by Sarah Graves
“Ellie.” She'd been wet and freezing for half an hour; her lips in the headlights’ glare were indigo against the ghostly white of her face. Her eyelashes had frozen together into clear, tear-shaped lozenges; her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely speak.
The bad part, though, was her level of consciousness. As I reached her, her knees went out from under her; I caught her in arms that felt like blunt lumps, and went down with her onto the frozen road.
The ice bit my kneecaps with that numb kind of pain that means you've really injured yourself and can't quite feel it. But a pair of skinned knees was the least of my worries, now.
“… okay,” she whispered, trying to smile. Then her eyes rolled back whitely and all at once she was dead weight.
“Hey! You, whoever you are, get out here, help me with…”
The car door opened. A person got out. Small, slender.
Like Ellie, in fact. But not half-dead of cold.
Alive and carrying a gun: a small, grey-metal pistol glinted in the headlights.
Behind the weapon Willetta Abrams.
She put the gun away once she saw who we were and helped me get Ellie into the car, into the backseat where I started pulling off her wet, frozen clothing. Chilled didn't even begin to describe her condition; I was terrified for her.
Slenderness may be a good thing for fashion. But for survival, more meat on the bones is better. “Crank the heat,” I ordered as Willetta put the car in gear.
A couple of protesting rumble-thumps backfired from under the chassis but the engine settled as the vehicle's systems cleared from having been sitting there, idling. “We need to go to the hospital in Calais,” I told her.
“You got it.” Willetta was a good, assertive driver, un-fazed by the ice on South Meadow Road and speedier when we got to Route 1, which was freshly sanded. Also, she was carrying emergency stuff, including a blanket; I remembered Joy saying their father had been a Maine guide and thanked my stars.
“Hey,” Ellie muttered, her eyelids fluttering.
“Hang in there, kid.” Her flesh felt rubbery.
She tried to sit up. “I want…”
“Right, but you need to get checked over.”
I’d heard a story once about fishermen dumped into the bay by a combination of bad weather and bad luck. They floated in lifejackets in the icy water until a rescue boat found them. On board, they revived, gratefully swallowing the hot coffee the rescue crew offered.
Whereupon—and this is a true story—they all dropped dead. The shock of a hot drink on their chilled systems killed the fishermen outright; by the time it got to shore, the rescue boat was carrying a dozen corpses.
Willetta glanced in the rearview. “Not much farther, now.” She snapped the radio on to WQDY, the Calais-St. Stephen station.
“… guess that storm took a wild turn, folks, and we've got a lot of unexpected ice out there, so the authorities are asking you to stay home, sit tight, wait it out a little longer until city crews can…”
She snapped it off again. No one else was on the road. “What were you doing out there?” I asked her. “And why are you carrying a gun?”
“Sorry I scared you. After you left Joy's, I—”
“Oh,” Ellie murmured, huddled into the blanket. “So cold.”7
“—I wanted to tell you the rest of it. About Peter. I went to your house but you were just leaving, so—”
“So you followed us to Melinda's, and then out here in an ice storm?”
She shook her head impatiently. “I didn't want to see Peter, and his car was at Melinda's, so I didn't go in there. I thought I’d see you at your house, again, but you made that U-turn. And it wasn't an ice storm. Not right away. I was as surprised by it as you.”
So it had been Willetta all along, following us. “Once I realized you must have turned off, I went back but by then you were getting into Ben's truck. So I followed, and waited for both of you to come back out again. I guess I could've just gone home at that point, but I don't trust Ben,” she added, frowning.
Right. Me, neither. “And I can understand why you wouldn't want to encounter Peter,” I conceded.
“Peter,” Willetta pronounced, “is a psychotic bastard.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “he is kind of unusual, isn't he?”
“Turn around,” Ellie said. Her voice was stronger. “I don't need to go to any…”
Willetta laughed harshly. “ Unusual? That's a nice word for what he is. Peter drugged me. He drugged me and he… did things to me. Awful things. I don't even remember them, but I know it's true. Because…”
Oh, for God's sake, of course: drugs.
