Dead Level (5 page)

If nothing else, I would have a peaceful time there.

Yeah, sure I would.

Once Jake and Ellie had left for the lake, Bella finished shampooing the carpet. She brought the rented rug shampoo machine back to the store, then managed to kill a little more time by mopping the kitchen floor, scrubbing all the knobs on the front of the stove with Comet cleanser and a toothbrush, and dusting the parlor piano, then polishing it with her secret mixture of lemon juice, olive oil, a drop of rosewater, and beeswax.

But her real task for the day still waited, and although she had been dreading it for weeks, she couldn’t put it off forever. Once each year, rain or shine … So with her kit of cleaning gear she trudged upstairs to the guest bedroom.

Still and silent, the room had a double bed in a spare maple frame, two matching maple bedside tables, and woven throw rugs. A roller shade and a pair of plain white cotton curtains hung at each of the two windows; a small television, never turned on that Bella could recall, stood on the maple dresser.

Don’t be silly
, she scolded herself as, after hesitating in the doorway a moment, she went in. After all, just because a person had died in a room didn’t mean it was haunted, she decided as she took down the curtains, pulled the sheets, the pillowcases, and the white chenille bedspread into a pile, and rolled up the throw rugs. If it did, the whole house would be thronged with ghosts.

But this was not a thought she wanted to pursue while alone in the old dwelling, and especially not here, in the room where Dr. Tiptree had breathed his last. Grimly she removed her shoes, then stepped up onto the mattress; from there she could reach the overhead light fixture and the ornate glass shade covering it.

A dead spider inside the shade lay with his legs curled up tightly
over his body as if trying to protect himself.
I know how you feel
, she thought, brushing the poor creature’s husk out onto the floor where she could get it later with the vacuum cleaner.

Right now, in fact, she felt the same way, hollowed out by anxiety, wishing she could wrap her own arms around her body and curl up into a ball, as if that might hold the fright off. But it wouldn’t, any more than it had held off death for the spider.

Or for Dr. Tiptree, either, whose presence she still felt in the room even after all this time. Replacing the glass shade, she stepped down with a sigh of relief from the mattress that he had spent his final days on.

Foolish
, she scolded herself.
You’re just a superstitious old scaredy-cat, that’s all
.

But she wasn’t. Only in the past few weeks, as the date of his death approached, had she felt some new, unpleasant sense of here-I-am-ness from the deceased man, as if what Jake called his deathiversary were summoning him back for a reenactment. From a faint, easily dismissed notion of some … some
otherness
, there and gone like a whiff of perfume or a few barely heard signature notes of an old, half-remembered melody, the uneasy feeling had grown until it was all she could do not to shout, sometimes, with the dreadful anxiety it produced in her.

And that, Bella knew, was ridiculous. First because ghosts couldn’t hurt you, and even more important, because as everyone knew, there was no such thing as them.

Thinking this, she turned with the bottle of Windex to the mirror over the bedroom dresser and gasped with shock at the face hovering in it, just behind her. But in the next instant, she let her breath out; it was only the dust rag hung on the bedpost, its shape curved by shadows and her imagination into a pair of eyes, a twisted nose, and a soft, drooping grin.

Angrily she swiped dust from the mirror, wiped off all the baseboards, brushed fluff from the corners. The closet door stood open a
crack; yanking it the rest of the way, she forced herself to look inside.…

Nothing.
Well, of course there isn’t
, she told herself as she damp-mopped the hardwood floor. The window shade slipped from her fingers and flew upward with a bang; her hand went to her throat. But she composed herself, and began wiping the top edge of the old window sash, then opening it an inch to air the room.
Which could use freshening
, she thought,
because it smells like …

Cologne. She recognized it at once: the expensive, dryly witch-hazel-scented stuff that Dr. Tiptree had always used before he started smelling like pain medicine.

And later, like pain. Bella stepped back from the window, caught in a moment of memory so clear it was like diving into a pool. He’d walked into this room and stood for a second, looking at the bed. Knowing, she supposed now, that he would die in it.

But not how soon. Awful, that final illness of his, seeking whom it might devour. At the time, though, she’d merely come up with some fresh towels, and when he saw her in the doorway, he’d thanked her.

For, he’d said, making it all so pleasant. He’d smiled at the flowers she’d put into a bowl on the dresser; peonies, she recalled.

“Jake always says what a genius you are,” he’d told her as he sat down on the bed.

Testing it, she supposed: Good to lie in? To die in? “I see now that Jake was right,” he’d said, and even then she’d thought his eyes looked a little sunken in, his lips a little blue. Maybe that had been the light, because the windows in here faced north.

Or maybe not, because he’d leaned down to unlace his shoes—it was then that she’d smelled cologne, the clean astringency of a prosperous, well-barbered man—and as far as she could recall, she’d never seen him wear them ever again.

Bella had other memories of him in this room, but none she wanted to recall. He’d died three weeks later. Lips pursed, she bent to gather up the bedspread and linens into her arms. Then, turning with
them, she glanced once more into the mirror on the dresser, and her arms tightened reflexively around the bundle she held.

