by Sarah Graves
But I didn’t want to think about that. Whatever had hit downtown Eastport the day before was going to look like nothing compared to the damage that old cannon could do to a lot of fireworks watchers.
So I had to stop it. I just had to. Also:
“Ellie.” She paused. “Ellie, find out who’s driving the boat. Get control if you can.”
She nodded silently and vanished into the gloom while I slid along the deck toward the cannon, now only a few feet away in the near-darkness. The quarreling foursome still huddled amidships with their backs turned to me.
“You knew I was out there somewhere,” Lionel was saying to Amity Jones. “You could’ve saved me.”
From a life as a kid on the street in Manhattan . . . yeah, I guessed he could’ve used some saving, I thought as I scrunched myself against the Jenny’s transom where the cannon was mounted. Not too sturdily, I hoped, since all I had was that one screwdriver.
We were just off Eastport now, sliding past the end of the fish pier. In the lights from the end of it, the screw heads glinted.
“. . . could’ve gotten in touch with me,” Amity was retorting hotly to Lionel’s rebuke.
“Me? I didn’t even know you existed, I didn’t know anything,” he maintained, but she wasn’t buying it.
“Don’t give me that, when I called you knew exactly who I—”
“Is that true, Lionel? Did you really know all about us up here?” Karen Carrolton asked.
Her voice was very even and calm. Dead calm. Without wanting to, I remembered the chicken with its neck wrung in the yard of her little subsistence farm out in the puckerbrush.
“Keeping track of us, too, were you? Maybe even planning a little revenge of your own?” she asked mildly.
Four bolts inexpertly placed through the slots on the base of the cannon held the gun to the boat’s transom. Luckily, each bolt had a groove in its top so that in a pinch, a screwdriver blade could slot into it, and in the fish pier lights I could manage to see the slots.
Still shivering hard from the dunking I’d had earlier, I lifted the screwdriver. The Jenny had stopped, or at least the shoreline had quit sliding by, but I still felt the rumble of diesel engines idling from somewhere under the deck.
But never mind them, I told myself firmly; we didn’t have much time. Ellie had tied a wine-bottle cork on a string through a hole she’d drilled in the tool’s handle, so in case she dropped it off the boat, she could retrieve it.
Still shivering, I pushed aside the cork on its string and put the blade’s end into the slot on the first bolt head, and—
Splash! The screwdriver hit the water before I realized that I’d dropped it.
Shocked, I looked down at the water where the cork bobbed, far out of reach. Then I looked at my hand, still not quite believing that it was empty.
But it was, and what the heck was I going to do now?
Ten
“Psst.” The sound came from below me, down on the water where the screwdriver had vanished.
Which was ridiculous, there couldn’t be anybody—
“Psst.” But what the heck, this night had already gone nuts; what were a few disembodied voices among friends?
I leaned over the transom, trying not to go where the screwdriver had gone. The rope ladder that had given me so much trouble earlier still dangled there, and at the bottom of it—
“Hey!” Timmy Franco’s round freckled face beamed up at me. He was jockeying his rowboat in the backwash from the Jenny’s engine with some skillful jujitsu of those hand-built oars of his.
“You guys okay?” He grabbed onto the rope ladder.
“No! We’re not.” Behind me, the four murder-plotters—or that’s what I guessed they were, anyway; however much they wanted to deny it to one another, they sure sounded as if they’d done it all as a team—moved toward the hatchway.
This, I thought, boded ill for Ellie, still belowdecks somewhere. Another sound came from the water. I peered over the stern in alarm.
“Timmy, what’re you doing down there . . . oh, no. Oh, wait.”
But in the moment when I’d looked away, he’d tied his rowboat to a cleat in the Jenny’s hull and was halfway up the rope ladder, sure-footed and happy as a little clam.
“Hi, Jake!” He beamed at me over the transom, then hopped over it to crouch with me behind a stack of folded deck chairs.
“What’re we doing?” He hunkered down comfortably, hands clasped on his bent knees.
