A Face at the Window

by Sarah Graves

  Anthony considered entering their place and teaching them a few things about how carelessness could lead to disaster; the key ring had a house key on it, for creep's sake. But screw them; let them learn it from someone else.

  Someone worse. A weedy-looking little dweeb with a wispy tan goatee, still wearing his striped pajamas, ran out onto the front porch of the house as Anthony drove away. Little pot belly, this guy had, pooching out from underneath his flapping pa-jama top.

  "Hey," the guy yelled, raising his fist. "Come back here!"

  Ooh, Anthony thought, grinning widely through his pain with the pleasure of gunning the van down the early morning street. Sticking his hand out, he flipped the little dweeb the bird, at which the dweeb hopped up and down in impotent outrage.

  Ooh, come back here, Anthony thought, laughing aloud. Yeah, sure I will. Go on back in and finish your Cheerios, or whatever it is dweebs eat. In the rearview, the dweeb's bare foot came down on a plastic toy, and that made him even madder.

  The last time Anthony looked, the dweeb was still out there waving and shouting.

  Jake was no natural athlete. Sam had inherited his physical agility from his father, she felt quite certain. Still, once she got to her feet again, walking on the Knife Edge wasn't quite as bad as she'd feared. Just don't look down, Sam always told her. One foot in front of the other.

  But halfway out another wave of vertigo hit her; she dropped to one knee and clung there, breathing shallowly Don't look to the left or right, Sam would've instructed. Desperately, she tried listening to him while the world turned and tilted and the narrow stone bridge seemed to be trying to buck her off.

  "I know," Campbell said. "You're very angry with me, aren't you? But look at it from my side for a minute."

  She crept forward a few more inches. "You despise me," he went on, "and yet I need you very badly. I need you to retract your victim's impact statement, Jacobia. You must do it for me."

  Oh, really? she. retorted silently. Then how come you're trying so hard to kill me?

  But he wasn't, she realized. For some reason she hadn't yet quite figured out, being out here like this was easy for him, and he had no imagination for other people, their feelings and fears.

  Only for his own. She dared another quick glance at him; at least Lee still had the life jacket. If she fell, there was the barest chance she might hit water, might miss those rocks jutting up like teeth.

  But they'd be hard to avoid. Another gull swooped in boldly, curious to see whether any of the unusual activity around here might promise food, nearly brushing Campbell's head with its muscular wing as it went by. At the unexpected movement his feet shifted uncertainly, all the brash confidence vanishing from his face for an instant.

  "No!" she gasped, scrambling forward as more stone fell away beneath her, bits of it bouncing and tumbling.

  "Calm down," Campbell advised, regaining his equilibrium. "That's the trouble with you, you get so upset over everything. Just come on out, it's as wide as a sidewalk, for Christ's sake."

  I'll give you something to be upset over, she thought. And then: If I could get out there, maybe I could give him something to worry about, for a change. But before she could complete this thought, two things happened:

  Lee began waking up. Or regaining consciousness. Which ever: the cool breeze, her discomfort at being clamped under Campbell's arm, or just her own childish recuperative powers-kids spiked fevers all the time; they didn't necessarily mean serious illness—one or all of these things together made Lee begin whining and squirming, kicking and waving her arms angrily.

  Campbell frowned, shifting his stance to keep his grip and his balance and barely succeeding, just as another big chunk of granite fell, exploding in a burst of shards on the rocks below.

  Where it had been, a jagged crack opened up, widened alarmingly.

  The Knife Edge was collapsing.

  ".…Jesus," Bob Arnold exhaled wonderingly

  Helen Nevelson opened her eyes. The Eastport police chief's pink, plump face hovered over her, delight and concern mingling in it. His blue eyes widened vexedly "Christ, she's bleeding."

  His face receded, a balloon bobbing away. No, she thought. No, come back, I have to tell you…

  "—call Town Hall, tell ‘em get the good ambulance running and get it over to my office, pronto," she heard him say. "We got a hospital run to make. And while you're at it, call the feds and the county guys, ask them to get over to me ay-sap. And you know what? Get somebody to Wallace Warfield's place, too; he called a minute ago to say his van got stolen."

