HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (4 page)

Something moved on the porch, a humped shadow, from right to left across the doorway. Then it moved back in the other direction, a pale blur of movement, a silhouette in the porch light.

She found her voice, a good voice, a good and powerful singing voice, a
helluva set of pipes
her father had told her more than once, and Elizabeth screamed, and screamed loudly.

CHAPTER FIVE

By two o’clock in the morning, the rain was turning to snow. It was mid-March, and snow was still a grim possibility at this time of year. Tom Milliner still sat in his living room, watching with a certain displeasure as the large, white flakes fell outside.

He hadn’t changed out of his soaking wet clothes; only his boots and jacket had been removed. The red-checked jacket, which had been drenched with the rain, dripped on one of the mudroom hooks where it had been hung an hour earlier.

Tom’s house in the Acres was a modest two-bedroom. He’d bought it four years before for ninety-five thousand. The Acres, altogether, had been bought up nearly a century earlier and had been long since sub-divided. There were over a hundred lots. Tom’s, a sizeable three acres, was right smack in the middle. It was one of only a few vinyl-sided homes among the subdivision, built as a chalet. A narrow living room bordered two small bedrooms, next to a kitchen, above which was a loft. There was no lake to overlook, no river burbling past, but it was all he needed, tucked away amid the slender pines.

The young man walked through the kitchen and into the living room and smiled softly at Tom. It was strange, having him there. No one else had been in the house since Stephanie, not for two years. Tom had no children — Steph had a son, a sixteen-year-old named Brian who had claimed the loft while he’d been there. To have Christopher in the house caused a stirring in Tom’s stomach, a queasy, nostalgic feeling. He smiled back at the young man and suggested that he sit down.

Christopher sat on the couch which faced the picture window. There was no television in the living room. Tom didn’t own one.

Christopher and Tom looked out the window. The large snowflakes spiraled lazily down.

“Thanks for letting me stay. It’s unusual for a policeman, isn’t it?”

“You want anything?”

“No, I’m fine, thank you,” said Christopher. His voice was low, quiet, mindful of the late hour, perhaps.

Tom opened his mouth, then closed it. He seemed to be having a hard time getting his thoughts together.
It’s all the evasive maneuvering
, Steph would have told him.
You aren’t built for it.

Tom had left on an exterior light, and it illuminated the snow.

“It’s beautiful,” Christopher said.

Tom looked out and nodded. “I didn’t always live here alone.”

“Were you drinking then?”

Tom turned his gaze from the window and studied the kid. Christopher was looking right back at him. His eyes, Tom saw, were green. He realized it was the first time Tom had really seen the kid in the light.

Tom was aware that the question had triggered his defenses, but the kid’s face — something about the look in his eyes — was soothing. Tom looked back out the window, surprised at himself, critical of himself. Worried that he’d just been so easily triggered, and by someone barely half his age. He felt like a man realizing the chickens have come home to roost.

“Yeah,” Tom decided to say. “I was.” He wanted to give the kid the benefit of the doubt, but Christopher had turned away and was looking at his hands, as if he now felt embarrassed for asking.

“I made mistakes,” Tom continued. “In my personal life and on the job.” He hesitated. “What makes you ask that?”

Still looking at his hands, Christopher answered, “A man living alone out in the woods without a drop of alcohol in his home is either Amish or recently sober,” he said, “and we drove here in a Chevy Blazer.”

This made Tom laugh. It sounded loud in the little house, but it felt okay. “What’d you — did you just go through my cupboards? I thought you needed to use the bathroom.”

“You’ve got clear recycling containers in the garage. I saw them when we pulled in. Not a can or bottle. You got me some juice from the fridge, not a thing in there. No wine rack. No mini-bar.”

Tom nodded and looked around the living room, feeling a brief surreal wave as if he were seeing the place for the first time. It passed quickly. He found his eyes drawn to the view again. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Not bad, but my old man used to keep his bottle hidden behind the trash can under the sink. Well, not exactly hidden, but not exactly top-shelf, either. So, you never know.”

