Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  Simultaneously Ellie cursed. “I can't get the engine out of reverse,” she snarled, struggling with the shift mechanism.

  Not a good development, because maybe we'd dealt with Jenna but we were still tied to her boat. If Ellie didn't get our engine back in gear in the next ten seconds it would seize up and quit and after that Jenna's boat would just keep towing us until it ran out of gas.

  “Damn you, move!” Ellie screamed, throwing her weight on the shifter.

  The lever popped free, the engine howl quieting and the boat nosing forward again under a steadily darkening sky, the clouds sullen purple and the wind snatching the whitecaps' foam off the wave tops.

  Quietly, Wanda began to weep. Me too, but on the inside; the actual outward sobbing, I figured, would start any time now.

  “Ellie, can you get us to . . . ?”

  Shore, I was about to ask. But she just pointed at the eyebolt in our prow, where the line was still clipped.

  The line connecting us to Jenna's boat. Which, it suddenly came to my attention, had begun sinking. And night was falling fast; soon we'd be lucky even to find Jenna's boat in the dark, much less get the tow line unhitched from it.

  We could unclip it from our end, except that clever Jenna had put a line lock on the cable. That was the little gadget she had attached, I saw as I scrambled to it on my belly, the wind lashing my face. The kind of lock that took a key. . . .

  I looked around wildly. No key. She'd taken it with her.

  “Bail faster,” Ellie snapped at Wanda, who struggled to obey, scooping up canfuls of the bloody water around Rickert.

  By skillful steering, Ellie kept as much slack on the line as possible, postponing the moment when the other boat's weight would drag us under. Too bad this maneuver took us farther from land, the touch of which I now desired more than I craved heaven and more than I feared hell.

  One of which I might be seeing in close-up, in the very near future. Ellie aimed us sharply to starboard.

  “What are you doing?”

  For an answer she just pointed, and in the encroaching gloom I spotted Jenna's face, her desperate hands clinging to the top of the Nun's Head.

  Then a wave washed over her and she was gone. The boat, too, gave a swaying little shudder, then sank.

  “Grab it!” Ellie shouted, waving at something. “Jake, get out there and . . .”

  I didn't see what she meant but at her gesture I crawled out on the prow again anyway, then spotted a small plastic tackle box bobbing in the waves.

  It had floated out of Jenna's boat. Tools, I thought. Maybe even the key to the cable lock. I scrabbled madly for it, the cold water numbing my hands instantly.

  “Jake!” Ellie cried behind me. “Jake, please hurry!”

  “I am!” I shouted. Or tried; all that came out of my mouth was the icy salt water that had just splashed into it.

  And all I could think of was Wade reading the note I'd left. Not knowing—yet—that it contained my last words to him.

  The prow was slippery, every roll of the vessel threatening to wash me off. My body trembled uncontrollably, partly from cold, partly in the kind of fear that turns your brain to mush.

  But finally my fingers closed around the tackle box handle. I threw it behind me, sliding back desperately into the boat as the sunken craft's cable shortened inexorably. When it tightened, it would drag us down. . . .

  Fumbling with the latch, I got the box open. A small box of .22-caliber ammunition, a really quite enormous hunting knife . . .

  I shuddered, not wanting to think of what Jenna might've had planned for that. Around it lay the usual snarl of fishing stuff that always litters the inside of a tackle box: lures, sinkers. But nothing I could use . . .

  A light somewhere on shore caught my eye briefly. Then it vanished, and I was too intent on the box's contents to pay much attention.

  “Get away, will you?” I told Wanda as she leaned in to where I rummaged in a mess of bagged hooks and other such small items. But she kept crowding me.

  “Wanda, cut it out. Can't you see I'm trying?”

  The boat jolted, stiffening as the last of the cable's slack went dangerously straight. The prow dipped abruptly. It was over; as Jenna's boat went down, we were inexorably being dragged under with it.

  Suddenly Wanda's fingers shot out, dipped into the box, and reappeared with . . .

