Dead Level (7 page)

After the half-hour trip up Route 1, I’d followed Ellie’s small sedan onto a narrow lane that dead-ended at a grassy turnaround. The rest of the way in to the cottage was a dirt track punctuated by rocks, ruts, washouts, gulleys, and the occasional blown-down tree trunk; her car would never make it, so once we’d parked, we’d moved all the supplies from it over into my pickup truck.

Now we got in, too, and began jouncing into the woods. The terrain was so wild, it looked almost prehistoric: plants and animals aplenty, but no people. “Do you think he’ll come back?” Ellie asked after a while.

“Beats me.” On either side, fragrant pine groves alternated with birches and aspens. Dragonflies buzzed at the windshield and sparkled in the open truck windows as if curious about us.

“I hope not,” I added, as a partridge ran onto the road, froze, then flew with a whirring of wings back into the brush. Ellie said something, but I didn’t hear it.

“What?” Gripping the wheel, I steered the truck along the narrow dirt track between a pair of massive old broken-off tree trunks. Brushy red-leafed sumac with fruit like lush purple pinecones crowded up against the road on either side.

“I said, it’s the anniversary.” Of his death, she meant.

I eased us around a rut so deep that it would have taken the muffler off the truck and then come back for the transmission.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I lied, swinging the steering wheel the other way.

The road into camp was a good-news/bad-news kind of thing, unmarked and primitive enough to keep vandals and party animals at a distance but hard on us, too. To reach the cottage, you had to know where you were going
and
want very badly to get there.

A rock I hadn’t noticed bonked the truck’s underside as Ellie looked wisely sideways at me. “Oh, you haven’t, huh? Guess somebody else must’ve put those flowers on his grave, then.”

We reached the beaver pond, flat calm with clumps of reeds sticking up from it. A culvert was supposed to drain the pond so it didn’t flood the road, but the beaver enjoyed plugging the big pipe with grass and branches, so after last night’s storm the backed-up water had overflowed, running over the dirt track in a widening trickle.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I retorted. But she was right; I visited the cemetery every year, because although my ex-husband was a skirt-chasing villain and a lying son of a bitch besides, he was dead now, and also he was Sam’s dad.

Besides, after he’d followed us here to Maine and lived in Eastport for a while, he’d mellowed considerably. “Yeah, it was me,” I admitted finally. It felt strange, missing someone I had fought with so viciously. “What can I say? Victor’s a lot easier to get along with now that he’s in his grave.”

Or he would be if he’d only maintain the silence generally associated with that location. “Stop here a minute,” said Ellie, and when I did she jumped down from the truck.

By the time I’d set the emergency brake and got out, too, she was kneeling on the exposed end of the big, corrugated metal culvert running under the dirt road. The culvert sent the water from the beaver pond on one side of the road to an outflow stream on the other side.

That is, it was meant to. Peering over into the plugged-up culvert’s end, Ellie began yanking with both hands on the reeds, moss, grass, branches, and leaves that the beaver had stuffed in there.

“Oof!” she said, hauling mightily. But it was no good. Using only their tails and their curious little handlike paws, the beavers had stuffed that culvert so solidly full, a bomb might be the only good way to demolish it.

And putting explosives in the culvert would unblock it, all right, but it would also destroy the road. “We’ll need to get the boys down here with some power tools soon,” she said.

“Right.” Ellie and I could do it, of course, but culvert clearing was just the sort of big, mucky job all the men in our families enjoyed and we didn’t, so we left it to them.

I knelt beside her. The pond’s bottom was silty and gray-green from all the gunk that the beaver had dug up while engaged in his construction project. Small, shiny insects skated on the water’s surface while more dragonflies zipped through jagged midair acrobatics, snapping up mosquitoes.

“Hey.” Ellie looked puzzled, peering down at the rugged pond bottom. “Where’d that big rock come from?” she said, pointing.

The water was four feet or so deep everywhere else. But directly below us, it got suddenly a lot shallower because of a round, domed rock, at least two feet across and covered with the same gray-green silt that lay on the pond’s bottom.

“I don’t remember such a big rock here before,” I began. “Maybe someone threw it in here, and … whoa!”

