Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (20 page)

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 passed the bank and the IGA, took the long turn in the foggy murk past the Mobil station and Quoddy Airfield, its runway lights pinpricks 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.

Hell
, she thought. He didn’t even look able to get up, much less get off this stinking boat and walk.

And especially not with that anchor still chained to his leg. Which
meant that as she’d suspected right from the start of this whole nightmare, she was on her own.

Still taped tightly in the blankets Randy had wrapped her in again, she wiggled to a sitting position and began straining against the tape strips. But it was no use. He’d wrapped them around and around her so no matter how much she twisted and flexed, nothing gave.

“Inch over here if you can,” said Sam. “Closer to me.” His voice sounded awful, like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. But she had no good plan of her own, so she obeyed.

“Ouch,” she said as her hip bones bumped the deck. After a long, painful slog across the damp, hard boards, finally she got to within an arm’s length of him. “Now what?”

“Get … your back close to my hands.”

She squinted doubtfully at him, then saw something gleam in his trembling fingers. It was a tiny penknife.

A thrill of hope went through her at the sight of it; maybe she wouldn’t die after all. A shaky grin creased Sam’s face.

“He was in too big a hurry,” said the young man who held her salvation in his not-very-steady grip. She recalled Randy’s rough, almost panicky rush as he’d seized her … .

You bastard, you made a mistake
, she thought exultantly, and in the back of her mind she could hear the girls in their graves cheering about it, too.

Eagerly she bounced herself closer to Sam, angled her stiff, tape-wrapped torso near enough for him to reach it. Freedom …

He dropped the knife. It clattered to the deck. In the pale moonlight she could see it was bloodstained.

Sam’s blood. “Ouch,” he whispered softly, and let his head fall back. Or maybe it fell back without him realizing it.

“Sam?” Please, no, not now when she was so close … “Sam?”

His eyelids fluttered open. “Sorry. Maybe you can …” His head moved slightly.

Get that
. Oh, yes. She definitely could get that.

She let herself fall onto her side, then inched like a worm toward the fallen blade, heedless of the pain the movement cost her.

Eyes on the prize, damn it. Because this was it, she had a strong feeling that this was her very last chance. She could get out of this tape somehow, get out of it and live, or stay in it and …

No. She shoved the thought from her head. The knife lay just inches away. Craning her neck, she touched her lips to it, tasted the blood on it, clamped her teeth around it, and pulled back.

It stayed between her teeth, though the blood taste made her gorge rise. Aching and feeling half dead with fatigue and terror, she began wiggling her way back.

“Hurry,” Sam whispered weakly.

Yeah, tell me about it. A little more … there
. She thrust her chin up, poked the knife toward his searching fingers …

“Okay.” This near, she could hear the harsh hitching of his breath, smell the blood soaking his shirt. “Sit up, I can’t—”

Biting back pain-sounds, she struggled to comply and at last got herself turned around and sitting so he could reach her. The first shaky cut went through the blanket into her arm.

Startled, she cried out. “Shh!” he warned, and pulled the knife back. But the next cut was no less vigorous. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “But there’s no time for—”

“Just get the damned tape off me,” she grated out. “I don’t care if you cut my arms off. It surprised me, is all.”

At last the blankets fell away. Next he slit the tape from her arms, which produced an unpleasant surprise in a night that had already been full of them: She couldn’t move.

And the man—Randy, his name was, Randy Dodd—could appear again at any moment.

Suddenly she began sobbing, hating it, hating herself, but unable to stop, because she’d gotten so far, she’d gotten free, and now none of it was going to make any difference.

“I can’t move,” she wept. “They’re all …”

“Hey,” said Sam. “They’re asleep, that’s all. Your arms and legs are just …”

A cough cut his words off as he slid down, tried to sit up again, and gave up the effort, collapsing with a hand pressed to his middle. Creased with pain, his face went even whiter. In the moonlight, his lips looked nearly black.

The sight shut her tears off abruptly. Was it just a few hours ago that she’d written him off because he wouldn’t be able to help her? Yet now, suddenly, keeping him alive felt almost as important as surviving herself.

Because they were together against Randy, and an ally in that fight seemed desperately required; she didn’t see why that should be, but it was. It just was. That Randy shouldn’t win. “Sam?”

The feeling was coming back to her arms and legs, ferocious prickling and tingling that was much worse than not being able to feel them at all. But they moved.

Tentatively she lifted one arm and then the other, flexed her fingers as much as she could, tried getting her feet under her.
Up, big fella
, Chip Hahn used to say whenever he hauled himself out of a chair after a long session at the computer. Chip … She hadn’t thought about him in hours, not since she looked for him outside the bar.

A fine assistant you turned out to be
, she thought at him, with a flash of the old irritation she used to feel when he screwed up. Which, she had to admit now, he almost never did.

But that thought seemed so irrelevant, she dismissed it almost at once. Because wherever he was, he wasn’t beat up and captive, held by some guy who would kill you as soon as look at you.

Another burst of resentment made her lips tighten, then all thought of Chip was gone, along with everything else back in her old life, the one she’d been snatched out of.

Because now everything was different. “Sam?” she said again, then got to her feet and managed to totter a few steps.

The boat moved gently in the water, the wind had gone down, and the sky, fully cleared now, spread overhead thick with stars.

Still no sign of Randy. What he might be doing, she had no idea; digging graves, maybe. The thought sent her to Sam’s side again, where she crouched urgently.

“Sam? Listen to me. Do you know how to run the boat? How to start it?”

No reply. She shook his shoulder gently, drew back with a little gasp when even that slight motion produced fresh blood on the front of his shirt. He roused with difficulty.

“Can’t go … now. Tide’s too low. Can you … water?”

She got up. Everything hurt, her wrist most of all, but now she thought maybe it wasn’t broken, because she could move it and the swelling at least wasn’t getting any worse.

And water was a good, a wonderful, idea; her tongue felt like a dry bone. “Cabin …” Sam muttered.

Turning, she confronted the dark hatchway. The notion of going down there at all repelled her; if he returned and shut her in there …

But of course that’s where the water would be. Food, too, although the idea of eating was disgusting. The thought returned that if Randy came back while she was down there, he could trap her there.

The fear of what he might do with her then made her stomach roll lazily and her throat close with fright. On the other hand, there might be more than food and water down there.

Randy might’ve stashed a weapon, maybe even a gun. Carolyn didn’t know how to shoot a gun, had in fact never even held one. She was afraid of them.

But he didn’t know that. Swallowing past the cottony-thick terror that was so all-consuming it felt like it might smother her all by itself, she put both hands on the frame pieces around the hatchway opening and started down quickly, before she could lose her nerve.