The Shape of Night

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Hannibal?” I circle around the outside of the house, calling his name, louder. “Where are you?”

  Only then do I hear it, over the sound of breaking waves: a faint meow.

  “Come here, you bad boy! Come on!”

  Again, the meow. The mist makes it seem like the sound is everywhere at once. “I have dinner!” I yell.

  He responds with a demanding yowl, and I realize the sound is coming from above. I look up and through the mist I see something move high overhead. It’s a tail, flicking impatiently. Perched on the widow’s walk, Hannibal peers down at me through the slats of the railing.

  “How the hell did you get stuck up there?” I yell at him, but I already know how it happened. In my rush to pack up and leave, I didn’t check the widow’s walk before closing the door. Hannibal must have slipped outside where he was trapped.

  I hesitate on the front porch, reluctant to enter the house again. Only hours ago, I had fled Brodie’s Watch in fear, believing that I would never return. Now I have no choice but to step inside.

  I unlock the door and flick on the light switch. Everything looks exactly the way it always has. The same umbrella stand, the same oak floor, the same chandelier. I take in a deep breath and detect no scent of the sea.

  I start up the stairs, setting off the usual creaks on the steps. The landing is cast in gloom and I wonder if he waits in the shadows above, watching me. Upstairs I flick on another light switch and I see familiar cream walls and crown molding. All is silent. Are you here?

  I pause to glance into my bedroom, which I’d left in such haste that the dresser drawers are open and the closet door is ajar. I move to the turret staircase. The door creaks as I open it. I think of the nights I stood at the base of these stairs, trembling with anticipation, wondering what pleasures and torments lay in store for me. I mount the steps, remembering the swish of silk at my ankles and the unyielding grip of his hand on mine. A hand whose touch could be both tender and cruel. My heart is thudding as I step into the turret room.

  It is empty.

  Standing alone in that room, I’m suddenly overwhelmed with such a sense of longing that I feel as if my chest has been hollowed out, my heart wrenched out of me. I miss you. Whatever you are, ghost or demon, good or evil. If only I could see you one last time.

  But there is no swirl of ectoplasm, no rush of salt air. Captain Jeremiah Brodie has departed this house. He has abandoned me.

  An insistent meow reminds me why I am here. Hannibal.

  I open the door to the widow’s walk and my cat saunters inside as if he’s royalty. He plants himself at my feet and glares up with a look of well, where’s my dinner?

  “One of these days, I’m going to turn you into a fur collar,” I mutter as I haul him into my arms. I haven’t fed him since this morning, but he seems heavier than ever. Wrestling the armload of fur, I turn to the turret staircase and freeze.

  Ben stands in the doorway.

  The cat slips from my arms and thumps to the floor.

  “You didn’t tell me you were leaving,” he says.

  “I needed to…” I glance at the cat, who slinks away. “To find Hannibal.”

  “But you took your suitcase. You didn’t even leave me a note.”

  I retreat a step. “It was getting late. I didn’t want him to be out alone all night. And…”

  “And what?”

  I sigh. “I’m sorry, Ben. This isn’t going to work out between us.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I did try to tell you. There’s so much about my life that’s a disaster right now. I shouldn’t be getting involved with anyone, not until I can straighten myself out. It’s not you, Ben. It’s me.”

  His laugh is bitter. “That’s what they always say.” He goes to the window and stands with shoulders slumped, staring out at the fog. He looks so defeated that I almost feel sorry for him. Then I think of the unfinished painting of Brodie’s Watch and the woman’s figure silhouetted in the bedroom window. My bedroom window. I take a step toward the stairway door, then another. If I’m quiet, I can be down those steps before he realizes it. Before he can stop me.

  “I always liked the view from this turret,” he says. “Even when the fog rolls in. Especially when the fog rolls in.”

  I take another step, trying desperately not to set off a creak and alert him.

  “This house used to be nothing but rotted wood and broken glass. A place just waiting for someone to touch a match to it. It would have gone up in a flash.”

