Home Repair Is Homicide - Crawlspace Part 27

Stuff swirled around her in the cold water, the seaweed and unidentifiable slimy bits clasping themselves horridly to her. Tendrils of vegetation poked at her eyelids and explored her lips as if seeking a way in.

A convulsive shudder went through her as something curled briefly around her wrist and then was gone. Gah, she thought, but it was too late for disgust.

Too late for anything. The utter foolishness of what she was doing struck her. But she couldn't just leave them, she just ...

The clasping thing grabbed her again, hung on tight. A hand, clinging ... at the same instant the plastic tube she'd given Bella to breathe through floated up, smacking her on the forehead.

Feeling around desperately, her hand found a ma.s.s of hair; she dug her fingers into it, trying to raise it. But it wouldn't come, and with her last sc.r.a.p of panicked energy, she let herself sink, bent her knees, touched the floor with her feet, and pushed.

Whatever she'd grabbed was stuck. Caught on something. Or it was dead weight ... But then as her lungs were about to explode she felt her body surging upward, still dragging a hank of hair ... .

Jake found the ladder by chance, grabbed onto it with one hand, and dragged the hair along with the other. At the top she couldn't climb anymore, with one hand still clutching Bella, but then Bella began moving.

One pale hand waved like a seaweed frond, then grasped the ladder rung in front of it purposefully. Jake hauled herself up out of the hole; right behind her, a wet ma.s.s of henna-red hair burst through the water's surface.

Bella's face followed. Jake seized Bella's shoulders, heaved her up and out of the hole the rest of the way, sucked a breath in, then plunged down through the hole and under again.

This time she opened her eyes, and the h.e.l.l with how it hurt them. Ellie sprawled bonelessly, clothes billowing out around her like laundry in a tub.

Jake wrapped her arms around the cloud of fabric and pushed off again, dragging dead weight. Weeping, sure she had been too late. She reached the ladder, but as she tried to shove Ellie up ahead of her she felt her lungs rebel, sucked in a big breath of seawater, and panicked.

But from above came Bella's hand, searching and finding. She pulled Ellie from the hole, then reached down again and grabbed Jake, who let herself be pulled until her face felt breathable air, then battled the rest of the way herself.

Ellie lay by the trapdoor. Coughing and choking she gagged up an enormous gush of ugly water, rolled over onto her stomach with a groan, and finally spoke.

"You cut it a little close," she said, gasping through the sick, wet-sponge sound of her lungs reinflating.

But she actually smiled when she said it, or at any rate it was as close to a smile as a person could get while regurgitating half the bay.

Jake crawled between the two exhausted-looking women. "Come on. You can finish being sick later. Right now we need to-"

But neither of them were listening to her, staring in horror instead at a ripple appearing suddenly on the murky water in the trapdoor opening.

Randy Dodd's face lunged up out of it, eyes narrowed into a glare of murderous fury and teeth bared. The rest of his big body followed; roaring, he heaved himself up at them.

"Oh, shut up," said Bella tiredly, and stuck her fist out at his nose; it flattened like a tomato. His eyes rolled up whitely as he submerged again, the water closing around him.

Bella slammed the trapdoor shut. "Nice one," said Jake, and would have laughed bitterly. But she was already crying, because all of it was for nothing: Sam.

By now he must be dead; Carolyn Rathbone and Chip Hahn, too. Randy had taken them, and she doubted he'd set his captives up comfortably somewhere to wait for him. She would probably never even find Sam's body, never know- "Come on," she said again, eyeing the trapdoor unhappily. "Let's just get out of here before that jerk decides to try using up another one of his nine lives."

Bella helped Ellie as they struggled up the stairs, pausing to rest sometimes, and sometimes to weep. At the top, the rooms were as Jake had left them, dim and silent. The mingled smells of chlorine and stale beer hung in the still air.

Through the back window overlooking the breakwater, the bay spread out darkly. Some men were unloading something from a small boat, but from this distance she couldn't see what it was and she didn't care anymore, anyway.

She turned from the window. Bella and Ellie were in the bar area, on their way to the front door. Jake could hardly move her feet anymore, she was so exhausted suddenly, the taste of blood on her lips nauseatingly pungent.

Ellie looked back over her shoulder questioningly.

"Give me a minute," Jake began, but then Ellie's expression changed. Turning slowly, Jake faced Roger Dodd, who stood behind her with a gun in his hand.

