Authors: Stephen Gallagher

The Boat House (37 page)

"No, you weren't wrong," Pete managed to say. "Now climb, damn it!" His arm, now lifting her, was starting to shake with the upkeep of the pressure.

She responded by raising herself a little, so that their faces were closer together. The strain on Pete's arm grew fiercer. His entire body was braced and trembling. In spite of everything that was going on around them, she could now lower her voice almost to a breath and still be heard.

"Remember when you first brought me to the valley?" she said. "We made a deal. You had to promise never to fall in love with me. And I said I'd try never to hurt you. I suppose you thought that was a strange thing to say."

"Grab the edge!" he said, "You can do it!"

But unexpectedly, she opened her hand. He was left holding on alone. Already he could feel her wet skin beginning to slide.

"Now perhaps you can understand," she said.

Her hand slipped through his own like smoke, leaving him not knowing whether he let her or whether he lost her, just staring at the oily surface of the water where she'd been not an instant before.

The Birchwood was reversing out again with Ted at the helm, releasing more daylight to pierce the smoke as it withdrew. The nose was crumpled, but the hull was in one piece. The Princess was listing badly and its interior furnishings were beginning to blaze. Something inside her fireballed with a soft thump.

The gap was widening; Pete took it at a run, and almost didn't make it.

The explosion that followed blew the roof off the boat house, scared the birds out of the trees for miles around, and echoed off into heaven like a distant thunder.

EPILOGUE

After the Drowning (2)

FIFTY-ONE

It was two years later to the day - or rather, to the night - that Ted Hammond took a plastic office chair out to the end of an empty jetty so that he could sit and watch the lake and the valley's few lights. It was a warm evening, but he had some cool beers that were going to stay cool because he'd put them in a net bag and lowered the bag into the water. He also had Wayne's radio-cassette player and a couple of his tapes, and he set this out beside him on the jetty and turned the volume up good and loud. Chuck and Bob lay on the boards, waiting for the empty cans to crunch.

He sat back, breathed the air. He'd done this a few times before, but tonight seemed special; almost an anniversary.

Wayne didn't talk to him any more. He missed it, but he was also relieved because it meant that his mind wasn't going after all. His doctor had told him that such a thing wasn't common but it wasn't exactly abnormal either, and after a period of attendance in an out patients' clinic and a course of antidepressants they considered that he'd been 'stabilised' - which mostly meant that he'd ceased in his reporting of symptoms that they couldn't explain.

And the doctors hadn't even heard the worst of it.

Out across the bay, he saw the lights in the restaurant go out at the end of the evening's business. Further lights on the north shore were so dim that they were like dying stars. Ted fished up the net, took out his second can, and dropped the others back over the side.

It was about half an hour later when a van door slammed and the two dogs came suddenly alert. He calmed them with a word, but they stayed watchful.

Then, after a minute or so, Angelica Venetz walked out along the jetty toward them.

She'd picked up a chair for herself along the way. Ted didn't stand, or look surprised; this, again, was nothing new, but neither was it yet a routine so familiar that the formalities of it could be skipped.

Ted said, "Is it the noise? I didn't think it would reach you from here."

"It doesn't," Angelica said. "I just came to join you for a while. Assuming that's all right."

"'Course it is," Ted told her, and gestured for her to set her chair next to his own.

They'd had three or four of these informal late night get-togethers since Adele's second, more major stroke back in February. Ted had been the one who'd stepped in when the usually competent Angelica had been caught wrong-footed, when without being asked and without needing to be invited he hired them a relief chef and kept their business ticking over until Angelica had been able to give it some attention once again. Shouldering someone else's worries had been an unexpected recreation for him; at least, it had been a break from his own.

"Will you have a drink?" he said. "Unfortunately there's only beer, beer and beer, but at least it's cool."

"I believe I will," she said, and so he hauled up the net and took out a can and then, after unzipping the ringpull, passed it over to her. The dogs' eyes followed every move.

"No glasses, either," he apologised. "Looks like I'm not too well set up for visitors."

