in a wide circle around the wreck, he saw horrors he would never be able to un-see. Part of a scalp. A bloodstained leather armchair. Black heels partly melted into a shiny silver refrigerator. Though the heat of the ship was still too great to get close, smaller fires burned all around him.
"Nora!" he cried.
Only the storm answered him, a primal scream of wind and rain. In his despair, as he searched for survivors, he turned his attention away from the ocean—only for a moment, but it was enough.
A wave much larger than any he'd encountered so far sucker-punched him from behind.
One second he was scanning the ocean. The next he was flying through the air.
End over end, he somersaulted through the darkness, plunging headfirst into the ocean. Icy-cold salt water gripped him from all sides. There was a moment of disorientation. It was too dark to know which way was up by sight alone. He started to swim, thrashing wildly, then his sense of gravity took hold and he realized he was swimming down and not up.
He reversed course. Only when his lungs were about to burst did he reach the surface, gasping for breath before a coughing fit seized him. Breathing the air was not much better than breathing the ocean; it was so thick with smoke that it burned in his throat. He spat out salt water and tried to keep his head above water.
He was just getting his bearings when he turned and saw another giant wave swooping down on him.
"Oh no," he said.
Then he was underwater again, spinning. His back crashed into something hard. He hoped it was his boat, but when he surfaced and spun around to look for it, he saw that it wasn't the boat but a long, rectangular object with a metal cylinder sticking straight up from the middle—some kind of table.
He swam for it, bumping against smaller debris. He tried not to think about what the debris was. He got hold of the edge of the table and tried to climb on, but it kept sliding forward and dumping him back in the ocean.
Cursing, he held on to the metal bar as his best he could, and spun around, searching through the churning water and the burning air for some sign of his boat. But the ocean was too rough and the light too poor to spot anything. Another wave crashed down on him, but this time he managed to ride it out by holding fast to the table.
He was so cold that he felt disconnected from his body. Did he have toes? Fingers? He was conscious of gripping the metal bar, but his fingers did not feel like his own. His ears felt like rubbery stubs. His clothes—the windbreaker, the jeans, his tennis shoes—might as well have been lined with lead for how they felt, weighing him down, trying to drag him under the sea.
Was this how it was going to end? He was going to drown in the dark, alone?
Mixed in with the moaning wind and the roaring sea, he heard the occasional crackle and fizz of the burning bits of boat that still remained. Other objects floated past: wine bottles, ripped paper, a bundle of toilet paper in a plastic bag. Something bumped him from behind; he turned and saw that it was a person— facedown, a shard of glass as big as Gage's fist embedded in the middle of a bloody red scalp.
Suppressing his horror, Gage rolled the body over.
It was Elliott.
His eyes stared ahead, unblinking. His boyish mouth was open in a silent scream. Gage shoved the body away from him. The sea brought it back. He shoved again, harder, shouting at the man who'd taken Nora from him. The body drifted away with the next wave, but the effort robbed Gage of the rest of his strength. His fingers started to lose their hold. He felt as if something was grabbing his ankle, pulling him under. Maybe it was Janet. Maybe she was telling him it was his time.
Don't give up hope.
No.
No, she wanted him to live.
He saw now that her words had been about him, not Nora. His wife didn't want him to give up on himself. He was no Ed Boone. He may prefer a hermitlike existence if given the choice, but he did have friends. A daughter. There was a lot to live for, and even if there wasn't, Gage would go on anyway. That was what you did. In the end, that's all hope was—finding a way to go on anyway.
So if he was going to die out here in the dark, it wouldn't be willingly. He would fight to the end.
The coast guard.
Brave souls, coming out on a night like this. The kid at the marina must have called them. Or they'd gotten reports of the explosion. When the wave dipped, he saw that the helicopter was quite a ways off, and that the bulk of the wreckage was some distance from him. The length of a football field, maybe more. The currents had pulled him away. The fires had already mostly burned out, but what was still burning was centered in that area. That was where they would obviously concentrate their search.
