by Sarah Graves
Couple of hours yet, before Marky needed to be up and doing. "He's taking a nap," Anthony said. "So we should be very quiet."
The kid considered this. Slowly she nodded, then wrapped her small fingers deliberately around his and let him lead her toward a small room off the kitchen. It was set up like an office with a desk, swivel chair, and two-drawer filing cabinet.
But there was a daybed in the corner, a table and a lamp, and a low bookshelf that mostly held reference books. There were a few kids’ books in it, too, though, some even with pictures.
"Lie down," Anthony said, and the kid climbed onto the bed obediently. He handed her a book. "Stay here," he said, turning. But when he got to the doorway a whimper stopped him, and when he turned her eyes implored him, huge and tear-filled.
"Aw, jeeze. What is it now?" He hadn't made her take the boots off, which she probably expected at bedtime. But the night was young and there were a lot of things left to do.
Like Marky, she'd be up again in only a few hours. And that, Anthony hoped, would be the end of this mess. "What do you want?"
She held the book out. "Read. You read."
Christ. "Listen, kid, I don't have time for—"
"Read!" she insisted, and he could tell from her quavering tone that despite her weird, calm self-control so far, she was getting ready to lose it.
Bottom line, the only thing keeping her cooperative was her desire to stop anything worse from happening. Which it could, and not just to her. If she didn't keep quiet, she'd wake Marky. Then Marky might start asking questions, wanting to know for instance how Anthony felt after killing someone for the first time.
On the way here he hadn't asked, because all he'd wanted was to get out of the woods and back to the house without incident. After that he'd been hungry, then drunk, then asleep. But when he got up he would ask, and if Anthony couldn't come up with a good, convincing answer, Marky really would go apeshit.
Anthony bent to the kid. "Okay, I'll read to you. But I'm hungry. You had your supper, right?"
She nodded reluctantly "Well, see, now I want mine. Look, I'll be right back, you just lemme go get a buncha crackers an’ some root beer for myself."
Her lower lip thrust out mutinously. She was going to start bawling, and Marky would shut her up if Anthony couldn't.
"All right," he gave in. "You can come with me. But quiet. Okay? Leave the book here," he instructed as she slid off the bed to follow him. "I mean it, now, we gotta tiptoe."
"Quiet," she echoed softly, padding along behind him with exaggerated care. "We be vewy, vewy—"
"Hey!" yelled Marky from the other room, stopping them both in their tracks. "Hey, what the freak? You said the lights worked and now the gee-dee light don't work. The freak's the problem?"
Damn. The lights did work, but one of the lamps was broken and of course Marky would choose that one to fixate on. Yet again came the sound of its chain being pulled repeatedly, and then the crash of the lamp hitting a wall.
Finally came footsteps, Marky stomping angrily through the house. "Hey! Where the freak are you? I'm callin’ you here, an’ when I call for you, you punk, you better answer me. Capisce? "
Yeah, Anthony thought. Icapisce, all right. Marky liked to use the old Italian words he'd learned from the gangster movies. I capisce that you're a nut job and I never should've come here with you at all. But now here I am.
He looked down at the kid, who stood with one cowboy-booted foot held theatrically up in mid-tiptoe while Marky kept charging around out there. Yelling, and coming closer.
"Hide," Anthony told the kid.
Buried alive…
Jacobia crouched in the car's pitch-dark front seat, in the gravel pit on Stony Road. By now, someone had probably seen that her house was dark, too, but they wouldn't have begun looking for her. A casual passerby would simply believe she hadn't come home yet this evening, and anyone who habitually paid closer attention to her whereabouts was away or busy.
So here she was; screwed, blued, and tattooed, as Sam would've put it. She hunched against the car door with her arms wrapped around her knees. It was cold in here.
Cold and miserable. And silent, except for the creaks and groans of the vehicle as it went on settling.
Collapsing, she amended bitterly as somewhere outside in the night, the distant whap-whap-whap of a helicopter sounded; not looking for her, though. Why should it be? No one had missed her.
