What We Lost in the Dark (10 page)

Garrett Tabor was near.

He was near to his harem of dead brides.

Near me.

He may have lived in the apartment where the Cryers used to live, the place where I babysat for a few months. Although Dr. Stephen owned the building and he would have painted and cleaned, nothing is ever really, really gone, so Garrett Tabor’s molecules rubbed against my own every day. Except for the penthouse, which—I now saw as I glanced up—had been for sale. The Cryers’ was the only vacant place in the building. Garrett Tabor would have had no need of a four-bedroom penthouse. He had to live there. That’s what Rob meant.

While I was supposedly the intuitive one, Rob got something that I hadn’t understood until now. A chill that had nothing to do with the icy wind and my freezing wet suit crept down past my tongue and swallowed my words, along with the iron tang of lake water.

Wesley had unzipped Rob’s suit, pulling off the top portion, and had laid two of the warm blankets he’d brought in a thermal bag over Rob’s shoulders. I struggled out of my own wet suit and, shivering, huddled in one of the blankets and pulled a stocking cap over my head.

Wesley had his gloves off and his phone out of his
waterproof gear bag. “It’s only eleven, and he’s probably put in a full day with the ski team, but he’ll get up. Yep. There’s the light.” I heard the muffled sound of a voice on Wesley’s phone. “Gary! Hey, man, it’s Wesley Krauss. To you, too, buddy, but here’s the thing. I’m approaching the beach down west of your parking lot in a rubber Odyssey with two free divers, kids. Yes. Rob Dorn and Allie … yes, Allie. Sure, you know them. I have been training them. Rob had an incident out there. No, he absolutely is completely conscious, no signs of that I can see … Okay. That’s great, man. About one minute out.”

Turning to us, Wesley explained that Gary Tabor was summoning an ambulance and would do “triage” himself—was even now, healer that he was, grabbing more blankets, a thermos of warm fluid, and a blood pressure cuff.

I blinked at Wesley. Of course he would have called “Gary.” That was the logical thing to do. I felt sick in the same way as when I’d encountered “Gary” at the morgue.

“Rob,” I called over the sound of the motor and the water. “Are you okay?” Weakly, he gave me the thumbs-up sign. I leaned close to his ear. “Did you see them? Did you see the chains? Did you see the bodies?”

I knew from Rob’s eyes when he opened them wide and his mouth formed an uncomprehending gape, he didn’t see a thing. It was not possible, but I was still alone.

As we smacked into the spit of beach, the velocity of the wind hit, and an ambulance and fire truck peeled into the parking lot. Lights flipped on in the condominiums; firefighters called up assurances that this was an accident, that all was well, there was no fire. The paramedics lifted Rob out of the Odyssey. Laying him gently on a flexible stretcher, they trotted for the open bay doors of the ambulance, and
tugging off my fins, I ran across the pebbled, cold sand after him. Garrett Tabor appeared around the edge of one of the open doors.

“You got this?” he said, as though he was one of the medics.

“We’re good.”

“Hi, Allie,” he said. “Always an adventure, huh?”

I said nothing. Wesley and Garrett Tabor bro-hugged, and Wesley helped me out of my wet suit and held up a rubber sheet while I slipped out of my bathing suit and into the warm sweats I’d packed. The thought of Garrett Tabor on the other side of an envelope-thick bit of rubber, the only material that separated him from my naked body, caught me in the gut. I leaned on Wesley and vomited hot sour nothing in the sand.

“Let me look at her,” Tabor said, approaching me with his stethoscope.

I screamed. “No!”

Wesley said, “She’s just freaked out, man.”

Tabor backed off, palms outward. “It’s okay, Allie.”

I reached up to turn off my miner’s light before pulling off my hood, as Wesley shook out my wet suit.

We saw it fall at the same moment, like a golden tear against the pale sand. The little pendant on its broken chain fell from the sleeve of my wet suit. If you didn’t know Garrett Tabor for what he was, you would not have seen the lurch of his shoulders, the involuntary near-lunge to snatch up the prize he so clearly recognized. But I went first. With nothing to fear except everything, I reached down and closed my cold hand around its cold surface, slipping it into the zipped hip pocket of my sweats.

No one can save me now
, I thought.

