“We can do that,” Jessie said.
“Two rooms?”
She held up a finger. “Just one.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed with new suspicion. She looked from Jessie to Harmony and back again.
“Room with two beds,” she said, more an assertion than a question.
“That’ll be fine,” Harmony told her.
Jessie handed over a pair of folded twenties and she let them inside. The boardinghouse was as Victorian on the inside as it was on the outside. Grandmotherly, and an antique dresser passed for a check-in desk in the front parlor. The innkeeper picked a brass key from the drawer, shoved it into Jessie’s palm, and pointed up the hallway.
“Room two. End of the hall, door on the left. No noise after eight o’clock. You make noise, you’re out.”
“We’ll be quiet as innocent church mice,” Jessie said.
“Are we your only tenants?” Harmony asked.
The innkeeper shot her a razor-edged glare. “Why?”
“Just curious,” Harmony said. “We’re on a road trip, seeing the coast, and it doesn’t look like a lot of tourists come this way.”
“They don’t. Nothin’ to see. Y’oughta get yourself out to Rockport or Camden. Those are for tourists.”
“We’ll add them to the list,” Harmony said with a smile.
Back out on the street, they strolled along the sidewalk and Harmony held up her phone to snap pictures, playing tourist. Jessie leaned close.
“You should praise me for showing amazing restraint.”
“Thank you for not antagonizing the owner of the only hotel in town,” Harmony said.
“You’re welcome. Catch how she responded when you asked about other tenants?”
“If Cranston’s staying there, we’ll find out tonight when we do a room-to-room search.”
“After eight,” Jessie said.
“Quiet as church mice.”
“Innocent church mice.”
Jessie nodded up ahead, toward the biggest building in town: a weathered church of gray clapboard, its bell tower pointing a finger of judgment toward the stormy sky. Rotting shingles clung to its angled rooftop like scales on a dead fish.
“Then again,” Jessie said, “this is Cranston’s childhood stomping grounds. If his family had property here and it never sold, he could be holing up there.”
“Lots of these houses look empty,” Harmony said. She cast her gaze across dark, dusty windows, some cracked, a few boarded over.
As she studied the street, she noticed something else. A motif. It was carved above doorframes or painted with tiny dots of color. Elsewhere, she spotted it engraved into iron railings. It was a cluster of seven points, tight but uneven, with no particular pattern. Where it was painted, six points were marked in silver while the seventh was bronze.
“You noticed it too,” Jessie said. “Any idea?”
Harmony shook her head. “It’s a symbol, but nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
It even appeared in the stained-glass windows of the town church. A hand-carved sign above the closed front doors read Graykettle First Presbyterian. In one window, the seven points rode above the head of a crucified Christ, like a constellation of stars in the night sky. In the other, it nestled almost hidden at the bottom of a raging sea, created with scallops of blue glass in a dozen shades. A lone black ship sailed atop it, aiming toward a distant sun.
“Harmony,” Jessie said.
“I know.” She raised her phone to snap some more pictures. It gave her an excuse to linger on the sidewalk and make sure her eyes weren’t fooling her.
The artist had hidden tiny figures in the stained-glass sea. Mermaids frolicked between the blue scallops.
“Feel like going to church?” Jessie asked.
They tried the doors. Locked, and a discreet sign only listed hours for services on Sundays and Wednesdays. Along the back of the church, a flimsy padlock held an old pair of storm-cellar doors closed. Jessie shot a glance over her shoulder.
“I can get that open, easy.”
A dented pickup cruised by, slower than the speed limit. Harmony shook her head and snapped a random photo.
“Let’s keep walking. The locals are definitely noticing us, and I don’t think they’re friendly. We can come back after it gets dark.”
The village hall was the closest thing to a tourist attraction in town. Black and white photographs lined the wooden walls of the lobby, memorializing Graykettle in its prime. Fishermen with grizzled faces and chapped lips hoisted nets, showing off the bounty of the sea. Others lined up to punch a time clock in a cannery, under a Cranston and Sons marquee.