“Timmy, listen, I don’t have time to explain, but I need you to get back in your boat, get to shore real quick, and find Bob Arnold. Or—Timmy, you don’t have a phone on you, do you? A cell phone?”
He’d had one the other day, out on his boat. But it was too much to hope for that he had one now; even if the phones turned out to be working again, Tim was the opposite of the modern constantly-device-equipped person.
His idea of “online” was a fish on a hook with a frying pan not far behind. But then he surprised me, producing a cell phone from his pocket. I thumbed the on button.
The screen lit up, and Timmy grinned. “Good, huh? Cheap little Walmart special, but it works.”
“Very good,” I agreed, flinging an arm around him and hugging his shoulders. “Tim, this is wonderful.”
“Thanks,” he uttered shyly as I punched in Bob Arnold’s number.
Nothing happened. Behind me, Tim fiddled at something with the screwdriver I’d dropped, because of course he’d grabbed it up out of the water.
I dialed again: nothing. “Come on, come on. . . .”
This time the call connected and the phone at the other end rang.
“You’ve reached the City of Eastport police department. Please hold, or if this is an emergency please dial . . .”
Which meant that Bob was so busy, he was sending all his calls to the dispatcher. Then the phone itself went dead.
“Argh!” I whispered, not quite hurling the thing into the drink. Now I would have to go down that rope ladder, which was approximately the last thing I felt like doing, and maneuver my way into Tim’s boat, which was the other last thing I felt like doing.
But things were too fraught to let Timmy do it, so getting to shore and finding Bob Arnold was my only option. Or at least I thought it was one until I spotted Tim’s rowboat floating away from where it had been tied to the Jenny.
Before I could think about what this meant, all the deck lights snapped on. Blinking in the glare, I sank behind the deck chairs and yanked Timmy down with me.
“Keep quiet,” I whispered.
“Look,” Timmy murmured in reply, nudging me, and I poked my head up just as Amity Jones, Karen Carrolton, and Willetta Beck trooped up through the hatchway and out onto the deck again.
“I know I heard something . . . ,” Amity Jones muttered, peering around suspiciously. With the lights on, she didn’t need a flashlight anymore, and she was coming our way.
“Come on.” When Amity turned her back, I grabbed Tim by his sweatshirt collar and hustled us both up and over the boat’s transom and onto that damned rope ladder, again: me first, and then he got the idea and followed.
“Where’s Ellie?” he wondered aloud softly.
I wondered it, too. Also, Lionel was missing from the group, and when I recalled the verbal dustup he’d had a little while ago with his half sister, Amity Jones, I felt uneasy about him.
And I still didn’t know who was at the helm of this floating gun-wagon. I mean, somebody must be driving, but the probable candidates were all right there in front of me, not at the helm.
Halfway down the ladder I paused to catch my breath. That’s how I noticed, behind the ladder, the four round brass-ringed holes in the Jenny’s stern, each about three inches across.
“Gun ports,” said Tim interestedly, not seeming to understand our neck-deep peril.
They were where all the earlier gunfire had come from, I realized as he went on. “Somebody did a nice job of installing . . .”
; Yeah, installing enough firepower to level a city, which still worried me, even though the gunports—and the cannon—were now all aimed out at the water, not at Eastport.
A chain rattled distantly; then came a familiar-sounding splash. It was the anchor, I was pretty sure. So we’d be staying awhile, even though from where I clung I could hear the boat’s big engines still rumbling quietly.
In case a fast getaway was required, maybe? Come to think of it, I’d have liked one of those myself. But unless I engineered one of them, it wasn’t going to happen; I was fresh out of ideas.
And now as if to put a sour cherry on an already inedible cake, I saw why we’d stopped with the boat’s stern and guns facing the bay:
That’s where the target was. “Tim?” I managed faintly. “Tim, is that boat I see out there the one for the . . . ?”
“Fireworks,” Tim finished for me. “It sure is, only it’s not a boat, it’s a barge.”
