by Sarah Dreher
Lt. blue '85 Chevy Blazer. Okay.
She closed the book and crept over to the door that led out into the parking lot. Turned the knob.
The door opened.
She slipped through and was about to let the door swing shut when she realized she'd probably lock herself out. Easing back inside, she swept her flashlight beam across the shelves behind the desk. Aha. A large roll of Scotch tape. Just the thing. Tearing off a long strip, she opened the door again, pushed the buttons that released the old lock, and taped them down for good measure.
It was the best she could do. If she couldn't get back in, she'd have to sleep outside until someone showed up, and pretend she'd gone for an early-morning walk and ended up locked out.
Stoner nodded to herself. Her mind was working amazingly well, considering the hour of night. She'd have to ask Boneset for the recipe for her tea. No sedative hang-over.
The car was easy to find, sitting at the edge of the parking lot under a choke cherry tree. She winced as the gravel made little crunching sounds beneath her feet. She stopped and listened for signs of stirring.
The silence was deep. No night birds twittering and fluttering. No bull frogs calling from the lake. It must be the dead of night. The witching hour. The stillness before the first silvery glint of dawn.
Holding her breath, she tried the handle on Divi Divi's car. The lock gave in response to her pressure. She stopped. She didn't really want to open the door. That might cause terrible hinge noises that would bring Security on the run. And who knew, maybe Divi Divi had one of those car alarms that were always going off and being ignored in the city? She could bet it wouldn't be ignored out here in the wilderness.
And, speaking of Security, it seemed The Cottage was a little derelict in that regard. Here she'd been wandering around downstairs, going through the books, opening and closing the front door, and nobody had shown up to ask what she was doing. She made a mental note to speak to Sherry about that.
Standing on tip toe, shining her flashlight beam through the open windows of Divi Divi's car, she looked around for tell tale signs of... of what? She wasn't really sure what she was looking for, but she didn't find anything out of order. Just the usual car clutter. Gum wrappers. A map of Boston with a foot print superimposed over the Public Gardens. Various audio tapes tossed on the dash board. Glove compartment held shut with duct tape. Behind the front seat an ice scraper, some frayed rope, a well-thumbed copy of My Lives by Roseanne Arnold. The floor of the front seat passenger side held an uncapped ball point pen with a gnawed look, an empty Dairy Queen Blizzard cup, and a receipt from Kinko's Copies.
At least there was nothing incriminating. And she now knew that Divi Divi left her car unlocked. Anyone could have substituted the pages in Roseann's script.
Switching off the flashlight, she gave her eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness. She could go around the inn to the right and cross the lawn to the barn, following the prowler's path. But that would mean walking across an open space, vulnerable to being seen. On the other hand, she could circle around to the left, where the trees pressed close to the building, stay close to the woods and maybe be invisible. Assuming she didn't trip over anything, walk into anything, or fall into anything. There could be all sorts of obstacles in the woods, not the least of which would be dry sticks, ankle-grabbing vines, and poison ivy.
Good time of year for poison ivy, too. Should be just about ripe, viscous, and potent. She'd already had two attacks of poison ivy in the past five years. The first was relatively mild—she hardly recognized it, since she'd been immune to it from childhood. The second was more serious, involving both hands, one knee, and a band of the stuff around her waist that she couldn't even explain to herself. The third time was bound to be fatal.
She supposed she'd have to get immunization shots against it, since they were moving out into the country where it undoubtedly ran rampant. She wasn't looking forward to that. Gwen had done it as a child back in Georgia, and declared they "pound that stuff into your arm with a jack hammer."
Excuse me, she asked herself, but why are you standing out here in the middle of the night thinking about poison ivy shots? While your prowler is undoubtedly doing serious damage and getting away with it?
I don't know. One thought just seems to lead to another. And, anyway, what makes you think that prowler is up to no good? It could just be a member of the company going to get something she left behind.
In the middle of the night?
All right, all right, I'm going.
She crossed the parking lot, stepping carefully, wincing at the way the gravel crunched like Rice Krispies. Loud enough to wake the dead.
Rice Krispies reminded her that she was hungry, even though dinner had been ample, tasty, and not particularly frightening. Rice Krispies would be good right now. Rice Krispie candy made with marshmallow would be even better. Add a few chocolate chips and she'd be in heaven. And maybe a handful of peanuts. Salted peanuts. Good mix of textures, soft, crunchy, chewy...
It really was dark out here. Dark enough to disorient. To make you lose your balance. She reached out, touching the hoods of cars as she passed. Hoped she wouldn't leave finger prints, if it came to that.
Came to what? Strange expression, "come to that." Who made up things like that? Were there people who sat around in a kind of think tank, coming up with strange expressions to confuse people whose first language wasn't English? Nasty little self-righteous people, probably hold-overs from the Reagan administration.
Something made her stop in her tracks. A physical sensation. Something out of place, wrong.
What...?
The car she was standing next to... The hood of the car she was touching...
...was warm.
Chapter Six
It was an off-white Lexus, no more than a year old.
It was still ticking as it cooled. So it hadn't been parked long. Long enough to belong to the prowler?
