Home Repair Is Homicide - Crawlspace Part 14

She wondered with a fresh burst of fright how he knew her name, then realized that she knew his, the face she'd seen in old newspaper photographs popping clearly from behind all the clumsy work he'd had done somewhere on his features.

Panic made her heart flutter, because with the realization, she knew something else, too: He didn't just want to kill her. He had to.

Because seeing his face and knowing what he'd done to her was one thing. But knowing why he'd done it was another, and now she understood that he hadn't just taken her off the street at random, or because she was a long-haired brunette, or for any of the other crazed, obsessively personal reasons men like him did things like this to women like her.

No, this time he'd targeted her specifically, because he knew she knew-or suspected, which as far as he was concerned was nearly as bad-that he was alive at all.

It was Randy Dodd there at the boat's wheel, she was certain of it. "Now," he went on, "unless you want me to tie the both of you to that anchor and drop it overboard ..."

He looked levelly at them. "Shut the freak up," he said.

CHAPTER 6.

IT WAS TWO IN THE MORNING WHEN JAKE HEARD BELLA come down the hall stairs in the dark, in the big old house on Key Street. Jake lay on the parlor sofa with the dogs dozing beside her on the floor and the TV turned on, the volume set very low.

She didn't speak as Bella pa.s.sed by in the hall. The dogs looked up, then went uneasily back to sleep.

Wade hadn't called, and there'd been no word at Ellie's house, either. That meant either that the men had spent the night in the woods and didn't know what was happening here at home or that they did know and they were still trying to get here.

Neither theory accounted for their silence, or why not even a guide or warden had sent any message from them. Jake tried not to worry, instead lying there being tortured with it.

Enduring it, and waiting for the time to go by. An hour or so before low tide, she figured, was about when she should leave. She'd readied her supplies: flashlight, rain gear, warm gloves, an extra pair of sneakers since the first pair would surely get wet.

She'd thought about asking Ellie to go along, then decided against it. There was no one to care for Lee without going to some trouble about it, and anyway, Ellie had a child's life ahead of her now, and a responsibility to make that life good.

So, Jake would do it herself. She rose and padded into the hall, then paused vexedly at the sound of Bella moving around out in the kitchen. She hadn't bargained on Bella being up and about. Now it would be a project, trying to get out of here unnoticed.

She didn't want anyone trying to dissuade her, and in any case she hadn't left time for an argument. The tide paused for no man, and no woman, either, and in an hour it would be just right.

Much after that would be too late. She didn't want to get stuck on the far side of the sandbar leading to Digby, a.s.suming it appeared at all; even now she had only Sam's casual word that it would.

She made her silent way to the cellar door, moved the light switch quietly, and for once got the door open with no betraying squeak of old hinges. The steps were bare wood, steep and liable to creak, but at least she wouldn't put a foot through one.

The memory of the rotten step over at the Dodd House sent a pang through the deep gash she'd found on the inside of her thigh when she got home. A half-inch higher and she would be in the hospital now, but if that was all the injury she ended up suffering tonight, she would count herself lucky.

In the cellar she remembered to keep her head low so as not to smack it against an old ceiling beam. Crossing silently to the northwest corner of the old foundation, she paused.

A stream of water trickled down the drainpipe pa.s.sing by her head: Bella, still busy in the kitchen. To the right of the pipe, a foundation stone was loose.

Bracing herself, she lifted it with both hands and set it on the cellar floor, then reached into the hole it had covered. A wooden box met her searching fingers.

Inside were two handguns: a .32-caliber semi-auto and a .22 pistol. In happier times, she'd handled them both enough on the target range to feel comfortable with either of them; it was yet another benefit of her marriage to Wade, being okay with guns.

She chose the .32 and two boxes of ammunition for it. If all went well, she would not have to touch the weapon. If not, she meant only to wound the man who'd taken Sam, to slow him down so that she could get her son and Chip Hahn's friend, Carolyn, away from him safely. And maybe Chip, too; she wondered again where he had gotten to and didn't like the possibilities she came up with.

So if she had to use a weapon ... well, best not finish that thought now, she told herself, tucking the weapon and ammunition boxes into her sweater pocket.

It had always been this way, through the snooping she'd been doing with Ellie White in Eastport and surrounding towns, and sometimes on her own. A few of those episodes had ended badly.

Not many, but a few, and in those she'd had to face what she faced now, without liking it a bit. She replaced the loose stone and turned back to the cellar stairs, then gasped in startlement.

Bella stood there. "Good morning," she said.

