A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 5)

by Scott William Carter

  Weak light from an overhead fixture illuminated what might have been intended as a family room, with a couch and loveseat, a wooden rocker, and a couple of throw rugs over a polished concrete floor, but it was more of a giant closet now: the green totes labeled with black magic marker were everywhere (spring clothes, taxes 2013, office supplies), as well as Amazon boxes, piles of newspapers, a ten-speed bicycle missing the front wheel, a free-standing clothes racked packed with coats, shirts, and pants … Wood-paneled walls. A musty smell. He saw a wood stove, carpeted stairs to the left, and two dark-stained wood doors to the right.

  "Hello?" he called.

  He tilted his ear, listening. No one answered. He leaned in farther.

  "Nora? Anyone?"

  Still nothing. He stepped into the house, glass crunching under his feet. His heart was really going now. There were movie posters between the two doors, one of James Dean, the other of Marilyn Monroe. Gage tried the door on the left. It was a half bath: a toilet and a wall-mounted sink. The other room was some kind of office, though it was even more crowded than the family room—filing boxes, newspapers, magazines, and other assorted papers piled all around a metal desk. A dusty mobile of the planets hung by the window, spinning slowly.

  Had someone just been in there? No, it was just from him opening the door.

  Gage navigated around the boxes and gritted his way up the stairs. He called out a few times, hoping maybe Nora was locked somewhere and would hear him, but nobody answered.

  The second floor—a country-style kitchen, a living room with wing-back chairs and a leather couch, polished hardwood floors—was nicer, but it still didn't seem quite normal. It was sterile, like a show house. The fruit bowl on the counter, the copies of Architectural Digest on the coffee table, the plush tan pillows arranged on the couch just so: it was all too perfect. It even smelled too nice, like lavender. An air freshener of some sort, most likely. Perhaps good old Howie Meyer needed to be ready in case a prospective client stopped by unexpectedly.

  The furnace kicked on, blowing hot air out of a vent just to Gage's left, and he jumped. Otherwise the house remained quiet. A humming refrigerator, a ticking clock, the slight crackle of an old window—these were the only sounds. He peered through the living room blinds. Alex's van was still there. The neighborhood was quiet. Maybe no one had called the police after all.

  Upstairs there were three bedrooms. Nobody was in any of them. They were all tastefully decorated, in blue and pink pastels, but only the master bedroom showed signs that someone lived in it. There were three cabinets packed with clothes. There was a wall-mounted television, speakers in each corner, plugs next to the high wire-frame bed for various devices. A bag of Doritos, a half-filled bottle of Coke, some M&M wrappers.

  One wall was dedicated to black-and-white photos in silver frames. Gage hoped he might see Nora in them, but they all pictured Howie and a woman who must have been Ronnie, his mother, at various ages. In one of them, she lay in a hospital bed hooked up to intravenous tubes, her hair grayish white, her limps shrunken and her face gaunt even as she smiled with happy, beaming eyes.

  Gage felt his hope slipping away. He'd searched the whole house and found no sign of Nora. Maybe this was all for nothing.

  Yet one of the photos showed his mother sitting in an aluminum fishing boat, ocean all around her, nobody else in the picture. She didn't look much younger than when she'd been in the hospital, but her hair was dark brown—dyed, most likely. The boat was so small that the photographer was probably the only person in it, and that photographer was most likely Howie.

  So he was familiar with boats.

  Lava rock. Boats. These things had to matter.

  Gage looked through all the drawers and cabinets, pawing through the clothes, searching for any clue. There was nothing. There was also nothing unusual in the medicine cabinet, under the bed, or in the walk-in closet—not unless you counted far more suits than any man should ever need in his life. There wasn't even a hidden stash of porn.

  He searched a little more on the main level, didn't find anything, and headed back downstairs. Dejected, he paused by the broken sliding glass door and called out to Nora again, really listening. But still there was no answer.

  So that was it. Howie wasn't involved. Time to go.