At least Campbell wasn't still out there, or at any rate she hadn't heard him lately. Probably when the rain started he'd gone back to wherever it was he was staying. Because after all, why be uncomfortable when you're committing murder?
Another murder, she reminded herself bleakly, aware of the faint, constant noises of the car giving in to the weight on it. And that thrumming sound…
She sat up, little patters of gravel falling to the floor; she'd stopped bothering to brush them off. It was a new sound out there now, a deep, rumble-and-crunch sound, faint but definite.
Getting louder. Or…nearer? Panting with anxiety, she shoved her fist under the section of windshield that had collapsed in over the steering wheel. The horn, where the hell in this godforsaken vehicle had they put the—?
She found it, heard its muffled bleat. Three long and three short, the universal distress signal—not that the sound of a car horn from under a rock pile wouldn't signal distress clearly enough all by itself. Hear it, please let whoever it is hear.…
The thrumming sound became a growl. Suddenly she was aware of how bad the air in here had become, sour and evil-tasting.
Her clothes, stinking of fear-sweat, clung wetly to her. She hit the dying horn again, heard its wavering wonk!
"Hello? Hello, is anyone out there? Can you hear me?"
No answer. No sound of an engine anymore, either. So what was it, or who? A teenager on an all-terrain vehicle out buzzing around the gravel pit in the dark? Or could it be Ozzie Campbell come back to taunt her again? Taunt her, or…worse?
Then came a sliding metallic clank, fast and rhythmic. She recognized it: Someone was trying to dig her out with a shovel.
But it wasn't going to be enough, because the gravel had begun pouring in thick and fast again. Each time whoever it was hit the pile with the shovel, more shifted and came inside.
Please let this get better somehow. But instead things got terrifyingly worse as the digging sounds stopped and the car lurched suddenly backward. Tow chain, someone's hooked a tow chain to the—
With a loud, wet, ripping sound the windshield fell in. She dove away as the car's rear end rose abruptly; her neck twisted, her arm and shoulder sliding down into the foot well.
She couldn't breathe; her chin was jammed too hard into her throat. Light strafed the car's interior as it went vertical all at once, her face jammed in between the accelerator and the brake pedal, until with a bone-jarring thud the vehicle slammed down onto its tires and the driver's-side door opened.
Someone grabbed her shirt. Her head hit the steering wheel, the door frame, finally the ground. There was an awful whooping sound from somewhere; her mouth, she realized, sucking in air.
She struggled to her knees, stomach heaving. A voice came from nearby but she couldn't understand it or see whose it was; after the darkness in the car, the light was violent as a hammer blow. Hideously, she began to weep.
"Jake. Hey, you're okay. We've got you, now, you're out."
Hands gripped her shoulders, lifting her.
Breathe. Breathe. "Jake? Look at me, now, come on."
She looked. Breathe. Again. Disbelievingly. "Wade?"
It was Wade Sorenson holding her tightly, whose strong hands had seized her, dragged her from the death trap she'd blundered into. Over a thick sweatshirt with the Federal Marine anchor logo stenciled in white on the chest, he wore an old denim jacket that smelled of diesel fuel and engine lubricant.
She pressed her face into it. "Wade," she whispered. "She's gone. Lee—and Helen, too—they really are gone"
"I told you, Ozzie Campbell called me and told me about it, or hinted, anyway, and if you don't believe it, there's nothing else I can say. What I want to know is how you found me."
But the Eastport police chief wasn't having any of her own questions or theories, and especially not the one about Campbell being right outside the buried vehicle.
"Jake," he persisted doubtfully. "You're sure? It wasn't…"
She'd had a shower, forcing herself numbly through it; now the familiar old overstuffed chair in the parlor of her own big old house seemed to gather her in. She resisted the urge just to close her eyes for a minute.
"It wasn't what?" she said tiredly "A hallucination? Like I was hysterical with fear? Or so oxygen-deprived that I—"
"Hey." Wade put a calming hand on her shoulder. "He doesn't mean it like that. There's a lot going on; he just needs to be sure."
