Crawlspace

by Sarah Graves

  Or if she didn’t exist at all. If something happened to her, clearing the way for him to start over without her weight on him, crippling him like the satchel’s strap.

  His name wasn’t Chip or, worse, Chipper. It was Charles, but she’d found out somehow what his nickname had been as a kid back in Manhattan, and ever since, she’d used it all the time.

  No matter how many times he asked her not to, it was Chip, do this. Chipper, do that. He’d have thought she did it to annoy him, but he knew better. She’d simply forgotten what he’d said.

  But what if he could change things? What if in one decisive stroke he could end Carolyn’s petty tyranny and his own habit of being a victim forever?

  Siobhan Walters would almost certainly want him to write the current book if Carolyn couldn’t, and that might open a door for his novel, too. So he’d have work, money, and freedom.

  A dust devil whirled down the otherwise empty street and collapsed as, stepping between two old buildings to escape the frigid wind, he felt his hands flex with unaccustomed urgency.

  The bar’s door opened and closed, and her boot heels clicked confidently if a bit unsteadily toward him. Only hers …

  For a moment he thought he heard something else, quick and stealthy, like a foot being dragged hastily on concrete. But no …

  He listened again. She was alone. Alone on a dark street, a little tipsy, late at night in a strange town …

  Anything could happen. And she’d come here to meet someone, hadn’t she? Mr. Mystery, their anonymous correspondent.

  Chip even had the e-mails to prove it.

  But in the next instant he realized how ridiculous he was being; self-dramatizing, as the Old Bastard would’ve called it. Feeling foolish, Chip realized all at once that at least in this case, the accusation was true.

  All he had, after all, was Carolyn’s word about the novel. For all he knew, Siobhan Walters thought Carolyn was only blowing smoke about writing one. Maybe Siobhan had just been humoring her star author about it, keeping Carolyn happy.

  In any case, no contracts had been signed for any such project; if they had, Chip would’ve seen them. Contracts, like taxes and receipts for expenses, were the kind of boring, routine thing Carolyn always let him handle.

  By tomorrow she might even have changed her mind about giving up true-crime writing, especially if things started going well here in Eastport. She’d talked about quitting before several times, and always for the same reason, but had never done it.

  So things might not be as bad as he thought, he reminded himself sensibly. And anyway he’d feel better, he knew, when he got back to the city, to his own apartment with his own books, his own papers and music and his own computer.

  His own bed. Thinking this, he stepped out of the shadows to look up and down the dark, quiet street for Carolyn. Probably by now she’d be wondering where he had gotten to.

  But she wasn’t there.

  CAROLYN RATHBONE HADN’T REACHED THE TOP OF THE NEW York Times nonfiction bestseller list by being a pushover. But as she stepped out of the bar and looked around for Chip, who was nowhere to be seen, the man got the jump on her, clamping a hand over her mouth and yanking her back cruelly.

  She thrust her head back hard, hoping to hit his nose with it. She tried to kick the heel of her boot backward at him, but he dragged her so fast that it was all she could do to stay on her feet.

  He hauled her around a corner. No one else was in sight. He took his hand off her face. She sucked in a breath to scream out Chip’s name.

  But before she could, the man slapped tape over her mouth. Suddenly she was fighting to breathe.

  A car stood with its trunk open. No. No, I’m not getting in there. … She resisted as best she could, but he lifted her easily, shoved her in, and slammed the lid.

  It had taken less than a minute. Pitch dark, smothering, and stinking in the car trunk … sheer panic boiled her thoughts down to a single phrase: No, please God no, oh please …

  Something was in here with her, thick blankets or something, trapping her. She couldn’t move, and she couldn’t …

  Breathe. Fear seized her as she battled to get air into her lungs. The drinks she’d had earlier rose like fire into the back of her throat. Desperately she forced them down, forced herself to pull twin threads of precious air in through her nostrils.

