Crawlspace

by Sarah Graves

  And the pages were thicker. Hurriedly, Chip pulled one of the clear plastic page covers apart. Inside were two sheets of paper, each with clippings and photographs mounted on it, their blank back sides placed together so they formed a single page.

  The scrapbook was made that way so you could rearrange just one page at a time, Chip realized. You could move the front side without moving the back, or the back without moving the front.

  Biting his lower lip, he parted the sheets of paper to look between them and found … money. Five hundred-dollar bills to a page, four laid horizontally top to bottom, one more vertically.

  On each side. So a thousand per page, basically. With sweat-slicked fingers he inspected more of them. Each page was fattened with money. A hundred pages or so … a hundred thousand right here in the book.

  So Roger must have put the money out on the water just as he’d said, and Randy found it. But this wasn’t all of it. There should be more somewhere.

  Almost a million more, most likely hidden on this boat. But as he examined the one’s he’d already located, he realized that there was no point looking for the rest of the cash. Because the bills were identical, and that meant …

  He stuck one of the hundreds into his pocket, stuffed the scrap-book down his jacket front, his fingers coming unexpectedly as he did so upon the map he’d found, floating out on the water.

  A hand-drawn map scrawled in blue ballpoint on a torn-out sheet of notebook paper, the paper wrapped in clear plastic. Soon after he’d found it, he’d gotten so busy avoiding a watery death that he’d forgotten all about it.

  And there was no time for wondering about it now, either. Shoving it down with the worthless bill he’d taken, he turned for a last glance around the cabin in case there was anything more in here that they might be able to use.

  There wasn’t. Time to get out of here …

  “Looking for something?” The voice came from behind him. Not Carolyn’s, and definitely not Sam’s.

  “Or maybe you think you’ve already found it.”

  Randy Dodd’s big hand seized Chip’s shoulder, spun him, and went into Chip’s jacket front. The scrapbook landed on the table alongside the knife Carolyn had used on Chip.

  The hand came back clenched into a fist, and when it arrived all the lights went out.

  DAWN WAS BREAKING WHEN JAKE AND BELLA FINALLY stumbled to the end of the gravel road and onto the pavement; the first passing vehicle, a bread truck, gave them a ride.

  The driver, an apple-cheeked young guy wearing a Yankees cap, wanted to take them directly to the cops, but they argued him out of it, and with difficulty persuaded him to let them out at the customs station between Maine and New Brunswick.

  Cars were already lined up at the border crossing in the thin morning light as Jake stood at a pay phone just inside the building, talking to Bob Arnold.

  “Bob, we saw him, okay? Never mind how we did it, he was in the water, he’s got a boat, and—”

  Dripping and shivering, Bella sat on a bench wrapped in a coat one of the clerks had lent to her. Bob was talking again, explaining to Jake what a fool she was, and that when he saw her in person he would go into even more detail on the subject.

  But right now he had questions to ask her, and based on her answers, urgent tasks to accomplish, and had he mentioned just how risky, how dangerous, how reckless, she had …

  Jake waited until he was finished. The swelling around her ankle had progressed down into her foot; soon she might have to cut the shoe off.

  “Someone’ll be up to get you,” he concluded when she’d told him all she could about where she and Bella had seen Randy Dodd. “So sit tight.”

  He hung up, not gently. Turning from the phone, Jake watched a customs officer walk up to Bella with a paper cup of hot coffee in his hand and an interested look on his face. He offered the cup to Bella, then sat and began asking questions.

  Apparently two women, one half-drowned and the other with an ankle the size of an elephant’s, required some investigation before they could be allowed to cross back peacefully into their own home country.

  Bella opened her purse, which was when Jake remembered that she did not have her passport with her, and no birth certificate, either, because they also had been in the lost satchel. Her ankle now felt like the elephant was stepping on it.

  Across the room, the border official had stopped smiling at Bella and begun looking grim. He stood and beckoned to another much less pleasant-looking fellow wearing a badge. Bella had not had the required paperwork, either, it seemed.