He put it to her head.

"I want Ellie and Bella to walk outside and get in Jake's car," he said. "Both in the front seat, Ellie driving."

He nudged Jake's scalp with the gun. "Toss her the keys."

Jake found the car keys at the bottom of her pants pocket, tossed them. Ellie caught them as Roger went on, "I'll be right behind."

He marched Jake forward a few steps. "If you do anything but what I tell you, or if you see anyone and try to talk to them or signal them, I'll blow her head off. Then I'll kill myself."

So this was it. The endgame ... "You and Randy were together on it all along, weren't you?" she said dully.

He didn't reply. "Chip Hahn was right about you. I should have seen it, too. But you'd done the grief thing so well. Faked it, that is. And I got snowed by it, just like everyone else. Especially when you faked Sam's call."

Because she'd wanted to believe ...

He nudged her again. "It wasn't all fake. I loved Anne. But my brother, Randy ... well." A humorless laugh escaped him. "You may have noticed that he can be persuasive. Could be, rather."

As was the gun to her head. "He came up with the plan. If I went along with it and helped him, fine," Roger explained. "But if not-"

"He'd kill you, too." She felt his nod of agreement in the movement of the gun barrel, now cold at the base of her skull.

And knew he was still lying. "Do it, please," she told Bella and Ellie. "Do what he says. And, Bella, no heroics."

Bella looked rebellious, but as it sank in that Roger Dodd was in control now, she nodded grimly; she and Ellie went out.

"They'll call help," Jake said when they'd gone. "The minute they get out there, they'll try to-"

Roger reached over the bar to the open cash drawer, scooped out the contents. "n.o.body's around. They're all out searching."

He stuffed the money into his jacket pocket. "And anyway, if anyone tries to stop me, I'll do what I said."

Kill her, he meant. "You don't come back from a thing like this," he said, marching her forward.

She spoke again. "So you helped Randy disappear. You knew he'd come back to kill his wife, and then yours, so the two of you could inherit. That's the way you'd planned it."

"The way he'd planned it," Roger corrected her. "I told you that already. My plan was to let him do the dirty work, then get rid of him."

Keep talking, she thought. "So the map, the fake money, they were all just-"

He laughed again. "Window dressing. To give him something to think about, make him believe I was still on board. I told him if he got in trouble to leave the money where I could retrieve it."

"So he made a map and planned to float it on the same buoy where you left the cash. The fake cash," she said. "So you'd know where he put it."

"Right, so he could get out of the country without trying to smuggle it past customs." He pushed the door open ahead of her. "We'd try again to make the transfer sometime later, I told him."

Outside it was dark and silent. "But you double-crossed him, had the fake money all ready in advance?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, of course I did. My plan was, he'd either get caught-if that happened I'd play victim, of course-or he'd figure it out about the money and when he came back for me, I'd be waiting for him, kill him in self-defense."

He shoved her outside. "I didn't know he'd turned into a nut job. A freaking girl-grabber, the kind you only read about in the paper. Who the h.e.l.l would expect that?"

Glancing up and down the empty street, he kept the gun at her head. "And I didn't know those two goofb.a.l.l.s from the city would show up at the wrong moment, wanting to interview him."

Chip and Carolyn, he meant. He kept close behind her as she crossed the dark parking lot to her car. But as they neared it he slowed uncertainly.

No one was in it. No Ellie, no Bella. Sam, she thought, and then, Oh, the h.e.l.l with it.

They'd be here or they wouldn't. Swiveling on one foot, she ducked hard away from the gun, punched out at Roger, and felt her fist sink into his midsection.

Ellie, hunkered down in the darkness at the rear of the car, jumped out as if on signal and landed a solid jab to the side of his head as he doubled over, wheezing in pain.

Bella jumped out, too, caught the gun he dropped, and pointed it at him as he collapsed. "Think I won't shoot you if you move?" she asked him. "Think I'm scared to?"

But she obviously would and wasn't, so he didn't.

"Jake," said Ellie. "Look."

A man was approaching, running toward them down the street as fast as he could. It was her husband, Wade, and as he ran he was shouting something. When he got nearer and she heard what it was, her knees went wobbly.