Yeah, yeah, she thought resentfully. Bob thought her getting trapped in the car was on account of a dumb notion she'd gotten and hadn't resisted. Which was partly true; in hindsight, she should have called him sooner.
But if Lee had been in there…"What did Tim Barnard's pals say?" she asked, deliberately changing the subject. Clearly she wasn't getting anywhere with this one.
"Did they know anything? D'you still think one of them took Helen and Lee?" She sipped some of the hot, sweet tea Wade had made.
Not knowing she was missing, he'd hitched a helicopter ride in with a diesel mechanic who needed a part made for the crippled freighter's broken propulsion system. At the machine shop Dana Weatherby ran on the Toll Bridge road, the job would take about an hour once Dana got everything warmed up and running—which the old, retired machinist would, at Wade's personal request. And out on the water the tide was turning, so Wade and the mechanic were going back later tonight.
"No," Bob said, "I don't think the boys did it. They've got good alibis for the whole day. Turns out Jody Pierce didn't just beat up Tim Barnard, he put the fear of God in all of ‘em."
At her questioning look he went on, "When they got picked up on Shore Road, they weren't breaking into a camp like we all thought at first. Jody had got ‘em a job workin’ on it; they was just clearin’ stuff out of there so they could start painting."
Bob shook his head regretfully. "And I heard from George and Ellie. They're on their way home."
So Ellie must've been calling from the airport or even from the plane. There was a message on the machine here in the phone alcove, too, the little red light blinking urgently. But Jake had no stomach for listening to it; not yet.
Bob glanced at his wristwatch. "It's a long flight to New York, though, and after that they need to get up here, so…"
He shrugged. "They might not be home until tomorrow. In the meantime the state and county guys've been working overtime, news bulletins are out and people've been plasterin’ ‘em everywhere, and every cop in the U.S. and Canada's been told," Bob said.
He stopped and sighed deeply. "As for Lee and Helen, though, they could still be anywhere. There's not been a single sighting of either one of ‘em."
He peered at Jake. "There's something else, too, and you'd better hear it from me."
He got up from the sofa and began pacing the rug unhappily. "State guys've called the feds in. It's gone on way too long for this to be a misunderstanding, Helen maybe going somewhere with Lee and not telling anyone. Or running away on purpose. Not," he added, "that there was ever really any possibility of it."
"And now that her car's been found…"
"Right. Now we know she didn't have car trouble, get stuck somewhere, something like that. Somebody hid her car in the pit."
But not all the way, Jake thought. Just enough so you'd only see it if you were specifically directed to it. "So what's he up to?" she murmured, and both men looked at her.
"It's as if he put the car there on purpose for me to find," she explained, "as if he set it up so I just wouldn't be able to resist crawling in, and then with the backhoe, he—"
Bob met her gaze squarely. He'd already informed her that there was no way of proving that the backhoe had been moved. If it had, it was back in its proper place when he and the rest of her rescuers arrived.
"Jake, that rock slide could have happened by its own self. All those piles are pretty unstable; it's why we tell the kids to stay out."
He frowned, then added, "And that's just one way of looking at it. Another is—and that's what I need to talk to you about— another is that you put her car there, tried hiding it, maybe the slide happened when you were rocking it farther down into the hole."
"What?" She shot up from her chair, spilling tea. "That's crazy, you can't be—"
"Bob," Wade objected, coming back from the phone alcove, "you know better than to think she'd do anything like that."
"Yeah. I do know," he replied. "But the feds won't. Even the state guys're starting to think your behavior's a little hinky."
She stared as he went on. "I mean look at it their way for a minute. All they know about you is, you had Lee before she went missing. You say she went to Helen's but they don't know that. What else happened and when is anyone's guess as far as they are concerned. And," he continued, "now there's this."
