On the stage, a group of musicians stood in a smoky glow of spotlights. A corpse-white man was singing, his voice a guttural snarl. The lead guitarist worked his instrument with such furious intensity, there was a physical discomfort in listening to the sound. I wanted to get away from it, had even turned to go ⦠when I saw the child. She stood to one side of the stage, as if frozen. Around her, oblivious to her presence, couples were moving in a jerky dance rhythm. The air was almost opaque with smoke, giving the figures on stage a dreamlike presence. At the rim of the sound another vocal had begun, a frail voice crying in the wilderness of noise. It was the child, I realized. Her words were indistinct, but I
felt
them, felt their pain and fear, and all at once I was slick with sweat. My muscles were tight, and breathing was difficult. The drumming kept on, like the thunderous footsteps of something terrible approaching. The sound banged off the walls, trying to escape. I needed to escape, too.
But not without the child.
I started forward. I edged around dancers, avoiding contact (something told me it wouldn't be a good idea to touch them) until at last I was close. I was reaching for the child, about to gather her to myself, when a laser beam blistered my face and sent me recoiling.
Bars of moving light drew my eyes open, and I was suddenly awake. I'd been dreaming. I was in a bed in a dark room, both unfamiliar. I stank of tobacco smoke. There were bright shapes sliding over the ceiling. Headlights? I knew then where I was. Except the lights weren't coming from the narrow road in front of the house, but rather from in back, from the beach. With a pounding heart I lay frozen between wanting to know what was going on and simply willing it to go away. I eased back the sheet and rolled quietly from the bed. The rattan roughness on my bare feet wakened me more fully. I drew on pants and moved with hushed steps to a window on the seaward-facing side of the room. Keeping to one side, I peered out.
Two high, close-set lights were piercing yellow eyes. Fog had engulfed the house, and it was as though some beast from the sea had come with it. Through the glare I could make out its vague, elongated shape. I thought I could hear a sound now, tooâa low rumble, as of an engine, though I wasn't sure.
I made my way downstairs, cat-footed through the dark house to the kitchen, but when I reached the door to the deck, the lights were gone. The sound seemed to taper to the thin edge of dream, and then it disappeared. The beach was fog-bound again, silent. I drew open the sliding door and smelled the sea. I stepped out onto the deck, the planks cold underfoot, and blinked into the seamless shroud. Was there a large, humped form going down the beach toward the water? Perhaps I imagined it. I stood in the cold night, feeling the wild thud of my heart. I didn't begin to shiver until I got back inside.
I left the lights off. The digital clock on the kitchen counter said 3:33. It was about as wee as the hour got. A slot player might have listened for a jingle of coins, or a prophet warned of a cut-rate beast of the Apocalypse. I tried to remember my dream, but it was hash. I told myself to make a list of things to bring back from Lowell and at the top to put my .38. I sat in the dark and watched the clock go through a lot of numbers before I finally dozed upright in the chair. I woke once around dawn, stiff-necked, and went to the slider and looked out.
The mist had thinned and paled. The beach had been swept
clean by the tide. Waves were gliding shoreward in calm, unruffled rows. I started to go back upstairs to finish my sleep when I noticed something in the sea off the point. A lone figure in a wet suit sat on a surfboard, gently rising and falling with the waves. More from lethargy than real interest, I watched him for a few moments, wondering if he'd catch a ride, but he let the water roll emptily under him and just sat out there, like a sentry on watch. I roused myself and went up to bed.
Â
Â
The next time I woke, it was to sunlight and the high music of children's voices outside. It was after nine. I went downstairs and stepped out onto the deck, squinting. People with beach chairs and blankets had materialized. I thought that some of them were looking up at me, but I rubbed my eyes and realized it was just the leftover heebie-jeebies of my busted sleep. The beach folk had other agendas, chief among them working on tans. I could smell the sunscreen. A jagged line of seaweed, broken shells, and bits of trash delineated the high-tide mark: flotsam and jetsam, I imagined, though don't ask me which is which. Seagulls chuckled overhead. Thirty minutes later, showered and shaved and dressed in a gray rough-silk sport coat, pale blue shirt, and chinos, I was at the police station. The young female officer at the desk frowned in consternation when I told her what I'd seen on the beach during the night.
“It wasn't a squad car,” she assured me. “Not down on the sand. Around three A.M., you say?” She checked the log. “No one called in to report anything unusual. But that doesn't necessarily prove much. This time of year, we sometimes get off-roaders, or kids on a toot. Though that's a pretty private stretch of beach. I'm noting it now, sir. How do you spell your name?”
As she wrote it in, I was scanning the notebook that served as the Standish police logâan old cop habit, I suppose. An entry from several nights before caught my eye. “What's that?” I asked, pointing at it when she'd finished writing.
The officer looked. “A call came in just before midnight that a young female was walking along Sea Street. It was just a safety issueâthere's
no sidewalk along there. An officer was sent over, but the person wasn't there when he arrived.”
Before I could ask if there were any further details, a cop rushed in to say there'd been a bad accident. A car had gone off the road south of town sometime overnight. They were pulling it from the ocean now: a red Daytona.
