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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 passenger 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 nutshell.

“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 damn 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 hell 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—”

I’m going to kill you!

“So then I wasn’t the only one? Other people had—”

“Complained,” said Bella, closing her eyes. Just resting them, of
course. “Yes. Your father was here when it happened; he told me all about it,” she finished, yawning hugely.

Jake thought about that, and probably would have said something more about it, too.

But Bella had fallen asleep.

A
WEEK LATER, CHIP HAHN AND CAROLYN RATHBONE GOT
out of Eastport at last. Or at least, that was the way they thought of it. Carolyn was driving.

“That’s what they mean about guys like him getting more grandiose as they get sicker,” she said, meaning Randy Dodd.

After five days in the hospital, the doctors had asked Chip if he wouldn’t mind sticking around town for yet another day, for a final neurology checkup.

Considering the importance of the equipment that they wanted
one more look at, he’d complied. He’d hit his head pretty hard somewhere along the way.

But now they’d pronounced him fine. Or as fine as he ever was, he thought ruefully.

“Thinking they can do anything they want and get away with it,” she said. “And that they’re allowed to.”

She glanced at Chip. “He was saving me, you know. To kill me later. Like, to have for a treat.”

Randy’s body had been found in the flooded cellar of his brother’s drinking establishment, the Artful Dodger. His DNA was being matched with evidence gathered from the remains of women down South.

“Yes
,” Chip said. “I know. I mean, I’d figured it out, that he was keeping you around for a reason.”

He let his gaze stray over to her again, enjoying the luxury of being able to look at her at all. She’d had her hair cut in the little salon across the street from the Eastport breakwater, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup.

With a lot of little black curls clinging tightly to her head and her blue eyes washed clean, she looked wonderful to him.

Alive
, he thought. Just … what a pleasure it was.

“So, who do you think really did it?” she asked. “Killed the Lang sisters, Roger’s and Randy’s wives?”

The causeway off the island was a curving concrete band, the water and sky spreading blue on either side of it. But even the beauty of downeast Maine had a horror-show quality to it now, as if any minute something bad could still fly out at them from it.

He thought it might take a lot of miles to lose that gun-shy feeling. “That’s obvious,” he said as they drove off the causeway onto the mainland.

“To me, anyway,” he added. “First Randy Dodd killed his wife, Cordelia. He had to get the ball rolling.”

Once she’d been checked over and pronounced okay herself,
Carolyn had stayed with Chip day and night all the time he was in the hospital. He’d thought at first she just felt obligated to, but then he’d remembered that Carolyn believed obligation flowed only one way.

And it wasn’t outward. “But Roger killed his wife, Anne,” he told her.

“Why so sure?” Carolyn asked as they slowed for the speed limit in Pleasant Point, then accelerated west toward Route 1. At the intersection, she waited for a highballing log truck to go past, then turned left.

By that time Chip had his answer ready. “If you and I were in a murder conspiracy, would you let me push you into doing all the dirty work so I could testify against you later if I had to?”

She shook her head. The black curls bounced prettily. Chip thought again about her staying with him day and night.

He’d been glad for the company. “Nope,” she said. “I’d make you do some of the bad stuff, too. So we’d be equally guilty.”

Around them now on either side of the road were only trees; they continued speeding south. “And there’s another thing. Those fingernails,” he said, still thinking about it.

“What about them?” Carolyn pulled out around a slow-moving pickup truck with a load of lobster traps piled in the bed, sped past it, and tucked the Volvo back into the right lane again.

She was a good driver; a little fast but accurate and very efficient. Chip relaxed in the passenger seat.

“Randy had to remove them somehow. His own fingernails. Can you imagine how painful that would be? But they had to be found stuck in his trapline so it would look as if he drowned trying to get free. Now, how do you suppose he did that?”

She made a face. “Knowing him, I’d say he just yanked them out with a pair of pliers. But no one could, so …”

“Right. He’d have needed help. Local anesthetic would be the best. Injected. And Roger Dodd used to be a paramedic.”

She looked over appreciatively. “So he could have stolen the painkillers Randy would need. But only if he already knew …”

Chip nodded. “That he needed them. Which meant he’d have had to be on board with Randy’s plan from the start.”

Evergreen forest spread out on either side of the road, dark and deep. “But even with a busted alibi, he still has the perfect guy to blame it all on. His brother, Randy.”

“Roger threatened those three women. Held them at gunpoint after they got out of that cellar,” Carolyn objected. “He was why they were down there in the first place; he lured them there.”

“So they say. He tells a different story. He says he called Jake Tiptree only to warn her that Randy might be around. He also says he never harmed or threatened them, that they misinterpreted all that because they were so distraught. He denies everything.”

They drove for a while in silence. Then: “They’ll get him for being part of it,” Chip said at last. “But it all makes me wonder whether maybe Roger was really the one who planned it from the start, and not Randy at all.”

Carolyn looked questioningly at him. He could see her mind working behind those blue eyes of hers.

“You mean, maybe Randy just thought it was all his idea?”

Chip shrugged. “Roger ended up with all the money.”

“There’s that.” She frowned, changed the subject. “Listen, I want to talk to you about something else.”

She looked at her hands on the wheel. “When we get back, I’m signing the rights from the first two books over to you. And I’m not writing the one about Eastport. About Randy and … all that.”

She paused to pass another slow-moving vehicle, this one an old Ford sedan with a dead deer lashed to the hood. Its eyes were open, and its antlers reminded Chip of a crown of thorns.

“You can write it, though, if you want to. I’ll fix it with Siobhan,” Carolyn went on.

Shocked, he stared at her. “I don’t want anything from any crime victims anymore,” she explained. “Money, or anything else. Like I said before all this happened, I can’t. And especially not now. Know what I mean?”

It sounded crazy. But he did know. He heard the words come out of his mouth. “Yeah. I guess I can’t, either. But … listen, Carolyn. If we did write it, all about what just happened, we could give the money we made on it away. To a victims’ organization. Or to something else entirely.”

He took a deep breath. But what the heck. Might as well say it. “We’d keep just enough to live on. Say, for a year or so. And we could write the novel together. The one you—”

“The one I stole from you,” she finished for him. “That I told Siobhan Walters was my idea, that I was going to do it.”

“Well, yes,” he admitted. On the face of it, that sounded like the craziest thing of all.

But he’d been thinking about it, and what she’d said a week ago—
God, was it only a week ago?—
was true: