Nail Biter (12 page)

George shook his head. “Kids, maybe. Reason they think it's bowhunters is, no one's heard shots. Also the warden was out there a week ago and he found a carcass. Sort of a mess, it was, had a really ugly kind of homemade arrow stuck in it that didn't want to come out.”

At that, Ellie did change the subject, forcefully enough so that neither man could mistake her cue; hunting talk was one thing but we didn't need the gory details at the dinner table.

“Who wants more casserole?” she asked, and everyone did, and after that she skillfully drew Sam out on the topic of the Coast Guard course he was getting ready to take soon.

“It's the hundred-ton mate/masters with attached sail-and-towing certificate course,” he informed us proudly, and went on to tell us all just exactly what that entailed.

Which was a lot, and involved some responsible tasks on boats that I'd have preferred not knowing about, much the same as I tried not to think too hard about Wade's job out on the water.

So while Sam described it I sat there recalling what he'd said earlier about Victor not feeling well, and tried keeping an eye on my ex-husband.

He was eating a little less than usual, I thought, and he'd passed on a second glass of wine—

We'd have omitted alcohol entirely but Sam wouldn't sit down with us if we did, insisting he had to remain sober in the real world, not some unrealistic be-careful-he's-a-reformed-boozer version of it.

—but otherwise Victor seemed his usual self. For instance, he caught me spying on him, his eyes meeting mine knowingly over the candle flame between us.

I thought he might say something about it, too, but by now it was time to clear the plates and he got up in a hurry instead, to avoid the kind of all-pals-together sort of labor he abhorred. And I'd have let the other husbands clean up as they offered, but Ellie and I wanted a couple of moments to ourselves.

Thus when we'd all had our coffee and the dessert had been served and eaten, Ellie and I met in the kitchen, where we fed the dogs, put Cat Dancing's dish atop the refrigerator where she insisted on having it, then conferred together while we washed and dried the dishes.

“So,” Ellie said when I had finished my report. “If Rickert and Eugene Dibble didn't know our house was being rented, they might've used it as a hiding place. Then once the tenants were in, Eugene might have had to sneak in, to retrieve the pills.”

“Right,” I said, admiring the way she attacked the stack of plates with a sudsy sponge. Like Bella Diamond, Ellie thought there wasn't much in the world that couldn't be improved by the application of enough hot soapy water, and often she was correct.

“But,” she added, “now the drugs have been confiscated. So they can't be sold by anyone, can they?”

There was an angle I hadn't thought of. “And
that
means now that Dibble's dead, Mac Rickert—or someone—still owes someone else for the stash all by himself,” I agreed.

“Wow,” she said, rinsing a handful of silverware, “if that's true, he'd
better
stay out in the woods.”

“Yeah. But why kill Dibble there in the house, I wonder, instead of some place where he wouldn't be found so soon? And then not even take the drugs with him?”

“
And
if Wanda saw Mac—then or earlier—why not take her right then? Why come back and run the risk of being caught all over again?”

“Beats me.” I wiped the stovetop off with a wet paper towel. “Maybe he just didn't think of it then.” When Bella came tomorrow, if that stove wasn't pristine she would fix me with what Sam had begun calling The Big Green Eyeball soon after she came to work for us.

Meanwhile Ellie's mind had begun running along a different track. “The other possibility, you know, is that this is all a fine theory. But that's all. Just a theory. You don't even know that girl you talked to—Luanne, her name was?—you don't even know if she was telling you the truth. And even if she was . . .”

She wrung the sponge, wiped the faucet with it. “Anyway, I thought we were just going to make a few calls,” she continued. “Maybe check out the teenagers' usual hangout places.”

Which I hadn't done, sending Sam instead and going right to Plan B myself. Because I was so sure already that Wanda wasn't in any of those places; that if she had been, some kid would have blabbed about it already.

That if she had been, I wouldn't be feeling this way about her.

“I'm just saying you seem intent on a worst-case scenario,” Ellie went on. “Are you sure you haven't been jumping the gun?”

