The Castle on Deadman's Island

by Curtis Parkinson

  She looked up and her eyes widened in surprise. Neil held his finger to his lips, then quickly found a knife – the same one he’d use to cut Daniel free. Was it only twenty-four hours ago?

  He released Crescent and she followed him outside. “Hurry!” he said. “They could be back any minute.”

  Crescent didn’t need any urging. “She had this meat cleaver,” she said. “And she looked as if she was ready to use it.”

  “If we can get Discovery underway before they find out you’re gone –” Neil began, but there was a sudden shout of alarm from behind them. They ran for the boathouse.

  Neil uncleated the lines and jumped aboard, and Crescent began paddling furiously. As Discovery glided out of the slip, Neil caught sight of a polished hull glinting in the moonlight on the far side of the boat-house. “Whose boat is that?” he said, in alarm.

  “It’s theirs,” Crescent said, as she hauled up the main. “A speedboat.”

  Neil’s heart did a flip. A speedboat ! And he thought he’d seen a figure in it. But how could that be? The sounds of pursuit had only now reached the front of the castle. “There they are!” he heard Mrs. Snyder shout.

  The sails filled, and Discovery slowly picked up speed. Come on, come on, Neil urged, but he knew that a sailboat takes time getting up its momentum, unlike a speedboat. He saw Snyder pounding down the path and disappearing into the boathouse. Any second now, he expected to hear the angry roar of the speedboat’s motor coming to life.

  Carson Snyder was about to leap into the speedboat when he stopped so suddenly that he teetered on the edge of the slip. He stared down in disbelief at the dark shape occupying the driver’s seat.

  “Come on, get in, Carson,” a sepulchral voice said. “Then we can both leave this cursed island forever.”

  Carson stayed rooted to the spot. “No, no,” he quavered. “It can’t be!”

  “What’s this, man?” the voice said. “Don’t you want to come with your old friend and partner in crime? I will admit I’m a bit of a mess – my nice jacket’s got blood all over it. See?” An arm was lifted toward Snyder, showing the bloodstained sleeve of a sports coat. “Even my face is bloody and my hands. And I’m not as … shall we say … as substantial as I was before. But that’s the way ghosts are – now you see them, now you don’t. I’m just getting used to it myself.”

  Carson backed away, trembling.

  The shape in the driver’s seat sighed. “Well, if you won’t come with me, then I won’t go either. And you know what that means – you may own the whole castle, now that you’re rid of both of us, but I’ll still be here, haunting the halls everywhere you look.” The shape laughed – a deep tormenting laugh. “So make up your mind, Carson….”

  Carson Snyder turned on his heels and ran from the boathouse, up the path.

  At the front door, Mrs. Snyder was waiting to see the speedboat shoot out of the boathouse in pursuit of the disappearing sailboat. Instead, her husband came stumbling back up the path.

  “What are you doing here? Get after them, Carson!”

  “It’s him,” Snyder stammered, breathing heavily. “Grimsby!”

  “Grimsby! Grimsby! Are you mad?”

  “But it’s him, I tell you … I saw him … right there in the boat … his jacket all bloody….” Snyder leaned against a column for support.

  “Grimsby is dead,” his wife said coldly. “Get hold of yourself.”

  “I know he’s dead…. It’s his ghost…. It’s going to haunt us….”

  Mrs. Snyder delivered a vigorous slap to her husband face. “Snap out of it, Carson. Those two kids in the sailboat are the ones who will haunt us, if they get away. Now listen carefully, I’ve got everything worked out. You can easily catch up to them in the speedboat. Then you run them down at full speed….”

  Snyder looked at her in dismay. “But we can’t –”

  “Just listen. It happens every summer. The story you tell is simple: you were rushing to shore to report Grimsby’s suicide to the police. The sailboat had no lights. You didn’t see it until you were on it. Now get going.”

  “But –”

  “Get going.”

  Snyder returned to the boathouse reluctantly Approaching the speedboat cautiously he was relieved to find it empty.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  _

  In the light breeze, Discovery was slow to pull away from Deadman’s Island. Neil and Crescent both stared back at the boathouse apprehensively, expecting the speedboat to come flying out at any moment, Snyder hunched over the wheel.

