by Sarah Graves
Not that he believed her. Once the pleasure of having her in his arms wore off, nothing she’d said would make sense. It didn’t now, even.
But it would serve her right if he pretended not to know that a while longer. It was what his father would have done.
Then he looked up, and in the black reflectiveness of the glass doors saw—
That nightmare face. “Dad?” he whispered. It couldn’t be, but—
And then it wasn’t. Carol turned her head to look up at him questioningly when she felt his arms tighten around her, holding her. Outside the glass doors, Bob Arnold frowned as he recognized the woman locked in Sam’s embrace, and started in.
Suddenly she caught on. “Let go of me, let … help! Someone, help me, he’s crazy! Help, I’m … you bastard!”
Rearing back, eyes blazing and teeth bared in a grimace, she reminded him of a wild animal in the moment before Bob Arnold reached them. A weasel like the one out at the lake, Sam thought, and why, he wondered, was he thinking about that right now?
Bob crossed the lobby, popping the handcuffs from his belt. He snapped them onto Carol’s wrists as Sam gripped her arms, pushing them down carefully so as not to hurt her.
“All right,” Bob said to her, his voice low and calm, almost soothing. “Let’s try it again, and this time there’s not going to be any escaping from anyone’s custody, so save your energy.”
Sam watched her face change as she opened her mouth to lie, to argue and try to bargain her way out of this. Suddenly she was an innocent young woman again, caught up tragically in some awful misunderstanding.
Just then Wade came up to them. “What’s going on?”
Carol’s head swiveled. “Please,” she begged, eyes filling with tears. “Whoever you are, please, this is a mistake. You’ve got to—”
“Save it,” Bob rapped out, and she shut up, reddening as if slapped. “That radio call I got?” He angled his head at her. “Girlfriend here sweet-talked somebody into letting her use the john by herself, at that rest stop on Route 9 on the way over to Bangor. God knows what she told him, but it worked.”
Sam wasn’t sure, but he thought he sensed Carol preening faintly at this description of how well she’d conned even a cop.
Bob went on. “Next thing he knows, he looks around and she’s gone, must’ve gotten a ride back this way from someone out on the highway. Stole another car in Eastport, followed you up here …”
Bob stopped, looking disgusted. But Sam got the point. One thing she’d said was true, then: with Richard out of the picture at least temporarily, she had needed help.
Money maybe, a place to lay low. And she’d thought that to get it, she’d be able to fool Sam again. That was how dumb she thought he was, the impression he’d given her.
“You’ll be sorry,” she spat, twisting in Bob Arnold’s expert grip as he guided her toward the glass doors.
“Yeah,” Sam said. Yeah, he already was. Bob took her out.
“Hey,” Wade said. From the cafeteria entrance now came warm smells of cooking; though it was not yet 4:30 a.m., the earliest morning staffers were already trudging in for their shifts.
“Everything okay?” Wade asked.
“Fine,” Sam said. “I’m good.” In the cafeteria, a big rosy-cheeked woman opened the tray line by sliding a grate up.
“Then how about we check on Bella and your grandfather once more, then get breakfast and take a ride up to the cabin?”
“Great,” Sam agreed. The night wasn’t ending too badly after all, he thought, by the time reached Bella’s bedside.
She opened her eyes, panic filling them at her first sight of the unfamiliar surroundings. But then she saw Wade, and her fear subsided.
Sam took her hand, forced back tears at the bony feel of it. “Hey,” he whispered, and nearly did cry when she gave his fingers a squeeze. “Hey, you look just great to me, you know that?”
She did, too; funny, he thought, how a skinny old woman with dyed red hair and a face that pretty much defined the term battle-ax could be so … so pretty.
Wade took his phone out, laid it on her bedside table. “You keep this,” he said. She didn’t have one of her own. “Don’t use it until they say you can,” he added cautioningly, and she moved her head up and down a little to show she understood.
“It’ll make her feel better just having it,” Wade explained when she was asleep again. They made their way back out along the corridor. “Because you know she wouldn’t use the one the hospital provides.”
