Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

“I meant what I said. They have to wait. I need a few days. Or maybe just one.”

  Sour bile rose in my throat; I averted my mind's eye from an all-too-clear picture of what he might want to finish.

  “Leave her alone,” I whispered.

  Ignoring me, he stood. If I'd tried it, I'd have capsized the boat immediately. But this guy moved as surely as if he were on shore.

  “Out,” he ordered, gripping the oar. That got my attention. We were still a hundred yards from land.

  Then he hit me with the oar. Not hard, but the flat part smacked the side of my head convincingly. If he'd done it with the edge it would've taken the top of my skull off.

  Woozy with pain and fear, I clambered up. “Listen,” I began, “we can talk about this—”

  Everything seemed to have ratcheted way down into super-slow motion; the waves, my heart. Rickert swung the oar again. This time the flat blade connected with my shoulder the way a bat hits a ball, lifting me and carrying me over the rail.

  The last thing I saw was his face watching impassively as I splashed down. Then came the sudden roar of the outboard as he motored away.

  Leaving me in the icy water, kicking and flailing.

  Drowning. The shock to your system is indescribable and the first thing you do is begin gasping, uncontrollably and in a way that makes you panic.

  But panic spells doom; you must think, and eventually the gasping will pass. Sinking, I kicked hard. That sent me up again, my face breaking the surface just long enough to drag in a breath. And then . . .

  My arm hit something solid. Instinctively, I went after it, and it bounced away, floating. Once more I sank, then somehow found the thing again, whatever it was, clawed at it knowing it would be only a clot of seaweed and no help to me, but unable to stop myself.

  Another hopeless grab, punctuated by a throatful of salt water. Gagging and weeping, I felt my hand brush the seaweed clump and somehow fasten upon it.

  Only it wasn't seaweed. It was Mac Rickert's life jacket.

  With the last burst of non-drowning purposefulness I could muster, I shoved an arm into it. That gave me enough hope to get my other arm into the other side, and my head through.

  Next I took a ragged breath, immensely grateful merely to be inhaling air instead of water, and after that I assessed my situation.

  Verdict: still terrible. But not quite as terrible. In with the good air and out with the bad made a lovely mantra, under the circumstances. Grimly I forced my iced legs to start kicking and my hands to begin paddling.

  But time was running out. My hands were little more than numb clubs. Soon I would be so chilled that my mental processes would quit working, too.

  Although you could argue they'd stopped functioning usefully a whole lot earlier, like way back when I'd decided to meet Mac Rickert out here at all. . . .

  But that was a scolding I could give myself later, if there was one. For now I kept kicking, paddling, and breathing, nearing a stony shore whose cruel battering I would soon be enduring.

  If I was lucky. Which by now I'd decided I was. After all, I could have gone into the water with a bullet in my head.

  But I hadn't. And that meant . . .

  My foot brushed a rock. A slippery, unhelpful, murderously treacherous rock. My shoe skidded on it, hurling me face-forward into the cold brine; sputtering and coughing I struggled back up, my eyes burning and my hands stinging and bleeding.

  I could feel warmth streaming from them. And . . . I could feel the bottom. Jagged, uneven, littered with granite edges so sharp they were practically serrated . . .

  Sobbing with relief, I scrambled on hands and knees, never mind the pain. I was ice cold, bruised, bloody, humiliated, and madder than hell; half at myself for getting into this mess, and half at Rickert for shoving me overboard, leaving me for dead.

  But I wasn't in deep water anymore, and that was something.

  Everything. Crawling up onto Deep Cove Road, I searched the darkness, spotted a window glowing yellow about a quarter-mile distant.

  Struggling up, I began trudging toward the light.

  The people in the house were very kind. They didn't dither or demand to know what I'd been doing out there in the first place. The only real trouble I had was in getting them to take me home instead of to the hospital.

  Especially since my teeth were chattering so hard I could barely speak, which was the first thing Wade noticed.

  And that I was soaking wet. “Jesus,” he said when I turned on the light and woke him, and he got a look at me.

