Home Repair Is Homicide - Crawlspace Part 17

Toward the sandbar. "The tide's turning," she said. "It's why he started back. We've got to get over there, too, before the water's too deep to walk across."

In the moonlight, her bony face was terrified. But her words didn't match her look. "Once we're there, I'm not sure what we'll do," she said.

She's still scared to death, Jake realized. Like me.

"But if we don't go," Bella continued, "you know as well as I do he's going to kill them."

It was enough to get Jake moving. Letting go of Bella, she tested the ankle once more, winced, and sucked in a breath as it signaled its determination not to function, or at least not without torturing her.

Screw you, she thought at it, and at any other body parts that thought they could run the show just because they happened to be attached. Then she took another step. It wasn't quite so painful this time. Probably because I've already severed all the important nerves in there, she thought.

Moments later she stepped into the cold salt water, now already lapping at the edges of the sandbar. As Bella had said, the tide was coming in.

Soon it would cover the temporary land bridge leading to Digby. But an icy bath, just as Bella had also said, did indeed make Jake's ankle feel better. And ...

Sam. She couldn't leave him here. She just couldn't. Not without at least trying ...

"Fine. Let's take it a step at a time," she gasped to Bella, who went on struggling along beside her.

So they leaned on each other and did.

THE HELICOPTER WOKE CHIP HAHN OUT OF A FROZEN HALF sleep. He'd been drifting out here for hours, it felt like, in the cold, fogbound darkness, just letting the tide and currents take him where they wanted to go, in the engineless boat.

He'd had no other choice. Even waiting for daylight wasn't a great bet, he'd figured out, since when it did come he might find himself in open water.

On the ocean. Far out on it, since for all he knew, that was where the current he was riding went. It sped him along as if an engine were pus.h.i.+ng him, he just couldn't tell to where. When the copter came, he'd thought for an instant that he was rescued.

But no such luck. The searchlights had come within a few hundred yards of where he'd stood in his small, disabled vessel, yelling and waving.

But that few feet might as well have been miles, for all the good the searchers had done him. They simply hadn't quite seen him, hadn't quite been close enough.

He sank back against the transom. The jagged rocks and arrowhead-shaped trees he was beginning to be able to make out in the moonlight now that the fog had cleared were all he could see. He was in a cove, surrounded on three sides by a pale sh.o.r.eline, here and there a few feet of beach studded with indistinct shapes and a lot of trees behind them.

The shapes were probably rocks. With the life jacket on, he might be able to swim to them. What he would do then, he didn't know. Getting to the sh.o.r.e would be hard enough, but getting from there to any kind of help could be an even more difficult task.

He didn't know how far it might be, or in which direction. He wouldn't even know which way to try. Useless, he berated himself bitterly, just a freaking useless little ...

Then he saw the fis.h.i.+ng boat. It floated very nearby, tucked under a dead, fallen tree whose matted branches formed a sort of awning over the water.

No light, no sound came from the vessel. Just a dark shape in a dark place. The waves lapping at its side made a faint gleaming line in the moonlight.

Soundless, ghostlike. Chip wasn't making any sound, either, and he resolved to go on not making any for as long as he could. The current kept rus.h.i.+ng him toward those branches and the boat.

And because his engine was dead and he couldn't steer at all without it, there was nothing he could do about that. Or ... Wait a minute, Chip thought. He was under power. Just not engine power.

Even as he thought this he was lifting his rump and planting it on the transom seat, gripping the Evinrude's throttle arm in his cold, stiff hand. Turn to the right, the boat's nose veered left, powered by the current. Turn to the left ...

Oh, h.e.l.l, he thought miserably, I can do something. Which meant he had to; for one thing, impact would occur in about five seconds if he didn't. Noisy impact ...

Desperately he hauled on the tiller; obediently, the little boat swerved around the thick, white, dead branch hanging down in front of him like a roadblock.

Holding his breath, Chip felt it go by with inches to spare. Thankyouthankyouthankyou, he thought. But it wasn't over yet.

Ahead hung a thick, dense curtain of thinner branches. I'm not the right guy for this. Plump and bookish. And timid ...

A stump rose out of the water at him. He pulled hard again. This time he was rewarded by a patch of clear water. Chip gasped inwardly as his little craft slid silently up against the larger vessel.

