My Sister's Keeper (17 page)

I couldn’t see the face well enough to tell it was Ashleigh, but neither could I rule her out. In fast-forward, she danced around at high speed, discarded the dress, removed her black lace bra, and wiggled out of her panties. The camera again zoomed past her to the shadowy face of the man who stood motionless, watching from behind. Again I pressed the “pause” button and moved forward one frame at a time until a strobe burst on and I got a fairly clear image of his face. He had heavy eyebrows and a thick mustache and could have been the same man that slugged me in the head.

I pressed “play” again and the tape quivered and squealed once more. The strobe pulsed and in slow-motion freeze-frame, the young woman danced about nude as the camera slowly moved in on her face. Although the hair was longer and darker, it was a face I recognized. There was no doubt now. Ashleigh Matthews was connected to the house at the beach.

Suddenly the man swooped out of the shadows like a lion attacking its prey and in the frozen pulses of the strobe, I saw the petrified face of terror

the kind that can’t be faked

as he savagely attacked her—beating and mauling her. It was appalling, disgusting, and repulsive. As she kicked and clawed and fought back screaming, crying, and pleading, I dropped to my knees and screamed with her. And when she fell mercifully unconscious from his brutal assault and the vicious rape began, I turned it off and wept.

THE NEXT MORNING, Saturday, I ached and throbbed from the back of my head to my ankles. I took three ibuprofen tablets, bandaged an open wound on my leg, and called my attorney, I told him about last night and the video, and he told me to take it to him.

As I pulled away from the house, I saw the Frederick boy on an old style bicycle heading up the street toward the house with the brick drive. I followed him and found Mr. Frederick pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with limbs and pine straw toward the street.

I lowered my window glass. “I saw your son riding down the street. Was that the missing bike?”

He plucked the gloves off his hands. “Yep. Turned up yesterday.”

“
Would you mind telling me where you found it?”

“
Sure. You know where those big boats are docked on Oleander?”

“
By that little bridge?”

“
Exactly. Well, it was leaning against the side of an old shed down there. Someone spotted the classified ad I ran and called me. Mighty glad to get it back. It means a lot to me.”

I thanked him and—on a hunch—went back to the house for the newspaper with Ashleigh’s photo in it. After dropping the videotape off at Scott’s office and filling him in on the house at the beach, I drove to that bridge on Oleander and turned down the dirt drive that led to the old shed.

The scene was like a picture on a jigsaw puzzle and probably hadn’t changed much in the last half-century. There was a run-down bait house sitting next to the water’s edge surrounded by abandoned crab pots and nets. At least fifty boats of various sizes from work skiffs to sleek schooners and banged-up trawlers were moored to dry-rotting docks built decades ago and now strewn with bits of netting, crab pots, and empty oil bottles.

I rolled into the dirt parking lot, cut the engine, and got out. The place smelled of gasoline and fish, and the greasy water along the shoreline had a coating of yellow pollen. The creek widened here and the banks were checkered with boathouses, docks, and marshes with patches of towering cattails and dying cypress trees. From the water’s edge I could see a half-mile up and downstream.

I strolled to the bait house, pushed in the door, and stepped inside. It smelled of dead fish, insects, and smoke from an antique pot-bellied wood heater standing in the center. The single room shack was lined with cages of live crickets, two bubbling 20-gallon aquariums of minnows, and shelves with cardboard containers of worms and a few cans of pork ‘n beans. An old rusty freezer marked “ICE” tilted where the floor sagged on the left side and a glass-top horizontal Pepsi box hummed behind the door. The place had never seen a broom.

A white-haired, leather-skinned old-timer sat on a cut-off tree stump mending fishing net and didn’t look up. “Morning,” he said, his coastal drawl making it sound more like 'marning.' “Somethin’ I kin do for ya?”

“
Good morning, sir.” I pulled the newspaper from my back pocket and opened it. “I’m looking for a girl. Blond hair, early twenties. Was wondering if you've seen her around here recently.”

He didn't say anything, just kept working a wooden tool attached to a heavy cord over and through the net repeatedly with the speed and accuracy of a mechanical weaver. I held the paper in front of him and continued, “I think she could be in a lot of danger. I'd like to find her.”

He still didn’t look up. “You her papa?”

“
No. A friend.”

Without a word, he continued with his work, his tongue sliding back and forth along his bottom lip. I pressed on. “I get the feeling you’ve seen her, but you don't know whether or not to tell me.”

“
Don't cha read them papers, Mister?”

“
More this week than usual.”

“
Then ya ought-a know she’s dead.”

I watched his hands working in perfect harmony with each other making their way along a single cord like a machine. I sighed, “Everyone seems to think so.”

“
But you don’t?”

A cold breeze whistled through a broken window in the shed. I zipped my jacket to my neck and backed up to the heater. “No, I don’t. I think maybe she got herself into something she needed to get out of, concocted a plan to fake her own death, stole a bicycle, and ended up down here early Monday morning.” He looked up at me on the word “bicycle,” then back at his work without comment. “Where it goes from there,” I said stepping back closer to the heater, “I was hoping you could help me fill in.”

His tongue again worked back and forth along his bottom lip as if it was doing the thinking for him. “Why you int’rested in that girl?”

“
The police think I’m the one who did it.”

His eyes looked up and studied me while his hands kept going on their own. “Why they think that?”

“
She planned it that way.”

He tied off a knot and cut the cord with a small well-honed curved blade stationed on a weathered bench next to him. Then his hands walked along the net and started another repair. I dragged a log stump closer to the heater and sat down stuffing my hands into my jacket pockets. I waited quietly, but didn’t have to wait long.

