Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut

by Sarah Graves

  “Hardly anyone but locals know about it, so I’d slide in among the other boats and keep the sails down. No one’s going to be there to notice, and in the dark you look just like everyone else, anyway.”

  Around us now the tides and the currents were converging to produce a sort of washing machine effect. I hoped we’d get out of it before the spin cycle began. But I couldn’t say anything about it; I was too busy hanging onto the rail to work any muscles other than the ones in my fingers.

  Besides, she already knew. A biggish wave hit us, and another. “This,” she uttered grimly, “is how pirate ships ended up on rocks.”

  Not what I’d wanted to hear. But then a few minutes later—it only felt like an hour to me—“Okay, that’s the end of that,” she said with a sigh as we cleared Buckman’s Head and the waves calmed.

  The next thing we saw was the cargo port complex—buildings and piers and storage warehouses—and on the water the massive shape of the Star Verlanger, the ocean-going cargo ship that Wade had piloted in the day before.

  Ten stories high and lit up like a city, the big vessel bustled with rumbling, beeping industrial activity: tall cranes; pallet loaders; and, on the ramp leading down to it, trucks hauling flatbed trailers carrying containers the size of railroad boxcars.

  In the hubbub we slipped by unnoticed, easing past the port and into the quiet cove beyond. Waves lapped our sides, slop-slopping as we slid along. An anchor chain clanked softly somewhere in the gloom, and a mooring ball bumped grittily against the prow of a vessel that had been made fast to it.

  Then suddenly small boats were everywhere, floating so thickly around us that I could’ve jumped from deck to deck. But:

  “Ellie, I don’t see—” In the distant, fog-diffused glow from the Star Verlanger, these boats all looked alike.

  She didn’t reply, just moved the throttle up a hair, sneaking us in between an old Chris-Craft cabin cruiser and a battered skiff.

  “Where?” I demanded, squinting, but then I spotted the Jenny, smaller than I remembered but still just as ominous-looking with her portholes dark and her black sails wrapped tightly around her mast.

  I wouldn’t have noticed her if I hadn’t been looking carefully. I was about to whisper something about how Ellie had been right about that when suddenly she let out a string of expletives so creatively chosen and well arranged that my mouth just sagged open the rest of the way in surprise.

  “Take the wheel,” she snapped, then dropped us into reverse briefly before switching the key to off. Next, she dropped anchor and trimmed the engine up so that the propeller was out of the water.

  Finally she scrambled past me to the stern once more and then out into the little well between the deck and the engine mount.

  “Come on, don’t do this to me,” she breathed, peering out over the water at something I couldn’t yet see.

  Which did not increase my confidence. Meanwhile, we were approaching that big mooring ball I’d heard scraping, and now at last I spotted the beat-up little skiff I’d seen, sliding toward us fast.

  The skiff hit us. “Damn,” I said, “so much for stealth.”

  “Jake! Get back here! Grab that grappling hook!” Ellie gestured urgently at a long pole I’d thought must be part of a fishing rod.

  It wasn’t. “But . . .” I still didn’t get what was going on.

  “We snagged that skiff’s mooring line. Hook the skiff so it can’t get away,” she said, and when I’d done so she leaned over our boat’s side, flailing at the skiff’s rail with the curved end of the long-handled grappling hook.

  After drawing the small boat even nearer, she tumbled off our stern down into the little vessel. “Do not,” she uttered darkly up at me, “let go of that hook.”

  So I didn’t, but even at anchor our boat badly wanted to go one way and that skiff wanted to go the other. Now crouched in the smaller boat, Ellie fought to haul the snagged line away from the propeller.

  Finally, the line inched grudgingly up from where it was caught under the prop, and then I really was the only thing keeping the skiff from floating away with Ellie still on it.

  “Ugh,” I said, as my arms seemed to stretch like the rubber-band extremities on animated cartoon characters.

  Gasping, Ellie clambered halfway up out of the skiff. “Okay,” she exhaled, which was when the grappling hook’s wet shaft slipped through my hands and the skiff slid away very suddenly.

