Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (27 page)

I hugged him, tried to comfort him. I patted his back. It was all I had to offer under the circumstances.

“Artie,” he said after a while, “how do you know Dick Desmond was heading for the Crack?”

I told him about Crystal and how even now she was standing chained by the neck to a tree.

“Come on, Artie, let’s go, this is a great shortcut—”

“Thanks, Clay.” And off we went as fast as we could.

The ferns were nearly head high now, like a stunted rain forest.

“You don’t feel it down here,” he said hustling, without turning around, “but there’s a lot of wind blowing, and I think it’s blowing from the northeast.”

I jogged to catch up. Dwight had said it never blew from the northeast in the summer. “What about boats in the Crack, Clayton?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never seen it, because it never blows from the northeast in the summer, and I’ve never been here any other time. But I’ve heard people talk about it. It sounds bad.”

We stopped abruptly at the edge of a swamp.

“This is the only trouble with the shortcut, right here,” said Clayton.

It wasn’t a huge swamp. In fact, it was sort of a miniature swamp, but it still had all the impediments for travelers of full-sized swamps. There was brown water of unknown depth. Lily pads with stiff yellow flowers on short stalks grew in it along with other aquatic vegetation. Dead tree trunks festered in it, and there was a coating of green scum over everything. It was just vegetable matter, but it still looked uninviting, like plutonium waste.

“It’s not too deep. At least it didn’t used to be too deep.”

I looked down at my shoes. I was sinking even as I stood there. Tannin-dark water lapped over my shoelaces.

“But you’ll be amazed at what a good shortcut it is.” And he stepped into the swamp, immediately plunging to his thighs in black mud and detritus the consistency of oatmeal.

I waded in after him. The swamp sucked at me, tried to claim my shoes; I curled my toes to keep them.

I lost my balance and went down thickly on my hands and knees. The swamp tried to keep my vulnerable finger. I snarled as I withdrew it. Now, dripping black ooze, it stuck straight out in the opposite direction from before and hurt like hell. It was making me mean.

“Christ!” said Clay. “You broke your finger!”

“I broke it before. I tripped over the dead guy.” That can happen when there are a lot of dead guys lying around.

“Let’s see,” Clayton asked, concerned.

We stopped waist-deep in the swamp, and I showed him. Maybe he knew what to do.

“Jesus, it’s kind of sickening, isn’t it? Is there anything we can do?”

“No, let’s keep going.” We did. We surged on through the viscosity, and sooner than it seemed, we emerged and climbed onto rocky ground. “Clayton, I think Desmond and that dead guy back there killed Kevin James.”

“What! Kevin’s dead—?”

“Murdered. In Boston. His head was split by a blow from an ax or something like that, a hatchet. Just like the guy back there. Just like the people in Micmac.”

“Just like my father,” he said.

“Desmond and the dead guy came here in Kevin’s boat.”

“What, that big black fishing boat?”

“You know it?”

“I’ve seen it from the Castle.”

“They knew Jellyroll was coming here. They showed up the next day. How long’s it take to get from Boston to here in a boat? Days, right?”

“I should think so, sure. Do you mean they killed Kevin to find out where you were going?”

“Could be.”

“And Kevin knew because I told him that day on the pier? Jesus. Dick Desmond, imagine! I did a
Murder, She Wrote
with him about a hundred years ago…You never know.”

The trees thinned. Were we there already? We both quickened our pace. Then we heard the noise—it stopped us in our tracks. Wind roared through the branches overhead. But there was another component to the noise, a water sound, as loud as a big waterfall, but not consistent like that, more of a staccato rhythm, like artillery salvoes. Surely the
sea
wasn’t making that sound—

I could see the clearing ahead, the old railroad station. The wind blew so hard we couldn’t look into it. I put my good hand over my eyes, peeked through the chinks between my fingers. Then as I stepped out into that clearing around the Crack, the wind stopped me in midstride, one foot off the ground, like a sight gag. It unnerves me, sometimes, to see how often life, reality, resembles the slapstick sight gag. Objects flew on the wind.