  Yet he couldn't quite make himself leave. He stood with one hand on the frame, the other still gripping the Beretta, and allowed the curtain to billow against his face. He told himself to think it through. If Gage had kidnapped someone, where would he put her? In a basement, most likely, hopefully with thick walls that would block any sounds. But he was in the basement.

  Or was he?

  This was a daylight basement. Could there be another basement underneath this one? Perhaps a hidden opening, something in the floor. Yet the floor was concrete, making such a passageway unlikely.

  But there were rugs.

  Giant, thick rugs.

  In a frenzied state, Gage pulled back the most easily accessible rug. Nothing but concrete. Undaunted, he turned to the next one, pushing aside the couch and some boxes to get to it. He thought for sure he'd find a door. But no. Concrete again.

  Wasn't there one more rug in the office? Sure enough, when he returned to the office, he saw the edge of it underneath the desk, a black and burgundy rug in alternating colors. He'd have to move the desk. Or did he? No, he could lift the back half of it. He didn't even have to move the chair; it was in the corner off the rug, three filing boxes stacked on it.

  Gage lifted the rug.

  And there, to both his relief and surprise, was a door.

  It was a gray metal panel set in a recessed area of the concrete, with two finger holes on either side—like a manhole cover, but square, perhaps four feet across and two feet deep.

  Gage stared at it in astonishment. Like the boy who'd found a hidden stash of candy, he perked up, listening, expecting at any moment to be found out, but the only sound was the low hum of the furnace. He stuck his finger in one of the holes. It went in deep, touching nothing. He leaned low, peering inside, but could see only darkness. Cool air blew through the hole—not fresh air, by any means, but it was not dank or moldy. Whatever was down there was ventilated.

  After placing the Beretta in his shoulder holster, Gage slipped a finger through each hole of the panel and lifted. The plate was two inches thick and heavy. He saw a ladder of wall-mounted iron bars leading down into the darkness, and a dangling chain hardly thicker than a spider's web. He placed the cover under the desk, then pulled the cord.

  Sure enough, a bulb that must have been just out of view flickered on and bathed the passageway with faint yellow light.

  Perhaps ten feet down, in a square passageway with slick concrete on all sides, was a metal door.

  "Hello?" Gage called.

  His voice rebounded in the tight space, but there was no answer. The walls were thick. If Nora was behind that door, it explained why he couldn't hear her upstairs and she couldn't hear him.

  Gage massaged his bad knee, preparing for the agony sure to come, then started climbing into the hole. He wasn't wrong. The pain was unbearable. The light bulb was on an exposed fixture wired through the support beams and the insulation. He was surprised to see the support beams. That meant sound should have more easily traveled from below, not exactly ideal for a hidden dungeon.

  Everything still had the gleam of newness about it—the concrete, the metal bars. When he got to the bottom, and saw that the simple lever handle on the metal door had no lock, he began to suspect why there was no soundproofing on the ceiling. If this room wasn't locked, there must be another locked room inside; otherwise, Nora would have escaped.

  If Nora was alive.

  No, she had to be alive.

  Holding his breath, Gage turned the handle.

  The room inside was nothing like the plain concrete passageway. It was well lit, for one, with two rows of fluorescent lights. The ceiling was low, perhaps seven feet high, and the room was maybe twenty
feet by ten, no windows, carpeted with the sort of low-nap tan pile common in office buildings. Gage's first impression, at a glance, was that the room was a command center. Bulletin boards filled all but one of the walls, each of them filled with newspaper clippings and other documents. He saw a detailed map of the Port of Siuslaw, a wetsuit hanging from a hook, and a deflated yellow raft. There was an outboard motor next to the raft, a small one, but certainly powerful enough to motor two people back to shore even in a bad storm. There were two large-screen computers, three filing cabinets, a stereo system, a small fridge, and a big-screen television currently tuned to CNN, the sound muted. A vent on the ceiling fluttered the paper cluttering one of the desks.

  Gage's second impression was that the room was a shrine.

  For the farthest wall was not covered with bulletin boards, but instead oak shelving packed with items related to Nora West.

