Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (34 page)

Because I had to sterilize the knife before I cut him.
That was it: that
smell like burnt match heads, like flint against a striker. So, were
there matches in the drawers? No, the odor was too strong for that.
Gunpowder?

Or a gun.
Swallowing against the knot in her throat, she leaned in a
little closer, opened her mouth, and tasted the air.
Don’t get your hopes
up. It’s probably not.
But the smell was stronger here and coming from
the bottom drawer of this bureau.

So. If it
was
a gun, what then? She couldn’t sneak that past Darth.
Unless I shoot him. But it would have to be loaded, and there’d be no way
to check. Might even blow up in my hand if it’s old and dirty or the mechanism’s frozen.

But Darth
did
need to take a whiz. She slid her eyes in a sidelong
glance. The boy was doing the dying-to-pee two-step.
Wear him down.
When he goes potty, that’ll be your chance.

As slowly as she could, she tugged the top drawer. The wood was
swollen and yielded in grudging squalls. From the weight and hollow
thock
of wood against wood, she could tell it was empty. The second
drawer held two pairs of boy’s underwear and three pairs of balled
socks.

As she pushed the second drawer shut, Darth broke, bolting from
the boathouse. A moment later, she saw him hustling for the dock.
Well, that’s one way to melt a fishing hole.
Wasting not a second more,
she dropped to a crouch and pried that bottom drawer free. The balky
wood jammed on its metal runner.
Come on, don’t blow this.
Risking
a fast peek around the bureau, she saw Darth stripping his gloves
with his teeth.
Minute and a half, max.
Squelching her impatience, she
wrestled the drawer shut then slowly pulled straight back.

This time, the drawer cooperated.
Hell.
Two pairs of jeans, two
cargo pants. While that burnt magnesium scent was still strong, she
had no hope of going through each and every pocket before Darth
made it back.

“Come on.” She slipped a hand beneath the jeans. “Please, God,
just cut me a—” She gasped as her fingers curled around smooth
metal. “No way,” she said. “It can’t be.”

“Penny
killed
someone?” Chris felt his jaw drop. “When?
Who?
”
“Well, more like
got
her killed. About two and a half years ago.”
With a weary sigh, Hannah dropped back into her chair. “It’s a long
story.”
Two and a half years ago, he was a sophomore in high school.
Simon would’ve been sixteen. Isaac Hunter had said that Penny was a
year younger than Simon. “Give me the short version. Did you grow
up in Rule, or are you Amish or . . .”
“Was. I left years back.” She shrugged. “I wanted more. School,
an education beyond the eighth grade. Peter and I met in Houghton
when I was a freshman at Michigan Tech. He was already a senior.”
“Peter went to college?” He blinked in surprise. “I always assumed
he’d been a deputy since high school or something.”
“Hardly. He was the TA for my freshman seminar in comparative
zoology, managed the lab. Nice guy.” Her mouth moved in an almost
wistful grin. “Very
forceful
, a million opinions. There was this coffee
place a block or two up from the river—Cyberia Cafe? Peter treated
a couple times after lab. We’d grab coffee, hang outside the library
along the Keweenaw Waterway.”
Keweenaw. He had a vague notion that this was way north and
east. “I’d never been much outside of Merton until I got to Rule.”
“Oh, the Keweenaw’s really beautiful. There’s this bridge between
Houghton and Hancock, which is a much smaller town on Copper
Island right across the waterway. Once you get past Hancock, there’s
virtually nothing on the island all the way out to Lake Superior except
farms and golf courses, and then Copper Harbor at the very tip. I
think about it sometimes, maybe settling up there?” Her expression
turned dreamy. “Raid the university library, then go on past Hancock,
find a nice, isolated farm just off Superior. Fish, grow crops, read
books. That would be all right.”
That sounded like something he would enjoy. “Maybe you should
make it happen.”
“Well, I couldn’t do it alone, for one thing, and you have to get
there, for another. Oh, and hope all the people-eaters have moved out
of town.” She gave another wry shrug. “Anyway, Peter really loved
school. His big thing was Isle Royale. We’d go back and forth on what
they should do about the wolves.”
“Wolves? Isle Royale?” It was like listening to someone tell him a
bedtime story in a foreign language. “Where’s that?”
“In Lake Superior. It’s a national park, but hardly anyone goes. It’s
tough to get there. It’s where they were doing this fifty-year study on
the wolf and moose populations?”
“They were?” He felt incredibly dense. “Why?”
She gave him a look. “Isle Royale’s an
island
, but it’s got wolves
and moose. So how’d they get there?”
“Swim?”
“Only the moose. Wolves can’t swim that far. The lead scientists
were all in Houghton at Michigan Tech. They figured the wolves
came across on ice bridges way back, but because of climate change,
there hasn’t been a stable bridge since the mid-eighties. So the wolves
are stuck. Their population’s been tanking for the last ten years.
Before the world went dark, there were about nine wolves left. Only
abour half were females. So there was a lot of debate about how
or whether to save them. Over the summers, Peter did fieldwork.