All silent above, too. Chip wanted to call out, to find out this very second if Carolyn was up there and still alive. Sam, too, maybe. But he didn't dare make a sound. Any instant now, he expected Randy Dodd's grinning face to pop up at him from the fis.h.i.+ng boat's stern.

Randy, whose own brother, Roger, said Randy was a killer. That while Randy was away, he had gotten a taste for it ...

Chip s.h.i.+vered as the current wedged his small boat tighter against the stern of the larger one, between it and half a tree trunk, broken off like some ma.s.sive white bone slanting down into the water alongside him.

He swallowed hard. He had no plan, no weapon, and no way to call help. Also, he noticed tardily-but there was not much he could've done about it earlier, was there?-no way to run.

Which was the option he would certainly have chosen had it existed. As it was, however, a metal ladder hung from the fis.h.i.+ng boat's transom like an invitation.

Not quite close enough ... but a line ran from a cleat on the fis.h.i.+ng boat's rail, extending toward sh.o.r.e. If Chip could grab that, he could pull himself ...

Here I am, the silent boat seemed to be saying to him. Here I am, kid ... . Wanna come aboard?

No, Chip thought. I most definitely do not want to. But his hand reached out anyway. His fingers grasped the line and pulled his own craft nearer to the ladder.

Hand over hand, he worked his way along the line. It bounced tautly each time he grabbed it. At last he pulled his body over onto the ladder and began climbing.

He was about halfway up the ladder when he heard something.

CAROLYN LAY EXHAUSTED AND BEATEN, ONE RUBBED RAW hand still on the rope knotted in the cleat, when she felt it tighten. It began quivering rhythmically as somewhere out in the darkness some other hand gripped it and began moving along it.

Randy. Randy was coming back ... now. With her breath coming in harsh sobs, she rushed to crouch by Sam and tell him.

Sam's eyes opened. "Below. Get below ... find ..."

His words snapped her to alertness, finally; she knew he was right. This wasn't over; not yet. Help hadn't come, though she'd screamed her lungs out as the helicopter flew near.

Just not near enough. Still, if she followed Sam's advice now, she might not need help at all, because if Randy was coming onto the boat and she couldn't get off, she would just have to ...

Ambush him. Go down there in the cabin and wait. He would climb aboard, notice her missing, and ...

Stick his head through the hatchway, maybe. Or lunge through with his entire body.

She would have to be ready. And now, as the quivering of the taut rope grew stronger, she thought that possibly she could be. After all, booze and junk food and a rancid-tasting jug of stale water probably weren't the only things stowed down there.

No, whispered the girls. The girls in graves, their voices a whispered chorus of trembling eagerness ...

So long denied. So coldly silent. Until now.

No, there are ...

Knives. Fish knives. Big, sharp ones.

CHAPTER 7.

BY THE TIME THEY'D GOTTEN HALFWAY ACROSS THE SANDBAR, Jake was having second thoughts. But when she voiced them, Bella shook her head stubbornly.

"We're all the way out here. We might as well get a look at him," she said as she trudged grimly ahead.

We are insane, Jake thought. But she went on slogging through the wet sand, too, since for one thing if Bella wouldn't back out of this, she couldn't, either.

"Yeah, well, what I'm worried about now is that he's going to get a look at us," she whispered. "And then he's going to take a shot at us."

"We're here. He's here. Sam might be here," insisted Bella. "I'm not going back."

It was still dark, a couple of hours yet before sunrise, and as cold as the grave out here. Jake told herself firmly to think of some other comparison, but she couldn't.

"You," she told Bella, "have even less sense than I do, did you know that?"

As she spoke, she stepped into a foot-deep hole that she had not seen because it was underwater. This put her soaked-to-the-skin-and-chilled-to-the-bone line right up around her hip.

"Oof," she said, catching herself just in time to keep the line from rising swiftly above her head. Bella seized her arm and held it.

"Yes, I do know that. You're the one who hadn't noticed until now. But never mind. That's it, over there."

Digby, she meant. Moonlight slanted across the expanse of water, picking out the shapes of the trees on the island ahead. To the left they were pointed firs, cut-out black arrowheads against the sky.

To the right the vegetation looked thicker. Jake imagined tangles of brushy softwood, mountain ash and sumac mingled with blackberry vines; that's what wild land grew around here. With a machete, the going might be difficult.

