Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  But he wasn’t paralyzed. More to the point at the moment, he wasn’t dead.

  Yet. The face twisted in despairing triumph, the ugliest thing so far because it showed he knew yet was the operative term here. But I guess when half your head is demolished inside, if you know anything it’s that nothing to lose has become your motto.

  Or slogan. Or theme song. Whatever. Damn it, Jake, will you do something? a voice in my head yammered uselessly.

  The razor at my father’s throat glinted fierily in a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight. Then I noticed I still had the guns, the recently fired one in my hand, the other in my pocket again.

  That’s me: always the last to know. It struck me that quite a number of important things had failed to dawn on me in a timely manner lately, but this was no time for self-recrimination.

  I knew what I wanted to do, but the blood-drenched, half-demolished figure with the razor gripped impossibly in its fist kept moving, bobbing and weaving. If I fired, I might hit…

  “Come on, give it here.” The voice dripped contempt, mixed bubblingly with blood, the remaining eye rolling whimsically in a way that would have been cartoonish — any second it was going to pop out on a spring, or a stalk — if it hadn’t been so awful.

  “Come on, girlie,” he wheedled. “You ever even held a gun before? Come on.”

  In that moment I’m not sure which I hated more: being called girlie, or the fear on Lian Ash’s face.

  I dropped that sucker where he stood.

  When we reached the kitchen I put the gun from my sweater pocket into the hiding place with the Bisley, tucking the small weapon in beside the massive one.

  “We need to call Bob Arnold,” I said, rubbing my icy hands.

  Too many years, too many questions. Where should I start? Did I want to? The baggage I’d carried around for so long seemed lighter than what I confronted: him. In the flesh.

  But he didn’t go to the phone. Instead he spoke again in reply to my final question. The one, after all the rest had been answered, that I was afraid to ask.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he told me quietly. “I know it’s what you always thought. Everyone did. The police, the FBI — they still think so. That I killed your mother and the rest of them.”

  The explosion had half-leveled a city block. Jemmy Wechsler had told me later that a lot of it had been stolen Army ordnance, the kinds of things civilians never get their hands on.

  Aren’t supposed to get their hands on, for reasons that were obvious on that early morning years ago, when they all went up at once like a Fourth of July celebration in hell.

  A kind of fury seized me. “Why should I believe that? And why, if you didn’t, did you run? And leave me…”

  The ashes of the wood fire from the shack in the hills were cold in my mouth. Poverty and grief, neither of which I’d earned, and the people they sent me to, my mother’s folks, hating me because I was half him. Watching me every minute for signs that I was like him; finding them regularly.

  “Because it was set up to look just exactly as if I did kill your mother,” he responded quietly. “And you. By a fellow who’d learned everything from me. But then he decided that I wasn’t radical enough to lead anymore. Because I wouldn’t kill innocent people for the cause. So he decided I’d gotten too old.” Small laugh. “I was twenty-four. He’s dead now. Last I knew he was a law-abiding husband and father paying taxes and covering his butt with the best of them.”

  His smile was bitter. “But at the time he was good. Didn’t miss a thing. If I were to walk into an FBI office today, noon tomorrow I’d be in a federal prison. Your mother’s death was the cherry on a very big cake, Jacobia. Once I was in, I’d never come out again.”

  “You ran before you knew if I was even alive.”

  Contradiction in his eyes; that didn’t jibe with what he thought. “What’s the first thing you recall after the explosion?”

  “Screaming.” I remembered it too well. “Sitting there under that big piece of sheet metal, screaming my head off.”

  “You’re sure?” he insisted. “Nothing before that?”

  “No. Well…” Doubt crept in as I ransacked the old memories. “Floating. Flying through the air. The blast blew me into the yard, sheet metal must’ve fallen on top of…”

  He shook his head. “Jacobia. There wasn’t a scratch on you.”

  That was true. But how did he know?

  I’d heard many times what a miracle it was, in voices sour with the unspoken wish that it had been me blown to bits and not her. They’d loved my mother, the relatives who’d taken me in, or had felt what they identified as love, once she was gone. That’s the definition of a saint: dead, so you can’t blow your image. I by contrast was very much alive, and what they did know about me, they didn’t like a bit.

