Sketching out the background in two or three brief paragraphs, he attached transcripts of a few of his grandfather's most obscure documents, asking her to search for any additional material on St. Michael's Sword she could find.
He signed off, then turned to the small packet he'd grabbed from his mailbox that morning: the September issue of JAMA; a flyer advertising a spaghetti dinner at the firehouse; the latest issue of the Gazette; a small cream-colored envelope, without name or stamp.
He opened the envelope and recognized the handwriting instantly.
Dear Malin, I don't quite know how to say these things to you, and sometimes I'm not so good at expressing myself, so I will just write them as plainly as I can.
I've decided to leave Clay. It's something I can't avoid any longer. I don't want to stay here, growing more bitter and resentful. That would be wrong for both of us. I'll tell him after the protest ends. Maybe then it will be a little easier for him to take. No matter what, it's going to hurt him terribly. But I know it's the right thing to do.
I also know that you and I are not for each other. I have some wonderful memories, and I hope you do, too. But this thing we almost started is a way of clinging to that past. It will end up hurting us both.
What almost happened at Squeaker's Glen—what I almost allowed to happen—scared me. But it also clarified a lot of vague ideas, feelings, that had been knocking around in my head. So I thank you for that.
I guess I owe you an explanation of what I plan to do. I'm going to New York. I called an old friend from the Community College who runs a small architectural firm down there. She offered me a secretarial job and promised to train me in drafting. It's a new start in a city I've always longed to see.
Please do not answer this letter or try to change my mind. Let's not spoil the past by something stupid we might do in the present.
Love, Claire
The interisland telephone rang. Moving slowly, as if in a dream, Hatch picked up the receiver.
"It's Streeter," came the brusque voice.
"What?" said Hatch, still in shock.
"The Captain wants to see you in Orthanc. Right away."
"Tell him I'll—" Hatch began. But Streeter had hung up and there was nothing, not even a dial tone, on the line.
Chapter 37
Hatch stepped over the last series of ramps and bridges to the base of Orthanc. The newly installed ventilation housing rose up above the Pit: three massive ducts that sucked foul air out of the depths and ejected it skyward, where it condensed into great plumes of fog. Light from the Pit itself spilled into the surrounding fog.
Stepping forward, Hatch grasped the ladder, then climbed to the observation railing that circled Orthanc's control tower.
Neidelman was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the tower was empty of anyone except Magnusen, scanning the sensor arrays that monitored the loads on the timbers in the Pit. The sensors were banked in rows of green lights. Any increase in strain on one of the timbers, the slightest shifting of a brace, and the appropriate light would turn red to the shrill sound of an alarm. As the bracing and buttressing had continued, the alarms had steadily decreased in frequency. Even the bugs that perpetually plagued the island's computer systems had, in this case, seemingly been ironed out. The complex placement of sensors that had its beginning in Wopner's last hours was now complete.
Hatch moved to the center of the room and gazed through the glass porthole into the Pit below. There were numerous side tunnels and shafts that were still extremely dangerous, but they had been marked with yellow tape and were off limits to all but the remote mapping teams.
A gust of wind blew the plumes of fog away from the Pit's mouth, and the view cleared. The ladder array plunged downward, three gleaming rails from which numerous platforms branched. Radiating out from the array was an extraordinary pattern of titanium struts. The visual effect was breathtaking: the polished struts, struck by countless lights, threw sprays of light around the mossy shaft, reflecting and re-reflecting the welter of titanium, stretching down into infinity.
There was a complex pattern to the struts. That morning, Neidelman's crew had been hard at work replacing the missing members of Macallan's original bracing with additional titanium members, following St. John's specifications. Other struts had been added, based on the results of a computer model run on the Cerberus computer. They might be ready to begin digging the final fifty feet to the treasure chamber by the end of the day.
As he stared into the brilliant depths, still struggling with the reality of Claire's letter, Hatch noticed movement: it was Neidelman, ascending in the mechanical lift. Bonterre stood beside him, hugging herself as if chilled. The sodium-vapor lights of the Pit turned the Captains sandy hair to gold.