  He saw the framed photos of her from across the room and felt his gut tighten. Stepping closer, he saw rows of CDs, vinyl records, magazines, and books, everything about her. There was even an action figure, complete with a free-standing microphone. It was a wall of shelving ten feet wide by seven feet tall dedicated to Nora West. Gage even saw that the very first item, far to the left, was the same Deering Middle School yearbook he had flipped through only hours earlier.

  There was no Nora, though.

  She should have been here but wasn't. So there were two possibilities. Either Howie kept her elsewhere or he'd already killed her. Gage didn't think he would have killed her, though, not with this kind of obsession. But where would she be? Some little cabin in the woods? A man who would go to this kind of effort to construct a hidden bunker would probably not risk putting her in a cabin in the open. His hiding place for her would be more elaborate.

  But where?

  Gage knew he had to leave the house soon. His advantage now was that Howie Meyer did not know Gage was onto him. That meant Gage had options. He could stake him out, hope to follow him to his other hideout. Or bring in the police. There was enough evidence now.

  He turned away from the shelving, heading for the exit, and that was when he heard the clinking.

  It was very faint, barely audible over the whistle of the air through the ceiling vent. But yes, there was a sound, a rhythmic clinking like two pieces of metal tapping against one another. Then it stopped. Then it started again, the rhythm changing, changing again … A repeating pattern.

  A song!

  All at once, Gage knew the rhythm. It was from the song Nora had recently written, the one about the lighthouse.

  Turning back to the shelves, he listened intently. The clinking sounded as if it was coming from the other side of the shelves. A secret room? If the situation weren't so dire, Gage would have allowed himself a smile; it was like something out of a James Bond movie, a secret room within a secret bunker. He searched for hinges or handles. He ran his hands along the tops of the books and other items, feeling for some kind of lever, and came up empty. It was dust-free, though. This was a man who liked to keep his collection tidy.

  Frustrated, Gage stood under the buzzing fluorescent lights and stared at the shelves. Maybe the latch or lever wasn't behind the books or CD cases but was the books or CD cases—or something else among the collection.

  Her first album?

  He located it, the one with her sitting on a stool in front of a plain white background, and pulled it out. Nothing happened. There was a mug from her first live concert, featuring aliens with microphones for heads floating over the city of Los Angeles. He picked it up. Nothing.

  Then Gage saw the Deering Middle School yearbook, the first item all the way to the left on the top shelf. Could it be? He tried to pull it but it wouldn't budge.

  Jackpot.

  If it wouldn't come out, would it go in? He pushed, and sure enough, it slid backward—only a few inches, but there was an audible click. Yet nothing special happened. All right, maybe it just unlocked some kind of mechanism. He pushed on the shelving …

  … and all of it slid back three feet.

  It slid right into what had appeared to be a solid wall but turned out to be only a third of a solid wall, one that dropped from the ceiling and stopped exactly at the top of the shelving, creating the illusion that it went all the way to the floor. Metal tracks were recessed into the floor, the shelves on wheels. Gage squeezed into the gap and found himself in a narrow hall with a single square of light in the center.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the square of light belonged to a window in another metal door.

  This, finally, was what he'd come for, and he held his breath as he approached, hoping that the person on the other side of that door was not only Nora, but that she was unharmed.

  It was her.

  Yes, it was her, though her appearance seemed both familiar and foreign. Through a glass pane thick enough that it would have been home on a submarine, he saw her crouching on a pine futon with a black mattress, staring gloomily at the floor, one hand chained by handcuffs to a metal ring bolted to the wall. She was dressed in a denim jacket and a black leather skirt a bit on the small side, designed for a body not quite so curvaceous. The tank top under her jacket practically pushed her cleavage right out of her shirt, though she also seemed ten or fifteen pounds thinner than the last time Gage had seen her. Fishnet stockings, with a deliberate tear up the inside of her thigh, disappeared into her very short skirt. She wore eyeliner almost as dark as her tall leather boots. Her fingernails were painted a garish green.

  When she looked up at the window, first with dread, then with relief, he realized why the outfit seemed familiar. It was a similar getup to what she'd worn in middle school. He'd seen it in the middle school yearbook.