Willetta found her voice. “It's why I wanted to tell you without Joy listening. Or anyone else… Peter took pictures of me.”
She glanced in the mirror again. “I’ve seen them. I just hope no one else has. That's why no one ever says a word against him, you know. Because he has always got something to hurt you with. You think he has gone for good, that he's forgotten you…”
“So that's why the gun, and the lights at your place?”
She nodded. “He'd hang around, hide in the dark waiting for me until I went out to go to work for the night. Joy doesn't know I have the gun, but I need it in case he…”
“Turn around” Ellie said. “Are you both deaf? George is going to be frantic, and Wade, too, we've got to go home…”
“… before he comes back,” Willetta finished. “Hey, it's stopping.”
The ice, she meant. As we drove, the crispy-sounding road surface beneath the tires became slush, then liquid water. The rain was all liquid, now, cast aside by the wipers in spraying gouts.
“Melinda's supposed to be seeing him tonight,” Ellie said. She'd given up on making us turn around.
To my surprise, Willetta nodded. “That stupid picnic at the old gas plant on the beach, probably. Those two are both nuts.”
I just adore the cold… “How do you know about that?”
She shrugged, eyes on the road. “He's been planning it for a while. And he calls me, too. Like I said, you don't get away from Peter. He calls and brags how wonderful life is without me. Never mind it was me who dumped him. And—”
She glanced at me. “Anyway, you don't dump Peter. You just don't.”
Or maybe Ellie hadn't given up. Maybe she'd just thought of something important enough to make us go back.
“This ice storm,” she pointed out, “wasn't in the forecast.”
A mental picture of them flashed in my mind: Peter and Melinda as I’d last seen them, discussing their planned outing. I remembered something else, too, suddenly: Melinda telling me she was going to have to do something about Peter.
“Willetta. Find a place for another U-turn.”
Melinda would do something, all right. She would go on that damned picnic. And then—tonight: so long, sayonara, don't let the screen door boot you in the backside on your way out, Peter.
Willetta looked startled, but scanned the side of the road obediently.
“Jake,” Ellie said, “first he threatens people, women, so badly they won't talk about him, even a whole continent away.”
Willetta made a three-point turn, heading us south. Big orange town trucks and emergency electric-company vans had begun hitting the highway in force, their yellow rooftop beacons strobing the darkness.
“Next he does his number on Willetta,” I agreed. “And that's the answer: why Faye Anne doesn't remember. She stuck with her decision not to see him anymore. So for revenge—”
“He drugged her with whatever he used on Willetta,” Ellie said. “Killed Merle and set Faye Anne up so it would look like she did it.”
“Maybe,” I cautioned. Ellie's color had improved remarkably. “We still don't know that for sure. Twenty minutes ago, we were sure that Ben had…”
Willetta made the turn onto Route 190 and sped toward the causeway. “But it doesn't matter. From Faye Anne's point of view, two suspects—besides her, I m
ean—are much better than one.”
“Oh. Okay.” Ellie sat back, satisfied. Her voice was stronger, too.
On the east side of the causeway the ice was gone but there were cars in the ditch and wires down, no lights in any houses anywhere. The storm had hit the island hard.
“Well, I know what I think,” Willetta said emphatically. “Bob Arnold caught Peter at Melinda's, lurking around.
Maybe Bob suspected him already, and said something that let Peter know it. So Peter attacked him.”
“What did Mickey Jean mean, then,” Ellie asked, “when she told Ben they had to finish what they'd started?”
But to that we had no answer. Ellie began digging through the box of emergency stuff Willetta carried. Flares, a small shovel, a bag of small things: matches, flashlight, batteries.
Finally: “Here,” she said, sounding satisfied.
Like a good guide, trained by a father who'd taught her to be prepared for any emergency, Willetta carried a set of dry clothes. Old and mismatched, too short in the legs and sleeves but plenty warm.
