The Hunted

by Anna Leonard

  Beth looked up at the sky, watching newly arrived clouds scud past, wispy white against the pale blue. It looked innocent enough, but she had grown up watching these skies, learning the warning signs. Storms could come up fast, even when it looked clear, especially in the spring. She should know that by now. “Sure,” she said, sighing. It wasn’t like it mattered, anyway. Dinner with Jake wasn’t going to do anything about her feeling of restlessness. It never did. That was part of the problem.

  She listened to his agreement, then ended the call.

  She didn’t want to reschedule. She didn’t want to have dinner with Jake at all, truth be told. She didn’t want a casual, comfortable dinner where they talked about things they had talked about for years, until the edges were all worn off and it was soft and easy and no surprises, followed by sex that was…Well, it was nice. Enjoyable. But not surprising. Not…passionate.

  She wanted passion tonight. She wanted to have a nice rough tumble in the sheets. Something dirty and sweet, sweaty and ache-inducing. Complete with biting and bruising, thrown clothing, tangled sheets, and no regrets, come the morning.

  “Yeah, and that’s gonna happen,” she said, shaking her head. Jake was a sweet, tender lover. Careful and considerate, always whispering endearments. He was a good man.

  He just wasn’t The One. Whatever that meant.

  Disgusted with herself, Beth rubbed the smooth surface of the teak railing, as though to wipe those treasonous thoughts out of her head, but they wouldn’t go.

  She was very fond of Jake. He was a great guy. But they were never going to go anywhere except in circles. And after five years…that wasn’t enough. They both knew it. And suddenly, right now, the lack made her want to scream.

  “Spring fever. That’s all. You get it every year.” But even as she went inside, closing the door behind her as though to block out the disturbing influences of the salt- and pollen-laden air, Beth knew that there was more to it than that. Something was rising in her, like the storm surge and just as impossible to control.

  A glance out the window showed her Jake had been right—the storm was coming in, and coming hard. Even in the half hour since she had left the roof, things had picked up speed. The sea was agitated, churning back and forth, and the sky seemed lower than normal, visibility poor and getting worse. Pity the sailor caught out in this, if they didn’t make it home in time. At best they would lose their lunch over the side. At worst…

  Worst in a storm could get pretty bad.

  Her head was muzzy and stuffed, and her skin felt too tight. Maybe she was coming down with something.

  She changed into an old pair of jeans and a thick fleece sweatshirt and went down to the kitchen to make her usual virus-fighting dinner of fresh pasta and vegetables, steamed and tossed with fresh-grated cheese, garlic and cracked pepper, and a beer that she didn’t finish. The taste was off, flat and metallic.

  “Yeah, probably coming down with a cold. Joy.” She poured the beer down the drain, left the dishes in the sink and went back into the office, determined to get something accomplished today other than fretting and woolgathering. A client had sent her a number of old family photos, browned, yellowed and cracked, to be scanned and digitally repaired. Her professional shingle might say Elizabeth Havelock, Photography, but it was this restoration work that kept the mortgage paid and the groceries coming in.

  Ten minutes of prep calmed her enough to start working, and another ten minutes into the project, and finally the panacea of work did its job, at least enough for her to forget her fuzzy-headed twitchiness. The whir of the scanner and the clicking of the mouse were soothing as she studied the image on the oversize flat-screen monitor that was her pride and joy, and made minute corrections to the photo, bringing the damaged photograph back to life. There was a crack across the woman’s face that slowly mended, half-inch by half-inch. Her world narrowed to the mouse and the screen and the pixels healing like magic under her application. It wasn’t art, wasn’t groundbreaking, news-making work, but it was satisfying in its own way.

  The storm finally broke around 7:00 p.m., with the sudden hard patter of rain on the roof, followed almost immediately by a heavy crack of lightning overhead, and the low, rumbling echo of thunder rolling in from the ocean. The sense of sudden, almost painful relief flooding her body took her by surprise, and her shoulders, which Beth hadn’t even realized were hunched while she worked, relaxed immediately. She looked out the single window in the studio. Branches bowed and waved in the wind, and water splattered against the window, echoing from every pane in the house.