  “Uh, Jake?” she managed. Her top half was on our boat, but her legs were still in the departing skiff, which now that it was freed of our propeller seemed seriously to be making a run for it.

  “Ellie, come on,” I urged desperately, reaching out for her as the skiff kept pulling away.

  “Oof!” she replied, hauling herself ineffectively, so I let go of the hook, grabbed her with both hands, and pulled hard. She rolled the rest of the way into the boat.

  Which should’ve been the end of it. But now the boat hook was floating away. It was a very nice boat hook, and I hated the idea of losing it, so I leaned down and snatched at it, and in my hurry to retrieve it I must’ve misjudged the distance in the dark.

  And that’s how I fell in.

  Falling into the dark, frigid water of Skeleton Cove was like a punch in the throat, a sledgehammer to the chest, and blast of liquid nitrogen applied to the rest of my body. At once I was so cold, I could barely move.

  But in a few minutes I wouldn’t be able to move at all, I knew from the safety lectures Ellie had given me. So with my squinched-shut eyes stinging with salt water, I grabbed blindly at what I hoped was the Bayliner’s swim ladder hanging off the back of the boat.

  I’d missed it twice by the time Ellie noticed that I’d gone overboard; trying to yell had only produced a sickly gargling sound and distracted me from the more immediate project of not drowning.

  When she did notice, she moved swiftly to toss me a life ring. I stuck an arm through it, and she hauled me closer until I could manage to clamber up the swim ladder and over the transom and then at last get back into the boat.

  That ended the situation’s drowning potential. The freezing part of the program, however, turned out to be more long-lasting.

  “Oh. My. G-goodness.” I was shivering so hard I was sure whoever was on the Jenny could hear my teeth chattering.

  If anyone was. But there was still no sign of any activity on the dark vessel, now just a few hundred feet from us. No lights, no sound . . . She floated like a shadow with the lights from the distant cargo dock glimmering faintly on the waves around her.

  “Don’t talk.” Ellie tore the life jacket off me and hustled me below, into the Bayliner’s little cabin. Luckily we kept dry clothes there, and in a few minutes I was dry, too, drinking more hot coffee and toweling my hair.

  But I couldn’t stop shivering. My hands kept on shaking, and I didn’t dare speak, because I knew whatever I said wouldn’t make a lick of sense, as Bella would’ve put it.

  And the icy lump of fear in my chest wouldn’t dissolve, either. Finally, though, I went back up on deck and found Ellie just sitting there staring at the Jenny with her cell phone in her hand.

  “What, are you going to call them?” I waved at the dark vessel. “Tell them we’re here and to turn the porch light on for us?”

  She looked up, pleased to see me moving around and talking. I didn’t tell her that my head felt like it might explode, because why bother? My headache was the least of our worries, and anyway she couldn’t do anything about it.

  “I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to board that boat. Secretly,” she added.

  I sat beside her. “Look, it’s been a good attempt, but maybe we should just go. . . .”

  Home. Not only was I nearly at the end of my rope physically, but every time I thought I understood one half of whatever was going on, the other half went haywire on me.

  Ellie wasn’t about to give up, though. “Do you know where your husband is?” she asked. “And mine, too, and probably even
Sam?”

  “In bed, sound asleep?” I replied hopefully

  Or in Wade’s case, sitting up watching the late-night sports shows and waiting for me to get home. I hadn’t spoken with him in hours, I realized with a sudden pang of guilt.

  But Ellie was already shaking her head. “Remember all those little boats we saw a little while ago, jockeying around to get a good place for watching the fireworks show?” She didn’t let me answer. “They were out there because the show’s on for tonight, word about it must’ve gotten around, and that means . . .”

  “Oh no,” I uttered as what she was saying finally got through to me.

  Because it meant Wade was out there. I hadn’t been thinking clearly enough to realize it earlier, but every year he was part of the crew that fired off the fireworks canisters from a barge just off Eastport.

  And if he went, Sam would go too, probably, and Ellie’s husband, George, as well, if he hadn’t already left for Bangor when he heard.

  “Once he heard the show was on, George would go out and get the girls from the slumber party, too, wouldn’t he?” I said, feeling a thrill of horror run through me.

