A Face at the Window

by Sarah Graves

  Dizziness swept over her. It's too far. I can't do it. But Lee was out there in the cold, rainy dawn with the bad men, and only Helen knew where.

  And only Bob Arnold, she felt sure, would believe her about it. He's nuts, her stepfather had once said about Bob, who looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy much more than he resembled a law officer: plump, balding, and pink-faced, with so much heavy cop gear always dangling from his belt you'd think he'd get pulled down just from the weight of it.

  Clearly he was not meant to be a police officer at all, much less a chief. A high school teacher, maybe, or a vacuum cleaner salesman. Something mild-mannered. Not a guy with a gun, who was sworn to use it. But cop was what he'd wanted, so he'd done it.

  That's a good nuts, Jody had told her. Guy sets his eyes on the prize and goes for it, nine times outta ten he's a person you can trust. Like you, he'd added surprisingly, clapping her on the shoulder in what was for him an unusual display of affection.

  Hoping it was true, she turned south on the gravel shoulder by the side of the dark road, steadying herself against the near-overwhelming waves of dizziness that were coming more often, now.

  Oftener and worse. But she didn't have to walk the whole way at one time, did she? Or maybe not the whole way at all. A single step, and then maybe another one if she felt like it…

  I will begin, she decided unsteadily, with the first one and see how it goes. Because you never knew; maybe Jody was right.

  Maybe she was good nuts, too.

  •••

  Jake's heart lifted briefly at the sight of the tiny motor mounted on the skiff's wooden transom, on the beach at Juniper Point. Small as it was, the engine's sound might still manage to draw attention.

  But gloom overtook her again as she realized that even so, further investigation was unlikely. Plenty of people weren't even up yet, and the ones who were had their own morning routines to attend to. And it wasn't unheard of for someone to be out here at this hour; seals swimming here liked fish breakfasts, and that meant men out guarding their weirs, the strong, handmade standing nets they had propped up on constructions of long, thin sticks.

  Herring fishermen weren't supposed to shoot marauding seals, which were protected by law. But some did anyway, and everyone knew it. So even a gunshot wouldn't sound too out of place, if—As if summoned by her thought, a single shot sounded from up in front of the house. The pair of thugs holding her captive had muscled her down here, Anthony gripping her elbow as she descended the steep slope with Lee in her arms. But then Anthony had gone off somewhere…

  Jody, she thought sorrowfully as her other captor returned, skidding clumsily down the slope. He'd gone back and finished Jody Pierce off, hadn't he? A shooting star streaked greenish yellow across the paling blue sky, her angry tears blurring it to flashing sparks until she blinked them away.

  "So?" Marky demanded petulantly as Anthony handed him back his weapon. "You do it, or what?"

  Anthony shrugged. "What d'you want me to say?"

  Marky eyed Anthony narrowly. "I want you to tell me that you done what I told you, you freakin’ punk. You think we're freakin’ around here? Is that what you think?"

  "No, Marky," Anthony replied. His face impassive, he reached around to the back of his sweatshirt and scratched at something. "I don't think that. I did it just like you said."

  Killed Jody, he meant. Still carrying Lee, she let the unwelcome knowledge flood her as Anthony waited for Marky to tell him what else to do. Like me, she thought, trying to stop her teeth from chattering.

  The chilly dampness had taken all night to settle in; now the cold, wet stones on the beach felt like ice cubes through the bottoms of her boots. Stones too uneven and slippery to run on even if there were any good places to run to…

  Which there weren't; to the south at the end of the beach, a massive shoulder of granite rose from the waves, cutting off any escape. To the north, half a mile of round, slippery stones lay; if Jake tried running on them she'd be down in only a few steps.

  And the first thing Marky had done when he hit the beach was hurl her beloved .22 as far as he could out into the waves. No chance she'd get it back. So her only option right now was going along with what these two wanted, and watching for her chance. "Get the oars in," Marky told Anthony. "And pull that engine up; if you drag it across the stones like that it'll break the propeller."

  It wouldn't, actually. The cotter pin that held the prop on the shaft would break first—it was designed to do so—and the pins were replaceable. Probably there was a little cardboard box around here somewhere, containing the extras; in the low lean-to on the shore, or maybe up in the house.

