Triple Witch (33 page)

Ellie shook her head vigorously.

“No. But Kenny did. Half-tide or higher, he said. Kenny,” she finished, gunning the engine harder, “told me all about it.”

Straight ahead, the narrows yawned at us, dark, and studded with jagged rocks. The boat lurched forward, as from its bottom came a sickening scrape that sent me scrambling up onto the bow, clinging frozenly as Ellie trimmed the engine, yanking its prop up so it spun in empty air, howling.

There was a crunch, like a bone breaking. A wave caught us, sending the little boat careening. Overhead, the lighthouse loomed massively out of the darkness, its lamp a white, wide-open eye, its tower a tilting club about to smash down.

And then, unbelievably, we were out of it. The boat shot ahead as its prop bit water again, hurling me in a heap off the slippery prow to the floor. As I hauled myself up I saw Ellie’s fist thrust into the spray, a grin of defiance on her face, and I heard her laugh of triumph. In that moment, despite the water seeping between the floorboards, I was glad we had done it.

But then reality set in again. “Drat,” Ellie said, spotting the seeping water. We were approaching the
Triple Witch
.

“Whatever you’re going to do, don’t waste time,” she said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes, ten of which we’ll need getting ashore, preferably before those squalls hit.”

She waved to starboard. The clouds were nearly upon us, wind gusts already slicing foam off the wave tops. A spatter of chilly drizzle slapped me, tasting of salt.

The
Triple Witch
rose alongside us, white as a glacier. “Back off a little,” I said.

Ellie reversed the engine, and with a low gurgle the little boat pulled back. Now I could see Baxter Willoughby peering over the cruiser’s side at us, surprised and annoyed.

Just that one glimpse of his face told me Ellie had been right. Willoughby had done the math on his little plan, realized that the deluxe brand of revenge he coveted
might cost too much. Better, he’d decided, to get away clean and fast.

If we’d waited, taken the time to go around the narrows, Sam would already have been in the water, Willoughby’s look said.

But now here we were.

“Hope he’s got his affairs in order,” Willoughby taunted.

Behind Willoughby, I spotted the terrified face of one of his crew, some poor twenty-something kid still sporting the last of his spring-break Florida tan. The face vanished suddenly; so much for any help.

Then Sam walked out onto the foredeck.

Blindfolded, and with his hands tied behind his back. The way we were situated in the water relative to the
Triple Witch
, Sam was only about thirty feet away, and getting nearer by the moment. But he might as well have been on the moon.

“Keep walking,” Willoughby shouted, and Sam did, one careful footstep after another.

Then I saw the glint of the weapon in Willoughby’s hand. As he turned to make sure Sam was doing as he’d ordered, I stuck my own hand into my satchel and came up with the Bisley.

Damn
. The boat lurched, sending my bag tumbling away from me. It came to rest at Ellie’s feet. In it was the little .25 caliber semiautomatic.

The one with the real bullets in it. We’d raced out so fast, I’d forgotten completely about the dummies I’d loaded into the Bisley, back at the firing range. And now I couldn’t get at the satchel again without Willoughby seeing me do it.

“I could try,” Ellie muttered.

Shooting at Willoughby, she meant. She wanted to, very badly. But that wouldn’t do a lick of good. I didn’t need her to shoot
at
him; what I needed was for her to hit him.

And she couldn’t. The distance and heaving water
only made it worse: moving sight picture, moving target.

“Thanks anyway,” I muttered back. “But in this mess, I’m not even sure that I can hit him.”

Sam loomed over me; he was almost at the tip of the
Triple Witch
’s prow. I had no idea how he was keeping his balance.

“You’ve seen him,” Willoughby crowed. “My side of the deal.”

Which had always been a sham. He wasn’t leaning over the side anymore. He was amidships, where he could be certain of hitting his own target. And where I couldn’t hit him.

From far away came the whine of the Coast Guard’s
Zodiac
, cutting through the rain at us. A sudden burst of wind blew us sideways and hit Sam hard, making him totter.

He was there, clearly in view, and Willoughby wasn’t.

One chance.

“And
now
—” Willoughby’s voice was exultant. When the
Triple Witch
heeled over in the next gust, I glimpsed him trying to draw a bead on Sam. Then he was gone again and all I could see was my son, like the silhouette on a paper target.