“Let’s get behind the sheds,” Clayton shouted.

It sounded like a good idea, to get behind something solid, but I didn’t move. I was transfixed at the sight. The sea beyond the mouth of the Crack ran white with streaks of spray snaking in the troughs, while great waves marched rank after rank from as far out as I could see toward the opening of the Crack. The wind had wiped away the clouds and fog, and now the sky was blue and cloudless, a terrible unending clarity.

The waves disintegrated in stark white explosions against the headlands on either side of the Crack—but a part of each wave kept coming right on through the opening. Their speed and size increased as they drove inward and compressed between the rock walls, where they seethed like the great caldera of an ancient volcano when the earth was still new and unformed. As one wave tried to recede, the next slammed up behind it, then the next and the next, and the energy built on itself until the properties of water itself seemed to change from the familiar into something volatile and unstable, like lava. The fifth or sixth wave, having no other way to expend its force, blasted straight up in the air from the apex of the Crack like a white-hot geyser. I stood there slackjawed until a short piece of wood struck me in the chest and knocked me back a stride. Then I followed Clayton and his bouncing gym bag into the lee of the red shed near the side of the cliff.

I pressed my back against the boards. “Nothing could survive in there, right?” I said. Wind whistled through unseen cracks between the weathered boards.

“I don’t know,” said Clayton. “Your hand looks like hell, Artie.”

“Yeah. It does.” I held it up, and we watched it for a little while. It was unusual to have parts of myself broken, disjointed, uprooted. I hoped the pain wouldn’t get any worse, so I could concentrate, react.

“God, Dick Desmond. I can’t believe it,” said Clayton. “We have the same agent, did you know that? I’d see the guy at auditions, he seemed normal, happy…as normal as anybody in the business, I mean. He had a family, kids. He showed me a picture of his kids once. Two little towheads at the beach. You can’t ever tell who’s going to turn out to be a psycho these days.”

It was possible to walk to the edge of the Crack but too scary in the face of forces I never imagined I’d actually see, let alone approach.

“Artie, maybe he’s just after the publicity, you know? Maybe it’s just some kind of twisted stunt.”

“It’s already gone too far,” I said in a cold voice I’d never heard before. “Thanks for showing me the shortcut, Clay.”

“Sure, Artie. He’s my favorite dog, too.”

I crawled to the edge of the Crack, trying not to drag my finger. It was hard to see through my salty glasses and all that spray in the air, and that enhanced the surreal quality. Each wave seemed to reach higher than its predecessor, and soon, I thought, they’d top the cliff and wash me off. After a wave passed, the water level plunged down over the rocks with a scary sucking sound.

Not a single stairway remained on the rock. I could see their broken bones crashing around in the maelstrom. The floating docks like the one the Hampton boat had been tied to was gone. The railroad-tie rack from which the sub had been launched showed no signs of ever having existed. Obliterated. All of it.

There were three vessels in the water. Broken, awash, sunk, they sloshed around like bathtub boats. Each of them, it occurred to me dimly, was from away. There were no islanders’ boats broken in pieces down there.

There was the submarine. The sea had stripped it of its tanks, hoses, pipes, and other external fittings; its Plexiglas bubble was ripped away. It was nothing more than an orange steel tube full of water, but there must have been some sort of flotation inside, because the pathetic ruined thing hung near the surface, and every wave dashed it against the rocks near the apex of the Crack. The dark granite was slashed with orange paint.

Near the sub, being driven against the same rocks, was the black-clad strangers’ Cigarette boat that had circled Dog Cove. How long ago was that? Its red bow poked the surface every so often. Then I realized that the bow section was all that remained of the boat. Its back had been broken in two. The engine half was probably on the bottom. That’s probably where the hipsters were, too.