  We’ll never outrun him, Neil thought. Crescent knew as well as he did that their situation was bleak. Time was what they needed – time to reach Lovesick Island before Snyder caught up to them.

  The minutes ticked by, Crescent fiddling with the sails to get more speed, Neil urging Discovery on, rocking back and forth, as if that would help. Soon they were halfway.

  “Maybe his engine won’t start,” Neil said hopefully.

  “Something is holding him up,” Crescent said. “Whatever it is, it gives us a chance. Another ten minutes and –”

  Vroom, vroom – a powerful engine sprang to life.

  “Oh, God, he’s coming,” Neil said.

  Crescent stood up and surveyed the water ahead. “Pull up the centerboard, Neil. Quick!”

  He leaped to haul up the board, not stopping to ask why. If Crescent thought it should be done, that was good enough for him.

  Still standing, steering with her foot, Crescent pushed the tiller to port. “Found it!” she cried triumphantly.

  Found what? Neil wondered. Then he remembered the submerged boulder that Charlie had warned them about.

  Behind him, Neil saw the bow wave of the speedboat reflected by the moonlight. It looked like a fluorescent arrow aimed straight at them. On it came, not slowing down in the slightest.

  He’s going to ram us, Neil thought. There was nothing they could do but brace themselves for the inevitable collision. “Hang on!” he called to Crescent, as the pursuing boat closed in, its prow seeking them out like a predatory shark.

  Then, just before it reached them, the speedboat went from full speed ahead to an abrupt, grinding, metal-tearing, shrieking stop, sending Snyder shooting over the windshield. He landed headfirst in the water with a sickening clunk.

  Neil stared at the devastation behind them. With the centerboard raised, Discovery had cleared the boulder, leading their pursuer into the trap.

  Snyder’s body was floating facedown in front of the wreckage.

  “Jibe, ho!” Crescent called, warning Neil to duck under the swinging boom. Discovery jibed through 180 degrees, and they headed back the way they had come.

  Crescent maneuvered as close as she could to the wreckage. “I’ll get him,” Neil said, and he slid over the side and found himself on the boulder in water just above his knees. Grabbing Snyder’s heavy body under the armpits, he heaved it into the boat.

  They reached Lovesick Island and, with difficulty, lifted Snyder onto the dock. Crescent felt for a pulse. “All we can do is try to revive him here. By the time we sail to the shore and call a doctor, it will be too late.”

  “It may be too late already,” Neil said. “He got an awful crack on the head and must have swallowed a ton of water.”

  Crescent began the life-saving technique she’d been taught in swimming classes at the yacht club. Water gushed from Snyder’s mouth.

  Neil wondered why Graham and Daniel hadn’t appeared to help. Maybe they’d slept through the crash and the commotion at the dock. But when he went to the campsite to get them, he found their blankets rumpled from being slept in, but unoccupied.

  “Any sign of life?” he said, when he returned. Crescent shook her head. He’s a goner, he thought, looking at Snyder’s inert body. Still, they had to do all they could to help him, even though he’d deliberately tried to run them down.

  Crescent kept working. “Where’s Graham? And Daniel?” she said, between breaths.

>   “I don’t know. They were both asleep when I left, but they’re not here now. I took Daniel’s dinghy over to the castle, so they couldn’t have gone anywhere.” Then he remembered the old punt, which had been tied up at the dock. It was no longer there. “I can’t believe they’d use that leaky old punt!”

  But it was only a few minutes later when they heard the squeak of oars in rusty oarlocks, and the old punt came jerkily out of the darkness. Graham was in the stern and Daniel at the oars, having trouble getting the punt to turn toward the dock. “Pull harder on your right oar, Daniel,” Neil called. Eventually the punt responded and they reached the dock.

  “He’s learning,” Graham said. “He’s a lot better at it than I am.” He saw Crescent working on Snyder. “We heard the crash and saw the wreckage; thank God it wasn’t you guys. How is he?”

  “No sign of life,” Crescent said.

  Graham and Daniel climbed out of the punt and stood looking down at Snyder. “We should get him to a hospital,” Daniel said.

