by Sarah Graves
“Stretch this rope out,” I told Lionel quietly, handing him a coil of the stuff I’d found just before I’d gone below.
Because I had a wild idea. “Run it back and forth across the deck,” I told him. “That’s right, just lay it down there. Make each length parallel to the one before, and a foot or so away.”
He did as I asked, and then I got Ellie criss-crossing a set of rope lengths in the other direction. Moments later a loose web of soft, pliable strands lay neatly arranged on the deck’s surface, like the diagram for a game of tic-tac-toe.
The women were still all huddled together by the cannon bolted to the stern. “What are they waiting for?” Lionel whispered. “And . . . you do know they’re planning to fire that cannon, right?”
He waved at the hashtag pattern made of ropes, spread out on the dim-lit deck between the mast and the cabin hatchway. If you didn’t know they were there, the ropes were almost invisible in the gloom.
But I could see them, and to me they looked just like what they were supposed to be: a trap, like the one they’d laid for us. Because as Ellie had said, we were getting too disruptive, I supposed, too likely to trip them up somehow. But now . . .
“I’ll bet they’re just waiting for the real fireworks to start,” Ellie said. “So the explosions will cover the cannon fire.”
That’s what I thought, too. If it took a while for people to figure out what was happening, it would be just that much longer before anyone tried helping the guys on the barge, who were the actual targets now.
“But why?” Ellie added. “I mean, why would they have anything against the Eastport fireworks committee?”
Lionel’s answering laugh came out a soft snort. “They don’t. I heard all their plans before they decided I wasn’t on their side.”
He looked out at the dark water. “It’s not those guys they want to hurt. It’s everyone else. Like the aunts said, the ones who broke my mother’s heart twenty years ago and didn’t investigate her death. And their . . . their descendants, too, I guess.”
“Hmph,” said Ellie. “We’ll see about that.” She turned to me. “What are we waiting for, anyway?”
I wasn’t sure how I’d become the leader for this little adventure. But... “Patience,” I said.
Onshore, more people crowded along the path above the boat basin and out onto the breakwater. Many had little kids in their arms or perched on their shoulders, eager for the fireworks display to begin.
I didn’t see Bella, Mika, or Ephraim, or my dad’s skinny figure, either. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Finally:
“Okay, you and Lionel go over there,” I told Ellie, waving them both to the far side of the deck.
It was almost time. “Okay,” I whispered, “each of you pick up an end of rope. That’s right, one at each corner.”
Out on the barge, a lighter flickered briefly, then went out. One of those long-nosed barbecue lighters, I supposed; no sense having to stick your hand right in there with the explosives to light them.
Meanwhile, near the cannon, the women’s voices grew urgent. From what Wade had said, firing an antique cannon was tricky, and I hoped they’d give up before trying it despite Amity Jones’s confidence.
But no such luck. “I’ll do it,” Amity Jones said.
What they wouldn’t have known was how to load the thing; too bad Wade had prepared the weapon after cleaning it. So the cannonball, explosive charge, and a fuse to light it all up were already in there, ready to go.
Amity lit a match. Out on the barge, somebody lit that barbecue igniter again, too, the tiny fire flickering in the dark.
Onshore, the crowd’s excited murmuring increased until it was audible even way out here on the Jenny.
“Get ready,” I heard Amity Jones say.
Get ready, I mouthed to Lionel and Ellie, who each held a rope end. I held one also, and I’d tied the fourth to a cleat on the rail so that the ropes lying on deck were the equivalent of a net, and now I meant to catch someone in it.
Several someones. . . . Amity stepped forward to light the fuse on the cannon, and—
Brring! A bright musical trilling erupted from my back pocket.
What the . . . ? Brringgg!-brringg!
It was the phone Tim Franco had given me. I grabbed reflexively for it, but the three women gathered by the cannon had already heard it; they rushed toward us.
Which had been my plan all along, actually, although the phone hadn’t been. So here goes nothing . . .