  And from the look on her face, she had not appreciated being reminded of this. Meanwhile, through the lobby window, Jake saw two U.S. customs guys hustling out of their own building, on the far side of the bridge.

  Judging by the customs guys’ expressions, Jake knew she and Bella must’ve interrupted something crucial, like making sure a carful of nice blue-haired Canadian ladies bound for a day of stateside shopping plus lunch wasn’t also secretly smuggling in an improvised nuclear device.

  The U.S. customs officers entered the Canadian building and looked around suspiciously. “Look,” she began to tell them, “this can all be—”

  Straightened out, she’d meant to finish. But suddenly it was all too much; her throat tightened and her eyes prickled.

  “Ma’am?” The two U.S. officers stood over her. They wore the kind of all-purpose smiles apparently issued nowadays by the U.S. government. “Ma’am, could you please come with us? Your friend here, too?”

  “Sure.” She sighed, straightening. No passport, no driver’s license, no birth certificate … oh, this was going to take hours. Maybe days.

  At least Bob Arnold already knew where they were, and where Randy was, too. “Come on,” she told Bella, who was already up and knew the drill as well as Jake did.

  Jake and Bella had been on—gasp!—foreign soil, and they wanted to—gasp!—come back. So now a decision had to be made: Should they be allowed to? Or had the foreignness infested both of them, like bedbugs?

  It was only about five hundred feet between the Canadian building and the U.S. one, but to Jake the distance looked like ten miles. Felt like it, too, on her bum ankle.

  A truck roared by, spewing foul exhaust. The U.S. customs building had a muck-tan exterior and a low concrete portico. Inside, they were left to wait in a room about as charming and hospitable as a gas station restroom.

  The chairs were hard plastic. Bella sneezed. They were both still in their wet clothes. Jake unlaced her shoe, tried pulling it off her swollen foot but couldn’t.

  Bella got to her feet. “Stay here,” she said, and disappeared down a hall made of cinder blocks painted yellow. She looked angry and miserable, and in danger of coming down with double pneumonia.

  But as she paused before an unmarked door, her look changed to one of mild-mannered reasonableness tinctured with a drop of pathos. Only the glint of purpose in her eye betrayed what an act this was; even now, Bella was about as pathetic as your average steamroller.

  Her act must have worked, though, because when she returned she had two pleasant middle-aged clerks with her, one carrying dry clothes and the other bearing a lot of rough cotton towels. An hour later Jake and Bella were warm, dry, and dressed in outsized U.S. customs sweatshirts and huge pairs of regulation trousers.

  But still they were waiting. Jake leaned back again in the hard plastic chair, sighing with impatience, then looked at the clock whose minute hand had refused to move since the last time she’d looked at it.

  “What d’you suppose is happening?” Bella asked tonelessly.

  Jake just shook her head. Purgatory, she thought, must be like this. But then through the building’s front window she spied a familiar face.

  Square jaw, blond brush-cut hair, eyes that in this early-morning light were a pale bluish-gray—

  It was her husband, Wade Sorenson.

  CHAPTER 8

  IN THE NEXT MOMENT, WADE’S ARMS WERE AROUND HER. Jake press
ed her face into the rough fabric of his heavy blaze-orange hunting jacket and felt his embrace tighten.

  “Hey,” he said into her ear. Not until then did she realize how much she’d needed his presence, that doing this all alone was, of course, possible …

  But it was dreadful. “Hey, yourself.” He smelled like soap, lime shaving cream, and the sharply herbal scent of the bag balm he used on his hands to keep them from cracking in cold weather.

  “Is there any news about Sam?” Because in the hour since she had talked to Bob Arnold, anything could have happened.

  But Wade only shook his head. “I got home just as Bob was hanging up the phone from talking to you. So I heard him out, and then I turned right around and started up here.”

  Half an hour later, the U.S. Customs and Immigration people accepted the copied documents Wade had brought with him. Wade had been on the phone again with Bob meanwhile.