  But she wasn't going to tell Marky so. "You ever run a boat before?" Anthony asked as he tossed the life jackets in. Two of them, Jacobia noticed. Not four.

  Marky shot a dark look at his partner. " ‘Course I have," he snarled insultedly. " ‘Course I've run one. What, you think I'm stupid?"

  Anthony knew better than to hesitate. "No. I just wondered."

  "Yeah, well, don't wonder anymore, okay? You're gettin’ on my freakin’ nerves. Push the boat in the water, for freak's sake, what d'you think, we're gonna start it while it's sittin’ there on the rocks?"

  Anthony bent to shove the wooden craft into the shallows. It would've been much better, Jake thought, to swing it around so the transom was in deeper water, eliminating the need for rowing before starting the engine. But Marky with all his experience at boating would figure that out.

  Sure he would, she thought sarcastically. The only boating he'd ever done was on a kiddy pond; she could tell by the way he eyed the skiff so tentatively while Anthony leaned on it, putting his back into the task of readying it for their departure.

  Tentative, she thought as she watched Marky, when he should have been rejecting the idea of setting off in it altogether, and if he'd known anything about the waters around here he would've been. Big waves, fast currents, granite ledges that poked up like teeth in the unexpected shallows…and that ridiculous outboard, a tiny two-and-a-half-horse Evinrude.

  The boat, she guessed, was intended for puttering around near shore, a toy for the summer people. "Get in," Marky snapped.

  On the horizon the sky began changing from deep, marine blue to light aquamarine. A rose-red line appeared behind the hills, thickening rapidly.

  "Hurry up," he said. "It's time, we don't wanna be late."

  Late for delivering me. Because that still had to be what this was about, for these two: Do a job, get the money. They'd taken Lee to use as bait and now they were finishing the task.

  She wished she understood why they had to do it by boat. She wished Marky weren't so jumpy and irritable, too, all hopped up on the excitement of doing this right, as if it were an achievement test.

  And she wished she knew where Helen was, and where Pierce's gun had gotten to. On his body, maybe, up there in the driveway? Should she be running now, trying to get to it before … ?

  But no. Because if it wasn't there, they might do something to Lee, to punish Jake for the attempt. Still carrying the child, she made her way carefully over the slick stones to the water's edge.

  "C'mon, c'mon," Marky urged, waving her on impatiently The boat had three flat seats: a sailing thwart in the bow, a rowing thwart at the center, and a rear seat back by the transom, right in front of the engine. Metal oarlocks with oars in them flanked the rowing thwart.

  Jake waded in, struggling to keep her footing as the icy current swirled around her legs. The water was so cold it made her hips ache, though at this time of day it was only knee-deep; later, the tide would bring it up nearly twenty feet. Reaching the gunwale she gripped it one-handed, settling Lee in her arm, and hesitated. "Where?"

  Marky let out a sigh of strained patience, as if just being around her were way more than a normal person could bear. "In the front, there, for creep's sake. The pointed end. What, you think maybe I'm gonna let you steer?"

  "Okay." The bow, he meant. She paused, rega
rding the little vessel and trying to remember how Sam had taught her to do this; Sam, who was so agile on the water he practically had gills. Here goes nothing…

  She placed Lee, wrapped in a blanket, on the rowing thwart. Once safely in Jake's arms the child had succumbed to exhaustion, and was now sound asleep, her face still flushed with fever. Next Jake swung a leg over the rail, then shifted her weight, leaning as far as she could stretch out over the flat wooden seat to keep the boat from rocking too much.

  Almost there… Pivoting on the seat with Lee once more in her arms she faced the bow, stood, did a one-eighty while taking care not to lean one way or the other, and sat.

  "Now you," Marky ordered Anthony. "Get on out there and keep the boat steady so I can get in."

  Anthony obeyed, holding the boat still as well as he could while Marky cursed and complained about the cold water, fumbled his way over the rail, and finally settled himself on the transom seat in the stern.

  "We're all wet, now," Anthony pointed out unhappily. Even his Devils jacket was soaking.