Bella
. That voice, that cologne whiff, that
face …

Not a dust cloth this time, or anything else she could blame it on, either. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tightened her fists, shook her head in mute rejection and denial, mingled with bone-deep fright.
Please. Go away
, she thought.

Just go away, and—

And when she opened her eyes again, he had.

CHAPTER
3

“H
urry,” said the young man anxiously pacing the launching ramp at the boatyard, a mile outside Eastport on Deep Cove Road.

The young man’s name was Richard Stedman, and at his panicky phone call a couple of hours earlier Sam Tiptree had gotten there as fast as he could, unfazed by the crack-of-dawn summons or the short notice. Both were part of the job; after working on and off at the boatyard for nearly a dozen years, he’d long since become the go-to guy for all kinds of problems among boat owners.

Not that Sam himself was impressed by that fact; boats always had
some new challenge to throw at you, and past successes were no protection from future failure where they were concerned. All a guy could do was pay attention to what a vessel was telling him, he reminded himself as Richard Stedman gazed beseechingly at him, then be ready to try answering in some way that was at least halfway useful.

“Okay, let’s just see what the trouble is,” he told Richard, now hurrying ahead down the boat ramp.

“I already know what the trouble is.” Richard’s rubber flip-flops slap-slapped the ramp’s grooved granite-slab surface. “Damn thing’s capsizing.”

“Yeah, well,” Sam replied, unwilling to commit himself any further than that without more information, and not about to take Richard’s word for anything, either. Because on the one hand, Richard Stedman so far had been good-humored, a hard worker, and most important, willing to listen, a trio of qualities that in Sam’s experience was uncommon among boatyard customers.

On the other hand, though, here Richard was, running around practically barefoot in the middle of October.
So we’ll see
, Sam thought, still keeping an open mind about the fellow trotting ahead of him between the dock pilings.

Here on the windy side of the island, the water bounced with a light chop, the greenish froth-topped waves still racing in the aftermath of the storm the night before. But the sky overhead was blue, only the dark gray mounds of the low-pressure system’s trailing cloud bank showing like foothills of a mountain range, to the east.

“Just take it easy,” Sam told the worried boat owner. “So far, we don’t know anything.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Richard groused, but amicably enough under the circumstances. “You mean
you
don’t know.”

Fair comment;
Courtesan
was tied up outside the farthest corner of the long T-shaped dock. Sam hadn’t seen her since the last time Richard had dragged him down here, four hours earlier.

What he did know, though, was that it made him happy to be here
at all: on or near the water, among the boats and even among their beleaguered owners. It was a knowledge he’d gone through a lot to obtain, trying and failing at college, trade schools, even online correspondence courses.

But none of them had worked, and he’d drifted aimlessly and unhappily for a while before realizing: he could do
this
. And not only could he
do
it, but he was
good
at it. The only thing wrong with living and working right here in Eastport, in fact, was the lack of female companionship; most of the women his age were taken, and of the ones who weren’t, either they didn’t want him or he didn’t want them.

“See?” Richard said, pointing. “She’s going down.”

“Huh,” Sam replied, understanding now as he caught fresh sight of Richard’s recently purchased vessel at last. The way she moved in the water, sluggish and tubby looking, contrasted sharply with her bright, jaunty attitude of earlier in the day. And her rail, riding a foot or so closer to the waves than it had been …

“Oh, yeah, that’s …”
Bad
. His voice trailed off as he sized up the situation and realized that it was dire.

“Going down,” Richard repeated gloomily. “Isn’t she?”

In his late twenties, he was about five-eight and compactly built, with small but solid-looking muscles, thick, curly yellow hair, and the deeply tanned complexion of a man with the freedom to have spent much of the previous summer outdoors.

Not exactly a veteran sailor, Sam had already decided, but Richard was definitely correct about one thing: from the look of her at the moment, his boat was about to become an underwater activity.

“Yeah,” Sam conceded. “You’ve got problems, all right.”

He strode farther along the dock, then knelt on it, peering over
Courtesan
’s rail and into her hatch. The twenty-four-foot fiberglass yawl Richard had bought used a few days before floated parallel to the dock—if you could call what she was doing floating.

Even
capsizing
wasn’t the right word;
sinking
, actually, was more like it. Sam stood and thought for a moment, gazing back toward shore.
Now at low tide, the storm-scoured beach extending a quarter mile on either side of the dock was a curving crescent of smooth, gleaming stones.

But at high tide, the water had been twenty feet higher, leftover waves from last night’s big blow swamping the dock and tossing thick mats of seaweed and driftwood right up into the boatyard’s gravel parking lot. Which meant that now the water was getting deeper again as the tide came back in.

Richard shot Sam a hopeful glance. “I figured you’d know what to do,” he ventured.

Sam didn’t reply. Five years ago he’d have enjoyed the flattery, even milked Richard for more. But back then he’d been a twenty-year-old kid whose youthful energy and odd natural talent for boats were getting submerged in a sea of alcohol.

Not that he’d lacked excuses: years before that, his mom had been a financial manager on Wall Street, with little time—or natural talent, either—for chasing after a small boy. Her own upbringing had been nightmare material, too, so had it been any wonder she’d had no idea how to raise her own kid?