I grabbed him. “I thought you wereâ”
“Aren't I?” He gazed around. “
Some
thing hit me.”
But there was no blood. A round had evidently lodged in the thick leather of his shoulder harness, and another had ripped his coat's shoulder, but he wasn't hurt.
With vast relief, I helped him up. He wobbled a little as he tried to walk, but then he caught on. We checked the two men on the sand; they weren't as lucky. St. Onge looked at me. “Either one of them your guy?”
They were strangers. The third man rolled in the surfâa few feet in, a few feet outâbut he wasn't Ted Rand either. I got my feet wet hauling him above the reach of the waves.
“You okay?” St. Onge asked.
My knees were gimpy. “Yeah.”
“Me too.”
It wasn't the whole truth for either of us, but it was a start.
Â
Â
The Sand Bar was only slightly busier than the first time I'd been there. The yin/yang philosopher looked up as we went in. If I thought he had answers to fill my needs right then, I'd have been glad to listen, but what I really needed was a drink. Maybe a chug-fest was in order. Ed and I moved to a table in a far corner. My shoes made squelching sounds. If we had been official, SOP would've required that forms be filled out, ballistics checked on all the weapons used, probably some kind of posttraumatic-stress counseling, and a full internal investigation. If we were official. Instead, we'd gathered up our weapons. I found the flashlight mashed flat. We dragged the crates of weapons back into the space where they'd been to get them out of sight. I didn't think anyone would be coming back for them tonight. We peeled off the latex gloves and stashed our own weapons in the trunks of our vehicles.
The bartender came over. “I remember you,” he said. “Olde Mr. Boston.” He grinned.
“Yeah.”
“You look pale. You ought to get some rays.”
“A couple drinks will have to do for now.” I glanced at St. Onge.
“V.O. double and a Bud,” he said.
“Two,” I said.
“That'll work also,” agreed the barman.
When he'd gone to get them, I said, “Maybe I should've just let them take the guns.”
“They were selling death in the streets. They weren't going to lie down.”
“I could have walked away when I found the boxes. It wasn't what I was after. I didn't have to call you.”
“How would you calculate the body count then? Not here, not today, but you can bet it'd be high.” He held out a hand, palm down, and I saw it tremble. “But we put some bad guys out of business.”
“A few permanently.”
He nodded grimly. “But we also clipped whoever in the staties made this possible. He won't be able to hide. Unless he's shark food already, his ass is grass. He'll get pinched.”
But Rand was smoke. Grab your metaphor. And maybe I'd blown everything. Maybe Rand had killed Michelle Nickerson when he'd killed her fatherâ
had
them killed. No, I wedged that thought away. Why would he kill her? She was no threat. But I didn't know. I didn't have her.
“Here you be, gentleman.” We took the drinks. The barman slid a glance at St. Onge, and then leaned toward me. “Don't tell me it's not a flat earth, brother. One day we all of us reach that horizon and go over into the void. In the meantime, do good where you can. I thought about what you asked me when you were in before. I recognized him.”
I stared, then got it. “The guy Jillian was with when you saw her last?”
“Uh-huh. I must've blocked it out, like a defense mechanism against reliving pain.”
I glanced at St. Onge, who was concentrating on his drink, then back. “What pain are you talking about?”
“The humiliation of playing against Point Pinesâit's like a conspiracy against every other team in the league. They crush us every time. The guy plays for them.” He set the drinks tray on the table and lifted a framed photograph from it. “Here he is here, the son of a bitchâgetting an MVP award.”
St. Onge kept out of it. I scanned the photo he had removed from the wall behind the barâit was an end-of-season banquet, all right, and Ted Rand was there at the table with his players. “This guy here?” I said, touching the picture glass.
“That's him.”
I was confused. It wasn't Ben Nickerson. “You're sure he's the one she was with a few nights before her crash?”
“A few
nights
? I'm talking a few hours. He left with Jilly that same night.”
I stared again at Mr. Softball, at his sturdy, suntanned face, with its shaggy hair, and I recognized him even without the mirror shades.
I drove out to the Old Cape Road, through the lonely slack-water places, and in the stillness the old Surf ballroom seemed far behind. St. Onge had looked questioningly at me when the bartender took his photograph back, but I didn't offer an explanation of what the cryptic exchange had meant, and Ed didn't ask. He had already shoved his neck way out. “I've got to get back to Standish,” I told him. “Can you handle things here?”
“An anonymous pay-phone call to the local heat is the extent of my involvement, then I'm out. I still haven't packed for vacation.”
He cut off my thanks with a wave. I left money for the drinks, and a five-dollar tip. So the cop named Shanley was the softball player who'd approached Jillian Kearns in the parking lot of the Cliff House and who'd been with her after she and I had parted at the lighthouse. That was interesting, but what it might signify would have to wait. Something else was beginning to knock at the back of my mind as I got in the Blazer. “Like a conspiracy against us,” the barman had said. He'd been speaking metaphorically, about a softball
dynasty, but it reminded me of something I hadn't given any thought to until now.
