Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  But the cellphones were both lost, still back in the truck. Walking out wasn’t an option, either, two miles in the dark while a bad guy with a shotgun stalked us.

  Worse, with the road washed out, we’d have to bushwhack around it, and in that direction lay marsh and brush so thick and thorny, it would turn our clothes to shredded fluff in minutes, then start on our skin; also, we didn’t have hiking boots, which put twisted ankles high on the list of likely events.

  “So how are we going to get out of here?” I asked, thinking she’d come up with some other suggestion. Instead:

  “We’re not.”

  “What?” I turned, horrified; she was giving up? “Come on, Ellie, there’s got to be a way to—”

  But she remained resolute. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But the truth is that we can’t get out without exposing ourselves, if not to his shotgun then to some other, maybe even worse, mischief.”

  She had a point; he might want all this to look accidental, but if push really came to shove, who knew what he’d do? “We’re exposed here, too,” I argued. “We’ve got to at least try. I don’t see how you can just quit.”

  “Who said anything about quitting?” She turned from checking the fire in the stove again. “I’m talking about winning. I’m cold and I’m scared and I don’t like being hunted. Which we are.”

  Yup: all three of those things, with emphasis on the scared part. Because that water trap he’d sprung on us was crazy, the kind of thing only a real whack job would not just think of but actually try. But it was also very resourceful.

  Enough to have almost worked. “And that,” Ellie went on, “makes me mad.”

  She marched to the firewood bin, then back to the stove, head high and shoulders straight even under all those clothes. “So I’m for catching him, and after that I’m for making sure he never does anything like this ever again.”

  She knelt to feed more sticks into the stove’s maw, watched the fire blaze up before closing the door on it again. “So put on your thinking cap, Jake, because the fact is, we can’t get out of here, at least not tonight, and we have no way to call for help.”

  She stood, her shape a slim, dark shadow etched on the larger darkness: of the room, the forest around us, and most of all the dark intentions of whoever lurked among the trees.

  Not only that, but there was a part of what had happened at the beaver pond that Ellie hadn’t thought of yet, or just hadn’t mentioned:

  Our attacker had gone to a lot of trouble making the truck rollover look accidental, a freak occurrence out in the woods. As Ellie had said, likely he’d meant to come back here to the cabin afterwards, to set things up so it looked as if those windows had been broken by wind, or storm-tossed branches … anything to make it seem like Mother Nature and not some human culprit was behind our deaths.

  But we knew different, and we’d lived to tell.

  So now he pretty much had to kill us.

  Gotcha, he’d thought as with dark-adapted eyes he’d watched the pickup truck slide sideways, then roll over into the flooded pond. But then …

  Then she’d had to spoil everything. The way she always had, the way she’d spoiled seven years of his life, because of course it had been her; who else could ruin a beautiful plan like that?

  Now as he crouched in the clearing, staring at the cottage with its glowing porch light and the woodsmoke puffing once again from its chimney, Dewey Hooper cursed his dead wife, who’d escaped before he could finish her off. Her and that friend of hers, Jacobia Tiptree … now, he fumed into the rainy darkness, he was going to have to deal with both of them again. And that meant time and trouble he could ill afford.

  Where the hell was his good luck? he wondered. Somehow it all seemed to have vanished, probably also on account of her. But whatever the reason, now the women knew someone was after them, and not only that, they knew who; in his rush to get back to the stream in time to pull the log out when they crossed the culverted part of the road, he’d accidentally allowed them to get a look at him.

  So if he didn’t finish this soon, they’d tattle on him, and the next thing he knew he’d be back in prison, where for all its warmth and safety he did not want to go, he did not.

  Or worse, Marianne herself would find a way to get revenge.

  And what that revenge might be like, he didn’t want to imagine. For all he knew, she might be able to reach into his chest, grab his heart with her ice-cold hand, and squeeze.…

  So he had to get rid of her permanently, do it right so that this time she couldn’t ever come back. Glancing around at the small, dimly lit area of rustic sheds and lean-tos ranged loosely around the cottage under the big trees, he began taking inventory of the available items that he could use for the job.

