by Sarah Graves
And when his father was alive. Afterwards, though …
Swallowing a sob, he straightened himself in the dress and stockings, picked up the purse that went with the outfit. He had not imagined that of all the tasks in his plan, this was the one that would be so …
Hard. But he was fine, he told himself; ordered himself to be, really. He could work with this, walk in the shoes, manage to keep the pantyhose from sliding off his middle, somehow.
So that the only thing left now for him to put on was …
Try it, boy. Just try it, and see what happens. You little loser, you little worm—
All snarled at him in a drunken slur. But for now, the spell was broken.
“Shut up, Ma.” He lifted the thing he’d dropped.
She couldn’t stop him. Couldn’t do anything to him. He moved the thing toward his face, breathed again the old, mingled smells of mothballs and Shalimar.
He couldn’t decide which fragrance he found more evocative, the sweet or the deathlike. Could not in fact decide with any real precision which was which. With trembling hands, he placed the thing he held very carefully onto his own head.
It was a gray, professionally styled wig, made from his mother’s own hair, which she’d cut for the first time in her life on the day the men came to tell her that Steven’s father was dead.
After they’d departed, she’d gone straight to the utility drawer in the kitchen and gotten out the sharp scissors. Steven recalled feeling relieved even through his grief when he saw what she was doing.
Half relieved, anyway, he thought as, placing a small hat atop the wig and pinning it there with a hatpin, then tucking the camera into the purse he carried, he stepped out of the abandoned house on Washington Street. That mass of his mother’s long, wavy gray hair falling to the floor, her wild, incoherent weeping as she’d hacked at it …
Still, at least she hadn’t been going for the scissors to use on him. His childish relief hadn’t lasted very long, though. Because with his dad dead, young Steven had been alone with her, no one around to intervene. And then the real horror had begun.…
Squelching the thought, he stopped at the door. What was he forgetting? Then he remembered; quickly he drew out the camera again, popped the card from its slot and then into his laptop’s card reader. After uploading the photograph he’d taken from his perch in the backyard tree house to his computer, he revisited the local library’s website once more.
With just a couple of taps on the keyboard, he emailed the photograph to the library, specifying by marking a check box that he would visit the library to print it out himself, so prying eyes would be less likely to view it.
Amazing, what you could do with technology nowadays … He grinned, thinking this. Now, though, he must hurry. This part was a bit tricky, and the timing was tight.
But he loved it, he absolutely … Outside, the sunlight was bright even through the thin fog covering the island. Wincing, he put his sunglasses back on.
Touching the wig to make sure it was straight, he began walking in the general direction he’d seen Jacobia Tiptree headed. The pantyhose chafed uncomfortably and the shoes pinched his feet like torture devices; still, he smiled as he proceeded, barely able to hide his euphoric glee.
She wanted to find something. He was about to make sure that she would. And when she did, he wanted to be there.
Watching, until his waiting was over at last.
“HEY.” JAKE STOPPED DEAD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SIDEWALK. She had remembered something, and now she couldn’t unremember it.
“That concrete we said we’d mix.” Overhead, the sky grew steadily milkier; to the south, a cloud bank lay on the horizon.
Motionless, or so it seemed from here. But out on the chilly ocean, things were lively indeed, she knew: warm air rolling east off the sun-heated land, an offshore summer breeze in full force skimming the cold wave tops.
When that happened, the air cooled. The water vapor quickly condensed. The result:
“Fog,” said Ellie, following Jake’s gesture. “Oh, darn,” she added. “I hope it doesn’t …”
“Rain,” Jake finished grimly. “If it doesn’t hold off, it’ll drown out the fireworks tonight. But from the look of it …”
As they watched, the cloud bank seemed to thicken and grow taller, like a muscle bulking up. Right now, it was still far out over what Sam liked to call the briny deep.
But it wouldn’t be for much longer, and they’d left all the cement, sand, tools, and the mixing trough, too, uncovered in the backyard; annoyed with herself, Jake pointed this out.
