by Blake Crouch
A southerner, I thought. Who else smiles at strangers?
A waitress brought her a plate of oysters Rockefeller for an appetizer and the little blond read the back of the menu while she ate. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. I wondered if she lived on the island, and if not, what she was doing on Ocracoke alone.
I turned my focus back to the map and studied the topography of Portsmouth until the waitress brought my plate of fried oysters with sides of coleslaw and hushpuppies. As she walked back into the dining room, I glanced across the porch at the adorable blond.
She gazed back at me with a look of captivation.
Her eyes averted to her menu, mine to my map.
I hadn’t been hit on in years and it felt amazing, particularly coming from this gorgeous young woman.
I picked up an oyster and took a bite. Excellent—briny and crisp.
A chair squeaked.
I looked up, watched the blond rise from her table and come toward me, her heels knocking hollowly on the floorboards.
She stopped at my table and smiled down at me, a lovely nervous simper.
"I’m sorry to bother you," she said. "Could I borrow your horseradish sauce?"
Her accent was unmistakable. She hailed from my old stomping ground, the piedmont of North Carolina.
"Sure. I’m not using it."
As she lifted the bottle I noticed her chest billowing beneath her coat.
"I see you got the oysters, too," she said, then took a sudden breath.
"Wonderful, aren’t they?"
She brushed her short yellow hair behind her ears, her eyes moving across the map of Portsmouth, then back to me again.
"Are you from Ocracoke?" she asked.
"Oh, no. Just visiting."
"Me, too," she said, still strangely breathless. "Me, too. Well, um, thank you for the ketchup, I mean horseradish."
As she walked back over to her table, I saw that a full bottle of horseradish sauce already stood uncapped beside her plate.
Thinking back to the way I’d first caught her looking at me, I finally put it all together.
That wasn’t captivation.
That was recognition.
39
VI returned to her table, heart thudding against her chest, scarcely able to breathe.
Oh God. It’s him. Eat something so he won’t suspect you know.
She forced down an oyster and did everything she could not to look at Andrew Thomas. One of the photographs in her briefcase had been digitally enhanced to show him with long hair and an unkempt beard.
The man with a tangle of grayflecked hair sitting fifteen feet away was a dead ringer.
Scottie Myers walked onto the screened porch bearing her main course—the fish du jour, blackened dolphin. He set the plate before Vi and said, "I think you gonna like this fish better’n anything you ever ate. Go on—take a bite. Tell me what you think."
Vi managed to smile up at Scottie. She took a bite and said, "Yes, that’s wonderful, Mr. Myers." Go back inside, Scottie. Don’t stay out here and talk to me. If you mention I’m a detective—
"Yeah, I know the fisherman who caught that."
"That’s wonderful," she said.
"Listen, I was thinking what we were talking about, and that Luther feller—"
"Hold that thought, Scottie," Vi said, standing up. "Would you point me to the ladies’ room?"
"Oh, sure. Go through that door, and it’s back there in the corner, past the pool table. You all right there, Miss?"
Vi walked through the French doors into the dining room, mindful not to rush, thinking, I don’t have jurisdiction to arrest Andrew Thomas in Ocracoke. Do it anyway? No. Call Sgt. Mullins. Tell him what’s going on. Then 911. Get Hyde County Sheriff’s Department down here. Hold him at gunpoint while you wait. You have to walk back in there packing. Throw down on him. Freeze! Police! On the floor! Make him cuff himself to the space heater.
She entered a filthy bathroom, the walls adorned with NASCAR memorabilia. Her hands trembled so much she could barely get a grip on the zipper. Standing in front of the cracked mirror, she unzipped the Barbour jacket, her shoulder rig now exposed, the satin stainless .45 gleaming in the hard fluorescent light. She reached into her pocket for the cell phone but it wasn’t there. In her mind’s eye she saw it in the passenger seat of the Cherokee.
It’s all right. He doesn’t suspect anything yet. Just walk outside and call Mullins from the Cherokee. No, Andrew Thomas will see you leave and he didn’t see you pay. He might bolt. Get him on the floor first. Then have Scottie call from the restaurant’s phone.
This man has been on the run for seven years. He’s a monster. He’s desperate. Probably armed. Breathe, Vi. Breathe. You’ve been trained for this. You can do this.
Unsnapping the holster latchet, she pulled out her .45 and chambered the first round. She took three deep breaths and waited twenty seconds for her hands to stop shaking.
Then, gripping the gun in her right hand, she slipped it into her jacket and stepped toward the door.
Vi cracked it open and glanced through the dining room onto the screened porch.
Her stomach dropped.
Andrew Thomas had left his table.
She opened the door and started for the porch.
