“The chief gave you odd jobs at the station, and you thank him by ransacking the evidence room.”
“They weren’t in evidence. It was a cover-up from the start. The guy spent the last fourteen years trying to convince Mom that Lucy’d run away. Guess where he came up with that ‘goodbye note’ she left?” James jutted his chin at the pages spread across the scarred bar. “You know how it wasn’t dated? That’s because the chief trimmed the top of the page to get rid of it. Luce wrote it over a year before she disappeared. It’s from right after that douchebag Decker emailed the whole planet those pics.”
“How do you know?” Nate had to ask, though he believed it. That note had never felt right to him. Yesterday, he wouldn’t have thought the chief capable of fabricating evidence, but now he knew better.
“The original’s missing a page. Six notebooks filled, and only one torn-out page. Right between the entries for November thirtieth and December second. The tear matches the edge of the note. The chief didn’t tell anyone he found the journals, then he read through them, found that note, and thought: Hey, here’s a neat way to avoid investigating my son and his best friends for murder. He sold that whole runaway line of bullshit to Mom right up till those tourists found her body.” James’s voice rose with each sentence. “I worked at that place for months before I found them. Making their coffee, filing their transcripts.” The Bennett family resemblance extended beyond coloring and cheekbones. The look on his face was pure loathing.
“ ‘Months’? It took me five minutes to find his secret stash of research, and that included breaking the pass code to the door it was locked behind.”
“What, you want a round of applause?”
“Everything you know came from these?” Nate held up the sheath of paper.
“That packet’s a copy of her last notebook. His notes said the rest were in her room, but the chief found that one right here. Read the last entry.”
Lucy’s script was larger in the packet’s last pages. It listed with a drunken slant unbound by the ruled lines.
Sometimes I don’t know if I can do it anymore and be everything he wants me to be all the time.
“Out loud.”
Nate almost lunged for the boy then. He was no one’s performing monkey and never had been. James was younger, but Nate had always been fast. Catch James, and he’d find out everything the vandals knew. Catch James, and the game was over.
“Why are you smiling?” James asked.
A note of fear crept into the boy’s voice. For now, this was enough to sate the beast inside Nate. When he read the entry aloud it was an act of magnanimity and not of submission.
So am I using him, or is he using me? Is that what love is—two people using each other?…
I could leave Nate, and no one would care because in the normal world this happens all the time. No one would skewer me with dirty looks from across the street or tell the twins what a legendary bitch their sister is. I think I could be kind if I wanted to be. I think I could be just about anything if I could just be free….
He didn’t let his voice falter, though it wanted to.
Nate didn’t look at me while he hacked away at Adam, but he did when he was finished. And Christ, his face. That way he smiles like a wolf. All teeth. I’ve seen that look before, but he’s never used it on me. Not ever. It’s different when those ice-cold eyes are on you. So I ran. Because I know Nate isn’t really there when he’s like this. He’s something else, and whatever that thing is, it scares me. I think it scares everyone….
The last words made him shiver.
Someone’s coming.
Now that he finally knew what had happened to Lucy, they were pure horror.
Someone’s coming.
“I told you. We know everything,” James said. If looks could kill, the boy’s snarl alone would have been dismembering.
“Everything. Right. Except for the one thing that actually matters.” Nate tossed the packet back onto the bar with the others. He dialed up the disgust. He had to, because despair was the only other option. “So what’s the plan? You terrorize everyone whose name shows up in Lucy’s journals and…what?”
“One of you killed her.”
“Maybe. And?”
“And?” James spat out. Rage made his face ugly. “And you have to be punished!”
Nate wanted James to have a plan. He’d hoped that it was some masterful conspiracy hatched after fourteen years of plotting that had landed Grams an inch from death.
But James was no Storm King.
For the first time since Lucy’s remains had been discovered, Nate contemplated a future in which he never found out who’d murdered her. James was right that the players she’d written about in her journals were the most likely suspects, but it could have been someone else. A total stranger. You only had to pick up a newspaper to know that in a universe that stacked chance upon chance, death could find you anywhere.
James still stared at him. Had he said something? Nate wondered. He saw the ivory-knuckled fury in the boy’s fists and felt the furnace of his gaze. Lucy, Maura Jeffers, Grams, Pete Corso: The equations of pain were grotesquely out of balance. Of course James was angry.
Nate detected movement behind him, to both his left and right. Shadows skulked toward him across the scuffed floor. Medea and the gnashing of the furious lake must have covered their footsteps as they crept up from the undercroft or down from the Century Room.
Nate took a step back. The short kid built like a fireplug, the goth girl, the pale towheaded boy. This was the strange tribe from Lucy’s funeral. As they neared the lantern’s aura, Nate saw baseball bats, wooden planks, and pikes of rebar clutched in their young hands. In the blood-tinged light, the vandals’ faces looked like slabs of meat in an abattoir.
“Not too close.” James waved the others away as if Nate were a rabid beast. “Not till I say.”
Nate reconsidered the young man. He did have a plan.
“What’d you do to Pete?” James asked again.
