I joined Kenzie in the cockpit. She sat, staring at her knees. Beneath the orange life vest she wore the same clothes I’d found her in. She looked much older than fifteen; like someone who’d crawled out of a burning building only to find the rest of the world bombed to rubble.
I fumbled in my pocket till I found the Jack Daniel’s. There was hardly any left. I gazed at the dark hulk of Tolba Island and drank a mouthful then passed it to Kenzie.
She took a sip and coughed. “That’s nasty.”
“Damn straight.” I finished the bottle and set it down then glanced at her white face, the crosshatch of claw marks across her cheeks. “Hey. You okay?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t look at me.
“Did he—”
“No.”
Sleet rattled the dodger’s awning. I looked across black water to where Paswegas waited, lost in night and fog.
“What were you doing?” I finally asked. “That night. When you went down to the harbor.”
From below came the engine’s stuttering roar. The boat rocked and moved forward. Kenzie stared silently into the darkness.
“I just wanted to talk to you,” she said at last. She sounded defiant, but then I saw she was crying. “That was all. I just wanted to talk to someone else. From away.”
“From away. Well, that makes sense.”
“I hate it here.” She kicked out furiously, and the empty whiskey bottle went flying. “I fucking hate it.”
I smiled. “Hold that thought,” I said. “I’m going to help Toby. Here—”
I handed her my camera and the boat hook. “Keep an eye on these, okay?”
I stepped across the icy deck to the bow.
“That lighted buoy’s the first one,” Toby shouted as he hurried toward the cockpit. “After a hundred feet, start looking left—”
I stood in the bow and swept the flashlight’s beam across the water until it picked up the second buoy.
“There!” I yelled.
“Good. Next one’s about three hundred feet, still to the left—”
It was like a dream, the Northern Sky drifting through a world where all color had been burned away; a world of nothing but black water and black sky, with a shifting scrim of gray between and the occasional shaft of black where ledge emerged from the water like an island being born, the flashlight’s beam insubstantial as a white straw flung across the channel. The cold wind made it hard to hear the clanking of the buoys, but Toby kept directing me where to look, and we fell into a kind of restless dance, the flashlight sweeping through the night, the Northern Sky shifting right or left as she bore inexorably away from Tolba Island, the engine’s drone like my own steady breathing. We might have traveled for miles, for hours; I might have fallen asleep, exhausted as I was and no longer able to tell where one world ended and another began, sky and water and stone and blood.
Then Kenzie’s cry cut through the wind like a gull’s.
“Cass!”
She pointed behind us, toward Tolba Island.
“That’s his boat!” she shouted. “That’s him!”
Toby peered through the dodger’s window. I stepped to the side of the bow, squinting through the mist. I couldn’t see anything.
But I could hear it—the roar of a powerboat. Kenzie screamed.
“Get below!” commanded Toby. He pushed her toward the companionway. “There’s a radio; see if you can get it to work and put out a Mayday signal. Stay down there till I get you—”
She disappeared down the ladder, and I stumbled into the cockpit.
“Shit.” Toby stared at the silvery shape arrowing across the water. “He’s got Lucien’s Boston Whaler. Thing’s got a twelve horsepower engine, we can’t outrun him.”
The roar grew louder: the boat was a hundred yards off, heading straight at us. Denny stood in the stern by the outboard motor. I couldn’t see clearly through the sleet and fog.
But he could.
“I see you!” His voice rose to a ragged shriek. I swore and turned to Toby.
“What do we do?” I demanded. “He’s got a fucking gun—”
I remembered the flare gun below. As Toby hunched over the tiller, I darted to the companionway and climbed down. Kenzie held the two-way radio and the NOAA band. The boat hook and my camera were on the bench beside her.
“Is that radio working?”
“I don’t know.” She punched a button. I heard a blast of static. “I think so. Maybe.”
“Keep trying.” I flung open the drawer, grabbed the flare gun. As I passed Kenzie I hesitated, then grabbed my camera and climbed back up on deck. Toby stared at me from the cockpit, his face taut. He gestured angrily at the flare gun.
