Dead Level (13 page)

“Well. He could’ve been in the water awhile, I guess. That might make a wound look a lot worse. Predators would, too.”

Like Cheezil, for instance. We thought the weasel was cute, but to a prey animal, he wasn’t, and I doubted he’d turn up his nose at a piece of fresh meat just because it was human, either.

“I guess with the nighttime temperatures so cold lately, he might’ve stayed in decent shape otherwise for a while, especially if he’d been in a shady spot,” said Ellie. “Then when the water started moving so fast, the current washed him out at us.”

“Could be. Guy’s from New York, doesn’t know how challenging the environment is here.” I looked out at the granite boulders studding the area around the clearing. “So he takes a fall, lands on his face. I mean, come on. Sandals?”

No wonder he’d turned up dead. Kneeling to feed the stove embers a handful of kindling, Ellie nodded. “You’re right, maybe I shouldn’t look for any worse trouble than he really had.”

The last of the light outside was fading fast now that the sun had set, the nearly bare tree branches black scrawls against the deepening sky. Soon it was going to be dark enough to turn on our solar lamps, whose glow I always regarded with the glee of a child witnessing magic tricks: look, Ma, no electric bill!

But the thought of the coming darkness still wasn’t welcome. “Maybe we should’ve brought along one of the dogs,” I said as I gazed out at the gathering night. “Or even both of them.”

Suddenly I was lonely for home and, although I didn’t like admitting it, feeling anxious as well.

But Ellie shook her head. “We’d just have to take care of them, on top of all the other things we need to do.”

Hearing that “we” made me feel better. Ellie was a brick, never whiny or moody, always ready to tackle a project. Also, she was a fine cabin cook, able to turn plain camp fare into meals tempting to the pickiest eater.

She pulled her cellphone from her satchel and plopped onto the daybed, looking as comfy as if she were surrounded by luxury instead of stuck at a rustic lake house where the only hot water available came from a kettle on the stove.

“Hey. Thanks for staying,” I told her, touched. “I really—”

She waved me off. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just call home and leave a message for George on the machine.”

It was one of the reasons why the cottage wasn’t really a dangerous place, despite its isolation; good cellphone reception here meant that even if someone did have an accident or any other kind of trouble, help was just a dial tone away.

“You go on out and finish arranging the lumber to suit you,” Ellie added. “I’ll get things going inside, tend the fire, and get something to eat started and so on.”

It was a more-than-acceptable division of labor, especially since I’d been planning baked beans on toast for dinner; with her in charge, it was more likely to be something involving homemade biscuits. Anticipating these, I went out into the chilly evening, where the sun sent a few last deep red streamers across the lake and a loon’s laugh rang eerily in the stillness.

On the lake side of the cottage, I began arranging the deck flooring into two piles, long ones and short ones; cut that way, they could
be laid out in a more attractive pattern than if they were all the same length. Above, the back door that used to lead out to the old deck now opened onto thin air, four feet off the ground, but soon—or so I told myself encouragingly—we’d be able to set chairs out there again.

Half an hour later I’d finished my prep work, and stars had begun prickling the sky. Inside, a warm fire puttered cheerily in the stove and lamplight the color of honey picked out the red curtains, sewn long ago out of remnants from a nearby woolen mill. Also, the place smelled delicious; whatever Ellie had found to cook on the kitchenette’s gas stove, it wasn’t beans on toast.

“So who do you suppose that poor guy was?” Ellie wondered aloud as we ate dinner a little later. From half a roast chicken out of the cooler, she’d made chicken à la king; with it we were having a bottle of good Cabernet, not what a wine expert might choose to accompany a chicken dish but delicious nonetheless.

I looked around at the fire glowing behind the woodstove’s window, and the solar electric lamp diligently shining out light collected from the sun. Puffs of steam huffing companionably from the kettle’s spout promised plenty of hot water for doing dishes, and later for washing up before bed.

Victor
, the thought came suddenly to me,
would’ve liked all this. Especially the fancy wine
.

Ellie raised her glass in a toast. “To absent friends,” she said with a smile, as if she’d caught my thought, and I smiled, too.