  A key. Nimbly she scampered out onto the prow, now slanted down thirty degrees or more toward the water. As I watched openmouthed she dropped to her belly, slid forward, and grasped the cable with a small, utterly helpless-appearing hand.

  Only it wasn't helpless. You've got to stop underestimating this child, I thought as she slotted the key into the lock, then turned it. . . . Click!

  The cable loop snapped away with the mass of the sunken boat pulling on it, and it whiplashed nastily before sliding into the water like an evil genie vanishing back into its bottle. Freed, the prow popped sharply up again, nearly sending Wanda into the water.

  But she clung on, sliding backwards to get her feet and then the rest of herself into the boat again.

  I threw my arms around her. “You did it! Oh, you wonderful girl . . .”

  She shrugged me off, dropping to her knees by Mac's body. I couldn't tell if he was alive or dead.

  Dead, probably. Ellie brought us around, motoring us toward land, which was now barely distinguishable from the dark water . . .

  . . . except for the light. It was there again, bright yellow-white, and moving. A flashlight, and as we approached the shore a car's headlights appeared. An ambulance was there, too.

  Silhouetted against them: moving figures. A hundred yards off we began to hear their voices shouting.

  I looked back, straining through the rain and wind to catch sight of Jenna again. But only the night and wild water were out there now, accompanied by a roar like a train bearing down on us.

  The real storm had arrived. Rickert stirred, moaned weakly; Wanda bent to him again.

  Then the makeshift cotter pin broke, the engine revving uselessly. But the waves carried us in; moments later, stones scraped on the boat bottom. Faces appeared; strong hands reached out to us as we trudged ashore through the slippery shallows.

  Wade lunged at me. “Jesus,” he moaned in relief.

  “I g-guess you g-got my nuh-note,” I said into his shoulder. His head moved, his arms tightening around me.

  “Yeah,” he said. There were tears of angry joy in his eyes. “I got it, all right.”

  “Let her go with him,” Bob Arnold ordered the ambulance guys when they'd loaded Rickert into the waiting vehicle. Even before he spoke, Wanda made a beeline for the open bay doors and scrambled in.

  “Now, George,” Ellie began as rain began hammering down. “It wasn't as bad as it seems.”

  The hell it wasn't. Everybody here knew that this time Ellie and I had pushed the envelope too far, us most of all. That we had gotten away with it—barely—didn't make me feel any better about it.

  Especially when George opened the door of his truck and the cab light went on, revealing the infant car seat strapped inside.

  “Mah!” Lee shouted gleefully as Ellie climbed onto the jump seat in back; then George closed the door, putting the light out.

  “Wade,” I began, intending to say I'm sorry.

  He pressed my head to his shoulder. “Don't say it. Just . . . you screwed up, you and Ellie. But if you hadn't, the girl might be dead now. You'd have to live with that.”

  He held me away from him, looked into my face. “That you hadn't even tried,” he said. “And anyway, if I'd wanted someone else, that's who I'd have married.”

  I leaned against him once more; it was all I'd wanted to hear. “The saddest thing is, I don't think Jenna ever once even asked anyone for help,” I said.

  Brief silence from Wade. Then, “Tell me about it,” he said, his tone communicating perfectly his clear understanding of the relationship between pots, kettles, and the color black.
>
  Whereupon I wisely decided to shut up, as the ambulance howled off toward Route 1 and the hospital in Calais. After that, George and Wade pulled Ellie's boat farther up the beach so the storm wouldn't carry it away, and Bob Arnold cornered me.

  I gave him the short version, with emphasis on Jenna still being in the water. But squinting out over the dark roiling bay as he listened, his face confirmed what I already feared: that by now the waves had surely finished what her thirst for vengeance began.

  “Won't have to arrest her,” Bob said as if this were some consolation.

  Which for Jenna maybe it would have been. “State cops checking on her found a warrant out of Massachusetts,” he added. “Seems there's quite a collection of contraband missing out of the evidence room where she was on the job last.”

  “Right,” I said inadequately. “Probably there is.” Tiredly I finished summing up the night's events. Now that the adrenaline was draining from my system, my legs felt as if they were turning to water.