“That’s useless!”
“Not if I nail him.”
The distance between the boats had narrowed to about fifty feet. Denny’s arm dangled limply at his side. He had a gun but showed no sign of using it. His head looked misshapen, his features blackened and smeared across his face like tar. His jaw sagged, and I could see where the flesh had been torn away, like a peeled fruit.
He was smiling.
“I see you,” he cried thickly.
“He’s coming right at us.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Like he’s going to ram us.”
“Look out—” Toby swung the tiller, and the sailboat tacked sharply to the right. “Watch your head!”
I ducked and grabbed the rail as the Boston Whaler shot toward our stern. There was a grinding sound, and the Northern Sky lurched.
Toby’s face went dead white. “He’s going for the rudder—he’s trying to shear it off—”
The outboard’s roar became a furious whine. The Boston Whaler circled then swept toward us again, Denny crouching over the motor.
“By his feet.” Toby called to me and pointed. “There’s a plastic container, it’s usually got fuel in it. You only have one flare. See if you can hit it.”
I braced myself against the rail. It was hard for me to take aim with one eye bandaged, but I did my best. Denny straightened to stare at me. His mouth opened in a wordless shout.
“I see you too,” I said, and fired.
There was a low whoosh, and a white ball rocketed toward the Boston Whaler. Around us the world glowed as a bright plume like a meteor’s tail split the sky in two. Denny lifted his face, arms outstretched, his shirt blinding white. The flare plummeted soundlessly to his feet and continued to burn, not fiercely but steadily, while brownish smoke rose around him. I dimly heard Toby behind me, cursing. Then the Northern Sky arced smoothly away from Denny’s boat and began to churn across the reach.
I clung to the rail and stared at Denny. The flare’s light still glowed in the Boston Whaler’s stern, but he made no move to put it out or kick it away from the fuel container, only stood with arms lifted and face tilted to the night, as though welcoming something. I could see the dull glint of the gun in his hand. Then his fingers opened. The gun fell, disappearing into the water. Denny lowered his ruined face until he stared at me then stooped for something at his feet. The flare, I thought.
But then he straightened. His eyes trapped the flare’s dull glow as he shook his head, slowly, sorrowfully, and his mouth split into an anguished smile as he held something out to me, a large, flat, rectangular object that flapped in the freezing wind and billowing smoke. His book.
There was a hiss like air escaping from a valve. Denny’s legs bloomed orange and black.
“Get down!” shouted Toby. “That’s the fuel line!”
A column of flame shot into the air. Denny screamed, a terrible high-pitched sound like a child’s cry, and the engine exploded.
I stared transfixed as gold and argent pinwheels spun from the boat’s stern. Black smoke ballooned and momentarily obscured everything as I grabbed the camera around my neck and clawed off the lens cap. I braced myself against the rail, shielded the lens from sleet, and coughed as oily smoke enveloped me then dispersed, windblown, as Denny burned.
I shot him
as he died, his clothes ragged wings and his hair ablaze, his hands beating at the flames as though they were swarms of fiery bees. His face blackened and collapsed; one arm twitched rhythmically as the boat began to dip below the water’s surface; and still he burned, a man like a dancing ember. I pressed the shutter release and angled myself along the rail, coughing as smoke coiled around me and my eye streamed, until a dome of black and gray erupted from the water’s surface and the Boston Whaler disappeared. Gray eddies washed toward us, the stink of diesel and melted fiberglass and charred meat.
The Northern Sky drifted, slowly, its engine a soft drone. As in a dream I replaced the lens cap on my camera, pulled it from my neck, put it in my bag, and shoved it out of the way. I stood against the rail and stared across the black swells.
A life preserver floated a few yards off, yellow nylon line, a clotted white shape that might have been part of the outboard engine: scattered wreckage that was too far off for me to see. Freezing rain beat against my face. It was a moment before I realized I was crying. I wiped at my one good eye, touched the sodden bandage on the other, and gazed back out at the water.
