Home Repair Is Homicide - Crawlspace Part 5

Chip nodded slowly, frowning. "We didn't know the other Dodd brother ran a bar," he said. "What a blunder. All the research I did, how'd I miss that?"

As a onetime financial pro and longtime Eastport resident who heard what there was to hear-which in Eastport was plenty-Jake could have told him that for tax reasons, the Lang sisters and their husbands had been incorporated for business purposes. So none of their names were in the kinds of public records Chip would have had access to.

But Chip Hahn's problems were the least of her worries all of a sudden; she turned back to Ellie. "Sam was on the breakwater last night to help a fellow haul his boat."

Pull it out of the water for the winter, in other words, so it could be stored under a tarp or a roof from now until spring. Home from college on his independent-study semester, during which he hoped to finish many of his engineering-major electives in one one fell swoop- Or swell foop, as he would've called it; he was, despite his diagnosis and treatment, still quite severely dyslexic.

-Sam was learning Morse code, doing a biology experiment on seaweed, writing a research paper about the Spanish Inquisition, and auditing a cla.s.s in electronic communications at the marine center in Eastport.

Still, he made time to do a lot of odd jobs around the dock and elsewhere in town, for spending money and because he enjoyed it. He'd put the brand-new karaoke system into Roger Dodd's bar, for example, and spent hours testing and tuning the equipment.

"But he didn't let the dogs out this morning, and his bed was made," Ellie said.

Outside, Bob Arnold's car stalled again.

"Right," Jake said. "That's why I'm starting to think he didn't come home last night at all, and I wonder if maybe ..."

But Ellie was already on her way out the door, to catch up with Bob Arnold before the Crown Vic finally managed to get its backfiring, fumes-spewing act together.

WHEN CAROLYN RATHBONE WOKE UP, SHE COULDN'T SEE, speak, or move. Terror set her heart hammering again. Caught ...

Gagged with tape and wrapped in a roll of blankets with even her head covered, she'd felt the man lifting her from the car trunk. Sometime after that, she'd pa.s.sed out. But how long ago?

She couldn't tell. The faint clang of footsteps going down a metal stair had been followed by the creaking of a dock. Then she was falling, cras.h.i.+ng into something hard.

She'd felt a part of her hand twist as it struck something, with a flare of pain that rocketed up her arm. An instant later her head landed and bounced, knocking her unconscious.

Now the surface she lay on, whatever it was, rocked gently. The salty smell of the sea mingled with the harsh reek of diesel fumes, strong even through the blanket. A boat ...

Despair clutched her. He was taking her out onto the ocean, where no one could hear her scream. But then ...

"Mmgh." Her own voice, she thought it must be at first. Through the pain of her injured hand, her head's awful thudding, and the harsh agony of barely being able to breathe at all, she couldn't tell what sounds were coming from where.

The boat's engine started up, a low, liquid grumble not far from where she lay. Fright and nausea mingled as she remembered that she got seasick, and that the tape he'd stuck over her mouth was still there Not that way, oh please, I don't want to die, but if I have to, please not like that, not strangling on my own ...

Control of her limbs returned suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped inside her. From frozen in terror to wild with it, her heart slamming madly inside the cage of her ribs, she writhed frantically until the side of her face pressed the rough-textured blanket he'd wrapped her in.

Tears and sweat soaked the tape on her mouth. Rubbing her cheek back and forth against the blanket, she managed to peel the strip of sticky stuff-and most of her skin, too, it felt like-partly off. The rest of it came free when she wrenched her jaws apart.

She worked her mouth around, trying to get the stiffness out of her jaw. Then she froze as from somewhere nearby came that odd sound again. A groan of pain, it sounded only half conscious.

A man, she thought. Or a boy. Not Chip. She'd have known his voice. Someone else ...

Gulping in huge, luxurious breaths, she tried thinking about what the sounds might mean but could only get her mind to take in the present moment.

Now. For right now, I'm alive. ... Breathing helped, and so did the realization that at least she'd done something about her situation.

Not that it would make a difference. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she knew, guys like the one who had her made sure in advance that no meaningful resistance was possible.

And they knew it, too. Because most of them had done it before. So fighting would achieve nothing. And yet ...

Her cheek went on burning. Gradually, she realized that she was still rubbing it against the rough blanket. Back and forth ...

And now the blanket was moving. With each motion of her head it slid more, until the tightly wrapped hood loosened to a cowl.

A gleam of light penetrated it. Turning slightly, she pushed the blanket's fold past her right ear. Because ...

I want to see, she thought. I want to see his face.

Another low groan came from nearby; this time she ignored it. Coldhearted, maybe, but too bad. Carolyn did not believe herself to be a nice person, even in the best of situations. And anyway, what could she do about it?