Maybe. Stoner tried to calculate time in her head. It seemed hours since she'd been standing in the window of their room, watching that light. But it could have been minutes. If it had been as long as it felt, the eastern sky would surely be showing signs of awakening. In the unchanging darkness, time seemed to be stopped.
She didn't like this feeling of disorientation. She wondered if Lexus felt it. But Lexus had a flashlight, and probably a watch, maybe even an Egg McMuffin.
The thought of an Egg McMuffin made her mouth water. Creamy cheese, salty ham, the yeasty crisp of English muffin...
What was going on here? She didn't even like Egg McMuffin. The yolks were usually hard-cooked and dry and made her feel like gagging. It was desperation food, the kind of thing you eat when you've been driving all night on the Interstate and know you'll fall asleep and kill yourself if you don't stop for breakfast. Or when you have to be up in the morning long before anyone with any sense would dream of getting up, and nothing's open anyway, so you might as well have an Egg McMuffin. Either that or kill yourself from the sheer misery of being awake before anyone else in the world. Egg McMuffin was definitely an alternative to suicide.
Stoner shook her head. Concentrate. The Lexus was her first decent clue, especially if the owner also happened to be the Flash Light Prowler. Now, if she was lucky, the doors would be unlocked and the registration right in the handy-dandy glove compartment. She reached for the door handle...
...and just in time noticed the blinking red light embedded in the dash.
Expensive, never-fail, car alarm. Designed not only to raise the dead but to alert the police, the fire department, the highway department, and the department of public works.
Well, Lexus wasn't the only person in the world with a flashlight. Not by a long shot. Cupping one hand around the lens to focus the beam, she aimed at the car's interior—then realized too late and with a start that the alarm might well be light-sensitive.
It wasn't. But there was nothing of interest inside the car. Clean as a whistle, whatever tha
t meant. Clean as a rental.
Maybe it was a rental.
Damn, she wished she could get inside.
In some states, you had to have your registration attached to the steering wheel, or clipped to the sun visor and visible at all times.
Not here, though. No siree, not in good old secretive, mind-your-own-business Maine. Not in the Pine Tree Fine Free State of Maine.
Back to checking the guest register, then. Assuming Lexus was a guest, and not just a person of low moral character slipping into The Cottage at night for nefarious purposes.
Stoner looked around at the still-dark night. Clearly, her best bet was to try to see the prowler for herself. Eyeball the suspect. Which brought to her imagination a vision of her eyeballs hurtling across the lawn in hot pursuit of the perpetrator.
McTavish, she muttered to herself, you are sick.
Hop to it. Time's a-wastin'.
Actually, for all practical purposes, time was standing still.
Moving slowly, placing each sneaker on the gravel carefully, she edged to her left across the parking lot and into the trees.
On her second tree-sheltered step she snagged her foot. Good old northeastern woods, bursting with vines and brush and downed trees and generally annoying undergrowth. She recalled the forests she'd seen in the west, particularly in Arizona. The tall, thick, reddish-brown trunks, and branches that seemed to start at the sky and go on forever. The forest floor as clean and needle-carpeted as a park, and smelling of fresh pine and heat beneath your feet. But in New England, nature was allowed—even encouraged—to run amok. New Englanders thrived on green congestion.
Now, there was a disgusting thought if taken literally. Green lung disease.
Or would that be green consumption?
No, green consumption would be eating a salad or other leafy vegetable. Healthy things.
What is the matter with me? she wondered. Her mind felt like a dog on long leash, wandering over people's yards, stopping to sniff endlessly at some singular, fascinating blade of grass...
A dot of light flashed from the direction of the barn.
Stoner focused her attention and waited. If she could lurk here, out of sight, until the person or persons unknown returned to his/her/their car, and opened the door and got in...
The light swept back and forth briefly, then disappeared.
Now what?
A moment later, a faint glow appeared wandering through the trees toward the lake.
Great. Wonderful. Terrific. The old McTavish luck was as bad as ever.
She had to follow.
The woods grabbed her ankles and snagged her clothes and complained with loud cracklings and snappings and rustlings. A branch came out of nowhere and slashed at her face, raising a stinging welt. The jagged end of a broken pine limb stabbed her forehead and sent her stumbling backward into a bramble bush that hadn't been there a minute ago but welcomed her with open briars.
She felt about as graceful as a bull moose.
The light ahead of her was gone now, but she didn't dare turn on her flashlight. Person Unknown could have sensed her, and turned to look. She couldn't give herself away.
Suddenly she had the feeling Person Unknown knew she was following. Wanted her to follow. Had, in fact, staged this entire event for her benefit.
Good. As if we aren't having enough fun, let's have delusions of grandeur.
She pushed on.
Finally, by some miracle, she was at the corner of the barn.
She looked toward the lake. Nothing there. Whoever had gone that way was either lying low, or had disappeared from the face of the earth. Slipped into the lake, maybe, back into the primordial ooze of which all lake bottoms were made. The Creature From The Black Lagoon.
Creature From The Black Lagoon in a Lexus?
Stoner listened hard. She couldn't hear a thing. No footsteps, no splashing water, no heavy breathing except her own.