Of course, maybe it was just goofy foot.
Â
Â
There was no one in the motel office, so I went around to the small house in back. The rain had stopped. I glanced at the dog pen and saw that Gruff was gone. After a minute of my knocking, Fran Albright came to the door looking puzzled. “Hi,” she said.
“Is your father here?”
“I don't know where he is. I just got home a while ago.” She glanced past me. “Is it still raining?”
“It stopped.”
“He went out this afternoon. I'm a little surprised he's still out.” I was, too, given his fear of spy satellites and phantom helicopters. Fran was looking closely at me, her brow knit. “Is something wrong, Mr. Rasmussen?”
Wrong? Things were as wrong as they could be. People were dead, and I'd helped some of them get that way. Time wasn't on my side, and now I was entertaining wiggy notions of how her father's idea of a grand conspiracy might in fact have a basis right here in this town. I stepped nearer to her there in the door, wanting to form some intimacy between us. “Fran ⦠did you know that your sister was pregnant when she drowned?”
She blinked several times. “What?”
“It was in the autopsy report. Three months.”
“But that's ⦠impossible. She ⦠she ⦔ Fran broke off, gaping at me from her doorstep. “You've actually seen this report?”
“Yes. Your parents must have seen it, too.”
“My God. She never ⦠They ⦔
She was reeling with the revelations, unable to pick up a cohesive thread. I let out a breath, not sure what else to say. The tiny housekeeping cottages in back were as dark as ever, obscured by the jungle of sumac growing around them. “Do you have any idea where your father is?”
She shook her head blankly. She stepped outside and moved closer to me, as if feeling a sudden need for companionship. I was
reluctant to leave her. I lifted my chin in the direction of the cottages, just to shift the subject. “How long since those have been used?”
She squinted toward the units, as if she'd lost track of their existence. “Years and years. Dad let them go while I was living in Colorado. Too much upkeep and not much demand.”
I nodded. “I've got to go. Will you be okay?”
“Years ago, it was the way families traveled. Rent a little place for a week, and move in. This time of year, folks would sit in front and talkâthere was no air-conditioning, just the sea air. Kids played in the yard because it was safe, there was no traffic ⦠it was nice,” she said quietly, and for a moment I wished with all my might that the world could be rolled back to that simpler time. But it couldn't. I started for the Blazer.
“Ginny and I would play flashlight tag with the kids, and blind-man's bluff,” Fran went on in a quickened voice, moving with me. “Now people on vacation want conveniences, and children play at video arcades. These places are totally forgotten, like those games we played as kids.”
I had the Blazer's door open and was about to get in, but I stopped. “I thought your father got this place much later?”
“Dad was a schoolteacher when we were little, but summers he and Mom managed the motel for Mr. Rand. Dad bought it only later, afterâ” She broke off.
“After your sister drowned.”
She looked at me quizzically, which was probably the way I was looking at her. I looked again at the cottages. “Do you have a flashlight?” I said. “I seem to have lost mine.”
Together we walked back toward the cottages. What had been the parking area was just crumbled paving, the pine needles and gravel making soft sounds under our feet. A sway-backed picnic table stood rotting nearby. There were nine cottages, arranged in a semicircle in a grove of sumac and second-growth pines that dripped with the recent rain. The last two cottages were almost completely overrun with honeysuckle. “Forgotten” was what Fran had called them, as Van Owen had called the road out here. It seemed as if Standish's collective memory was faulty; it had forgotten a lot.
The cottages had once been white with green shutters, but time had painted everything in shades of gray, and now the night added dark tones. The roofs sagged with the load of years. Shutters hung crookedly on rusted hinges. I could see bird nests in the broken window screens. There were padlocks on the doors. Stepping forward through a surf of damp leaves, I shone the light into the first building and saw only emptiness. I glanced toward the other cottages.
“What is it, Mr. Rasmussen?” Fran Albright asked at my back, her voice with a little underlay of tension now. “Is there something you're looking for?”
Was it history? Explanations? Understanding? I didn't know. Honeysuckle gave its fragrance to the wet air.
The second cottage was the same as the first, and the third, too. In the next cottage, the light beam roved across old mattresses stacked on their sides like vertical slices of moldy bread, the striped ticking had split open in places, stuffing protruding. Farther in was the suggestion of stored furniture: dim angles and bulky shapes. The door was dry-rotted, and the hasp and lock were rusted. The screws pulled out as I applied pressure to the panel, and the door
rawked
open. I looked over my shoulder at Fran Albright. For a beat of edgy silence, our eyes met; then I pushed the door wider and stepped inside. She stayed with me.