  Storms sounded different out here than they did on the mainland. Hell, storms were different. When it rained in Boston, when she was in college, it never felt this…soothing.

  Thunder crashed again, and she shook her head. “And that puts an end to that for the evening,” she said, shutting down her computer once everything was backed up. You didn’t take chances with the electronics in an old house during a spring storm, especially when those electronics represented your livelihood.

  No sooner had she thought that than the overhead lights flickered, came back on and then went out. The familiar steady hum she barely heard anymore died as well, leaving the house in an almost supernatural stillness broken only by the rain.

  “Jinx,” she muttered. Well, she was officially off the clock now. Mother Nature insisted.

  In the drawer of her desk there was a flashlight, and she used it to find her way to the store of candles, the sound of thick, heavy raindrops on the roof and windows following her as she went through the house. The linen closet on the second floor was the repository of all blackout supplies—extra gallons of water, a box of protein bars, dry shampoo and soap, and an entire shelf filled with thick pillar candles.

  Beth’s practical streak failed her when it came to candles. These were handmade by a local craftswoman, lilac in color and scented with clean, crisp lavender and sea grass. Picking three of the candles off the shelf, along with a book of matches, she closed the closet door and went back downstairs to the main parlor. It had always been her favorite room, aside from the corner bedroom that had been hers all her life, and if the storm was going to go all night, then that was where she would wait it out.

  One pillar went on the walnut coffee table, one on the plaster mantel over the fireplace and the third she positioned on the table next to the old cracked leather sofa. Using only one match to light them all, the room was soon bathed in a warm, comforting light. There was something about the flickering of candle flame that she adored; it didn’t fill the room the way artificial light did, but it seemed to illuminate better, somehow. The antiques in the room looked better in firelight: her great-grandfather’s spyglass; the rough but gorgeous little carvings of ivory that dated back to when whaling was the industry on this island; the handmade wooden ships her father had collected, three- and two-masters, all perfect down to the last detail, including the narrow boats lashed to their sides. Neither she nor Tal had ever felt the desire to play with them when they were children. They would watch them for hours, but never once had she taken one down other than to dust or display it for someone else. It was as though it was forbidden to look too closely, to ask too much, although her parents had never forbidden her or Tal anything of the sort.

  Now, in the candlelight, she watched the shadows their masts and riggings made on the cream-painted walls, and felt some of her restlessness subside. Those boats were her inheritance, as much as this house; they told the story of her great-grandfather helping to build the fleets that used to ply these waters, her grandfather’s specialization in the carpentry of higher-end boats that put her dad through college, and her own dad’s fascination with boats that never seemed to translate into anything larger than those models. An entire family, tied to the shoreline without ever actually going out to sea. Beth suddenly wondered why she felt no particular draw toward boats, why Tal had actually gotten seasick the one time he went out on a fishing boat when they were in grade schoo
l. Maybe it was something genetic, and the further from their shipbuilding great-grandfather you got, the less you cared?

  “Maybe it was just the storm,” she said. “Maybe I need a vacation. Get off the island for a little bit. Maybe go inland, see a forest or a mountain.” She had never gone more than a day’s travel inland; there were entire stretches of the country she had never seen except as the backdrop for movies on the television. Maybe she could get a passport, leave the country. See England, or Paris, or…

  Her imagination failed her. She didn’t have a passport. She’d never been on a plane. She didn’t even watch the Travel Channel, for God’s sake. “Maybe it’s time to change all of that,” she said. “Do something different.”

  A crack of thunder and a flash of lightning directly overhead sounded as though in answer.

  “Fine, but is that a yes or a no?” she asked the ceiling, half expecting a reply. But the lights stayed off, the rain came down and no further electrical energy exploded overhead.

  “Thanks for nothing,” she said, curling up on the sofa, her arms around her knees. Her attention was drawn, not to the shadows now, or even the fireplace, laid with wood already in case she wanted one last fire before warmer weather came in, but into the next room, where a plate-glass window looked out over the small front yard, over the tops of smaller Cape-style houses, down the road that led to the shoreline.

