Riptide

by Catherine Coulter

  The lights flickered. Becca had bought candles and matches and she set them on her bedside table. She paused to listen as the storm bludgeoned the shoreline. She heard a newscaster predict great destruction of lobster boats and pleasure craft if they hadn’t been thoroughly secured. She could imagine what the harbor looked like now, waves frothing high, whipping against the sides of the boats, probably sending water crashing over the sides.

  She shivered as she pulled on a sweater and snuggled down into her bed. She kept the TV on nonstop weather coverage and looked at the light show outside her bedroom window. The thunder was deafening. The house rattled with the force of it.

  The meteorologist on channel 7 said that the winds were strengthening, nearly up to sixty miles per hour now. He said people should go to official shelters away from the coast for protection. Oddly, he sounded excited. Becca still had no intention of leaving. This old house had doubtless seen its share of comparably violent storms in its hundred-year history just as the Piper Lighthouse had up the road. Both had survived. Both would survive another storm, she didn’t doubt that, although she couldn’t help but cringe as the house groaned and creaked.

  Suddenly, with no warning, thunder boomed, lightning streaked through the sky, and the lights went out.

  6

  It wasn’t dark for long. The lightning and thunder kept the sky lit up for a good five minutes, without a break. She could easily read her clock. It was just after one in the morning. She finally couldn’t stand it any longer and reached for the phone, to call Tyler, but the line was dead. She stared at the receiver, then looked out her bedroom window as a huge streak of lightning lit up the sky. She felt the thunder deep in her eardrums as it boomed, almost simultaneous with the flash. It would be all right. It was only a storm. Storms in Maine were just another part of life, like the hordes of mosquitoes that occasionally blanketed a town. This was nothing to get alarmed about.

  As Becca lay in the darkness, looking out the bedroom window, she swore that the winds were growing even stronger as they ravaged the land. She felt the house literally shudder around her. It shook so hard, she briefly worried that it would pull free of its foundation. A loud wrenching sound had her bolt upright in bed. No, it wasn’t anything, really. Had she come here just to be killed in a ferocious summer storm? She had wished earlier that she was closer to the ocean, listening to the waves hurling themselves against the high cliffs covered with pine trees bowed and bent from the winter winds, or beating against the clustering speared black rocks that lined the narrow cluttered beach at the end of Black Lane, a narrow, snaking little dirt road that went all the way to the ocean.

  But not now. It was just as well that crashing angry waves weren’t added to the mix. She watched the lightning continue to tear through the sky, making it bright as day for long moments at a time. She felt the scoring of the thunder to her toes. It was impressive, utterly dramatic, and she was getting scared.

  Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. She lit the three precious candles, stuck them in the bottom of coffee mugs, and picked up the Steve Martini thriller she’d been reading until the storm had really gotten serious.

  Was the storm easing up? She read a few words, then realized that she couldn’t remember the story line. This wasn’t good. She put the novel back on her nightstand and picked up the New York Times, carried only by a small tobacco shop off Poison Ivy Lane. She didn’t want to read about the attempted assassination, but she did, naturally. Page after page was devoted to the governor’s attempted murder. She was mentioned too many times.

  Thunder rolled loud and deep over the house as she read: There is a manhunt for Rebecca Matlock, former speechwriter for the governor, who, the FBI says, has information about the attempt on the governor’s life.

  Former speechwriter now, was she? Well, since she’d left without a word or any warning, she supposed that was fair enough.

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning.

  Suddenly, with no warning at all, the wind gave a howl that made the hair bristle on the back of her neck and set her teeth on edge. A flash of lightning exploded, filling the sky with a bluish light, and a crack of thunder seemed to lift the house right into the air. She nearly bit her tongue as she stared out her bedroom window. She watched the proud hemlock weave once, then heard a loud snap. The old tree wavered a moment, then went crashing to the ground. It didn’t hit the house, thank God, but some upper branches crashed into the window, loud and so scary that she leapt from the bed and ran to the closet. She crouched between a yellow knit top and a pair of blue jeans, waiting, waiting, but there was nothing more. What had happened was over with. She walked slowly back into the bedroom. Tree branches were still quivering as they settled just above a pale blue rag rug on the floor. The window was shattered, rain slithered in around the beautiful green leaves, dripping onto the floor. She stood there, staring at the huge tree branch in her bedroom, listening to another loud belt of thunder, and thought enough is enough. She didn’t want to be alone, not anymore.