“No,” I said when she offered me some of them; her brief collapse had scared me badly. And I guess I must have sounded serious enough not to argue with; as swiftly as she could in the cramped backseat of the car, she began pulling them on.
When she was finished she looked ready to stand out in a garden, to scare crows. She was warm and dry, though, and a pair of old boots underneath the seat fit her well enough, too, for the moment. And by now I thought a cup of hot coffee probably wouldn't kill her, so I was satisfied.
For the moment. “Wade is going to be worried,” I said. “And mad.”
“He'll cheer up when he sees you're okay,” Willetta said. We were on Clark Street, taking the back way into town.
Toward Melinda's. I saw lights, suddenly. “The generator. It must be working.”
“Of course it's working. George fixed it.” Ellie peered out. “I don't get it, though. There aren't any lights at—”
Melinda's house: everything on the way to it was lit up, streetlamps shedding yellow cones through the rain subsiding to mist. Christmas decorations on houses shone merrily: laughing Santas and packs of elves frolicked everywhere.
But Melinda's compound gaped like a black hole. We went up the driveway to the house, dark and deserted looking. “Let's go home,” Willetta suggested nervously.
“No. Maybe we should knock, see if…”
“No one's here.” Ellie's voice was definite. “I think we'd better look for her. Let's try the beach.”
Willetta looked more doubtful. “You should go home, anyway,” she said, meaning Ellie. “Take a hot shower and make sure you're really all right. We don't know they're even together, not for sure. And besides…”
“And besides, you don't want to confront Peter Christie on the beach in the dark,” I guessed.
No streetlights illuminated the shore by the old gas plant, and the sound of the water rushing beneath the old, crumbling wharf blocked out other sounds.
“Right,” Willetta admitted with a show of embarrassment. But I understood: down there at night, you could feel a million miles away from anyone and anything.
Away from help. “Let's just look,” Ellie said persuasively. “It's on our way back to Jake's. And if they're not there, we will go home, call Tim Rutherford and ask him if he's seen them.”
“And if they are there, we'll call him, too,” I added, no more anxious to provoke anything with Peter than Willetta was, alone in the dark.
Willetta drove down Water Street, turned on Clark Street toward the bay, and stopped where the road ended above the steep slope down to the edge of the bluff. The glow of the streetlights turned the wave tops the color of gleaming pewter, a hundred yards out, but close to shore the massive legs of the old wharf staggered darkly into them, unlit.
It was high tide; only a narrow stretch of gravel and round-shouldered old bricks showed at the waterline.
“Let's go,” Willetta said anxiously.
“Wait.” Ellie peered down. “What's that, a footprint?”
The remnants of slush here were grey and rotten looking. She snapped on her little flashlight. “It is.”
Willetta looked impatient. “Anyone could have made that…”
“No, they couldn't. It's been raining and sleeting. Someone made this footprint not very long ago. And there's…”
Another one: blurred but distinguishable, the toe-mark aimed at the shore. I peered at the old wharf, pitch-darkness beneath it, deep water moving against the massive old pilings.
High up under them, deeper pockets of darkness yawned. Big iron spikes for the plant workers from the old days to climb were barely visible against the water beyond. The footprints seemed to emerge from the heaving waves.
In summer, birds nested in the sheltered cubbies of the wharf ruins. Feral cats scrambled up to the support formed by the crossing of beams, planks, and the old wharf pilings, to have their litters there. At low tide, skunks and foxes prowled the beach, eating mussels and urchins, waiting for the eggs, newborn kittens, and baby birds that fell occasionally into their jaws.
But now it was winter: nothing, no one. “The tide was lower,” Ellie said. “Half an hour ago, maybe, someone was under the wharf. They walked back on the beach that's covered with water, now. And here, they angled up toward the street.”
“But only one set of…”
Footprints, I’d been about to say, but the sudden pair of headlights shining straight into my eyes interrupted me. Then the lights cut off and Peter Christie slammed from his car, ran down onto the beach toward us. “Is she here?”
