Repair to Her Grave (30 page)

“You don’t know anything,” she snapped. “Sam—”

“Where is she, Jill?” Sam asked quietly.

“I
told
you, she—”

“Yeah, she fell.” His tone was icy. “So instead of calling the cops or getting an ambulance, you went home and got dive gear and came out here, all on your own.”

Jill stared at Sam, her face like that of an animal caught in a trap.

“I think you brought her here,” Sam said.

“I didn’t!” She clenched her fists as Lillian put a hand out to her. “Get away from me!”

“You know what I think? I think Charmian called your mother to tell her about her find. The original map, she thought, and it was readable!” I said. “But you answered, and she was so excited, she told you instead. That's what I think happened.”

No reply from Jill.

“You’ve been planning something all along, haven’t you?” I went on. “Hanging around with Sam, pumping him for information. A pretty girl, and smart. You probably knew Raines was coming and why long before he even got here, from when you were staying with your uncle Wilbur. You know where Wilbur was searching, too.”

She smirked at what she thought at first was a compliment, scowled resentfully as I went on.

“Too bad you take after your father, instead,” I said. “Who thinks life is about expensive toys, and the money to buy them.”

Something sparked in her eyes at the mention of her father, a look of sharp caution. But I didn’t care about that now.

“I’ll bet we find out that your mother's gun is the one that shot Wilbur, won’t we?”

New knowledge creased Sam's face. “So that was why. A girl like you, wanting to hang out with me …”

“Oh, shut up!” she spat at him, then whirled on me. “If my moron uncle Wilbur would’ve just… None of this is my fault. I just wanted to move back with my dad,” Jill insisted.

“And bring him something when you went?” I suggested.

“Yes,” she hissed. “Something to make us
rich.
I
want
it. Or do you think I should stay here in this hick town, marry someone like your son? So sweet,” she added venomously. “And
dumb?”

Sam flinched once, but that was all. For an instant I wished she’d known him a few years ago: angry and strung out, crippled with dyslexia but not knowing what was wrong, hooked on anything he could get his hands on, and so afraid. Afraid that he was stupid.

Maybe she’d have liked him then, I thought, wanting to slap her. But I didn’t need to. Sam had gotten over lots worse things than Jill, mostly without my help. Now he turned away, walking back toward the car where Cartwright leaned against the bumper.

The rest of us followed, leaving Jill. By now she’d begun stripping off the drysuit; Lillian got a blanket from the trunk of her car and brought it to the girl, saying nothing. Without many clothes, Jill looked more her age: young. Very young.

And scared; with the blanket around her she peered up and down the little road for some way of escaping us. But there was none. She walked as far as the pavement, picking her way in bare feet, before Wade seized her arm.

“Let
go
of me, you—” She tried to jerk away, at which Wade grasped her other arm and turned her to face him. He outweighed her by a hundred pounds, but that wasn’t what stopped her.

It was the look on his face. I’d never seen it before, and you wouldn’t want it aimed at you. Wade went along so peacefully most of the time, you could forget that such a look might be in there.

But of course it was; the look of a boy whose father has been beaten to death outside a bar. Anger and grief, the wanting to hurt someone, wanting to be able to undo some terrible thing that has happened and not being able to: all the fight went out of Jill at the mere sight of it. She sat down hard on the side of the road and began crying.

Wade called police dispatch on his car phone and asked them to send the ambulance; by now, it would have finished delivering Mapes to the hospital. After that he called Bob Arnold, who was returning from the mainland, filled him in, and got him to send a tow truck to take Jill's car.

And that, we all thought, was all we could do.

Until Jonathan Raines spoke: “Sam. Give me your dive gear.”

“Oh, hey, you can’t— Listen, it's way dangerous. You don’t even know how to—”

“Sam.” In that moment the shark's tooth Raines wore at his throat looked suddenly appropriate. Remembering the snapshot of him at the edge of that cliff, I knew any fears I might have had about his inexperience were groundless.

He checked the tanks and regulators while Sam watched, but didn’t pull them on; the cliff was too steep for their weight.

“Lower these down for me, will you?” he said to Sam. “I’ll put ’em on down there.” Then Sam had another bright idea, one I thought was even worse than Raines's brainstorm.