  I back away another step.

  “And that widow’s walk was ready to collapse. But the railing was sturdier than it looked.”

  I am almost at the doorway. I place one foot on the first step and my weight sets off a creak so loud it seems as if the whole house has groaned.

  Ben turns from the window and stares at me. In that instant he sees my fear. My desperation to escape. “So you’re leaving me.”

  “I need to go home to Boston.”

  “You’re all the same, every one of you. You dangle yourselves in front of us. Make us believe. Give us hope.”

  “I never meant to.”

  “And then you break our hearts. You. Break. Our. Hearts!”

  His shout is like a slap across the face and I flinch at the sound. But I do not move, just as he does not move. As we stare at each other, I suddenly register his words. I think of Charlotte Nielson, her decomposing body adrift on the sea. And I think of Jessie Inman, the teenage girl who fell to her death on a Halloween night two decades ago, when Ben would have been a teenager, like Jessie. I glance through the window at the widow’s walk.

  That railing was sturdier than it looked.

  “You don’t really want to leave me, Ava,” he says quietly.

  I swallow. “No. No, Ben, I don’t.”

  “But you’re going to anyway. Aren’t you?”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Was it something I said? Something I did?”

  Frantically I hunt for the words to soothe him. “It was nothing you did. You were always good to me.”

  “It was the painting, wasn’t it? My painting of this house.” I stiffen, a reaction I can’t control, and he sees it. “I know you were in my studio. I know you looked at it, because you smeared the canvas.” He points to my hand. “The paint is still on your fingers.”

  “Can’t you understand why that painting spooked me? Knowing that you’ve been watching my house. Watching me.”

  “I’m an artist. It’s what artists do.”

  “Spy on women? Slink around at night to watch their bedroom windows? You’re the one who broke into my kitchen, aren’t you? Who tried to break in while Charlotte was living here?” I’m finding my courage again. Preparing to counterattack. If I show fear, then he’s already won. “That’s not being an artist. That’s being a stalker.”

  He seems stunned by my retort, which is just what I want him to be. I want him to know that I won’t be a victim like Charlotte or Jessie or any other woman he’s threatened.

  “I’ve already called the police, Ben. I told them you’ve been watching my house. I told them they should take a good look at you, because I’m not the first woman you’ve stalked.” Can he tell I’m bluffing? I don’t know. I only know that now is the time to leave, while he’s off-balance. I turn and head down the stairs, not at a rush, because I don’t want to act like prey. I descend with the calm and measured pace of a woman in charge. A woman who’s not afraid. I make it down to the second-floor hallway.

  Still safe. Still no pursuit.

  My heart is thudding so hard it feels ready to punch its way out of my chest. I walk down the hall toward the next staircase. I just have to get down those steps, out the front door, and climb into my car. Forget Hannibal; he’ll have to fend for himself tonight. I�
�m getting the hell out of here and driving straight to the police.

  Footsteps. Behind me.

  I glance back and there he is. His face is twisted in rage. This is no longer the Ben I know; this is someone else, something else.

  I bolt toward the last set of stairs. Just as I reach the top of the staircase he tackles me and the impact hurls me forward. I am falling, falling, a terrifying swan dive down the stairs that seems to happen in excruciatingly slow motion.

  I don’t remember the landing.

  Twenty-Nine

  Heavy breathing. Warm air huffing on my hair. And pain, great pounding waves of it, crashing in my head. I am being dragged up the stairs, my feet thumping over each step as I’m pulled higher and higher. I can make out only shadows and the faint glint of a wall sconce. It’s the staircase to the turret. He is taking me to the turret.

  He pulls me over the top step and drags me into the room. Leaves me sprawled on the floor as he pauses to catch his breath. Hauling a body up two flights of stairs is exhausting; why has he gone to the effort? Why bring me to this room?

