Nail Biter (27 page)

But now I did: long and wider at one end, the other glinting bluish in the last shreds of light before the clouds thickened up entirely.

It was a shotgun. “Wade?” I asked.

“Yeah, I've got something.”

A weapon, he meant. He wouldn't have come out here without one. “But I'm not going to start a shooting war here, Jake. For one thing, we're outgunned. And . . .”

And for another, he'd have had to pick them both off fast and by surprise, in a cold-blooded ambush: not his style.

Not in this lifetime. The
GhOulIE gUrl
's diesel rumbled.

“Now that we're sure she's here, we'll tell Bob Arnold,” Ellie said consolingly. “He can get a group together in daylight when there's not so much chance of something going wrong. They'll get her back, Jake. But now . . .”

Yeah, yeah. The boat noise was our cue to get out of here while we still could. Time and tide, and all that; pretty soon, we wouldn't be able to leave.

That was why I turned my back on Wanda Cathcart; careful not to snap telltale branches in the undergrowth—our flashlights on the way in had been risky enough, though the men hadn't seemed to spot them—we returned to the sandbar.

But at the edge of it I paused.

Wade went ahead on the slippery stones, now covered in water as the tide came in. Turning, he reached a hand back to me; Ellie had already gotten sure-footedly to the other side.

“Jake, if we try to do anything now, there'll be shooting and the result won't be good. Come on, take my hand.”

So I did, clinging to the support he offered. But as I left Wanda I was leaving someone else behind, too, alone and unrescued.

Again.

“Turn here,” I
said minutes later.

“To the tenants' house?” Ellie was driving.

“Yes,” I said, firmly. “We're going to tell Marge Cathcart her daughter's still alive.”

It wouldn't be all good news. But it was something Marge could cling to for now, and that much I wasn't going to turn my back on.

In the moonless night the Quoddy Village houses looked smaller and meaner, some sporting jack-o'-lanterns grinning with orange malice, others entirely dark.

“Imagine if it was Sam or Lee. We'd be wild,” I said. “We can't let Marge go on in the torture she's in. We just can't.”

“Okay, okay,” Ellie said, taking the turn. “I'm going.”

Across the water a row of taillights on the causeway led out of town; it was Bingo night at the Youth Center and people were on their way home.

We drove slowly around the last curve. “Hey,” Ellie said, slowing the car. “What's going on?”

Cherry beacons whirled in front of the rental house, one of them on Bob Arnold's squad car. In the drive an ambulance stood with its rear doors open; inside it the gurney was missing.

Ellie pulled in behind Bob's car and we all got out, Wade to talk with Bob, who was speaking into his radio, while Ellie and I hurried inside.

Greg Brand and Hetty Bonham were in the living room. “What's the problem?” I asked them.

Hetty answered. “Oh, it was horrible,” she wailed. “Marge was in the kitchen, doing the dishes.”

Sure she was, I thought. Probably she was still doing all the cooking, too. A burst of unreasoning anger for the sort of foolish woman who could get herself into such a bad situation in the first place at all washed over me.

But I cut it off because I'd gotten a good look recently at the sort of woman that was.

In the mirror.

“She had some kind of an attack,” Greg added. “I told her if she sat down she'd feel better. But she wouldn't.”

The EMTs brought her out. Marge was ghost-pale, what I could see of her under the oxygen mask.

“No, she had to start gasping and getting herself even more worked up,” Greg added, gulping at his drink.

An IV bag hung over her and they were hustling her along in a businesslike manner. I followed them. “What's wrong with her?” I demanded of the EMT at the gurney's rear.

“Heart attack.” A portable EKG machine bounced at the foot of the gurney. “Shocked her once.” To the other technician he added tersely, “Come on, we gotta go.”

They hefted her in, then pulled away with sirens howling.

“Did something trigger this?” I asked Jenna Durrell when we were back inside.

She shook her head impatiently. “No. She was a walking time bomb, is all. You could practically see her blood pressure going up, she kept forgetting to take her medicines, and . . .”

