Wreck the Halls (30 page)

Or giving us any. Ben and Mickey Jean couldn't get out to us any more than we could get back in: the wire on the ground had trapped them on one side of it, us on the other.

“Ellie. We're in a situation, here.”

Now I was squinting, trying to keep ice pellets from penetrating my eyes. With them came enough cold liquid rain to coat everything and glaze it instantly. After that each new layer of water froze onto the ice beneath; in the morning this would all be a glittering fairyland.

Right now, though, it was a death trap.

“A sand truck will come along,” Ellie gasped, slogging through knee-deep snow. Her feet still broke through with each step; mine, too. We were fighting our way; between exhaustion and hypothermia it was a toss-up which one would get us.

If another section of power line didn't come down and zap us. As if in answer to my thought, a loud crack! followed by a popping sound and another brilliant flash of sick, greenish-yellow light came from behind us.

The weight of the accumulating ice was taking down one section of line after another. Another crash, this time from the woods, as an old branch gave up its grip on a tree that had held it for a hundred or so years. On its way down it took dozens of smaller, ice-coated branches. The sound of breaking glass seemed an odd, tinkling accompaniment as twiglets snapped and shattered.

“If we can make it to the road,” Ellie insisted.

I didn't contradict her. I didn't have the heart to, much less the lung power. Every breath of air was like a frozen fist slugging my chest. The cold was seeping up my leg bones, weighting them with a deep, frigid agony that sooner or later was going to stop them.

Would I be found lying down, or frozen standing up, sheeted in ice? Only an hour or so ago we'd been at Joy Abrams’ place, looking out at those hideous yard lamps. I’d have killed to be within sight of them, now, and I was dying of thirst, too.

But when I put my tongue out, all I could catch were needle-like ice pellets. They felt dry as grains of rice.

Water was all around, puddled on the frozen snow. I could drink some if I could just get down to it, and then I could…

“No! Jacobia, you'll never get back up again, your stuff is too heavy, don't do it. Look, we're almost to the…”

Road. Ellie's face bobbed like a balloon. Distantly the thought occurred to me that this was hypothermia; I was losing all my judgment.

A stab of fear pierced me. “Okay.”

My tongue felt thick. Soaked through and frozen, and too slow. Too slow for what?

No matter. One foot. The other.

We emerged onto the road that felt pebbled with frozen rain atop a coating of sand. Ice pellets fell with a sound like gravel pouring from a dump truck.

There we stopped. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness: the road a dark grey ribbon, remnants of snow here and there like heaps of dirty white rags, and the woods. Dark and endless, or as good as endless for our purposes.

“Jake,” Ellie said quietly.

“We're done for, aren't we?”

“No, Jake.” Her tone became insistent. “Look.”

I followed the slow, heavy gesture of her right arm, aiming at a dark shape, silent and motionless by the road.

A big dark, shape. It was a car. “Oh, my God.”

I moved toward it. If the keys were in it, if we could get the damned thing started…

Even if not, maybe we could get inside, out of the icy rain. There might be a blanket, a tarp, something. The headlights went on, the sudden glare blinding me, making me stagger back.

Scaring me, too. “Who is it?” I shouted. “Who's there?”

Ice bits fell thickly through the cones of pale yellow projected from the lights. Rain steamed on the hood, billowing up in clouds that obscured the windshield.

Sitting here, I realized, with the engine running. Someone rolled a window down. A face peered out. “Who is that?” a voice called.

My ears felt frozen all the way into the center of my head; the voice came through like someone talking underwater, unrecognizable. I moved toward it—worriedly, but it was our only hope—then stopped as Ellie said my name.

“Jake?” she said again. Puzzled-sounding this time. As if, having come this far, she didn't understand why she had stopped.

But I did understand: she was twenty pounds lighter
than I was and four inches taller. And hypothermia is a function of time, temperature, and body mass.

No exceptions; it was why the men had contests to see who could get into the survival suits fastest.

“Ellie.” She'd been wet and freezing for half an hour; her lips in the headlights’ glare were indigo against the ghostly white of her face. Her eyelashes had frozen together into clear, tear-shaped lozenges; her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely speak.

