Sea Fever

by Virginia Kantra

  “You have to tell Dylan,” Margred said.

  “I plan to.” Caleb’s voice was grim.

  “Where is Dylan?” Regina wanted to know.

  Caleb’s gaze switched back to her face, but she got the impression he didn’t actually see her. Story of her life, really. “Damned if I know.”

  Typical. Unreliable, typical male.

  “Reggie.” Caleb’s eyes sharpened. His voice was gentle. “Is there something going on? Is there a reason you want to hire this guy, this Jericho?”

  Yes. No.

  I could be pregnant. With your brother’s child.

  Definitely, No.

  She shrugged. “We’re really busy right now. I could use some help.”

  “Lucy,” Margred said.

  Caleb frowned thoughtfully.

  Regina shook her head. “I don’t need a waitress. I need somebody to do the dirty work.”

  “Lucy’s not afraid of work,” Caleb said. “Or dirt.”

  Margred nodded. “And she’s strong.”

  “On her college track team,” Caleb said with pride.

  “She’d make more money sterning for your father,” Regina felt obliged to point out.

  “Lucy hates the water,” Margred said.

  “Talk to her,” Caleb said. “I’ll tell her to stop by.”

  “That would be . . . good,” Regina decided. She smiled. “Thanks.”

  Caleb did not smile back. “Just take care of yourself.”

  Regina fingered the cross at her neck. “I’m trying.”

  With one eye on the clock and the other on the entrance,she tackled the evening prep, chalked the day’s specials on the board, boiled and boxed a dozen lobster orders for pickup.

  And every time a tall, dark man crossed the threshold, her heart jangled like the bell above the door.

  But it was never Dylan.

  Customers came and went, picking up orders of lobsters and pizza, lingering to chew over gossip or pasta in the dining room. Antonia came and went during the height of the dinner rush to help on the line. Nick came downstairs to bolt a meatball sub between the first and second features of a Chuck Norris movie marathon on TV.

  Dylan did not come.

  Maybe his conversation with his brother took longer than expected, Regina thought as she shut down the grill.

  Or maybe she had finally driven him away. She walked through the silent restaurant, her own words echoing in the empty space. “You try being responsible for somebody besides yourself sometime, and we’ll talk.”

  Well, fine. She flipped the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED.

  She didn’t expect anything else. From him, from anybody. If you learned not to expect things, you couldn’t be disappointed. She and Nick were fine on their own.

  Or they would be with a little help. Tomorrow she would talk to Lucy about working out the summer.

  She closed the register, counted bills and receipts. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty . . . Counted: September, October, November, December . . .

  Her baby would be born in April. If there was a baby. If the pressure deep in her abdomen was more than nerves and water weight.

  She lost track of the numbers, had to begin again. Twenty, forty, sixty . . .

  Wipe the tables, clean the case and counters, haul out the garbage, mop the floor. The routine should have steadied her, but her mind kept racing like a hamster in a wheel, circling round and round without getting anywhere.

  She was accustomed to planning and preparing, more comfortable with “What next?” than “What if?” Even the gamble of going to Boston at the age of eighteen had appeared to her practical mind as the next logical step in her chosen career.

  Yeah, and look how that had turned out. Every risk she’d ever taken, no matter how calculated, had ended in dead ends and disaster.

  Except for Nick. She was glad she had Nick.

  But God, oh, God, she didn’t want to be pregnant again.

  Fatigue pulled her muscles, settled in her bones. She returned from the Dumpster and headed for the mop sink, a cramped closet in an out-of-the-way corner.

  She flipped on the light. The mops jumped out of the shadows, skinny monsters with clumped and stringy hair. Regina leaned against the tiled wall, listening to the water hiss into the bucket and trickle down the drain.

  She couldn’t say what made her turn. A noise. A shadow. A tickle at the base of her spine . . .

  “Jericho!” The name whooshed from her, an explosion of breath, of annoyance and alarm.

  He blocked the work aisle behind her, skinny and stringy as the mops, and close. Too close. She could smell him, his clothes, damp with the outdoors, sour with sweat and the smoke from too many campfires.

  “He smells . . . wrong,” Margred had said.

  Yes.

  Her heart beat in her throat. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  But he did not move out of her way. She could shove past him. But touching him didn’t seem like a good idea. She didn’t want to commit herself to physical contact, to push him into violence. Skinny or not, he was bigger than her.

  The taste of adrenaline was flat in her mouth. “What do you want?”