  Without warning, another attack of nerves hit him; shakily he ordered himself to take deep breaths, wait it out, ignore the idea that life might be like this now, forever and ever: scared. Just … he didn’t know how people did it, all this having to make decisions. How had he made them before? He couldn’t remember.…

  But in the light of the rising moon as the clouds from the departing storm began pulling aside, the lamplit area wasn’t all he could see, and soon his surroundings gave him an idea: there was a gas can in the shed. And if that failed, there was a propane tank standing on a small concrete pad at the side of the house.

  At the sight of it, a smile began curving his lips. The tank was not the fat, barrel-shaped kind that fuel companies installed at in-town residences; instead it was the tall gray industrial-type cylinder used in garages and factories. Back in prison he’d moved these around on metal carts, delivering them to classrooms where inmates learned employment skills like metal cutting and welding.

  But even without a cart, one man could move a tank like that fairly easily. He’d need a wrench to disconnect the tank from the gas line that led into the cabin; probably it ran the cookstove, maybe some gas lamps. But there were wrenches in the toolshed.

  Then he noticed a homemade outdoor shower setup at the far edge of the clearing. In the summertime it would most likely be screened by an elderberry thicket, but now through the leafless brush he could just make out the big black rubber water bag hung from a tree branch, and a long hose with a plastic spray head at the end of it.

  The water bag didn’t interest him, but the hose did; maybe his good luck hadn’t abandoned him after all. Maybe instead things were all falling together for him at last.…

  Finally he spotted the pile of kindling, by a chopping block with a long-handled ax stuck in it, and his smile widened to a grin; it was the last piece in the puzzle.

  Because that propane tank resembled a bomb, and properly handled it would act like one, too, or at any rate its contents would. So with gasoline or with propane, one way or the other those women were as good as dead … but the hardest part of all this would be making sure they stayed dead.

  Or making Marianne stay that way, anyway. And now even that knotty little problem was solved, because he’d seen enough scary movies to know that if you were having trouble getting a dead person to stay dead, you put a stake through their heart.

  A wooden stake … And now, wouldn’t you know it, here he was practically within arm’s reach of a whole kindling pile of them.

  Sharp ones, too, he noticed. Long, splintery, and …

  Gotcha, he thought.

  Inside the cottage, Ellie and I sat together on the floor by the stove, away from the windows. I’d hurried back upstairs long enough to grab some more quilts and blankets, and we’d gotten as dry and comfortable as possible.

  Considering, I mean, that there was a guy out there in the darkness who was bent on killing us. Also that we had only a single weapon, which in no way matched the firepower of the guy’s shotgun.

  And of course we had no vehicle. It was quiet, too, no sound from around the cabin except for the usual nighttime-in-the-forest squeakings, rustlings, and the occasional dying shriek as some unfortunate small mamma
l fell prey to an owl or weasel.

  Quiet, that is, until something big hit the outside wall of the cabin. A faint metallic skreek-skreek sound followed, then came a clank!

  Ellie crept to the window, then turned back to me, her lean, delicate face lit sideways by the moon’s glow.

  I must’ve been staring. “What?” she demanded, but I couldn’t speak, still looking at Ellie but seeing instead an old obituary photo from the Quoddy Tides.

  I’d last seen the picture seven years earlier, when Marianne Hooper died; it had struck me hard then how much she was like my friend, and now that image rose clearly in memory again.

  That face. Those eyes … Not twins, not even close, but the same kind of wavy, pale red hair and the same delicacy of facial features, so that an imagination rubbed raw by guilt might …

  “Ellie.” I found my voice. “Maybe I know why.” Why he’s doing this. It was crazy, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

  Only I couldn’t say so because just then a bundle of flaming rags soaked in what smelled like gasoline flew in through one of the broken panes; suddenly the floor was a pool of flames.

