Dead Level (15 page)

He drained the rest of his martini. The Rusty Rudder had great martini glasses, large and thin stemmed. Sam took another gulp of his lemon drink.

“Look, man, I was the one who scuttled her, okay? It was my bad, not yours,” Richard assured Sam as Carol leaned forward in earnest agreement.

“You did everything you could. I mean, gosh, you nearly got killed.” Outside, evening fog turned the dark street to a smeary palette of headlights and neon-sign colors. In here, though, it was bright and
warm, good smells of food and candles sweetening the air; Sam didn’t know why he felt so chilled.

Maybe he was coming down with something. Or maybe he’d hit his head harder than he’d thought when he fell. Suddenly the voices from the other tables seemed too loud, women screeching and the men laughing in great, swinish-sounding
haw-haw-haw
s.

Richard drank again, beads of moisture sliding down the side of his refilled glass—and how had
that
happened?—as his lips melted the frost. Sam got unsteadily to his feet. “I don’t …”

Feel so good
. But why? He’d watched other people drink lots of times before, and he’d been sober for so long it didn’t bother him. It was a kind of freedom, one he luxuriated in.

Until tonight. Because if ever there was a time when this virgin lemonade was absolutely not enough, it was …

Dimly, he was aware that Richard and Carol were looking up at him in dismay. The room turned slowly around him, then faster.

“I need to …”

Sam
. Suddenly what he’d been trying not to remember in any detail slammed into him: that dead face with its bleached white eyes and howling mouth, swirling up at him like smoke up through a chimney out of the bilge of the good ship
Courtesan
, now sunk. As the memory assaulted him he staggered, nearly fell, catching himself with a hand flattened on the table.

He glimpsed the owner of the Rudder, wearing a striped apron and chef’s hat, frowning from behind the grill, scrutinizing him. But he was too busy trying to maintain his equilibrium to correct the impression he must be giving.

Sam
. Looking down into the flooded bilge, unable to believe his eyes … it had been his father’s face in the sloshing filth down there, his father’s voice coming up out of the hole.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, feeling a cold sweat break out on his forehead. He tried a laugh, didn’t manage it very well. His companions, anyway, weren’t the least bit fooled.

Richard pulled a credit card from his wallet, signaled to the waiter.
“I think you might’ve hit your head harder than we knew,” he said. “I think you need to go to the hospital, now.”

“No!” They drew back, shocked at his vehemence. “I mean, no, thank you,” he amended faintly, still seeing the drowned, white, oh-so-
familiar
face in the black water.

He forced a smile. “I need some air. You two stay and eat.”

“Nonsense.” Carol crumpled her napkin and flung it onto the table. “You’re not going anywhere alone. If you want air, you can get it by taking me for a walk.”

The waiter returned with the credit card slip, which Richard signed without looking at. “Better go along with her, buddy. She has a habit of getting nasty when she doesn’t get her way.”

But he grinned when he said it, and Carol was smiling so charmingly and persuasively that Sam couldn’t argue with her.

“And anyway,” she said, taking Sam’s arm and squeezing it in a sweet, confidential way that utterly finished him off, “I’ve already eaten half of that pizza. I’m
such
a little food hound.”

Feeling her slim form against him, Sam didn’t think it could be true. Maybe the heat and energy she radiated used up calories, he thought distractedly as he let her usher him into the rainy night.

Why the hell was my dead father yelling up out of a hole at me?
he wondered.
Did he want me to duck, the way I did, or stay and get my head taken off by that flying metal cable? And was I really about to steal a swallow of Richard’s martini just now?

He didn’t know which of those questions he might dislike the answer to more, the one that suggested he’d better start going to a lot more AA meetings, or the one that suggested he was losing his marbles and should find himself a psychiatrist, toot sweet.

What you’d really better do, buddy, is go and check on your mother, up at that cottage
.

And where had
that
idea come from? His mother had said she wanted to be alone at the cottage, and she was fine there.

Of course she was … wasn’t she?

CHAPTER
6

L
ong before dawn the next morning, the chuckling percolator sent coffee smells wafting under my nose, luring me from my nest of blankets. Ellie crouched by the woodstove, feeding thin-split lengths of maple into its glowing maw.

“Rise and shine,” she said, noticing that my eyes were open. “Big day ahead; I guessed you’d want to get right to it.”

“Ugh. You’re awfully chipper.” But she was right. Sunrise comes first to downeast Maine, but so does sunset, and in autumn the daylight ends shortly after 5 p.m. So if I wanted to get much done, I needed to hop to it.

Also, there was still that newspaper column I’d promised to write. Thus far, I’d managed to suppress the whole idea of it, but that wouldn’t last unless I had something occupying me.

Thinking this, I put my feet on the cold floor, then yanked them back up under the blankets reflexively. But before a yelp made it out of my mouth, Ellie was there with my slippers in one hand and a steaming coffee mug in the other.

“After we eat our breakfast, it’ll be light enough to start,” she said cheerfully.

I swallowed some more coffee. “Have you ever thought about getting your thyroid checked?”

She just laughed, meanwhile stirring pancake batter, wiping off all the gas lights’ glass shades, sweeping up bark bits from in front of the woodstove, and pouring out two glasses of orange juice, all without even breaking a sweat.

