I gave the rope a good tug, expecting it to come away easily.
Instead, it had no give. There was something heavy on the other end.
I felt along the cable’s length to the end and found a wooden hull. An upside-down one, covered in barnacles, but still a hull. Even under water I could tell that something was wrong. The boards were uneven or sticking up, as though someone had taken an ax to it.
My fingers probed the perimeter till they hit something soft and squishy that swayed with the ripples of the water.
I jerked my hand away.
I started to shake—and not from the cold.
I knew a dead thing when I felt it.
Maybe it wasn’t what I thought it was. Maybe it was a halibut or a spiny dogfish, even though I knew the truth.
Halibut don’t have fingers.
By now, Henry had found the flashlight and was standing on the back patio, shining it in my eyes, his own eye a puffed-up, plummy mess.
“Pix?” he called.
I didn’t want him here. I didn’t want him to see what I was afraid we’d see. I tried ignoring him.
“Pixie?” he said again.
“Stay there, Henry. Call my brothers.”
The only response was a splash. I should’ve known. Say what you like about Henry’s mood this afternoon, he wasn’t the type to stand back and observe when there was an emergency.
I tugged on the cable and tugged again, but it wouldn’t come free.
Henry surfaced next to me with a gasp. “What have you got, Pix?”
He wasn’t ready for this. He hadn’t been trained. So I tried once more to send him back.
“I can handle this on my own, Henry.”
He ignored me. He reached under the water and found the hull.
I’d forgotten that he was boat-savvy. He rowed crew. Even his mess of a face was a boathouse-related injury.
He felt along the cable to where it was attached to the buoy and loosened the complex knot.
The rowboat should’ve floated to the surface.
It did not, but I could’ve told him that. There had been a drag to it when I’d tried to lift it earlier.
“All right. Let’s flip it, then drag it to the beach.”
“Henry . . . ,” I said.
I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew that even if he thought he was ready for this, he wasn’t. I’d met people in his situation before. Dads mostly. People who thought they were prepared for the worst, as though there were some kind of test you could take to be ready to see a loved one who’s died violently or in a stupid accident.
But there were no courses for this. If someone offers you an out, take it. You can see your baby brother cleaned up in the funeral home later. And you’ll be better for it.
“It’ll be harder to flip once we’ve beached it,” Henry said about the boat.
Had he felt the soft tissue underneath? I didn’t think so. And I didn’t want him to.
“Let me take care of this. If you want to do something, call my brothers. They can help.”
It was so dark out, so cold. And it was about to get worse.
I don’t know exactly when Henry realized that I was trying to get rid of him, but he knew now.
“I’m not leaving, Pix. Grant is mine. I should be here.”
Trying to get Henry away from here was useless.
Together, the two of us flipped the boat. It was so heavy, it didn’t float any nearer the surface. So we beached it.
Henry found the flashlight where I’d dumped it on a log on my mad dash to the buoy. He shone it on the interior of the boat.
There was a pale hand, reaching directly for me, attached to long fingers, some of them still sporting jewels. The arm was attached to a lithe body and an open black mouth, as though it were going to chew me up and spit out my bones.
It was the troll from my nightmares, and yet it wasn’t. Even in death, no one could ever accuse this woman of looking like a troll. She had those high Slavic cheeks. Her hair was smooth and glossy, even though the only thing keeping it in place was water.
It was Henry’s stepmother, Lyudmila.
The cable was wrapped around her neck three times. I undid it and, even though I took her pulse and didn’t find it, I pulled her from the rowboat and into the sand so I could perform CPR to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive,” because that’s what you’re supposed to do, even though she was too far gone for disco.
“Henry?”
I kept pounding Lyudmila’s chest, but slower this time. Water dribbled out of her mouth, but it didn’t seem to be doing her any good. I didn’t think I’d be able to bring this one back.
A rat-a-tat-tat came from the lagoon. Some idiot was duck hunting with some serious firepower.
Henry was just standing over me, not knowing what came next.
“Call my brothers,” I repeated. “We need help.”
He ran up the boardwalk to where he he’d dropped his jacket on a log. I heard him rustle around and then saw his face lit up from his cell phone screen.
As soon as he was gone, something strange happened.
Water gushed out of Lyudmila’s mouth, so I rolled her to one side, even though I knew this wasn’t a fairy tale. Here, in the real world, yurp up the poisoned apple and you’re still dead.
I took my hands off her.
In one jerky motion, Lyudmila sat up.
I scuttled backward on the cold sand.
There could be no doubt about it: Lyudmila was gone. There was no pulse. So why was she moving? Pointing at me with a long bony finger? Staring at me with cloudy eyes?
She spoke with a voice that wasn’t her own.
Stay . . . , rasped the thing that had been haunting me for years. Good girl.
Then I blinked, and she was a corpse again, lying on her side on the cold sand.
It took me a while to realize that I was no longer a stupid kid, the one Hal Liston had terrified motionless.
I had to remind myself I was seventeen years old now and had seen and fixed much worse.
In every emergency, I knew how to act. Why should this be any different because it was someone I knew?
I couldn’t resuscitate this one, but I owed it to Henry—and to myself—to learn anything that was to be learned from what was left of his stepmother.
