by Sarah Graves
Moving a lot. Then from the corner of my eye I spied why: that cargo ship we’d passed on our way in here was easing away from the dock, deck lights blazing so that it resembled an inverted chandelier shining in the night.
And the ship’s massive movement was creating waves; big ones, now rolling into Skeleton Cove.
Grimly, I grabbed for the ladder again with my right hand, then felt my left one slip. Oops . . .
The fall took a long instant. Then icy water surrounded me. The terror I felt was nearly as bad, and when I finally came up, gasping and choking, I found I was about to be crushed between the Jenny and the Bayliner’s hull.
That stuff about your life flashing before your eyes is true, by the way. Meanwhile, I learned suddenly that when I have to, I can swim pretty fast.
But I couldn’t do it for long. Suddenly I was out from between the two vessels, no longer about to be ground to a pulp between them. Also, though, I was still floundering, gasping, and splashing.
And to make things even worse, I’d taken off my life jacket when I’d changed out of my wet clothes and hadn’t put it back on. So when the round white life ring sailed down out of the darkness at me and smacked onto the waves, I latched on to it so hard that I thought my arms might never unbend.
Which in the next moment turned out to be a good thing, since the life ring immediately rose up off the water again, as up there Ellie pulled hard, and went on rising with me hanging on to it for dear life.
Meanwhile, I was once again (a) wet, (b) scared witless—some say the witless part is just my natural condition, but never mind—and (c) chilled to the bone yet again. In moments I found myself level with the boat’s rail and then toppling over it, onto the Jenny’s deck.
“Oof,” I said quietly, blinking in the gloom.
No one peered back. “Hello?” I whispered, still ice-cold but beginning to feel hopeful. Maybe we really had sneaked onto the . . .
From the darkness behind me two hands swooped, snatching the life ring away. A rope looped around me so fast that I couldn’t stop it, lashing my arms to my sides.
“Up,” said a voice. A woman’s voice . . .
Darn. Glumly I struggled to my knees, then rocked back onto my feet and managed to stand up; not gracefully, mind you, and not even on the first try, but I did it.
Dim deck lights were burning now, so I could see that the boat was much larger than I’d thought, with a long, wide deck area and the black-sail-wrapped mast sticking up in the middle of it.
A wet bar had been set up near the hatchway to the cabins that must be belowdecks; deck chairs, folding tables, and shade umbrellas were attached by bungee cord to cleats set into the rail, along with more flotation devices and some flat-topped wooden barrels that I thought might be used as food-serving stations.
In other words, this place was . . . but I didn’t have time to finish that thought.
“Walk,” said the figure holding me, and I didn’t have much choice about that, either, so I obeyed once more: straight ahead across the Jenny’s shadowy deck, through the small open hatchway gaping ominously, and down a set of steps—there were three of them and they were carpeted, I recall that part very clearly—into the dark.
On the bottom step, I thought about turning and running, getting back up onto the deck somehow and yelling . . . but the cargo port and the cargo ship departing from it were too far away for anyone to hear me.
And anyway, before I could do any of those things, someone came up from behind me and bonked me on the head with something.
I saw stars, then nothing at all.
* * *
When I came to, I was in a small paneled cabin with a porthole, a pair of side-by-side bunks, and a wooden straight chair. I was on a cot, trussed up like a cartoon heroine who is about to be tied to the railroad tracks. And I had the headache that ate Chicago.
“Hey.” It was Ellie, propped in the chair, tied around the waist just like I was but otherwise okay.
“Hey, yourself.” I wiggled experimentally, but of course there was no slack in the rope binding my arms to my sides.
“We’re underway,” she said.
Moving, she meant. The Jenny was going somewhere.
“So I guess it was a trap after all,” she said.
Yeah, and it worked. Oh, terrific.... Sucking in a deep breath, I sat up; good heavens, that hurt.
My head, my arms, my chest . . . groaning, I swung my legs over the cot’s edge and tried to stand so I could see through the porthole.