Ellie believed that just because you were out in the woods with no proper electricity, no running water, and a woodstove that by the time it got the cabin warmed up, we’d have been outdoors working for a couple of hours—well, none of that was any excuse not to enjoy the little things in life.

Like, for instance, real cream for coffee, and orange juice freshly squeezed out of real oranges. “I brought a bag of them,” she explained while I pulled on as many clothes as I could, as fast as I could.

She turned the radio on to Maine Public Broadcasting, which was running a local newscast; it was too early even for “Morning Edition.”
“… authorities say Hooper, who is believed to have stolen a series of vehicles during his escape, could by now have gotten as far south as New York City.…”

“Good,” said Ellie. “Let them have him.” She dished out the pancakes, having of course set out real butter and a pitcher of real maple syrup to douse them in. Breakfast isn’t ordinarily my favorite meal, but this morning I ate like a starving person.

Cottage life will do that to you, I’d found. Outside, the sky turned from black to marine blue. Branches, some with leaves clinging to them, materialized against it. Ellie had heated water, so we did the
dishes, rinsing them with the steaming kettle from the gas stove, and then we went out into an early morning so coldly clear, it shocked me instantly the rest of the way awake.

“All right, now,” I said, privately not as sure as I wanted to appear that I could do this at all. Our first task of the day was to dig the foundation hole for the stair rail’s bottom post, but before that I had to locate the hole, measuring straight out from the deck to a spot just left of where the bottom step would end up.

And this, using only a tape measure, string, and a T square to find the right angle—needed to make the stairs run straight out from the deck instead of some other cockeyed direction—was a tricky task. An hour later, though, after only a few backtrackings and remeasurings, we’d X-marked the spot with a squirt of spray paint.

Next came digging, which in downeast Maine is best done with (a) a backhoe, or (b) nitroglycerin. But all we had were two shovels and a pry bar, so by the time we’d finished excavating a hole deep enough to sink the post in, I felt ready to be buried in it myself.

Fortunately, Wade and I had already poured a concrete block, setting a metal bracket into it before the concrete hardened; all I had to do was sit the post down into the bracket, then drive a few nails through the bracket’s holes and into the post.

“Okay!” said Ellie when we were finished. “Now let’s go to the gravel pit.”

Because of course once the post was on the block and the block was in the hole, the hole had to be filled again. And it had to be with something heavy, so the block with the post fastened to it wouldn’t shift. Which meant gravel: dug, hauled, and shoveled into the hole atop the block …

I laid down the pry bar that we’d used to lever boulders out while we were digging. What I wanted to do was smack myself in the head with it a few times, since if I knocked myself out maybe my back would stop hurting.

But Ellie was here to help now, which was why we were doing all
this heavy work before I tackled the decking or the step building. “Tell you what,” I bargained. “How about first we take a look at that culvert again? See if the road crew’s there yet.”

If they were, Ellie would be going home after lunch, a good-news/bad-news situation for me. I’d certainly gotten a lot more done with her here than I would have without her; on the other hand, if she stayed much longer they’d be laying out my dead-of-exhaustion corpse on that new deck.

Ellie rode silently as we trundled along in the truck. “You all right?” I said at last. There was always the possibility that she was tired, too, I supposed. But it wasn’t likely.

“I’m fine,” she said and sighed. “It’s just … well. It’s still that thing about Dewey Hooper,” she admitted.

We were nearly to the culvert; I pulled the truck over and we got out. The day had dawned clear, but now dark thunderheads were mounding stealthily again and a sneaky breeze rustled the cattails around the beaver pond.

“I wish I’d … I don’t know,” she began again. “I didn’t know Marianne. There was nothing I could’ve done about her. Or that you could’ve, either,” she added, seeing my face.

“Maybe not,” I admitted. Marianne had been very stubborn. “But I know what you mean. It feels like I should have, somehow.”

Ahead, the dirt road ran fairly undamaged over the culvert, except for the one deep crosswise channel the flood had cut. Tire tracks on the far side of the channel showed where Bob Arnold and the Calais cops had parked to retrieve the body we’d found.

The road surface itself was still soft and wet, and the guys whose job it was to repair it had not yet arrived. The pond itself was nearly full again, the culvert as crammed with branches and clots of mud as if it had never been opened.

“The beaver must’ve worked overtime,” I said, hunkering down to peer into the culvert pipe. Across the road, Ellie looked into the other side.

“Not even a trickle,” she reported, glancing uneasily at the sky where more clouds gathered. “And if it rains hard again …

“Then the pond will flood again, and the road will wash out even more this time, gravel or no gravel. Ellie, look at this.”

She came over to crouch beside me.

“See all the grass clumps stuffed in there, like chunks of turf?”

“So? Beavers use their claws to dig up … oh.” She looked at me.

“But those aren’t exactly like claw marks, are they? More like—”

“A blade,” I agreed. “Like the roots were dug with a garden spade or …”

A big knife
, I didn’t say as we looked at each other. But it was what those marks suggested.

We got up simultaneously. Not twenty-four hours earlier, a dead body had been lying a few feet from where we stood. A chill that had nothing to do with the breeze went through me.

“Ellie, you don’t suppose …”

“That the hiker got killed by somebody, and that somebody is still around here stuffing mud and sticks into the culvert, maybe as part of a plan to try killing us, too? Murder by beaver pond, for no reason?”