A Face at the Window (26 page)

"Wait." A feeling of unreality swept over her as with shaky fingers she slid the switch casing into its base until it locked.

The feeling, she realized with a stab of panic, was one step away from not being able to do anything about any of this, so why even try? Why not just give up, give in, get it over with?

Just one step, one stray thought, one panicked feeling. But that way lay disaster. "I've got it," she managed through lips that had suddenly gone papery-dry. "Don't you want to see it go on?"

Praying that the loose wire really had been the trouble, she glanced up at Anthony. She had a feeling he knew perfectly well what she was up to: keeping his pal Marky from going outside and finding Pierce, still lying there in the driveway, and finishing him off as easily as clipping a pesky hangnail.

"Okay," Marky allowed grudgingly.
Thank God,
she thought in a brief burst of optimism,
for short attention spans.
And when the lamp snapped obligingly on, "Big deal, I could've done that," he said, turning away.

Eyes narrowed, he stood with his arms folded as if waiting for something. Anthony gave him a "What?" look.

"The knife, you schmuck. Or were you gonna let her keep it? Maybe I should give her the gun, too? Moron," Marky added.

"Hey, it was worth a try," she said, attempting a light tone as she relinquished it. But at her words, alarm filled Anthony's face and in the next instant, Marky's hands were on her throat.

"Don't," he uttered viciously as his thumbs dug into her voice box. "Don't freakin’ try
anything.
Keep your mouth shut and do what I say, you got it?"

He let go. Her eyes prickled with black stars. "You, too," he added to Anthony as she dragged in a harsh breath.

See?
Anthony's look said.
See what I'm dealing with, here?

Silently he followed his partner out to the kitchen, leaving her in the pool of light shed by the newly repaired lamp.

She crossed the room, gathered Lee up, and held her.
Yes,
she thought as the child moved fretfully in her arms, then settled.
I do see. You're so far up the creek that your chances of getting down again are just about zero.

Like mine,
she realized with sad certainty. And the chances of the man lying out there in the driveway were even slimmer.

If he was still alive at all.

"Damn kids," the
walrus-mustached man raged, glaring at Helen Nevelson before seizing her and yanking her up out of the kayak. In the darkness he couldn't see that she was injured.

Or maybe he didn't care, too angry at the destruction she'd
caused. "Alla you, got no respect for people's property. Come out here, throw your pot parties and booze parties and I don't know what all."

The smell of his breath said he'd been having a party of his own recently He pushed her ahead of him up the pebbled path alongside the cabin, shoving her when she faltered.

"Kids stole all the kayaks, so I locked ‘em up," he ranted. "Now you come along and smash the shed lock, break the windows."

She knew him, she realized dimly. His name was Hank Harriman and he lived across the lake on Roughy Hill Road where she'd been heading; he went hunting and fishing sometimes with Jody

But not often; Jody hadn't cared for Mr. Harriman's habit of getting loaded, even before he got into the woods. And the one time Mr. Harriman had seen Helen, she was much younger and he'd been half in the bag, as Jody had put it.

As he was this minute; more than half, even. Way more, so Mr. Harriman didn't know her now.

"Teach you a damn lesson," he slurred.
Lesshun.
The motion detectors on the yard lights must've set off an alarm over at his house across the lake, so he'd come to check. Jody had probably hooked the alarm up; it was the kind of thing Jody was good at, and everyone around here knew it.

"Throwin’ around beer cans, trashing the whole area. Why'n the hell a man can't have a place to himself ‘thout a bun-cha you little brats comin’ in an’—Git along, there," he said, shoving her angrily again.

She tried to speak, but by now her broken mouth was so badly swollen that all she could produce was a sort of
baaing
sound as he hustled her out to his pickup truck. It was an old GMC beater with a plow mount on the front, a trailer hitch on
the back, and a two-way radio with a Radio Shack microphone wired into the dashboard, probably also by Jody—
he's your friend,
she tried and failed again to croak out—some time or another.