  The job, she thought with sudden hope. Maybe he’d come about the job. Although now, with him looming between her and the door, didn’t seem like the best time to tell him she was thinking of hiring somebody else.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Listen, it’s late,” she said in what she hoped was a calm, rational voice. As if her tone could tug him back from whatever brink of crazy he was on. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow—” She wet her lips. In daylight, when there are people around.“— and we can talk about that job?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  He sounded sincere. Which, for some reason, made her knees tremble. Her knives were on the other side of the kitchen, like the phone, like the door.

  She couldn’t run away. Nick was upstairs.

  Should she scream? But if she screamed, Nick might hear and come down to investigate. Please, God, don’t let him come down, her boy, her baby. “Take care of yourself,” Caleb had advised, but he didn’t have an eight-year-old depending on him.

  Regina gulped and eased her hand around a mop. The handle was smooth and reassuring in her grip. “So, uh, can I get you something? A sandwich?” If she could reach the counter, if she could get to the phone . . .

  Jericho lunged.

  She jerked back. Swung. But she was too close, he was too close, the mop crashed into the wall and slid uselessly off his shoulder. She did try to scream then, but his hands closed hard and bruising around her neck, and it was too late.

  Nick, she thought. Nick.

  Too late.

  Jericho’s fingers pressed. Her vision grayed. She slammed her foot into his instep, tried to bring up her knee, clawed at his hands, his wrists. He grunted, his fingers slackening. She lashed out with hands and feet. He snarled and grabbed at her chest.

  Burning. She smelled burning. Spots spangled the darkness behind her eyes. Something stung the back of her neck. Jericho roared and threw her into the wall. Her head thumped once, and then his forearm pressed, an iron bar against her throat. Smoke filled her head, cut off her air.

  Air. She raked his arm. She needed . . .

  More sparks swam in the roaring dark, and then blackness swallowed everything.

  * * *

  Nick woke in front of the TV. His legs were cold. His cheek pressed against the carpet. Chuck Norris was gone, replaced on the flickering screen by some guy with a bunch of cars behind him, promising the best deal in town.

  Nick sat up slowly, rubbing his face. It felt late. His mom never let him stay up this late. Where was his mom?

  His mouth tasted funny. He stumbled to his feet and into the bathroom, took a pee, drank some water from the plastic cup.

  In the living room, he flopped down on the couch and thumbed t
he remote. Nothing was on. Just grown-ups, sitting and smiling, selling things. It must be really late. He squinted at the little blue numbers above the TV. 3:37.

  Nick got a funny feeling in his stomach. Had his mom just gone to bed and left him lying on the floor? Without a blanket?

  He got to his feet, more slowly this time, and shuffled to her bedroom door. She slept with it cracked. So she could hear him, she said, if he woke in the night.

  “Mom?” he whispered.

  No answer.

  So he said it louder. “Mom.”

  And again, “Mom.”

  He pushed the door open. The covers on her bed were flat and smooth. She wasn’t in it. Wasn’t there.

  “Mom?” Real loud, this time, which was stupid, she must be in the restaurant, she couldn’t hear him.

  Nick didn’t like to go downstairs at night, didn’t want to go out on the landing in the dark and the cold, down the iron stairs to the alley. The kitchen was really big and dark, all corners and shadows, and the windows out front didn’t have any curtains, so anybody walking by could see in.

  But his mom should be upstairs by now.

  He was mad at her because she wasn’t, and now he had to go downstairs, past the Dumpster, in the dark.

  What if something bad happened? What if she fell and couldn’t get up, like the old lady in the commercial, and he had to call for help, call Nonna or 9-1-1. Nick didn’t like to think about that, didn’t want to think anything could happen to his mother. But she should be here.

  He was shaking a little as he unlocked the door, as he crept out on the landing. He wasn’t afraid. He was cold. He stood on the landing a minute, getting up his nerve to go down the stairs, when a shadow slunk from the deeper shadows around the Dumpster.

  Nick’s toes curled on the rough, cold metal. Oh, jeez. Oh, shit. A rat. Nick hated rats.

  But then the shadow crossed into the moonlight of the graveled parking strip, and he recognized the bushy tail, the golden eyes. Hercules.

  So . . . okay. Nick drew a deep breath and ran down the steps to the cracked concrete, hopping from one foot to the other as he fumbled with the handle, as he yanked on the door. All the lights were on. Good. That was good.

  “Hey, Mom!”

  The kitchen was empty.

  His heart pounded in his chest, making it hard to breathe. “Mom? Mom?”

  But she wasn’t there.

  7

  CALEB STILL HAD NIGHTMARES.

  From Iraq, and from seven weeks ago, when he’d tangled with a demon. The Army shrink said the dreams would get better over time. In the meantime, he wrote Caleb a prescription.