She was stretching it, but what the heck; he was absent so her toast was at least half true.

And maybe more than half, I admitted grudgingly to myself; he’d been gone for a long time. What I did know for sure, though, was that right now Ellie and I were here: warm, safe, and happy.

Or at least that’s how I imagine we must’ve looked to Dewey Hooper, who I later learned was at that very moment standing just outside the cottage, in the darkness of the clearing, staring in at us through one of the windows.

• • •

Back in prison they’d told Dewey Hooper to reflect on how he’d gotten there, and what he might do to avoid ever being in that situation again. They’d advised him to think about his good traits and his less good ones, to identify his strengths and weaknesses.

But Dewey had already known what they were. Patience, that was the first of his strong points, and the next was the ability to plan out a course of action and stick to it, no matter what got in his way.

Such as, for instance, the plan that had gotten him out of prison a good thirteen years earlier than his scheduled release. Now, three days after his escape from the medium-security facility in Lakesmith, Maine, he stood outside a cabin in the remote rural area very near where he’d been born, and where (with a few short breaks for sentences in juvenile facilities) he’d spent his life.

So: Patience. Planning skills. More than enough wilderness know-how to allow him to survive out here in the woods for a long time, and—well, even Dewey knew he wasn’t very smart, or anyway not book smart. But he was cunning and adaptable, and able to zig instead of zag on an instant’s notice.

And that, he thought, was a much more useful talent to have than a knack for, say, arithmetic, or the ability to make sense of a newspaper article. He was loyal, too, when he got a chance to be, which wasn’t very often; most people didn’t deserve it, he’d found, but when they did, there was no truer pal than Dewey. Hey, just look at what he’d done for poor old Bentley Hodell.

As for his negatives, he saw no point in dwelling on them. “Think positive” was his motto, although if pressed he might have conceded that his temper had bollixed him up occasionally. Since his escape, he’d noticed also that he was having trouble making decisions; out of practice, he supposed, after so long pretending to go along with other people making them for him. Also, a lot of folks might say he was
too
superstitious.

But he didn’t agree. To him, habits like avoiding black cats and not
walking under ladders were only the beginning. Under the common run of so-called old wives’ tales lay another whole realm of reality entirely, he knew: signs and portents, omens and premonitions, sixth-sense perceptions he couldn’t describe but that he trusted completely.

So that as he peeked through a cottage window and saw the women inside—and especially
that
one, the sight of her like a lightning bolt to his brain—he knew he’d been drawn here for a reason. The window was open a crack, whiffs of woodsmoke and the delicious aroma of chicken stew escaping through it. The smells made his stomach growl hungrily, but it wasn’t the food that held his attention.

It was her. Not Jake Tiptree, whose big mouth had helped put him in prison: slim, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a dark green sweatshirt … the mere fact that she’d testified against him at his trial was more than enough reason to hate her with a passion, and he did.

Oh, he definitely did. But it was her companion he couldn’t tear his gaze from now. Tall and slender, she had red hair pulled back into an elastic from which a few softly curling tendrils escaped, framing her fine-boned features. Her brows were wing shaped, her lips pale pink and curved in a smile.

She looked like an angel … or a ghost, he thought with a faint shudder. It was what she must be, even though the Tiptree woman called her Ellie—

But it wasn’t her name. Calling her that was just some kind of trick, meant to fool him.
That face
 … lightly freckled, with perfect features and large, light colored eyes. Beautiful, and so
familiar
—

It was her. It was his dead wife, Marianne. Impossible, but there she was. Glaring up at him the last time he’d seen her, she’d spat at him, then sworn with her last breath that he would pay, that she would come back to
make
him pay.…

Which she had, just the sound of her name driving him crazy the whole time he’d been in prison, whispering in his head … and now here she was. Practically writhing in a spasm of fury mingled with panicky sixth-sense flappings of superstitious fright, he moved closer to the window.
Her …

The daughter of a fisherman and a well-known midwife—he skinny and silent, she massively motherish—Marianne had always been the witchy type, even as a young girl a brewer of odd teas and maker of weird, pungent potions.