But instead my knees turned to jelly, and I sat down hard again, this time on the floor.
And I was so cold. “Jake!”
I rolled over and struggled back up onto my knees. “Wha?” My mouth wasn’t working too well, either.
“Come closer,” she urged. “And turn your back to me.”
“Urk,” I replied, but she kept nagging at me until I did it.
“Now, hold still,” she said.
Her forehead bumped the middle of my back. “What are you . . . ?”
But then I got it; she had the knot in her teeth and was trying to loosen it. Finally, she created enough slack in the ropes.
“Oh,” I moaned, rubbing my arms, but then I got right to work, too, and moments later she was free of her own bindings.
And she was ripping mad. Ellie stomped to the slatted wooden door of the little cabin—two narrow bunks, a tiny washstand, two reading lights, one for each bunk—and yanked on it.
Locked. Of course. “Oh, give me a break,” she said disgustedly.
She grabbed the wooden chair and smashed it against the door until the slats broke, then reached through and unlocked the door from the outside.
“Ellie,” I breathed, “shouldn’t we at least try being quiet? I mean”—I babbled on as she hauled me out through the demolished door—“from everything I’ve ever heard about sneaking around, one of the first rules is that you need to be very, very—”
“Jake,” she grated, “I know. I really do. But what we need most right now is to be up there on that deck.”
“Huh?” We reached the hatchway we’d been hustled down through. On the other side of its door, slatted like the cabin’s, a battery lamp burned low, its sullen orange glow seeping between the slats.
I put my face to the slats. Beyond it, the lantern shone upward through the murk onto the faces of three people hunched forward.
The deck lamps had been turned off again. The night was silent. “We need to be out there, to find out what they’re up to,” Ellie said.
She had a point. Besides, down here they could trap us again; they knew the boat’s whole layout and we didn’t.
“Tying us up and stowing us away now doesn’t mean they won’t kill us later. It just means they haven’t done it yet, maybe because they’re busy getting ready to do something else,” she added.
Right again; something not good. “There’s not going to be anywhere to jump to, either,” I agreed, “no place where we can make the swim to shore until we get wherever they’re going.”
At this point I had a fairly good idea of where that might be, too, because looming behind the dim-lit figures on deck, a familiar shape hunkered. A black shape, blocky below and round above . . .
It was the cannon from my garden shed, the one that Wade had cleaned on the back lawn and that Sam had put on the porch so as not to hit it with his lawn mower. Where it could be seen from the street, and had been stolen, and under the circumstances there was no point to stealing it, I thought, unless someone meant to . . .
Voices approached. “Quick!” Ellie whispered as we slipped out through the hatchway door onto the shadowy deck and hustled behind one of the big wooden barrels positioned against the Jenny’s rail. Lashed there, because you sure wouldn’t want that thing rolling around loose when you hit rough seas, especially if it just happened to have a tray of canapes and some champagne flutes on it....
The thought prodded my brain again. Why was this boat set up for food servic
e? Because clearly it was, but right now I had more urgent questions to ponder.
Like whether we would survive this. Crouched in the gloom, we held our breaths as the three shapes that had been huddled around the lantern gathered at the rail. Then a fourth person popped out of the hatchway from which we’d just emerged.
“They got out.” It was Amity Jones. Angrily she stalked toward the figures at the rail, gripping a flashlight.
“Well, look for them.” I recognized Willetta Beck’s voice. “They can’t be far, can they?” She sounded shaky but determined.
The others stepped forward, wincing when the flashlight’s beam crossed their faces: one was Lionel, Henry Hadlyme’s unacknowledged son, in skinny pants and a down jacket. Beside Lionel stood Karen Carrolton, with her thick gray braid and coal-dark eyes, wearing a dark sweatshirt, pants, and boots.
What the heck?” Ellie murmured beside me.
“Yeah,” I agreed, startled at the sight of all of them together on the Jenny. “I guess murder’s a team sport now.”