  “Do you seriously believe you could be blown through the air,” he persisted, “then land under the convenient shelter of a piece of corrugated sheet metal?”

  First the explosion. Then into the yard. Floating… It was corrugated metal, grooves like waves on water, glittering.

  The lightbulb went on. “You carried me there?”

  He nodded slowly and I realized with a shock that I believed him. It explained why I’d been unhurt. It didn’t fix things. But it stowed them in a section of old baggage I knew wouldn’t have to be opened again.

  “I thought you murdered her. That’s what they all said.” My mother’s people: to them, her husband’s name had been a curse word. “But killed yourself, too. Burnt to ashes that blew away on the wind.”

  The bloodthirsty, satisfied tone when they said it: I’d been tasting those blown-on-the-wind ashes all my life.

  “So you’ve been watching me from afar? And when you were satisfied Harry Markle wasn’t on your trail anymore, you moved up here to be closer. You answered my ad for a mason to get nearer still. But you never—”

  Of course he hadn’t. After so many years, why should he risk his freedom on what I might do?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could talk to the young fool I was. I wish I could bring your mother back. But I can’t.”

  He looked squarely at me. “I can’t do so many of the things I wish I’d done. And I’m so sorry,” he repeated. “For all of it, Jacobia. For everything.”

  Which was when Bob Arnold rushed in without knocking, found me covered in blood with a gun on the kitchen table in front of me. He’d come to tell me he’d just gotten the fingerprint report.

  But he stopped when he saw us. “On the stairs,” I managed to say, and he went, whereupon I burst into sobs. I despise crying in front of people, always have, but now I thought I could weep for a year and not be done with it, that they’d have to set up a saltwater intravenous to replenish my tears. Then Wade arrived, took one look at me and one at Mr. Ash.

  And comprehended utterly, the way he knows what weather is coming out on the water: not the details, maybe, but enough of the drift to know just what to do.

  “Hey,” he said kindly to me. “You don’t need this.” He took the gun, which I’d picked up again.

  “Hey, yourself,” I said gratefully, hating the way my voice trembled.

  After a little while Bob Arnold came back looking grimly resolute. “I need to know what happened here, Jacobia.”

  By then George and Ellie had arrived, too, summoned by Bob. I said the man we’d called Harry Markle had come into the house and surprised me, that he’d attacked me.

  That Mr. Ash — I was still calling him that, of course — heard the struggle, rushed upstairs just as I’d fired the little .32 semiauto I had been carrying in my sweater pocket when I was alone in the house.

  That I’d shot my attacker twice when he wouldn’t back off. He’d fallen on me, and then down the stairs: end of story.

  And although I could see in Ellie’s eyes she was skeptical, and Wade figured out that something else had happened, and Bob Arnold knew I’d been carrying the Bisley, not a .32, they all took my stor
y as gospel anyway. Why would I lie?

  Two shots fired, two bullets missing from a recently fired weapon. The only part missing from my story was two shooters and I wasn’t telling that. If I brought Lian Ash into it, Bob might feel it was necessary to look into his background.

  So I shut up, glancing around dazedly. But when I did, a new terror struck me: Sam wasn’t here. Maggie, either.

  After I finish up here in Eastport.

  Your son. His girl.

  Chapter 11

  Where were they going?” I demanded, jumping up. The world only wheeled a little bit, then straightened. “Did they tell anyone?”

  Wildly I ran to the door, yanked it open, peering out to the street and the driveway. But they weren’t there, either.

  “Wade?” I turned helplessly. It was dark out now.

  “I’m on it,” he called, already at the telephone. “I’ll try Victor. Maybe Sam talked to him lately.”

  But when Wade got through to the hospital they said Victor wasn’t available. A man had come in earlier in the day asking for him and the two had gone off urgently together. A man with close-clipped greying hair, wearing a leather jacket.

  “He’s got them,” I said. “He’s got them, he’s done something to them, and he’s dead. I killed him.” The last laugh…

  “I killed him… so now, he can’t tell us where.”