“Right, because it might have germs on it.” Back home, her über-cleanliness could be a trial.
But now not so much. In fact, by the time he sat down at the cafeteria table with Wade, who was already digging into his eggs, he felt almost cheerful.
Still, he couldn’t stop wondering about one detail. “Hey, Wade?”
The big man looked up from his meal, his broad, craggy face mildly amiable now that no one seemed to be in any immediate danger. He wore his usual uniform of a dark sweatshirt over a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and work boots; Sam thought that at his age, he ought to be less comforted by Wade’s presence. But he was very glad he didn’t have to do all this alone.
“Earlier, in the lobby,” he began, not quite knowing how to phrase the rest of it. So he finally just blurted it all out: about the nightmare face in the bilge water, and the other times he’d seen it, ending with the most recent hallucination.
“So what I want to know,” Sam added hesitantly, because if just one person saw something, that was one thing. But more than one was entirely another. “What I want to know is this,” he said, and then he asked Wade: had he seen Sam’s dad, too? Had he?
Wade put his cup down, considering the question seriously.
And after a moment, answered.
To store electricity from the solar panels at the cottage, we used a deep-cycle marine battery, plus a converter to change the direct current from the panels to alternating current. That way we could run ordinary appliances on it instead of having to buy special ones.
But not just any household appliances. Fluorescent bulbs for the lamps were mandatory, so as not to waste power, and we didn’t bother even trying to operate electricity hogs like toasters. I’d kept planning to rent a gasoline-powered generator and bring it here along with a vacuum cleaner, and give this place a serious cleaning. But I hadn’t done it, which was why the cabin’s braided rug had so much dog hair embedded in it.
I knew it did, because I’d been lying on it for an hour when light began peeking through the burnt spots of the bed linens nailed up at the windows.
“You’re sure those decking boards are the way we want them?” I whispered.
Despite the tea Ellie kept making me, my mouth tasted like old blood, and even with so many panes broken out of the windows, the cottage interior still stank of ashes and gasoline.
“I’m sure.” Ellie was on the daybed with my gun in her lap; he’d be coming soon, we thought. For some reason we didn’t know yet, and probably wouldn’t like, he seemed to be waiting for better light.
And now it was here. I sat halfway up, lay back down again fast. Saving my strength, Ellie called it.
I called it nearly fainting, any time I tried raising my head higher than my feet. But my state of consciousness wasn’t the important thing now, I told myself firmly. Getting away with this was the important thing.
So I was having second thoughts about the completeness of our preparations. “Ellie. Upstairs, there’s a little electric jigsaw.”
I’d put it there when the gas-generator idea was fresh and attractive instead of just something I’d never gotten around to. Besides the vacuuming project, I’d meant to build—if you can believe such a corny notion—a pair of wooden window shutters with the outlines of pine trees jigsawed into them.
Folk art, I’d thought optimistically, ignoring the fact that I am neither folksy nor artistic. Anyway:
“Jake,” Ellie began patiently, “a jigsaw will dra
in all the power out of the—”
“I know.” The battery wasn’t meant to run tools. But it was all we had, and if we could just get ten minutes out of it …
Blood leaked down the back of my throat again, thin and salt tasting; I spat into a tissue without looking. No sense scaring myself; I was already scared enough.
“But do me a favor and go get the saw anyway, will you?” I asked Ellie. “I’ve just got a bad feeling.”
In fact, if my fears were electricity, I could’ve run that saw for hours, with enough power left over to light Times Square.
Ellie scampered upstairs to the loft; I heard her cross the floor over my head, and moments later she returned with the tool.
“I don’t understand, though, what you think we can—”
“Thanks.” The saw was shaped like a power drill, only with a place to insert a slim cutting blade instead of a drill bit. But there was a problem with it:
No cutting blade. I’d dulled up the last one notching two posts upstairs, I now recalled, so I could set in a shelf for a mirror and a few toiletries. When I was done, I’d taken the old blade out and discarded it, meaning to bring a fresh one the next time I visited.