  There was a silence while he listened. Then: "Yeah, I know. Wonder he can even tell it's gone. Run down there anyway, though, or…yeah. Yeah, he is kind of a little—"

  Pissant, Helen thought clearly. She baby-sat the Warfields’ kids, and Bob was going to say that Wally Warfield was a—

  "Okay. Thanks," Bob finished. Then he returned. "Hey, Helen. Hey, girl, you know how hard we've all been lookin’ for you? Your ma's gonna be tickled pink."

  A shadow crossed his face; there was something Bob wasn't saying. But it couldn't be as important as…

  She tried struggling up but somehow her head wouldn't rise from the headrest, in the front seat of the purple car that she'd gotten into somehow, hours or days earlier.

  But before that, what had happened? She wasn't sure; had she been hit by a car? Or had someone attacked her?

  Maybe, she realized dizzily. Whatever it was, it felt like a ton of bricks had been dropped on her from a great height. Then the woman who'd saved her—

  …the knife, Helen thought, what happened to the…

  —began speaking.

  "I wanted to take her to the clinic," the woman said, "and I tried, but she was so absolutely insistent about talking to you first, and she looks awful but her vital signs seem okay, so—"

  Helen's eyes rolled, focused again. Don't tell them that I pulled a knife on you, she begged silently Please don't. If the woman said that, they'd think Helen was the one who'd…

  But no one was talking about a knife. An ambulance screamed up to where the purple car woman had taken Helen, outside what Jody always called the cop shop…

  Jody Suddenly she remembered him and felt frightened for him, though she didn't know why. Something was happening; he was here but he wasn't here…

  "Helen? Come on, now, stay awake for me a minute. Your mom will be here shortly Helen, do you remember what happened?"

  Again Bob turned away. "Hey, get that FBI crew on the horn, will you? Tell ‘em we got one of ‘em back. Yeah, the big one."

  He leaned over her. "Helen, where's Lee? Was she with you?"

  She could smell the Juicy Fruit on his breath. "Helen, do you know where Lee is? Do you know what happened to her?"

  Lee…they'd taken her. But how long ago, and where? Pain came slam-banging back into her head as Helen struggled to stay awake, to remember-Suddenly, the woman held out the switchblade. Helen's heart sank. "She pulled this, in the car," the woman said reluctantly. "I'm sure she wouldn't have hurt me, but…"

  Bob looked at Helen, at the knife, and then at Helen once more. She could practically see him thinking with his cop mind: who Helen was, who her friends were, where they went and what they did there. The parties they all went to at night in summer, for instance, at the gravel pit or…out on the cliffs.

  "Knife. The Knife Edge," he said.

  "You know, Jacobia, when I look back on it I have to admit that almost all of it was really about your father."

  "Get to the point." Astonishing, she thought, that she could summon the breath to speak, now when the terror she felt made all other fears fade. The stone bridge out over the rocks and water had cracked all the way through, and any instant now it could…

  Oh, screw it. Just… She got up and took a step.

  Act as if, Sam's AA pals told him. Fake it till you make it. Pretend you've beat the bottle, that you don't want a drink. That you're fine. That you're not, as he would've sugge
sted, flat-out shared skitless.

  Another step, and then another. Campbell stood only six feet away, now, Lee still trapped under his left arm. She'd stopped struggling, and from the look on her face she was thinking about something, turning the pros and cons of it over in her head.

  "He was a lot smarter than me, your dad," Campbell went on. "Better looking, too. Better all the way around. He had a home, a wife and a kid."

  He shook his head ruefully. "Just…better." Behind him the water spread brilliant blue, with the long strip of green that was the island of Campobello dividing it from the sky.

  "Not that he ever made me feel that way deliberately. He was too good for that, too."

  Sour twist on the word good. A sailboat motored tranquilly out past the Cherry Island Light. Fixing her gaze on the horizon made Jake feel better, but then a breeze riffled her hair, set her heart hammering again inside the fragile cage of her ribs.