“Drat,” said Ellie, looking reluctant. There was no help for it, though; that cement mix couldn’t be allowed to get wet, and a tarp over the whole project wouldn’t help matters at all.
“Double drat,” Jake agreed as they turned back toward the house. “How inconvenient is this?”
Rain or even just a thick fog wouldn’t only ruin the cement bag they’d opened; in addition, it would turn the remaining bags to solid, utterly unusable objects that were also so heavy, it would take a block and tackle—or several large men, none of whom they’d wanted to enlist any further in the project—to move the ruined bags to the bed of the pickup truck.
And thereafter, to the dump. “Oh, let’s just mix the stuff,” said Ellie resignedly when they reached the yard. Which did make some sense; even the hose was still turned on, not even leaking.
Which was the saving grace of the whole operation, thought Jake. But just then a tiny fountain began spurting near the hose nozzle, its spray creating a tiny rainbow.
She stifled a curse. “All right,” she allowed grouchily. “I should have my amateur home-repair license taken away, you know that? What was I thinking of, leaving all this—”
Because the absolute first rule of home fix-up was Finish What You Start, and the second rule was Put Stuff Away.
Behind the fountain, a wisp of breeze caught the corner of the open bag, sending a gray-white puff swirling up. The hose leak’s spray caught it and spattered the result onto the grass.
“I guess we’d better just do it,” she went on, “before the weather decides to mix this stuff up for us and then the rain comes and slops it all over the tarp.”
At least the firs and the low, red-fruited barberry bushes around the edges of the yard lent privacy. But as she shoveled sand from the garden cart into the mixing trough, Jake glanced uneasily up at the pointed trees.
“Oh, come on,” said Ellie, understanding Jake’s unease. “You don’t really think …”
“That he’s up there? No.” Jake ran water into the trough. This was the tricky part, adding enough water but not too much.
“Not in the trees, anyway. But I still feel … watched.”
Using a trowel, she stirred the water, sand, and cement mix experimentally in the trough, then added a little more water.
“Nerves,” Ellie diagnosed. “You know he’s around here, and not knowing exactly where makes you feel he could be anywhere.”
“Or everywhere,” Jake agreed, looking up once more. The only things in the trees were a couple of accidentally released small balloons and a flock of enthusiastically cheeping purple finches.
From downtown came a blare of patriotic music played through a loudspeaker, followed by the revving of engines that signaled the imminent start of the parade. Jake stirred harder.
“Maybe one of the others will find Steven Garner while we’re doing this,” Ellie said hopefully. But then, “Um. Jake?”
Never a good sign. “What?” Jake snapped a little more tartly than she’d intended; her mood was deteriorating rapidly.
“Well,” Ellie responded mildly, “not to be nitpicky. The thing is, though, we’re mixing concrete here. But the forms”—she pointed at the wooden boxes that the concrete was to be poured into—“are over there.”
Oh, blast and damnation.
“And we can’t just pick the forms up and move them,” Ellie went on, her forehead furrowing as
she worked it out in her head, “because …”
Because the forms had to be level. Otherwise, as Jake had figured out and carefully allowed for earlier by placing a level on them, the blocks that came out of them wouldn’t be square.
And now … now the concrete had been mixed and was already beginning to set. Much longer and it would be too thick to pour.
Or in this case, shovel; the trough was too heavy to lift. So it was too late to move the forms now. Or … was it?
“Okay, just wait here a minute,” said Jake, crossing the yard hastily.
Grabbing up the forms, the shingle pieces they’d used for shims beneath them, the eyebolts she meant to set into the concrete, and the bolt brackets that held the eyebolts, she stalked back to the mixing trough and dropped them all.
Then, while Ellie waited bemusedly, she sprinted across the lawn to the corner where the compost heap loomed behind a screen of forsythia. There in the cool gloom, she took deep breaths, clenched her fists, and uttered the very same swear words that Bella had used a little earlier, one after the other.