The bad part, though, was her level of consciousness. As I reached her, her knees went out from under her; I caught her in arms that felt like blunt lumps, and went down with her onto the frozen road.

The ice bit my kneecaps with that numb kind of pain that means you've really injured yourself and can't quite feel it. But a pair of skinned knees was the least of my worries, now.

“… okay,” she whispered, trying to smile. Then her eyes rolled back whitely and all at once she was dead weight.

“Hey! You, whoever you are, get out here, help me with…”

The car door opened. A person got out. Small, slender.

Like Ellie, in fact. But not half-dead of cold.

Alive and carrying a gun: a small, grey-metal pistol glinted in the headlights.

Behind the weapon Willetta Abrams.

She put the
gun away once she saw who we were and helped me get Ellie into the car, into the backseat where I started pulling off her wet, frozen clothing. Chilled didn't even begin to describe her condition; I was terrified for her.

Slenderness may be a good thing for fashion. But for survival, more meat on the bones is better. “Crank the heat,” I ordered as Willetta put the car in gear.

A couple of protesting rumble-thumps backfired from under the chassis but the engine settled as the vehicle's systems cleared from having been sitting there, idling. “We need to go to the hospital in Calais,” I told her.

“You got it.” Willetta was a good, assertive driver, un-fazed by the ice on South Meadow Road and speedier when we got to Route 1, which was freshly sanded. Also, she was carrying emergency stuff, including a blanket; I remembered Joy saying their father had been a Maine guide and thanked my stars.

“Hey,” Ellie muttered, her eyelids fluttering.

“Hang in there, kid.” Her flesh felt rubbery.

She tried to sit up. “I want…”

“Right, but you need to get checked over.”

I’d heard a story once about fishermen dumped into the bay by a combination of bad weather and bad luck. They floated in lifejackets in the icy water until a rescue boat found them. On board, they revived, gratefully swallowing the hot coffee the rescue crew offered.

Whereupon—and this is a true story—they all dropped dead. The shock of a hot drink on their chilled systems killed the fishermen outright; by the time it got to shore, the rescue boat was carrying a dozen corpses.

Willetta glanced in the rearview. “Not much farther, now.” She snapped the radio on to WQDY, the Calais-St. Stephen station.

“… guess that storm took a wild turn, folks, and we've got a lot of unexpected ice out there, so the authorities are asking you to stay home, sit tight, wait it out a little longer until city crews can…”

She snapped it off again. No one else was on the road. “What were you doing out there?” I asked her. “And why are you carrying a gun?”

“Sorry I scared you. After you left Joy's, I—”

“Oh,” Ellie murmured, huddled into the blanket. “So cold.”
⁷

“—I wanted to tell you the rest of it. About Peter. I went to your house but you were just leaving, so—”

“So you followed us to Melinda's, and then out here in an ice storm?”

She shook her head impatiently. “I didn't want to see Peter, and his car was at Melinda's, so I didn't go in there. I thought I’d see you at your house, again, but you made that U-turn. And it wasn't an ice storm. Not right away. I was as surprised by it as you.”

So it had been Willetta all along, following us. “Once I realized you must have turned off, I went back but by then you were getting into Ben's truck. So I followed, and waited for both of you to come back out again. I guess I could've just gone home at that point, but I don't trust Ben,” she added, frowning.

Right. Me, neither. “And I can understand why you wouldn't want to encounter Peter,” I conceded.

“Peter,” Willetta pronounced, “is a psychotic bastard.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “he is kind of unusual, isn't he?”

“Turn around,” Ellie said. Her voice was stronger. “I don't need to go to any…”

Willetta laughed harshly. “ Unusual? That's a nice word for what he is. Peter drugged me. He drugged me and he… did things to me. Awful things. I don't even remember them, but I know it's true. Because…”

Oh, for God's sake, of course: drugs.

Willetta found her voice. “It's why I wanted to tell you without Joy listening. Or anyone else… Peter took pictures of me.”

She glanced in the mirror again. “I’ve seen them. I just hope no one else has. That's why no one ever says a word against him, you know. Because he has always got something to hurt you with. You think he has gone for good, that he's forgotten you…”

“So that's why the gun, and the lights at your place?”