All right, she'd lost her quarry. The question now was, what should she do? Go into the barn and check for damage? Go back to bed before someone else decided to look out a window and saw her light and came to check, and then someone else saw both their lights and...
They could turn the whole night into one big slumber party. Invite the entire population of The Cottage. Even the Crones. Crones always knew how to liven up a party.
And eventually someone as congenitally curious as herself would ask whose idea it had been and why she'd been out here in the first place.
Better to slink back to bed and wait.
Except that she really was congenitally curious, and the thought of sleeping without knowing what had happened here was inconceivable. She knew she'd be up at dawn, rush through breakfast, and make a very-uncasual beeline for the barn. Thereby attracting attention and arousing suspicion.
She had to know, and she had to know now.
Carefully, she turned the knob on the door. It wasn't locked. Bad idea. She'd have to speak to Sherry about that first thing in the morning.
To her amazement, the door opened smoothly and silently. She'd expected squeaks and groans at the very least. After all, this was a night for noises. But the hinges were well-oiled. Unusual. People didn't normally pay a lot of attention to barn door hinges. But someone had paid a great deal of attention to these.
On a hunch, she touched two fingers to the upper hinge. They'd been oiled, all right, and recently. She sniffed. Not just oiled. Sprayed with WD-40, the handy-person’s magic elixir. Guaranteed to clean, de-rust, and lubricate all in one spray.
So the hinges had probably been neglected until recently. Why would someone suddenly care about silent hinges?
Because Someone wanted to sneak around, obviously.
Or, equally obviously, because one of the techies, who was never without her can of WD-40, had decided to do everyone a favor and silence the squeaking hinges.
She tried to remember if the hinges had squeaked this afternoon.
Yes, they had. She had noticed it right away, because she'd been afraid of interrupting the rehearsal.
And this evening?
They'd been squeaky then, too.
She was relieved to note that her mind seemed to be functioning normally again, without going off on a food tangent.
So Someone—her prowler, no doubt—had wanted to slip into the barn unnoticed, and had gone to some trouble to do so.
Wait a minute. The hinges were on the inside, of course, there being very little purpose to placing hinges on the outside of a door and inviting theft and unauthorized entry. So that meant they'd been oiled earlier, possibly so someone could enter silently in the dark of night. Which pointed the finger of suspicion back at the company.
Well, she might as well have a look around.
Narrowing the flashlight beam again, she ducked below the windows and prowled through the uninhabited barn.
At night, the rooms in barns and factories belong to inanimate objects. It's their time, and their place, their turn to use the spaces of the world. Taking over, they sit heavily and sharpen their edges. They fill their territory with their bulk, pushing back the walls and permeating open places. The metal-and-electricity odor of them saturates the air.
They resent intruders.
Stage lights, caught in her beam, flashed a glassy warning. Ladders rose up threateningly. Piles of rags seemed to pull themselves together and think of attacking. A portable radio smirked. Tool boxes stirred. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the movement of wrenches.
Moving to the periphery, she avoided snaking orange coils of electric wire. Chairs shifted, so silently and slightly it might be her imagination. In one corner, the broken lighting instrument lay plotting revenge.
It wasn't my fault, she wanted to say. I didn't do this to you. You can't blame all humans for one bad one.
The saw horses moved a little closer together and glared at her.
"Bigots," she muttered. "Human-haters, huddling together in your anger like the Religious Right."
The saw horses simpered.
As far as she could see, there was nothing wrong in here. No more breakage, at least. No obvious acts of vandalism. If anything had been stolen, she wouldn't know it.
It didn't make sense, she thought, sitting back and turning off her flashlight so she couldn't see the sneers of the tools and instruments. This was a theater company. An amateur theater company. A women's theater company. What could possibly be a motive for the things that were happening? Certainly not money. They'd probably meet expenses only if they were lucky, even with everybody volunteering her time. And the show had little chance of making it to Broadway, or even off-Broadway. They certainly didn't represent any serious competition.
Maybe someone had a grudge against someone, though destroying the show seemed like a rather elaborate way to get revenge.
Maybe it was like climbing Mt. Everest. You just did it because it was there.
Sure.
Well, this was getting her nowhere. She flicked on her light and took one last look around.
Nothing.
She crawled to the door and slipped out and took aim at the house, its white painted stones glowing like fog in the darkness. As she started across the lawn, she thought she heard the chairs behind her, shifting their positions.
Sleep still on her, she felt Gwen slip into bed beside her, and turned herself lazily into the softness of Gwen's arms. "Tell me it's not morning already," she grumbled.
"I'm afraid it is."
Stoner groaned. "I feel as if I just went to bed."
"You did," Gwen said with a low laugh. ''You were prowling all night."
She nuzzled against Gwen's shoulder. "Did I wake you?"
"Not for long. Boneset's tea packs a punch. I only had two swallows and I was out like a light."
"Not me," Stoner said.
"Well, from what you've told me about your reaction to pot..."
"Huh?" Stoner said, jerking upright. "There was marijuana in that tea?"
"Sure," Gwen went on as blithely as if nothing had happened. "So, since you told me it always used to energize you..."