So I crawled closer on my hands and feet.
I closed my eyes because I didn’t trust them. Instead, I listened to the howling of the wind, tasted the salt and rot on my tongue.
And I smelled.
The closer I got to her neck, the stronger the smell became. It was so strong it almost singed my nostrils off.
Someone had doused Henry’s stepmother in bleach.
six
HENRY
My phone was in my jacket, which I’d left on a log, sodden with rain. Dead. Had to be. I scrubbed the phone’s face with my dripping arm. I tapped every part of the screen. I got static first. Then random icons popped up and blinked out.
I couldn’t think straight. My fingers were shaking too hard to push buttons. I needed Dad. He’d know what to do. How the hell was I supposed to get in touch with him now? He didn’t give his phone number to just anyone. You had to earn it. Even when I called him, I always got his assistant, Joyce, first, and she decided if I was important enough to be passed on to Dad on high.
I put my head in my hands and let myself be pelted by rain. Where the hell was Grant?
I was going to murder the little twerp myself when he showed up.
When I looked up, Lawford and Frank had materialized, and they looked somber. At least, I assumed it was Lawford and Frank. I was a little stressed and their faces blurred in the rain. Lawford had his Taser out and Frank was rubber-gloved and carrying a first aid kit.
“Where’s Sammy?” I said. Even after all this time, understanding their quirks and knowing their scars, I still sometimes had to guess at who was who.
“Dunno,” Lawford said. “Probably still out searching with Mered
ith. They went off together hours ago. I don’t think anyone’s heard from them.”
They waited for the next morsel of information.
“Tell me you’ve got my brother.”
“Grant? Not yet. We’d hoped you and Pix had scared him up.” Frank was the one who spoke first.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t him we found.” I pointed to where Lyudmila lay under dark skies, the tide ebbing beyond her. I couldn’t see her, but I knew her face was blanched and crusted with sand. Her eyes were open. She didn’t even blink them against the rain.
Pix had given up working on her and was now swimming the bay, looking for “loose ends,” as she called them, which I think meant the corpse of my little brother, which might have drifted away. She thought the killing might have been some kind of two-for-one special.
But I didn’t want to think about that. I was too cold to think. I’d put my shirt back on once I’d gotten out of the water, but it did little to warm me since it was wet from the rain, too.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to warm up.
Meanwhile, Frank had trotted over to where we’d left Lyudmila on the beach. He put two fingers to her neck, then closed her eyes with his hands the size of hulls. He shucked off his yellow oilskin raincoat and draped it over her.
Most people would’ve thought this a kindness, but not me. I was pissed. He didn’t even try to resuscitate her. I mean, he was Frank Gray. I once saw him try to give CPR to a field mouse that was so dead it’d been partially digested by a barn owl.
“That’s it? You’re not even going to try?” I now had three Grays. I expected miracles. Where was my god-damn miracle?
Frank said, “I’m sorry, Henry. She seemed like a really nice lady.”
“Where did you find her?” Lawford said.
“In the boat. By the buoy. It had been sunk. They were really catching crabs.”
I guess I’d said that last part aloud. Lawford blinked. “Pardon?”
“It’s a rowing term. You know, when you scoop or get out of sequence with the guy in the stroke position? And we found the boat by where the crab traps usually are? Get it?”
Frank took a penlight out of his first-aid kit and inspected my good eye, then he pried the bad one open and looked at it, too.
That hurt.
It may have been dark out, but I saw Frank mouth the word shock to Lawford.
“We think you should sit down over here, out of the rain. The smart thing now is to get Pix and the dog and start looking for your brother on land.”
Those were the first sensible words I’d heard in hours. When Pixie said she was going to swim the bay a little longer, it hadn’t seemed very smart to me. As I said, I was too numb to think. But now it occurred to me that if she were right, Grant’s body might soon be lined up next to Lyudmila’s on the sand, and I really didn’t think I could see that.
Maybe, if we were lucky, he’d just wandered off and been kidnapped again.
There was precedence. Dad and Lyudmila had a foundation, and they thought it was important to show us how the rest of the world lived. They were always taking us to Haiti or Africa or South America. As the smallest of us and the one most prone to running off, Grant made an easy target. In Sudan, I caught up with him “playing” with boy soldiers who showed him how to chop down trees with a machete. Their machetes got closer and closer to Grant’s head until I paid them off with American dollars. Then there was that time in Venezuela, the express kidnapping center of the world, where Grant had learned to play Texas hold ’em and acquired a taste for guinea pig on a stick with some kind of narcotics peddlers wearing tattered uniforms with epaulets. Again: The solution had been American dollars.
I prayed that this time wasn’t worse, that he hadn’t been given the same treatment as Lyudmila. I’d always been able to fix him with a payoff before. I hoped I could now.
Yeah . . . denial is a powerful thing.
“Henry,” Lawford said. “I need to ask you some questions. Can you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“When we left the house, Pixie was with you. Where is she now?”
“Swimming in the bay.”
“Why would she do a stupid thing like that?”
“No clue. I think she wanted to rule out that Grant hadn’t . . . drowned, too.”