  The reek in the trunk was of gasoline and stale sweat. Her own tears clogged her throat. She swallowed the salty taste and struggled not to sob.

  Why? Her mind shrieked the question as the car started up, lurched backward, and swung around, then headed uphill, rolling her violently onto her side. Her cheek hit the trunk latch with a pain so explosive she saw stars, and the thick, heavy blankets or whatever they were rolled on top of her.

  The trunk latch … hope pierced her. But when she tried to reach out for it, she found that he’d wrapped something around her arms, too, binding them to her body. The car accelerated, forcing her even tighter into the space between the trunk lid’s edge and the weight of whatever it was, smothering her.

  Tiny, shuddering trickles of air … with terrible effort, she made herself concentrate only on them. On each small, lovely sip of oxygen …

  But even as she seized this bare triumph, her heart thudded madly, her mind filling with awful questions she already knew she didn’t want to know the answers to.

  Where is he taking me? And what will he do then? Whoever he was, he might let her out of the trunk when they got where he was going, but what might happen after that was too bad to think of.

  Yet she couldn’t help it. Even as she fought for breath, a slide show of crime-scene photographs flew past her mind’s eye:

  Girls tied in handcuffs, in blindfolds, in chains. Girls in rooms, alive but hidden from everyone, sometimes for years.

  Girls in graves. It was the crime writer’s dark burden, this knowl edge—real, factual knowledge—of the terrible things people could do to one another. It was why she’d tried getting out from under it, by borrowing—all right, stealing—an idea from Chip.

  At first she’d been proud of remaining unhaunted by victims of even the most depraved crimes. But by the time she and Chip finished the first book, they’d crept in, infesting her dreams.

  And they haunted her now, the girls with their bruised eyes and limply curled fingers, their hair clotted with earth. Because as she lay there trying not to smother to death, she knew without any doubt that however much she begged, bargained, or pleaded, she was about to become one of them.

  Because they’d tried all that, too, those girls. That and more, in the vain hope of escape. And yet there they all were in the crime-scene photographs Carolyn had pored over. And this right here, what was happening to her right this minute—

  This was how they’d gotten into those graves.

  The car drove on, rumbling along under her. This wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. She couldn’t believe it, but blood from her wounded cheek leaked down under her nose and she could smell it, like the taste of a copper penny.

  Gradually, though, her breathing settled and her heartbeat slowed. Think. A man was taking her somewhere for a reason she did not dare imagine. If she did, she might just die of fear. But he was not doing anything to her now, was he?

  Not right now, not yet. That meant she still had a chance to …

  She tried moving her feet. They were weighed down by the heavy blankets, but they weren’t bound. Which meant that if she got the chance, she could run.

  She tried rolling partway onto her back and was able to. But as she did, something behind her shifted and fell with a metallic clunk.

  Carolyn froze. A tire iron, maybe, striking the metal rim of the spare. Had he heard it? She held her breath, but the car didn’t slow. She felt it turn again, realized it had done so several times.

  It felt as if he was driving around in a circle, or maybe around the block. As if he was waiting for something—for the coast to be clear, maybe? Only … clear for what?
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  But from this thought her mind reeled back in terror. Her gorge rose chokingly, her eyes streamed tears, and a scream tore at her throat until she thought it would burst. Until …

  No, she told herself with a terrible effort. Stop. Breathe. Think.

  Probably those other girls had tried to command themselves, too. Tried, knowing they were facing death, to get a handle on their terror, at least enough so that they could function. And it had always failed.

  But Carolyn had always felt herself to be an exception, the one who de spite (or even possibly because of) a solid mountain of disadvantages—a mental picture of her childhood home, a two-room trailer hunkered at the edge of a one-horse town in the middle of rural Kansas, flashed into her mind—would succeed better than anyone else could.

  Thinking this, she pushed the fear down again, stretched as best she could to force a larger space in the mass of blankets. Remembering to breathe slowly and shallowly, she began inching her legs around, pushing first with her back and then with her feet.