  "Did you know they never spent a penny on themselves?" he asked. "Your mom and dad? On you, the things you needed, sure."

  He laughed for some reason only he knew, sparking a long-ago vivid memory of his voice from a nearby room where her parents sat happily with him, eating a meal and drinking wine, while she lay warm in her bed drowsily listening to grown-up laughter. A laugh from another life. "Otherwise they gave fifty here, a hundred there," he recalled. "Anonymous, gave it to people in the neighborhood who they knew needed it."

  Because everyone there had known everything about everyone, just like here. She put her foot forward again. "What's that got to do with me?"

  Back then, he'd been a young man with thick hair, a wolfish grin that both delighted and terrified her, bright white teeth and gleaming eyes…Even to the child she had been, Ozzie Campbell had been a handsome man. But now he looked like what he was, some guy from New Jersey who used to work construction and owned a bar and was in trouble with the law. If she'd passed him on the street today, she wouldn't have recognized him.

  "I just wanted you to know," he said. "Why I loved her. Both of them, really. He was my friend, and she—"

  "Fine, I get that. Cut to the chase, though, will you? Tell me exactly what you need me to change in that statement. I'll do it, no problem. Just give me the kid."

  He blinked in surprise. "But… I thought you knew. The DA's guy didn't tell you? That Sandy guy, he works for—"

  "Told me what? They haven't said anything." If, she added impatiently to herself, there was anything to tell. Campbell was desperate about something, or he wouldn't have done all this. But guys who walked into shopping malls and began firing at random were desperate, too; just not about anything coherent.

  He spoke again. "There's new forensic evidence."

  She stopped dead. "What?" Sandy O’Neill had mentioned it, that all the evidence from the original crime scene still existed and was being examined again, in case it might turn up something new. And his message last night…

  Call me. There've been developments. A change in plans.

  Campbell's ravaged face took on a dreamy expression. "The dress she wore, remember that flowered, silky one she had on? I didn't. But you described it perfectly in your victim's impact statement. And that black velvet ribbon in her hair. The soft shoes she always wore, like ballet slippers…"

  He met her gaze. "They found them; even back then they were good enough to find things like that. Traces of them, what was left after the fire."

  He hitched Lee tighter up under his arm. "They're in the new report. It's all there. Everything but…"

  She understood. "The earring," she finished for him. The one he was wearing now, the one he'd always said Jake's mom had given to him, days before she died…

  But on that night Jake had seen both of them. "I described it, didn't I? Seeing the two earrings, not just one—"

  Dangling before her as she lay under the quilt, her mother leaning over to murmur loving words, kiss her good night. The ruby earrings, flashing by the light of the scented candles her mother had enjoyed, and later by the larger fire's savage brilliance…"That must've been how the fire got started," she said. "The candles must've overturned." In the struggle, she didn't add; it would've been pointless.

  But it was so. "Maybe," he said, even now admitting nothing. "But here's the thing," he went on, his voice suddenly brisk with purpose. "The new forensics tests confirm your whole description of her that night. Clothes, shoes, hair ribbon—all accurate in every detail. So…"

  At his words, what Sam would've called a knowledge-bomb went off in her head. "So because I'm proven right about the rest," she said slowly, "a jury will believe me about the earrings, too?"

  She couldn't keep the triumph out of her voice. "They will, won't they? That she wore both of them that night so she couldn't have given one of them to you, days earlier. Before…"

  Her whole body trembled as her understanding of what this meant went on expanding. "They'll know you lied. She didn't give it to you, not for love or any other reason. She never would've. And there's no other motive for you to have lied, is there?"

  Her throat closed convulsively. "They'll know you must have gotten it while you were…"

  While you were strangling her. And with that, she realized, she wasn't just a long-ago murder victim's survivor anymore, her story no longer a heartrending but ultimately irrelevant tale of childhood tragedy. Instead, she was what she'd yearned to be:

  The prosecution's slam-dunk. Campbell nodded, confirming it. "Sandy O’Neill's boss Larry Trotta is revising his trial strategy as we speak, I would imagine. With you as the star witness and him as the political scene's brand-new golden boy."