And then I looked up at Tabor’s eager, so-false grin.

I thought,
Bring it, you piece of shit. I’ll go down, but I’ll take you, too
.

Rob spent the night at the hospital, being treated for hypothermia and exposure. It was more or less an excuse to keep him there, to make sure nothing else was wrong, because he was basically unhurt. He’d coughed up what little water was in his lungs, and he’d only briefly lost consciousness.

My mother was already at the hospital. As the nurse in charge of PM’s at the emergency room, she monitored the radio. She was just ending her shift when she heard—for about the fifth time in six months—that the incoming guests were part of her own crew.

So she waited. We got there about 11:20
P.M.
, and my mother had probably reached the point of no return, anger-wise, maybe fifteen minutes earlier after transmissions from the paramedics made it clear that I was alive and well.

When Jackie strode into the cubicle where I was waiting with Rob and Wesley, her posture was about as yielding and maternal as a sawed-off shotgun. She gave me a quick once-over, and said, “We’ll deal with this privately.”

Whenever my mother said she wanted to deal with anything privately, I wanted our next encounter to take place in an airport or a federal building, because nothing, nothing, could go well if she got me alone and went savage. With very clear exceptions that were compulsory given her over-protective nature, Jackie likes to think of herself as nurturing my independence. She’s more or less in favor of every nutty thing I do. She wants me to feel and be free, despite wishing she could wear me like a lapel pin to make sure that I don’t do anything at all.

I had thought that she would freak out about Parkour; instead, she had said it was beautiful. She never took that back, even after Juliet disappeared. What she would think about my going deep into dark, cold water that would have frozen if it didn’t have wave action, without an air source, I could only imagine. I really didn’t want to imagine.

So when my mom stalked out, telling me to go ahead and stay with Rob, that she was going to call her best friend Gina and
go get a drink
when it was
nearly midnight
—which was the equivalent of my mother of telling me she was going to meet her drug connection and score a few rocks of cocaine, I had two reactions. The first: I hoped Gina would talk her down, murmuring things about kids and look what we did when we were young … and my trembling increased. Because my second reaction was picturing myself forced to withdraw from John Jay and work at the hot pretzel stand in the lobby of the Timbers Ski Resort at night for a semester, until I learned a lesson.

When Rob’s parents showed up at the hospital, we were both busted again.

If only Wesley had been able to keep his mouth shut. But, Wesley was the moral equivalent of an Eagle Scout, and he
spilled everything about our recent hobby, down to the risks of a DWB.

For this Mrs. Dorn decided to blame me.

Ignoring me, she said to Rob, fuming, “Don’t you have enough problems without going for a little dip in a freezing lake, especially without an oxygen tank?”

Weakly, Rob protested that Wesley was there, and that we were never at any real risk.

“Risk?” Mrs. Dorn said. “Risk is all you do. You and her. Isn’t it enough that Juliet is dead? Doesn’t that make you want to think about the time you have and—”

“It’s all the more reason,” Rob said, struggling to sit up. He did look weak and ashy. I was proud of him, but I sort of wanted him to take it easy.

Mrs. Dorn started to cry, and Mr. Dorn, whom I’d never seen do anything but smile, frowned at Rob. “Why do you want to go and worry her?” he said.

“Obviously I didn’t want to worry her or I would have told you guys about it,” Rob said.

This is actual logic, but it does not cut ice with parents, ever.

The ER doctor, Brice or Brick or one of the other guys about five years older than me whom my mother flirted with, told the Dorns he was admitting Rob. They all turned and looked at me like I was some kind of infected bug bite. I shrugged. It was ten degrees outside. My mother was out at a tavern. What was I supposed to do, walk home? Halfheartedly, Mr. Dorn said I could drive Rob’s car and return it tomorrow night, but Rob’s car was parked back at the Tabor Oaks and I would rather have spent the night on a plastic couch in the lobby than go back there to pick it up.

Wesley said then, “No hassle, parents. I went to school
with one of the medics and they’ll give me a ride to my car. I’ll take Allie home.”

It was all so stiff and awkward that I didn’t even kiss Rob goodbye.