  There were lights flickering outside, on the road heading toward the beach. Most of them were white headlights, but—she squinted—at least one or two were red. Cops. Or an ambulance.

  There wasn’t anything she could do, if there had been an accident, either some idiot in a car, or a greater idiot in a boat. She had the basics of CPR, courtesy of a town-wide push last summer, but she wasn’t a paramedic or anything useful. There was nothing she could do at the scene other than clutter it up and get herself soaked. There was no reason she was extinguishing the candles, grabbing the flashlight, an oiled baseball cap and her raincoat, and grabbing the keys to her Toyota.

  No reason at all. Except a sudden need to be there, to see what the storm had brought in.

  The rain almost knocked her little car to the side of the road a time or two, but she got to the beach without disaster. The rain and clouds made it seem much later in the evening, closer to midnight than 8:00 p.m., and added to the unreality of the entire scene, to Beth. There were dark forms on the sand, over the dunes: people gathered, and a single vehicle with the red lights on top that marked it as belonging to the rescue squad.

  Not an accident, then. Not a car, anyway. And no sign of wreckage that you’d expect, if someone were stupid enough to take a boat out with a storm coming in…

  She parked and got out, startled by how noisy the rain was, once she was in it. Cold and hard, and even through her rain slicker she was quickly drenched. The cap kept the water off her face, but nothing more than that, and her hair stuck to her scalp unpleasantly.

  “Get the stretcher over here!” a man’s voice yelled. “And you people, back off! You’d think you’d never seen a moron before.”

  “Never one out of uniform” the retort came back from one of the bystanders, a woman. Beth slowed her steps a little. Obviously, whoever it was was still alive, and not in critical danger, if they were mouthing off over his body. Nobody here was quite hardened enough to crack jokes over a dead body. Something prickled on the back of her neck, like a spider walking there, or the unexpected touch of a warm hand. She flinched, and then looked around, feeling embarrassed, but there wasn’t anything but the crowd gathered, seven or eight people, including herself. And yet, somehow, the feeling remained, like some phantom hand rested just above her collar.

  It wasn’t like her to spook at anything, much less nothing. After one last look around, she shrugged off the feeling and turned to the much more real scene in front of her.

  “Evening, Beth.” The nearest dark form in rain hat and slicker turned out to be Mrs. Daley, who had taught seventh-grade math to Beth and her cousin, with variable success. She was in her sixties now, but still held students in thrall with a voice of steel and a heart of marshmallow.

  “What happened?” Beth asked her.

  “No idea. The call went out from the lighthouse about an hour ago—they spotted something in the water. So we came out to search.”

  “We” in this case was the self-titled border patrol, a group of locals who came out when a whale or dolphin beached itself, or a ship got into trouble, or any other crisis requiring a pair of hands and a strong back. Mrs. Daley was a charter member.

  “And found…”

  “One body, male.” Mrs. Daley leaned in, laughter in her voice even if Beth couldn’t see her face clearly in the dusk and rain. “Nude.”

  “Mrs. Daley!” Beth had to laugh, and immediately felt bad about it. “He’s all right, though?”

  The older woman nodded. “Out cold, but doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. In any sense of the word. Spoilsport Josiah had to go and throw a blanket over him, though. Poor boy. I hope there wasn’t anyone else out there with him.”

  Beth assumed that she meant the stranger, not Josiah. “A boat wreck, then?”

  “Well, what else could it be, wash him up here, a night like tonight? No debris, that anyone’s seen, but you think he was just out for a casual swim? In that water?”

  The Atlantic Ocean was not a gentle body of water, even in summer. It was only spring now, which meant that the water was still too cold for anyone but the most fervent polar bear or long-distance swimmer to be out in it. Although you never knew what someone from Away, a non-Islander, might do; people came here and did stupid things, all the time. Usually in tourist season, though.

  Beth felt that prickle again, this time all down her spine, and she shivered. Not a warm hand this time; more like the sleek dark shadow of something swimming in the deep waters below her.

