A Face at the Window

by Sarah Graves

  An instant later, the burning pain in his arm told Anthony that he had been shot.

  •••

  "Come on, it's only a flesh wound," said Marky.

  Anthony wasn't sure how he'd made it back up to the house. His scraped hands suggested that he'd crawled part of the way; a bump on his forehead said he'd fallen at least once.

  Marky slapped him hard on the back; the pain nearly made him faint. "See? Hardly even any blood," Marky said cheerfully.

  The telescope-type thing was a telescopic sight, Anthony realized now; an eyepiece, like, for a handgun. You held it up to your eye with one hand, the gun with the other.

  The living room smelled of fireworks. Anthony guessed Marky must've been trying the thing out.

  On Anthony. Or for the hell of it. Or maybe Marky'd shot him by accident, never used the eyepiece at all.

  Whatever. "Freakin’ bullet went right through you," Marky said. "Lucky you, it'll heal by itself."

  Yeah, lucky. Anthony glanced down at the small, purplish hole in his upper arm, like a little mouth. Or an eye, winking slyly at him, sending a wave of nausea through him.

  He didn't feel lucky. He didn't think the bullet had gone all the way through, either; if it had, where was the hole that it had come out of?

  "Here, lemme tie a bandage around it for you, you'll be fine in no time," said Marky, yanking on a strip of bedsheet he'd torn up for the purpose.

  "Right. Now you're a first-aid expert," said Anthony through clenched teeth. He could still leave here. He could get in the car and…

  "Why'd you have to shoot the gun off, anyway? You already broke the window, why d'you have to—ouch." He took a shuddering breath and held it, as Marky finished tying the bandage, Marky's face gone suddenly as hard as stone.

  "Jesus. That hurts," Anthony said, inspecting the strip of cloth. Blood seeped through it already.

  "Yeah, it hurts. Big deal, you freakin’ baby. Ask me any more of your stupid freakin’ questions," Marky said, "I'll make all your pains go away, shoot you through the freakin’ head. You got that, you little punk? Right. Through. The head."

  On the word punk, spit drops flew out of Marky's mouth. He flicked Anthony's skull hard with his fingers.

  "Do you? Get it?" He shoved Anthony in his wounded arm.

  "Y-yes," Anthony replied, staggering partly from the roaring pain and partly from the blackness that kept threatening to close in over his head. "G-got it."

  If he left, Marky would find him. Marky would catch up with him sooner or later, or the guy who'd hired them would. And what happened after that wouldn't be good.

  Marky turned away. "Now go get the freakin’ kid. We haven't got much time, we're already running late. It's your own fault," he added petulantly "If you'd left her out where I could get her ready, none of this would've happened."

  So that was it. Marky had been searching, and he hadn't been able to find the kid, either. Hide, Anthony had told her, to keep her from driving Marky any more crazy than he already was.

  And she had. She'd done it real well. But that might've been a mistake, he realized now.

  The hiding part. Not the crazy part.

  Standing in the kitchen at a few minutes to midnight, Jake tried washing the dirty dishes still sitting in the sink, gave up after only a few cups had been rinsed. That scream…

  For the hundredth time she banished the sound from her head. But it came back; it was in the water running over her hands, the night outside. It was in each breath she dragged in and forced out once more, only to have to do it again.

  She threw the sponge down, cranked the faucet off. Without even the dogs here, the house was incredibly silent, their steady breathing—her usual remedy for nighttime worry—now painfully absent. She let herself look at the clock on the kitchen mantel again, found that the minute hand had moved only a fraction since the last time she'd checked.

  Four o'clock. You cant be there until… Three whole hours, or better yet, three and a half, would have to pass before she could take any useful action. Until then, she had to stay clearheaded, keep her courage up, and most of all, stay silent.

  Because if she didn't do this right, if she messed anything up or she broke down and told someone…Her cell phone lay on the kitchen table. The urge to pick it up and call someone on it was nearly overwhelming. Without looking at it again she snatched it up, dropped it into her sweater pocket, and left the room, shaky as someone newly recovering from a serious illness.