He'd even stopped by to see her mother not too long ago, she recalled, to get a book that had been put aside for him. But he hadn't seen Helen; she wished now she'd gone in from the screened porch to speak to him, but—

He yanked the cab's passenger door open. "Get in there," he snarled. "You and your trashy ways. Stole clothes, too, I see," he added, spying the sneakers she'd found in the cabin, and the old sweaters.

When she faltered at the high running-board step, he grabbed her and hoisted her up one-handed, sending her sprawling.

"Now you just sit there," he growled. She was crying again and couldn't stop, gasping and sobbing with pain and renewed fear. Most of the people you ran into around the lakes were like Jody, good-hearted and easygoing.

But not this guy. "Little bawl-baby," he growled. "Guess your scummy pals must've put a pretty decent beating on you, on top of everything else. Teach you to hang around with ‘em."

She scrambled upright as he leaned into the truck cab to survey her in disgust. "Buncha losers," he spat contemptuously, backing out again and slamming the door.

In the yard lights she watched his stocky form stomping into the cabin. Shudderingly, she battled to get back some composure, to stop crying and figure out something to make him understand-

There. On the dashboard, a notebook black with finger marks, and a stubby pencil clipped to it. Relief flooded her; of course, she could write him a note.

Opening the notebook she flipped rapidly through a dozen
or more pages of symbols and numbers with counting marks lined up alongside them, four upright marks and a diagonal line indicating five of something. A counting system, maybe for plow jobs so he'd know how much to bill people. But why not write their names down?

She didn't bother wondering any more about it, though, just kept flipping until she came to a blank page. On it, she printed her name, Jody's name, the word
daughter,
and three more words:
Help Me Please.
When he came back, she waited until he was all the way in but with the door still hanging open and the dome light still on, then thrust the notebook at him.

"What the—?" He scowled at her, his eyes full of angry contempt and… something else. Fear, she realized. But of what?

Fear and… shame. Too late, she understood why.

"What the hell is this?" he demanded, shaking the notebook at her. "It ain't enough you kids come out here trespassin’ and ruinin’ my stuff, now you gotta screw up my job book?"

He flung it at her, started the truck up, and jammed it into gear. Jouncing down the dirt road, they passed through an open gate; he jumped down from the cab, swung it shut, and locked it behind them, then climbed back in and accelerated again, heedless of the way the truck clanked and rattled over the bumps.

He couldn't read. That's why her writing in the notebook had made him angry; he couldn't, and he was embarrassed about it. He had stopped by the house to get materials for something about the reading lessons her mother gave; that's what the book he'd gotten was, another part of the lesson material.

So the note she had written him wasn't just useless. It had made things worse.

"Fasten your damn belt," he growled when they got out to the main road, Route 1 a ribbon of darkness in the larger dark.

While she was out cold her jaw had released. "Please," she
managed to whisper. It came out "bleh." But he understood, as they sat there waiting for an eighteen-wheeler to pass by.

"Oh, sure," he said scathingly. "Now you're scared. You've had your fun, paid for it, too, you thought, with the clobberin’ they put on you. Well, you're gonna pay more," he went on with vindictive relish. "I'll teach you a lesson you'll never forget."

She didn't like the sound of that one bit. Behind the truck came a poky little subcompact, too slow and underpowered to pass on the downhills and too scared, probably, to try it on the ups. Mr. Harriman waited angrily for the slowpoke; she didn't like the sodden gleam in his eye, either, as he sat contemplating whatever it was that he was planning to do with her.

The subcompact was
very
slow. He'd miscalculated in waiting for it and now he fumed impatiently while it struggled up the hill behind the truck. Helen unbuckled her seat belt stealthily.

"You're gonna learn," he recited. "Oh, yeah. Think you know it all?" His mustache twitched damply in anticipation, big hands tightening on the wheel.

Helen's mind worked frantically. She wasn't afraid of jail, or the cops. By now, they must know she was missing and she'd be able to communicate with them. So they would help her.

And she hurt, oh, God, she still hurt so bad; more than almost anything in the world, she wanted to pour her story out to the police, and then lie down and let people take care of her.