  At last she lay perpendicular to the trunk, with her head toward the passenger compartment, knees drawn in, feet aimed up.

  If her wrists had been tied in front of her, she could’ve worked on loosening the tape. But they weren’t. They were bound flat to her sides.

  He’s done this before; it’s why he knows how, she thought, then banished the realization before it could paralyze her. Her only chance was to wait until he opened the trunk, then kick out hard with both feet, hoping to surprise him and maybe hurt him.

  Then, before he could recover, she would throw herself bodily over the trunk’s rim, get herself to her feet somehow, and run … .

  The car slowed. Her heart slammed in her chest. Tiny whimpers, muffled by the thick tape, sounded as loud as screams inside her head.

  Those girls …

  Without wanting to, she saw them once more, lying in shallow holes … never deep, because the men who’d put them in there were so lazy and stupid.

  And because they wanted to be able to get at them again. …

  No. Don’t think that, either. Or about how slim her chances were, slim bordering on none.

  The car door closed softly. Footsteps scuffled around to the rear of the vehicle. The click of the trunk latch sent an electrical charge of terror through her.

  She could barely breathe. The trunk swung up with a faint creak. Not yet, she thought as he leaned in at her, his big hands blotting out the light shining from behind him, making a massive shadow of him … .

  Now. She kicked as hard as she could, felt her booted feet slam his chest. He let out a grunt of pained surprise and reeled backward as she lurched up, praying for the momentum to hurl her forward.

  But her bound body was too clumsy and the blankets on it too heavy … Just for an instant she saw the distant breakwater and the lights illuminating its empty concrete expanse, as she tried with every muscle and nerve to lift her torso off the floor of the car trunk.

  Then a hand gripped her throat and squeezed. A fist punched the side of her head. Pain burst brilliantly behind her eyes like a million fireworks, and she felt herself go limp.

  Felt the blankets wrap her tightly, felt the tape snugging the thick fabric around her head, waist, and ankles. A terrible sorrow overwhelmed her as she realized: one chance.

  Just like the other girls, the ones in the pictures she had studied and written about, the girls in their graves …

  One chance only. She’d had it. Had it and blown it.

  And now—

  Now it was gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!

  On the morning after Chip Hahn and Carolyn Rathbone arrived in Eastport, the voice on the phone was a high, disguised warble of malice.

  The slim, dark-haired woman in jeans and a paint-speckled red sweatshirt put the receiver down. Her name was Jacobia Tiptree-Jake, to her friends—and it was the fourth such call she’d had in two days.

  “Who was that?” asked Ellie White, coming into the old gold-medallion-wallpapered dining room of the big, ramshackle antique house on Key Street.

  Model-slim and as deceptively fragile-appearing as an Arthur Rackham fairy princess, Ellie was in fact as tough as an old boot. Today she wore a chartreuse turtleneck, a turquoise smock with lime green rickrack edging its bodice, black leggings, and gold flats with fake jewels glued onto the toes.

  A yellow gauze scarf with a lot of sequins on it tied back her red hair; it was a habit of hers to raise each day’s glitter quotient as much as possible.

  “Just some jerk.” Crossing to the dining room window in the thin, fleeting light of an early November morning in downeast Maine, Jake gazed out past the pointed firs edging the backyard to where a row of barberry bushes divided her lawn from that of her nearest neighbor.

  She had not seen him tending to his own lawn or anything else lately; the time of planting and cultivating was over for the year. But the plot of ground over there was still a gardener’s paradise, with dozens of low, pampered rosebushes neatly pruned, mulched, andas of this morning—covered in tan burlap.

  So he’d been out. Must have been; he never let anyone else touch the roses. She simply hadn’t noticed him.

  Just as well, she decided, that they hadn’t run into each other. He’d moved in the previous summer and immediately gotten to work improving the property. But he’d never introduced himself and when she’d tried, he’d shut the door in her face with a snide glance at her unmowed grass.