The kid didn’t reply to this, but Tom saw in his peripheral vision Christopher’s head lift back up, his hands slip under his thighs in a boyish gesture. It felt like the kid might want to say something else, that there were some other deductive powers he had yet to unveil, but Christopher stayed silent.

“I used to drink vodka,” Tom said. “My father was a whiskey man. He said vodka was for girls and gays. But I was a vodka man, I guess, so I could tell myself I wasn’t like him. In fact, probably the only reason I focused on the vodka, aside from liquor-is-quicker, was to spite him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have cared what I drank.”

Tom broke off. He felt cold. He stood and walked to the thermostat and turned it up past seventy degrees.

“You comfortable?” Tom asked

“Yes.” Christopher wasn’t watching Tom — he was still looking out the window, but something in his posture had changed.

“You sure I can’t get you anything else?”

“No, sir, thank you, I’m fine.”

“Where were you, before you were at the gas station, by that old phone booth? At a friend’s?”

“Is that where you first saw me?”

Tom nodded. He waited for the kid to ask him why the old cop had been sitting and watching a never-used phone booth in the middle of the night.

“I can’t really remember.”

“Having trouble with your memory? We call that ‘convenient amnesia.’” Tom searched the kid for guile but could find none.

“Yes. But I think I’m beginning to understand some things now.”

Tom nodded once, as if this made sense. He was still standing at the thermostat when the kid said: “Look.”

Tom looked out the window at what Christopher was staring at.

The snow fell at a slant now; a northerly wind had kicked up, and blew steadily.

Tom didn’t have much of a lawn to speak of, just a strip of grass in front of the house, a dirt cul-de-sac, and the short driveway; forty-or-so yards of road.

He squinted even though his contact lenses were still in.

There were shapes moving down the driveway, drawing closer. They looked like people.

“Here they are,” Christopher said from the couch behind him.

* * *

Jared stalked slowly across the kitchen and lowered himself into a crouch. Elizabeth felt dizzy on her feet; she felt sick. Her head was swimming, the kitchen yawing out, stretching this way and that, like reflections in a funhouse mirror. She thought of the glinting chips of the wine glass, shattered on the fieldstone walkway. The sound of the glass breaking in her memory brought her back around.

“What’s out there?” Her voice was a whisper. She whispered even though she had screamed. She whispered because her scream had not driven whatever, or whoever, it was away, and she was terrified.

Jared said nothing, but stopped and tensed. Liz shut her mouth tight.

On the porch, something thumped. It sounded like feet to Liz. Like bare feet. There was no mistaking that thump. The one thump, the whickering of something dragging over the wooden slats, then another thump. Like the labored walking of a barefoot intruder.

Both the screen and storm doors were closed, but not locked. Something was working at the handle of the storm door; the pane of Plexiglas rattled, and the door appeared to be tugged at from the other side; its hinges were positioned so that it swung out, the screen door swung in. Now whatever was out there had managed to rotate the old thumb latch handle on the storm door and started to get it open.

“Oh God,” said Liz.

From her position in the doorway of the kitchen, within the vestibule where the stairs led up and where the living room began, Liz could just make out Jared’s Adam’s apple bob once in his neck as he swallowed. He loaded two shells into the shotgun, racked it, and then leveled it.

The storm door inched open a little further, the hinges pealing a short squeal. Then, whatever it was lost its hold and the door sucked back shut.

“Jared,” she called, soft and urgent. “Jared.”

He was rooted where he stood, about six feet from the door, in the middle of the kitchen. The overhead light was on inside, the porch light off. She could see half of Jared’s reflection in the polarized glass, blurred by the screen door in front of it. Neither of them could see much beyond their own images, only that vague hump on the other side.