And I'd thought the last time I'd seen her that she wasn't well. We went out to the kitchen, where everything was spotless, only a single undried cup in the dish drainer indicating where Marge had been interrupted in her self-assigned chores.

“Where were you when it happened?” Ellie asked Jenna.

Meanwhile, in the living room, Hetty and Greg were arguing about whether or not they should go up to the hospital.

“You don't even know the woman,” Greg insisted. “You just want to playact the role of the anxious friend in the waiting room,” he accused.

“Out on the front steps,” Jenna told Ellie. “Just sitting there trying to keep my head on straight. Because between Marge's anxiety and the gruesome twosome in there, it's been . . .”

She put her hands flat on the kitchen counter. “I could get a bus home to Massachusetts. Almost did it today. But then Marge would've been alone with them and I didn't quite have the heart for that,” she finished.

Wade and Bob Arnold came in together, Bob wearing the “let's wrap it up” look his face took on when his duties were done but people still wanted to talk.

“What're you all doing out here?” he wanted to know when he spotted me. I wanted to tell him, too. But now wasn't the time, not when all three remaining tenants were listening.

“Just thought we'd come visit,” I said.

Bob shot a funny glance at me and I could see him getting the notion that there was more, then deciding to let it go for now.

“Right,” he said skeptically, not mentioning the message I'd left for him, either. Then he took off in the squad car, leaving Wade and Ellie to occupy the tenants while I had a peek around the house.

A
thorough
peek.

“At least we
didn't have to explain to Marge why we'd left Wanda out there,” Ellie said as we drove home a little later.

“Small comfort,” I said distractedly. My search of Marge's bedroom had yielded a surprising result. “Ellie, when you have to take pills, where do you keep them?”

“Kitchen windowsill,” she replied promptly.

Which was what I'd expected. Everyone I knew who took pills on a regular basis kept them somewhere like that, so they'd see them and remember. Only not Marge Cathcart.

Jenna had said Marge forgot to take her medicines, and that meant Jenna and probably the others as well had known of her need for them. Yet when I examined her quarters . . .

“I gave Marge's room a going-over.” I held up two small orange plastic bottles. “And these were
inside
the base of her bedside lamp.”

Wade turned interestedly. “So she was . . .”

“Yep. Hiding them.” I tucked the bottles back in my pocket; when we got home I'd give the hospital a call, let them know what medicines she'd been on.

“Not at first, or Jenna wouldn't have known about them. But it looks like maybe once Marge got to know her housemates a little better . . .”

Ellie took the long way home, to Dog Island through Bayside Cemetery. On clear nights you could see up the Western Passage to New Brunswick, but tonight the only view was of clouds pierced by the strobing beam of the Cherry Island light.

“. . . she put them away,” I finished. “Maybe she was worried about them, that someone might steal them or tamper with them?”

We drove between the deserted sidewalks and tall darkened storefront windows of Water Street, turned onto Key Street past the Happy Landings Café and Peavy Library, its big diamond-paned windows reflecting the yard lamps of the Motel East.

“Only now we can't ask her,” I said. “I'm not even sure why I snooped around in the house in the first place, except . . .”

Except that there was still something important I wasn't getting about all this; something
missing
.

Like for instance an obvious villain. Because I'd had a good look at the way Mac Rickert behaved with Wanda on Tall Island. Their body language, at any rate: not predatory or threatening on his side, not frightened on hers.

For which there had to be some reasonable explanation. But I couldn't imagine what it was, and as long as I didn't know, I still feared for her.

Big-time. As I got out of the car at my house, the air seemed heavy with impending calamity and the fog drifting in the street didn't help; going inside, I wished I'd paid more attention to Marge when I'd had the chance.

I couldn't have consoled her; nothing could do that except her daughter's safe return. But I could've listened to her. If I had, maybe I'd know more than I did right now.

Because, I thought, feeling the pill bottles rattling in my pocket, maybe Marge hadn't been such a foolish woman after all.

The railing assembly
for an outdoor stairway consists of the posts, the balusters between the posts, and the handrails. I knew this because I'd read it in one of the many how-to-build-it books I'd collected.