Hatch wondered why the Captain wanted to meet him there. Maybe he's got a canker sore, he thought bitterly. Actually, he wouldn't be surprised if it did turn out to be health-related. He'd never seen a man work so hard, or go so long without sleep, as had Neidelman during these last days.
The Captain swung up to the staging platform, then climbed the ladder into Orthanc, his muddy boots marking the metal floor. He faced Hatch wordlessly. Bonterre stepped up onto the deck, then entered the chamber behind the Captain. Hatch glanced at her, then tensed suddenly, alarmed by the expression on her face. Both were strangely silent.
Neidelman turned to Magnusen. "Sandra, may we have some privacy for a moment?"
The engineer stood up, walked out onto the observation deck, and shut the door behind her. Neidelman drew a deep breath, his tired gray eyes on Hatch.
"You'd better steady yourself," he said quietly.
Bonterre said nothing, looking at Hatch.
"Malin, we found your brother."
Hatch felt a sudden sense of dislocation, almost as if he was pulling away from the world around him, into a remote and shrouded distance.
"Where?" he managed.
"In a deep cavity, below the vaulted tunnel. Under the grate."
"You're sure?" Hatch whispered. "No chance of mistake?"
"It is the skeleton of a child," Bonterre said. "Twelve years old, perhaps thirteen, blue dungaree shorts, baseball cap—"
"Yes," Hatch whispered, sitting down suddenly as a wave of dizziness passed over him, leaving his knees weak and his head light. "Yes."
The tower was silent for the space of a minute.
"I need to see for myself," Hatch said at last.
"We know you do," Bonterre said, gently helping him to his feet. "Come."
"There's a tight drop down a vertical passage," said Neidelman. "The final cavity's not fully braced. There's a certain danger."
Hatch waved his hand.
Shrugging into a slicker, stepping onto the small electric lift, descending the ladder array—the next minutes passed in a gray blur. His limbs ached, and as he gripped the lift railing his own hands looked gray and lifeless in the stark light of the Pit. Neidelman and Bonterre crowded in at either side, while members of the bracing crews looked on from a distance as they went past.
Reaching the hundred-foot level, Neidelman stopped the lift. Stepping off the metal plate, they crossed a walkway to the mouth of the tunnel. Hatch hesitated.
"It's the only way," said Neidelman.
Hatch stepped into the tunnel, past a large air-filtration unit. Within, the ceiling was now braced by a series of metal plates, held up by a row of titanium screw jacks. A few more nightmare steps and Hatch found himself back in the octagonal stone chamber where Wopner had died. The great rock lay against the wall, seemingly undisturbed, a chilling memorial to the programmer and the engine of death that destroyed him. A twin set of jacks still braced the rock at the place where the body had been removed. A large stain coated the inside of the rock and the wall, rust-colored in the bright lights. Hatch looked away.
"It's what you wanted, isn't it?" Neidelman said in a curious tone.
With a tremendous effort, Hatch willed his feet forward, past the stone, past the rust
-colored stain, to the well in the center of the room. The iron grating had been removed and a rope ladder led down into darkness.
"Our remote mapping teams only started working the secondary tunnels yesterday," Neidelman said. "When they returned to this vault, they examined the grating and calculated the shaft beneath it intersected the shore tunnel. The one you discovered as a boy. So they sent someone down to investigate. He broke through what seems to have once been some kind of watertight seal." He stepped forward. "I'll go first."
The Captain disappeared down the ladder. Hatch waited, his mind empty of everything but the chill breath from the well before him. Silently, Bonterre took his hand in hers.
A few minutes later, Neidelman called up. Hatch stepped forward, bent down, and gripped the rails of the narrow ladder.
The well was only four feet in diameter. Hatch climbed down, following the smooth-walled shaft as it curved around a large rock. He stepped off the bottom rung, sank his foot into foul-smelling ooze, and looked around, almost drowning in dread.