Something threw her back into the bathroom and slammed her against the wall.
Time slowed, fragmented into surreal increments: the door closing, lights out, trying to scream through the hand covering her mouth, reaching for the gun (no longer there), the coldness of its barrel behind her left ear, lips against her right ear, then whispering she could hardly hear over the williwaw of her own hyperventilation.
"Have you called anyone?"
She shook her head.
"You know who I am?"
She shook her head.
"Don’t lie to me."
She nodded.
"Put your hands behind your back. If you make a sound, you’ll never walk out of this bathroom."
Andrew Thomas found the handcuffs in her coat pocket and cuffed her hands behind her back.
"What’s your name?"
She had to think about it for a moment.
"Violet." The voice didn’t sound like anything that belonged to her.
"We’re going to walk out of here together, Violet."
He dug through her purse, found the car keys.
"Which one is yours?"
"The Jeep. I’m a detective, sir. You’ll be in a world of trouble if—"
"I’m already in a world of trouble. When we get outside, I’ll open the door for you. You get behind the wheel."
Her hands were going numb as Andrew Thomas zipped the Barbour jacket up to her chin. In the darkness she felt the barrel of the .45 jab into her ribs.
"Feel that? Anything goes wrong, the first bullet is yours. The rest are for whoever else gets in my way, and their blood will be on your hands. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I will, and without hesitation, because I have nothing to lose. We clear?"
"Yessir."
He opened the door and pushed her out.
As they walked through the main dining room, Andrew put his arm around her.
Vi looked straight ahead, praying that Scottie Myers or the hostess or one of the waiters would be standing near the front door. They’d see the terror in her eyes, they’d stop this from happening.
Crying now, she prayed, Please God let someone be standing by the register.
She heard laughter in the kitchen, loud gleeful laughter, but no one saw her walk outside with Andrew Thomas, down the steps, into the cold rain.
The foreknowledge of her imminent death proved the hardest truth she’d ever faced. It weakened her knees and she fell, bawling, as Andrew dragged her toward the Cherokee, the wet gravel skinning her knees through the hose.
She’d failed miserably and would soon pay for it, along with Elizabeth Lancing and all future victims of Andrew Thomas.
Only as she glimpsed her oncomi
ng death did she realize she’d never believed in it. Dying was something that happened to other people. The unlucky and the old.
But she believed in it now because once she got into her Jeep with Andrew Thomas no one would ever see her again. Last year she’d told a class of high school freshmen to fight with everything they had to keep from getting dragged into an attacker’s vehicle. She should’ve made Andrew Thomas shoot her right there in the parking lot.
But she climbed into her car at gunpoint for the same reason most people in that circumstance do—because she was afraid, because she didn’t have the guts to risk dying now, even though getting into the Jeep with him all but guaranteed the lonely horrible death to come.
P O R T S M O U T H
40
THE detective pulled into a parking space at the Community Store on Silver Lake in proximity to Charlie Tatum’s dock. I sat directly behind the driver’s seat as the young woman shifted her Jeep Cherokee into park and turned off the engine. She’d cried all the way from Howard’s Pub and she was still crying when she gave me the car keys and laid her head against the steering wheel.
While she wept rain hammered the roof and streamed down the glass.
The .45 trembled in my grasp.
"What’s your name again?" I asked.
"Violet," she whimpered.
"Sit up, Violet. I want you to stop crying."
Violet wiped her eyes and glanced at me in the rearview mirror. I scooted over into the middle seat and told her, "Put your hands on the steering wheel and don’t let go."
"I’m pregnant," she pleaded, her face starting to break all over again. "I just found out this morning. If you kill me, you’ll be—"
"Shut up. I don’t care. Give me your wallet and your badge." She reached into her purse and handed them over. "The phone, too. You have a pager?"
"Not with me." She lifted her cell phone from the passenger seat. I took it out of her hand, dropped it on the floorboard, and stomped it into bits with the heel of my boot. Then I opened her wallet and scanned the driver’s license. She was from Davidson, North Carolina, my old home, and only twenty-six years old.
"I told you not to let go of the steering wheel. Did you follow me here?" I asked.
"No."
"No?"
"I swear."
"Then what the fuck are you doing on Ocracoke?"
"I came here to find a man named Luther Kite. His parents live here, and it was his last known—"
"Are you investigating the murder of that family in Davidson?"
"Yes. Along with the kidnapping of Elizabeth Lancing."
"Boy, you have really fucked things up for me."
The dashboard clock read 3:05. It would be getting dark soon and Charlie Tatum was expecting me.
Through the windshield I saw him exit the shack at the end of the dock and step down into his boat. Its motor subsequently purred in the water.