  Then I hear him open the door to the widow’s walk. I feel the rush of cool air and the scent of the sea sweeps in. I try to rise but pain, sharp as the slice of a knife, shoots from my neck and down my left arm. I can’t sit up. Just moving my arm is unbearable. Footsteps creak closer and he stares down at me.

  “They’ll know it was you,” I tell him. “They’ll find out.”

  “They never found out before. And that was twenty-two years ago.”

  Twenty-two years? He’s talking about Jessie. The girl who fell from the widow’s walk.

  “She tried to leave me, too. Just like you are now.” He glances toward the widow’s walk, and I picture that cold and rainy Halloween night. A teenage boy and girl arguing while their friends are downstairs getting drunk and making out. He’s trapped her here, where she cannot escape. Where murder requires only a shove over the widow’s walk. Even twenty-two years later, the terror that girl felt still lingers in this room, powerful enough to be felt by those who are sensitive to echoes from the past.

  It wasn’t Aurora Sherbrooke’s death that had shaken Kim so deeply on the day she visited this room with her ghost-hunting team. It was Jessie Inman’s.

  “That’s life in a small town,” says Ben. “Once they decide you’re respectable, a pillar of the community, you can get away with everything. But you, Ava?” He shakes his head. “They’ll see all the empty booze bottles in your trash bin. They’ll hear about your hallucinations. Your so-called ghost. And worst of all, they know you’re not from here. You’re not one of us.”

  Just like Charlotte, whose disappearance raised no questions. One day she was here, and the next she was gone, and no one cared enough to investigate because she was an outsider. Not one of them. Not like the well-respected Dr. Ben Gordon whose roots run generations-deep in Tucker Cove. Whose father, also a doctor, had the power to keep his son’s name out of the newspaper after the Halloween night tragedy. Jessie’s fate was forgotten, and soon, so would Charlotte’s.

  Just as mine will be.

  He bends down and grasps my ankles. Begins to drag me toward the open door.

  I flail, try to break free, but the pain shooting down my arm is so agonizing that I’m reduced to kicking. Despite it he holds on, hauling me toward the widow’s walk. This is how Jessie died. Now I know the terror Jessie felt as she struggled against him. As he lifted her up and over the railing. Did she hang on for a moment, her legs dangling over the abyss? Did she plead for her life?

  I keep kicking, screaming.

  He pulls my legs through the doorway and I reach out with my good arm to grab the doorframe. He yanks harder on my ankles but I hang on for dear life. I won’t surrender. I will fight him till the end.

  In fury he drops my ankles and brutally stamps his heel on my wrist. I feel bones snap and I shriek. My broken hand is useless and I cannot hold on.

  He drags me out onto the widow’s walk.

  Night has fallen. All I see of Ben is his shadowy outline, wreathed in mist. Here is how it ends, tossed from the rooftop. A fatal plummet to the ground.

  He grabs me under my arms and wrenches me toward the railing. The mist is as wet as tears on my face. I taste salt, inhale a final breath that smells like…

  The sea.

  Through the swirling fog, I see the figure looming in the darkness. Not mere mist but something real and solid, advancing toward us.

  Ben sees it too and he freezes, staring. “What the fuck?”

  Abruptly he releases me and I slam down onto the deck. A jolt of pain shoots from my neck, and it’s so excruciating that for an instant everything goes dark. I don’t see the blow, but I hear the fist thudding into flesh and Ben’s grunt of pain. Then I make out the two shadows grappling in the fog, twisting and turning in a macabre dance of death. Suddenly they both lurch sideways, and I hear the crack of splintering wood.

  And a shriek. Ben’s shriek. For the rest of my life, that sound will echo through my nightmares.

  A figure looms over me, broad-shouldered and cloaked in mist. “Thank you,” I whisper.

  Just before everything fades to black.

  * * *

  —

  I cannot move my head. A cervical brace encases my neck and shoulders as I lie flat on my back in the ambulance, and I can only stare straight up, where I see the reflection of flashing blue lights on my IV pole. Police radios chatter outside and I hear yet another vehicle arrive, tires crackling over gravel.