  In the parlor she paused, pressing her fingertips to her lips. Somehow these next few hours must pass, and at the end of them she had to be focused, purposeful, and calm. And although it felt absolutely foolish, irrelevant, and out-of-this-world silly, there was really only one way to accomplish that.

  Straightening, she regarded the fireplace mantel. Andirons and a set of fire irons stood on the hearth; these she moved from their places into the hall, setting them on a pad of newspapers to keep the soot off the carpet.

  Careful, competent, step-by-step: In this way, she knew, she might manage to keep her mind working competently, too, even though everything in her shrieked insistently—overwhelmingly, almost—that what she really ought to do was panic, fully and irretrievably.

  She clipped a work lamp to the mantel's thin top board and by its good, strong light examined the repair job she hoped would rescue her state of mind. Somewhere in the back of her head that child's scream replayed itself; grimly, she let it, because right now there wasn't a single thing she could do about it.

  Nothing but wait…and work. From her toolbox she selected a razor knife and with it began carving away the loose paint and splinters from in and around the deep, uneven gouge in the mantel trim; painting the ceiling in here a few weeks earlier, she'd swung the stepladder around clumsily and taken the ragged chunk out of the old wood.

  The fix was much like patching up Hoke Sturdevant's canoe, only in the case of an architectural repair like this one, it was a multiple-step job; now, with the flaked paint chips and other loose material cut out and the ragged gouge trimmed clean with the razor knife, she spread more newspaper sheets on the hearth to protect it, then pried open the half-pint tin of architectural primer with the tip of a flat-headed screwdriver.

  Around her, the old house creaked and sighed, shifting and settling, expanding a little with the warmth of the daytime and shrinking with the chill of night. She used a cheap, disposable brush to paint the raw wound in the wood—it was, she reflected, the first time in almost two centuries that wood had been out from under a coat of paint—to swab the clear liquid primer on.

  Otherwise the repair would look good at first but eventually it would fall out. And she meant this to be a permanent fix. Let dry, the instructions on the primer tin said.

  Nuts to that, she thought, and went upstairs past the clock in the hall, its white face sneering, for the hair dryer. Back in the parlor she set the dryer's handle into a coffee can half full of pebbles so it wouldn't fall over, then set the can on the top step of the stepladder. Twelve thirty, twelve thirty-five…

  With the dryer aimed at the repair, she set the heating element to Cool and the power to Low and turned the thing on.

  The elegant fireplace trim was original to the house, like the medallions in the door trim and the carved wooden baseboards. As she left the dryer to do its work, she noted distantly that her heart's frantic thudding had eased, even though actually doing the tasks one by one instead of running screaming from them had taken all the restraint she possessed.

  Twelve forty-five. One o'clock. Under the rush of lukewarm forced air, the epoxy primer dried swiftly while she spent the interval selecting her clothes—warmer sweater, thick corduroy dungarees, heavy socks, and her good pair of sturdy hiking boots—and putting them on.

  At last, she went to the cellar and unlocked the lockbox where she kept the .22 and the Bisley Through the floorboards held up by massive two-hundred-year-old beams, hand-cut with the ancient bark shreds still hanging from them
and the adze marks in them, she heard the hair dryer whirring steadily. In another half hour, she could go on to the next step. Meanwhile, though…

  The smell of gun oil drifted sweetly from the opened lockbox as she removed the .22, checked to see that it was loaded and in working order, then zipped it into the pocket of the new, warmer sweater and closed the box again. Putting it away behind the one loose brick remaining in the fireplace foundation—she'd rebuilt the rest—she climbed the old, unpainted wooden stairs again and returned to the parlor.