  Ellie ran one way for a fire extinguisher; I ran the other for something to help smother the fire. I got to the daybed, reaching out; then my foot caught the edge of the braided rug and I went sprawling, hitting my head so hard on the corner of the bed frame that I saw stars.

  And that’s all I remember about that.

  “Maybe we should go check on them.” Sam sat with Wade at a table in the otherwise empty hospital cafeteria, drinking the warm brown liquid that had come out of the vending machine.

  “On Mom and Ellie, I mean. At the cabin, make sure they’re all right.” The powdered creamer had lightened the stuff in the paper cup without improving its vile taste.

  Wade looked up. “You think something’s wrong there, too?” On top of everything else? his tone added.

  Sam shrugged, both hands wrapped around the paper cup. If he had been home, Bella and his granddad might not have had to drive themselves wherever they’d been going. Or worse, his conscience added unhelpfully, maybe they’d gone out looking for him.

  “I don’t know. Probably not. Just a feeling, that’s all.” A feeling, Sam didn’t add, born of a nightmare apparition: his dead father, on a mission to warn him about something.

  Something bad … Or maybe it was only his own twisted psyche trying to tell him something. Like Don’t let that girl con you.

  He had, though. He’d been a complete sucker, and was now in the aftermath of it, suffering the consequences. So maybe his dad wouldn’t appear to him anymore, leering and dripping; maybe the worst had happened, and that last vision had been the final one.

  Or maybe not. He felt … disturbed, like his insides were a hornet’s nest somebody was stirring up with a stick. “I don’t know,” he repeated, and might’ve said more, but a familiar voice stopped him.

  “You two boys mind company?” It was Eastport police chief Bob Arnold, plump and pink-faced in his cop uniform, with a ton of gear hanging from his duty belt as usual.

  Equipment jangling and rattling around his ample waist, Bob pulled up a chair. “So. I guess you’ve had yourself quite a day.”

  Sam nodded. “I didn’t fall off the wagon, Bob.”

  The chief nodded. “Good. Glad to hear it. Guess I had that part wrong, then.”

  No apology, though, and why would there be? Sam thought if he lived to be a hundred without ever taking another drink, there would still always be that little question about him.

  A deserved little question. “You might want to know those two fair-weather friends of yours got nabbed,” he went on.

  The cut on Bob’s forehead, held together by strips of surgical tape, looked fresh. Sam’s mind flashed to a mental picture of the metal clasp on Carol Stedman’s handbag.

  Bob noticed Sam eyeing the cut, put two fingers to it and winced. “Yeah, she got me,” he confirmed Sam’s suspicion. “When I was helping her into the squad car, she …”

  He stopped, apparently not liking this memory any more than Sam liked imagining the event. “Would have taped it myself, but I know when the wife comes home she’ll ask if I got it looked at.”

  Sam thought about a woman who was so honest herself that you wouldn’t lie to her just on that basis, even about such a little thing. “Huh,” he said thoughtfully, and Bob nodded as if catching his thought, then went on:

  “I guess they thought we were just a bunch of bumpkins, they could get away with just about anything.”

  Sam regarded his paper cup. Yeah, and who was the biggest bumpkin of all? Thinking this, he felt suddenly like jumping up from the table, maybe even tipping it over on his way out.

  But Wade spoke up and saved him. “Sounds to me like they were a pair of pretty smooth operators.”

  Bob nodded. “Had enough warrants out on them to wallpaper a room. Made a career out of bamboozling people, charging whatever they could on stolen credit, maybe pulling a few burglaries and then skipping town, on to the next place.”

  He looked up at Sam again. “Had the boatyard’s cashbox in their car, money and credit slips still in it. It’s on its way back here now.”

  Sam sighed, a bigger weight lifting off him than he’d known was there. “Thanks.”

  He managed a smile, got up from the table without tipping it over. The clock on the wall by the exit said it was 3:10 a.m.

  “Guess I’ll head home, try for a nap,” said Bob.

  “Yeah, sounds good,” Wade replied, lobbing a crumpled cup at one of the trash receptacles.

