Night Mares in the Hamptons (27 page)

The mares' mental outpourings had a different effect on Susan; the deluge gave her a piercing headache and blurry vision. She instantly interpreted the symptoms as a return of the cancer with a tumor in her brain, her worst nightmare.

All three of them wanted to know how come Ty and I weren't affected by the mare's distress.

“Uh. . . We weren't sleeping.”

Neither was Susan at the time, and she'd pulled out a tuft of her own hair, which was a shame, now that it was growing back after chemo.

The only reason I could think of why we were spared was that our emotions were as engaged as possible for two people to be. Together, maybe we were strong enough to fend off anything from outside. We hadn't heard the sirens, hadn't felt the flood of emotion. I shrugged. “The luck of the Irish, I guess.”

Susan slammed the oven door on the brownie pan. Little Red jumped in my arms and growled. “You're not Irish.”

Ty's explanation satisfied them more: the mares left us before sending out the mental shock waves.

Connor escaped most of the tumult because he wasn't in the mares' path to the ranch, but he did feel a sudden overwhelming thirst for a drink.

He looked at Ty. “But I didn't have one.”

Ty tipped his head.

Connor knew something was desperately wrong when Paloma Blanca and Lady Sparrow raised a ruckus. Then he started hearing sirens. He was ready to ride to my house when he couldn't reach Ty on his cell—Ty had it turned off to keep the night quiet except for his chant—but Connor knew Ty'd kill him if he left the horses.

“Damn right.”

Then we told them what happened at the ranch. Or what we thought happened. I wasn't sure about the chronology of the thing, and I doubted if the medical examiner was going to be any more definitive. But as far as I could figure, with Ty adding a point here and there, we laid it out for our attentive audience. Connor was too busy eating the leftover vegetarian lasagna Susan put in front of him. Ty sipped at his coffee, with a dash of brandy. I was waiting for the brownies, so I had time to talk.

I explained that Snake must have had at least one partner. The Snow Man. That was what my father had warned about.

“Your father's warnings have never been worth the breath he takes to blather about them.”

Grandma Eve and Dad had never gotten along well. He was my father; I had to defend him. Wasn't he right about the bad view? I did not mention the alligator, the cave, or the banker. That was when it occurred to me that if Dad meant a drug dealer, he hadn't been seeing danger to Grant. Who I hadn't thought about in days, it seemed. I was happy he'd be safe on his snowy mountain. I had enough to worry about right here.

“The cocaine dealer is definitely dangerous, just as Dad said. Big Eddie smelled the drugs, and Snake had to know they were there.”

Doc wanted to know how bad the coke trade was in Paumanok Harbor.

I didn't really know, but Susan said it was all over the bars and night spots, and a couple of kids had been expelled from the high school in June for snorting in the bathrooms. She'd been offered a boatload of pot when she was doing chemotherapy, from everyone from her old school friends to the postmaster. There was an open market. Someone had to be satisfying the habits of all the rich summer people in East Hampton, so why not Snake?

He wasn't rich enough, for one reason, passable in polite company for another, or smart enough. I thought his part in the illegal business was hiding the dope until someone else could transport it or deliver it. We all knew the stories about the Prohibition era and the smugglers off Montauk. There was even a chain of stores called Rumrunner. Men in small boats would meet larger ones off shore, bring the contraband back to dry land, stash it in people's homes, then truck it around under piles of fish. The job had to be easier these days, with radar and satellite trackers.

Grandma Eve added that the police knew all about the widespread use of the drug. They made arrests when they could, but no one saw any benefit to hauling in the recreational users, not when the dealers were still at large. The Coast Guard searched as many boats as they could, but there were too many boats, too many harbors, too few Coast Guard patrol boats. The county narcotics squad would be thrilled to shut down the operation at the ranch, if it was as large as Big Eddie's nose said it was.

First they had to find the missing dope, which meant finding Snake's truck and his partner.

According to my dream-conversation with H'tah, someone had hit the colt with a car, then scooped him up before the mares could return to help him vanish. I thought that might take two men. H'tah appeared to be as tall as a small pony, although not as wide.

Sure as hell neither Snake nor the Snow Man picked up the injured animal out of the goodness of his heart, or to take him for medical care. I assumed they knew the mares were powerful, if only from the rumors in town. For some reason, maybe the same myth that had the Froeler girl give her fictional horse healing powers, Snake thought the colt could cure his liver disease. H'tah couldn't.

Snake needed money, maybe for a liver transplant. That told me he wasn't making it big in the lucrative drug trade. He'd called me. I recounted his message, and how it ended on a shriek.

Ty gave his theory that the mares went berserk after my dream of their kin being threatened with snakes or death. Almost everyone in their vicinity was affected, including Snake when the mares reached the ranch.

Maybe Snake went crazy. Maybe his partner did. Maybe the snakes they kept around to guard the drugs did, too. The Snow Man shot Snake, either because of the double cross, or because he went homicidal at the brain waves. Or maybe he was shooting at the snakes.

I assumed he moved the cocaine to Snake's pickup because no one would think to search the rusty old wreck. The truck was described on every police bulletin in the county now.

Somewhere in there, between the emotional assault and the assassination, the mares stomped the snakes, found H'tah, and disappeared.

We arrived, found the colt's hidden cell door partly opened, and Fred Sinese thoroughly dead.

Susan took the brownies out of the oven to cool. “Talk about a snake in the grass.”

Grandma Eve wanted to know if the whole affair was over.