“Pull!” I yelled, and Ellie and Lionel did. So did I, whereupon the rope trap we’d set up on deck tangled niftily around the ankles of the three murderous plotters hurling themselves at us.
Too bad that even after Lionel had abandoned them, there was still another one.
* * *
“Hello, Jake.” Timmy Franco’s freckled face appeared in the cabin hatchway opening. Then the rest of him emerged, crossed the deck to me swiftly, and seized my wrists in his strong hands.
The next thing I knew, I was on my back with my hands tied.
“Sit up.” Ellie and Lionel were tied, too, lying there on the hard deck right beside me.
“Mmph,” I said, wincing, then lurched up as I remembered:
Wade. Sam and George and the rest, on the fireworks barge . . .
The crowd still massed on the shore; out on the water, the barge loaded with the equivalent of who knew how much dynamite—
Enough to kill them all, surely . . .
—still floated peacefully. “Tim, why?”
He smiled sadly. “Why do you think? Or did you think that when I get old and poor, even poorer than now, you’ll take me in to live with you and your family?”
He finished the knot he was tying around my ankles. “So you’ve been on the boat all along?” I asked. “And after you gave me the phone and rowed away . . .”
He nodded. “Came right back again. You were busy, so I just kept out of sight behind you.”
The same way we’d stayed behind the three plotting women: in the dark, we just hadn’t seen him.
“And by the way,” he added, “in case you’re wondering, that rope ladder you’re probably counting on, to escape?”
A mischievous grin spread on his face. “Kaput,” he pronounced, waving toward the Jenny’s stern where it now lay in a tangled heap.
“But Tim, how will you ever—”
Get away? I meant to finish, but he took a different meaning.
“Live with myself?” A bitter chuckle escaped him. “Jake, for a guy like me, the question’s a lot simpler than that. It’s, like, how will I live at all.” He shook his head sadly. “Everybody in Eastport thinks the same as you. ‘Good old Tim, never has a dime but he’ll get along somehow. He always does.’”
He checked the knots at my wrists. “But you know, winter’s coming again, and I don’t think I can spend any more nights sleeping rough,” he finished. “I just don’t think so.”
Back by the cannon, the women had regrouped to complete their evil deed. But now it seemed the fuse wouldn’t light.
That, or it had lit and then fizzled out. And I knew from hearing Wade discuss it that it was risky business, lighting a too-short fuse. To do it, you had to get really close to the cannon, and when it went off—
Boom! An explosion split the night. I thought my heart might jump right out of my chest.
But it wasn’t the cannon, which still hunkered stubbornly unfired back on the Jenny’s stern. Instead a bright-white chrysanthemum with a crimson center bloomed on the dark sky, its fiery tendrils twining.
“They’ve started,” Ellie murmured while Lionel looked daggers at Tim. We were tied up with enough of that loose rope to braid a—
A ladder. Which of course I couldn’t do, or anyway not on such short notice. But . . .
Wait a minute. You can climb a rope ladder. But you can also climb a—
You could climb the rope itself, I realized desperately, and more to the point right now, you c
ould slide down one. That is, if you really had to. And Tim would’ve tied his own boat to the Jenny again when he came back aboard, right?
So it was down there, probably.
“Ellie! Lionel!” I kept my voice low; somehow I had to get them onto their feet and following me, and they had to do it fast.
“Come on, hurry!” Because we weren’t being rescued; Tim hadn’t ever gone to alert Bob Arnold. Those guys on the barge weren’t being saved, either, or any of the people onshore.
Not unless we saved them. Not to mention ourselves.
“Move!” I said urgently. Tim had gone back to the helm, and now was our chance.
I leaned over the rail. Just as I’d thought, Tim’s little boat bobbed down there, tied securely this time; that floating-away stuff had just been a ruse to keep me from suspecting him of anything.
The water was still just as dark and cold, though, and it was just as far down as it had been, before. Oh, it all just looked impossible. But we did have one thing in our favor:
After tying us up with the loose ropes that had been all over the deck, Tim hadn’t cut off the surplus.