  As he swung his legs out of bed I was already stripping my clothes off, my icy fingers struggling. He ripped my shirt down the front and pulled it from me, muscling me toward the shower.

  “Okay,” he kept saying when he got me under the warm water. It felt scalding hot. “Okay, now, you're going to be okay.”

  I couldn't stand up by myself, so he lowered me to a sitting position and got the rest of my clothes off. By then I was shuddering uncontrollably, unable to speak.

  But later I did, dressed in warm flannel and wrapped in blankets, a mug of hot milk laced with brandy cupped in my hands, sitting up in bed.

  “Alone,” Wade said grimly when I'd finished. “Without telling anyone.”

  It was four in the morning. “Jacobia, you know there's not a thing you can do or ever will want to do, that I'll ever tell you not to. But this . . .”

  I nodded wretchedly in reply. The superficial shivering had ended; now the shudders were slower and more painful, seeming to come from the insides of my bones.

  Also, my nose was running. Wade took the mug from my hands and replaced it with tissues, then caught sight of my hands.

  “Let's see,” he said sternly.

  Reluctantly, I held them out. They were a mess, with long, water-bleached skin flaps that if they were any deeper would have required stitches to close. As it was, they just stung like hell.

  Wade looked silently at them for a moment. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and put his arm around me.

  “You poor kid,” he said as I began weeping again, hating myself but not able to stop. By now anyone else would've been shouting at me, I knew.

  Wade just sat there until I was finished. “I'm so sorry,” I whispered. “I thought if I found out what he wanted . . .”

  It still didn't make sense unless you knew what sent me out there, and maybe not then either. Anyone else would have told me what an idiot I'd been.

  But Wade heard the silences between the words. And didn't press me. Instead he concentrated on Mac.

  “He drugged you, held a gun on you—”

  Wade's gun. We hadn't even gotten yet to the part about Mac still having it. Or that I'd taken it without asking.

  Or about Victor. “. . . hit you and forced you overboard.”

  He stood up, turning away. Probably so I couldn't see his face; under most conditions Wade was the gentlest of men.

  But this wasn't most conditions. “Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty pitiful, actually.”

  I drank some more hot milk. My heart wasn't palpitating anymore, another symptom I hadn't mentioned to Wade.

  When he turned back his face appeared carved out of stone. “Well, then,” he said. “I guess there's no choice. I'm just going to have to go out and find the son of a bitch and kill him.”

  The gentlest of men, but at that moment he wasn't kidding. And in downeast Maine, he didn't have to be; guys vanished here. Not often; years might go by before a sort of unofficial court of last resort passed down an unspoken verdict.

  But over the decades this remote part of the world had disposed of enough proudly unreformable wife-beaters, predatory child molesters, and other innocent-victim-creating monsters to form a precedent: if you were bad enough, and the justice system didn't get you, sooner or later someone else would.

  “Wade, if I hadn't been so dumb he'd never have had a chance to do anything to me.”

  Wade said nothing.

  “Also if he has go
t Wanda and something happens to him, we might never find her,” I went on.

  Wade studied his hands.

  “I'm sorry I didn't tell you where I was going, or bring you along,” I added. “It was foolish of me and I won't take that kind of risk again.”

  He was listening.

  “But don't let what's happened make you do something foolish, too,” I pleaded.

  His hands relaxed.

  “When you walk into a buzz saw,” I said, “if you get cut, you don't blame the saw.”

  Reluctantly, Wade nodded. He hadn't put away the idea of punishing Mac Rickert, but there wasn't going to be any vigilante justice dispensed tonight.

  “Okay,” he said. “But don't do this to me again, Jake.”

  His face was gray and exhausted. “I mean it. Don't make me wonder where you are every minute, what's happening to you. Because I can't take it.”

  I nodded. Part of me argued silently that if I'd been a guy we wouldn't be having this conversation. But the other part—the sensible part—knew that getting hijacked by your own obsession was a gender-neutral form of stupidity.

  “All right, then,” he said finally. “You'll be okay alone here for a minute?”

  And when I said I would be, he padded downstairs; I lay there listening to my husband moving quietly around the big old house.