Motes of dust drifted in the flashlight beam, and an odor of mildew filled my nostrils. A strand of sticky web stretched against my cheek, then snapped. I brushed it aside and stepped farther in, pushing past the image of some jaunty Jolly Roger of a spider hurrying down the broken strand, eager to sink fangs into whatever had invaded its fine and private place. Beyond the stacked mattresses, the beam found a rounded contour that gleamed dully. It was the corner of an old steel bed frame. I sidestepped nearer and saw an old gray blanket, humped with folds and wrinkles. As I reached for it, my scalp gave an odd, premonitory tingle. I lifted a corner.
Beside me, Fran Albright drew a sharp breath and clapped her hands to her cheeks. Then I saw it, too. Under the old blanket, tied with a faded red bandanna, was a dark mass of what could have been hair. Fran's eyes were wide, agleam in the faint peripheral glow of
the flashlight. Motioning her to stay back, I drew the blanket all the way off.
She screamed. She cupped her hands over her mouth, as if to cut it off, but it came anyway, a shrill cry ending in a strangled gasp.
“Oh my God!”
She turned, bumped into one of the mattresses, sending up a plume of dust, and fled.
Her screams had sliced across my nerves like a serrated knife. I wanted to go, too, but I stepped closer to the old bed and shone the light. I felt as if I was studying one of those projective images, where you sometimes have to look and look before you finally see the dual image of a young woman and an old hag. I saw it now, a bodyâactually, skeletal remains. Most of the flesh was gone. The clothing had fared somewhat better, as had the hair, and I judged from these that the body was that of a girl. She was hunched in an almost fetal posture, as if she'd wanted to give herself comfort. I forced myself to squat by the mattress and look more closely.
The remains had been here a long while. Exposed to heat and cold and time, they had become mummified. What was left had a dark, sinewy texture, shiny like old greased leather. The fingers were claws. I saw no sign of jewelry or a handbag or other personal effects. I scanned the surrounding area, quickly looking for anything that might help me make sense of what we'd found. Then I turned and went outside to Fran Albright.
She clutched her hands before her as if she were about to pray. Seeing me, she gave an odd little laugh, then she moaned. “Oh, my God, don't let this be happening. Oh, please, God, no.” She seemed to be on the brink of hysteria.
I put an arm around her. She bucked, as if she wanted to run, but she didn't. After a moment, she pushed her face against my chest, and I held her. When she'd steadied a bit, she stepped back. “What ⦠what is that?” she asked, her voice throbbing. “It's not the ⦔
“No. I think it's a runaway girl who vanished years ago. A hitchhiker.” I didn't go into details. That would be for the ME and the police to establish. I took Fran Albright's hand, which was cold as death, and led her farther away.
It wasn't the same mild summer night we'd left. The pine trees
were menacing shapes, dark and spiky, that crowded near. Something foul had erased the honeysuckle sweetness. Wet brambles clawed at our clothing, and the silence was spooky with threat.
“Does ⦠does my father know it's here?”
“I don't know,” I said. But I was pretty sure I did. I led her back to her house and we went inside. “Where does your father keep his guns?”
She led me to a cabinet in another room. The door was locked, but she got a key and opened it. John Carvalho had himself a regular little arsenal: several deer rifles, an assortment of handguns, even a powerful-looking hunting bow. The Colt Python that he had taken with him the last time was missing. In one of the drawers below, I found boxes of ammunition, including .38s, and I reloaded the Smith & Wesson. Wordlessly, she watched. When I'd stashed an extra handful of rounds in my pocket and put the box away, I said, “Your father has scanners, here and in his car. Does he monitor police radio traffic?”
“Sometimes. He's kind of ⦠afraid of police.”
I nodded. “I've got to leave for a while, Fran.” Her eyes went round with fright. “I'm going to try to prevent anything worse from happening,” I said, hearing the hollowness of my words. I considered taking her with me, but I knew it would only add risk that I couldn't afford. “I don't think you're in danger, but I want you to telephone the police and get someone to come out here as soon as they can make it.”
“Can't you do it?”
“It's best if I don't.”
“Who should I talk to?”
“Anyone you get. They're dealing with other things right now, but be persistent. Tell them we may have found a girl who disappeared in town six years ago.”
“That must've been when I was in Colorado. I don't remember it.”
“They will. Can you handle it?”
She didn't seem quite sure. I took her hands in both of mine and held them, trying to put some warmth in them. “Make the call, Fran,” I said gently. “I'll wait.” She was motionless for a moment,
uncomprehending, I feared, but then she nodded and went into the kitchen. I watched her move among the high stacks of old newspapers and magazines, as if she were fading into the past. I listened until I heard her speaking to the police, then I left and hurried toward the Blazer.