He faced her. "You were out looking for Lee. You think this Campbell guy's got something to do with it. I get that, but to them it looks like you keep on showing up in the investigation in ways most people wouldn't."
She kept her mouth shut tight. Because they were right; she was involved. Just not in the way they thought.
Or would believe. "And this time, you messed up a lot of evidence," he continued. "When they start working on that car of Helen's, your fingerprints are going to be in it. Hair and skin cells, blood that might've come from a struggle, only now…"
Now they'd think maybe Jake had deliberately obscured those things, to cover her own involvement. "So you'd better get ready for it," said Bob. "Get used to it, that until you're ruled out you're on their persons-of-interest list, just like anyone else."
Or more so. Bob turned to Wade. "And don't you go all righteous on me, either," Bob told him. "You read the papers, see TV. You know the ugly stuff that happens to kids."
And, he didn't have to add, the kind of people who ended up being the culprits. As often as not they were the ones who'd been closest to the child; the ones most trusted.
Bob's voice penetrated again. "As for you," he said, "I'm glad you're all right. And it's a good thing you had a cell phone to get me with is all I've got left to say on the subject."
He headed for the door. She hurried after him. "Bob, wait. I don't get it. What about the phone?"
Because that made no sense, it made absolutely no—
"The text message you sent me," he explained impatiently. "Without it you'd still be in the pit, so that was smart of you. But if you'd called earlier, I'd have already had my supper, now, ‘stead of my nice, rare burger sittin’ on the counter at home, turnin’ into a hockey puck."
"Thanks, Bob," said Wade, joining Bob at the door. "We owe you one, for sure."
"No!" she blurted when she was finally able to speak. They both looked at her, Wade curiously and Bob with an unmistakable, not-quite-hidden "Oh, hell, what is it now?" expression.
"Campbell had called me to hint about where the car was, I told you that," she said.
She rushed on past Bob's here-we-go-again look. "And I got a minute or so out of the phone in the gravel pit, when Ellie called me. But in there, the reception was pretty crappy."
Surrounded by the pit's high sand walls and by a mountain of gravel… no wonder the signal had been weak. And then she'd lost the thing.
"But I most certainly did not text-message you from inside the car. I couldn't have, I told you, an
d even if—"
She took a deep breath. "The only things on that phone that I actually use are the numbers and the redial. I no more know how to text-message somebody on it than I could jump off a building and fly."
Back in the city she might have had some practical reason to acquire such a simple skill. But in Eastport, she'd just never found a reason to.
"Bob, what did the message say?" Wade asked.
Bob looked from Jacobia to Wade and back again. " ‘I'm in the gravel pit, come get me, ha ha ha,’ " he recited. "And then the one word, Jacobia.’ "
Wade looked taken aback. "Ha-ha like laughing?"
"Yep. I figured it was a joke at first. Somebody having fun with me, I thought. Rotten sense of humor but hey, you can't get a message like that and not check on it, can you?"
He turned to her again. "But the phone—it does have a text-messaging feature on it, right?"
She nodded. "Sam bought it for me, so naturally it's got all the bells and whistles." And her protests about not knowing how to use most of them could be lies, of course. She couldn't prove they weren't.
"Can't someone trace the message?" Wade asked. "Find out who—?"
"Maybe. Maybe not." Bob shook his head vexedly "My phone said ‘anon,’ on the sender line, though, which I know stands for anonymous. So…"
So forget it. Campbell was smart, she realized; he'd have figured out something. Abruptly she came to a decision. "Bob, when that federal team gets here, you tell them I will take a polygraph, give fingerprints and hair samples and saliva, anything. Anything they want."
Her voice trembled; she let it. "In fact, I insist. Also you need to tell them I'll answer any question they ask me, no matter how embarrassing, impertinent, or even potentially incriminating, about absolutely anything. Got that?"
Because the idea that she'd done anything to that child, and then done something else to cover it up, was what Bob was talking about. And soon a lot of other people would be saying it, too.
People with badges. "But I want it all as soon as possible. No, wait," she added as he started to answer.