  Appliances off, check; door locked, check. Dogs in their beds sound asleep and Cat Dancing atop the refrigerator, double check.

  Later, safe in the darkness with him, I noticed every one of the differences between this and the cold water I'd struggled in. I was aware too of him lying there awake beside me.

  “Jacobia,” he said after a while.

  The word made a warm burst of breath on my neck. Every inch of his skin where it pressed on mine radiated like fire.

  “You can tell me. Whatever it is, if you ever want to, you can.”

  “I know,” I said. But the truth was that I still couldn't. Instead I turned into his arms, heedless of the pain in my shoulder and hands, heedless of everything but having been returned to the land of the living.

  He kissed me very carefully but with wonderful effectiveness considering the night's circumstances.

  Or any circumstances, actually.

  He was an effective man.

  Chapter

  10

  Ellie arrived at my house the next morning at a quarter to seven; Wade had already called her.

  “He says you need your head screwed back on straight,” she told me frankly. “But he didn't say why.”

  I was out in the front yard gazing at the place where the old porch had stood. Around dawn I'd wakened to the rumble of enormous gears grinding; looking out, I'd been treated to the sight of a big truck backing from the street onto the lawn.

  “So?” Ellie went on, squinting at me with a cup of coffee in her hand. Sam had already come by to take the dogs out. “You look awful, by the way,” she added.

  Yeah, no doubt. Now the Dumpster I'd filled was gone, along with the pieces of the old porch I'd demolished; time marches on and all that, but at such moments I always felt sorrowful, as if its parade route led over my heart.

  “Well,” I began. Also, time's marching always left a trail of destruction for me to clean up. Unhappily I noted the trenches that the garbage truck's wide tires had dug into the lawn.

  Topsoil, grass seed . . . But not until after the porch was rebuilt. The lumber still lay under the blue tarp, ready for me to begin measuring, sawing, and hammering.

  Instead I felt like crawling under the tarp myself. “I did a kind of a careless thing,” I admitted.

  Right. Stepping off a twenty-story building could be called careless, too. Oh, I felt like the world's worst fool.

  Ellie wore a cream knit turtleneck, denim coveralls with red hearts appliquéd to the bodice and pockets, and tan suede clogs. For her it was a remarkably color-coordinated getup except for the orange and green ribbon she'd braided into her red hair.

  “Anyway, you're coming with me,” she said, not waiting for me to explain any more. “I've got our day all planned.”

  She didn't mention my hands, I noticed, though they were a disaster, too. Apparently Wade's conversation with her had been quite detailed; yet another wave of humiliation washed over me.

  In the kitchen I hesitated; down in the cellar my father was getting ready to plug the broken water pipe for good. With him was Toby Sullivan, head of Eastport's public works department. And when I stepped out the back door to see what else might be involved, I saw that Toby had brought along—shudder—a backhoe.

  “But Ellie . . .” How could I leave when they were planning to assault my home with a digging machine?

  “You're coming if I have to put you in a sack and drag you,” Ellie repeated firmly.

  Just then Sam and Victor arrived, apparently in hopes that I would fix breakfast. Fortunately Bella chose that moment to show up too, though, and so did Ellie's husband George.

  “Thought I'd keep an eye on the proceedings,” he said. Which meant he would supervise the pipe work, thank goodness.

  “And what about you?” I turned to Sam, whose day was supposed to be spent at the boat school. What I really wanted was to get Victor alone for a minute, but he avoided eye contact.

  “I'm hangin' out with Dad,” Sam said. “What with him taking off tomorrow and all. He just told me he's going.”

  “Seminar,” Victor explained. His eyes still didn't meet mine. Cat Dancing watched him skeptically.

  Me too. “In Denver, on surgical techniques,” he added. “One of their presenters canceled, they asked me to fill in. Couple of days. A week, tops.”

  Uh-huh. We'll talk more later, I telegraphed to Victor, who this morning seemed fine. Sam must've misunderstood his father last night, I thought, annoyed.