The life preserver had drifted out of sight, but the swells brought other things closer: sheets of oversized paper, some torn but others miraculously intact, or nearly so: Denny’s book, its pages ripped from the homemade binding. I stared in disbelief as a sheet floated past and disintegrated before my eyes, its layers detaching themselves—leaves, hair, green pigment, ochre, albumen, blood, all dissolving into a bright slick upon the surface of the sea then disappearing into flecks of foam and brown kelp. A tiny shard like an arrowhead seemed to crawl across a page floating past. A swell lifted it, and a torn photograph curled from the sheet. I had a glimpse of eyes blurring into mouth and hands, a turtle’s shell.
I gasped and leaned forward with one hand, reaching for a sheet that seemed intact. My fingers closed around one corner, the heavy paper sodden but untorn. Another swell nearly tugged the sheet from my grasp. I stretched out my other hand to grab it, winced as my hand closed on it and my legs suddenly shot out from under me. My boots slid across the icy deck as I pitched forward, and overboard.
* * *
The water slammed me like a wall. My mouth opened to scream, and I kicked out frantically as I sank. Frigid water filled my mouth and nostrils. I kicked again, frantic, pinioned by utter darkness. Freezing water crushed me; I saw nothing, felt nothing but that terrible weight and then the shock of light, air, my name.
“Cass! Cass!”
I gasped then choked as air filled my lungs, felt a dull pressure against my cheek. Something glinted then struck me again, on the shoulder this time. The boat hook. I tried to grab it but my hands were numb, then dimly saw a figure reaching from the stern. Kenzie.
“Hang on!” she shouted.
Another shape appeared behind her. “We got you, Cass, hang on there—”
Toby grabbed me by the shoulders as Kenzie dug the boat hook beneath my arm. Together they pulled me on board. I knelt, puking up sea water, as Toby draped a blanket around me.
“Come on, girl, let’s get you below. Come on,” he urged. “You’re gonna freeze to death.”
He half-carried me below deck, giving instructions to Kenzie beside us. “Try to get her warm, whatever you do keep her warm—”
Kenzie forced me onto one of the bunks and peeled off my clothes, wrapped me in more blankets, then lay beside me. Most of the grime was gone from her wan face, and she’d put on one of Toby’s heavy sweaters over her filthy sweatshirt.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
I nodded but said nothing. The two of us lay there in silence, listening as Toby spoke calmly into the radio and then climbed back up on deck.
When he was gone, the cabin seemed to contract around us. The lamp guttered to a dull glow as I listened to the creak of wood, a noise like someone scratching at the hull. The hiss of sleet sounded like my name. After a while Kenzie and I sat up, still without speaking. We crouched side by side on the bunk, with Toby’s worn blankets wrapped around us and his voice echoing faintly from above, and stared out the porthole into the darkness until the first lights of Burnt Harbor shone through the night.
27
We were met by John Stone and Jeff Hakkala, two ambulances and a number of state troopers. A crowd had already gathered outside the Good Tern. I recognized Robert and the two guys who’d set upon me earlier; also Merrill Libby; Everett Moss, the harbormaster; and a small white TV van, headlights blazing through the fog.
“My camera,” I said.
Toby gave me a funny look.
“It’s safe,” he said. “I put it below. Out of sight,” he added.
I swore as someone started running toward us from the news van.
Toby put his arm around me and walked me toward the ambulance. When the reporter drew up beside us, Toby shook his head fiercely.
“Can’t you see this lady’s injured?”
“That ain’t no lady,” a voice yelled as the reporter fell back into the crowd.
I glanced over to see Robert standing beside Kenzie and her father. He grinned at me, tongue stud glinting in the headlight, then turned away.
At Paswegas County Hospital, Kenzie was examined and treated for trauma and poisoning; there was no sign of sexual assault. My arm was cleaned and bandaged. I got fifteen stitches and a temporary eye-patch.
“You’re going to have a scar there,” the ER doctor told me.
I stared into the mirror, at a black starburst of stitches and dried blood beside my right eye.
“Souvenir of Vacationland,” I said.