The important word being team: none of them could’ve done it alone, I realized, any more than I could’ve run my whole household by myself. Together, though . . .
Lionel spoke. “Listen, ladies,” he began hesitantly. “I’ve gone along with all of this so far. So don’t get me wrong, but—”
Amity Jones turned smoothly. “Oh, what shouldn’t we get wrong, Lionel? The fact that this was all your idea in the first place?”
His mouth dropped open. “My idea? What’re you talking about, you were the one who—”
“Children.” Willetta Beck’s voice cracked like a horsewhip. “Find them, please. You can quarrel later.”
Lionel stomped over and leaned against the barrel we were crouching behind, his posture rebellious. After lighting a cigarette, he blew its pale smoke into the chilly night. “Find them yourself.”
He flicked the match over his shoulder. “Killing Henry was one thing. He deserved it. But the rest of this—”
The match landed in my hair, which fortunately was still wet, and have I mentioned that I was freezing to death?
“We said we’d help you if you helped us, Lionel.” It was Karen Carrolton this time. “That was the deal, remember? Or are you saying now that you want to back out?”
She stepped forward menacingly. Lionel shrank a little but held his ground.
“I’m saying Henry’s dead. That’s what we all wanted. This stuff about getting revenge on Eastport, too—”
“Is none of your business,” said Amity Jones.
I’d almost forgotten she was a cop, but her service weapon glinting in her shoulder rig reminded me, a stray flashlight beam bouncing off its blue-steel grip.
Oh, great. I nudged Ellie; she sighed minutely, nodding to let me know she’d seen it, too. So even if we did jump . . .
“Henry was just the half of it,” said Willetta Beck. “What he did to your mother was criminal. Not just leaving her in the lurch the way he did, but turning the town against her.”
She turned to Amity Jones, who was going around the deck poking that damned flashlight beam at every shadowy place. Soon she’d reach the one we were hunkered in.
“He told everyone she was crazy, hysterical, that she needed to be in care. An institutional,” Willetta emphasized, “care facility.”
“Which by that time she practically was, what with the way he’d lied to her and then abandoned her,” Karen put in. “He even told her that if he went away and made good the way he planned, he’d be back.”
That flashlight beam bobbed worrisomely nearer. Lionel flicked his cigarette over the rail.
“I know all this,” he said impatiently. “So he got to look like the hero, leaving in hopes of being able to provide for his family—”
“When all he really wanted was to chase fame and fortune,” Amity Jones finished for him, turning away just as the flashlight was about to invade our hiding place. “Not for her, for himself.”
“Fine, like I said, I get all that,” Lionel retorted. “I’ve known it all along. But what did the rest of Eastport do to any of you that was so bad?”
Karen Carrolton’s reply was even colder than the water around us. “Nothing. They just believed him. Everyone did. It’s why she couldn’t get a job here, or a place to live on her own. They all believed she was crazy.”
“It’s why,” Willetta Beck added softly, “no one investigated her murder. They just assumed she’d committed suicide, and that was that.”
The seas beneath us got rough again suddenly; by now we were coming back through the cross-currents around Buckman’s Head toward the boat basin and the lights of downtown Eastport.
“Fine,” Lionel said. “I get that. And I understand why Amity is involved, too.” His voice softened. “Funny how I’ve gone so long thinking I had no family. Then I found Horrible Henry—that’s what I’ve been calling him—and now I find out I’ve got a sister.”
Somebody switched some deck lamps back on again, I didn’t see who. I looked from Lionel’s face to Amity’s, seeing as if for the first time: Of course.
Two peas in a pod, as Bella would’ve said, and never mind the different fathers they’d had; I should have seen it sooner, only she wore so much makeup that I couldn’t have.
Wore it deliberately, maybe, so nobody would guess. “But now that I do know, I’ve got to live with all this somehow,” Lionel said. “With whatever really happened to Henry,” he added carefully.
Too carefully, I thought, as after a moment Amity spoke up. “I’ve known who Henry was all along,” she told Lionel. “I’ve known because Aunt Will and Aunty Karen had told me about him.”