  Still, it all left me at liberty just as Ellie had hoped, so that half an hour after dropping the baby off at day care—George intended to spend the afternoon with Lee, I'd been informed—we were on our way out of town.

  “Wow,” was all Ellie said at first when I'd told her what had happened. “So he's really got her. Have you told Bob Arnold?”

  No lecture; thank you, I thought at her. “Tried,” I said. “Wade said there wasn't much point waking him up in the middle of the night. So this morning I left a message for him but he hasn't called back.”

  In Eastport, if Bob wasn't at a phone, your call got routed to a county dispatcher, which wouldn't be helpful either. “Wade said he'd keep trying,” I added. “But hell, what I did was so nuts I'd be surprised if Bob even believes me.”

  Along Route 190 the bronze needles of the hackmatack trees glowed against the hard blue sky, while in the old orchards along the road leafless apple trees drooped, still heavy with fruit.

  “Anyway, what good'll it do talking to Bob?” I went on in frustration. “The state cops are already looking for Rickert and I don't know where he is. What more do I know, other than that he is really capable of murder?”

  Ellie took the long curve past the airfield and shot uphill toward the Quoddy Village turnoff. There a girl walked backwards along the shoulder, her thumb stuck out. Wearing a black jacket, heeled boots, and a miniskirt, she jerked her hand down when we got close enough for her to see our faces.

  And realize that we weren't potential customers. “That was Luanne Moretti,” I said as we went by, craning my neck around.

  A pickup slowed and pulled over to let Luanne in.

  Ellie watched in the rearview mirror. “Mm-hmm. I've seen her out here a few times before. I'd be scared to just get in a car with some guy, wouldn't you?”

  The pickup pulled back onto the road. “Yeah. Probably she is, too. But I guess everybody's got expenses to cover.”

  Ellie slowed for the speed trap at Pleasant Point, the cop behind the wheel of the parked squad car gazing motionless from behind his dark glasses. A couple of minutes later she stopped at the corner of Route 1 to wait for a log truck, then turned left. />
  “Anyway, I guess I could also call the state cops,” I went on, “but if I do it's going to come out why I was out there with Rickert and then Bob's going to be in trouble. Which if I thought it would help, that would be one thing. But . . .”

  “But it doesn't give them any better places to look than they had before.” Ellie finished my sentence. “I'm not so sure your little adventure last night was completely useless, though,” she said, pressing the accelerator again.

  We began by heading for Machias, the next town to our south. But soon she turned onto a side road, narrow blacktop winding along a river where mallards floated among the cattails.

  “Oh, yeah?” I retorted, swallowing hard. With Ellie at the wheel, we might as well have been at the Indy 500. “Name me one helpful thing I learned,” I demanded as she steered expertly through a trio of hilly S-turns. Between her speed and a lingering chloroform hangover, the curves set my bruised head spinning.

  “That maybe he's not a murderer.” She noticed my discomfort, popped open the glove box. Inside lay a pint bottle of Scotch.

  Meanwhile she went on driving very fast. I couldn't decide whether to stare at the bottle or at the truck headed suddenly at us, straddling the yellow line as it rounded the next curve.

  “Ellie!” I exhaled as her left hand hit the horn, her right hand downshifted, and her feet did a complicated maneuver on the clutch, brake pedal, and accelerator.

  “Hang on,” she advised. Instants later we had bumped through a ditch luckily cushioned by barberry and bittersweet and were back on the road, Ellie flipping a middle finger out the window.

  Thoughtfully, I opened the pint bottle and took a swallow, considered putting it back in the glove box, then tucked it between my knees instead.

  “As I was saying,” Ellie said as we zoomed onto an uphill straightaway, “it strikes me that this life jacket you fastened onto was just a little too convenient.”

  Surrounded on both sides now by stone wall–fenced pastures, the road just went on climbing. “What do you mean?” I demanded. “I told you, if it hadn't been there, I'd have . . .”

  Then I stopped as the road crested the hilltop. Ahead and below spread hundreds of square miles of trees, lakes, and hills, the blueberry barrens wine-colored with the autumn leaves of the fruit bushes and the farthest mountaintops already snow-covered.