  “He wouldn’t want them to miss it,” she agreed, holding up the phone. “I tried to call them, but nobody’s answering.”

  Of course they weren’t. If the men were anywhere near the barge-load of fireworks right now, their phones were off; theoretically there was no danger, but Wade was in charge of safety and didn’t want the tiniest spark from a phone or anything else near the explosives.

  “No one at your house is answering, either,” Ellie said, “and now the phone service is getting spotty. So . . .”

  Oh, Lord; Bella loved fireworks. They might’ve all bundled up against the night’s chill and headed downtown, where they’d be right in the line of fire if any should occur.

  Which I was fairly sure it would; sure, the Jenny was here right now, but it wouldn’t take her long to get back over there and into menacing position.

  “Try the radio?” I suggested. “The Coast Guard, or call 911?”

  She sighed heavily. “Tried ’em both, but the radio’s finally crapped out, I’m afraid. It won’t go on at all, and 911 dispatch says one of those drones they’ve been flying around downtown just hit the comm tower on High School Hill.”

  The comm tower was the way everyone’s cell phone signals got routed around here; our island was too remote to use the tower on the mainland. I must’ve made a face.

  “Right,” she responded bleakly. “Phone service is iffy until they get someone to go up the tower and fix it.”

  So maybe that’s why no one answered the phone at home . . . or it’s what I told myself, anyway. But the way things were going around here I didn’t feel optimistic about that.

  “Meanwhile, we’ve got about an hour left to do something about all this,” Ellie went on. “After that . . .”

  Right. I glanced at the time on my own phone. The fireworks would start at midnight if they kept to the original schedule as I expected they would, and by now it was 10:45.

  “Ellie, does the Jenny have a swim ladder like the Bayliner’s, d’you suppose?”

  I didn’t know for sure what was going to happen in an hour and fifteen minutes if we didn’t manage to intervene somehow, but the more I thought about it, the more I was betting on kablooie.

  “Yes, I think I saw a ladder. But getting on isn’t the problem, you know,” said Ellie. “Our getting over there without them noticing is the problem.”

  I understood. The quiet thrum of our engine coming in here very slowly had been one thing; I could imagine them not hearing that. But the var-ROOM of the outboard’s startup was hard to miss.

  And if this was indeed a trap, the last thing we wanted was to meet their welcoming committee.

  “So what if we just floated up to them?” I said. “Quietly.”

  Ellie frowned, her face pale and unreadable in the moonlight. “You mean . . . but . . . oh, I see. Just—”

  I jumped up. “Yup. Tide’s rising, now. See it all going by us? And it’ll carry us along, too, if we let it.”

  On the water, clumps of seaweed with driftwood tangled in them sailed serenely by on the incoming current, moving swiftly toward the innermost inlets of Skeleton Cove.

  And toward the Jenny. “Because you’re right,” I said, “we need to get on that boat. If we don’t, whoever called us on my phone is going to do something bad. I don’t think they were lying about that.”

  Ellie got up, pacing the deck in the near darkness. “I’m not sure how close I can get us with no engine. It’ll be dicey.”

  But moments later she was scrambling out onto the foredeck to haul up our anchor. Ripples streamed silently against our hull as we began drifting on a slow, stealthy collision course with the Jenny.

  * * *

  “Ellie?” I whispered.

  Ahead, the sailboat loomed gloomily like a ship out of a dark fairy tale.

  “I’m here,” she whispered from out on the Bayliner’s foredeck, where she hunkered. “I’ve got to be ready to drop the anchor again at the right moment, so we get close enough and stay there.”

  That gave me pause. Her hauling up the anchor and our getting going at all had been such an important moment—

  Adrift! Dark water! Collision course!

  —that I hadn’t thought too much about the stopping part.

  But of course there would be one, and as the Jenny’s black hull drew rapidly nearer I spied Ellie leaning out with the anchor in her hands. The tide ran fast here, and we’d closed the last few dozen yards swiftly.

  “Ellie, look out, we’re going to—”

  The anchor splashed. Too late, though. Bracing myself, I gripped the rail and hung on.