The fireworks for the pirate festival that Wade and Sam would be working on tonight, and George, too, probably.
“Must be about time for ’em,” Tim said. “Got a lot of explosives on there, wouldn’t be safe try’na light ’em from a fishing boat.”
Right. But the barge wasn’t going to be safe either, if . . .
A mechanism inside the gunports whirred, startling me so I just about leapt off that rope ladder; as it was, I was swinging one-handed for a minute there.
“Yeeps,” I said, gripping the hemp rungs again.
Out on the water, the dim forms of men moved around on the barge. Mostly they were Eastport fellows, some who used explosives at their jobs on the logging crews and others like Wade and Sam who’d helped out every Fourth of July for years and knew just what to do.
Meanwhile, the tide, the breeze, and the currents had conspired to float Tim’s little watercraft out past the breakwater’s end, but now it had drifted back nearer to us again, just not quite near enough.
“Tim, if I snag it, could you get back into your own boat?”
It bobbed tantalizingly only a few feet from the rope ladder’s bottom rung. I could grab it, I thought, but only if I—
There. One hand on the rope ladder, one foot swung out to give myself a little more reach . . .
And then the wet scrap of rope was in my hand, which would’ve been fabulous if only my foot hadn’t chosen that moment to slip.
“Hang on, I gotcha.” Tim scampered down that rope ladder like he’d been born to it, seized the back of my sweatshirt in one hand, and heaved me up past his own body onto the rungs above him.
I clung there, shaking. He’d snatched the rope as I went by, and he still had it. Down in the water his small boat waited patiently, an air of reproach seeming to cling to it as if it wondered why he’d let go of it in the first place.
“How . . . how’d you do that?” I quavered when I could speak again.
Which of course was not the big question right now, but it was the only one I could think of.
“What?” He looked puzzled, briefly. But then: “Oh, you mean. . . hey, I’ve been tossing lobster traps overboard an’ haulin’ ’em back up since I was a tadpole.” He brushed off my amazement at his strength.
Then he let go of the ladder himself and dropped down into his boat. “But I better get goin’ now and try to find Bob Arnold for you, don’t you think?”
Oh, boy, did I ever. “Yes!” I hissed, and in the next moment he was rowing silently away from Jenny, out of sight—leaving me alone there, clinging to a rope ladder in the dark, while out on the water that barge carrying all the fireworks might as well have had a glow-in-the-dark bull’s-eye painted on it.
You could, I supposed, miss it from here; the cannon wasn’t exactly a precision instrument in the target-hitting department.
The other guns, though—the ones inside the Jenny’s gunports. I still didn’t know what they used for ammunition, but whatever it was, they shot a lot of it and they shot it fast, to judge at least by the damage they’d already done to downtown Eastport.
And now not only was the fireworks barge in range but all of Water Street would soon be filling with spectators for the fireworks display, which was why I had to do something even though I had no idea what, and Ellie was still on the Jenny somewhere, too . . .
Trapped, maybe. Needing me to come and get her. So I reluctantly unclamped one hand from the rope ladder, hauled myself upward, then unclamped the other hand and repeated the process.
At last I reached the top rung and peered over the transom—no one was on deck, again—then climbed over it past the cannon.
If I’d known how to operate it, I’d have made it inoperable, but I didn’t. So instead I crept down onto the deck and across to the hatchway leading below. With my back flattened to the hatchway door, I looked right and left, unsure which way to go.
To the foredeck where the anchor chain must be? If I hauled up the anchor, the Jenny would drift and those guns wouldn’t be lined up anymore with their intended target.
But if that happened, somebody onboard would do something about it. Drop anchor again, probably, and we’d be back where we’d started.
On the other hand, if I went below looking for Ellie, I could get caught there and that would be . . . let’s just call it equally unhelpful.
While I wavered, out on the water the barge revved its engine, the men aboard her knowing from past years’ experience where to position the barge for maximum fireworks visibility. I scanned around for something I might use for a weapon, but there wasn’t anything: no boat hook, no broom handle, not even a hatch cover to clobber somebody with.