  “The wind is dying,” Crescent said. “By the time we sail over to shore and find a phone …” She got up. “But we’d better go anyway. I don’t seem to be doing any good here.”

  “We should let his wife know first,” Graham said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  _

  They found Mrs. Snyder standing on the dock, peering into the darkness. She watched silently as Neil and Crescent approached in Discovery. The wind died completely and they had to paddle the rest of the way to the dock.

  They climbed out. “I’m afraid we have bad news about your husband,” Crescent said.

  Barbara Snyder looked at the two teens in front of her, her eyes veiled.

  How strange, Neil thought, to be standing here with her, when she was making plans just an hour ago to hurl Crescent from the balcony. It felt surreal, as if they were actors in a play discussing the next scene.

  “His boat hit a submerged rock and he was thrown out,” Crescent said. “I tried to revive him, but …”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Mrs. Snyder said in a flat voice.

  Crescent hesitated. “I … I can’t detect any pulse-that’s all I know.”

  “We could take him over to shore now and try to find a doctor,” Neil said. “But it will be a long, slow trip with no wind…. It might be just as fast to wait till morning, when the Ruffs come with their boat.”

  “I’d like to see him,” Mrs. Snyder said, after a pause.

  Neil saw that Daniel’s dinghy was still tied up where he’d left it earlier. “Your husband’s at Lovesick. We’ll leave the sailboat here and row you over.”

  On the way, they were silent, avoiding each other’s eyes. Mrs. Snyder stared at the wreckage of the speedboat as they passed by.

  Graham and Daniel were waiting on the dock with the body. Graham was anxious to question Mrs. Snyder about his aunt’s disappearance and might have, regardless of the circumstances, had Daniel not convinced him that this wasn’t the right moment.

  Mrs. Snyder got out and approached the body. They all stood back while she knelt and lifted her husband. For a moment, Neil thought she was going to take him in her arms, but she was only turning him over to check for a heartbeat and examine the gash on his head. When she straightened up, Neil could see that her eyes were moist.

  “Take us both back to the island, please,” she said. “It’s only a few hours till dawn.”

  They lifted Snyder into the dinghy. There wasn’t space to lay him flat on the bottom, so they sat him on the stern seat, his wife beside him to keep him from toppling over. It looked for all the world, Neil thought, as if they were taking a drunk home from a party. He manned the oars and Crescent sat in the bow.

  As they approached Deadman’s Island, Mrs. Snyder began, for the first time, to speak. “He was a good man at heart,” she said. “Weak, though. As long as everything was going well, Carson was fine, but if something went wrong, he fell apart. Do you know, he actually thought he saw Grimsby’s ghost sitting behind the wheel of the speedboat tonight?”

  So that’s why it took him so long to come after us, Neil thought. We were saved by a ghost! He waited to hear more, but Mrs. Snyder turned to the body of her husband.

  “I don’t suppose I was the best wife for you, Carson,” she said, smoothing his hair. “You should have married someone with less ambition, someone who would have been content just being your wife.”

  “What will you do now?” Crescent said.

  Mrs. Snyder considered, then said in the same flat voice, “I shall spend my days in retreat – husbandless and ambitionless.”

  Neil doubted Mrs. Snyder would ever be ambition-less. Nevertheless, he began to feel sorry for her and had to remind himself what she had done. He thought of Grimsby’s broken body, still lying on the rocks. What a shock it will be for the Ruffs – first a skeleton, now two bodies.

  When they reached the dock, they lifted Snyder’s body out. They expected Mrs. Snyder would want them to carry it to the castle, but she told them to leave it at the dock. “I’d rather not go back to the castle ever again,” she said. “That place was our downfall. I’ll just stay here with him and wait for the Ruffs.”

  As Neil rowed away, the last he saw of Mrs. Snyder, she was sitting on the bench staring out over the water, the body of her husband propped up beside her. “I wonder if she’ll be charged over Grimsby’s death,” he said.

  Crescent looked skeptical. “I doubt it. She has her cover story.”

  “But she can’t say it was suicide. She knows that you saw it all.”

