Toad in the Hole

by Paisley Ray

  Travis and I stared at my grandmother.

  “I’ve pissed some people off in my day. Until I sort through things, I want you both out of sight.”

  “Shouldn’t we stay here and help?” I asked.

  “Our luggage is in the hotel,” Travis said.

  Opening cabinets and poking in cubbies along the galley-like interior, GG nodded approvingly. “There are sweatshirts and jackets in the closet, the kitchen staples are stocked. If you don’t find what you need, you can buy necessities en route.”

  Travis wagged his hand and announced, “I’m a shore fisherman, not a boater.”

  “There’s fishing gear somewhere on board. You two will have a fine time.”

  “This is a bit abrupt,” I said.

  “Think of it as an excursion.” Looking over her shoulder, she said, “There’s one more thing you should know about. Locks.”

  “Locks?” I asked.

  “Not the front door kind, adjusting the water level kind. There are dozens of them from here to Stratford. During the day there are keepers, but on evenings, one of you will have to get out to secure the boat and work the gate to let the water in or out.”

  “You’re joking?” Travis said.

  “With a little practice you’ll be pros. Travis, be a dear. Pull in the port line.”

  “Port?”

  She pointed. “That rope on the left side, love.”

  Travis’s hands swept though his hair. “I’m not pulling anything,” he protested.

  “Young man, if you choose to be stubborn, you may endanger yourself and Rachael. I know this is spur-of-the-moment, but I need for you both to disappear. It will be much easier for me to quiet this brouhaha without worrying about your safety.”

  Travis threw his arms up. His voice trailed, “We’re not experienced boaters.”

  I wondered if he was going to abandon me, but relaxed when he began curling the rope on the deck.

  Why would anyone come after Edmond? He couldn’t possibly be involved in anything. The biggest sin he’s ever made was planting his tomatoes too early.

  GG went down below and turned the key. “Keep the headlights off until you pass the bend ahead.” Water began churning beneath us. “Power here, neutral here, reverse here. Try not to hit anything head on. When you need to rest, dock at marinas.” Pointing to a wood paneled cubby, she said, “They’re marked on the map.” GG gave me a squeeze. “I’ll see you both in five days.”

  We trailed her footsteps to the deck. “Where? How will we find you?”

  Hopping off and onto the dock, she said, “Edmond and I will meet you at the Shakespeare Theatre.” She reached in her pocket and fanned tickets. Handing me two, she said, “See you at Twelfth Night.” Then with her foot, she gave the front of the boat a solid shove.

  NOTE TO SELF

  It’s official; my grandmother put the C in Crazy. No wonder she drives my dad insane. I now have a better understanding of his uber-conservatism—rebellion.

  CHAPTER 10

  Locks and Weirs

  A chill rose from the black pools of water that rippled along the side of the boat. It only took a few minutes to lose sight of Oakley Court. I’d been tempted to idle near the opposite shore and watch the chaos of the disgruntled Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd, but I was glad we didn’t dawdle. Even as we rounded a bend, two torch beams from the hotel property were already sweeping the opposite shore.

  “This is not right,” Travis said.

  In the quiet, the motor puttered along and I sympathized with his summation of the situation. Thankfully, the cabin was low and didn’t block my sight when I steered from the back. The vessel stretched out as long as a station wagon and to be honest, it intimidated me. “Do you want to drive?” I asked from the rear cockpit.

  He sniped a curt, “No.”

  Hugging the shore just far enough not to run aground, I cruised along shadows that guided me just out of reach of the brambles and branches from the berm’s shoulder. “Warn me if I’m going to hit something.”

  There was no answer. I knew that game well enough not to push, but as the silent treatment ticked from minutes to a half an hour, I became peeved. It wasn’t like I’d planned this surprise excursion.

  Both shorelines were visible under the starry sky. I concentrated on the right side, mostly undeveloped and sparsely dotted with docks, outlines of homes, and a couple of closed restaurants with outdoor seating.

  “What the hell are we doing?” he mumbled from the cabin below.

  My emotional bucket had been drained. Travis wasn’t the only one in freak-out mode. My teeth chattered and I wasn’t happy that I’d been assigned captain. “Boating on the River Thames.”

  Low beam headlights reflected the bleakness we were gliding through. Motoring the craft at a crawl, I tried to get a feel for night navigation. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with traffic since we were the only numbnuts cruising the river.

  Travis moved to the steps below me and sat. Tucking his knees under his arms he began to laugh. It was contagious.

  “What’s so funny?”

  His arms fanned wide. “This.”

  “Driving a barge on the Thames?” I giggled.

  His eyes closed as his chuckle gained conviction. “Your family has a funny idea of a summer vacation.”

  “I know, right?”

  I’d told him, more than once, that ever since my mother left my father for her psychic-tryst, my family had gone certifiably bonkers. He’d mostly shrugged my assertions off, figuring I was venting smoke about the split of my parents, but now he had first-hand experience.

  “What kind of grandmother hands her granddaughter keys to a boat, in the middle of a midnight raid, and says, ‘Try not to hit anything. See you in five days?’”