He only got brief glimpses, but could see the helicopter struggling to remain aloft, strong gusts pushing it left and right. A spotlight swept across the water. The helicopter was moving outward in an ever-increasing spiral. He cried for help. It was no use. He could barely hear his own voice with all the wind and waves. The spotlight was approaching, the whup-whup of the helicopter blades growing louder. It was going to be close. Would it miss him?
It did.
It swept just off to his right, mere feet away.
He shouted at the source of the light as it receded, but it was no use. Would they try again? No. When the ocean pushed him higher, he saw that the helicopter was already turning back, away from the wreckage. With the conditions the way they were, it was too dangerous to stay out long.
Yet this was Gage's only chance. He sensed a heavy presence in his jacket pocket. Yes! The flare gun. But would it work? It had been sealed up in his windbreaker, but there was no way the jacket was completely waterproof. Still, flare guns were meant to work in extreme conditions, and most guns would even fire underwater as long as the cartridge was completely sealed and the gunpowder inside was dry.
He unzipped the pocket, submerging for a second while he struggled. He hated taking the flare gun out underwater, but it didn't matter at this point. Either it would work wet or it wouldn't.
The whup-whup was almost gone. He couldn't see the helicopter, but knew they would soon be beyond eyesight. He shook the flare gun hard, shaking loose whatever water he could. His arms were so weak.
He pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
It didn't work. Then he realized that the trigger hadn't really moved. It had been hard to tell, since his fingers felt like ice. A safety. That had to be it! Even as another wave crashed over him, he felt around for a lever and found it on the left side. Yes! He clicked it forward with his thumb.
He aimed high and squeezed the trigger again.
This time there was a loud bang and a burst of smoke. The gun jerked back. A smoky streak of red sliced through the storm, bursting high above. The flare lasted a few seconds before the storm smothered it with all its fury. Gage searched the sky and saw the helicopter's blinking beacon. Would it turn?
For a few agonizing seconds the helicopter didn't seem like it would, then it banked hard to the left and swung back around.
Chapter 25
Five days later, Gage watched the sunset.
Ensconced in one of the leather chairs in the turret atop Alex's bed and breakfast, a glass of bourbon resting on his lap, he watched the sun sink underneath what was, finally, a tranquil ocean. It was a welcome change. There was a little choppiness, the waves like stuffing tearing through an emerald-green couch, and a few clouds that masked much of the vivid reds and yellows that painted the horizon, but the scene was nothing like the ceaseless turbulence that had been their companion for so long that people had started to wonder if the storm would ever end.
But it did, as storms always did. At least he had his bourbon to help see himself through it, though he usually nursed a single glass for so long it could hardly be called drinking. He felt the coolness even through the thick jeans, the ice already half melted. He didn't want to drink much. He didn't want to throw himself such an easy lifeline, not when there was so much stewing in guilt to do, not when he deserved to feel the full weight of his failure without anything to lessen the load.
"Dad?"
That was a voice he had not expected. He turned, expecting to see Zoe, his Zoe, the teenage Goth girl with the attitude, and was surprised when a young woman stepped into the room. Who was this tall, lean person in denim, white blouse under the designer jean jacket, black leather boots giving her height she didn't need, Ray-Ban sunglasses holding back her auburn hair? It was almost like he was seeing her for the first time in years, not weeks.
"Can I join you?" she asked.
"Of course. So good to see you."
"I told you I was coming."
"Yes. But you said Friday night. I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow."
"Um, it is Friday."
"Oh. Right."
He gestured to the chair next to him. She sat, the two of them transfixed by the sunset. Or at least he was. He was conscious of her repeatedly glancing at him.
"You okay?" she asked.
The concern in her voice was so genuine that he couldn't give his usual flippant answer. Everybody else who'd asked that question lately—the coast guard rescuers when they'd pulled him out of the water, the paramedics who'd met him when they landed, Alex when he'd picked him up in Florence—he could lie his ass off and just tell them what they wanted to hear. But not Zoe. He could still duck and weave, though. A good fighter, when the punches were coming too fast, could always duck and weave.