A map of the town drew Harmony’s eye. The old cannery was down on the shoreline, alongside the town’s docks and a string of boathouses. The map was dated from 1972, no telling if any of it was still right. Her gaze shifted to the waters off the coast. There were islets out there, not far from shore, with a small maze of waterways between them.
Something about the islets gnawed at her. Then she saw it.
“Jessie,” she whispered, tapping the map with her finger. “That symbol we’re seeing all over town. The seven points.”
Jessie squinted. There were more than seven dots on the map, if you counted the tinier ones flecking the pale ink sea.
“Seven are big enough to stand out from the rest, but the pattern’s all wrong.”
Harmony held up the flat of her hand, then turned it at a ninety-degree angle.
“Not if you’re standing on the shoreline, facing east. From that perspective, if you draw it with east facing ‘up,’ it’s almost a perfect match.”
Jessie tilted her head as she looked at the map. Across the room, a stubborn door rattled open. A bald man with a wrinkled scalp poked his head out. He had flat eyes and a broad, thick-lipped mouth that curled in a welcoming smile. Second local we’ve met, Harmony thought, and the second one that looks like a blood relative of Judah Cranston.
“New faces,” he said. “Don’t get too many of those around here, not these days.”
“We’re just passing through,” Jessie said. “We’re on a road trip, seeing the coast. Are you the mayor?”
He gave her a folksy chuckle. “Oh, no, ma’am, just your humble public works director. Mayor’s on vacation in Tulsa. Must be nice, right? So…what brings you out this way? Graykettle’s a little off the beaten path.”
“That’s where you find the most interesting places.” Harmony gestured to the photographs. “I see the name Cranston and Sons in a lot of these photos. Are they still in business?”
“No, ma’am, sad to say. Was a time when Cranston was this town. Every man in Graykettle owed their living to that family, one way or another.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“Well, as the saying goes, the sea’s like a lover. She can be generous, giving…but if you demand too much and push her too far, she’ll take it all away.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Commercial fishing exploded a ways up the coast. Big engines and big nets, scooping up everything that swam. Now…well, a few fishermen still get by here, but it used to be a good life, not just gettin’ by.”
“What happened to the Cranston family?”
She caught the glint of a warning in his eyes. Just the tiniest flicker, telling her to step lightly.
“When business dried up and blew away, family blew away with it.” He tapped his chin, thinking. “Last I heard, there weren’t many of ’em left. Guess one of them did real good for himself, got himself a college education and started a new business in Miami or some such. Can’t say I’d be happy down there, too hot for my tastes—”
The front door blew open and a stringy-haired woman in a calico dress stormed in, hands curled at her sides. “Goddamn it, Jeb, we got a boat out on the water, outsiders from Upton pokin’ around again—”
She froze in mid-sentence, staring at Harmony and Jessie with her big, flat eyes.
“Sally,” the public works director
said, his voice taut. “We got company. Tourists, on a road trip.”
Her attitude shifted in a heartbeat. She put on a smile and smoothed the front of her dress.
“Well, that’s…that’s nice. We don’t get a lot of visitors these days. I’m Sally Ann.”
“Sally Ann runs the only diner in town,” he said. “Only one we need. Genuine stick-to-your-ribs home cooking.”
She clasped her hands in front of her, squeezing them tight. “You two should swing by later on, treat yourself to some of our world-famous peach cobbler.”
“We’ll do that,” Jessie said.
“Sally was…concerned,” he added, “because sometimes boats from out of town get into trouble in our patch of water. There’s a tangle of islets off the coast; bootleggers used them during Prohibition, because they’re a lot trickier than they look. Lots of jagged rocks just under the surface, entire stretches that are more shallow than they look, it’s easy to run into a mess out there. So we try to keep an eye out, and make sure to warn off sailors who don’t know any better.”
“Ayuh,” Sally said. “That’s right.”
“Ladies, it’s been a pleasure, and please feel free to stop in again anytime. Sally Ann? I’d appreciate a brief word in my office.”
30.
