Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (23 page)

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, hell
, 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 fishing 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 shivered 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 massive 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 fishing boat’s transom like an invitation.

Not quite close enough … but a line ran from a cleat on the fishing boat’s rail, extending toward shore. 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.

B
Y 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 fishing 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 shifted 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 rushing 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 shore.

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 shore 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 shore 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 shore, 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.

Waves
, thought Jake. And water, twenty feet of it. Walking, at that point, might not be appropriate. Or possible.

But swimming wouldn’t be, either. Bella slogged forward once more, making pretty good headway until another, bigger wave hit her amidships, nearly capsizing her.

Uh-oh
, Jake thought. “Bella, I want you to listen to me.”

“I’m listening.” Bella got her feet back underneath her on the submerged sand, tried another step, and stopped dead, water swirling around her waist.

“What is it you’d like to suggest, Jake? That we walk some more? Because I’m sorry, but I—”

“Yeah, me neither.” Walking had indeed dropped off the list of options available.

“No, we’re done with that.” Overhead, the stars had begun fading. The sky, without becoming any lighter at all, had changed from indigo to a charcoaly hue that meant dawn would come soon. A line of pink edged the eastern horizon.

Jake tried stepping forward again, noticed that her feet were instead making little paddling motions. Now, too late, she understood why Randy Dodd had turned tail so suddenly.

It wasn’t the helicopter that had spooked him, she understood now, though that might’ve been enough to get him moving all by itself. It was the tide. He’d seen it turning. And he’d known he had to get back across the sandbar while he still could.