"I feel like shit," he said, "but I'll live."
"You certainly look like shit. Better than when I came down that first night and saw you in the hospital, but still like shit."
He'd forgotten she'd visited him in the hospital. Of course, he remembered almost nothing of the two days he'd spent there.
"Thanks," he said. "You're so kind."
"They could put you in an art gallery. 'Man Beaten to a Pulp.' People would pay a fortune."
"Keep going, you're doing well."
"Uh huh. But I can see how you're doing physically. Are you okay?"
"Like I said, I'll live."
She said nothing, smart enough to wait him out. Most people weren't. Most people had to fill the silence. She would make a hell of a psychiatrist, if that was the route she decided to go. The thought annoyed him. He didn't want her to be a psychiatrist. She should be an astronaut who went to Mars, a scientist who cured cancer, or president, and even those things seemed too small.
The sun was nearly gone, filling the room with a warm amber light. The western half of the hexagon was a series of floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a 180-degree view of the ocean. The back half was filled with bookshelves, giving the room the comforting smell of aging paper and stained walnut. The room was Alex's pride and joy, the reason it was called the Turret House Bed and Breakfast, and Gage was one of the few people—maybe the only one—who didn't need to ask if he wanted to spend time in it.
"I don't like failing," he said.
"I know."
"I failed Nora."
"I'm sorry."
Still, he didn't look at Zoe. If he looked at her now, he might lose it, and that wasn't going to happen. He took a drink and swallowed it all in one gulp. The burn in his nose, the warmth spreading across his face—it helped for a moment. But only a moment.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Zoe asked.
"Not really." And then he surprised himself by saying: "But this doesn't feel right. We're missing something. The police, the press—they've got it all wrong."
She was silent for a moment, maybe waiting for him, and when he didn't answer, she got up and went to the liquor cabinet. He heard her open the fridge. He watched her from the corner of his eye and saw her pour 7 Up into a glass and add nothing but ice. Same old Zoe. She might have a glass of wine during the holidays, but alcohol just wasn't her thing. He thought
about her parents, meth addicts whose only saving grace was that they'd died before they could screw up her life any worse, and felt another surge of anger. There was so much failure in the world. Failure all around.
"I only read one article," Zoe said, returning to the chair, the 7 Up still fizzing. "And Alex told me a few things. But I really don't know much about what happened."
That was it. She didn't tease him with something pat like "Tell me about it," or "I'm interested in your point of view," but it was still a tease. Yet even though he saw right through it, subtle as it was, it worked. He found himself talking without even making a conscious decision to talk.
He started at the beginning, from the night he met Nora, focusing on the things that unsettled him. He told her about the letter Nora had received from Ed Boone—or so they all thought at the time. Was it really from him? He explained the strangeness with the library typewriter. And what about the dog? If he loved Lady Luck so much, which he seemed to, according to Ron, why did he not even mention her in his will or his letter? If he'd made arrangements with Ron to take care of the dog whenever he was gone for long periods, why didn't he do so the night he committed suicide?
Then there was the text message, the night when everything went down. Who sent the text to Elliott? It certainly wasn't Gage. He said nothing about his repeated forays into the forest chasing ghosts. She was worried enough about him.
But the text. There was no denying the text. It was real.
"Didn't that other guy confess?" Zoe asked. "The one you got away from? I thought he said he sent the text just to psych you out."
Gage snorted. "Denny would confess to blowing up the World Trade Center if he thought it was what the police wanted to hear. He's got the brains of an inchworm."
"So who do you think sent it?"
"I don't know! That's the point. Somebody else was playing us like puppets, jerking our strings from a distance."
"But why?"
"Yeah. Why? That's what I don't know. But nobody wants to believe me. Even Chief Quinn told me the text seemed like something I would write, poking somebody in the eye like that."
A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 5) Page 28