I was released around three am. They kept Kenzie overnight then released her the next morning to her father and the ministrations of local law enforcement.
I spent the rest of the night with the state police. So did Toby. There were a lot of questions, especially for me, and I gathered there’d be more once the FBI arrived and investigators saw what was in the trees on Tolba Island. I didn’t want to think about what they’d find in the quarry, or that clearing.
I was beyond exhaustion. And I felt a sick pang, that I hadn’t saved Denny’s book. All that terrifying beauty, lost. Only glimpses would remain, in the pictures Ray had, and Lucien Ryel.
But they were like postcards of the Taj Mahal. And I’d seen the real thing.
Denny Ahearn had created an entire world out there with his turtle shells and daguerreotypes, his mangled home religion and tormented attempts to reclaim something from the death of the girl he had loved all those years ago. It was a horrifying world, but it was a real one. How many of us can say we’ve made a new world out of the things that terrify and move us? Aphrodite tried and failed.
Monstrous as he was, Denny was the real thing. So was his work. He really had built a bridge between the worlds, even if no one had ever truly seen it, besides the two of us. Now it was up to me, to carry the memory of the dead on my back.
* * *
It was dawn when Toby finally drove me to the Lighthouse.
“Here.” He handed me my camera. “I figured you’d want this.” As I turned it to the light, he added, “No one’s seen it. Didn’t seem like it was their business.”
The sign in front of the motel now read no vacancy. Merrill had arranged for us to be given cabins in the woods behind the motel, rather than the rooms near the main road.
“In case reporters start showing up,” explained Toby. He looked drawn and exhausted, but also immeasurably sad. “Be a little harder for them to find us there.”
“That’s thoughtful of him.”
“Merrill’s not a bad guy. I told you that. I should have, anyway.” He looked at me and shook his head. “You should get some sleep.”
“Yeah. You too,” I said and stumbled inside.
Sunlight leaked through the blinds as I locked the door. I kicked my boots off and set them atop the heater, downed the last two Percocets and fell into bed. I slept like the dead, dreamless, mindless. When I fina
lly woke, it was night again.
* * *
I spent the next two days in a daze: no booze, no drugs. A lot of time giving statements to various law enforcement officials. A background check brought up the time Christine had called the police on me for domestic assault, but as she’d never pressed charges no one could run with that. Toby and Suze vouched for my whereabouts and everything I’d done during the time since MacKenzie Libby went missing. Toby made no mention of me slipping him a Mickey. There were a few raised eyebrows and some unpleasant moments—I’ve never been good at interviews—but there was no arguing with the fact that Kenzie was alive and safe, and that she wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t intervened. I gave all my pertinent contact information and was told I could go, for now.
The press had a field day. Within hours the incident had leaked to the national media, with headlines like photo finish and silence of the snapping turtles. Denny’s story had nearly everything—murders, abductions, madness, art. Best of all, a teenage girl who survived to tell the tale—though not, it turned out, to the tabloids. Merrill Libby surprised me again by taking a relatively hard line with any exploitation of his daughter. There was an exclusive interview with the Bangor Daily News, and that would be it. For now, anyway. Kenzie was in counseling; she’d been sent to stay with relatives near Collinstown for a few days. Merrill had been in touch with her mother for the first time in several years.
The wreckage of the Boston Whaler was recovered. Denny’s body was never found, despite divers who searched the frigid waters off Tolba Island. This further complicated things as far as the investigation went.
All this must have been terrible for Gryffin. I still hadn’t seen him. Toby said he was caught up with the details of his mother’s funeral, as well as with the nightmare of learning his father was a compulsive murderer. It was unnerving to think that, in the space of a few days, I had effectively orphaned him.
I’d also insured that the youth of Paswegas County would be provided with a campfire story for years to come. Toby told me the locals were already referring to Denny as The Mad Hatter, after I’d explained to the investigators about the contents of Denny’s darkroom. All artists crave some kind of immortality. Denny Ahearn had achieved his. Unless, of course, he really was too tough to die.
Generation Loss cn-1 Page 26