  She dressed and ran downstairs. She had to find something to block up the window. But there wasn’t anything except half a dozen dish towels with lighthouses on them. She ended up stuffing all her pillows around the tree branch. It worked.

  She closed the front door behind her and stepped into the howling wind. She was wet clear through before she’d taken three breaths. No hope for it. She ran through the heavy rain to the Toyota and fumbled with the lock even as her hair was plastered to her head. Finally she got the door open and climbed in behind the wheel. When she turned the key in the ignition, the car growled at her, then stopped. She didn’t want to flood it so she didn’t turn the ignition again. No, give it a rest for a moment. Again, finally, she turned the key, and Lord be praised, the engine turned over, started. Tyler’s house was just about a half-mile down the road, the first street to the right, Gum Shoe Lane.

  At a loud crack of thunder, she looked back at Jacob Marley’s house. It looked like an old Gothic manor in the English countryside, hunkered down in the rain, filled with lost and ancient spirits. It looked menacing even without billowing fog to shadow it in more gloom. A sharp lightning flash streaked down like a silver knife. The house seemed to shudder, as if from a mortal wound. It looked like the gods wanted to rip it apart. She was very glad she was leaving. Maybe Jacob Marley Senior really had poisoned his wife and God was just now getting around to some punishment. “Thanks a lot for waiting until I was here,” she yelled heavenward. She waved her fist. “I come here and you decide, finally, to mete out divine justice. You’re a little bloody late!”

  The huge hemlock that could have so easily smashed right into the side of the house lay on its side nearly parallel to the west wall. That one very full and long branch that had crashed through her bedroom window looked like a hand that had managed to reach into the house. She shuddered at the image. Everything suddenly seemed alive and malevolent, closing in on her, like the man who had called her and stalked her and murdered that old woman and shot the governor. He was near, she felt him.

  Just stop it. She drove very slowly down the long narrow drive, no choice there. Debris filled the road, wind bent trees nearly to the ground. The boughs glanced off her windshield. Branches whipped toward her, rain hammered against the windshield, pounded against the car, making her wonder if she’d come to Maine only to be done in by a wretched storm. She had to get out of the car twice to pull fallen branches out of the way. The wind and rain slammed hard into her, making it impossible to stand straight and nearly impossible to walk. She knew there had to be dents in the car fenders. The insurance company was going to love this. Oh dear, she’d forgotten, she didn’t have any insurance. That required being a real person with real ID.

  Suddenly headlights cut through the thick, swirling sheets of rain, not twenty feet from her. They were coming toward her, fast, too fast. Damnation, to get killed on Belladonna Way. There had to be some irony in that, but she couldn’t appreciate it right th
en. She’d come to hide herself and be safe, a tree branch came into her bedroom, and now she was going to die because she couldn’t bear to stay in that old house, knowing it would collapse on her, swallow her alive. She smashed down on the horn, jerked the steering wheel to the left, but these headlights kept coming inexorably, relentlessly toward her, so fast, so very fast. She threw the car into reverse but knew that was no good. There was so much debris behind her that it was bound to stall her out. She slammed on the brakes and turned off the engine. She jumped out of the car and ran to the side of the road, feeling those damned headlights crawl over her, so close she wondered if the stalker hadn’t found her and was now going to kill her. Why had she ever left the house? So there was a tree branch in her bedroom dripping on a rag rug. It was still safe, but not out here, in the middle of a wind that was whirling around her like a mad dervish, ready to hurl her into the air, and a car that was coming after her, a madman at the wheel.