Sounding alarmed. “I went home to get ready for our outing,” he added. “I was supposed to go back and pick her up but she's not home, her lights are off…”
He spotted Willetta. “What are you doing here?”
“I guess I should just drop off the face of the earth,” she spat furiously. “Well, let me tell you, you're not going to get away so—”
“Never mind that.” I stepped between them. “Peter, you were meant to pick up Melinda at her house? When?”
“An hour ago, we were going to do it right after you two left.” He spread his hands helplessly. “We were going to come down here, we thought it would be wild out, but fun. We had no idea the storm would get so bad.”
Something about that old wharf made me uneasy. The masses of water moving lazily beneath it: so deep, now.
And something else. A reflection? Halfway to the end of the old structure… I squeezed my eyes shut, looked again.
Nothing. “Then I went back to her place, still no one home, walked around it calling for her,” Peter complained. “Pounded on the doors. All the drapes are open, and I had a flashlight, so I could see in. In case,” he added defensively, “she was there, hurt or something. Then I went home, figuring she'd have called. But she hadn't.”
The wind was falling, drifting billows of fog now just sitting, barely moving on the waves. From under the wharf came the faint slop-drip of water draining as the tide ebbed.
“You did something to her,” Willetta snarled. “Why'd you come down here? Because you saw Ellie's flashlight, and you thought we might figure out what you've done, isn't that right?”
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so that everything was in shades of grey.
“The way you did something to Merle,” Willetta rushed on. “Killed him to get Faye Anne in trouble. You drugged her, didn't you? The same way you drugged me. So she wouldn't remember, or be able to tell anyone what you did…”
His mouth fell open. “Is that what you're telling people? That I— It's not true!”
“Oh, yeah? That's what you say. But when they find those drugs in your house, that you used on me and Faye Anne, then we'll see who people believe. You still have them, I’ll bet, and the police are going to find them. And then…”
She stalked away from him as a shout came from above: “What the hell's going on down there?”
It was Ben Devine, scrambling down the steep slope onto the beach with Mickey Jean behind. He strode up, slammed his hands into Peter's chest.
“Where is she, you little son of a…”
“I don't know! God damn it, get your hands off…”
Great; a testosterone-spewing contest. Just what we needed. “Shut up, both of you,” I snapped. “Ben, how did you know to come here? Just took a sudden notion to visit the beach, did you?”
His bulk towered above me. But the question took him aback. “She… she said they were coming here. You heard her. For that goddamned little picnic the two of them cooked up together.” He swung back to Peter. “I swear, if anything's happened to her I’ll take you in the woods and feed your eyes to the crows.”
“But I didn't…”
Mickey Jean came up to me. “We tried to call her once Ben got the generator running, make sure she was okay.”
Oh, for pete's sake, of course they would have a generator. The two of them were set up for anything short of Armageddon. Which Peter and Ben looked just about ready to have between them; the shouting was escalating.
“But there was no answer,” Mickey Jean said. “The power company had turned off the electricity on account of that downed line, but even then we couldn't get the truck out; half a tree fell on it.” She took a deep breath. “But my Honda was okay. So we came in to make sure she was all right. Or Ben did, anyway. He feels he owes it to her, to take care of her.”
“Right, Melinda's good at making people feel they owe her,” I said. Because it had suddenly occurred to me, why we were here on a beach in the freezing darkness, fighting and worrying:
For Melinda, who despite all our fears was probably sitting somewhere nice and warm, now, drinking wine and thinking up lots of reasons to criticize us.
But Mickey Jean looked surprised. “You don't know? Why he feels that way? But no, of course you wouldn't…”
“What?” I turned at her tone. Willetta had climbed the slope again, looking down at Peter and Ben, still arguing.
“Ben wasn't always a strong guy,” Mickey said. “Kidney failure, it hit him out of the blue. Three times a week dialysis, until…”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding Ben's devotion.