Mr. Harriman was still talking. If you could call it that: "Kids nowadays, buncha little whining, grabby parasites, got no respect at all for other people's hard-earned…"

Tuning him out, she struggled to remember what it was she had to tell someone. A name? An address, a phone number, or—

No. None of those things. The answer went through her like an electric shock:
she knew where they were going.

"But first, you're gonna gimme all the names of everyone
who was out there at my place with you, drinkin’ and dopin’ and—"

Carrying on,
Mr. Harriman would've finished, but she didn't hear him because she was already out of the truck, flinging the door open in the last instant before he roared out onto Route 1.

"Hey!" he yelled furiously as she hurled herself out of the truck's cab into the roadside gravel. Clambering up, she tripped and fell headlong into a ditch full of icy rainwater, then hauled herself desperately hand-over-hand up and out the other side.

"I'll get you, you little—" But before he could chase her, Mr. Harriman was still sober enough to realize, he had to back the pickup truck out of the travel lane and put the parking brake on. And by the time he'd done that, Helen was in the trees.

The cliffs, they were taking Lee to the…Gagging at the pain rocketing through her, Helen struggled through thick brush. Behind her, Mr. Harriman yelled for her to stop and fought his way into the brush, too. But pretty soon, he gave up.

Hadn't he? Or maybe he was sneaking up on her. Shivering, she crouched in the mucky hollow between a rock and an old stump. If she moved even a muscle he might hear it and pounce on her…

But in a few minutes she heard his truck start, then peel out onto the highway with a clattering of its old engine. So he was gone. She struggled achingly upright.

He could drive up and down the road scanning for her, and he might. So she'd have to keep out of sight; meanwhile, Eastport was twenty miles south of here; no way she'd be able to walk that far, but she could get herself away from where Mr. Harriman might be on the hunt for her. If she could find an old trail or logging road paralleling the highway, she could stay even better hidden.

He wouldn't call the cops. His boozy outrage wouldn't help
him with them, especially since he was driving. And he would know that; drunk guys generally did.

So she was on her own. A motorcycle sped by in the dark, its insect whine rising to a roar and fading again. If she could flag down one of those…

Her feet were so swollen that even in the too-big, stolen shoes, they felt like a pair of blood-blisters. The ringing in her ears was a lot louder now than it had been, and she had a bad feeling that the darkness all around her wasn't entirely on account of the endless-seeming night.

That
she
was fading in and out. Clumsily she blundered into a patch of stinging nettle, backed out of its fiery clutches, and altered her course a fraction. After another unmeasurable stretch of slow going, she stumbled onto a track. Two ruts, humped down the middle and padded with grass at the sides…

Every so often a car sped past nearby, so she knew she was close to the road. There were things about what she was doing that didn't make sense. But she knew one thing:

She had to get back to Eastport, find Bob Arnold, and tell him about the awful men who'd taken Lee, and…God, what was the other thing she'd known about them only a minute ago?

Fright stabbed her as she wondered if the memory, whatever it was, would ever come back. But—

Keep moving. Keep the paved road on your left. Put one foot in front of the other.

With these words echoing in her head, she tripped hard into a mess of vines and fell sprawling into them, hauled herself to her knees and sat back, panting, then fought the rest of the way up. A hoarse snort from somewhere very nearby froze her blood for a moment. But from the rustling and crunching that came with it, Helen realized it must be another moose.

At her next step, a snake slithered thickly from under her
right foot; jumping back with a shriek she slammed her head into a tree trunk. The impact sent stars rocketing around behind her eyes; staggering, she lost the road, and for a while didn't know where she was at all.

But then just by luck she heard cars going by once more, and another truck. Faint with relief, she left the trail, angling her steps closer to Route 1 so she wouldn't lose it again.
Make sure I can hear it, maybe even see headlights, because if I get lost out here again.…
She put a foot out blindly, expecting it to come down on rough earth, fallen branches, and uneven stones.

But instead she stepped off an embankment, plummeting with a breathy shriek of surprise. Tumbling and bouncing, she felt her skull smack something hard at the bottom.