"No glasses, nothing to wash up. I'm thinking of trying the same arrangement over there." Then she took a sip, and made a face.

"No good?"

"I wouldn't know. I'm not used to it."

"I'll lay on something else for next time."

"This is fine for now."

They sat in easy silence for a while, watching the night and listening to the music.

No, he hadn't told the doctor everything.

I'm not at peace, dad, Wayne had said to him from the dank shadows in the bottom of the dock. None of us are. She's going to keep us like this forever. Please don't let her do it. And then, when a puzzled Frank Lowry had shone a light in because he was wondering why the bell had been ringing and ringing with no one to answer it, the Wayne thing had simply broken up. Ceased to be.

The truth, of course, was that it had never been there at all.

One kind of truth, anyway.

But it was the other truth that he'd been observing when he'd taken an axe to one of the bulkheads in the sinking Princess in order to puncture a fuel tank and feed his fire. By rolling the gas cylinders into the flames before abandoning ship, he'd killed the woman who'd killed his boy. No quiet hospital for her, he'd thought at first, even a hospital with bars; but then, as the rest of the story had come out, he'd realised that he'd probably done her a kindness.

But by then, it hadn't mattered.

"Peter and Diane came in tonight," Angelica said. "Little Jed was with them." And she made a slightly wry face as she said his name, as if she still couldn't quite come to terms with it. "He said something very strange. He said that when somebody drowns in the lake, they don't die, but their spirit becomes a part of it. Where do you suppose he heard that?

"Probably at school," Ted said. "Some old fairy story."

"You don't think there's anything in it."

"Nah," he said, and he reached down to turn the player slightly so that it faced the water.

The next track, he knew, would be one of Wayne's favourites.

Be at peace now,
he thought.
And God bless.

Meanwhile, in the cottage on the Step, Pete McCarthy stood at the window of his bedroom. He was leaning on the frame and looking out, with the sash half raised to let in the night air and the night-time sounds. He still got bouts of insomnia and occasional headaches, even after all this time. They'd told him that both were due to the double concussion that he'd received, once when Alina had hit him from behind and again from his closeness to the boat house explosion. They no longer talked about charging him with the shelter of an illegal alien. The situation was complicated enough, and the story would probably never be known in all its details.

In the bed behind him, Diane stirred slightly… but she slept on. No complications there.

But for soundness of sleep, Jed took the prize; road drills wouldn't wake him. He was in Alina's old room now, with his Hulk posters and his Spidey lampshade and the printed cover that turned the bed into the likeness of a racing car. He said that he liked it here, better than any of the other places that they'd stayed. He said that it felt more like home.

Home.

Leaving had once seemed like the best idea but, in all of their wanderings, each of them had known that they'd eventually come back to this place. Even Ted Hammond had known it, keeping it empty for them and spinning his sister some line so that he wouldn't have to rent it out. Jed had been the first one to put it into words; and after that, it had seemed kind of inevitable.

Pete returned his attention to the view - the foliage, the rise, the valley beyond like another country just over the hill that could never be reached. He was thinking about what Jed had said at the restaurant earlier, and wondering what might have caused him to say it. Could he have overheard them talking and if so, when? Or had he perhaps seen or heard something in his wanderings on the Step, something down by the lakeside that perhaps rose from the water and spoke to him, slipping through those doors in his mind that hadn't yet become closed to visits from the outlands of reality?

If she's in love with you, she'll call to you. And in the night, she may even come to you. And then perhaps you'll come down to the water's edge, and you'll beg me to take you.

He'd stood like this many times around this hour, sometimes with Diane unknowing beside him and sometimes alone, watching the ridgeline against the moonlight, against the stars, against a darkened sky with only memory to assure him that there was anything there at all; and nothing, and nobody, had come, which meant that no, the feeling wasn't love.

But that didn't help him to know what it was that drew him here night after night. He'd never mentioned it to Diane and she'd never asked, although he sometimes suspected that she might have guessed. He wondered if it would fade, but wasn't even sure that he wanted it to.

Diane stirred again. It was time for him to return.

And he would - after just a little while longer.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Prologue

Part One