Without one, difficult was a mild term for what bushwhacking through it would be. And that, of course, was the direction Bella was aiming toward.

But the trees and brush weren't what she pointed at. "Boat," she said quietly.

Jake nodded silently as she spotted it, too, half hidden in the gloom. It was a squat, blocky shape like a kid's drawing of a fis.h.i.+ng boat: wheelhouse, rail, a few bright, sloppy little waves running along its side.

It was pulled in under a long-ago-fallen tree, which made a canopy over it. Nothing moved on it. Bella stopped, staring at the dark, silent vessel sitting there motionless.

Bad ankle or no, the sight of the boat banished Jake's pains. She shook Bella's hand off her arm. "Sam could be on there." She started forward.

Bella caught her. "Probably he is. Maybe the girl, too."

Carolyn Rathbone. "But unless you're planning to get them both killed and us with them ..."

On the boat, a dark shape moved briefly. Jake kept her eyes on it, but it didn't move again. Maybe it was just a shadow, the light changing as the boat s.h.i.+fted in the tide.

Which, she noticed nervously, had now risen to mid-calf on her frozen legs, running fast. Its pressure was an insistent shove whose ripples sent regular stabs of frozen pain all the way to her backbone.

"We've found them," Bella went on. "We can tell people where they are now. That's what we came here to do, and-"

"Are you kidding?" Jake turned in disbelief. "I thought you wanted to do something about this. We're all the way out here, we've got them in our sights, and-"

"What sights?" Bella demanded fiercely. "We don't have any weapons, we're soaked and half frozen, what do you suggest?"

Jake said nothing. Bella went on: "I said we should see. We have. But, Jacobia, that man has nothing to lose."

Jake felt her body slump in defeat. But then she took stock of her surroundings again, and disappointment changed to something else.

Anxiety, maybe. Or ... fright. Because in the few moments that they'd been standing there, the water now rus.h.i.+ng over the sandbar had quickened to a torrent. Deeper, too. Much deeper ...

"Come on." Bella had turned her back on the boat. "We've got to get somewhere that has a phone, so we can-"

"Right." Jake pulled one foot out of the sandbar, which had become less solid and more ... liquidy, sort of. It sucked at her shoe, nearly pulling it off, when she took a step.

And then another step, even more difficult, as if something down there was pulling hard in its own direction; harder, even, than Jake was pulling in hers.

"Bella? I think we've got a ..."

Situation. Because the tide had turned, and as it came in, it wanted to pull everything in its path along with it. To that implacable surge of water, she and Bella were pieces of flotsam, just stuff to be hustled along with the rest that was lying along the sh.o.r.e.

The word futile popped into Jake's head as she made yet another attempt to haul a foot out of yet another ice-cold, salt-water-based, ferociously sucking sand pit. Then everything else left her thoughts except trying to escape.

Trying and failing. The tall, bony woman beside her fought also to make some sort of headway. With each step, her foot made a sound like ... like the top of a sealed jar of something glutinous being opened.

Ahead, the dark sh.o.r.e they'd come from beckoned. Half a mile or so past that, the car waited. Five minutes after they reached it, they'd be in St. Stephen.

From there they could call help: cops, ambulances if necessary.

Please don't let ambulances be necessary.

But for right now, the task was to get to sh.o.r.e before the tide got too much higher. And at the moment, the tide was winning.

"Listen, I think we'd better-"

"What? Take a rest? Pray for deliverance?" Bella gasped. The ropy-armed old housekeeper, who could haul a full-sized vacuum cleaner up and down two steep flights of stairs without seeming a bit inconvenienced, sounded winded.

The water was up to their waists. Jake's feet were so numb with cold, she couldn't even tell anymore when they were stuck in sand-muck and when they were being released. The sucking, slurping sounds had also vanished, replaced by the gurgle of surging water; only a few inches of forward motion every so often told her they were making any progress at all.

And the sh.o.r.e, as best she could estimate in the dark before dawn, was still a good hundred yards or so distant.

"No," she said with what little breath she could spare. "We don't have time to rest."

As for getting saved, previous life experience had clued her in pretty thoroughly to the likelihood of that possibility: i.e., not very. "How deep do you suppose the water gets here at high tide, anyway?"

"Twenty feet," Bella exhaled. She seized Jake's hand, tried pulling her forward again, then stumbled and nearly fell into the waves herself.