  Caleb never filled it. He swallowed enough pills to handle the pain of his shattered leg; he wasn’t taking more to deal with nightmares. Now when he woke, heart pounding, brain searing, drenched with sweat, he reached for Maggie.

  But it wasn’t a dream that woke him this time.

  He rolled away from his wife and fumbled for the phone. “Hunter,” he said, keeping his voice low.

  Margred was already stirring, her warm, rounded body shifting under the covers, her hand finding the small of his back as he swung his legs out of bed.

  Antonia’s voice pierced the fog of sleep. Caleb listened grimly, a bad feeling in his gut.

  “I’ll be right over. Take him upstairs.” He sat up straighter. “No, don’t touch anything.”

  “What is it?” Margred asked as he crossed to the dresser.

  “Regina Barone.” Caleb tugged on a shirt. “She didn’t come home last night.”

  “She— But—” Margred’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

  Caleb sat on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  * * *

  More than an hour after his phone had rung in the dark, Caleb still didn’t know if he’d been called to a crime scene.

  Nothing in his initial walk-through suggested Regina was the victim of violence. No mark of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no ominous note to suggest suicide or kidnapping. No vandalism, no robbery. The previous day’s receipts were neatly totaled, the bank deposit bag in plain sight beside the untouched register. Everything was clean, everything— except for a mop lying flat in the work aisle— in its place. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that Regina was simply gone. Vanished. And until the state’s evidence team arrived to process the scene, Caleb had almost nothing to go on.

  He stood in the middle of the missing woman’s living room, a shabby space brightened by the red blanket over the back of the couch, the bits of green and gold sea glass hanging in the windows. The sun was just beginning to rim the edges with light.

  Caleb rubbed his face with his hand. It was going to be a long day.

  Antonia scowled. “I’m not taking that boy anywhere. I just got him down fifteen minutes ago.”

  “I doubt he’s sleeping,” Caleb said.

  He had spoken to Nick only briefly before going downstairs to rope off the perimeter, stretching yellow crime scene tape across the sidewalk in front and around the parking strip out back. And wouldn’t that give the early morning fishermen something to talk about.

  The boy had been crying but clear. He remembered the apartment door had been locked and the kitchen door unlocked but closed. No, he hadn’t seen his mother since dinnertime. After the movie. Seven? His big eyes sought Caleb’s for confirmation. Reassurance. “She’s okay, isn’t she?” he’d asked. “You’ll find her.”

  Caleb didn’t have the answer the boy wanted. “That’s my job,” he’d said gently.

  Antonia’s mouth set in a stubborn line. “Boy’s better off in his own bed.”

  “He would be,” Caleb agreed. “If I didn’t have to process the apartment.”

  “Why? You heard Nick. She never came home last night.”

  “We think she never came home. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from her things.”

  “What things?”

  He owed her an explanation. If not as Regina’s mother, then as his boss the mayor. “Address book. Cell phone records. Credit card statements. If we have a record of who she knows—”

  “Christ Jesus, Cal, we know everybody she knows. And we know who did this. That homeless guy, Jericho something. You need to go after him.”

  “I will,” Caleb promised. “As soon as I leave here. Right now I need you to take Nick back to your place and wait.”

  “Who’s going to open the restaurant?”

  “Nobody. You’re closed until I can release the scene.”

  Antonia’s hard mouth trembled. “You think she’s dead.”

  “I’m not assuming anything at this point,” Caleb said evenly. Kinder to keep what he hoped, what he feared, to himself. “Maybe she took a walk. Visited a friend. But I’ve got to process the scene while the potential for evidence is still there.”

  He didn’t tell her that anything he found was unlikely to narrow the field of suspects. There wasn’t a soul on the island who didn’t eat at Antonia’s, whose prints or presence couldn’t be explained away.

  “And what am I supposed to do? Besides go crazy?”

  “Make me a list. Anybody she talked to, girlfriends maybe, anybody who might have called her up in the middle of the night—”

  “Regina wouldn’t leave Nicky.”

  That’s what Caleb figured, too. “Can you think of anything else that might explain her disappearing for a couple hours? Drugs, alcohol, anything like that?”

  Antonia made a visible effort to pull herself together. “She drank in high school. Same as you and everybody else. I don’t know what she did in Boston. But if she got up to anything now, I’d have heard.”

  Caleb nodded. On the island, you started working young and drinking young. But if you had a problem, your neighbors talked about it. Caleb knew. He’d grown up the son of a drunk.

  “What about men? Boyfriends?”

  “She won’t have anything to do with the island
boys.”

  “That could cause hard feelings. She complain about anybody hanging around, giving her a hard time?”

  Antonia crossed her arms. “You mean, besides your brother? Why don’t you ask him where she is?”