At the rock’s unexpected movement, I reared back so fast, I nearly fell off the culvert, which would’ve been too bad, since the huge thing lurking down there wasn’t a rock at all. It was a snapping turtle, its thick, hook-nosed head poking out suddenly from its shell while its fat, black-clawed legs thrust sideways, lazily but purposefully.

Then its
eyes
opened, two round, shiny black orbs glowering dourly up through the water at us as if to say what were
we
doing here,
and would we like to get eaten? Grabbed and dragged under the water to drown and then
devoured
?

Because if so, the huge snapping turtle’s cold, black stare said very clearly, it would be happy to oblige.

“Yikes.” Ellie stood and tiptoed back to the dirt road, her look startled but delighted; she adored wildlife.

Me too, actually, but those thick-clawed legs looked strong, and if the thing heaved itself up onto the bank and came at us—never mind what they say about turtles, they’re fast enough, and you don’t get that big by being an unskilled predator—I didn’t know what I’d do.

Run, for one thing. Scream, for another. “Ellie, come on. It’s way past noon and it’ll get dark early tonight.” Cold, too, so I wanted to get more firewood in and the solar panels wiped off and adjusted.

“Oh, all right,” Ellie said, though I could already see her plotting to return, probably to try feeding the thing in the pond pieces of lettuce.

The only use that monster had for lettuce, I thought as we hopped back into the truck, was as a garnish for our fingers. But I didn’t say so as with relief—at least on my part—we left the beaver-blocked culvert and its prehistoric-looking guardian behind.

A few minutes later we were unchaining the gate across the last half mile of the cottage road. Through the trees I caught glimpses of the lake, the water level higher than I’d ever seen it before, and thought uneasily of the pond; if it did overflow, we’d be stuck here.

Then Ellie spoke up: “Jake, you don’t think that guy who escaped might be heading this way, do you? Dewey Hooper?”

It was what the monster turtle had reminded me of, too: cold, black eyes, and the flatly predatory look in them as it watched us.

“No,” I reassured her. “I really don’t.” We drove in, the truck rolling silently over a thick mat of fallen pine needles. Huge hoofprints showed where a moose had walked on them not long ago, but nothing else disturbed them.

Not, for instance, human footprints left by a whacked-out wife killer. “He’s hundreds of miles from here by now.”

I hoped. Somehow Bob Arnold’s reassurances weren’t quite as comforting as they had been back when we were in town. Here, we were on our own.

“I know,” Ellie replied. “Of course he is. But … look, it’s really not just that she looked so much like me, is it? That’s bothering you, I mean. It’s that …”

I got out and closed the gate behind us and put the padlock back through the chain that held it shut. “Yeah,” I said when we were rolling again. “Yeah, it is something else.”

Because it was true, her own resemblance to the murdered woman wasn’t the real problem; Hooper wasn’t even aware of it, as far as we knew. It was what that remarkable likeness reminded me of:

Seven years earlier, Hooper had let his wife, Marianne, out of the cellar—he’d done that sometimes—then taken offense at a remark she made. About him always being drunk, or never finding a job, or not taking a shower more than once a month, maybe.

Whatever; evidence found later said he’d wiped the floor with her numerous times before, but he hadn’t managed to kill her fiery spirit. So she’d said something sassy to him, no one knew exactly what, and all he’d done was backhand her across the face in reply, which was how he explained it in court against the advice of his attorney, who hadn’t wanted him to testify at all.

So was it his fault, Hooper had inquired very reasonably of the jury, that when she fell, she hit her head on a corner of the kitchen counter and died?

Whereupon it had fallen to me to explain, under oath, about the many times she’d come to me—back when he was still letting her not only out of the house but off the property and even into town—bruised from yet another session of being Dewey’s punching bag, and how I’d told her to get out, to come anytime and stay at my house for as long as she liked.

Which pretty much put paid to Dewey’s tale about how it had been just the once that he’d hit her. The M.E.’s testimony about a fractured hyoid bone, a classic hallmark of a strangling, hadn’t helped
him, either, and as a result, Dewey was convicted of aggravated manslaughter and sent away to prison for twenty years.

Dewey, of course, thought that this was unjust, and at the time he’d made no secret of his anger at everyone involved. But now, seven years later, most people’s memories of him had faded.

Just not mine. If I’d had it to do over again, I would have gotten Marianne Hooper out of there by whatever means necessary.