  "Yeah, well, suck it up," Marky retorted. "There's plenty dry clothes where we're going. You check the fuel on this?" he asked as Anthony swung a leg over and hopped in, moving gracefully and swiftly despite his injured arm.

  But at the question he froze. "No. You didn't tell me to…"

  Marky leaned forward. "Hey, Anthony? Have I gotta tell you to breathe? Are you really that dumb, or is it all a big act to make me think you're freakin’ harmless? Turn around, you punk."

  Anthony did. Marky reached out and grabbed a handful of the Devils jacket's neckline, bunching it up tight. "Listen to me," he grated softly. "I don't think you're harmless. I know things about you. So don't mess with me, tryin’ to make me think maybe you are. Got it?"

  Anthony nodded as well as he could while trying to breathe through Marky's grip. "Okay," he choked out.

  Marky let go, shoving Anthony as he did so. "Creep's sake, I gotta think of everything," he said, then found the fuel tank cap and opened it. There was enough daylight now for him to see in; satisfied, he screwed the cap back on while Jake thought about people who left tanks of gas sitting around for months on end.

  She wondered how much gunk was in the bottom of the tank by now, ready to get sucked up the fuel line and clog the filter, and whether or not the outboard would start. She wondered if it would stall later, the way Wade's crippled freighter had, making the vessel impossible to control.

  Marky peered doubtfully at the throttle arm, frowning at the words printed on it. But he wasn't about to admit his doubts, and anyway, puzzling out the procedure wasn't difficult; locating the Start position on the sleeve, he turned it and gave the rope a mighty pull.

  The engine spun briefly and clanked to a stop. A stream of profanity issued from Marky's mouth as he pulled again, with the same result, then looked up to see Anthony watching curiously.

  "What're you lookin’ at? You think this is easy?"

  "No, Marky," Anthony replied patiently. A breeze sprang up, riffling his hair. "Try it again, though. If it's anything like a lawn mower," he added helpfully, "sometimes they take a little loosening up."

  "Oh, loosening up," Marky repeated mockingly. "So you're the expert, now? Start rowing," he ordered, so Anthony did, seizing the wooden grips in a way that made Jake think he knew more about rowing than Marky did about engines. For one thing, Marky hadn't checked the spark plug or the fuel line, two main things Sam had emphasized to her about troubleshooting balky outboards.

  In the reddening dawn, the skiff pulled away from the rocky shore, bouncing in the chop that had come up with the breeze. A hundred feet out the bow eye dipped sharply and the boat's nose swung suddenly south, caught by the current, the limply trailing painter suddenly slapping itself against the skiff's side.

  "Hey!" Marky objected. He'd been caught off guard when the bow swung to starboard and nearly gone over the rail. "What the hell you doin’?"

  "Nothing," Anthony grunted. "It wants to go that way." He bent to the oars, trying to change course but unable to make the skiff obey.

  Jake watched him struggle, knowing he would have no luck. Even an oarsman with two good arms would have trouble out here; this was no sweet, meandering current, though it might resemble one from a distance. These tides rose and fell twenty-plus feet twice a day, the resulting cascade like Niagara Falls only without the vertical drop.

  Unless you counted the one that took you down to what Sam called Davy Jones's locker room…Jake gripped the seat with one hand and held Lee tight with the other. The current shot straight south toward the rocky Narrows at Lubec, eight miles distant.

  Which—especially if you were engineless—was bad enough. But between here and there swirled something worse, that made the Narrows look as trivial as your average golf-course water hazard: Old Sow, the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere.

  Twice a day when the tide ran hardest, billions of gallons of water surged through it, over channels, ledges, and granite spurs, into abysses so cold and black that the creatures in them resembled science-fiction animals, eyeless and strange. Com bined with the massive tides, that hidden geology dropped the bottom out of the water or sent it surging, swirling it into spouts and sinkholes that swallowed boats or tossed them heedlessly, broken and spinning. Ferries had been lost there, and schooners, not to mention the occasional unwary pleasure boat.

  But these two guys wouldn't know anything about the hazards. Why should they? And that, she thought as the boat's bow jerked stubbornly from Anthony's control again, was very likely her only chance.