It was part of what had attracted Dewey to her in the first place. Marianne was always picking and drying the leaves of odd plants, bringing home mushrooms she’d found out in the woods and mashing them up with pinches of this and that. After her parents died, she’d lived alone for a while, marrying Dewey only after he’d courted her for a whole winter with smoked salmon, venison haunches, and firewood.

And the result had been worth it: a warm house, a soft bed. One way and another, she’d been the prize in the box of Cracker Jacks, at first. But then the trouble began. Why did he have to drink, why couldn’t he hunt in season like other men instead of poaching … why, why, why?

Some people had said Marianne could tell what ailed you by the pulse in your throat, or fix a barren woman so she could have children. They said she could predict your future from the way a few tea leaves lay drowned at the bottom of your cup.

A grim smile twisted his lips at that last thought. Hell, she couldn’t really have been too great in the fortune-telling department, or she’d have seen ahead to her own choked throat, wouldn’t she?

But his smirk fled when she looked up suddenly toward him. For no reason that he could tell, she strode to the window and yanked the shade down, then went around to all the other cottage windows and covered them, too.

Shutting him out. Just like always. She’d thought she was so good, too good for the likes of him once she got to know him. But he’d taught her a lesson, showed her who had the upper hand.…

Both hands, actually. Around her throat, choking the life out of her while she fought and sputtered. Cursing him all the while, even when she no longer had breath enough to make a sound.

In the end, they’d gotten him for her death. His attack had left marks, the result of his temper getting the better of him. But only for manslaughter; no one could prove he’d been planning it, that he’d decided enough was enough.

No one but her, and she wasn’t ever going to be able to tell, was she? Not after his thumbs had been pressed so far into her throat, he’d felt small bones in there cracking. No one …

Not until now
. Slowly he backed away from the cabin, his feet finding the small stones of the clearing and moving lightly on them to avoid making a sound. Suddenly the cabin door opened and he froze, certain that he had been detected.

But then, framed in the glow of the open doorway, the dark-haired one named Jake only flung water from a pan at the bushes and went back inside again, closing the door behind her.

Dewey let his breath out. Being imprisoned had taught him the value of his patience; he’d planned his way out, going over every step again and again, taking a couple of years to make sure he’d thought of every eventuality, plugged up any potential hole in his scheme.

Thinking of it all again, pushing the hex she’d put on him determinedly from his mind, he crept away from the cottage. Back in prison, he’d had to gain trust, be a good boy so he could get a spot in the prison’s work program, in which inmates whose release was at least theoretically possible were encouraged to learn new, useful skills like cooking, laundry, or landscaping.

Already planning, he’d told the counselor he wanted to be a healthcare worker, so in their wisdom they’d made him a janitor in the infirmary. There, silently pushing a broom, emptying wastebins, and wiping out sinks, he’d learned to control the fiery urgings of that temper of his. He’d become—on the outside—the kind of inmate the authorities wanted to see: the kind that everything alive had been systematically reamed out of, leaving only a husk who would follow rules and regulations to the letter.

That was the first step; then there’d been a long period of waiting
for an inmate to die naturally, which right there was a rare event. Usually if a guy got so sick that he might kick the bucket, they sent him out to a hospital for a tune-up, not out of concern for the guy but to avoid trouble from lawsuit-happy relatives, weeping crocodile tears while secretly relieved to be rid of the bum. And if they could squeeze a big payday out of a negligence claim, so much the better.

But at last Sonny Sawtelle had clutched both paws to his barrel chest one morning while slopping gray oatmeal onto orange plastic breakfast trays in the cafeteria, and bingo, Dewey had his exit pass. Still, for all his planning, there wound up being a twist he hadn’t predicted.

Sneaking down the dirt road away from the cabin in the woods where Marianne’s ghost—or whatever it was—now sheltered, he recalled the next part of his escape with a scowl. Faking up a body in his own bed hadn’t been any real trouble; prison guards were as stupid and lazy as anyone alive, and after a while of a guy’s good behavior they let things slide. If an inmate always showed up for roll call in the morning whether they’d done an overnight bed check or not, the guards got complacent, and their routines got even sloppier than they ordinarily were.