Finally she strode back to the mixing area, refreshed—and freshly unnerved. Because while she’d stood by the pile of coffee grounds, lawn clippings, and eggshells, relying on the power of bad language to flush fury from her system, she’d seen … what?
“A flash,” she told Ellie as she set up the concrete forms again, working fast so they could actually fill the forms without the concrete turning to hardened lumps on the shovels.
She hoped. “Like … from binoculars,” she added unhappily as she replaced the shims.
“Really. From where?”
Jake laid the level across one corner of the first form and then across the opposite corner. “The top floor of the old meetinghouse,” she replied. “Where you would go, if …”
If you wanted to spy down into the backyard of my place, she didn’t finish. But Ellie understood.
The meetinghouse, a massive old white clapboard structure, was attached to an even larger old house much like Jake’s own.
Unlike hers, though, it was uninhabited. And there were no curtains at the windows.
Bending to finish shimming the form boxes level again, Jake peeked sideways; no new flash came from the attic window. Meanwhile, the sky went on thickening, pale wisps of humidity sailing across it like ghostly streamers.
With an effort, she restrained herself from looking again at that bare window; half of her wanted badly to concentrate on the concrete and ignore everything else.
But the other half felt as if a target had been painted around her.
“Okay,” she said grimly as the last of the concrete went into the first plywood form box.
Swiftly she set the stainless-steel bracket and bolt into the wet mixture. “Okay, if there’s someone up there, let’s just think about what that means.”
That he’d been watching, that he knew where she was right now …
Ellie shoveled sand into the now-empty mixing trough, then cement mix. A cloud formed overhead, and one fat raindrop fell from it, forming a crater in the dry, powdery stuff.
“Hurry,” she said as Jake picked up the hose. And then: “He wanted you to see him, before, didn’t he? To know he was around.”
“So maybe he does now, too,” Jake agreed. Soon the second form was mixed, poured, and fitted with a bolt.
More raindrops fell. “D’you have another tarp?” Ellie asked.
Despite a forecast promising the first rain and fog-free Fourth of July in years, Moose Island was not much more than a hunk of rock halfway to the North Atlantic. So forecasts always had an air of fingers crossed behind the back.
Like now, for instance. “Yeah,” Jake said, and dropped the shovel just long enough to retrieve another plastic sheet from the yard shed.
Which posed a further chore: finding enough rocks, bricks, and other heavy objects lying around the yard to hold the tarp down over the newly filled forms.
“Jake,” Ellie said thoughtfully, holding the hose up.
“What?” Jake dropped the tarp and grabbed the mixing trowel again as Ellie ran water into the trough. If you didn’t want any rocks, there would be dozens of them lying all over the—
“Why d’you suppose he’s watching? If he is,” Ellie added as Jake stirred the fourth and thank-God-last concrete batch.
“Well …” She thought for a moment, trying on alternatives. Then: “I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “Unless he’s got a high-powered rifle, he can’t do anything from that distance. Can he?” she added nervously.
And if he did have one, all of this taunting he’d been doing would be beside the point. Straightening, she felt body parts protesting; mixing concrete was a lot like lifting it, only you did it while bending over.
“What I do know is, he doesn’t know we know he’s there.”
“Because?” Ellie shot the hose stream over the shovels, the trowel, the mixing trough, and her own hands.
“Because I just peeked again, and the binoculars are flashing again.” That, or he didn’t care if they saw him; the thought deepened her anxiety.
Naturally, as they spread the tarp over the concrete forms, the rain quit spitting; in the yard, vapor wisps dissolved.
On the horizon, though, that fog bank still squatted. “Yes, I just saw the flash, too,” Ellie confirmed. “So what’ll we do?”
Jake dropped rocks scavenged from the dahlia bed’s edging onto the tarp’s corners. “I don’t know that, either.”
Rain or shine, by tomorrow that concrete would be set up, and the tarp wouldn’t be needed anymore. So for now the job was done; together they heaved the rest of the last bag of cement into the cart and hauled it across the yard to the shed.