I raised the Bisley as our little boat bobbed up and down, and so did the
Triple Witch
. The wind was blowing harder, now: another way for the unsteady sight picture to be made more meaningless, the bullet carried sideways.

But I didn’t think about that. What I thought about was the dummy bullet, filled with wax and ketchup: the way that, at fifty yards out on the firing range, it had missed the center target by only about three inches.

And I thought about a landlubber’s slipknot.

It wasn’t something I wanted to count on, but Sam didn’t move when I shouted. He couldn’t hear me through the rising storm.

Willoughby appeared again, leveling the weapon, vanished. The Bisley jumped in my hand, its report swallowed by the roar of wind and water.

Sam went over the side.

Almost instantly, Willoughby’s face showed again, twisted in rage. “You bitch!” he shouted, leaning over the rail, not knowing quite what had happened, only that I had somehow spoiled his fun.

I fired again, fast, and it was easier this time: straight up, not much distance, the movement of the little boat in synch with the bigger vessel.

A bloom of crimson exploded on Willoughby’s shirt. He straightened, his hands patting weakly, dabbing at the red stuff.

Ellie hit the throttle, unmindful of the cold water rising to our ankles; the little boat wasn’t going to last much longer.

“Sam!” I shouted into the sheets of icy rain.

Waves as sharp as arrowheads raced at us, driven by the wind. Every whitecap came up masquerading as a face, and wasn’t.

“Sam!” No sight of him, only the water, slamming us against the cruiser’s side and hauling us out again as the Evinrude struggled and the break in the little boat’s bottom widened alarmingly.

Ellie grabbed a flare from the box under her seat and fired. Its sudden chemical brilliance sizzled upward, arcing against the violence of the storm clouds and reflecting a sick, sodium-yellow glare off the heaving water.

Minutes went by. I couldn’t hear the
Zodiac
anymore, and there was still no help from the crew of the
Triple Witch
. And then:

“Mom …”

A ghastly, waterlogged whisper. In the next instant, a hand flopped bonelessly over the side of the boat, and I grabbed it and pulled hard.

“Sam!” The hand was followed by the rest of him, clambering and choking, his body a shivering mass of
gooseflesh, his teeth chattering uncontrollably with a rattle like dice being shaken in a cup.

The blindfold had come off. His eyes were rolled partway up into his head. His hands clenched stiffly in front of him, corpselike, as his muscles, too chilled to respond to signals from his nervous system, achieved a single position and stuck there.

“We’ve got to get him to shore,” I said, but I knew it was too late to do it in our boat. The water in it was up to my knees, and I couldn’t feel my feet anymore, only a dull aching that transformed to hammering agony the minute I noticed it.

An odd whine filled the darkness around us, a sound I didn’t recognize. All I knew was that the break in the boat had gotten suddenly much larger. We were going down.

Bright light blinded me. Ellie threw a life cushion at me. The Evinrude foundered and conked out. Then we were floating, the little boat sliding away underneath us, leaving us in the water.

Sam gasped once, his body spasming powerfully, and I lost the life cushion trying to hang onto him.

Then I lost him, too. I wanted to swim but the cold paralyzed me, punching a fistful of frigid salt water down my windpipe. I was sinking, drowning and disbelieving, fighting to the surface, sucking in a frantic breath of air.

Turning all the while to try to spot him, my eardrums still pierced by the whining sound. Somewhere Ellie was shouting, then not shouting. The life cushion smacked me and I clutched it in arms that had frozen lumps at the end of them, not hands.

In the next instant, hugging the life cushion, I was not drowning anymore. But Sam was gone.

Sam.

48
Wade stripped the wet clothes off me and muscled me into a bathtub on board the
Triple Witch
. The warm water in the tub felt scalding, but it could not penetrate the misery iced into my bones.

All I could do was weep and wish I had drowned.

“Drink this.” Wade thrust a cup at me, then pressed it to my lips when I couldn’t hold it.

I spat the spiked hot drink out into the bathwater.

Wade kept talking, saying things I couldn’t make sense of. I thought he’d been saying them for a while. But I could only see Sam falling, feel him slipping away from me.