  Because Marky being moody was the least of it. Worse, he was hard. Hard as hinges, as Bella Diamond would say, and he didn't mean Jake to live much past her usefulness to him, she felt sure. For one thing, she'd seen his face, and no matter what Campbell had told Marky to do or not do, money and witnesses were the two things a fellow like Marky never left on the table.

  Maybe Campbell thought he'd been employing a hired gun when he signed Marky up for this. But he'd gotten a loose cannon and sooner or later it would fire, and to hell with how well Campbell thought he was controlling the situation.

  Glancing down, she spotted the pair of life jackets lying behind her in the well of the bow. Cautiously, she snagged one of them, covering the action with Lee's blanket.

  Marky paid no attention, fiddling with the engine's choke lever. Not that a two-and-a-half-horse outboard would do them any good in the Old Sow, but he didn't know that, either, did he?

  To him, one engine was as useful as another. Besides, now that daylight had come up a little more, she realized that this one wasn't going to start at all, because what jumped out at her now was that there wasn't any spark plug in it.

  The socket where the plug belonged was empty, the short wire with the electrical contact on it dangling. But nobody left gas in a boat's tank and then took the spark plug out of the engine; if you were careless enough to leave one, you left the other.

  Ipso fatso, as Sam would've put it. Which meant…

  It meant that maybe Anthony had the spark plug. She hoisted the life jacket up under the blanket. The jacket was too big for Lee, but if Jake overlapped the front panels and ran the straps a couple of times through the armpits before tying them, she thought she could make it stay on.

  Just in case…Lee barely moved, lying there in Jake's lap, and the redness of her cheeks was now way past the rosy pink of health and into the flush of fever. Just a little longer, she promised the child silently as the rolling, pitching vessel they were trapped on wallowed farther out into the bay.

  But she still didn't know how or whether her promise would be kept. As they struck open water, the cold breeze blowing out of the north stiffened miserably, sending icy slaps of salt water off the oars’ blades each time Anthony lifted them. Blood soaked his sloppy bandage and a low grunt of pain escaped him with each stroke; she wondered how he kept on rowing at all, much less so steadily and determinedly.

  Fear, she s
upposed. Fear of Marky, and the kind of youthful energy that Sam still had; boundless, seemingly inexhaustible. As larger waves began smacking the boat's sides, bullying the tiny craft this way and that and hurling spray up in foamy gouts, she thought again about what Anthony could be planning.

  The way they were seated, Marky in the stern still furiously struggling with the outboard and Anthony a few feet from him on the rowing thwart, facing his partner, she didn't see how Anthony could do anything without Marky noticing. Meanwhile Anthony rowed on, helped by the rushing current.

  Even now the retreating shore lay only a few hundred yards distant. But in this forty-degree water, she reflected, it didn't matter if you could swim at all, much less how well.

  And anyway, Marky would shoot her if she tried it. Cradling Lee, she hoarded the scant warmth they shared. A spark plug, the dead, perhaps deliberately crippled engine…what was Anthony up to?

  "Cripes, Anthony," Marky's nasal voice cut into her thought, "what the freak are you doing? Get us out of this, can't you?"

  Anthony didn't answer, too busy handling the boat. He had wisely decided to let the water's massive power have its way for now; the current hurtling them along was going in the direction they wanted, apparently. If not, surely Marky would already be yammering about it in that buzz-saw voice of his; Jake made a mental note to slap the taste right out of that boy's mouth, as Bella Diamond would've put it, if she ever got the chance.

  But the satisfaction she took in this imaginary comeuppance was short-lived, as an unwelcome sensation invaded her stomach all of a sudden. Seasick…

  "Oh, hell," she muttered miserably, the wind snatching her voice away. The lurchingly unsettling movements of the boat had gotten to her. Queasily she leaned over the rail…but then Sam's voice sounded in her head: Look at the horizon. Find it, and keep your eyes fixed on it.

  Gasping, she straightened. Despite Anthony's efforts the boat had come around on its own in a swirling eddy: deep green, glassy-looking, and foam-topped. She cast her gaze past it.