Jake leaned against the cold stone wall. "Bella, you-"

Scared me. More startling, though, were the clothes Bella wore, and the look on her face.

Bella approached, ducking automatically under the ceiling beam, and reached past Jake to push the loose stone into the wall a little farther.

"No sense letting anyone notice what's there. Hidey-holes should be hidden," she told Jake with a complicit glance.

She wore thick pants made from the kind of heavy-duty stuff men put on for cold-weather construction jobs. Over them she had on a gray sweatshirt, a blaze-orange quilted vest, and the shirt from Jake's dad's new set of white insulated underwear, peeping out from the sweatshirt's heavy ribbed collar.

Her face in the dim cellar light was like a gargoyle's, long and bony and without any friendliness in it at all, her eyes flat with purpose. "Let's go," she said.

Jake followed her upstairs. Bella had hiking boots on her feet. Jake hadn't known that Bella even owned hiking boots. In the hall the smell of fresh hot coffee floated.

In the kitchen Bella poured two cups without asking, thrust one at Jake, and began drinking the other herself.

"I figure it's about an hour from here, where we need to go," Bella said without preamble. "And low tide is in about an hour."

She put her cup down. "I didn't wake your father." Because he wouldn't have liked this, either, and Bella knew it.

She plucked a pen from the mug full of them on the kitchen counter, a pad of paper already on the table. "If he gets up, or if Wade comes home, they'd better know where we are, though."

Or if we don't come back. "Bella, now listen to me. I can't be dragging you into-"

Bella's hand paused on the notepaper. "If I'm not going, then you're not, either. I can still wake him, you know."

The words sounded implacable but her tone didn't, her voice faint and shaky. She was frightened, and forcing herself to do this, Jake saw. Only that she felt she had to.

Me too, Jake thought. I don't know what will happen, and I'm as scared about it as she is.

Still, going alone wasn't the brightest idea in the world. She just hadn't been able to think of anyone else; at least, not anyone who wouldn't try stopping her.

Bella finished the note and propped it against the sugar bowl. "So, which is it?" asked Bella. "Me or us?"

"All right," Jake gave in. "It's getting late."

In the car, Bella settled in the pa.s.senger seat. "I set your cell phone on vibrate."

Jake glanced over in surprise. She hadn't examined the phone before tucking it into her bag.

"You don't want it ringing at the wrong time," said Bella matter-of-factly.

But the look on her face was anything but matter-of-fact. She looked like a Christian getting ready to meet the lions, her head high but her eyes wide, anxiously determined.

"I put some food in a bag, just snacks to keep our energy up, and the rest of the coffee in a thermos," she added, as if she were in the habit of sneaking up on murderous men hiding on desolate islands every day of the week.

"Thank you," Jake said, trying to keep the smile out of her voice as she backed the car out into the dark street.

Maybe this expedition was just as crazy as Bob Arnold would say it was, if he knew about it. Maybe it was insane.

But she was suddenly very glad to have Bella riding shotgun on it with her. "What's your plan?" Bella asked as they drove out of town.

"We'll drive up to where Sam said the sandbar to Digby is at low tide," she began. Her own voice was as shaky as Bella's.

Bella didn't notice, or if she did, she decided to make no comment. "We'll get as close as we can, maybe even right out onto the island," Jake went on.

In the predawn hours, Eastport's streets full of antique mansions and small wooden bungalows slumbered peacefully; only the fog and their own vehicle moving through them.

"The rocks there are probably very slippery, and it'll be dark, so we'll have to be careful. We can't turn on a light, and we'll need to be very sure we don't-"

Slip, fall, cry out, make a commotion, or in any other way get injured or react to an injury, she did not finish. But Bella just nodded once, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap.

They pa.s.sed the bank and the IGA, took the long turn in the foggy murk past the Mobil station and Quoddy Airfield, its runway lights pinp.r.i.c.ks in the streaming dark. Bella spoke again when they'd crossed over the causeway to the mainland and turned onto Route 1 headed north.

"I'll warn you if need be," she said calmly, as if Jake had been inquiring as to Bella's job description on this trip. "Or I will bonk someone, if that needs doing."

She reached into the back seat and came up with her bonking tool, which she'd apparently placed there while Jake was down in the cellar. "With this."

It was an iron crowbar from Jake's workroom, curved at one end, flat at the other. As a bonker, it could not have been more satisfactory. Still ...

They sped between the trees and thickets lining Route 1 on both sides. "You know we're probably just reconnoitering, though, right?" Jake asked her.

The headlights were flat white cylinders in the fog ahead. Jake slowed, trying not to drive into what she couldn't see. But it was no use going so slow that it felt safe.