Tranquilizing wolves, collecting samples, fitting them with collars,
hunting down moose carcasses. He was very passionate, thought it
was our fault for wrecking the environment. I think if he could’ve
figured out a way to sneak wolves onto the island, he’d have done it.
You have to admire that.”

“I guess.” Chris felt a nasty ping of envy. If things hadn’t fallen
apart, that might have been
him
going to classes and arguing ethics
over coffee. “How does all that relate to Penny?”

“Because of one really bad decision Peter made. The island’s all
backcountry and very remote. You either go five to seven hours by
ferry, fly in on floatplane, or pilot your own boat. Peter had this vintage thing he’d refitted with a fiberglass hull. It was like Quint’s boat
in
Jaws
: pilothouse, engine room, galley. He turned the forepeak into
sleepers. Over spring break of his senior year, he offered to take a
bunch of us over to the island. The catch is, the park officially opens
in mid-April, and this was mid-March. You can get into huge trouble
if you’re caught, but Peter knew a cove to slip into on the north end,
closer to Canada. I figured, a little winter camping, a little hiking, a
nice boat ride, it’d be fun. Twelve of us crowded onto this old boat,
including Penny”—she paused—“and Simon. He and Peter were
close, even then. I think the grandparents hoped Simon and Penny
would hook up.”

That was exactly what Isaac described, too. “They weren’t like
that?”
“I never got that vibe. From what Simon said, he always thought
he should look after her the way Peter did for him.”
Interesting. Just how close had Hannah and Simon been? “How
did Penny feel?”
“Well, she and I never”—she inserted air-quotes—“
bonded
. She
was nearly fifteen and still pretty young in a lot of ways. Peter had
this real blind spot for her, just adored her. But she was already very
troubled. You could see it, the way she hung on some of Peter’s
college friends. And it was”—her gray eyes slid up in a sidelong
glance—“spring break.”
Meaning lots of alcohol. “What happened?”
“Everyone got drunk,” she said, simply. “That is, everyone but
Simon. Even then, he was a very careful, very private kid. Being a
freshman, I didn’t know Peter’s friends very well, so Simon and I
hung. Talked about college, his interests, what I was doing. Anyway,
there we are, in the middle of Lake Superior. No one’s wearing a
life jacket. It’s March, and
freezing.
The water’s forty degrees. Peter’s
completely wrecked, a beer in one hand or a shot, and knocking them
back. People are goofing around. A bunch are below, some making
out in the bunks and . . .” She punctuated the sentence with the arch
of one eyebrow—“Penny, too, with a guy. I think Simon lost track of
her. If he’d known, he’d have gotten her out, but I guess he was a little
distracted, talking to me and keeping an eye on Peter.”
He still didn’t see where this was leading or how Penny got a girl
killed. “So what happened?”
“Penny set the boat on fire,” she said.
This wasn’t just any pistol. Alex knew it as soon as she saw that hinged
steel barrel, and a plastic baggy with a cartridge the size of a twelvegauge shell.
A flare gun.
She’d seen only one in her life, the time she and her
parents had taken a coal-fired ferry boat that chugged between
Ludington, Michigan, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The captain had
shown her his flare pistol when he gave them a tour of the pilothouse. His flare gun had been orange plastic. This pistol was metal
and looked old and worn.
She thumbed the release and broke the weapon open the way she
would a single-shot shotgun. The barrel housed a removable metal
insert. Opening the baggy, she shook out the shell. The cap was brass;
the cartridge red, with bam-pm 1-060-062 stamped in black. Below
that was the word laliber and then numbers: 12/70. On the back was
the word signalpatronen, also in black.
No way she was leaving this behind. “And where are you, Darth?”
Her heart gave an unpleasant lurch as she did a peek around the
bureau just in time to see her guard zipping his fly.
Hell.
Her pants
weren’t exactly skinnies, but someone might notice a pocket bulge.
Slipping the shell into the barrel, she quickly shoved the flare pistol
beneath her sweatshirt and flannel into the small of her back, then
fluffed out her parka.
You’re crazy; you’re nuts. One good whiff of that pistol and you’re dead.

She was about to push up from the still-open drawer, but hesitated,
her attention still pinned by that bizarre
hospital
smell.
Something still
there.
Peering into the very back of the drawer, her eye ticked to a
fluffy, feathery red splotch. She made a swiping grab and her hand
closed around a very slim plastic tube that she instantly knew was
both too narrow and too long to be a spare cartridge for the flare gun.