  Our laughter subsided. A cold mist trapped foggy air pockets that settled onto the water. One long day had rolled into the next. Inside my throbbing head, my throat constricted, and I blinked back tears that threatened to break my fragile mental state.

  Travis’s chortle lost its momentum. Tipping onto his back, he covered his face with his palms. From beneath his hands, he said, “Rachael, your grandmother is mixed up in something.”

  I gagged on an oversized reality pill. “Maybe.”

  “The probability is more than a maybe. She said she needs to sort through things.”

  Oxygen shuddered inside my chest and my nose began to leak. “Whatever her dealings are, I’m not involved.”

  He sat up. “But you are. And now so am I.”

  My fingers fell on the eye of Horus trinket I wore around my neck. Deep down, I knew this mess was about the oyster. If I dug through the gobbledygook in my emotional warehouse, yeah, I’d admit I’d been afraid of opening a can of worms. We’ve all done things we shouldn’t have—drunk too much, had a misjudged romantic encounter, said things we shouldn’t. Hell, I did that stuff all the time and maybe mistakes didn’t stop when you passed fifty or sixty. Maybe GG still had her own share of goings-on. She lived a hidden life of sorts and I was fine with that. Somehow through her career she’d come into money and owned a lot of expensive stuff. And if some of her dealings weren’t on the up and up, I didn’t want to know about them. But now, Edmond was in trouble, and probably GG, too. Keeping the message inside the brooch a secret somehow complicated my life, and now I was up to my eyeballs in murky waters.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  We? That meant he wasn’t mad at me.

  Exhaustion weighed on my shoulders. “This round-up is probably about the brooch.”

  He clapped. “Good guess.”

  “Maybe it’s had other owners and one of them wants it back.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  A narrow set of steps led to the deck from inside the cabin. Moving below he leaned over a barstool in the galley.

  Slowing the motor to idle, the river current guided us along. I crossed my arms against my chest and leaned against the rail at the
rear of the boat. Holding the brooch in my hand, I wondered if curses were more than imaginary. My mother and few other extrasensory-perceiving women I’d met all believed in that woo-woo stuff, but I struggled to trust things I couldn’t see.

  Being on black water dredged up images of the man I’d worked hard to suppress. When I closed my eyes, my mind’s imagery flashed snapshots of Billy Ray being shot then dropping to his knees. I blinked them open before I saw what I knew happened next.

  “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”

  Icy tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I’d promised myself never to tell anyone, but when I kept secrets they grew a life of their own and led me into danger. “Something happened last year. Something really bad.”

  Toying with a stack of coasters, he waited.

  Midway down the steps, I rested my hands on the deck above. “Billy Ray, he’s…”

  “He’s an asswipe prick.”

  I walked down the few stairs into the cabin. Travis slid my frozen hands into his. “He didn’t? Please tell me that you were never alone with him long enough for…”

  “No. Not that.”

  The night stood still and gave me goosebumps. Under a heave of air, I blurted, “He’s dead.”

  From a dim corner lantern that cast a yellow glow, I watched Travis crinkle his face and process what I’d said. “What happened?”

  “On spring break, I didn’t know it but he stalked me. We were at a Lowcountry boil on the May River. He attacked me when I was alone inside the oyster refinery.”

  Travis wrapped me in his arms. “Oh my God, Rachael.”

  My chest tightened and I swallowed against my dry throat. With my head pressed against his shoulder, I told him what happened. “I ran out of the building. He chased me through the parking lot and across the street into a wooded swamp until I was trapped by water. I was so scared and so mad that I threw the only thing I had at him, the oyster brooch.”

  “That a girl.”

  “It hit him square in the forehead and he laughed. He was taunting me with a gun and I shut my eyes. Then I heard the bullet blast from the barrel, and I thought I was dead, but didn’t feel any pain. When my eyes opened, Billy Ray was on his knees, blood puddling from his chest into the swampy water.”

  He pushed me out from his chest. “Did you shoot him?”

  “No. The only thing I had on me was the oyster brooch.”

  “Who, then?”

  “I don’t know. Someone followed us into the woods.”

  “Was he dead?”

  “He was when the alligator snapped him up and dragged him under.”

  I’d never known Travis to be at a loss for words, but the at that moment, he was incapable of speech, and clutched me to his chest while tears spilled down my face and onto his shirt.

  NOTE TO SELF

  I am spending the night alone with Travis. In the future must be more specific with wishes.

  CHAPTER 11

  Marooned

  Like an old movie, the dead of night cast variations of black and white: stone walls, the river, the boat. And just like a silent movie slinking through reels of film, other than the sound of the motor’s dull chug, it was eerily silent. Boating is not a popular night sport.

  “The way I see it, we can do as GG asked and meet Edmond and her in Stratford-upon-Avon. Assuming we can get there without incident,” Travis said.

  “That’s one option,” I said.

  “You have another in mind?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Gem people must be like restorers.”

  “Theft, bait and switch, hoarding.”

  “Travis!”

  “Sorry.”

  “They specialize, know a lot about what’s out there, what’s coming up for sale, that sort of thing. Maybe we can talk to this Sonny guy at Garrard’s; he may know about gems and relics, anything that went missing during the Crimean War. That sort of thing.”