  “Christ,” said Bob when I was through. “What a sorry mess.” He strode to his patrol car. “Get on home,” he called over his shoulder. “I'll talk to you later, you and Ellie both. State cops will want to, too, I imagine.”

  No kidding; I felt my shoulders slump at the thought. But then he turned. “Jake.”

  “Yeah?” He didn't look happy, and he couldn't say Good job. It hadn't been. But . . .

  “You really are the snoopiest woman I ever met,” he told me finally, his mouth forming a grudging smile. “And by the way, I gave Victor a call. He's headed for the hospital to meet Rickert.”

  To do the surgery, he meant, if it turned out Mac was still a candidate for any. I felt a spark of hope, but puzzlement, too.

  Victor had barely been gone a day; I hadn't known he was home. “And Marge Cathcart woke up,” Bob added. “She'll be able to see Wanda when the ambulance gets there.”

  He started the squad car. “I sure wish winter would come,” he finished with a touch of wistfulness. “Freeze things good and solid, maybe I could get a minute's peace once in a blue moon.”

  “Sure,” I said carelessly, not thinking much of it. Wishing for winter was a chronic thing with Bob. His job became vastly less stressful when the last of the summer visitors departed and the rest of us were trapped inside by the cold.

  But that time his wish came true, because the next day winter did come.

  Along with something else.

  Something I still haven't figured out.

  The following afternoon, soon after I replaced the money in my cash stash—the envelope of bills looking lonely without the Bisley there behind the loose brick—my father arrived with the box he'd dug out of the mortar from the cellar wall.

  “Here it is,” he announced proudly as he carried it up the front steps.

  The new front steps. Because as it turns out, what it takes me weeks to do can be accomplished in a few hours by a carpenter who's not following instructions out of a how-to book. One, for instance, like Ellie's husband George, who thinks of power tools simply as extensions of his hands, and uses them as easily.

  Now the new wood glowed richly under a coating of ice; the cold front reaching down from Canada behind the storm was like a hand from a morgue refrigerator, gripping us by our throats and polishing the steps with a sneaky layer of slipperiness.

  “Drain holes,” George said. “I'll drill drain holes in 'em.”

  To keep water from pooling on them, he meant. But not right that minute; we were all too curious to see what the box held. My father brought it into the dining room and set it on the table.

  “It's beautiful,” Ellie breathed at the dark cherry top and elaborate inlay figures delicately set into it. At the center was a rose, while fanciful birds adorned each corner and a checkered strip ran around the edges inside the raised trim.

  “And you've cleaned it up so well. How did you get all that concrete off it?” Ellie asked.

  He straightened proudly. “Steel wool so fine you could polish a baby's bottom with it, and olive oil mixed with just the right amount of . . . well, I ain't saying.”

  He waved a lean hand at Bella Diamond, hovering over the box there with us. “She came up with the recipe, deserves the most credit,” he said.

  “Oh, go on with you,” Bella reacted gruffly, but with an interesting little glance at my father that I thought boded well for the future.

  “That inlay's hand done,” George said, admiring it. “Somebody spent a lot of hours on each o' them birds.”

  “And the finish,” Wade agreed, “was hand mixed.” In his gun-shop work he often concocted finishes so the repairs matched the originals. “Wish the guy had left us that secret recipe,” he added with a touch of craftsman's envy.

  My father took the top off with a ceremonial flourish. “And inside . . .”

  “Oh,” we said softly together. Inside lay a book bound in dark leather. Over the years the leather had dried but not so much as to crack or disfigure itself, and the golden curlicues stamped decoratively into the cover still gleamed.

  “One hundred and eighty-one years ago, give or take a year,” my father said reverently. “That's how old the house is, and they built the foundation first.”

  So the book was at least that old, too. “Age isn't the most interesting thing about it, though,” he went on.

  He lifted the volume, presenting it to me. Hesitantly I took it, feeling the surprising weight of it in my hands.

  Whatever he had done to repair the little hole he'd drilled in it, he'd done invisibly. “Open it,” my father said gently.