  One-thirty. The gouge in the mantel was a deep one, she saw when she examined it again; worse than she'd believed at first. But the hair dryer had dried the primer completely, the old wood paling even in its deepest recesses from dark gold to champagne. Behind her the hall clock tick-tocked the desperate moments away as, opening the second tin, stirring and scooping out some of the thick, gray glop inside and pushing it into the gouge's depths, she reminded herself again that even quite serious harm to an old house—and to other things, she told herself very firmly—could be repaired.

  That is, if you were willing to do what it took. The epoxy tin's instructions said to pack the stuff in there as if it were putty, so she did. Two o'clock, and at last two-thirty … At a few minutes past three in the morning, Jake tapped the top back onto the tin, washed her hands very thoroughly to get the epoxy stink off them, and left the house.

  Her car sat in the driveway; one of the fellows who'd helped get her hauled out of the gravel pit had driven it here. Striding toward it, she gripped her car keys tightly enough to hurt; if this wasn't the dumbest thing she'd ever done in her life, it was close. But she didn't see much choice. If she wanted Lee and Helen back, she would have to go out there to meet with Campbell as he demanded, humor him and at least try to find out what it was he wanted so badly from her.

  Around her, Eastport was silent, the moon a small iced disk and the sky around it deep, velvety black, prickling with stars. Crossing the dark driveway she shivered despite the thick clothing she'd pulled on; still August, not even Labor Day yet, but on a clear night like this it was already cold as a twitch's wit, as Sam would've said.

  If she went back for a jacket, though, she was so thoroughly nervous about all this that she might not be able to force herself out here again, she realized bleakly. Because for the very first time, though she'd gotten her tools out and applied herself fully to the task of keeping her hands full, her mind clear, and her nerves at least minimally unjangled…

  It hadn't worked. None of it had; she felt absolutely scared witless and as if she might chicken out at the slightest excuse. So she didn't go back, and she'd managed to get herself nearly to the car when a voice came out of the darkness at her.

  "Going somewhere?" Not Ozzie Campbell's voice, and not the one that had been on the phone when the screaming happened. The screaming, dear God, the—

  Someone else. "Get in the car. Turn the dome light off and start it." As she did so a man's shape slipped into the backseat and pulled the door shut. "Take it easy."

  She glanced over her shoulder, felt relief wash over her. It was Jody Pierce, Helen Nevelson's stepfather; she recognized him at once from the portrait she'd seen in the family's living room.

  He slid below window level as she backed angrily out of the driveway. "What are you doing here? I could've shot you if—"

  A dry laugh came from the backseat. "Yeah, I worried about that. But Wade says you're pretty decent with a gun, so I figured you probably wouldn't."

  The .22 was still zipped into her sweater pocket. "Great. I'm flattered."

  The Bisley .45 was a lot more powerful; the difference was between sitting a man down, and leaving him there for good. She'd decided against it only because the bigger gun couldn't be hidden as easily on her person, and carrying a purse would've been flat-out stupid. "You didn't answer my question," he said.

  No following car was in the rearview mirror, idling on a side street, or lurking by a curb. She crossed Washington Street, the pavement still gleaming from the earlier rain, passed the Mobil station and the Baptist church with its vast flat parking lot shimmering wetly under the backlit marquee: All Welcome!

  "I'm going to a meeting," she said tightly. "You could say it's a command performance. But you're not invited." She thought a moment. "How'd you know I'd be going anywhere?"

  Because he had known; it was why he'd been out there waiting for her. "Did you know a person can eavesdrop on a cordless phone with only a baby monitor?" he asked, seemingly in reply.

  At which she felt like smacking the heel of her hand to her forehead: Fool. Get a digital phone, Sam always said, not that old analog cordless; anyone who wants to can hear your business.

  But she never had; why bother? After all, this was Eastport, where everyone already knew your business. "So you just—?"

  "Easy as pie," he confirmed from the backseat. "I sat," he added confidingly, "in your backyard."

  Of course; out there where it was dark. But…"How did you know you wanted to listen to me at all, though?"

  She glanced into the rearview again; still no one following. On every telephone pole flapped a white 8½-by-11-inch flyer with two photographs on it. MISSING, shouted the top of the flyer.