  Then, suddenly, miraculously, the headlights stopped about eight feet from her car. Rain and lightning battered down, blurring the headlights, turning them a sickly yellow. She stood there, the wind beating at her, breathing in hard, soaked to her bones, waiting. Who was going to get out of that car? Could he see her, huddled next to some trees that were nearly folding themselves around her from the force of the wind? Did he want to kill her with his own hands? Why? Why?

  It was Tyler McBride and he was yelling, “Becca! For God’s sake, is that you?” He had a flashlight and he pinned her with it, the light diffused from all the rain, pale, blue-rimmed, and it was right in her eyes. She brought up her hand.

  She opened her mouth to yell back at him and nearly drowned. She ran to him and clutched his arms. “It’s me,” she said, “it’s me. I was coming to your house. A tree branch crashed through the bedroom window and it sounded like the house was going to collapse.”

  If he wanted to smack her because she was teetering on the edge of hysteria, he didn’t let on, just gripped her shoulders in his big wet hands and said very slowly, very calmly, “I thought I saw some car lights but I couldn’t be sure. All I thought about was getting to you. It’s okay. That old house won’t fall down. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Now, follow me back home. I left Sam alone. He’s asleep but I can’t count on him staying that way. I don’t want him to wake up and be scared.”

  She got herself together. She wasn’t helpless, not like Sam was. The wind tore at their clothes, the rain was coming down so hard it hurt where it struck. Her jeans felt stiff and hard and heavy. But she didn’t care. She wasn’t alone. Tyler wasn’t the crazy man from New York. She took a deep breath and watched as he drove at a snail’s pace back to his house on Gum Shoe Lane. It took another ten minutes to get to the small clapboard house that sat back in a lovely lawn that was planted heavily with spruce and hemlock. She jumped out of the car and yelled as she ran to the front door, “Gum Shoe, what a wonderful name.” She began to laugh. “Gum Shoe Lane!”

  “It’s okay, Becca, we’re home now. We made it. Jesus, this is one of the worst storms I can remember. As bad as the one back in ’78, they said on the radio. I remember that one, I was a little kid and it scared me shitless. I’ve got to say that your timing is wild, Becca, coming to Riptide just before this mother of all storms hits.” He gave her another look, then added, slowly, his voice calm and low, “It’s sort of like the Mancini virus that came along last year and crashed every computer in this small software company called Tiffany’s. They called me in to fix it. That was a job, I’ll tell you.”

  Becca stood dripping in the small entrance hall, staring at him. He was trying to talk her down and doing a good job of it. “Computer humor,” she said, and laughed after him when he fetched some towels from the bathroom. A slash of lightning came through the window and lit up the pile of newspapers on the floor beside the sofa. “I’m okay,” she said when Tyler began to lightly rub his palm over her wet back. He drew back, smiling down at her. “I know. You’re tough.”

  Sam was still asleep, curled on his side, his left hand under his cheek. The world was exploding not ten feet away and Sam was probably dreaming about his morning cartoons. She pulled the blanket over him, paused a moment, and said quietly to Tyler, who was standing just behind her, “He is precious.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She wanted to ask him why Sam didn’t talk much, was so very wary, but she heard something in his voice that made her go still and keep her question to herself. There was anger there, bitterness. Because his wife had left him? Walked away without a word? With not a single regret? Well, it made sense to her. Her own mother had left her, and she felt sick with rage at being left alone. Not her mother’s fault, of course, but the pain of it. She looked down at Sam one last time, then turned and left the small bedroom, Tyler on her heels. He gave her one of his wife’s robes, pink and thick and on the tatty side, well worn, and she wondered what sort of woman Ann McBride had been. Why hadn’t she taken her robe? She couldn’t ask Tyler now. The robe fit her very well. It was warm, comfy. She and Ann McBride were of a size.

  They drank coffee heated on a Coleman stove Tyler got out of the basement. It was the best coffee she’d ever tasted and she told him so. She fell asleep on the old chintz sofa, wrapped in blankets.