“I told you—”
“They were supposed to tag your house last night. Now Maura’s dead and Pete’s missing. We cruised Bonaparte Street this morning and what’d we see, Carlos?”
The stout boy took one cautious step into the perimeter of red light. He held the rebar toward Nate like an exorcist brandishing a cross. “Nothing?”
“That’s right. Nothing. They never tagged your house, which means they never got by you. Which means you did something to them.”
The goth girl took a step closer, the scarlet glow of the lantern lighting the moon of her face like a Christmas ornament. The plank she carried was spiked with nails.
They were psyching themselves up to do something. Something Nate was certain to find unpleasant. They had the numbers and the weapons. At the moment it was only courage that they lacked, and James buttressed this with each word.
Would they beat him? Shatter his surgeon’s hands? Kill him? In the halls of the Night Ship above the raging lake inside the livid hurricane, anything seemed possible.
Then Nate spotted her, loitering behind the others. Gone was the confident bartender who’d slipped him a pint the day before. This was an ashen vestige of that girl. One look and he knew what she’d done. A part of him had known all along.
“Hello again, Tara Jane.”
“No one calls me that.” She muttered the words to the floor. Guilt rang from her like the note from a struck bell.
“She’s going to die, Tara.” His eyes wanted to well, and he let them. Let these children see the Storm King cry and see if that got him anywhere.
“Who?” But she knew. She was different from her twin brother and older sister. She didn’t have their marble faces and frosted armor.
“Wasn’t she good to you, Tara? My grandmother?” It made sense that whoever set the fire at the pub had access to the place.
“Stop talking to her,” James said.
“She gave you a job, didn’t she? She gave you a c
hance when no one else would.”
“She wasn’t supposed to be there!” Her voice was pure anguish.
“Teej. Shut up.” James turned to face his sister.
Nate felt the current of the room shift. Some of the kids began to look unsure.
“There is a murderer here,” Nate shouted. “But it’s not me.”
Menace had been gathering speed, but now doubt was ascendant. Nate used the confusion to go for the doors to the boardwalk. Not too fast, not too slow. Confident yet nonthreatening.
“The Union’s gone, too, not that it matters,” Nate said, as if they were in the middle of the conversation instead of at its end. “You already tore out the heart of that place.”
The white-blond boy with the baseball bat stood in front of the doors, but Nate gave him a look that sent him scurrying.
“No one was supposed to get hurt!” Tara was crying now.
“Teej, for Chrissake.”
Nate seized the opportunity to slip out the exit. The teens had the strength to stop him but still lacked the nerve. They weren’t following him, either. This didn’t surprise him. The Night Ship was its own universe with its own rules. Things that felt inevitable there might become unthinkable in the fresh air of the living world.
Still, he quickened his pace on the boardwalk along the northern side of the pier. This section of the pier had always gotten the worst of the weather, and the years had taken their toll. The wood creaked ominously underfoot, and Nate soon reached a stretch where an entire stride’s worth of planks were missing.
He girded himself and jumped across the gap. The plank he landed on cracked in protest, but he was quick to keep moving.
The rain had picked up again, and the wind was a mounting scream through the Night Ship’s spires. Across the savage waters, the headland’s peaks were devoured by clouds.
James could still rally the others through the promenade to intercept Nate, so it was important for him to hurry. But then he saw something that rooted him to the warped wood.
There was a body in the lake. He saw the black cap of a head and the dark outlines of legs and arms tossed by the furious waters only a few dozen feet from him. His first thought was of Lucy—which was impossible—and his second thought was of Pete Corso. The lake returns what it takes.
Then Nate realized that the person in the water wasn’t lifelessly bobbing. They were swimming. In the lake. In the middle of a hurricane. He watched the figure complete a half dozen strokes before he could believe his eyes. The body was slight, but there was something feminine in what he could see of the hips. Her limbs and head were dark because that was the color of the dry suit she wore as she cut an expert wake across the water toward a patch of shore close to the northern boundary of the town.
Back-plotting her trajectory led Nate to believe that the swimmer had exited the Night Ship through the boat launch in the undercroft.
Nate couldn’t imagine anyone he knew swimming through such weather. There was no chance it was a member of James’s crew.
This was someone else. Someone not in Lucy’s journals or in the chief’s files or on James’s hit list. Someone new. Nate was sure of it.
It was reckless to run across the fragile boardwalk, but Nate did it anyway.
Sixteen
Medea kicked spindrifts of water at Nate as he darted along the shore.
Few of the Strand’s homes were north of the Night Ship, but he ran through the backyard of every one of them as the headlands loomed in the gray distance. It was hard to track the swimmer through the curtains of rain and the whitecaps of the tempestuous lake. Just when he thought he’d lost her, a crooked arm of slick black broke the foaming surface.
The figure cut for the shore where the Strand turned from the waterline. Nate watched the swimmer emerge from the lake, her steps almost dainty as they negotiated the swell of surf and treacherous rocks. She shook off the lake’s cold water with feline contortions.