She shook her dishtowel out, folded it, and hung it on the rack. “Of course, if you hadn't we wouldn't know about Rickert at all. But even if he is involved, it could be he killed Dibble and Wanda
didn't
see it. Or,” she finished, “anything else.”

Spying a spot I'd missed, she licked her finger and rubbed a corner of the stovetop until the smudge was gone. “I mean, she is only fifteen, maybe with her head full of dreamy foolishness like any other kid that age. So maybe she did run off on her own just like Bob Arnold suggested.”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly, hanging up my own towel. “You're right, I guess that's possible, too.”

Even I'd thought so at first. Still I kept seeing Wanda's face: unrebellious, even passive except when she'd been coddling that tiny bat. She was dreamy all right, but in the short time I'd been with her I'd gotten the sense that her dreams weren't the bright-lights, big-city kind cherished by so many teenagers.

That instead they were childish, earnest, and unaffected. Like my own dreams a long time ago, in a past still so hideously well remembered it made me shiver, there in the snug, warm kitchen.

It was past
ten-thirty when everyone left. Victor stuck around awhile to try promoting something better out of me than reluctant acceptance, which was where I'd settled on the plane-chartering business, while Ellie and George gathered the baby's things. Meanwhile Sam finished his laundry before taking it and the rest of the leftover casserole in case he got hungry during the night, and headed for home, too.

“Oh, all right,” I gave in finally as Victor went out the door, “have a good time, then, the both of you.” I couldn't imagine why my blessing mattered so much to him, but it seemed to.

After they'd all gone and the dogs had been outside for the last time, I went upstairs to take a shower, pausing by the hall window looking out over Key Street on my way to get fresh towels from the linen closet.

The fog had come in, billowing off the water and drifting along the street, hanging in the skeletal branches of the trees like gray cotton batting. Within it the streetlights were hazy glowing blobs, eerily nebulous.

“Spooky, huh?” Wade said, coming up behind me and putting his arms around me.

I jumped about a foot. Then his arms tightened and I relaxed against him, muzzy from my final glass of wine and feeling safe for the moment from any goblins or ghouls that might be wandering outside.

But not, apparently, from things that go bump in the night. “Why, Wade,” I said, turning to him. “I didn't know you cared.”

His strong hands pressed into my waist. “Want me to demonstrate?” His voice rumbled in my ear. “Or maybe after the day you've had you'd just rather sleep.”

At his touch I felt the rest of the tension go out of me. I'd missed Sam since he moved to his own place but there were advantages to knowing you were alone in the house.

“You do know how to persuade a person,” I said into the side of Wade's neck. It smelled like shaving soap. “How about letting me take a shower first?”

He nodded assent. “What say I change the sheets and light some candles while you do?” he said, and let me go.

Whereupon I stood there gasping for a moment while he got out the clean sheets, a burst of faint lavender fragrance coming from the linen closet when he opened the door for them.

Smiling, he kissed me before he went away with them; I just leaned on the windowsill until my heart stopped racing. Which was how I happened to glimpse the barest suggestion of a shape in the shadows across the street.

A darkness against the larger dark, loitering there against a lamppost. Then came the pale flash of an upturned face.

Up toward my windows, the dark hollows of its eyes seeming to search for something. Or . . .

A car turned onto Key Street, its headlights making solid bars of the drifting fog. The lights strobed the place where I'd seen the shape, or thought I had.

I squinted, trying to make out what I'd glimpsed, the sidewalk and the streetlamp where the dark figure had seemed to lurk momentarily visible as the car went by.

Then the night was full of darkness and silence again, the fog so thick it seemed to press against the windowpane like a soft gray hand.

And there was no one in the street below.

No one at
all . . .

Hours later I jerked from the clutches of a bad dream into full wide-awake mode, and to the sound of running water.

Torrentially running water. I was alone in the bed and the clock on the dresser said 3:27 A.M. in glowing red numerals.