  The sun was harshly bright, too bright, as if the storm had scrubbed off a thick layer of dust from all the trees and streets and houses, even given the sky a thorough shower. Becca’s jeans were soft, hot from the drier, and so tight she had barely been able to zip them up when Tyler had tossed them to her.

  Sam said, his small voice unexpected, startling her, “Did you bring cookies, Becca?”

  An entire sentence. Maybe he was just very frightened and wary of strangers. Maybe he didn’t think of her as a stranger anymore. She hoped so. She smiled at him. “Sorry, kiddo, no cookies this time.” She’d awakened with a start, frightened, tingling, to see Sam standing beside the sofa, holding a blanket against his side, his thumb in his mouth, just staring at her, saying nothing at all.

  Sam said now, “Haunted house.”

  Tyler was pouring cereal into a small bowl for his son. He looked over at Becca.

  She said, “You could be right, Sam. It was a bad storm and that old house shook and groaned. I was scared to my toes.”

  Sam began eating his Cap’n Crunch cereal his father put in front of him.

  Tyler said, “Sam’s too young to be scared.”

  Sam didn’t look up from his cereal bowl.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock that morning when Becca drove back to Jacob Marley’s house. It no longer looked frightening and menacing. It looked bedraggled, very clean, and the hemlock with its branch sticking through her second-floor window no longer looked like a ghostly apparition, but like a tree that was dead now, nothing more. She smiled as she walked around the house, assessing damage. Not much, really, just the branch in the window. They’d have to haul the tree away.

  She called the real estate agent, Mrs. Ryan, from a working public phone in front of Food Fort, who told Becca she would notify the insurance company and the tree-removal people and not to worry about a thing, everything was covered.

  Becca went back to the house and toured for the next twenty minutes, not seeing any damage anywhere inside. The electricity flickered on, then off again. Finally, when it was nearly noon, the lights came on strong and bright. The refrigerator hummed loudly. Everything was back to normal. Then, with no warning, the hall and living room lights went off. The circuit breaker, she thought, and wondered where the devil the box would be. The basement, that was the most likely place. She had to check down there anyway. She lit one of her candles and unlatched the basement door, which was at the back of the kitchen. Steep wooden stairs disappeared into the darkness. Great, she thought, now to top it all off, maybe I can fall and break my neck on these rickety stairs. They were wide and felt sturdy and strong, not so dangerous after all, a relief. There were a dozen steps. The floor was uneven, cold and damp co
ncrete. She raised the candle and looked around. There was a string hanging down and she gave it a pull. The bulb switch clicked but nothing happened. This light must be on the same circuit. She began at the right of the stairs, lifting the candle to light up the wall. It was dank down there, and she smelled mildew. Her toes sloshed in a bit of water. Yep, leaks from the storm. On the wall facing the stairs she finally found the circuit breaker box. Beside it were stacks of old boxes, everything dirty and damp. She flipped the downed circuit breaker switch and the bulb overhead blossomed into one-hundred-watt light. Stacks of old furniture, most of it from the forties, perhaps some even earlier, were piled against the far wall. So many boxes, all of them very large, labeled with faded and smeared spidery handwriting.

  She started forward to look at the writing on one of the labels when there was a low rumbling noise. She stopped cold, fear spiking through her. Where was it coming from? Where? All the nightmares from the night before tore through her. Sam’s words—“haunted house.” Shadows, the damned basement was filled with shadows and damp and rot.

  She whipped around at the crash not thirty feet away from her, in the far corner of the basement. She watched as the wall heaved and groaned and spewed brick outward onto the basement floor, leaving a jagged black hole.

  She stood there a moment longer, staring at the hole in the wall. She was surprised. The house was very old, sturdy. Why, suddenly, would this happen? The storms over the years must have gradually weakened this particular wall and now, finally, the one last night was the final blow. Perhaps all the damp contributed, as well.

  She walked to the corner, dodging crates and a huge steamer trunk that looked to be from the nineteen twenties. The light didn’t reach quite that far. She raised her candle high and looked into the black hole.