"That even if we find them-"

On a night like this, the only safe thing was staying home, huddling under the covers.

"All we can do if that happens, probably, is call Bob Arnold and tell him."

"Hmmph," said Bella communicatively.

Bob hadn't been impressed by the soot smear she'd delivered to him, or by their invasion of the Dodd House. He'd warned Bella not to do such a thing again, though he'd promised to follow up.

According to Bella, who'd been quite indignant about it when she got home from the police station, Bob said that if it was a map they'd found, there was no proof Randy had drawn it.

Nor would their romping around down there clarify matters, he'd added. "Bob said if Randy did make it," Bella declared now, "it could just be part of a plan that Randy had thought about and then given up on."

Which Jake had to admit made some sense. Digby Island was about the least likely refuge in the bay, with not one single easy place to get out onto it by boat. Even helicopters couldn't land there, Sam had said, because of the trees; also, there was nowhere flat.

And anyway, tracings from the pen grooves of a map-if it was one-weren't much evidence of anything. This could be just a goose chase. But: "If I were Randy Dodd," Bella went on, "and I needed to find a hideout, I'd pick the one place that no one would expect me to go. If it were infested with poisonous snakes that would bite you to smithereens-"

Jake was pretty sure poisonous snakes only needed to bite you once, and that the result was rarely smithereens. But never mind; Bella continued: "That is where I would go. I know Bob wouldn't, but that boy has the failing of too much common sense."

The other news Bella had brought home was that the Coast Guard had called back its search vessels until morning, and air traffic was grounded, too, on account of too much fog.

Shedding tamaracks' gold needles made a slick, wet carpet of the winding two-lane. Twenty minutes later they entered Calais, the border town between Maine and Canada.

The officer in the border-crossing booth looked sleepy and uninclined to think they were either smugglers or terrorists. After rattling off his questions-where they were from, where they were going, what they would do there- "My sister's sick," said Bella with a straight face.

-he let them through without a hitch. Coming out of customs into the small town of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, they turned right onto the main street, past the dark, silent duty-free shop and the currency-changing storefront.

It was still several hours before dawn; only an occasional car moved in the streets. "When I was a girl, we used to come up here for parties now and then," said Bella. "We'd have bonfires on the beach. The boys brought beer and the girls ... well, the girls brought themselves," she added.

Jake hadn't ever linked Bella with the notion of parties, or of being a girl. "Turn here," Bella said. "It's a shortcut."

The narrow, rudimentary road was of pale gravel, angling in between old fir trees that crowded up on either side. The car's tires on gravel made loud crunching sounds, and the headlights's glow made Jake nervous.

More nervous, even, than she already was. Bella frowned. "Pull over and park. That's what we used to do. It's only another half mile or so to the beach."

Jake tried imagining Bella with a gaggle of girlfriends, out late at night for a party featuring boys, a bonfire, and beer. Not being able to picture it at all made her feel sad, and what Bella said next didn't help.

"You new people around here think you know what it was like back then, when no one had a penny and we were all we had. But you don't," she added as she got out. "You really don't."

In the pine-smelling darkness, the silence all around them felt huge, Eastport and home very far away. The only thing that kept Jake from turning back was the knowledge that Sam might be out here, too.

"All right," said Bella. Her voice shook only a little bit. She began marching forward into the darkness. "Let's the two of us just get this over with."

After a moment, Jake followed.

CAROLYN RATHBONE LAY FLAT ON HER BACK ON THE DECK of the boat Randy Dodd had put her on some unknown number of hours and a whole long lifetime ago.

They had motored along very slowly through the fog for what felt like forever. Now with the sky clearing and her eyes fully adjusted to the dark, she could glimpse that the boat was pulled up against the side of a cliff rising out of the water.

Above her, very near, spread a canopy of dead branches, made, she supposed, by a tree that had toppled off the side of the cliff as erosion took the edges of it.

Or something like that. Not much about her situation was certain, was it? she thought ruefully; only that she was in bad trouble.

And that Randy was gone ... for now. She didn't know where. But she knew that sooner or later he would return.

And then the trouble would get worse. She turned her head. Nearby, the young man whose name was Sam sat with his back to the rail.

He didn't look good. "Hey," she said.

His eyes opened. Grimacing, he held a hand to his side. It was still leaking blood. As the moon emerged from the thinning overcast, the blood's dark wetness shone in the bluish light.

"Hey," he said in reply, and managed a smile. But his lip trembled as he did it.

h.e.l.l, she thought. He didn't even look able to get up, much less get off this stinking boat and walk.