She wasn't even convinced that she could save herself-the opposite, in fact. Sorry, buddy, she thought, but you don't sound like help to me. So sayonara.

Meanwhile, she did at least have a plan: get this blanket off her face so she could see the son of a b.i.t.c.h who'd grabbed her. Maybe he would end up killing her anyway.

Probably he would. She'd seen enough crime-scene photos and other evidence not to have many illusions about that.

Still, before he did whatever it was he'd brought her out here to do, she meant to see him.

To look right at him, not crying, if she could help it- ... she might not be able to help it ...

-and spit in his eye.

"STILL GOT THAT GREAT RIGHT ARM?" BACK IN THE CITY, IT had been Chip's ability to throw a baseball that first caught Sam's interest.

Beside Jake in the car, Chip managed to look pleased and discomfited at the same time.

"Yeah. I guess. Haven't used it a lot, lately. Few friends of mine, we get together in summer when we can."

He fell silent for a moment, then went on. "Listen, I'm sorry about this."

"Don't worry about it. Not your fault." Though whose it was she couldn't imagine, either.

She and Chip Hahn had left the police station an hour ago, and since then she'd been calling everyone she could think of who might know where Sam was. But she'd reached only the guy who'd hired Sam the night before.

Down at the breakwater last night at about eleven-fifteen, Sam had finished cranking a twenty-two-foot Sea Ray onto a trailer, then signaled that the boat and trailer were good to go. The guy who'd hired Sam had pulled the trailer out of the water, stopped to pay Sam the twenty bucks they'd agreed on, and continued home.

He'd offered Sam a ride, he said, but Sam had his bike with him and said he'd be riding it. And that was the last the guy had seen of him.

Now it was late morning; beside Jake, Chip gazed out the car's pa.s.senger-side window at the north end of town. Moose Island was only seven miles long by about two miles wide, not much territory at all for everyday purposes. But it was vast if you were searching for someone.

A gravel turnaround edged the gra.s.sy bluffs overlooking the Old Sow whirlpool and the U.S. geological survey marker. From here you could see all the way up the Western Pa.s.sage.

On the Canadian side, the distant hills rising up out of the landma.s.s of New Brunswick had snow on them already, white between the dark stands of old trees. "I don't understand," she said.

They'd found Sam's old red three-speed leaning against the rear wall of Rosie's hot dog stand between the picnic tables and the trash barrels, not far out on the breakwater near the boat ramp.

"If he'd meant to ride his bike home," she wondered aloud, "why's it still there?"

"Someone could've picked him up in a car," Chip said. "In which case he's probably still somewhere on the island."

She glanced sideways at him. "Because?" He'd been quiet for a while; now she recalled how smart he'd been, back in the city.

"Bob Arnold said he saw everyone who crossed the causeway late last night," he reminded her. "I suppose Sam could've gone somewhere on foot, then got driven to the mainland later."

"We'd still have heard from him by now," she objected.

It hadn't always been true. For the past ten years, Sam's life had been an ongoing battle against the bottle, with as many skirmishes lost as won.

But just two nights ago she'd stood out in the yard with him and the dogs, watching a vee of Canada geese whistle south across the full moon. Sam's face in the moonlight was bluish-white.

"I know why they fly that way," he'd said in that grown-up man's voice he had now. "What's that vee remind you of, those two lines they make?"

She'd been working with him on Morse code and reading with him about its science: how it got sent and received.

"An antenna?" she guessed.

He nodded. "Got it in one. See, geese navigate by magnetic field. That's how they migrate, and I think that vee shape they form when they fly is how they sense it."

She'd turned, amazed. "You read that somewhere?" It knocked her out, sometimes, how much he was like his father, Victor.

The late great. Victor at his best. "No," Sam said. "I just think so."

They had followed the dogs back to the house, calling them when they strayed into the adjoining yards. "Not that a goose isn't great all by itself," he'd added. "But it's when they get together that they can really do something special."

It was the last time she'd talked with him. Now she scanned to her right and left for him as she drove slowly on Water Street past the a.s.sisted living facility, a long, low waterside building that had once been a sardine cannery.

There'd been fifteen of them in the late 1890s when Joseph Paducah Lang made the cans to supply them all, she recalled, mean while trying to stay calm, trying not to think about what might have happened to Sam. Fifteen canneries crowded along the island sh.o.r.e, employing some eight hundred people, cutting the small fish and packing them Sam, she thought.

"Bob Arnold also said there was a car stolen last night, but it got returned to its owner," Chip said. "Remember?"

"So?" The day had brightened, then gone sour again. Weather in Eastport in November was notoriously fickle. She hoped Sam was not out in the cold somewhere, as sleet spattered the winds.h.i.+eld; she ran the wipers again.