But I hadn’t. I’d forgotten. A deep, sick thud of fatigue hit me suddenly, like being smacked upside the head with a two-by-four, as my dad probably would’ve put it.
“Okay,” I said. I put the saw down. Then something else hit me: “Do you smell propane?”
Ellie sniffed. “Uh-huh. Probably from when I was trying to turn the stove on. The last of it, that was in the gas line …”
“Yeah. That’s got to be it, I guess.” Since if the tank was empty, what else could it be?
Moments later she’d fetched me the Very Sharp Knife, the kind the TV ads say easily cuts steel or a tomato. Because the more I thought about a second escape route, the more I wanted one.…
“Great,” I said, trying to sound reasonably confident and cheerful. Although from what I could tell, everything about our situation was about as far from great as it could get, short of vaporization by the explosion of, say, a thermonuclear device.
“The thing is,” I told Ellie as I slid across the linoleum to the spot on the floor that I had in mind, “we think we can lure him into trying to come in here after us.”
Or get him to come as far as the deck platform, anyway. The plan we had so far was that when it got light enough, we’d slip outside, being careful not to dislodge any of those loose deck boards. I’d go down the ladder and hide in the bushes alongside the path, while Ellie perched at the edge of the deck structure.
And then she would taunt him, which of course was the most dangerous part. But he’d had chances to shoot us before, and he hadn’t, so we were still betting he wouldn’t this time, either.
Betting our lives, actually, that he still wanted somehow to make our deaths look accidental. And that, we hoped, would quite literally be his downfall:
If we could get him to climb onto the deck, a careless step from him would knock some of its boards off the joists they were perched on. When the boards tumbled, he would, too, down into the enclosure below.
The plan wasn’t perfect; how could it be? If he had that shotgun with him when he fell, for example, we might have to shoot him.
Seeming to catch my thought, Ellie spoke up. She still had my gun with her. “Jake? If I get a chance, I’m going to—”
“Shoot him? No.” I’d practiced with targets, but not moving ones, and hitting something that’s sitting still is hard enough. So far he hadn’t shown himself enough to be vulnerable, but even if he did I had no confidence that I’d be able to take him down, especially in the dark.
And for all her admirable determination, Ellie barely knew which end of the weapon to hold. “We don’t want to make him so angry that he forgets what he’s doing and just charges in here, blasting,” I said.
Which for all we knew he might still do anyway, another reason we needed an emergency exit. I gripped the knife, rolled the rug aside, and scored the floor’s elderly brick-patterned linoleum, then tore up a square of the stuff. Underneath was plywood, whose grain goes in lots of different directions due to the way it’s manufactured.
That makes it hard to cut. But the knife—a Miracle Blade, the TV ad had called it, and I hoped to hell the name turned out to be appropriate—was all we had. Also:
I looked at the plywood. A hole for me to slip the blade’s sharp tip into did not obligingly appear. “Hand me the hammer and a big nail, will you?”
Ellie brought them; I slammed a nail into the plywood and pulled it out. Then I did it again, right next to the first hole.
And again. Six holes later, I had a small circle of holes in the plywood. Perforations: I slammed the hammer down hard on the circle’s center. The wood popped out, fell through, down into the blackness under the cabin.
Meanwhile, more ways that our plan could fail kept occurring to me. The deck still lacked stairs, of course, so we’d stationed the stepladder where he could easily use it to get up onto the platform. But what if the stepladder made him feel suspicious, so he didn’t use it? Or …
“What if he tries to force us out without coming in?” I said when Ellie went on looking puzzled.
“Oh. We’re trying to trap him, but …”
“Exactly.” I started sawing with the Miracle Knife, which in fact cut so well, I pitied any tomato unlucky enough to come into contact with it. “This is just in case he tries the same.”
The blade was not only better than no tool at all; it was much better; sooner than I’d thought, I’d nearly finished cutting a two-foot-square hole in the floor. But by that time my arm was like spaghetti and six or so inches still remained un-Miracled.