"Jake! Are you all right?" He sprinted up to her and threw his arms around her. "We were on the water, we saw the-"

Distress signal. SOS. On the rocks with the flashlight; it felt like forever ago. "Yes," she managed, leaning on him.

Stupid to be this way, so weak and ...

"What did you say?" she demanded, letting him hold her up. A stiff breeze would've knocked her over. "What was it about Sam?"

She'd heard it. But she still couldn't believe it. Then in answer he held her away from him and said the best, loveliest two words in the English language: "He's alive. Jake, they found him alive; he's on the way to the hospital right now and that Chip guy is with him."

She looked around wonderingly. The world wavered in and out. Just then her father drove up behind Wade in his pickup truck.

He slowed. There was someone beside him in the pa.s.senger seat, wet and bedraggled-looking.

He peered at them all, rolled his window down, and spoke: "Anyone missing a girl?"

LATER, AFTER THE HOT SHOWER, HOT TODDIES, AND HOT chowder thickened with Pilot crackers, Jake lay on the couch in the front parlor with the dogs gathered around her and let Wade tell the rest of the story.

"George and I split up," he said. "George took his own boat south, in case Randy Dodd tried for Grand Manan."

Sam was in surgery, doing well so far: pulse, check. Blood pressure, check. Breathing, A-OK.

All the minimum daily requirements. In a few minutes she and Wade would be on their way up to the hospital to see him.

"I went with some other guys, up toward New Brunswick, where you'd seen him," Wade went on.

She managed a smile. Of course Wade had taken her sighting seriously. That was Wade in a nutsh.e.l.l.

"And on the way, we saw this humongous fire start up on one of the islands up there. Big old tree burning. Christ, but it was amazing. Went up like a d.a.m.n torch."

Sam, she thought as Wade went on.

"But by the time we get there, the fire's out, it's dark, sky hadn't cleared yet, and we can't see a thing past the flashlights."

He swallowed some coffee. "So I'm stumbling around out there in the woods with the other guys, I turn around, this thing comes flying out of the dark at me."

Wade wrapped his hands around the mug. "It's a rock, came flying up out of this pit. So we look down there, and there's a guy. Lying down there-I thought he was dead."

The guy being Chip Hahn. "But when I get to him, I can see he's still crawling. Or trying to. He gets one hand uphill, digs in with it. Other one just flops. Then he digs again. We had to fight with him, get him to lie still so we could carry him."

He shook his head, remembering. "Finally one of the other guys had the brains to ask why he wouldn't quit struggling and just let us get him the h.e.l.l out of there."

Meanwhile down on the breakwater Jake's dad had been pulling Carolyn Rathbone out of the water. Like a dead rat, he'd said.

Carolyn was at the hospital now, too.

"That's when he told us where Sam was," Wade said. "Said he was trying to get to him."

Wade stopped, swallowed hard. "He said he wanted to be able to tell you where the body was," he added quietly.

But when they found him by following Chip Hahn's directions, Sam had been alive. "They found the boat, too," Wade added. "The one Chip stole from the fish pier. Down behind the Motel East."

Where Randy must've put it ... "Oh," she said. "Well, that's good, then." Because it would be a shame if Chip were prosecuted for theft, after all he'd been through.

She got up, steadied herself with an effort. "Okay, let me just go get ready." Sam. She still couldn't quite believe it.

Upstairs, she ran a swift hairbrush through her hair, then climbed to the third floor, where she found Bella in her own room, sitting up alertly in bed with her hands folded on the coverlet.

"Ellie all right?" Bella's voice was like a rough stick scratching across an old violin.

"Yes," said Jake. "She's at home. I asked if she wanted to come, but she says she'd rather be tucked up in her own bed."

Bella nodded judiciously. "Where she belongs. Family around her. Like," she added, "me."

"Yes," Jake said, feeling her throat close. She sat down on the edge of Bella's bed, wanting to say something.

But she couldn't. So the two women sat in companionable silence until Bella piped up with something surprising.

"Our backyard neighbor got arrested this afternoon."

"What? The guy with the rose garden?"

Bella nodded drowsily. She'd had several of those toddies urged upon her by Jake's dad.

Not that she'd argued much. "Yes. For making threatening phone calls. Lots of them. He didn't like it when the dogs got into his yard. Cats, either. Or children."

Bella sighed. "Or even a pet ferret one time, from what I understand. So he found out who they all belonged to, and-"