She was about to suggest calling the police, or suggest going back upstairs and pretending none of it was happening; or going out the front door and running down to the pond, swimming away in the frigid water if they had to, out to where the loon was, out to where sanity lay. And freedom. She was about to say something like this when she heard the sound of the levered handle to the storm door depressed again, turning enough to disengage the latch, the door starting to jerk open once more.

“What is
it?”

Who is it
?

It’s Christopher, it’s just him, he’s come back and he’s confused or maybe . . .

Maybe Christopher had been hurt — maybe whatever was going on with him when he stood in the kitchen was still going on, and he was lying there on the porch and trying to get in, unable to call out, unable to ask for help.

Like an automaton, Elizabeth started across the kitchen, her soft-soled boots moving her quietly and swiftly. Her hand came up to open the screen door but Jared’s arm shot out and stopped her, catching her and blocking her at the upper thighs. He pushed her back, hard enough to make her lose her balance and stumble back a step. The door, still stuttering open, stopped moving, about a foot ajar, and she thought she could see something through the screen mesh, down low, and it looked like skin. Like human skin. Not animal.

Jared was going to shoot someone. He was going to shoot Christopher, she was suddenly and brightly sure of it.

“Jared,” she breathed in alarm. “I think it’s someone. I think it’s—”

Jared’s hand scrabbled at the air before finding purchase on her left thigh, where it once again gripped and squeezed and then shoved. This shove forced her back again, but this time she toppled over.

“Ow!” she cried out, her rear hitting the floor, and at the same time the storm door heaved open the rest of the way.

Jared fell back on his ass and started to scramble backwards across the linoleum. He still had his boots on, and the rubber soles squeaked as he pushed. It was, after all, a freshly washed marvel of a kitchen floor.

Elizabeth realized that whatever, or whoever, was on the porch had still not been scared off. Instead, Elizabeth saw with a distinctly muscle-mushing horror, it was trying to look in.

It wasn’t Christopher.

Her chest felt as though it had collapsed. Her arms and legs were quivering limpets. On her butt, on the floor, right next to Jared and his shotgun, Elizabeth was eye level with the spot where the wooden kickboard of the screen door ended and the mesh began — about two and a half feet above the threshold.

What was outside on the porch was attempting to see in. She saw an eyeball, and a nose. It was as if whatever was out there was somehow on its back, unable to get upright, and she thought fleetingly once again of Christopher.

It wasn’t him. The person or thing on the porch had no hair. She could see its forehead now, and the top of its skull as it strained to lift its head higher, to elevate itself to see over the kickboard, to get a better look in at them.

She and Jared sat breathless, unable to move. Her heart was triphammering — she could feel the pulse in her ears, her jaw, her neck.

They watched the screen door. A hand: human enough maybe, pale and shining wet, with baby-like skin that looked both waxen and delicate, hooked into a claw. It rose up and found the latch to the screen door.

And a second head appeared, right next to the first one, so close that the ears (if they were ears — one appeared as a mere unformed lump of skin) were touching.

Two heads were looking in at them, just behind the screen mesh, peering in with two sets of misshapen eyes — one eye barely articulated, just a small rent, with a murky pea-sized ball within the cleft of skin.

The screen door started to open, and that’s when Jared fired the shotgun.

* * *

Elizabeth had met Christopher at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. She had been eighteen, and he twenty-four.

Jared, she met four years later at a concert. He was the consummate rocker — long, flowing brown hair, torn jeans. He’d played the entire gig — or most of it — with his eyes closed, and when the band had offered him solo time, Jared had been truly magnetic.

They’d made love that night when a group of them — musicians and groupies alike — had shacked up in a wintry board-and-batten cabin in Vermont. He hadn’t initiated the sex; she had. His aloofness had made him all the more appealing, and she’d been unable to resist.

“Get out of here,” Jared said now, the shotgun gripped in his hands in a way that reminded her, absurdly, of him playing guitar. He stood up, pointing the weapon down at the floor, gripping along the stock. “Elizabeth, get out of here.”