Â
Â
I fought a desire to speed. At last I came around a curve and onto the scene. The already narrow coast road was further narrowed to a single lane by a line of emergency flares. In the midmorning sun they were no brighter than Fourth of July sparklers. It appeared that most of the town's police force was already on site. I made out Chief Delcastro talking with several people. The Daytona, its windshield gone and its roof crunched at an angle, oozing water from every seam, was being winched onto the back of a wrecker. I told the officer directing traffic that I had information to share with Chief Delcastro. Trustingly, he waved me through.
When Delcastro saw me, he did a double take. “Get out of here,” he snapped.
“What about the driver?” I demanded. “Was it a young woman named Jillian?”
He fixed me with his gaze. “What do you know about this?”
“Was she inside?”
His silence was all the answer I needed. I felt as if I'd been punched. I let out a breath and looked away and for the first time saw that a length of wooden guardrail had been broken off.
“She didn't make it,” Delcastro said in a quieter voice. “We took her out already.”
It was my duty as a citizen to report what I knew. It wasn't muchâI didn't even know the young woman's name for sureâbut I gave him what I had. I realized that I was probably one of the last people to have seen and spoken with her, possibly the very last; and oddly Delcastro kept a firm look on me, then motioned me over to his cruiser, out of earshot of others. “Around nine-fifteen P.M., you said. At the lighthouse.”
I nodded. “We spoke for ten minutes, maybe less, and then she left.”
“And what did you do?”
“I made a quick stop to get some food supplies, then went back to where I'm staying.” I was about to add that Ted Rand could vouch for me but realized that I didn't have to; no one suspected me of anything. I did tell him that I drove out to the Beachcomber, and I said I'd just been at the police station, since he'd find out anyway. He didn't seem much interested in lights on the beach at night; he had a fatality on his hands. “Okay, the driver's last name was Kearns. How was she involved with this allegedly missing Nickerson girl?”
“I'm not sure she was. She overheard me asking questions out at the sports market and left the note on my car. I called and set up a meeting. She and Ben Nickerson evidently picked each other up in a bar Tuesday night. She said she went back to his rented house with him and they partied a little, but she left just before midnight.”
“And Nickerson's daughter?”
“She claimed she never saw her.”
He posed a few more questions, and I replayed what I could. “You still have the note?” he asked me.
“It was on my windshield in lipstick,” I said. “Paradise Plum, if it matters.”
He didn't seem stirred by anything I'd told him, or convinced of its importance. “Well, I appreciate your coming forward, but I don't think there's any mystery to solve.” He glanced toward the Daytona sitting atop the wrecker, one headlight goggling out like a displaced eye, a brown frond of seaweed dangling from a broken door mirror. “This is a bad road, and people sometimes go at it wrong for the conditions. It got foggy last night. Add in the fact that the victim may have been drinking ⦔
“I don't think she had been when I spoke with her.”
“I've got witnesses who put her at the Cliff House near closing.”
“Which is how you came up with the estimated time of her crash?”
He shot me a glance. “Dashboard clocks aren't what they used to be. They don't freeze the moment of impact.”
“Was she with anyone at the Cliff House?”
He pointedly ignored the query.
“Who claims they saw her?”
Ditto.
“Do you happen to know her real first name? It seemed a multiple choice last night.”
“To answer the
next
question I know you're going to askâand so you won't think I'm being rudeâwe will investigate the accident.” He turned and headed back to the scene.
“I never doubted it, Chief,” I called after him.
As I reached my car, the wrecker drew past, and it occurred to me to do what I hadn't thought of last night: I jotted down the Daytona's plate number. For an instant, as I put my notebook away, something stirred at the edge of my memory, but a police siren whooped and the something was gone before I could grab it. I slid the Ford back into the halting flow of the curious.
Â
Â
I'd told Delcastro that I didn't doubt he would investigate the car crash, and I assumed there would be an autopsy; what I did have doubts aboutâand mulled as I drove back to Standish Center, slowlyâwas whether my meeting with the woman in the Daytona had somehow contributed to her death, directly or otherwise. As I'd said to Delcastro, she had seemed nervous last night, but when he'd pressed me on it, I didn't have a reason. I played with possibilities now. Was it about the softball player she'd wanted to duck at the Cliff House? Someone in the van that had cruised the lighthouse? Being seen talking to me? Did it concern Ben Nickerson? If she'd been inebriated and driving dangerously on account of it, as the police seemed to be promoting, I could let myself off the hook because that had come later. She wouldn't have been my bet to win any safe-driver awards, and yet I had to ask myself what, if anything, I might have done to prevent it. Until I knew more, I was going to wonder.
Of course, it was entirely possible that the accident went down just as Delcastro had read it. The road was curvy, and certainly by the time she went off, the fog had rolled in so thickly that visibility
would've been dicey. I used my cell phone and called the RMV in Lowell and asked for a woman I knew. The wait took only half as long as if I'd been there, standing on line to get a license. She sounded happy to hear from me.
“I need an ID to go with a tag number,” I said.
She played coy awhile, reminding me how she couldn't
possibly
give out that information to anyone except a
real
cop; it wouldn't be professional.
“You're tough,” I said.
“Go on, you think so?”
“Armor-clad. You could be a CIA spook.”
“Seriously?”
“You'd get an ultra top-secret clearance easy.”
“Oh, you're sweet.” I heard a tap-tapping of keys. “Okay, here's the name.”
Lucky thing it wasn't her virtue I was assailing. From my car, I called directory assistance and got a phone number and an address. I felt like Nero Wolfe on wheels.