That left a long stout line with . . . yes! A loop already at the end of it. We couldn’t do what I was hoping for without one, and I couldn’t have managed tying it with my own wrists still bound together.
Ellie and Lionel watched, not understanding, while I scooped the loop-end up in both hands and dropped it over another of the cleats on the Jenny’s rail.
“Okay, it’s tight,” I said. We’d already gotten our ankles out of their bindings by yanking and wiggling; painfully, and with the loss of a fair amount of skin, but we’d managed it. “Now we just need to untie our hands somehow.”
“Oh, is that all?” Ellie said skeptically, but Lionel turned his back to me.
“Pocketknife. In my back pocket.” My annoyance with him faded slightly, even more when the knife turned out to be sharp.
So I dealt with the ropes: clumsily, but he’d been too hurried to put our hands behind our backs before tying them, so I managed that, too.
“All right now, Lionel, you go first,” I said, “and when you get down there, steady the boat. Hurry!”
He looked at me like I was nuts. “Are you kidding? I can’t—”
One of the women huddled by the cannon lit another match. In a minute they were going to kill my husband and my son.
And then they’d kill us. “Lionel, if you don’t go over that rail right this instant, I’ll beat you unconscious and throw you over.”
My cheery tone must’ve convinced him. He scrambled over the rail, surprising me with his agility, and in a moment despite his fears he was in Tim’s boat.
“Now you.” Ellie looked doubtful about leaving me, but: “Go on,” I urged her, “I want someone down there with Lionel right away.”
Because he must know that despite his apparent change of heart, he’d be in custody soon while everything got sorted out by the police—and depending upon how it got sorted, for a long time afterward.
“He’s clever,” I told Ellie, “and if he gets away from us, he’s gone. And this last part I need to do might take me a minute.”
Which was a lie; the truth was, I wasn’t convinced I could do it at all. In fact, I was pretty sure I couldn’t—and I didn’t want her stuck here with me if I got caught.
She looked suspicious. But there was no time to argue, so she did it: over the side, down the rope, quick as a little monkey.
A glance told me she’d made it. Now it was just me against them. I wouldn’t have the stomach to do what I’d planned by using the knife, though.
Some things—like not being able to stab people with a pocketknife, for instance—you just know about yourself.
So I guessed I’d just have to do the rest of it the hard way, with my hands.
Eleven
I crept toward the stern, keeping to the shadows and ducking behind the deck chairs, when Amity Jones glanced around, getting almost within slugging distance.
Out on the water, the barge fired off three bright white flash-bangs and an enormous pinwheel, lighting the whole sky; I froze, waiting for darkness again, then eased forward a little more as Amity Jones fired up another match.
She was still trying to light that cannon. If she succeeded, the fireworks barge—with my husband and son on it, plus a lot of other Eastport fellows—would go up like a gunpowder factory.
And after that... “Tim knows what to do?”
It was Willetta Beck. I thought again how uncertain she sounded, as if this was all against her better judgment.
Amity, by contrast, sounded pleased with herself. “Oh, he knows, all right. He got this boat all the way up here from Portland, and once this part is done, he’ll haul the anchor again and bring us back around so our stern faces town.”
I listened in horror. So that’s what Tim had been doing during his week away from here. And those smaller guns, I realized, the ones installed belowdecks with their ports set into the stern . . .
That’s why the Jenny would be coming around: to fire them at the crowd onshore, one that by now included Mika, and my grandson, probably. And Bella and my dad. Everyone . . .
Fright flooded me, and with it came new determination. I had to stop this now . . . if I could. And if not—well, if not, then my life wouldn’t be worth a hill of beans anymore, anyway.
So before I could talk myself out of it, I clenched my hands together, raised them over my head, and stepped up quickly behind the three women making their ghastly revenge plan.
Maybe I couldn’t overpower all three of them at once, but I could disorganize them, and right now that’s all I really wanted.