Affair? We had a one-night stand. Oh, she meant the mares. “I think so. Except.”

“Except?”

“Except how did the Snow Man get there if he left in Sinese's truck? There should have been another car. And what if he took the horse along with the coke?”

I heard groans from everyone. I rubbed Little Red's silky ears.

“I mean, we don't really know that the mares rescued the baby, do we? What if they got there and Snake was already dead, his partner and the drugs and the colt already moved? Remember, Snake said he had someone else interested in information about the horse. That person might have gone there first. He might have had the gun.”

Susan put the brownies on a plate in front of me, but she slapped my hand when I reached for one. “They're too hot.”

Red snapped at her fingers, but I didn't know if he was defending me or claiming the brownies. I put him down while I went to pour glasses of milk for anyone who wanted one.

Grandma didn't. She frowned at Red searching for crumbs on her clean kitchen floor, and she frowned at the idea of adding a third villain to the mix.

I found a loose walnut, so I broke off a piece of it for Red. “Why not? What would a drug dealer want with an injured horse?”

“What would the other bidder want it for? Besides,” she asked, “why don't you think the mares didn't take their baby with them?”

“Because my bracelet didn't dissolve in the shower. Margaret said it would last until I found the colt.”

“Are you sure she didn't mean until the colt was found?”

“That's not what she said.”

Everyone thought on that while I ate a brownie.

It was Doc who finally said what we were all thinking: “Then the mares wouldn't have gone.”

I had a drink of milk rather than answer.

Ty broke his brownie in half. “They would have tried to follow. Until light came.”

“Which means they'll be back tonight?”

“I have no idea. Someone could be driving the colt to Canada for all we know. If he's still nearby, though, so are the mares.”

More silence.

“I know what we need,” Grandma Eve said after I'd eaten another brownie and Red was back in my lap, looking needy.

I expected her to say a good walk to burn off the calories or a pot of coffee or a nap. I needed all of them. Instead she named Joe the Plumber.

Before I could wonder if Grandma Eve had finally gone round the bend or her dishwasher was leaking, she said Joe was a scryer.

Very helpful, a scryer.

Susan said it for me: “What the hell is that?”

“It's a person who can see things. Not in the future, like reading entrails and such, although I've never held much stock in that messy business. This is more like crystal ball reading, only in the present.”

“Is such a thing possible?”

“Joe says so. He often sees things in the sinks he's fixing, sees people in the swirling water. They're not always who he's looking for or thinking about, but he sees them, sees what they're doing at the time. I suppose he could make a fortune in blackmail but he's honest, our Joe, and never talks about what he sees. Except for his ex-wife and that drunk she ran off with. He sees them nearly every time he's fixing that upstairs toilet of mine, the one that keeps running on no matter how I jiggle the handle. They're always yelling at each other. Joe enjoys it so much, he never gets the toilet working properly.”

“So he can tell us where H'tah is?”

“Oh, I don't know if he can tell where. But if he is somewhere here, as opposed to There, Joe ought to spot him, especially if you give Joe one of your drawings of the horse to concentrate on. Maybe we can figure out the location from what Joe sees.”

“Call him.”

Grandma sighed. “I can't. He's in critical condition from one of the car accidents. Someone sideswiped him, and his van went into the bay. They'll fish it out later, when all the volunteer rescuers aren't so busy. I heard that Joe was yelling about all his tools sitting in the salt water overnight when they airlifted him to Stony Brook Hospital.”

“Damn.”

That about summed up everyone's feelings.

W
E HAD TO WARN EVERYONE. AGAIN. We couldn't be certain the mares were still here, or if they'd come back, but the town couldn't take another night like the last one. We started making phone calls.

The drugstore would be putting sleeping pills and ear plugs in every sack. Grandma mixed up a special batch of her soothing teas to give away at the farm stand. Doc was getting a ride to the village square, where he'd sit on a bench talking to everyone, shaking hands, offering encouragement or conversation to anyone who sought it. The chief was putting on extra patrols, with a lot of the policemen hired from out of the village, ergo not sensitives. Susan planned tonight's restaurant menu around some special ingredients and recipes. Most important of all was what Bill at the hardware store was doing: bringing up boxes of Christmas lights from his storage basement and sending trucks to pick up more from every other shop owner in the Hamptons.

The lights might keep the mares away even if they couldn't keep the vandalism or violence away. Main Street stores already kept their lights on all night, and that didn't keep their windows from getting broken yesterday. We still felt the extra brightness was worth a try; we spread the word to sleep with the lights on, too.

Pretty soon Paumanok Harbor looked like Christmas in summer, with everyone outside on ladders, everyone who knew what was going on, that was. The summer renters and tourists and even the locals who were outsiders, i.e., not of the old blood, not espers, weren't affected by nightmares or mental firestorms, so they thought we'd all gone crazy. Worse, their houses were bare and undecorated, so it looked like some version of the plagues on Egypt, with only Israelite households marked to save their firstborn sons. So the Chamber of Commerce declared it a publicity stunt for some magazine, handed out free lights, and sent for photographers.

People were still nervous. Understandably. Not just because of the night terrors and the mayhem, but because we'd had a murder in town, which was an extremely rare occurrence. No one was going to miss Snake, but no one wanted to be sitting next to a killer at the barbershop, or standing near him on line at the bank. Some residents went to visit relatives elsewhere. Some tourists shortened their vacations. Some just canceled their reservations.