Frank shook his head. “Your stepmother didn’t drown, Henry. Someone just dumped her in the water to hide what they really did to her.”
Lawford kicked him.
“It’s all right. I have to face it sooner or later.”
And that was the first time that night that I thought I might lose it. I thought of Grant and his long eyelashes and the way he jumped around so much, lighting from one interesting thing to the next, especially up here, and how you had to focus to stay with him, but it was always fun to try.
My little brother always running ahead. Come on, Henry. Come, look.
Here I was, sitting in the rain, with no idea what to do next.
Luckily, I was with people who did.
“All right. We’ll call the sheriff. We’ll get our sister out of the bay, find her dog, and get a piece of Grant’s clothing. We’ll find him, Henry.”
“Where’s Yuri?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” Lawford said. “And we’re a little concerned about the semiautomatic shots we heard in the lagoon earlier. Those weren’t random duck hunters. We’re not convinced Yuri’s not actually, you know, behind some of this. Maybe stay here, out of sight, till the sheriff gets here.”
“Wait . . . you think Yuri might’ve killed Lyudmila? That can’t be right.”
There was no way. He came with her from Moscow, and I sometimes saw sweet moments between the two of them. He’d stick wildflowers in her hair, and she called him brat with a smile on her face. Didn’t brat mean “brother” in Russian? I had no idea what they really were to each other. I sometimes wondered if Yuri were Lyudmila’s real love and Dad just their meal ticket.
Not the time to think of that now.
“All right,” Lawford said. “I’ll make the calls. I’ll get 911. I’ll find Sammy and see about releasing Dean. Frank, try to get Pix out of the bay. Henry, for God’s sake, stay here. There are already too many variables in play tonight.”
I didn’t think it would be too hard to get Dean out of custody, because when Dad had suggested to the sheriff that the Grays might be involved with a child’s disappearance, the sheriff had laughed.
I’d seen my father issue orders before, and he made it sound as though the world would end if he didn’t get what he wanted by tomorrow.
But he didn’t sound as though he had half as much authority as these two did. They told me to stay put, and that was what I was going to do.
Then Pixie surfaced in the bay holding something that looked like a purple gelatinous Frisbee.
seven
PIXIE
The first death of the night I hadn’t expected.
The second I was ready for.
I shouldn’t have stayed swimming in the bay. I should have gotten out, found a piece of Grant’s clothing, thrust it under Patience’s hound nose, and let her lead the way to whatever we’d find at the end of the trail—alive, dead, injured, stranded, pecked at by an osprey and deposited in our yard.
I definitely didn’t want Grant to be deposited.
But still I lingered in that cold salt water. I should’ve known better. The best chance I had for finding Grant alive was to start the search-and-rescue on land right away. I knew the statistics. I knew the first three hours were crucial. Who knew how much time had passed since Grant had gone missing? He had come to me at eleven that morning, asking me to carry him away. When Henry and Mr. Shepherd came to our door, it was five thirty.
But everyone other than me thought he was hiding, because that was what he did every Sunday evening. Someone was playing us—buying time to get away with something horrific we didn’t entirely understand yet.
The only reason I stayed in the wa
ter was that I thought there would be a second body, and if it had somehow come free from the rowboat, I wanted to be the one to find it. Not Henry. He’d already been through enough.
So I did an inefficient thing. I stayed in the water. I flutter-kicked in a circle around the Shepherds’ buoy, grasping at flotsam—and then farther out, the same thing. The water was so cold I felt it gnawing on me.
Since it was dark both above and below and I couldn’t see, I “looked” with my fingers.
It was easy. Grant wasn’t huge, but he was substantial enough. And there weren’t any impediments in the bay—no rocks, no coral—nothing to break up the sandy bottom other than moon snails and sand dollars. Lots and lots of sand dollars. Even in this, Mr. Shepherd was rich.
At first there was nothing. Bulb kelp. Iron fixtures from some far-off unmoored ship. Razor clams. Scallop shells. Discarded shells—the kind from rifles, which pissed me off, but I’d learned to live with it. Even though it was illegal, hunters shot ducks in the lagoon all the time, and they occasionally got a heron, which they deposited for my brothers and me to take care of.
Hence the “pissed off” part.
Then something grabbed me. Gently, at first, but then more and more insistent, until it locked around my wrist and sucked at my skin at the same time.
Tentacles.
Yes, we had octopuses here. But this was no octopus. Whatever had a grip on me had fingers. That’s when I heard a voice in my head saying, Stay. Good Girl.
Oh God. The troll. I wasn’t on the shore, where I felt a measure of protection. I was in the bay. I was sure I was finally going to see the real face of the troll, just before he crunched me in half with jagged barnacle teeth.
Just the night before, I’d awoken howling because I’d had a nightmare that he was reaching for me, just like this. Dean had splashed Clamato juice in my face, as usual, and then said, “This is getting old,” before leaving me to clean up the mess.
I had not dreamed that the troll would be an active participant in this day’s tragedy.
Good girl. I’ve come for you and everything you love. There’s nothing you can do about it. Much easier if you give up and let me take you down to the wreck.
Useless Bay Page 5