“Your tanks down there?” he asked Jill, and she shrugged in sulky assent, not looking up at him.

The gun, probably, too, that Lillian had thought Jill didn’t know about, and that I thought Jill had used to menace Charmian into doing as she was ordered: it hadn’t been in Jill's hands as she came up over the cliff. By now it had likely been swept out in the torrent of tide and currents.

“Sam, don’t you think you should wait for—”

“Hey, Mom, I’ll be fine.” He grinned briefly at me, but I could see the smile was only for show.

The set of his jaw and the toss of his head as he bent to gather the rest of Jill's gear—were all business.

Ellie saw it, too. “He looks like Victor,” she said.

“Yeah. Doesn’t he, though?”

“Except for the eyes. The eyes are all you.” She meant well, but it wasn’t true.

Like the rest of him, Sam's eyes were a mixture of traits I would never be able to sort out. Nor could I stop trying.

But I could stop taking it out on him. As he went over the cliff edge I gave him a small salute, two fingers touched to my eyebrow:
Good luck.
But I wasn’t sure he saw it.

“What are the chances?” Winston Cartwright asked Wade. His voice craved reassurance, though he must have known it wasn’t possible to give any honestly. “Of being alive in …” He angled his massive head slowly at the churning water. “In that,” he finished brokenly.

Wade didn’t lie to him. “I wish I could say something more optimistic to you, sir. But …”

Cartwright nodded. “But the tide is high, and the water is cold, and the current is swift and vicious. Jonathan's bravery is admirable. I only hope his life, and that of the boy, aren’t put at risk, too.”

“They are, sir.” Wade shot a swift glance at me. “But Sam's a good diver, and I gather Raines has some experience?”

Cartwright laughed harshly. “More than you would believe. He is, despite his scholarly appearance, a very physical young man.”

Time passed with excruciating slowness until Sam's head popped up over the side of the cliff. It was all I could do not to run over to him and fling my arms around him, gear and all. Instead I waited.

“No go. Currents are murder,” Sam said when he got to us. “Raines went ahead. I tried to wave him back, but he wasn’t having it, he went in a cave.”

He coughed, and I realized it was worse in the water than he was letting on. “He's trying to save her,” Sam finished.

Jill, silent and resentful over no longer being the focus of everyone's attention, looked up and laughed bitterly.

“Grow up. He's not saving anybody. He's finding the gold.”

Cartwright's head turned slowly, and his stare made Wade's earlier look resemble a loving glance. “What do you mean?”

She tossed her blond hair carelessly, recovered a bit now, and pleased to have information that someone wanted. And a way to feel she was both superior and interesting to us again.

“That's what's down there,” she replied scornfully, as if this must be obvious to all but the fools we were. “Not some old crummy violin. Mom
told
you it couldn’t be. I knew it, too.”

Right. Everyone knew it. And yet… “What's there, Jill?”

She smirked at me. “Gold. And another way out. A tunnel.”

Those account books, I realized; the hidden one, especially, where Hayes had written the truth about his illicit income. And then I wondered all at once: so
much
gold. Where
had
it all gone?

“How do you know?” Cartwright's big fist tightened on the head of his walking stick; Jill caught the movement and flinched away from what it implied.

“Well,” she quavered, then regained her confidence, secure in her belief that we wouldn’t let an old man beat her to death, although in this by now she was only barely correct.

“I found a piece of it. A big gold coin, when I was diving here with Sam. But of course I didn’t show
him,”
she added with a scathing twist.

Sam's face remained impassive. “And just now?” I prodded. “More when you were down there with Charmian? Or is this all just another lie, something to keep us fascinated?” I turned away.

“No!” As I’d expected, she reacted swiftly to the threat of being ignored again. “I could prove it, I’d show it to you, but I gave it…”

And there it was, the lie within the lie. Her mouth snapped shut as she realized what she’d nearly said. More tiny pieces of the puzzle fell into place for me, like the glass bits at the end of a kaleidoscope.

“A friend,” she finished weakly.

“No,” I said. “Not to a friend. You haven’t any of those.”