In the eight seconds before Darth clumped to the door, she had
enough time to think how strange it was to find a flare pistol beneath
a stack of jeans. Although she could wrap her head around it. This
was a boathouse. When you were out on a boat and needed help, you
got off a flare. The fact that there
was
no boat was a little strange.
Didn’t the gun belong where you might conceivably need and use it?
Why
hide
it?

And now here was another puzzle squirreled away and under
wraps, just like the signal gun: a common hospital item in an uncommon place.

All she could think as she stared was,
Peter. What the hell?
Because what she held in her hand was a fluid-filled syringe.
The way Hannah told the story, it was a wonder anyone made it
off that boat alive. The watertight fiberglass hull meant the wood
beneath was dry as kindling, a fire waiting to happen.

Hannah was on deck at the time, propped against the pilothouse,
her eyes closed against the wooziness in her head and the heave of
her stomach: “It was so cold, I was turning blue.” She lay there, shivering, until Simon peeled out of his jacket and draped that around
her shoulders.
Wouldn’t want you to catch your death
was what she
remembered him saying. She’d just opened her mouth to thank him
when there was a huge
bang
and something hot and white suddenly
blasted through the hull not five feet from her face.

After that, Hannah’s memories were a chaotic blur: screaming kids
stampeding from below; flames shooting first out of the forepeak and
then the hatch; the boat taking on water; the electrical failing a second after Peter, sobering fast, got off a Mayday. There was a life raft,
but it was designed for eight, not twelve. Once Simon and Peter got
the raft into the water, keeping people calm enough not to swamp it
was another nightmare, especially when Peter’s boat began to sink.

“It wasn’t dark yet, but the water was so black Peter used a flashlight. That boat filled and rolled pretty fast. Once you were in the
water, you really couldn’t see, had no idea which way was up. I don’t
think he or Simon realized Penny and another kid
weren’t
there until
they did a head count,” Hannah said. By then, the fire was out, but
the boat had disappeared.

Both frantic, Peter and Simon jumped out of the raft and swam
back to the spot where the boat had gone down. What happened
next was . . .
a little hazy
was how Hannah put it. As Peter later told
it to the Coast Guard, he and Simon dove a good fifteen or twenty
feet, grappled their way through what was left of the hatch, and surfaced in the skeletal remains of the engine room. The remaining air
pocket was tiny, no more than a ten-inch gap. Numb with cold and
nearly exhausted, Penny was treading water that was up to her chin.
The other girl, a townie no one really knew except for the boy who’d
brought her aboard, was already dead.

“Peter told them the other girl must’ve gotten snagged on something that held her underwater,” Hannah said. “Simon said the same.”
“Who was she? The girl who died?”
“Amanda . . . Peterson? No, Pederson.” She paused. “You know,
I remember that at the time, there was one thing I thought was . . .
weird. As soon as the boys got Penny to the surface? Peter screamed
at Simon to take care of her and not follow, and then Peter dove
back under, on his own, and he was gone a
long
time. I thought he’d
drowned.”
“Why would that be weird?” he asked. “He probably tried to get
that girl’s body out.”
“I guess.” Smoothing back her hair with one hand, Hannah rose
to go. “Maybe you had to be there, but I know something happened
down there, in that boat. I just don’t know what.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because Peter never came back to school,” she said. “And about
six months later, Simon tried to kill himself.”
Plopping down on the last step up from the boathouse, Alex decided
to steal a few minutes to spaz in private. Chugga-chugging ahead like
the little asthmatic engine that could, Darth was already halfway to
the house. Or maybe he was daring her to run so he could shoot first,
eat second, and ask questions later.
You have lost your mind, honey.
She propped her back against a knotty
red pine. The pistol knuckled her spine. She’d slipped the capped
syringe into a right cargo pant pocket. What was she thinking? Wolf
always slept close. If he sniffed or felt that pistol? She was sunk.
So far, all her grand schemes had been pipe dreams of an oh-sodaring getaway. But
now
, she had a real weapon. Two, if she counted
the tanto. (That funky syringe she wasn’t sure about. The more she
mulled over that feathery thing, the more she thought:
fletchings.
Was
this some kind of dart?) But no kidding around this time. Execute
this just right—blind someone, set a few Changed on fire—she
could swipe a couple rifles, have herself some real
gun
-guns. For
that matter, she
could’ve
shot Darth right then and there. Of course,
a twelve-gauge shell in a tiny little gun had to be loud. Still, she
could’ve grabbed his rifle and skedaddled before anyone knew what
was going on. If she
really
wanted to throw a monkey wrench into
things? Set the house on fire. Those propane canisters she’d found,
combined with popcorn-dry, resin-rich pine certain to throw off a ton
of sparks—what’s not to like?