  “Harriet’s house,” Ellie said decisively, already halfway out my back door. “He wants us to know.”

  As soon as she said it I knew she was right. Finding bodies wouldn’t be bad enough, cruel enough, for his last laugh. No, he was setting us up for something worse than that.

  Much worse, as we discovered upon walking into his place: Prill was unconscious. The big dog’s breathing was shallow and fast, her eyes rolled back in her glossy, reddish-gold head.

  That son of a bitch. “Call the vet,” Ellie told George, “and can you get someone to take her out there, right away?”

  George nodded grimly, grabbed the phone and found it dead — another joke, ha-ha — and hustled out to his truck’s cell phone.

  “Poor thing,” Ellie was crouched by the animal. “He must have poisoned her.”

  Wade and Bob Arnold were in the kitchen, searching it for a clue to what this mad evil bastard might have had in mind for us. But I didn’t have to search. Deep down in the coldest place in my heart, I knew where to look.

  “There,” I said, waving miserably at the map of Eastport on the corkboard over the mantel, at the murders and accidents we’d suffered marked on it.

  In reality of course he’d been keeping score. There was his own house with a cute little smiley-face drawn on it; looking at it made me want to put my fist through it. And there the Danvers’ house elaborately decorated with two horrid stick figures, eyes fatally x-ed in, to represent Harriet and Samantha; jagged lines of waves for the water in the cellar, inked-on lightning bolts.

  “Guy was an artist,” Ellie commented acidly, looking over my shoulder.

  From the Moosehorn Refuge: cartoon bubbles and a balloon-captioned word: glub! Dear heaven.

  There was even a receipt tacked to the map, from an on-line weird pet dealer called Captive-Raised Invertebrate City. The receipt was for a dozen brown recluse spiders — Loxosceles reclusa — via FedEx.

  Oh, this guy was hilarious. The spiders were a real hoot. I felt their legs on my arms again as I went on scanning the map.

  A word captioned over my own house: boom! A sketch of Sam’s speeding car flying downhill…

  Okay, you son of a bitch, I thought, my fury growing.

  I see how clever you’ve been. Now tell me—

  “There.” Ellie pointed to a mark that I’d taken at first to be a printed icon: small, neat, unlike the cartoonish scrawls of other annotations.

  But upon closer inspection the icon was inked in: a small, round, black object with a fuse burning at the top of it.

  “Wade…” He was at my side in a heartbeat.

  “They’re down at the boat basin,” I said. “Sam, Maggie, and probably Victor, maybe with explosives.”

  Over in her dog bed, Prill sighed heavily and didn’t breathe again. “Oh, no,” Ellie mourned.

  But then the dog took another sighing, shuddery inhalation, just as a big bearded guy I didn’t know rushed in, some friend of George’s, lifting the dog as tenderly as a baby, cradling her.

  “I’ll take care of her,” he promised, his hugely muscled arms wrapped protectively around the animal, and went out again.

  Peering out after him, I saw he was tucking her into the sidecar of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which ordinarily I wouldn’t have been in favor of at all, but now I had no choice.

  Not to mention no time. “We can all go there in the back of Wade’s truck,” I said, “and…”

  We moved in a rush toward the back door, which was nearest. All but Lian Ash — I still called him that, in my mind, and I had a feeling I would be doing so for a long while, maybe forever—

  —who hung back alertly. “Wait.”

  His command could’ve cut through lead sheathing. We halted as he stepped in front of us, leaning down toward a length of something barely visible stretched across the doorway opening.

  “Trip wire,” he pronounced. So we all went out the front again, feeling a good deal more nervous than when we had arrived. But not as nervous as we were about to be.

  Not by a long shot.

  “It’s a bomb, all right,” Mr. Ash said ten minutes later.

  The cloud-filled sky had darkened early. We stood on the finger pier, gazing along a flashlight beam into Sam’s boat, where Sam, Maggie, and Victor had been tied up on deck.