Reading them, unfortunately, was easier than following them. But the morning after we found Wanda on Tall Island, I needed a hands-on project.

Thus, after making some coffee and drinking it as calmly as I could, then taking the dogs outside—pausing to savor the pure, deceptively clear island morning with the air like spring water and the sun just now rising over Campobello, on the other side of the bay—I hauled my tools outside to the front of the house.

“Okay,” Bob Arnold had replied when I'd called him as soon as we got home the previous night. He'd picked up the phone right away, not asking
how
we'd found Wanda or why I hadn't mentioned it to him at the Quoddy Village house, either.

Just: “I'll let the state boys know and they'll take care of it.”
Click
. Which told me that one of those state boys was in his office right that minute, ears pricked alertly.

And that it was out of my hands.

The lawn's crisp frostiness showed my indented footprints as I walked on it; winter was coming. A border of clouds lay like cotton batting on the horizon, the edge of the approaching storm having drifted sneakily toward us overnight. In the neighborhood nothing moved yet, shades still drawn in the silent windows of the old houses around mine.

But loud nailing wasn't on the agenda today. Instead I opened the long red toolbox containing my ratchet kit, which was a set of tools for screwing or bolting things together.

So all right, now: the posts. These held up the handrails, or would once I'd bolted the posts to the stringers. I'd bought precut four-by-fours about forty inches long so I'd have enough to cut them at the proper angle. And George had drilled half-inch holes for the hex bolts, so my second task was simply putting bolts through the holes and tightening them one after the other; easy-peasey.

The
first
part was harder, though: holding the railing up at the angle I wanted it, then marking the sides of the posts to be cut so the rail could rest atop them. This did require noise, and a certain amount of terror as well, since the post cuts needed a circular saw: my personal old-house fix-up nemesis.

But the way I felt, I could either run the circular saw or roar on out right this minute to Tall Island, guns a-blazin': not a good plan. So I took the posts back off the stringers and laid them across a pair of sawhorses, and fired that sucker up.

Whang!
There is nothing like the ferocious metallic sound of an operating circular saw, cutting either a four-by-four or the hand off your forearm, whichever it hits first. I cut the posts as fast as I could, before my bravery ran out and also before the neighbors started leaning out of their windows cursing a blue streak at me.

When I bolted the four-by-fours on, for a wonder they fit into their places perfectly, and they were cut at the correct angle, too. This I thought might have been my ration of good luck for the day, but never mind; now all they needed were the railings, which the book said to attach using galvanized nails.

I looked at the nails, and at my claw hammer, then around at the houses inside which people were just getting back to sleep after the racket of the saw.

On the other hand, at various ungodly hours I'd been woken by dogs barking, engines starting, and people summoning other people out late at night by leaning on their car horns.

Recalling those times, I gathered the claw hammer, a handful of nails, and one of the railings. There was no possible upside to the idea of driving to Tall Island.

None whatsoever, I told myself. Which was when Bob Arnold pulled up in his squad car and my luck ran out.

“
GhOulIE gUrl
turned up this morning,” he reported. “Drifting. A lot of gear on her, camping stuff and so on. And a shotgun.”

Uh-oh. “They found Joey Rickert's body floating a couple miles away,” he added.

I put the hammer down. “What about Wanda?”

“No sign of her. Mac either. Looks like Joey fell over the rail. Hit his head, maybe—he's got a big scalp wound. Drowned.”

“So you think
Mac spotted you,” my father said half an hour later at his place, a down-at-the-heels bungalow on Prince Street with a workshop out back.

“Must've,” I said bitterly. The workshop was in what had once been a small concrete-floored garage, made over to include a woodstove, plenty of hanging tool storage, and a variety of old salvaged kitchen cabinets for the flotsam and jetsam guys with workshops always tend to collect.

“Ellie heard him saying he wasn't leaving. Not yet. So why else would he change his mind and get out of there so fast?”

Why, indeed. Because we'd spooked him, that's why. He just hadn't let
us
know we had.