  That, she realized, was what Sandy's last message must have been about: He and Larry Trotta had already decided what to do. Now they were letting her in on their plan. Which Ozzie Campbell and his attorney would have figured out, also.…

  "But you couldn't just kill me," she said, still staring at him, "to shut me up. Because if anything happened to me, you'd be the obvious suspect. So first, you sent people to watch me."

  He'd saved her, she realized abruptly. She didn't remember, but that's how she'd wound up on the beach. Campbell must have gone out, hand over hand on that steel cable to the rocks near where she'd floundered, and dragged her ashore before she drowned. Because he needed her to live.…

  Lee looked up and smiled purposefully, as if she, too, had come to some realization. Jake stepped out to the midpoint of the promontory, and past it. The height, the wind…they still buffeted her, still scared her.

  Just not like before. Inside her head, everything had gone calm. "You wanted to know where I went, what I did. You wanted to learn what I cared for the most. Who," she finished, "I loved."

  His face said she'd gotten it almost right. Her Achilles’ heel, her weakest point, where he could best attack her. But—

  "That's why I felt followed and watched, not because I was being paranoid but because you really did have someone here."

  Though even now she couldn't have said who. "And then…"

  He shook his head. "Not someone. Me. Hanging around, playing the tourist. Oh, don't look so surprised," he added. "You barely recognize me now. And people here," he went on, "are friendly. So chatty," he pronounced scornfully. "If you approach them right."

  Not if you behaved like the thugs had in Wadsworth's, asking a lot of nosy questions right off the bat. But if your curiosity stayed low-key and you never got too pushy or intrusive…

  "Anyway," he said, "I found you and I wanted to make a deal. But if I'd asked, would you have met with me? Of course not," he answered before she could. "Why would you?"

  She faced him wordlessly. "That's why I fixed it so you'd have to agree to see me," he went on, "to hear what I had to say whether you liked it or not. Lured you, teased you. And now…"

  He smiled beatifically as the day brightened around him, all the water and sky filling steadily with the rich, golden light of a Maine island summer. "And now here you are."

  "They
'll never believe me," she objected. "If I just change my story for no good reason—"

  "You don't have to change it. Just say…you're not so sure anymore. About the clothes and so on, fine. But not the earring. Hey," he added, "it's not like eyewitnesses don't go sour on the prosecution all the time. Don't worry, you won't be the first."

  Small comfort. And slinging that kind of thing past Sandy O’Neill and Larry Trotta wouldn't be any cakewalk, either. Still, it could be done; better no witness than a poor one, the two of them would be thinking. If they couldn't use her, they couldn't. Whether they liked it or not.

  "But how do you know I won't cheat?"

  Because he must have thought of it, too, that his deal made no sense. Once she got Lee back, it didn't matter what she'd told him; there was no way for him to guarantee she'd keep her word to him. But he had an answer for that, also.

  "I already told you." He waved his free arm; she caught her breath as he teetered, caught his balance again. "It's why I had to get you way up here, do it all the way I did. So you'll know, so you'll believe…"

  He looked gloatingly down at Lee. "… that I'll do anything. And…that I can."

  His plan, conceived and executed in only a few weeks, had been from the start a shaky, Rube Goldberg-like contraption of tight scheduling and obsessive preparation, so detailed and full of opportunities for failure that only a madman would attempt it.

  But it had succeeded. He'd done it. She was here.

  "I'm not going to jail," he said flatly "After all I've been through…I'm just not, that's all, no matter what. So either you promise to change your statement or I'll drop this kid right now. Break your promise later, though," he added, "and…"

  He extended his arm, dangling Lee over the precipice. "I'll come back. She'll never be safe—I swear," he finished obscenely, "on your mother's grave."

  There was no grave. The fire, and the resulting explosion, had made sure of that. "You'd be in jail," she responded dully.