  "I didn't," he said. "But I was scanning cop radio traffic and your name was getting a lot of attention, for somebody who wasn't directly involved. That said that maybe you were."

  He paused. "And anyway, by then I didn't know what else to do," he admitted. Join the club, she thought as he went on.

  "I know all Helen's passwords, for MySpace and Facebook and so on, on her computer. And there's no plot to run away from home and be a movie star, no chat-room boyfriend who's pretending to be a nineteen-year-old and is really a forty-two-year-old ex-con."

  He sounded frustrated. She kept driving, letting him talk. "So after I made sure of all that, I figured I'd have a look at you. A listen, rather," he amended.

  Uphill past the recycling center and the dialysis clinic: no one else on the dark road, more flyers everywhere. "Which," he went on, "is what I think this other guy must be doing, too, the one you're worried about."

  Past the clinic came the short, flat causeway to Carlow Island, its thick hemlock shapes marching down to the water; they crossed in a few moments.

  "You don't have to be nearby," he said before she could voice her next objection: that if Campbell were outside her house with an eavesdropping device, someone would notice.

  Pierce himself had been monitoring from the backyard, so Campbell couldn't have been there. "You get something better than a baby monitor, you can target a phone from anywhere," Pierce continued. "Just key in the phone number. Stuff's expensive, and illegal, too, but your pal's not worried about that, probably."

  Yeah. Probably not. Or you, either, she thought at Pierce. "So if you didn't think anyone was watching, why the stealth act just now? Making me turn out the car's dome light and so on?"

  "No sense taking unnecessary chances." Like you're doing, he didn't add. But she heard it in his voice.

  Or maybe it was in her own head. "Yeah, well, if you were listening to me, then you know that I'm supposed to go alone."

  "Uh-huh. To the solar house, that big million-dollar baby out on the Jiminy Point road."

  So he had heard. For a while, every tradesman in the county had known about the Jiminy Point house; it had been a gold mine for carpenters, plumbers, drywallers, and electricians. But when it was finished, everybody forgot about it, including the owners who now came around only once or twice a summer.

  Sitting there empty at the end of a dirt road, as a hideout it was just about perfect. "How come you didn't call the cops?" Pierce asked.

  She slowed for the posted thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone through the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point. Now was no time to get snared in a speed trap.

  "About the call? Why didn't you?" she turned the question around. "Call Bob Arnold, tell him all about—"

  (the screaming
, please stop the… .)

  Sweat made the steering wheel feel greasy under her hands; she bit her lip and tasted blood. As they crested the next hill, the black-and-white Tribal Police squad car sat motionless under the lights in front of the Pleasant Point municipal building.

  "I would've, but if I stick around to explain, Bob Arnold's got to pull me in and book me for assault," Pierce answered. The squad car didn't move as they passed. "He's got no other option, what with that kid still in the hospital."

  Pierce laughed humorlessly. "Timmy Barnard. Jeeze, what a complete waste of space on earth. He's lucky traction's all I put him in. Pine box would've been my first choice."

  At Route 1 she turned left and crossed the bridge past the Perry Farmer's Union building. "And if I didn't stick around to explain things to Bob," he went on, "you'd just deny it all, say you hadn't had any call from anyone, then go ahead on your own. To meet whoever it is out here."

  "You've got that much right." After what she'd been through, it wouldn't be hard convincing Bob that the only place she meant to go anymore tonight was upstairs to bed.

  The rank, muddy smell of the river seeped in through the closed car window. A hopeful thought hit her; after all, he'd set up the security camera. "Did you record it? The call?"

  "No. Only reason I had the baby monitor was because it was in my truck; I'd fixed it and had it out there already, to bring back to the customer. All the rest of my stuff is in the house, and I didn't want to risk that."

  The blacktop curved uphill between thick stands of spruce and hackmatack crowded up close to the edge of the road. "As it was, I nearly got spotted by one of the state boys while I was getting the tape from the camera. Had to hotfoot it."