But then, wait a minute, I thought. A sailing vessel—
The sails, wrapped tight around the Jenny’s masts, were canvas with metal grommets set into their edges at intervals. No way could I ever get one of them down alone, even if I could think of something useful to do with it.
Which I couldn’t. Where there were sails, though, there were probably . . .
Extra lines. Or ropes, as landlubbers like me still called them. But as I thought this, the women returned to the deck, popping up out of the hatchway as I shrank from it and dropped into a crouch.
This time they didn’t turn the deck lights on, probably because the shore was filling with fireworks spectators and the women didn’t want to be seen.
“You’re sure you know how to fire that cannon?” Willetta Beck was asking Amity Jones worriedly. “So we don’t get blown up ourselves?”
“Don’t you trouble yourself about it,” snapped Amity over her shoulder as she strode to the old weapon on the stern. “You’d be amazed what you can learn just by Googling it.”
Fat chance, I thought. Looking it up online was one thing, but actually managing to fire an antique weapon was something else, especially if you didn’t want to blow your face off.
Still, in this world dumb luck makes up for a lot of ignorance, I’ve noticed; thinking this while feeling around, I found a handle to one of the boat’s built-in storage bins along the rail.
The women were still looking the other way. The handle turned, and the bin cover lifted, and inside was . . . rope! Neat coils of the softest, flexiest, easiest-to-manipulate nylon rope I’d ever handled.
Before this bunch got ahold of her, I thought, somebody must have really liked the Jenny a lot. Which raised another question, one I’d puzzled over before. But never mind, I thought again. Amity Jones was getting ready to fire that cannon, so there was no time for strategy or a rescue mission, not by Bob Arnold or anyone else.
This cockamamie plan was going to work, or else—
No. Don’t think about that, either. Just . . .
Just don’t.
* * *
I slipped through the dark hatchway and hurried down a short corridor past a couple of tiny cubicles like the one we’d been kept in earlier, each with a pair of narrow bunks and a single porthole. Next came the galley, and now I saw why the cabins were so small: to make room for an expanded food preparati
on area.
Stove, oven, fridge, even a chest freezer were cleverly positioned to use up as little space as possible; pots, pans, and serving implements hung on hooks, and plates were lined up on edge in slots on a shelf near the ceiling.
The whole place looked smart, efficient, and very professional; photogenic, too, with its stainless steel surfaces and teak trim, and those foot-friendly rubber mats on the floor.
This made me even more suspicious about whose boat the Jenny might be. Or might have been. At the passageway’s end, three carpeted steps led up to another door, this one with a window in it.
And through the window: fuel gauge, battery indicator, switches for lights and pumps . . . It was the Jenny’s helm, where all the controls and instruments were located, as well as the steering.
I couldn’t see who was at the wheel. I tried the door handle: locked. I had a moment to wonder why it was locked, and then somebody touched me on the shoulder and I nearly passed out from fright.
It was Ellie. Behind her, Lionel stood sullenly rubbing his wrists.
“Amity Jones can’t tie a knot worth a darn,” Ellie said with a grin, holding up a length of clothesline.
“Yeah, well, it was tight enough for me,” Lionel grumbled. “And she must’ve wrapped it a million times around my wrists before she yanked it.”
“Yes, well, you know what they say: If you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot,” Ellie replied mildly.
Right about then, I felt like tying one end around my waist and the other to the anchor and jumping overboard; if I was lucky, maybe some kindly shark would come along and put me out of my misery.
“How are you, anyway?” she added, peering at me.
“Terrible,” I said, which was putting it mildly. By now my head felt as if someone was in there where my brains were, hammering their way out. “But come on, we’ve got to be quick.”
We went back up on deck, where from out on the barge, men’s voices carried across the water as they laughed and joshed with one another now that the fireworks preparation was finished. Amity Jones and her two aunts were near the boat’s stern, conferring.
We still didn’t know who was running the Jenny. But maybe we wouldn’t have to....