  The crowd parted, and she could see that the paramedics were loading him onto the stretcher now. Drawn by the same urgency that got her down there, Beth moved forward, needing for some reason to see the face of this stranger.

  “Miss, stay back, please.” She didn’t know the paramedic; he must have been new. Not that she knew everyone in town—it was small but not that small—but almost everyone was on nodding basis with everyone else.

  That thought put the words in her mouth. “I…want to make sure I don’t know him.”

  It wasn’t totally a lie. She did want to make sure of that. She didn’t think there was a chance in hell she did know him, but it worked; the paramedic moved aside just enough for her to see the guy’s face in the light of the emergency vehicle’s headlights.

  Pale skin, even allowing for shock and being washed out under those flashing red lights. Clean-shaven, with broad, strong cheekbones. Masculine, without being heavy or brutish. The light flickered, highlighting reddish glints in thick black hair so much like hers—there was a moment of shock, and Beth felt her knees almost give out under her.

  “Ma’am?” The paramedic was right there at her elbow. “Do you know him?”

  That moment of concern allowed her to get close enough to touch the stranger, the flesh of one arm outside the blanket, wet from seawater and rain, cold but not dead-cold, just wet-cold.

  “No.” Her breath came back in a rush, and her heart started beating again. No, it wasn’t Tal. It wasn’t her cousin, dead and buried and not haunting her because he would never have been cruel enough to do that. Just some guy with hair the same color and texture his had been, like hers, that was all. Coincidence.

  And the look of this guy said he was closer to her age, maybe in his early thirties at most, than Tal’s fifteen when he died. Beth swallowed and forced herself to look again. The features were different, too, now that she could see him more clearly. Tal had been blessed with the family nose, a sort of turned-up snub, and his skin had been darker, his coloring inherited from his Italian father, not the pale-as-flounder Havelock line. This stranger was pale like
that, like she was, and his nose was longer, narrower, his mouth wider, the chin more stubborn, and without the five-o’clock shadow that Tal got, even as a teenager.

  She touched the stranger’s arm again, driven by an urge that she didn’t understand, and something sparked under her fingers, making her shiver again from something other than the cold.

  Something clicked. Something changed, here and now. Chemicals collided in her bloodstream, stars aligned, a wave crested and fell, and she was never going to be the same again.

  Beth shook her head, refusing the sense of portent overwhelming her. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing—she was tired, that was all. Tired enough to swear that the guy was shimmering in the rain, that his skin was overlaid with something, some kind of…

  A second layer, almost. The kind that she used when she was retouching photographs, to blank out details she didn’t want to use in the final product or distract the eye from things that couldn’t be repaired.

  Beth blinked, then wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Humans couldn’t be retouched. She was probably running a fever to go with her cold; that would explain it. She needed to get the hell out of the rain, get her overtired imagination under control.

  “No,” she said again, backing away before she could touch the body again. “I don’t know him.”

  They bundled the stretcher into the ambulance and pulled away slowly over the sand, lights flashing but the siren off. The crowd started to drift away, and Beth drifted with it, back to the house. She shed her raincoat and sneakers just inside the door, then peeled off her sodden jeans and sweater as well, and walked through the house in damp panties and socks. The main bathroom upstairs was old-fashioned enough to still have the original claw-foot tub, and she started the water running hot while she stripped off her socks and underwear and added scented bath salts to the water. Hair piled on top of her head, she sank gratefully into the steaming, sweet-smelling water up to her shoulders and felt her body finally let go of the rain’s chill. She reached up with her toes and managed to shut the tap off before the water reached a dangerously overfull level. Her muscles softened, her eyes closed, and only some remnant of awareness kept her from falling asleep in the tub. When the water cooled enough to rouse her, she hauled her body out of the tub, dried off and put on warm flannel pajamas and slid into bed. The moment her damp head hit the pillow, she was asleep, dreaming of deep green waves, briny air and the slide of warm, warm hands along the inside of her legs and up across her stomach, lingering in places that made her smile in her sleep, as she turned to embrace her pillow as though it were a lover.