“Jacobia. Listen to me. We got him aboard the
Zodiac
before we found you. It’s why
you
couldn’t find
him
. Ellie’s in the next cabin, she’s okay, too. Now will you drink this?”

A shudder went through me. “You’re not just saying that? You wouldn’t lie to me?” I searched his face.

“As God is my witness, I saw him. I’ve pulled guys out of the water, Jacobia. He needed attention. But he’ll be all right.”

I pressed the cup against my mouth, and forced myself to try drinking. A little of it managed to go down.

“The Bisley … did I hurt Sam? I didn’t see where it hit him. I was afraid I might have put his eye out.”

Now that I wasn’t dying, or Sam, either, I saw the richness of the
Triple Witch
’s bathing facilities: gleaming fixtures, a huge porcelain tub, ceramic tiles. Heaps of towels embroidered with the monogram
BW
piled on a chair upholstered in gold brocade.

“I got his wet stuff off him,” Wade said, “and wrapped him up in some blankets before the
Zodiac
left. I didn’t see any marks on him anywhere. I looked him over pretty good.”

I swallowed more tea, as Wade ran more hot water into the tub. “Maybe the water soaked the ketchup off,” I said.

Wade squinted puzzledly at me. The worst of the chill I’d suffered was seeping out slowly, so that now I was only shivering instead of shuddering.

“I didn’t,” he repeated, “see that Sam was hit anywhere.”

I couldn’t stop shivering, though. “What about Willoughby?”

Wade turned away momentarily, then looked straight at me.

“Willoughby’s dead. The blow to the chest, from the dummy bullet. I didn’t get a very good look at him. But from what the medic aboard the
Zodiac
said, the impact stopped his heart.”

At his words a terrible feeling came over me, as if I had taken what I thought was a simple step, and instead walked off the edge of a building.

“I killed him? You mean, I shot him and killed him? But I’d never meant to—”

I wanted to go back, put the tape on rewind, just run it all backwards and try it all over again.

Not shoot anybody. Or not kill anybody. In the heat of the moment I’d been ready to, but the moment had passed. In the end it had been enough to think that I could kid a kidder if my bullets were loaded with wax and ketchup.

But now the joke was on me.

Later, in the adjoining stateroom, I found Ellie pulling on a monogrammed sweatsuit that didn’t fit her.

Shakily, she managed a grin. “Sorry about the bumpy ride. I guess the water was deeper out there, back when Kenny did it.”

Or maybe old Kenny had been full of beans. But I was not going to say that to her now. “The ride was fine. You got us there. That’s what counted.”

I sat on the bunk, feeling the cruiser’s engines rumble into life, noticing the tiny lurch that meant the craft was moving. Ellie peered into the gilt-trimmed mirror, brushing her red hair.

“You were right about Willoughby. He could have killed us when he caught us, out at his place,” she said. “Or let that British guy do it, before Wade got there. But he didn’t.”

She gave a last critical squint at her face and turned. “Like you said, he wasn’t the physical type. Not until you had him backed into a corner, and he had a personal reason to hurt you,” she said, “did he really get dangerous.”

But somebody had.

“So I guess there’s one more conversation I still need to have,” she finished mildly.

She sounded so serene and untroubled, you’d have had to know her well to realize what she meant by the innocent-sounding word:
conversation
.

But I did. Know her pretty well, I mean. And boy, was I ever glad she wasn’t planning to have that conversation with me.

49
The recuperative powers of a sixteen-year-old boy are miraculous; by the time we reached my house a few hours later, Sam had telephoned to say that he was fine, he was hungry, and he was coming home just as soon as the doctors at the hospital in Calais finished marveling over him.

By the way, he added, did we have any lunch meat? Because what he was really hungry for, if I could arrange it, was a good old-fashioned hero sandwich.

“Sam,” I said. “I’m so sorry. That I had to shoot at you, I mean. But it was the only way I could get you off the deck of that boat, out of Willoughby’s line of fire. I was just terrified that I would put your eye out. But I couldn’t help it.”

Silence over the telephone. “Uh, Mom? Listen, I don’t want to, like, ruin your confidence in your marksmanship or anything.”

Behind me, George Valentine came in whistling and grabbed Ellie, and hugged her hard, and waltzed her around the kitchen.