But then—like everyone, I guessed—in my life there were a lot of things I’d like to have done over again.

“Look, the Portland and points-south sightings of Hooper still make sense. He’s a day’s drive away at least. And even if he weren’t, he doesn’t know about this cottage.”

Bottom line, there wasn’t a much safer place than a cottage in the Maine woods. Still … “Open the glove box,” I told Ellie.

Putting the truck in reverse and twisting the wheel hard, I backed in the last hundred yards, with pine boughs brushing the fenders on both sides. When the way behind us opened up, we were in a clearing with sheds on one side, the cottage on the other.

Downhill between the trees the lake glittered, brilliant blue and white-ruffled with a breeze, the little waves slopping at least two feet higher up on shore than the last time I’d been out here.

“Oh,” Ellie said softly into the silence when I’d turned off the truck engine.

In the glove compartment lay a Bisley .45 six-shot revolver, its blued-steel barrel glinting darkly and its figured rosewood grip gleaming like good old furniture. Beside it, I’d tucked in a box of Buffalo Bore cartridges, but I doubted I would need them; the weapon was already loaded, and if anything came up that took more than six shots to settle, I was probably done for anyway.

And I still didn’t think anything would. “I don’t know what Wade was thinking of, Jake, teaching you to shoot a weapon that size.”

Smiling as I recalled the answer to this, I got out of the truck. He’d been thinking of marrying me, actually, courting me on the same gun
range where police chief Bob Arnold spent a lot of his spare time, because, as Bob said, it might only pay off once, but that once was plenty.

It was also where I’d taken a shine to target shooting and to Wade in the same breathless moment of recognition. I’m not sure which I liked first, the man or the smell of gunpowder, but the combination turned out to be potent and we had been setting off small, interesting explosions ever since.

“You’ve got your cellphone, too, right?” she added.

“Yes, Ellie.” It had been all I could do to talk her into leaving me here alone, even before Hooper’s escape; she believed that the presence of a mild-mannered but combustibly tempered redhead was an advantage in just about any circumstance.

But one of the reasons I wanted to be out here was for the solitude. Maybe it was the dustups I’d been having with Bella, or maybe the deathiversary really had gotten to me, and the hints of haunting in the old house really were psychological, not supernatural.

Or maybe my loner nature was just poking its head up and taking itself out for a little airing, as it had done a few other times over the years. For whatever reason, though, a long silence sounded like heaven to me. While I was here, I didn’t even plan to turn on the radio.

Meanwhile, the fresh pile of boards at the edge of the truck turnaround reminded me of something I
did
mean to do: that deck.

“Come on, let’s get the supplies inside,” I told Ellie.

For the next half hour, we worked steadily, transferring the tools, the coolers, the dry goods, and my clothes and toiletries into the cottage, a sixty-by-eighty-foot post-and-beam building with a sharply peaked roof, shingled outside and pine-paneled inside.

The main floor was one big room with a woodstove situated dead center in it, an open galley kitchen with a gas stove and propane refrigerator, and a living area with bright braided rugs, big overstuffed chairs, and a round wooden table plus a pair of daybeds for lying around on, reading and relaxing.

Not that much of that went on at the cabin, though, since a few
feet downhill was the lake. A long wooden dock ran out into it, and when we weren’t working on the camp—a surprising amount of labor went into just keeping the place in running order—we were swimming, fishing, floating in inner tubes, or just messing around in boats.

“Oof.” Ellie set the last canvas bags of supplies on the kitchen counter. “It’s like you’re staying for a month.”

I put the gasoline-powered chain saw down. Most of the deck work that remained could be built with a handsaw, a hammer and nails, and a battery-driven drill equipped with wickedly long bits that looked like parts of a spearfishing kit, for drilling the holes the carriage bolts went into, to attach the steps and railings.

But I did still have to cut the posts for the railings that would run alongside the steps, and I had no intention of trying to do that by hand. The posts would be made of six-by-six-inch pressure-treated lumber, and pressure-treating doesn’t just force anti-rot chemicals in; it also makes the wood a lot harder. So I’d bought myself a new sixteen-inch gas-powered Stihl: big enough for the job, light enough for me to handle well, and best of all, an easy starter.