Jessie took the lead as they circled the back of the village hall. They crouched under windows, shoes crunching on rocky soil and weeds, until they reached the right one. Sally Ann’s shout was muffled by the glass.
“—we don’t exactly practice for this shit, Jeb!”
“And that’s why I’ve been sayin’ for years we got to modernize how we do things around here,” he shouted back. “We got a perfectly good alarm system. We should be using it every time an outsider shows up, not just for full-on emergencies.”
Harmony pressed her back to the moldering clapboard wall. Jessie did the same on the other side of the window. She couldn’t hear Sally Ann’s reply, too soft to catch on the far side of Jeb’s desk.
“You let me worry about the city girls,” he told her. “I’m more concerned about boats poking around where they got no business pokin’. You go rally the boys, get out there right quick, and learn their intentions. We can’t have any hiccups, not with the doc in town.”
* * *
The rocky shoreline curved like a question mark. From the water’s edge, salty spray flecking her polished shoes, Harmony could see the faint outlines of the islets in a gray mist. They were lumpen tumors rising up from the depths.
“Think he’s holing up out there?” Jessie asked. They moved side by side, scrambling along the wet rocks as the village faded at their backs.
“Cranston? Either it’s him or something he doesn’t want us to see. I want to know how many of the locals are in on this. They’re hiding him.”
“Honestly?” Jessie turned, looking over her shoulder. “From the looks of these people, I think they’re all related. Real question is, do they know why he’s hiding? Could be they think he’s just a hometown boy in a jam, and they don’t know what he’s really up to.”
They found what they were looking for at the end of the question mark. A lighthouse stood at the tip, its flame extinguished in the murky sunlight. Peeling eggshell paint clung to sagging bricks, the giant standing planted in a bed of scraggly weeds. An old and tired sentry, starting to lean. Jessie circled around back while Harmony rapped her knuckles on the rough wooden door.
No answer. Jessie popped back into sight and waved her over. She’d found what Harmony hoped would be there: a short, sagging dock and the keeper’s boat. It was a drab olive ten-footer built for two, with a small outboard motor and just enough space for the daily catch and a six-pack of beer. A cheap fiberglass fishing pole and a pair of binoculars sat beside the swiveling seats.
Harmony stepped into the boat, the flimsy shell rocking uneasily under her feet, and took the back seat by the motor as Jessie untied it from the dock.
“You know how to drive this thing?” Jessie asked.
“Grew up in Michigan,” Harmony said. “I can pilot a motorboat. If this engine actually works and if it’s fueled up. Lots of ‘ifs’ in play here.”
Jessie clambered in and Harmony took hold of the outboard’s handle, lowering the propeller into the water behind the boat. She checked the gearshift, set the motor to neutral, a mechanical routine drummed into her from childhood summers on the shore. Then she stopped.
“Damn it. Needs a key.”
Jessie looked back at her. “Before you ask, I have no idea how to hotwire something like this.”
“Might not have to.” Harmony slid off her seat, crouching low, patting along the floor of the boat. “Backwater town, minimal crime, everybody knows everybody…I’m hoping this is the kind of place where people leave their spare keys in the glove compartment.”
Her hand slid under her seat, peeled away a yellowed strip of index tape, and produced a tiny, tarnished key.
“Or under their seats.”
Jessie rolled her eyes as Harmony slotted the key into the ignition.
“I forgot I was partnered up with a refugee from Mayberry.”
Harmony pressed the ignition button. The outboard motor revved to life and the boat crawled along the water, the propeller pushing them away from shore.
“Don’t knock it till you try it,” Harmony said.
“Oh, I’ve tried it. I prefer civilization. Places with mass transit, fourteen-dollar cocktails, and a healthy sense of mutual distrust.”
A curling fog rolled along the water, and the seamy, clammy mist clung to Harmony’s skin as she steered them toward the islets. She kept her eyes open, ears wider as they rode in slow silence. The steady low thrum of the engine was the only sound, but the open sea magnified it, the reverberations filling the empty gulf all around them.