  Seeing them, I felt my heart go dead in my chest. Their eyes were closed and for a moment I thought they’d been given whatever Prill had, only a lot more. Then I spotted Sam’s chest moving.

  “Alive…” Wade squeezed my shoulders. Bob Arnold was going around under the big lights that made the dock resemble a stage set at night, talking to boat owners and Coast Guard guys, asking them to get the vessels out of the boat basin, onto open water.

  Wisely, he’d decided not to tell them that if they didn’t, a bomb might blow them all up; as it was, the scramble of activity that resulted began making me anxious: engines, and boat wakes.

  “I can’t stand it,” I said, “I’m going aboard and—”

  A big hand stopped me. “Hold your horses.”

  Lian Ash assessed the contraption tangled under the wooden deck chairs the three prisoners sat on. “Let me think about this a minute,” he said calmly.

  “What’s there to think about? It’s a—”

  Victor’s eyes opened. “Bomb,” he snapped viciously. “It’s a clock and some explosives, any moron can see that it’s a—”

  “Correct,” Lian Ash interrupted mildly. “An old-fashioned alarm clock with two brass bell-domes by the winding stem, hooked to a wire tied to four sticks of good, old-fashioned dynamite.”

  For a moment it was a toss-up which would explode first: my ex-husband, or the device. “Do something about it, you big—”

  “Don’t move,” Mr. Ash said sharply. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he added, echoing my earlier thought. Then:

  “Got it. It’s that stuff he’s tied you up with. And the material that’s under the dynamite. Was it there when you got here, do you recall? Also, how much of it was there? Say, a cupful? Or more?”

  Another boat motored out past the concrete mooring dolphin, sending another wash of waves glittering under the lights into the boat basin, rocking the pier we stood on and the boat we were peering into.

  “Hey,” Sam protested, waking, trying to get his hands free. “What—?”

  “Oh,” Maggie moaned groggily.

  “Stay still, everything’s fine. Do as I say, please,” Victor told them, and they obeyed at once: that voice of his. I thought I despised it.

  But now I’d have fallen on my knees and thanked God for its instant
effectiveness, if the backwash from the parade of exiting boats weren’t threatening to knock me off the finger pier.

  “What do we do now?” The water was the deep, pure blue of fountain-pen ink, the breeze off the waves fragrant with cold sea salt mingled pleasantly with a whiff of diesel. No stars, and the smell of rain drifting with the other scents, but you just couldn’t believe anything could go wrong on a night like this.

  “Det cord,” Lian Ash said to Wade and George. “It looks like colored clothesline, but…”

  The Coast Guard crew was setting up barricades at the end of the fish pier, the sawhorses yellow in the lights from Rosie’s hot dog stand. A hundred yards away on Water Street, folks were beginning to gather under the streetlamps, their shapes mere dark silhouettes against the lighted store windows.

  “It’s the cord they use to set off explosives,” Wade told me. But I already knew that, and the picture of what had been put together here was coming horridly clear.

  “So cut the cord,” Victor grated. “What’s hard about that?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Lian Ash answered. “For one thing, it’s not fuse cord, which is what you’re probably thinking of. Safety fuse burns slow, thirty or forty seconds per foot and doesn’t explode. It’s designed that way, to be less volatile.” He frowned. “Detonating cord has an explosive core that goes up at twenty-five thousand feet per second, flame ball around the cord about eighteen inches in diameter. And that’s not the half of it. See that mound of grey stuff, sort of clayish looking, by the fake bomb?”

  “Fake bomb?” Victor began apoplectically, and started to get up, whereupon Wade fixed him in the pale-grey stare he’s been known to use on guys bigger than he is.

  “Sit your butt on that chair and pipe down,” he said.

  Victor did so.

  “Fake by comparison, I meant,” Lian Ash clarified. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure that grey stuff’s C4,” he went on quietly. “Commonly known as plastique. Cord’s in a ring, little length leading from it to the explosive.” He shook his head slowly. “Bottom line is, I’m not sure what all booby traps are laid for us here. Do something wrong, whole dock would go. Lot of other stuff down there, too. I see an M14 land mine, for one thing.”