“THAT WAS ONE tense moment,” Wesley said after we’d been ferried by ambulance to his car, parked behind the Y. It had to be one of the first Volkswagens ever made, and the floor was not made of floor, but of some kind of pasteboard, like cheap bookshelves. It also had no radio, no heat, and seatbelts that looked like the kind that you see in old movies about airplane crashes. “I don’t mean the hospital. I meant out there on the lake. It doesn’t mean Rob should give up free diving though. That happens even to the best.”

Thanking Wesley for his kindness, I rushed inside my house, now feeling that frozen-through way you do when you are certain you will never be warm again. As I opened the double locks with my keys, my phone pinged.

Good.

Rob was telling me he loved me and his parents had calmed down.

As I opened the door, I fished my phone out of my front pack.

UNKNOWN had texted: You have something that belongs to me.

The door opened the rest of the way, and I nearly fell in.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Angela complained. She was looking up at me, wearing pajamas with moose on them that were about two sizes too big for her frame, which went about fifty pounds soaking wet.

The phone pinged again.

Leave it in my inbox at the lab, in a sealed envelope, and we’ll pretend this never happened.

Pretend this never happened? I was ready to call the Navy Seals to go down there tonight and rescue those girls—not their lives, but their justice—and secure Garrett Tabor’s comeuppance. Even though Rob had dropped the camera, the camera was down there, somewhere, although the thought of the restless ebb of Superior’s waters made me wary about how far it could tumble before anyone could get back to it. Still, the girls were there. I’d seen them. Rob might have seen them, too, and that was why he panicked. Maybe he remembered by now, having shaken off his stupor.

Pretend this never happened?

I had Tabor. I
had
him.

It was just a matter of who to call first. I had to think things through. If I called the nearest regional office of the FBI before calling the local police, there would be delays and all kinds of official weirdness. If I called the local police, well … my record of luck with calling the local police was the strongest possible disincentive.

“Did you even hear me?” Angie said.

Distracted, I answered, “Well, you might not need a babysitter. I would like someone to make me bagel pizzas and play the kind of Monopoly with me where you don’t just go around the board, but you get to buy all the properties and make loans and stuff. How come you don’t want that?”

I paid the babysitter, Mrs. Staples, and exchanged the look you give adults that says,
Kids, huh …
 Even if you don’t mean it. All the while I was thinking, who can I call? What the hell am I going to do? Do they put heinous-crime discovery off for the holidays? It was three days before Christmas Eve. My grandmother would be coming, and my Uncle Brian, with his wife and their two daughters.

As Mrs. Staples closed the door, Angela went on complaining, “If I did need a babysitter, I wouldn’t want it to be her. She reads me parts from her books, and they creep me out. She says, ‘How’s this, Ange?’ I hate it when people call me Ange. She reads me things like, ‘He clutched her back, where the heat of her skin burned through the thin wisp of silk …’ Why do I want to hear that? I’m nine.”

I pulled Angela down onto my lap and patted her hair, still bowling options around in my mind. To my mother’s horror, Angela and her friend Keely had recently decided to razor-cut their hair, employing blades they pried from disposable ladies’ shavers. Keely looked like a baby chicken. Nobody could do anything to make Angela’s thick, blue-black hair—shiny as ice—look anything but pretty. This had come close. With her big tip-tilted eyes, she looked like an anime character.

“I think it’s nice that she respects your opinion, Angela. That’s what people have to hear when they’re too old for a babysitter,” I said. “And since when is … you just said you’re nine! Third graders have babysitters.”

Angela pouted. Mrs. Staples’s romance novels, published directly to ebooks under the name Roxanne Royale, were brisk sellers. She finished a new one every two weeks, and some people said she sold more than fifty thousand copies of the last one.

What was
she
still doing in Iron Harbor?

What was I?

“Could you eat?” I asked Angela. Stuffing my face helped me think.

I made sandwiches of roast beef, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, Thousand Island dressing, mayonnaise, and pickles. Angela ate hers and a quarter of mine. I made another one for me.

“Can we make ice cream?” she said.

“No.”

One of the both ridiculously expensive and fetching things my Grandma Mack had given us last Christmas was an ice-cream maker that produced soft serve in fifteen minutes. As it was getting near to Christmas, my mother had to inventory the storage spaces and get out all the things her mother had bought that we’d never used. She placed them on the counter tops so they’d look as though we used them daily.