Sam, where are you?

"So the only safe place to leave a stolen car," Chip said, "where the police won't be able to draw any conclusions about you from it, is back where you got it. Someone knew that, and cared."

She glanced again at him, surprised; he shrugged modestly in reply. "Hey, I told you I worked for a crime writer. I'm used to thinking about this stuff."

But not to living it. No one ever was. Out on the water, the Coast Guard's orange Zodiac and her crew practiced water rescues, tossing and retrieving a man-shaped dummy. Cold duty, but at least once a year they did it for real, so they rehea.r.s.ed. At the wharf by the Chowder House restaurant, closed for the season, a few lobster traps were being put onto the deck of a tubby little wooden boat.

It was the season for lobster fis.h.i.+ng now that the creatures were done with their yearly molting. Soon the boats would be out in force, no matter the weather.

Randy Dodd had gone overboard in November. If he had.

Funny thing about work in Eastport, that somehow the best season for it was always the worst weather for the people who did it. Warm day, though, she recalled, when Randy went over.

"A car you used to transport someone ... or something?" Chip mused aloud. "To a boat, maybe? That's the only other way to get off this island efficiently, right?"

She nodded. "Which brings us to the guy in the mask."

On the dock the night before ... Because if you knew from personal experience, as Randy would have, that local kids hung out on the dock at night, and if you wanted to be prepared to get rid of them if you needed to, so they wouldn't see something-or see you-that's what you'd bring along. A fright mask, or something like it.

"Maybe Sam did see someone on the breakwater," Chip said. "While he was helping to haul the boat, or afterwards. Did he know Randy Dodd? Would he have recognized him?"

"He used to crew for Randy," she replied. "A few years ago, before he went away to school. So yes, Sam would know him if he saw him."

But then it hit her how ridiculous she was being. She wanted an answer to where Sam was, and in the absence of anything else she was fastening on to Chip's theory.

Trouble was, Randy being alive still didn't make any sense. The fingernails that had been found stuck in his trapline showed that, even if nothing else did.

She bit her lip hard, drew warm blood before she trusted her voice enough to speak. For almost a year now, Sam had been as sober and as reliable as the tides.

He could've fallen off the wagon again. But she didn't think he had. Something had happened to him, something bad. She wished her husband, Wade Sorenson, was home.

For a moment she pictured Wade, tall and solid with brush-cut blond hair and pale eyes that were blue or gray, depending upon the weather. Wade was calm and silent, a man p.r.o.ne to doing things instead of talking about them.

A native Mainer, he knew everyone in the county, too, and if he was here he would be calling them, thinking of more things to try, and trying them. And perhaps most usefully of all, they could lean on each other.

But he wasn't here. He'd left that morning to go on a deer-hunting trip, before she was awake. She didn't know if she could even reach him.

"Randy Dodd's dead, Chip. I don't know what happened to your friend, Carolyn"-Sam, where are you? she thought helplessly-"but Randy's not lurching around here like some zombie, kidnapping people."

When they were boys, Chip and Sam had been fans of all things horror-related: books and comics, films and video games. Probably one or both of them had owned a scary mask like the one the guy had been wearing on the breakwater last night.

"Zombies don't kidnap people," Chip said with a small smile, seeming to follow her thought. "They eat 'em. Vampires just drink your blood. Shape-s.h.i.+fters might kidnap you, or ghouls. But-"

She smiled back in spite of herself. "You haven't changed much, have you? Are you still interested in strange music, too, the way you used to be?"

"I am. I might even try writing about it," he added, clearly gratified that she remembered. "And I have a bigger project in mind to do, too." He hesitated. "But there are some things I have to clear up with Carolyn first." At this, he looked miserable again.

"What is it, Chip? No," she added, "don't bother denying it. I know you, remember? And I know that look on your face."

She'd last seen it when she'd tried asking about his family, years earlier in New York. He'd given her a brief, useless answer whose unspoken message was Don't ask me again.

So she hadn't. "Spill it," she said now.

Whereupon he broke down and revealed to her how much work he'd done on Carolyn Rathbone's books, and how little credit he had received.

"People want to think she does it all," he said simply, "so we let them. It's just good business."

They pa.s.sed the ma.s.sive granite-block post office on Water Street, and across from it the Moose Island general store. "Even those strange e-mails I got," Chip said. "I replied in her name, not mine. I'm supposed to be invisible."

"And you resented that?" She pulled over in front of the bar Roger Dodd ran, on the first floor of a two-story brick building a few doors down from the store.

With its side window overlooking the length of Water Street, the Artful Dodger had a view of nearly the whole downtown.

"No," Chip said. "That's what I signed on for, I knew what I was doing, so how could I have resented it later?"