His black raincoat and a tangle of frayed juniper hid him as she made her way across the beach. She followed the arc of the Strand as it swung from the water. This was the farthest edge of Greystone Lake. The mountains dominated the northern horizon, and woods grew thick where the residential streets ended. This was the route Nate’s father had driven them that day in April, before he took the turn that switchbacked into the sky.
The Tatum house, the site of their high school graduation party, was located deep along this landward stretch of the Strand. At first, that’s where Nate thought the swimmer was going, to that place of so many last moments. But she struck out north long before the turnoff for the Tatums’.
He trailed the woman by a few hundred feet. It seemed like she was leading him into the wild, then he noticed the ghost of a gravel driveway pocked with puddles and broken with thickets of weeds. When he lost sight of her among the trees, he followed the curve of this faded path to reach a decrepit hovel of a place.
This forest abode made Tom’s unkempt ranch house look like the Empire Hotel. It was a half step up from a shack: a single-floor construction more like that of a detached garage than a home. Bare patches marred the roof where shingles had migrated elsewhere. Its walls might have once been painted, though Nate could not guess at the color. The browns of rot and greens of growth shaded the house into the palette of the forest as smoothly as a bird’s nest. Look at it from the corner of your eye and you could imagine it wasn’t there.
He watched it for some minutes before understanding what he’d come here to do.
Nate’s feet crunched against bristling undergrowth as he circled the house, but Medea’s winds and rains drowned what noise he made. Borders of light glowed from the edges of the rags that covered the windows. There was a battered storm cellar entrance on the rear side of the structure. The handles of its hatch were bound with a rusted length of chain. This place was more than it appeared.
A house like this wasn’t supposed to be in a tidy town like Greystone Lake. A swimmer like the one who rattled inside it had no place here. Not even a Daybreaker would be so committed an acolyte to those colorless waters. Who was she?
The question sent a shiver of hope up his spine.
He’d left Lucy’s funeral little more than an hour ago, but was there a chance there’d been a mistake? Could the tests they’d used to identify the body have somehow been wrong? The odds of this were infinitesimal. But maybe it wasn’t impossible. So little was impossible. Greystone Lake itself had taught Nate that.
The storm cellar’s door was warped and splintered. Nate braced his foot against the hatch, then pulled and twisted one of its handles until it tore from the rotted wood. He tossed it aside and threw open the door. Medea devoured his every sound. The air that billowed from the entry smelled of incense and extinguished candles: church and street fairs, holidays and mysteries.
He descended into the cellar with only the wild sky’s meager light to find his way. A short flight of steps brought him to what felt like an uneven floor of packed earth.
Nate stumbled against something and sensed objects stacked like columns in the dark. Medea’s winds followed him through the hatch, bumping him from behind. A flock of papers danced around his feet, and the room’s contents swayed in the gale.
He didn’t get more than a few yards deeper into the basement when one of its many piles crashed across his path and sent another one tottering. Unless he wanted the room reduced to utter wreckage, Nate had to close the hatch.
As he backtracked to reseal the entrance, he glanced down at the steps. What he saw froze his hand in the searing air. One of the papers skirting his feet had wrapped itself around his shin—an envelope dyed a shade of red so dark it could be mistaken for black.
Somewhere deeper within the cellar came the rattle and creak of a warped door being opened. Light blazed into the claustrophobic space.
In a story worthy of the Lake, the burst of illumination would have been that of a lantern, as if they were in the seventeenth century and not the twenty-f
irst. The woman holding that light would be none other than his lost Lucy.
But the shock of light came from a set of bare bulbs that studded the ceiling. And the person who’d flicked their switch was a woman as old as the mountains. She had a wiry plume of gray hair that stuck from her head like the tail of a diving whale. He hadn’t recognized her under the cap of the dry suit, but that mess of hair was unmistakable. She was the same woman who’d accosted him on the street outside the Empire the night before. She was dressed in a garment that might once have been a bathrobe.
Nate wondered how much of his idiotic fantasy that Lucy was still alive could be blamed on the head trauma. Or was it just this place? This town and how its every street and structure was poisoned with futures that would never happen.
“You.” The woman’s voice was a rustle compared to the roar she’d leveled at him during their earlier encounter. Bewilderment stood where anger had been.
Now that the space was lit, Nate saw black-red envelopes scattered across the dirt floor. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Piles of clothes and books and papers and boxes clotted the tight cellar, and the black-red envelopes stood out like crime scene splatter.
“Where did you get this?” Nate waved the black-red envelope at her. As if he wasn’t the one who’d just broken into her home. He still had his grandparents’ invitation to the Night Ship’s 1964 Independence Day party in his jacket pocket, and he pulled it out to compare the two. The envelopes were identical, their color was inimitable. Blood when it’s starved for oxygen.
“It’s mine!” She snatched the empty one from him and pawed at the others strewn across the floor.
“Who are you?” Nate asked.
“You’re in my house.” The woman looked up from the ground to squint at him. “Get out of here. Go back to where you came from.”
Over the woman’s shoulder, a piece of paper was taped to the cinder block wall.
The Storm King: A Novel Page 25