“
She first come by Tuesday last week. Just hung ‘round a spell…lookin’ at the boats. Then, the next day, she come back and asked how much to rent one. Said she wanted to go ‘xplorin.’ Wanted to keep it fir a week, she said.” His eyes stayed on his work. “Paid for it in cash and give me a extra two hundred.”

“
So, she got it Wednesday?”

“
Well now, that’s the
strange
part. I gassed it up and give her the key on Wednesday. Then she showed up T’ursday, and took it out most all day. Then brung it back, gassed it up again, and just left it. Ain’t never come back.”

The heat was too hot on my back. I stood up and moved around trying to get some of the warmth down into my legs. “Can I see that boat?”

“
Well, that’s another
strange
thing. Somebody stole it.”

“
When was that?” I asked.

“
It were here Sunday when I left, and gone Monday morning when I come in at five. I figured she took it ‘til I seen her picture in the paper and learnt what happened. That’s when I called the law.”

“
What did it look like?”

“
Just a old workboat. Had a 85 Merc’ry outboard on it. Run good. That’s it in that yonder picture.” He pointed his chin over his shoulder to a four by six color photograph thumbtacked to a wooden cabinet door. It was a picture of the old man standing in an open Boston Whaler holding a string of giant-sized trout. There was a cockpit in the center with a steering wheel and gauges, but no windshield.

“
When was this taken?”

“
Shoot. You don’t find trout like that ‘round here no more. Probably twelve or thirteen year ago.”

“
Where’d she say she went with it?” I asked.

“
Didn’t say.”

“
How long was she out on Thursday?”

“
She come ‘round 10 that morning. I seen her load a ice chest on it and then hightail it outta here like her hair’s on fire. She didn’t have no fear of it neither. Know’d what she was doing. Next I seen her was half past four.”

“
How far could she have gotten in that time?”

“
Depends what way she went and what the wind was doin’.”

“
You got another one you can rent?”

“
Well, ain’t none here now. Folks got ‘em all out. You want one in t’morning?”

“
Yeah, I do. What time do you open?”

“
Five every day. And I’m here ‘til they all come back.”

“
Put me down for one. Richard Baimbridge. I’ll be here when you open. Five o’clock.”

“
Baimbridge.”

“
Right.”

“
You got it.”

23

I
PICKED UP A FEW THINGS I’d need for the outing: a laminated nautical chart of the waterways from Wilmington to Little River, fresh batteries for a radio, a waterproof flashlight, cans of food with pull-open tops, bottles of Pepsi and water, and a couple of cans of tuna. By the time I got back to the house, my left leg was twice as large as normal and the skin felt like it was splitting open. I pulled myself up the stairs, cleaned the wounds, applied an antibiotic ointment, and wrapped the leg again.

I looked up the phone number for
Screen Gems’
Wilmington studio and dialed it. The operator reeled off a list of movies in production or about to commence, but said she didn’t know of any Brad Pitt movie scheduled for Wilmington. I thanked her, hung up, unfolded the nautical chart, and laid it out on the dining room table. The Cape Fear River actually runs south from Wilmington and empties into the Atlantic Ocean some thirty or forty miles downstream. But Wilmington is only a few miles west of Wrightsville Beach, which is also on the ocean. It’s as if Wilmington sits atop an ice cream cone-shaped peninsula; the Cape Fear on the left side and the Intracoastal Waterway on the right. These waters meet each other about twenty-five miles to the south.

Ashleigh rented the boat at Bradley Creek which flows due east and dumps into the Intracoastal Waterway right behind the barrier island that is home to Wrightsville Beach. From there you could take the waterway north or south, or go into Wrightsville Beach. I didn’t think she would have gone to Wrightsville Beach unless she had someone meeting her, and if someone was going to meet her, why not meet them somewhere she wouldn’t need a boat? Besides, to leave Wrightsville Beach by car, she would have come right back through Wilmington. My guess was that Ashleigh was on her own and headed either north or south.

The phone rang and I picked it up without taking my eyes off the chart or considering who it might be. “Richard Baimbridge.”

“
Richard, this is Sydney Deagan.” There was that voice again

musical and unique. I sat back and the tension inside me mellowed.

“
Hi.”

“
Martha called me and asked if I knew where Ashleigh’s brother was staying. So I checked with a few of the girls and found out that he’s living with his aunt and uncle, Henry and Doris Jackson, on a farm about twenty miles from town.”

“
Do you know how to get there?”

“
Well, that’s why I called you instead of Martha. If you’re thinking of going out there, it might be best if I go with you.”

“
And why is that?”

“
I was told he won’t talk to anyone. He may not talk to me either, but he might if he remembers me. Ashleigh used to bring David to the studio years ago and he’d hang out during her classes.”

“
Okay. When can we go?”

“
I can go right now if you want.”

“
Which way do we head?”

“
Toward Lake Waccamaw.”

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, I was sitting at the new Wal-Mart watching for Sydney’s van. Everywhere I looked there were couples walking hand-in-hand laughing and teasing, hugging and kissing—even folks that looked like they’d been married half their lives acting like newlyweds. Have these people always been out there, or is it just spring fever?
God, how I missed being in a relationship.

The passenger door abruptly snapped open and Sydney hopped in wearing a dark gray cowl-neck sweater with a silver ballerina pin near the collar, black jeans, black sneakers, a three-quarter-length gray suede coat, and sunglasses. Her hair was pulled back in a looped ponytail and a wide smile spread across her face. I whiffed the light fragrance of her perfume and realized being around Sydney for an entire week and
not
falling in love was going to be difficult.