  “Yes, but all I could see was a jumble of bodies on the balcony. I couldn’t tell who pushed who, and she knows that. She’ll say that her husband was jealous and that he and Grimsby tussled, the railing gave way, and he tumbled over. I couldn’t dispute that.”

  “She’s got it all worked out, hasn’t she?” Neil said. “I suppose they loosened the railing beforehand too, but I don’t expect the cops will catch that – not with Sergeant Simpson doing the investigating. She’ll play the bereaved widow, and he’ll swallow her story about Grimsby hook, line, and sinker.” Neil turned to make sure he was still heading for the Lovesick Island dock. “But it may not be so easy to explain what her husband was doing chasing us with the speedboat.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Crescent said. “She can say he must have changed course to avoid hitting us and hit the rock instead. Boating accidents like that happen all the time – especially at night. There’s no way for us to prove he was planning to ram us. Any way, what’s the point – he’s dead.”

  Neil made a course correction with an oar. “We’re just lucky that Snyder got spooked by a ghost and didn’t catch up to us sooner. Otherwise, it might be us laid out on the dock instead of him.”

  Crescent shuddered. “Don’t say that, Neil.” She leaned forward and touched his cheek.

  “I wonder how come he thought he saw Grimsby’s ghost?” he said. “Blood-soaked jacket and all, he told his wife.”

  “It is strange,” Crescent said. “Almost as if Grimsby’s ghost was looking out for us – if it really was Grimsby’s ghost.”

  Neil stopped rowing. “You don’t suppose …?” He gazed at her. “I wonder where Graham and Daniel went in that old punt?”

  “A good question,” Crescent said. “Where did they go, and what were they up to at that hour?”

  “I’m going to ask them,” Neil said.

  But, for the moment, he wanted to forget the events of the night. The water was flat calm, like a dark polished mirror. He let the dinghy drift and patted the seat beside him. “Come and sit here.”

  She slid into the seat and he folded her in his arms. The dinghy continued to drift, the two figures locked as one, a ribbon of moonlight stretching out before them like a silver path.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  _

  It was driving Neil nuts. All he could get out of Graham were meaningless responses, accompanied by an enigmatic grin. Nor was Daniel any
more forthcoming.

  “C’mon, Graham,” Neil pleaded. “Did you or didn’t you impersonate Grimsby’s ghost last night?”

  “But Neil, to impersonate means to imitate a person,” Graham said, “and a ghost is not a person-at least not anymore. Therefore it’s a contradiction in terms, if you see what I mean….”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. All right then, I’ll rephrase my question. Did you find Grimsby’s body and borrow his sport’s coat? Then did you get in the speedboat and pretend you were Grimsby’s ghost in order to scare off Snyder?”

  “What! Take a bloody sport’s jacket off a dead man and put it on? Yuck! I shudder at the thought. Besides, it’s highly illegal to tamper with a dead body before the police arrive. Think what Sergeant Simpson would say if he suspected I’d undressed Grimsby’s corpse and borrowed his clothes!”

  Neil sighed. They were sitting around the campfire, only smoldering ashes now. Crescent, however, had returned to Deadman’s Island. She had grown fond of Mrs. Ruff and knew she would need company after the shock of finding two bodies.

  Leonard, accompanied by Mrs. Snyder, took Snyder’s body to shore. Grimsby’s, however, was left untouched to await the arrival of Sergeant Simpson.

  The morning sun and the blue sky proclaimed yet another fine day. Gulls circled raucously around a boiling school of minnows. The world goes on as if nothing happened, Neil thought, no matter what people get up to in the night.

  He turned back to Graham. “If you were impersonating Grimsby you’re a hero in my books. By delaying Snyder, you saved Crescent and me – otherwise he would have caught us and run us down.”

  “What difference does it make who saved you?” Graham said. “All that matters is that you were saved.”

  “But don’t you see? If you didn’t do it, and Daniel didn’t do it, it means there really was a ghost!”

  Daniel said, “Don’t you believe in ghosts? I sure do. My great-grandmother’s ghost is still hanging around Gran and Gramps’ house on Long Island. She’s neat.”