  “Um, Ellie?” Because any instant we’d be slamming into—

  But we didn’t. Instead our vessel stopped forward-motioning with a jarring lurch and began to swing around until we were nestled flat alongside the Jenny’s stern. Her shiny gold name’s elaborately curled script gleamed high above our deck, and above that two round white life rings hung from her stern rail.

  There was still no sound from her. No handy escalator or elevator from our deck to hers, either, unfortunately. In fact, I did not see any swim ladder, which would’ve made the whole thing much easier.

  I squinted puzzledly, trying to figure out how we were going to get aboard. Then a new thought hit me: Maybe we couldn’t. Maybe we’d have to give up in defeat, and instead of this harebrained adventure we’d just have to come up with something else.

  Personally I believed I could think about it much more usefully while standing in a hot shower, but—

  “Jake.” Uh-oh. “Jake?”

  That didn’t sound good. It didn’t sound bad, exactly, but . . .

  “Jake, come on out here.”

  I climbed up and out onto the foredeck, where Ellie still perched somewhere, stepping carefully since it was dark here in the shadow of the Jenny.

  “Where are you?” I whispered, peering.

  “Here,” she said, and then I saw her and wished I hadn’t, because what she was doing was what I was going to be doing very soon unless a lightning bolt struck me—at the moment I’d have definitely preferred one—and what she was doing, exactly, was this:

  With her sneakered feet balanced precariously on the rail of our own vessel, she was holding on with both hands to the lower rung of a rope ladder hanging down off the stern of the Jenny.

  Which raised my suspicions at once, even aside from the bolt of sheer fright that the sight of that ladder shot through me, so intense it was like an out-of-body experience.

  “How’d that get here?” I said, partly to postpone the whole idea of me being on the ladder; oh, I just loathed the notion.

  “Because if they just now threw it over,” I said, “it means they really did know we were coming, and that means . . .”

  “Yup. Like I’ve been saying.” Ellie nodded grimly. “Probably a trap. Now, stead
y my legs,” she added, adjusting her grip on the ladder dangling from the Jenny’s stern.

  I hurried to comply. Falling in at all would be bad enough, I knew from my own unhappy experience, but if she did it here, she’d be stuck between the two vessels.

  I wrapped my arms around her jeans-clad calves.

  “Not so tight.” Her whole body swayed with the movement of the two boats, and I felt her feet slip.

  “Ellie!” I cried in alarm. Then both her legs wriggled suddenly out of my grasp and she was gone, scrambling away from me up the rope ladder in the dark.

  “Come on!” she called softly to me from above. “You can do it!” But then, “Oh, I think there’s someone . . . Jake, hurry!”

  “Yeah, right,” I muttered, still hesitating. But if I stopped to think about it much longer, I would never manage it, and I couldn’t let her down, I just couldn’t.

  So I took a few deep breaths and crawled up onto that rail, and then I just kept on going, damn it, not stopping until I stood with my hands over my head, swaying wildly while grabbing for the ladder.

  It dangled elusively as the water and the boats moved, first one way and then the other. Snatching at it, I staggered scarily, then regained the vestiges of balance that I could and snatched at it again.

  This time the rough hemp strands of the rope brushed my fingers, then slipped through them. Teetering, I grabbed for it one more time, and this time I caught it.

  “You’re doing great!” Ellie called softly, her face showing pale from high above me on the Jenny.

  Wade did this all the time, transferring from the pilot boat to a waiting cargo ship so he could pilot the big vessel into port. People do this, I recited to myself, and I am a people, therefore I can—

  I put my left foot out, settled it onto a rung. The Jenny moved away from me. Or possibly I leaned away from it.

  But for whatever reason, now my right foot was on the ladder’s rung and my left was still solidly on the Bayliner’s rail, with me in the air between them.

  Also, one hand was still waving around. Then my left foot lost contact with the Bayliner.

  All I needed was an eye patch and a sword clenched in my teeth and I’d have fit right in with the pirate festival, boarding this dratted boat. Struggling, I swung my free hand back around to the rope ladder but it kept moving....