She nodded. “He'd hang around, hide in the dark waiting for me until I went out to go to work for the night. Joy doesn't know I have the gun, but I need it in case he…”

“Turn around” Ellie said. “Are you both deaf? George is going to be frantic, and Wade, too, we've got to go home…”

“… before he comes back,” Willetta finished. “Hey, it's stopping.”

The ice, she meant. As we drove, the crispy-sounding road surface beneath the tires became slush, then liquid water. The rain was all liquid, now, cast aside by the wipers in spraying gouts.

“Melinda's supposed to be seeing him tonight,” Ellie said. She'd given up on making us turn around.

To my surprise, Willetta nodded. “That stupid picnic at the old gas plant on the beach, probably. Those two are both nuts.”

I just adore the cold… “How do you know about that?”

She shrugged, eyes on the road. “He's been planning it for a while. And he calls me, too. Like I said, you don't get away from Peter. He calls and brags how wonderful life is without me. Never mind it was me who dumped him. And—”

She glanced at me. “Anyway, you don't dump Peter. You just don't.”

Or maybe Ellie hadn't given up. Maybe she'd just thought of something important enough to make us go back.

“This ice storm,” she pointed out, “wasn't in the forecast.”

A mental picture of them flashed in my mind: Peter and Melinda as I’d last seen them, discussing their planned outing. I remembered something else, too, suddenly: Melinda telling me she was going to have to do something about Peter.

“Willetta. Find a place for another U-turn.”

Melinda would do something, all right. She would go on that damned picnic. And then—tonight: so long, sayonara, don't let the screen door boot you in the backside on your way out, Peter.

Willetta looked startled, but scanned the side of the road obediently.

“Jake,” Ellie said, “first he threatens people, women, so badly they won't talk about him, even a whole continent away.”

Willetta made a three-point turn, heading us south. Big orange town trucks and emergency electric-company vans had begun hitting the highway in force, their yellow rooftop beacons strobing the darkness.

“Next he does his number on Willetta,” I agreed. “And that's the answer: why Faye Anne doesn't remember. She stuck with her decision not to see him anymore. So for revenge—”

“He drugged her with whatever he used on Willetta,” Ellie said. “Killed Merle and set Faye Anne up so it would look like she did it.”

“Maybe,” I cautioned. Ellie's color had improved remarkably. “We still don't know that for sure. Twenty minutes ago, we were sure that Ben had…”

Willetta made the turn onto Route 190 and sped toward the causeway. “But it doesn't matter. From Faye Anne's point of view, two suspects—besides her, I mean—are much better than one.”

“Oh. Okay.” Ellie sat back, satisfied. Her voice was stronger, too.

On the east side of the causeway the ice was gone but there were cars in the ditch and wires down, no lights in any houses anywhere. The storm had hit the island hard.

“Well, I know what I think,” Willetta said emphatically. “Bob Arnold caught Peter at Melinda's, lurking around.

Maybe Bob suspected him already, and said something that let Peter know it. So Peter attacked him.”

“What did Mickey Jean mean, then,” Ellie asked, “when she told Ben they had to finish what they'd started?”

But to that we had no answer. Ellie began digging through the box of emergency stuff Willetta carried. Flares, a small shovel, a bag of small things: matches, flashlight, batteries.

Finally: “Here,” she said, sounding satisfied.

Like a good guide, trained by a father who'd taught her to be prepared for any emergency, Willetta carried a set of dry clothes. Old and mismatched, too short in the legs and sleeves but plenty warm.

“No,” I said when she offered me some of them; her brief collapse had scared me badly. And I guess I must have sounded serious enough not to argue with; as swiftly as she could in the cramped backseat of the car, she began pulling them on.

When she was finished she looked ready to stand out in a garden, to scare crows. She was warm and dry, though, and a pair of old boots underneath the seat fit her well enough, too, for the moment. And by now I thought a cup of hot coffee probably wouldn't kill her, so I was satisfied.

For the moment. “Wade is going to be worried,” I said. “And mad.”

“He'll cheer up when he sees you're okay,” Willetta said. We were on Clark Street, taking the back way into town.

Toward Melinda's. I saw lights, suddenly. “The generator. It must be working.”