He was in a small chamber, cut into the hard glacial till. It had the look of a cramped dungeon, massive rock walls on all sides. But then he noticed that one of the walls did not reach the floor. In fact, what he thought was a wall was a massive piece of dressed stone, hewn square.
Neidelman angled his light beneath the stone. There was a dim flash of white.
The pulse pounding at his temples, Hatch took a step forward, then bent down. He unhooked his flashlight from the harness and snapped it on.
Jammed beneath the stone was a skeleton. The Red Sox cap still hung on the skull, clumps of brown hair peeking out from beneath. A rotten shirt clung to the rib cage. Below was a pair of ragged dungaree shorts, still attached by a belt. One bony knee peered out from the denim. A red, high-top Keds sneaker covered the right foot, while the left was still trapped behind the rear of the stone, ground into a rubbery mass.
The distant part of Hatch could see that the legs and arms were massively fractured, the ribs sprung from the breastplate, the skull crushed. Johnny—for this could only be Johnny—had fallen victim to one of Macallan's traps, similar to that which killed Wopner. But without the helmet to slow the movement of the rock, death had been much quicker. At least, Hatch could always hope so.
He reached out, gently touching the brim of the cap. It was Johnny's favorite, signed by Jim Lonborg. Their father had bought it for him on that trip down to Boston, the day the Red Sox won the pennant. His fingers moved down to caress a lock of hair, then traced the curve of the mandible, past the chin to the crushed rib cage, along the arm bones to the skeletonized hand. He noticed every detail as if in a dream: distant, yet with that peculiar intensification that sometimes occurs in dream, every detail etched into his brain with jewellike clarity.
Hatch remained motionless, cradling the cold, birdlike bones in his own hand, in the sepulchral silence of the hole.
Chapter 38
Hatch swung the Plain Jane's dinghy past Cranberry Neck and into the broad, slow reach of the Passabec River. He glanced over his shoulder as he angled the boat closer to shore: Burnt Head lay three miles behind, a reddish-colored smudge against the southern horizon. The late summer morning air held a chill that was pregnant with the promise of winter.
He kept the little engine running hard, concentrating on thinking about nothing.
As the river narrowed and became less tidal, the water grew calm and green. Now he was passing what as a boy he'd called Millionaire's Row: a series of grand nineteenth-century "cottages" adorned with turrets, gables, and mansard roofs. A small child, dressed in the fantastically anachronistic outfit of pinafore and yellow umbrella, waved to him from a porch swing as he went by.
Inland, the landscape softened. Rocky shores gave way to low pebbled beaches, and spruce trees were replaced by mossy oaks and stands of birches. He passed a ruined pier, then a fishing shack on stilts. Not much farther now. Around another bend, and there it was: the shingle beach he remembered so well, its massive, improbable banks of oyster shells heaped twenty feet high. It was deserted, as he knew it would be. Most local residents of Stormhaven and Black Harbor had little interest in prehistoric Indian encampments, or the shell heaps they'd left behind. Most, but not all: this was the place Professor Horn had taken him and his brother one warm cloudless afternoon, the day before Johnny died.
Hatch pulled the dinghy up onto the beach, then retrieved his battered paintbox and collapsible chair from the bow. He looked around a moment, deciding on a spot beneath a lone birch tree. It was out of the glare of the sun, and his paints wouldn't dry up in the heat. He placed the paintbox and chair in the shade of the tree, then went back to the dinghy for the fold-up easel and portfolio.
As he set up, he found himself looking around, choosing theme and viewpoint, arranging landscape elements. Sitting down, he gazed out at the scene through a viewing frame, squinting to better understand the distribution of color and mass. The light gray of the shell heaps in the foreground made a perfect contrast to the distant purple bulk of Mount Lovell. No need for a quick pencil sketch here; he could go straight to the watercolor.
Opening the portfolio, he carefully removed a large sheet of 240-pound, cold-pressed paper. He taped it to the easel, then ran his fingertips appreciatively over the pure linen rag. An expensive indulgence, but worth every penny: the paper had a tooth that would hold the paint and make detail work easier, even with the kind of wet-on-wet style he favored.