The islets were close now. Pale lichen, sickly-yellow and white, clung to hills of jagged rock. No gulls squalled in the mists, no crabs scuttled along the shore. This place was dead. A graveyard without graves, or at least without stones to remember the fallen.
“Do you think—”
Jessie held up a hand, sharp, silencing her. She leaned forward in her seat, her senses picking up something Harmony’s couldn’t. She pointed to the islet just ahead.
“Kill the engine.”
The purr of the motor faded away. In its absence, Harmony could hear what Jessie heard: another motor, louder, more powerful, somewhere ahead in the fog.
The nose of their boat bumped up against the islet’s shore. Their shoes splashed in icy water as they jumped out, hauling the boat up a few feet onto the rocks so it wouldn’t wash away with the tide. Harmony snatched the lighthouse keeper’s binoculars from the boat before following Jessie inland, crawling up the rocky hill to get a better vantage point.
They got down on their bellies. Sharp wet spearheads of stone dug into Harmony’s skin. Jessie pointed off to the northeast, her cold blue eyes softly glowing, and Harmony aimed her binoculars to follow her fingertip.
A boat was anchored out on the water, and a pair of men in bright orange vests were passing the afternoon with fishing and beer. From the open, empty cooler and the number of Pabst cans crumpled around their feet, the only thing they’d caught was a buzz. Cursive script over the outboard motor gave the boat a name, the Aquaholic. Another boat was closing in from behind. It was a long, flat fishing boat with a raised perch and a booth for the pilot. Four men stood out on the deck, and they wore the squat bodies, flat eyes, and frog-like mouths that marked them as Judah Cranston’s kin.
Harmony couldn’t hear anything but the faint motor of the engine, but she saw one of the fishermen wave and call out as the second boat approached. One of the men on deck did the same, offering a broad smile as they pulled up alongside the smaller craft.
They talked, back and forth, and Cranston’s man gestured to the empty beer cooler. The fisherman gave a what-can-you-do shrug. Cranston’s man smiled more broadly and pointed to a pair of big red plasti
c coolers on the deck behind him. He held out his hand, grabbing the man’s wrist and hauling him up and on board. His buddy stayed behind and kept fishing, his line drifting in the water. Another townie opened up one of the coolers as they escorted their new friend across the bigger boat’s deck.
He reached inside and took out a machete.
The smile never left his face as he punched it through the fisherman’s belly and out the other side, torn intestine snaking through the gash in his back. He ripped the blade loose and kicked the twitching body to the deck.
His buddy turned, startled by the sound, and saw what was happening. The fishing pole fell from his hands. It hit the lip of the boat, bounced, and plunged into the foam. He fell to his hands and knees and scrambled on all fours toward the outboard motor, desperate to escape. One of the other townies leaped into the boat, a fillet knife in his clenched fist, and landed on his back with both feet. He yanked the fisherman’s head back and sawed wildly at his throat, chewing through meat and cartilage, his hands and the motor drenched in arterial spray, until the blade rasped against bone.
“Fuck,” Jessie breathed.
“Well, we were wondering if the locals were active conspirators,” Harmony said. “There’s our answer.”
The killers dragged the second corpse up onto the bigger boat’s deck, laying the dead bodies out side by side, and talked back and forth for a minute. The killer with the fillet knife started up the outboard engine and drove off alone, taking the dead men’s boat back toward shore.
The other boat kept its nose pointed seaward, and it began to glide—slow, cautious, keeping the engines steady as it trawled through the treacherous shallows.
“Now where are you going?” Harmony murmured, keeping the binoculars trained and adjusting the focus.
Her answer, if she had reckoned the symbol seen all over the village correctly, was the special seventh islet. The one marked in a dot of bronze.
Now she saw that it wasn’t just an islet. It was a full-fledged island, a mountainous blot of dead and mossy stone, and its outer arms hooked like crab pincers to form a natural cove. Beyond the cove stood the open mouth of a cavern, jagged stalactites drooping down like teeth.
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 21