  So I did.

  Chapter

  14

  The dream was always the same, its events proceeding simply and exactly as they'd happened in real life.

  Exactly as they'd happened: Six weeks after Jenna Durrell died in the water off Tall Island, I sat in the rocking chair by Victor's bed in the guest room in my old house.

  He opened his eyes. “Hello,” he said thickly.

  The clinic treatment hadn't worked and after that it was all downhill fast. The operation Victor did to remove the bullet from Mac Rickert's skull was the last surgery he ever performed.

  “Hello, Victor,” I answered, leaning forward so he could see me. If he could. Lately I wasn't sure. “I'm here,” I said.

  A faint smile touched his lips. After performing the surgery on Rickert, he'd arranged for Rickert's transfer to a rehab place in Portland, and referred Wanda Cathcart to some experts he knew in New York for evaluation of her language deficiency.

  “Jake,” Victor said, and closed his eyes again, his fingers plucking restlessly at the top of his linen sheet.

  Outside it was snowing, white flakes swirling thickly past the window in the pale, bluish early-morning light. “I'm here,” I said again, not knowing if he could hear me.

  Only after Wanda had seen for herself that Rickert was alive and expected to make a full recovery had she agreed to go for the evaluation.

  “After that,” Marge Cathcart had told me of the bond between Rickert and her daughter, “we'll have to see.” But it was clear she understood that Mac had saved Wanda's life, and that whatever else might be true about him, the unlikely pair loved one another.

  “She was protecting me,” Marge said of why Wanda hadn't told her about Eugene Dibble's murder. Wanda had known Marge was no match for Jenna, while Hetty and Greg would save only themselves if push came to shove. And how likely were the police to believe an odd girl with a bat in her sleeve, even in the event that she managed to make them understand?

  “Edward Jenner,” Victor whispered, then slept again.

  If it was sleep. I leaned forward anxiously. His breath came at last, then another, lifting the blue and white quilt that the ladies at the medical center had made for him.

  Blue for the sky, they'd said when they brought it; white for the summer clouds they prayed he would get well to see again.

  But they'd known he wouldn't, and now cold winds r
attled the storm windows as if trying to get in.

  I sat back. Wade and I had agreed together that Victor must come here, and by that time he was in no position to argue. Sam spent most evenings here, too, and we had a hospice nurse. But she wouldn't be on duty for another hour or so.

  Monday lay watchfully on the floor beside me, Prill in the hall. Astonishingly, Cat Dancing had stationed herself at Victor's feet, refusing to be moved.

  After a while Ellie came to the door. “He's asleep?”

  “I think so.” Together we'd put the hospital bed in the room, Wade and George lugging its parts up the stairs for us. Now a tiny piece of white toast with quince jam on it lay uneaten on a plate on the bedside table.

  “Bob Arnold called,” she said. “He said you'd want to know a grand jury indicted Hetty Bonham for being an accomplice in more kinds of fraud than you can shake a stick at.”

  The poor-abused-Hetty story had been a lie, it turned out, along with all Greg and Hetty's supposed family history together. They'd been partners in crime, nothing more; why Hetty had been so vehement about Eugene Dibble's past—which did turn out to be true—was still her secret.

  But I thought I could guess. Victor muttered something that I couldn't make out.

  “Is Lee still wearing the mask?” I asked, mostly to distract myself.

  As if I could. “Yes,” Ellie smiled. “She won't take it off, or the rest of the getup, either.”

  For Halloween we'd had a record number of trick-or-treaters up the new front steps. To greet them, little Lee had been dressed as a baby goblin, and she'd fallen in love with the outfit.

  The holiday had also conferred an unexpected benefit on me; at a party at the Happy Landings Café a pretty young high school teacher visiting our island from New York had suffered a costume malfunction so spectacular, so revealing, and so nearly certain to have been deliberate, it wiped me and my doings right off the map in the gossip department.

  “I'll check on you later,” Ellie said, and closed the door. Victor's eyes opened at the latch click, his lips moving without sound.