He unrolled the cardboard from around each of the brushes, then examined his selection: a square-end, a couple of sable rounds, a goat-hair mop, and an old quarter-inch flat for dry-brushing clouds into the background. Next, he half-filled a palette well with water. Reaching into the paintbox and removing a tube of cerulean blue, he squeezed the paint into the well and stirred, momentarily annoyed that his injured hand wasn't healing as quickly as it should. He dampened the paper with a cotton ball, then glanced out at the landscape for a long moment. Finally, fetching a deep breath, he dipped a brush in the well and laid a flat blue wash over the top two-thirds of the sheet.
As the brush ran along the paper in thick, broad strokes, Hatch felt something coiled tight within him begin to come loose. It was healing work, painting this landscape; cleansing work. And it felt right, somehow, returning to this place. In the years after Johnny's death, he'd never been able to come back to the Indian shell heaps. And yet, returning to Stormhaven a quarter century later—and especially now, after the discovery of his brother's body—Hatch sensed himself turning a corner. There was pain, but there was also an end to pain. His brother's bones had been found. Perhaps—if he could decide on a fitting memorial—they would be removed from the earth where they had lain for so long. Perhaps there would also be time to understand the fiendish mechanism that caused his death. But even that was less important now. He could close the chapter and move on.
He returned to the painting. Time to lay down a foreground. The stony pebbles of the beach were an almost perfect match for his yellow ochre. And he could mix the ochre with the tube of Payne's gray to catch the color of the shell heaps.
As he reached for another brush, he heard the sound of an inboard coming upriver. Looking up, he saw a familiar figure scanning the riverbanks, the tanned skin dark under a large-brimmed straw hat. Bonterre caught sight of him, smiled and waved, then nosed the Thalassa launch gently toward the shore and killed the motor.
"Isobel!" he said.
She anchored the boat on the beach, then came toward him, removing the hat and shaking her long hair back. "I have been spying on you from the post office. They have a nice old telescope there. I watched you take your little boat into this river, and I got curious."
So that's how she's going to play it, he thought: business as usual, no dewy-eyed empathy, no treacly references to what happened the day before. He felt vastly relieved.
She jerked her thumb downriver. "Impressive houses back there."
"A group of wealthy New Yor
k families used to come up to Black Harbor in the summertime," Hatch replied. "Built all those houses. FDR used to spend his summers at Campobello Island, ten miles north of here."
Bonterre frowned. "FDR?"
"President Roosevelt."
She nodded. "Ah. You Americans, so fond of abbreviating your leaders. JFK. LBJ." Her eyes widened. "But look at you! Painting! Monsieur le docteur, I never expected such artistic depth."
"You'd better reserve judgment until you see the finished product," he replied, dabbing in the shingle beach with short brush strokes. "I became interested in med school. Helped me relax. I found I enjoyed watercolors most. Especially for landscapes like this."
"And what a landscape!" Bonterre said, pointing at the shell heaps. "Mon dieu, they are enormous!"
"Yes. The oyster shells at the bottom supposedly date back three thousand years, and the ones at the top are early seventeenth century, when the Indians were driven out." Hatch gestured upriver. "There are several prehistoric Indian encampments along the river. And there's an interesting Micmac site on Rackitash Island."
Bonterre moved away, scrambling up the oyster-covered bank to the bottom of the nearest heap. "But why did they leave their shells in just this place?" she called back.
"Nobody knows. It must've been a lot of trouble. I remember reading that there may have been some kind of religious reasons."
Bonterre broke into laughter. "Ah. Religious reasons. That is what we archaeologists always say when we do not understand something."
Hatch chose another brush. "Tell me, Isobel," he said. "To what do I owe this visit? Surely you have better ways to spend your Sundays than following old bachelor doctors around."
Bonterre grinned mischievously. "I wanted to find out why you had not asked me for a second date."
"I figured you thought I was a weak reed. Remember what you said about us northerners having had the marrow sucked from our bones?"
Riptide Page 27