Mapes would live, unless I missed my guess; there’d been a lot of blood, but the ambulance fellows hadn’t looked desperate. They’d known what to do, and Victor had assembled a crack team of trauma experts at his medical facility.

So Jill wouldn’t be guilty of murder in the shooting attack on her uncle Wilbur, assuming it could even be proved without a gun.

The ambulance still wasn’t here, or Bob Arnold, either. I wished they would come. I wanted to be away, back in my own house with its familiar haunts.

“Anyway, he can’t save the girl
and
grab the gold, can he?” Jill's tone was smug now.

Raines, she meant. “And that tunnel goes a long way,” she went on, “probably all the way to the other side of the island.”

She shuddered. “When you get way in there, it goes uphill, and then it's all red ants and spiders, crawly roots hanging down. Ugh.”

Wade nodded minutely. It was what he’d been telling me about the caves earlier: that they were supposed to go, some of them, for miles. Although until now, no one had believed it, because no one had been foolish enough to try following them wherever they led. Or to where they ended in a flood of icy water, down there in the dark.

Cartwright's face darkened further. “That young blackguard,” he began. But just then Bob Arnold screamed up in the squad car and skidded to a halt in the sand by the side of the road.

We told him what had happened. “His air's run out by now,” Sam added glumly, meaning Raines.

The ambulance pulled to a halt behind Bob's car and the fellows got out of it, looking around for someone to rescue but not finding anyone. Bob waved at them to wait.

“Let's just have a look-see,” he said in the patient tones that meant he was on the very edge of losing his temper, which if he did we were all going to be very,
very
sorry, indeed. He went to the edge, and we followed him.

But there was nothing at the foot of the cliffs but water and rocks, their bare top surfaces sloshed over with foam. We all looked hard, too, praying to see something: an arm, a face, some hint that someone might be recovered out of this disaster.

There wasn’t any. “Better get the Coast Guard out, tell ’em we’re looking for bodies again,” Bob Arnold said reluctantly. “Divers need to check inside the caves again, too, far as they can go, see if there are any remains caught up in the entries.”

Wade headed back toward his truck. I took a deep, sorrowful breath, looking out over the water on a bright summer day with the seagulls circling and the white clouds floating carelessly.

Jill hunkered on the pavement, her lips a tight, thin line of sullen resentment. “I don’t see why you think all this is
my
fault,” she said injuredly to no one in particular.

“Okey-dokey,” Bob sighed, and trudged on over to collect his prisoner as the rest of us made our way to our own vehicles.

At the car, Winston Cartwright gazed sadly at Charmian's opal ring. “If I’d let her marry him, she’d be alive now,” he said.

Lillian came over, too, looking beaten. “Jacobia, I just want to say I don’t hold any ill feeling on account of—”

Jill turned as Bob Arnold was putting her in the squad car. “Say so long to your dad for me, Sam,” she called. “Tell him I’ll miss him.” Her eyes glittered with this last malicious thrust.

Damn you, I thought, knowing suddenly what she meant. What she must mean, because in spite of it all she was a pretty girl. And a pretty girl is like a melody, I thought with bleak sorrow.

A melody to the same old song. I didn’t look at Sam.

“Get in,” Bob Arnold told Jill, holding the squad door open. “Watch your head.” Through the cage that divided the car front from rear, I could see her face: even more frightened now. Beginning to wonder if she would get out of this at all.

Then they were gone. Wade and I looked at each other across the pickup hood. The whole thing just felt so unbelievably not possible, everything gone so hideously wrong, so fast. Not until we’d actually gotten into the truck and were preparing to drive away did one of the ambulance guys come over and peer in at us.

“Folks?” he said in tones of puzzlement. “You sure we’re all done here? Because …” He waved toward the cliff edge.

“Yeah,” I began dully. “We’re done.” And then I saw a figure staggering toward us across the bluffs. It was Jonathan Raines. And with him was …

A great bellow of joy erupted from Winston Cartwright.

“Charmian!” He stumped as fast as he could across the bluffland, practically pole-vaulting with the walking stick over scrub brush and stones.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Wade said.

“I guess there was a kind of treasure out there after all,” I said, gazing through the pickup's windshield.