And then there was
Seastar
. My heart sank when I identified it. There wasn’t much left. I put my forehead down on the rock to cry or moan or something, but pebbles blew into my eyes. I looked again. The boat was upside down. Its bright green bottom pointed at the sky. The propeller was gone, and the thick shaft was bent like my finger. Splintered pieces of the cabin and the deck swirled in and out with the waves. Had my dog been aboard that boat when it went over? If so, I’d never see him again.

TWENTY-FIVE

I
 scuttled like a crab away from the Crack, back toward the faded red shed, where Clayton waited. He was pale, his eyes fixed on mine. What had I found? Jellyroll drowned and sloshing around down there? Tears welled up in his eyes. Clayton and Jellyroll loved each other. I told him about the wrecked vessels I’d seen, the submarine, the Cigarette boat, the black sportfisherman, but no people and no dogs. “Maybe we beat Desmond here,” I said.

“You want to wait?”

How could I wait? Maybe they were never heading this way. Maybe they only told Crystal that so she’d tell me and I’d take off on a wild goose chase. What to do? Mostly, I like to do nothing; now here I was making these sorts of decisions, potentially life and death decisions, while staring at my hand with a grotesque fascination. So do I wait in ambush while Crystal stands chained to a tree in the storm? I wished I had my gun. That would have made it easier, all that power to destroy, even if destroying didn’t make any sense. Psychos beget psychos.

“What’s in this shed, Clay?” I demanded.

“Christ, Artie, I don’t know, I haven’t been here since I was ten. Since the night I killed my father, I guess. They used to store railroad parts and equipment in there. All the stuff was greasy, I remember. Too greasy to play with.”

I knelt down to look through a chink in the weathered boards. I moved to hood my eyes with my hands so I could better see into the darkness, but I rammed my finger into the side of the building. I howled in pain. Besides, the goddamn shed was empty inside.
“Jellyroll—” I called, nonetheless. Silence, of course. Hearing his name out loud, I started crying.

Clayton put his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t we wait in the depot?” he suggested.

The depot—that would be a good place for us to wait, or for Desmond to hide.

I turned to look at it, across the clearing from us, about a block away. Windblown objects bounced against the boarded-up facade. Nature had leached all the moisture from the wooden structure; the naked boards had contracted, nails had rusted away, and the roof had sagged in the middle. The wind and salt had scoured off the paint, but a red-with-white-trim tint remained deep in the grain of the old boards like a shadow of the past. You could still see KEMPSHALL ISLAND in the stain of once-white letters over the boarded door. The depot was the cliché of rural American whistle-stop stations, yet in miniature, almost half-scale. Maybe that toylike quality had been a whimsical touch by Clayton’s old man. Now it just felt grim, depressing, and weird, a death house, the sort of place where serial killers leave messages for each other.

“Was this your toy, Clay?”

“Fuck no, it was his toy. He’d put on his engineer’s suit, you know, with the hat, one of those old-fashioned oil cans, and hang out the window, waving like he was just a jovial old eccentric fellow.” Clayton’s lips were tight as he remembered.

We stepped from our shelter behind the shed, put our backs out into the wind, and it spirited us across the clearing faster than I’ve covered ground since high school track. We ducked out of the jetstream behind the railroad station barely panting, because the wind had done all the work.

Two of the rear windows weren’t boarded up. A few panes of glass were missing. The door was closed, probably locked, but boards were not nailed across it. This would be a fine place to hang if you were a dog stalker with no means of escape, the situation
spinning out of your control. I looked in. So did Clayton. The room was starkly empty. The old tongue-and-groove wood floor was mostly covered with dust and bird shit. Shafts of light from holes in the ceiling fell on piles of it. There might have been some small mammal droppings mixed in, rats, voles, porcupines, etc.

“Strange, isn’t it?” whispered Clayton.

“What, specifically?”

“These are practical people who live on islands. Yet here are vacant buildings right on the harbor where they’d be most useful, but nobody ever chose to use them, not in thirty years. It’s not like an ownership thing. I gave the people everything for the taking.”