Hastily pulling on a robe and slippers, I hurried downstairs only to hear another sound underlying the first. After an instant I recognized it as the
thrum-thrum
of a motor, and realized that it was coming from the cellar.

Water and a
pump
motor. Which could only mean . . .

“Wade?” I called down the cellar steps, the dogs pressing anxiously against me on either side.

“Everything's fine,” he called back, but it wasn't.

“Step aside, girlie,” my father said from behind me, rushing in the back door. Wearing rubber hip boots and a grim expression plus a pair of blue jeans and a flannel pajama shirt, he gripped a hammer in one hand and the biggest pipe wrench I'd ever seen in my life in the other.

Obviously Wade had called him. I'd never seen the wrench before, but from the size of it I thought it was the one you might grab for if you were on a submarine in an emergency.

And I hoped he knew how to use it, because from the sound of the water pouring in, any minute now a submarine was what we were going to need.

Pushing Prill and Monday aside, he hurried past me down the steps. “I got the tools,” he told Wade.

“Dad?” I called after him, then nervously followed the sounds of splashing mingled with awful cursing to the third step from the bottom.

The second step was already under water. “Dad, what—?”

And then I saw them, way over in the corner where earlier in the day my father had been working on the foundation.

Only there wasn't much to work on anymore. An entire section of the old granite was missing as if exploded from the wall, leaving a ragged hole about the size of a refrigerator. And crossing the hole where a lot of the old stone used to be was the pipe he'd mentioned.

A
big
pipe, now obviously broken.

With water gushing out of it. I craned my neck so I could see to where the Bisley's lockbox was hidden in the base of a chimney at the other end of the cellar, behind a loose brick.

My emergency cash stash was back there, too, money I kept on hand against disasters. One of which we were certainly having; the rising water hadn't quite reached the height of the loose brick yet but that was the only positive detail I noticed.

“Was anyone planning to wake me?” I asked. “I mean, seeing as the house is apparently about to be floating away . . .”

That was when I spotted the firehose snaking out of the cellar window. “Under control,” Wade gritted out, wielding the enormous pipe wrench my father handed him.

The cellar had French drains, like gutters running along the bottoms of the foundation walls, to carry any seeped-in water back outside. We had sump pumps, too, a pair of them set into the floor just in case.

But none of those devices had ever been meant to handle a flood like this. And anyway Wade had already shut the pumps down, I deduced from the way the fuse box door hung open, no doubt because their motors were (a) electric and (b) already submerged.

“Where's it coming from?” I asked, looking around. A couple of wooden pallets floated merrily near the furnace like makeshift life rafts; right about then I could cheerfully have gotten onto one and floated out to sea.

“Old reservoir,” my father replied, busy helping Wade put the wrench on an ancient valve. I'd have helped, too, but from the expressions on their faces I was pretty sure one of them would clobber me with the wrench if I tried.

“Okay,” Wade grunted through the gouts of water spurting from the pipe into his face. “See if you can break the . . .”

Whang!
While Wade held the wrench in place my father hit its handle with the hammer, and I don't even want to think about what the impact must have felt like rattling up through their arms.

But the water slowed a little as the rusty old valve turned a fraction. The waterfall sound diminished, first to a trickling and then to a steady
plink-plink
as they got control of the pipe. Eventually the bottom cellar step became visible, then the second one from the bottom.

And so did an item I'd failed to notice earlier, owing to the fact that most of the water in the universe had been flowing into my house. “Just managed to muscle it out and move it before that thing went—”

Kablooie,
my father's gesture communicated with perfect clarity when we had all gone back upstairs.

It was a chunk of the foundation, about two feet square and a foot deep. He and Wade had gotten it up the cellar steps; now it sat on the kitchen table; Bella, I thought, would have a fit.

“That old water pipe,” he went on, “all that was holding it together anymore was the foundation structure. I took enough of that away, and—”

It seemed that at some time in the distant past new pipes had been put into Key Street and the old ones shut off. But they had clearly not been drained of the water they'd contained.

Until now. “The good news is . . .” my father began after a restorative gulp of coffee.