  “He sent a boat over to where you said you saw Randy,” Wade reported as they left the customs building.

  “And?” she said, steeling herself.

  Because if the news had been good, he would already have told her about it. Bella sneezed again and wrapped the wool blanket Wade had brought along more tightly around herself.

  “He said they found the fishing boat, but Dodd was gone. No Sam or anyone else on it, either.”

  They drove through the market town of Calais between tire shops and convenience stores. As they pulled out of town, Wade reached over and turned the heat up even higher, then let his arm fall around Jake’s shoulders.

  Along the road old maples and cedar trees screened barns and farmhouses from traffic noise. A little snow dusted the north sides of the tree trunks. As well as she could through a haze of fatigue and fear, Jake brought Wade up to date on the events of the night, until at last he steered the truck through the final pair of downhill S-turns before the turnoff to Eastport.

  In the distance, the leafless white maples on the hillsides looked like stands of soft paintbrushes. “Randy was hunting us, back there on the beach. If something more important hadn’t come up, I think he might’ve found us and …”

  Beaten us to death. Or shot us. “He’s got some plan in his head,” she said. “But I don’t know what. And if he’s not where Bella and I saw him …”

  He’d already proven he could hide, that he knew the coves and inlets as well or better than anyone around here. So by now he could be anywhere.

  Then she saw in Wade’s face that there was something more. Something worse. “Sam’s old friend,” he answered her unspoken question. “Chip Hahn is his name?”

  She nodded.

  “When they found the fishing boat, they found a life jacket floating nearby. Bob Arnold’s pretty sure it’s one from the dory Chip stole out of the boat basin yesterday. Guy it got stolen from, he says he’d left two jackets on that dory.”

  Wade went on. “But the dory’s gone. Bob thinks maybe Chip’s with them now. That maybe he’s on the missing dory with Sam and the girl.”

  And Randy Dodd, Jake thought, chilled. Her ankle felt huge, and as sore as a boil. “But how would Chip have—”

  “Found ’em?” Wade slowed for the speed trap just inside the Passamaquoddy Indian reservation.

  “Drifted there, maybe. There was a slick on the water by the fishing boat, a gasoline leak. So maybe a fuel line came loose, Chip lost power? And that’s right where you would end up, if you just let the current take you.”

  Just before the causeway sat the Indian police squad car, waiting for drivers who didn’t know or had forgotten that the speed limit sign meant business. Wade lifted an index finger from the wheel as he went by, and the cop returned the salute.

  “None of this is in any way your fault,” he added evenly. “If Randy Dodd hadn’t seen you, he’d still have seen the copter and hightailed it.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said glumly, hoping her dad felt that way about it, too. Keeping Bella out all night, putting her in danger, and soaking her to the skin … oh, he was not going to be happy about this.

  “We’ll just get home, get that ankle looked at and everybody present and accounted for again, and then see what happens,” Wade said comfortingly.

  But the expression on his face wasn’t comforting. It said things were bad, and that they might be about to get worse.

  “Bob’s sending a car up to Saint Stephen,” he added. “To check your vehicle.”

  In case of evidence, he meant. In case Randy Dodd had made it that far inland before returning to his boat.

  “It’s a big ocean,” Wade added quietly.

  As if he was thinking it, too: that all Randy wanted was to get away with the money. That his simplest, best move was to kill all three of his captives.

  And that he could dispose of their bodies most easily just by throwing them overboard.

  “I CAN MAKE YOU FAMOUS,” CAROLYN RATHBONE SAID quietly to Randy Dodd. She sat near the stern of the small boat Chip Hahn had come in. The dory, he’d called it.

  Up front, Sam Tiptree lay crumpled and motionless; Randy had gotten Sam from the larger boat into the small one by the simple method of dumping his limp body over the transom.

  Chip sat near Sam, sullenly silent. A huge purple bruise was swelling on his cheekbone where Randy had hit him.

  Randy himself looked straight ahead, one hand on the tiller of the engine he’d gotten started simply by tinkering with it and one on the little gun he’d gotten from somewhere. It was daylight now; as he piloted the boat, he kept scanning the shore.