Lionel leaned back hard against the barrel, which to my amazement didn’t shift—not quite. My heart settled back down into my chest.
“After our mother Anna Benoit died, her mother died, too,” Amity said. “So I had no one. But Karen and Willetta took charge of me and eventually sent me to a convent school in Bangor.”
“So you’re my . . . my aunts?” Lionel questioned the two older women. “My mother’s sisters?”
They nodded together. “When Amity phoned us to say Henry was on his way to Eastport, of course we were interested,” Willetta said.
“And after she got you two on board with her plan, that’s when she called me.” Lionel went silent, working it out in his head; then his voice rose angrily. “You’d known about me, too? Where I was and what I was doing?”
“Yes. But there wasn’t anything that I could do about—”
“He took me to Manhattan,” Lionel cut in harshly. “Stuck me in a private orphanage where he was working as a cook’s helper so he could pay his way through culinary school.” He sucked in an angry breath. “By the time I was eight, I’d run away. Somehow I latched on to a documentary photographer who was doing a series on the characters who hang out in Penn Station.”
Ellie nudged me, a squint of puzzlement on her face. A thought had just struck her. Me too, suddenly, as the Jenny went on making its way through the bounding waves around Buckman’s Head.
“Guy wasn’t a creep, by some miracle. He started letting me do errands for food and a place to sleep. Pretty soon I knew the darkroom chores, too, and I could pack his kit: film, lenses, lighting gear.” Lionel sighed. “And the rest is history. A few years later when I applied for a job on the Eat This! podcast team, Henry interviewed me. And he didn’t even recognize me.”
But Lionel had known Henry. An unpleasant chuckle escaped him. “I’d kept track of him, you see,” he added in a voice that made me glad it hadn’t been me he was keeping track of.
Behind us, the hatchway we’d come out of gaped darkly; if we got down there again unnoticed, maybe we could find a better hiding place.
“I’m sorry,” Amity said, hearing the hurt in Lionel’s tone. “I’m sure that he wouldn’t have known me either.”
Again with the careful talk. She didn’t want to admit that she’d seen Henry up close at all before h
e died.
“Anyway, let’s find them,” she said, changing the subject. She meant me and Ellie. “If they’re overboard, good riddance. If they’re not . . .”
She drew a finger across her throat, and considering what else she’d apparently been up to lately—I still didn’t understand all of it but what I did know was bad enough—that was enough for me.
“Hurry,” I murmured to Ellie as we backed up toward the hatchway opening on our hands and knees.
“Right,” she muttered. She knew by now, too, that somehow Amity Jones was at the dark heart of all this.
Whatever this was. Inching backward, my shoes bumped against the hatchway’s threshold. Beside me, Ellie stopped also.
“What?” I whispered.
“Look.” Ellie pointed with her gaze at Wade’s cannon, mounted on the boat’s stern. All it needed was a lit match.
And as my friend had just realized, we couldn’t leave it like that. “Ellie, d’you still have the big screwdriver in that satchel of yours?”
The satchel had been hanging from around her neck when she had climbed the rope ladder. Although the tool wouldn’t still be in it, of course; I’d had to ask but there wasn’t enough good luck in the world for that big screwdriver to still be—
Without looking she plunged her hand down into the bag—it had been tossed under one of the bunks in the cabin when our captors tossed us there earlier, and fortunately they’d been too careless or distracted to notice it when they left us, so Ellie had found it again—and came up with the screwdriver. Big, chunky handle, thick, steel shaft, sharp-edged blade . . .
She passed it to me.
“The right tool really does make all the difference,” I said, feeling a bit more hopeful, suddenly. They hadn’t yet dumped us overboard, after all, so we were ahead in that department at least.
Ellie crept backward yet again toward the open hatchway while I made my way toward the stern and the cannon mounted on it. Mounted with screws, I hoped—with heads that this screwdriver would fit. If it didn’t . . .