  A light shines in my left eye, then my right.

  “Pupils are still equal and reactive,” the paramedic says. “Ma’am, do you know what month it is?”

  “September,” I murmur.

  “What day?”

  “Monday. I think.”

  “Okay. Good.” He reaches up to adjust the bag of saline that’s hanging over my head. “You’re doing great. Let me just tape down that IV line more securely.”

  “Did you see him?” I ask.

  “See who?”

  “Captain Brodie.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “When you came up to get me, he was there, on the widow’s walk. He saved my life.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. The only person I saw up there with you was Mr. Haskell. He’s the one who called the ambulance.”

  “Ned was there?”

  “He’s still right outside.” The paramedic sticks his head out the back of the ambulance and calls out: “Hey, Ned, she’s asking about you!”

  A moment later, I see Ned’s face looking down at me. “How’re you feeling, Ava?”

  “You saw him, didn’t you?” I ask.

  “She’s asking about someone named Brodie,” the paramedic explains. “Says he was up there on the widow’s walk.”

  Ned shakes his head. “The only people I saw up there were you and Ben.”

  “He tried to kill me,” I say softly.

  “I wasn’t sure about him, Ava. All these years, I wondered how Jessie really died. And when Charlotte…”

  “The police thought you killed her.”

  “So did everyone else. When you got involved with Ben, I worried it was happening all over again.”

  “That’s why you followed him here?”

  “I heard you screaming up on the roof, and I knew. I think I always knew it was him. But no one listened to me, and why would they? He was the doctor and I’m just…”

  “The man who tells the truth.” If my wrist wasn’t encased in bandages, if it didn’t hurt just to move, I would have grasped his hand. There’s so much I want to say to him, but the paramedics have already started the engine and now it’s time to leave.

  Ned climbs out and swings the door shut.

  I’m trapped, stiff as a mummy in my neck brace,
so I can’t look out the rear window at the morgue van that’s waiting to transport the body of Ben Gordon. Nor can I catch a final glimpse of the house where I would have met my death, were it not for Ned Haskell.

  Or was it the ghost who saved me?

  As the ambulance bounces down the driveway, I close my eyes and once again I see Jeremiah Brodie standing on the widow’s walk, keeping watch as he always has.

  As he always will.

  Thirty

  A white curtain hangs beside my bed, cutting off my view of the doorway. My hospital room is a double, and the patient in the other bed is a popular woman who has a steady stream of visitors bearing flowers. I can smell the scent of roses, and through the curtain I hear greetings of: “Hi, Grandma!” and “How ya feeling, honey?” and “We can’t wait for you to come home!” The voices of people who love her.

  On my side of the curtain there is silence. My only visitors have been Ned Haskell, who stopped by yesterday to assure me that he is looking after my cat, and the two Maine State Police detectives who came to see me this morning, to ask many of the same questions they asked me yesterday. They have searched Ben’s house and they found the painting I described. They found his laptop, which contained photos of me as well as Charlotte, taken with a telephoto lens through our bedroom window. Perhaps what happened to me is also how it happened to Charlotte: a flirtation between the town doctor and the pretty new tenant of Brodie’s Watch. Had she sensed a disturbing undercurrent in his pursuit and tried to break it off? Faced with rejection, had he reacted with violence, just as he had with fifteen-year-old Jessie Inman two decades ago?

  When you own a boat, it’s easy to dispose of a body; what’s difficult is hiding the fact your victim has gone missing. He’d packed up Charlotte’s belongings and made it appear to everyone that she had left town on her own, but details had eventually tripped him up: the PO box overflowing with her mail. The decomposing body that unexpectedly surfaced in the bay. And her car, a five-year-old Toyota packed with her belongings, which only yesterday was found abandoned fifty miles from Tucker Cove. Had it not been for those details—and for all the questions I kept asking—no one would have known that Charlotte Nielson never made it alive out of the state of Maine.