  “You’re mental.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I do. Drive this thing to Stratford without sinking and hope to hell your grandmother shows up.”

  “She’ll be there.”

  “If she’s not, we’re screwed. Our passports and tickets are in our luggage—in our rooms.”

  The current rose and fell in a frantic motion, unable to decide its course, and a set of ripples bobbed the vessel. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about than our passports.”

  “Like what?” Travis said sarcastically.

  “Like the waterfall ahead.”

  Water could be heard churning, and a sign on the bank read Danger—Waterfall Ahead, Do Not Pass. “This must be one of those locks that GG mentioned.” Pointing to the right of the falls, Travis instructed, “Steer for it. Pretend you’re parking a car in a garage.”

  “Why don’t you come take the tiller and show me how it’s done?”

  “It’s your grandmother’s boat.”

  “It’s a rental.”

  “All rentals have a few dings, right? Just go slow. Once we’re in, hit reverse till you stop, then shift to neutral,” he said.

  Pulling into a chamber-like dock, the boat light illuminated upon a closed gate sign that read, Cuckoo Weir. I cut the engine. “Now what?”

  “Ahoy there,” Travis shouted.

  “It’s two in the morning.”

  He shrugged. “You never know.”

  Standing at the tiller, I couldn’t shake the river’s chill that had stiffened my limbs. “One of us needs to get out. The water ahead is below us. See if there’s a button to open the gate.”

  “Is that safe?” he asked, seeming less than enthused about exploring the dock for the gears that controlled the lock.

  “I’ll take a look around,” I said, thinking that moving would at least warm me up.

  “You know you have a knack for freak accidents.”

  “I do not,” I protested as I wound myself up for a leap onto land. In the dark, I didn’t see the decorative metal rope anchors and tripped, pancaking myself on soft turf. Jumping to my feet, I was glad Travis’s back was turned to me. He stood in the cockpit, trying to keep the boat off the walls of the lock.

  To my right was a path. To my left, Her Grace.

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. I mean there aren’t any controls.”

  “There have to be. Something controls the water so the gate can open and shut.”

  Fatigue washed through my arms, and my fingers were stiff from the vice grip I’d had on the tiller. “Okay, there’s a knee-high cement thing with some buttons and a wheel.”

  “Don’t push anything. Come back here on the boat and let me have a look.”

  A grinding noise like a distressed Sasquatch echoed and the gates in back of the boat closed. I knew two more things had to happen. The narrow canal we’d pulled into had to empty, lowering the boat, and the front gate needed to open when we were at the river’s water level. But I couldn’t make anything else happen. With the boat in the lock, we were at a standstill. Travis tied a rope on a metal rung of the lock and joined me on the dock. I showed what I’d done and he fiddled with all the same things I had.

  “We’re stuck.”

  My dry eyes stung from still being awake, and I tripped over my feet.

  “We should get some rest,” he said.

  “But the marina where we can anchor is somewhere beyond this lock.”

  Travis reached for my hand and wrapped me in his arms. I guessed he worried about my mental state since I’d told him about Billy Ray. “We’ll stay here until morning and hope a lock keeper shows up.”

  I was sorry when he released me.

  Back on board, climbing down steps from the cockpit to the cabin, we ducked inside. There was a single room with a kitchenette, bench seating, and a two-by-two potty enclosure. The Murphy bed that folded out of the wood cushioned bench was cozy. “There’s only one bed.”

  “What was your grandmother thinking?”
<
br />   I owed her a thank you.

  “That we’d stay in hotels along the river.”

  Travis hid a hand behind his back. “We’ll draw for the bed.” He counted to three.

  I had pretty much conceded to myself that I was not quarry in this hunt, but for decency sake said, “You can sleep with me as long as you keep your pants on.”

  He locked his arm around me from behind. “Have you forgotten, this isn’t our first time?”

  I hadn’t.

  Being close to him made me feel safe. And the cramped quarters didn’t bother me a bit. Tonight at least one thing worked in my favor. I was going to sleep with Travis and I hoped this was the beginning of a memorable trip.

  NOTE TO SELF

  Apparently I’m seeing London via the River Thames. Never would’ve thunk it.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Keeper

  The clunk, clunk, clunk on the deck was annoying, like school mornings when your PU’s —parental units—purposely closed doors and rattled kitchen drawers with a vengeance. Early morning clanks and clunks were normally a precursor to a shout from the bottom of the staircase. “Are you up yet?”

  “Hoy, anyone in there? This isn’t a boat hotel. We’ve got vessels waiting.”

  Travis tugged his arm out from under my neck. The sudden jerk sparked a volt into my dodgy shoulder. It acted up when I twisted funny or when the barometer dropped before a storm.

  Despite a portside window cracked open, the air inside smelled of church pew benches and musty bedding. My head thumped a beat and my eyelids protested as though someone had cemented them shut.

  “Rachael, wake up. Someone’s found us.”

  I felt as though I’d only just fallen asleep.

  A belt buckle jangled as it slid through pocket loops. “We got four hours sleep.”