When I looked back at Violet her neck was craning. She eyed the gun. She’d probably never had a loaded firearm pointed at her.
"Well, here’s the deal," I said to Violet. "We’re taking a boat ride. You’re my wife, and your name is…Angie. Don’t talk. Don’t cry. Once we get on the boat, you just sit there and stare at the ocean, like we’re fighting."
"Where are we—"
"And let me tell you something. This old man who’s giving us a ride…his life is in your hands. Because if you start crying and freaking out and he gets suspicious, I’ll just shoot him and dump him in the sea. You understand that?"
"Yessir. You don’t have to hurt anyone."
"That’s up to you. I’ve been hiding for seven years. I’m not going to prison."
Reaching into the way-back, I grabbed up her red poncho and a pair of small damp hiking boots. Then I dragged the backpack I’d purchased from Bubba’s Bait and Tackle into the backseat.
"Here." I handed her the poncho and boots. "It’ll be wet and cold where we’re—"
"You going to hurt me?" she asked.
I wanted to say, No, you’re safe. Everything you know about me is a lie. But only fear would get her to that island. She had to wholeheartedly and simultaneously believe two things: first, that I would execute her at the slightest resistance, but secondly, that she still had a chance of surviving this.
So I lifted the .45, aimed it between the seats, and threatened her with horrible things.
41
WE sat on a bench seat along the gunwale. I put my arm around Violet and cuddled with her as Charlie Tatum piloted the Island Hopper away from the dock into the middle of Silver Lake. The deck reeked of mildew and the discarded sunspoiled viscera of fish.
"That wind’s already turned on us," he warned. "It’s gonna get rough as hell once we clear the harbor."
Silver Lake was empty. I saw the motels and B&Bs along the shore, tendrils of smoke climbing out of several chimneys.
The rain intensified.
I wondered for a moment if I were mad for doing this, then thought of it no more.
We chugged through the Ditch and I stared beyond the narrow outlet into the sound, its waters roiling in the fierce north wind. Emerging from the harbor, Charlie leaned into the throttle. As the ferry lurched forward in a sprint for open water, he pointed to Teach’s Hole, a cove in the murky distance that the pirate, Edward Teach, (a.k.a. Blackbeard) had used for a hideout prior to his beheading in 1718.
Passing the southern tip of Ocracoke, we finally reached the inlet, where ocean and sound collided in a series of deadly shoals and currents. Waves pounded the sides of the boat and spindrift whipped off the whitecaps. We were exposed now to the full force of the nor’easter, the rain driving sideways into the plastic drop curtain with such fury we could see nothing of Ocracoke, its lighthouse, or the blue water tower just a few hundred yards back. The howling grayness enveloped everything, reducing our world to a cold angry sea.
The boat rose to the crest of a wave and slammed down into its trough, nearly jarring us from the padded seat. Charlie looked back at me and shook his head.
"Worse than I thought!" he yelled above the roar of the motor. "We got no business being out here in this! I don’t know if I can dock her!"
I glanced down at Violet. Her poncho was drenched, her hands cold and red. She stared out to sea as she’d been told. Her lips moved. I wondered if she were praying.
When I gave her a gentle squeeze she looked up at me. So delicate.
"Cold?" I asked. She nodded. I pulled the arms of her poncho down over her hands and almost told her that she was safe.
We struggled on through the chop.
Waves swelled.
Violet trembled and I stared ahead into the deluge and the cold chaotic nothingness of the storm and the sea, as scared and alive as I’d felt in a good long while. But I didn’t savor the adrenaline. I’d have taken the boredom and solitude of the Yukon wilderness any day.
We’d been on the water for twenty minutes when Portsmouth appeared suddenly in the gray distance. Several wooden structures stood near the bank and they looked long deserted. Glimpsing the ghost village through the pouring rain and the scrub pines flailing about in the wind like an army of lunatics, I filled with foreboding. This north end of the island looked utterly haunted. Had I not known the history of Portsmouth, one glance at those abandoned dwellings would have told it all.
My dread was palpable.
I didn’t want to set foot on that island.
It was forsaken.
42
I tossed my backpack to Charlie, stepped up on the gunwale, and climbed onto the dock.
The wind gusted, then died down as I heaved the pack onto my shoulders.
"I think ya’ll are nuts for doing this," the old sailor said, rainwater spilling over his hood, running down his face into his bushy white beard.
The sea was rowdy.
It banged the boat into the beams.
"We’ll see you tomorrow afternoon," I said.
"Hope so. Let me give your wife
a hand up. I got to get back to the harbor ’fore this gets any worse."
"Mr. Tatum, just a moment. These buildings from the old village are publicly owned. Correct?"