“The bottom line is,” she went on, “there’s no way to be sure what he’s up to. But there are twenty-four vacant houses on the island, including the meetinghouse.”
And he was in the meetinghouse right now. Or somebody who was likely spying on them was in there, anyway.
They pushed the cart into the shed and closed the doors on it. “I left the houses that are way out on the outskirts of town off the list.…” she said.
Right now Wade and Sam, her dad and Bella, and Ellie’s husband, George, were entering and inspecting the houses, except for six near Jake’s own place. Those, she and Ellie meant to examine.
“… Because I doubt he’d pick somewhere far away to hide out in,” she continued. “But why would he let the lens glare give him away? It’s not rocket science that it might,” Jake added.
They went inside. From the kitchen, there was no direct view to the meetinghouse’s top floor.
Or vice versa, thankfully. Ellie scrubbed more cement dust off her hands, then splashed her face at the sink. “Unless he …”
“Wants us to know he’s watching?” Jake finished for her.
“Because he’s luring us into a trap,” Ellie agreed. “You know, I’ll just bet that’s it, the little sneak.”
Jake wandered thoughtfully to the back door. She looked out into the bright street, just as a gray-haired woman in a purple dress walked by, heading downtown.
The woman looked like her feet hurt, Jake thought, in those heels. “Maybe,” she told Ellie. “Or maybe he just wants …”
The woman smiled shyly, catching Jake’s eye and fluttering her fingers in a shy wave, then limped on.
“I don’t know,” Jake repeated impatiently, turning from the door. “And you know, I’m already tired of wondering about it. We were going to look in the meetinghouse anyway, weren’t we?”
“Yes,” Ellie replied doubtfully. “But—”
“But nothing.” She plucked a leather leash from the hook by the back door, then a dog collar. Hearing the jingle, the big red Doberman trotted from the parlor inquisitively.
“Come on, Prill,” Jake said. Eagerly the big red Doberman allowed herself to be hitched up to her leash once more.
Then Jake stepped outside with the dog and Ellie follow
ed. On the porch, the faint mingled smells of mothballs and Shalimar perfume hung in the warm air.
“Let’s just get those houses checked—the old meetinghouse first, of course—and get this over with,” Jake said.
Thinking even as she spoke that it probably wasn’t going to be that easy.
And naturally, it wasn’t.
CHAPTER
7
THE VAST WHITE BULK OF THE OLD NONDENOMINATIONAL meetinghouse loomed so tall that from close up, it appeared to be toppling forward. Around it on either side of a cinder-paved circle driveway, the grass had been mowed by someone using a hand scythe; the long cut swathes dried greenish-gold in the afternoon sun.
On the front steps, two massive clay pots of red geraniums bloomed exuberantly; it was where Jake had gotten the idea for her own front porch.
If I ever get back to it, she thought. The front door of the meetinghouse stood open a few dark inches.
“He wanted us to know he was here,” she told Ellie. “He’s been tricky so far, and that makes me think the binoculars glare was no accident.”
Up and down the streets around the meetinghouse, tourists and locals strolled. On the breeze, the greasy smell of grilling hamburgers floated.
“And that suggests maybe there’s something here he wants us to see,” she added, holding Prill’s leash securely.
But do we want to see it? she wondered silently, and gave the open door a push. “Hello?”
No answer from inside. Prill stiffened, though, sniffing something. “Easy, girl.”
The dog settled, padding obediently forward. “Look,” Ellie said unhappily.
The main room was a small chapel, with seats and a podium plus smaller tables on which printed matter was arranged: flyers, music sheets, posters for the summer lecture series.
A vase of garden flowers had been knocked off the podium and broken, the water still running between the front pews.
“Oh, what a shame!” Ellie knelt to rescue the scattered blooms while Jake and Prill went on past the podium to the rooms behind: a small kitchen, a lavatory, two parlor rooms, and what had once been a library.