  Which was why nowadays even without his flat, disapproving gaze across the common lot-line, she felt each immaculately tended mound in his rose bed as a reproach. In her own yard, the fallen leaves still littered the lawn, and if the dahlia bulbs got dug up before they froze solid, it would be a miracle.

  “Well, can’t you find out who it was?” Ellie asked with a frown at the telephone.

  “Probably not.” Jake peered at the caller ID box. It listed the most recent call as having come from “undisclosed.” That meant the caller, whoever he or she was, had blocked the ID function.

  Just like before … “Kids playing a joke, most likely,” she told Ellie, more annoyed than concerned.

  When she first came to Maine ten years earlier, a telephoned death threat would’ve unnerved her. But nowadays she reserved her anxiety for true emergencies.

  Such as, for instance, the fact that it was nearly winter and despite earnest promises from a succession of remodeling contractors, her old house still had no insulation in it. So she was doing it herself, a decision she dearly hoped would not end up making her wish the death threat were carried out.

  She was only putting about a gazillion cubic feet of fire-retardant-treated cellulose into the old walls, though, so what could go wrong?

  Nothing, she reassured herself. The whole thing would be a snap. But Ellie still didn’t seem quite convinced.

  “Are you sure we should try this?” she asked Jake again when they had climbed the two full flights of stairs up to the third story of the old dwelling.

  Most of this floor had been turned into a large, modern studio apartment a few months earlier. But a big, south-facing section was still Jake’s carpentry workroom: a place to glaze antique windows, strip off layers of paint, and sand sections of old hand-carved woodwork laid out on milk crates.

  “I don’t see why not,” said Jake. Much earlier that day, as dawn was breaking, the delivery truck had arrived and the big, bright room with its tall, bare windows and whitewashed walls had been filled by the delivery men with as many blue-plastic-covered bales of insulation material as could be stuffed into it.

  Hoping yet again that she hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew, or at least not without breaking a tooth, she added, “People do it, we’re people, therefore …”

  Also in the room were a forty-foot orange heavy-duty extension cord, a circular saw that in a pinch could’ve been used to anchor a barge, an iron pry bar, dust masks, and two plastic shower caps. A leak in on
e of the insulation bales had spewed a small volcano of impossibly fluffy-looking gray cellulose onto the floor.

  “How’s Bella doing?” Ellie asked, poking one of the bales experimentally and watching it spring back.

  “Okay, I guess.” Since the housekeeper’s recent marriage to Jake’s father, her relationship with Jake had gotten awkward, or so Jake felt. “We don’t quarrel, if that’s what you mean.”

  They never had. The trouble was, now Jake didn’t think it was enough. At her insistence the third-floor studio apartment had been put in for the newlyweds; Jake thought that alone must signal to Bella her happiness at her father’s choice.

  But Bella had gone on behaving after the wedding just as before: kindly, even affectionately, yet with the faintest touch of distant formality. And surely, sooner or later, a person’s stepmother should begin treating a person more as a daughter and less as an employer?

  “She’ll warm up,” Ellie predicted, but Jake barely heard her as she looked around again at the room full of stuff. It was a lot of equipment, as befitted the installation of a lot of insulation, yet something was missing. A big something, an important—

  “Oh, what an idiot I am.” Standing at the window, she peered to the yard below, put a hand to her head in dismay.

  Three stories down on the lawn stood an air compressor. Positioned on a wooden pallet, the compressor was for blowing the insulation material into the space between interior and exterior walls. About the size of the cab on a standard pickup truck, it had been delivered early that morning while she was still getting dressed.

  And by the time she’d raced downstairs to ask them to move the machine upstairs, the delivery men had gone. Then the dogs, Monday the black Labrador and Prill the red Doberman, had begun dancing urgently around, indicating that they needed to go out.

  So she’d taken them, even though it wasn’t her job, being careful not to let them cross over into the precious rosebushes. She’d brought the animals in and fed them—not her job, either—and then the death threat had come in.