Whereupon Ellie stomped on it; the wood broke and fell with a clatter to the darkness below. “There,” she said decisively. “Now we’re good if he tries coming in.…”
She turned to the back door. “Or if he doesn’t.”
Suddenly I smelled propane again, stronger now, and glimpsed a brief flicker of orange flame outside the front windows.
And in that flicker, I saw his face.
His hands were shaking. The match went out before he could light the rest of the matchbook and toss it. And she’d seen him.
Damn it, she’d—Dewey tried again, fumbled it, stamped his foot in frustration, nearly weeping. Now they knew something was up; they were moving away from—damn it, why couldn’t he make his hands stop shaking?
Back in prison, making his escape plan had been easy. Hell, he’d had nothing else to think about—that’s why his plan had been so good. That plus a helping of the good luck he’d worked so hard to cultivate …
And then, bing-bang-boom and it was done: quick, simple. But this—it wasn’t just the one thing anymore. It was everything, all coming at him all at once, every minute. Breathing in ragged gasps, chest thudding as if he was having a heart attack, Dewey cursed his luck—and that, somehow, turned out to be the charm.
The next match flared, igniting the rest of them. As the tiny flare sailed in through the break in the cottage window, he ran, flinging his arms up over his head.
Then from behind him a huge, dull boom full of bluish flame erupted, setting the world afire.
Wade and Sam reached the end of the paved road and started down the dirt portion of it just as the sky changed from black to deepest gray.
Ahead, the truck’s high beams picked out ruts and rocks that Wade steered strenuously to avoid, with only partial success. On either side, evergreen branches scraped the fenders and slapped intermittently at the roof of the cab.
“You think they’re awake yet?”
Sam drank deeply from a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee container and began devouring another glazed cake donut from the box of a dozen they’d bought after leaving the hospital. He hadn’t thought he’d be hungry after the enormous breakfast he’d just eaten back at the hospital. But something about not getting demolished by at least three different possibl
e disasters in the past twenty-four hours had made him ravenous.
Wade shrugged. “Don’t know. They might still be asleep. But your mother wants to win a bet she made with me, though, that she and Ellie could finish the deck on their own this week.”
He slowed for a deer whose eyes glowed eerily in the truck’s headlights. “So I’m guessing they’re up early to get a good start on the job,” Wade finished.
He eased the truck forward again as the young buck stepped deliberately off the dirt road and into the brush. “I’m just glad we can tell them that Bella’s okay, and your granddad, too.”
“Yeah.” A fresh wave of relief hit Sam; funny how you could go along practically dying for something interesting to happen, but what really felt good was—
Nothing. No thrills, no drama, just riding down a dirt road in a truck with your stepfather in the new dawn, eating a donut. He rolled the window down, letting in the smell of swamp.
“Listen, Wade,” he began hesitantly. “About that thing we were talking about before.”
“Yeah.” Wade gazed straight ahead, alert for more deer in the road, or maybe a moose. The enormous creatures had no regard at all for vehicles and would step right out in front of you.
“About what you saw. My dad, I mean, at the hospital,” said Sam, but Wade interrupted.
“Twice. I saw him twice.” Wade steered around a puddle the size of a small pond. Surprised into silence, Sam heard the water splash up against the truck’s underside, hissing as steam formed when it hit the hot exhaust system.
“Once outside the hospital. And before that, in my workshop at home.” Wade hit the gas, powering out of the puddle.
“I got the feeling it was your mother he was looking for, not me. Or at least that’s what made sense to me at the time.”
He frowned, calculating the height of a rock sticking up out of the roadbed ahead, and slowed to let the left-hand tires ease up and over the obstacle. “As much as anything did,” he added.
Sam found his voice. “So … what’d you do?”
Wade’s lips pursed wryly. “I told him to get lost, that if he wanted to talk, he should talk to her. Maybe apologize for all the BS he put her through when he was alive.”