  The bastard had dressed her that way.

  The whole room was a portal back in time, as if it had been scooped out of a teenage girl's past—Nora's, he assumed—and deposited in this dungeon of dark memories. Posters of Nirvana, Alanis Morissette, Radiohead, and dozens of others layered walls that had been painted a similar green as Nora's fingernails. Ceramic dragons, trolls, centaurs, and other mythical beasts adorned her cheap pressboard dresser. There was an acoustic guitar leaned against a hamper that was actually full of clothes. There was a water cooler and a plastic camping toilet next to the bed. Somehow Gage didn't think those two prison necessities were in Nora's teenage room.

  Nora jumped from the bed and was jerked back by the handcuffs. He heard the barest tink of sound and knew that was how she'd produced the rhythm, by clinking the handcuffs against the metal loop. The dark eyeliner and purple lipstick couldn't hide the gauntness of her face, the deep groves under her eyes.

  She shouted something but there was no sound. He shook his head and tried the lever door handle. Locked. Now that his eyes had adjusted, he saw a keypad next to the door, the numbers zero through nine barely illuminated. It made sense, in a twisted way. There was undoubtedly a keypad on the other side, and only Howie knew the combination. After he let himself into the room and closed the door behind him, only then did he unlock Nora's handcuffs. If she tried to hurt him, she'd just be locked in there with him.

  Gage looked at Nora again. She was still shouting at him, crying now, her mascara spider-webbing down her cheeks.

  "I can't hear you!" he shouted at her. "I'm going to find something to break the glass!"

  Nora stopped long enough to watch him intently, then shook her head, frantic. She pointed at her mouth. He understood. She wanted him to read her lips. He nodded. Slowly, with greatly exaggerated mouth movements, she said the following words:

  Howie … was … just … there.

  On the last word, she pointed at the window to punctuate her point. Gage squinted at her, fairly certain he'd made out the words correctly, but how could that be? Gage had seen Howie drive away in his Lexus. The only way that would be possible was if Howie had somehow circled back and …

  With a chill, Gage remembered the gate in the backyard, the one that led
to a path through the blackberry bushes and the road below.

  He started to go for his Beretta, but it was too late. Down the short hall past the door, the shape of a person emerged from an alcove that had been hidden from his view.

  "Hello, Gage," Howie said.

  There was a loud pop and Gage was consumed by fire.

  Chapter 28

  It wasn't fire, though Gage didn't know that until a few seconds later. It certainly felt like fire, a sizzling buzz of agony that gripped his entire body. Every muscle went taut against his will, turning him into an electrified statue. It was only when he stumbled backward that he also felt the darts sticking into his chest.

  A Taser.

  He hit the concrete floor hard, knocking the wind out of his lungs, and he would have gasped for breath if he could have even managed that much control over his paralyzed body.

  Howie materialized out of the darkness, the light from the window shining on the side of his pale face. With his black hair and black mustache, his skin seemed all the whiter, ghostly, even.

  The nodes attached to Gage's body went on doing their work, electrifying him, producing a steady, clicking buzz. How long would it last? Even physically immobile, Gage's mind was strangely clear. He remembered the charge on Tasers lasting half a minute or so. Howie didn't waste time, rifling through Gage's coat until he had the Beretta and Alex's cell phone. Then he took two pairs of handcuffs out of his pocket, snapping one on Gage's ankles, the other to Gage's wrists behind his back. It was then that the Taser stopped and the spasmodic twitching racking Gage's body was finally ceasing. Too late.

  Gage heard the faint beeps of Howie typing on the keypad, a loud click, then felt a whoosh of cool air spill into the hall.

  "Don't hurt him!" Nora cried.

  Howie grabbed Gage by the ankles and dragged him into Nora's room. The big, doughy man with the beer gut didn't seem so doughy after all. He left Gage next to the dresser, far from Nora's bed, then delivered a sharp right foot straight to Gage's kidney. The pain cleared away whatever remained of his paralysis, and Gage rolled onto his side and hugged his knees to his gut, all that he could do with his hands pinned behind him.