  But nothing moved there. They’d heard engines for a while, and voices; Randy had tucked the dory into a cove between high boulders and a deadfall, dark as a cave, and from outside just as invisible. When the voices went away and the engine sound faded, they’d emerged.

  And now here they were. Rocks, trees, cliffs … once she saw an eagle swoop, seize a fish out of the shallows in its talons, then sail away with its silvery prey still wiggling and gleaming.

  And once, only a dozen or so yards distant, a whale breeched, its vast, dark, gleaming shape like something in a science-fiction movie. But since then, nothing.

  “I mean it,” she said, keeping her voice low. The sound of the engine probably covered it, she thought, but there was no sense letting Chip hear.

  No sense in depending on him to save her. “I write crime books. I sell millions of them. You could be in one, and then—”

  Then everyone would know how smart you are, she’d meant to finish. Because they all wanted it, didn’t they? Everyone did. To be famous. To be special.

  As if being a bloody monster wasn’t special enough. It was all she could do just to talk to this guy at all without throwing up or screaming. The girls, though; the girls in their graves.

  You’re one of us, they seemed to intone yearningly as they gazed at her with hollow eyes. You’re one of us … almost.

  The girls sounded confident. She wanted them to be wrong. She took another breath of the salt air, let it steady her, and tried again to make what they were saying untrue.

  “People would understand how important you are,” she said to Randy. “How … interesting.”

  Right. Like a tumor is interesting, she added silently. She tried keeping those thoughts off her face, though. Because if she was going to get out of this, she had to offer him something.

  Something he wanted. And he would have to believe her, that she could deliver. “I’d let you talk to my editor,” she bargained. “You’d stay entirely hidden, though. Completely anonymous. They might,” she added, struck by a burst of inspiration, “even help you get out of the country.”

  Not bloody likely. The only thing Siobhan Walters would do if she heard from this creep would be to hire security guards, and with her next breath she’d demand her own bazooka. Because Siobhan was no fool; she knew she didn’t need the real people that most nonfiction got written about. And especially not the criminal ones; a photograph, maybe, just to show readers he really did exist a
nd wasn’t the product of some fool’s fake memoir.

  But nothing more. Most nonfiction subjects were nothing but trouble anyway, with their new prima donna attitudes and their demands to have their pasts fixed up to their satisfaction, their good deeds magnified and the bad ones papered over like so much rough plaster. And it was the same with true-crime books.

  Forcing herself to gaze at Randy Dodd’s surgically altered features, she knew for a fact that she could bring his dead body home strapped to the hood of the Volvo, write about him as if he were alive, and barely anyone would even know the difference.

  Dead guys didn’t open their big yaps to contradict anything the writer said about them, either. They didn’t give interviews, or sue.

  In other words, he’d be perfect, and for Carolyn herself it would be a coup. “You’d be famous,” she said confidently again.

  Interviews with a serial killer that the author had escaped from herself … God, it would be beautiful. All just as a way of getting free from him, and saving Chip and Sam, too, of course.

  She told herself that once more as the dory pulled between the shore and some more large rocks. “Famous, huh?” he said.

  Tonelessly, his eyes still roving back and forth. In the pale morning light, she examined his face, the scars at his temples and in front of his ears where some clumsy surgeon had made a tuck here, loosened a little there.

  Reddened ridges revealed where stitches had been. What a botch job, thought Carolyn, who had done a teensy bit of preemptive research into cosmetic surgery herself, just to be ready when the time came.

  Still, what he’d done had been enough to let him venture into Eastport, to pass for a stranger as long as it was dark and no one looked too closely.

  “Yes,” she said, forcing herself to sound enthusiastic when what she wanted was to puke on his shoes. His bloody shoes …

  She looked away. “You could be,” she went on, keeping her voice even, “a star. Go on TV. They’d probably make a movie about you.”

  Randy Dodd laughed humorlessly. “That what you think I want? Lots of people knowing about me?”