  It went in. “You know,” Sam ventured, tossing his own cup, “on the way home, maybe we could …”

  Stop in at the cabin. At this way-too-early hour, the idea was ridiculous, but he wanted to see his mother and Ellie.

  He just … wanted to, that was all. In the deserted hospital lobby, he pulled out his cellphone, tried his mother’s number, and again got its “leave a message” recording.

  And that did it, somehow. Whether or not it made sense, whether he’d had some crazy otherworldly warning or had made it all up in his own head, he was going out to the cottage at the lake whether his stepfather liked it or not.

  He turned to Wade, striding along behind him, intending to suggest that Wade ride home with Bob in the squad car while he, Sam, took the truck down the dirt road. But before he could say that, Wade’s square, regular features went suddenly still and stunned-looking, as if in the shiny black reflectiveness of the hospital lobby’s plate-glass windows he was seeing something that wasn’t, couldn’t be there. Something or someone …

  Then, from behind them both, an alarm began sounding shrilly, a high, abrasive beeping that obviously meant something had gone very wrong somewhere. Beyond the doors leading to the patient wards, people were running, doctors and nurses sprinting toward whatever the alarm was for.…

  Toward where Sam’s grandfather and Bella lay injured and helpless. Wade turned from whatever he’d seen in the window, hurrying toward the alarm’s insistent summons, and after a frozen moment—what had Wade seen out there, anyway?—Sam ran, too.

  CHAPTER 9

  When I came to, I thought I was at home in my bed, safe and sound. But then I realized: Ellie and I were in a cottage deep in the woods, a man with a shotgun was romping around outside, and we had no way to escape.

  Or, anyway, I assumed he was still out there, the drowning plot he’d nearly pulled off and the firebomb he’d thrown tending to confirm my belief; if nothing else, the guy was persistent.

  Now as I lay on the floor looking up, Ellie peered down at me, relief on her face as she noticed that I was awake again.

  “Hi,” she said. She’d been fiddling with her Kindle, sitting by me with the device in her lap, but the fire extinguisher stood right next to her on the floor, and when I saw it, I sat up fast, recalling even more of the recent events.

  “Ouch.” I put my hand to the side of my head, felt a sticky, wet lump the size o
f a robin’s egg that hurt like a son of a gun, from where I’d smacked it on the bed frame.

  “Here.” Ellie found her way to the cooler, dug out some ice cube remnants floating around in there, and located a dish towel to wrap it in. “Put this on it.”

  “Double ouch …” Ice might make it feel better in the long run, but in the short run, see son of a gun, above.

  “I’ve been trying to send an email,” she said. She’d put the Kindle back into its case; with the world’s most energetic and inquisitive five-year-old at home, Ellie was compulsive about keeping electronic devices in padded surroundings.

  Wishing hard that our attacker were in some, I tried opening and closing my eyes a few times, noting that they still worked but that I also wished I’d had some kind of padded enclosure for my head.

  “I didn’t know the Kindle had email capability.” In Eastport it didn’t even have a reliable download connection, due to the remoteness of the place; the joke in town was that the island community was the best place to be in the event the world ended, since we wouldn’t find out about it until ten years later.

  But here at the cottage, Ellie and I were nearer to one of Canada’s wireless towers, so the gadget’s bells and whistles worked. “It’s supposed to be able to hook up to a Web-based mail site,” Ellie said. “With the browser.”

  She frowned, setting the thing aside. “So I tried. But it’s really not what the Kindle’s meant for, so who knows if it went through. I couldn’t tell for sure.”

  A small, uncertain laugh betrayed how worried she was; like me, I supposed. But there was no point in dwelling on that. “Anyway, while you were out cold, I nailed the front door shut. And the front window shades are all down. He can lurk, but he can’t watch us.”

  The back windows looked out over the deck construction, and after that, sharply downhill through more trees, to the lake. You couldn’t see in through those windows unless you were in one of the trees—unlikely, since they were paper birch trees with long, smoothish trunks, difficult to climb—or on stilts.