To make this work, I’d have to clobber one from behind, then hurl myself at the other two, bowling them over. Okay, now: One, two . . .
Not quite believing that I was doing it at all, I brought my two fists down hard on the back of Amity Jones’s head. It felt as hard as an anvil, but—
“Oof,” she uttered quietly, and dropped as if shot. Behind her, Karen Carrolton and Willetta Beck gaped in surprise.
But their startlement wouldn’t last. I stepped back, gathering myself to charge, putting my head down and hunching my shoulders . . . and then I heard it: a soft, purposeful-sounding sizzle.
“Oh, holy criminy,” I heard myself saying, and backed away fast.
Amity Jones must’ve finally got the fuse lit just before I hit her. And now that it was lit, there was no way to put it out, or not any that I knew.
Which meant that in moments Sam and Wade would be dead; Ellie’s husband, too—blown to bits when the fireworks barge exploded. And all because I’d failed. I’d been so glad to see Tim Franco when he showed up, it simply hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why I was seeing him.
But now it was obvious: it was what he’d been hired for, to run the Jenny while she was in Eastport and probably to pilot her out of here in the confusion after the mayhem happened. Even who she’d belonged to was starting to become more obvious: that well-equipped galley I’d seen had been built for just one person—but there was no time to ponder that, either.
The fuse sizzled hotly, a small, spitting red dot in the night’s gloom. Then it stopped, and the two women still standing nearby peered down curiously at it, probably to see if it had gone out.
But it hadn’t.
In the next instant a bright orange flash erupted around the cannon as the gunpowder ignited and a thunderclap smacked the world senseless. It smacked me, slamming me back hard against those heaped deck chairs and out of the way of what happened after that: the whole cannon flew backward, whizzing past me sputtering flame, just missing the Jenny’s mast to crash straight through the hatchway doorframe.
The hatchway collapsed on itself. Smoke spewed in black billows through the debris, and somewhere an alarm began honking. Frantically I looked over the rail for Ellie and Lionel, too stunned to think of anything else.
I didn’t see them. Here on the Jenny, all th
ree women who’d been plotting mass murder moments before now lay crumpled on the deck near where the cannon seemed to have ripped loose from its bolts, propelled by the gunpowder blast.
But they were all moving, and when I staggered unsteadily over to them, I found that the cannon hadn’t hit them; they were just stunned.
Behind me the smoke from the demolished hatchway thickened ominously, tinged with yellow flame, and unless I was mistaken the deck had begun slanting . . .
Then I realized: The Jenny was sinking. I crouched by the women. “Are you all right? Can you get up? Because we’ve got to . . .”
I couldn’t hear myself, and as for that crouch, it was more like a collapse.
Kids, don’t try any of this at home.
“Listen, all of you, we’ve got to get off this boat.” Hurriedly I turned Willetta Beck over onto her side so she was facing me.
Her mouth moved soundlessly. Then her eyes rolled back, becoming white. In the dark they were all I could see, and what they looked like is yet another thing I urge you not to try experiencing for yourself: yikes.
Even worse, though, was the sight of the shoreline when I looked up, because it was moving again.
We were moving. Also, the deck began vibrating with a distant mechanical chatter: Those smaller guns, I realized suddenly. The ones built into the Jenny’s stern. The gunports Tim Franco and I had climbed past and that he’d commented on....
Tim’s at the helm, and he’s turning the boat so he can fire those little guns at—
At everyone onshore. And when I say little, I only mean compared to the cannon.
Ellie appeared in the smoky gloom on deck. I jumped away, then recognized her.
“What’re you doing? I thought you were—”
“Never mind, come with me,” she urged. “Once it tips far enough, this boat’s gonna roll, and we don’t want to be here for that.”
Yeah, no kidding. And she’d scrambled back up that rope to save me, hadn’t she? Gratitude welled up in me, even though I didn’t have a lot of time to spend luxuriating in warm-and-fuzzy feelings.
“What about them?” I waved at the women still sprawled on the deck, then noticed that Amity Jones wasn’t with them.