Nail Biter (6 page)

“Come on,” I told Jenna. “We'd better tell the others what we've found.”

“I guess.” Then, “Listen—you don't think one of us did it, do you? Because when I said watch our backs, I didn't mean . . .”

“I can't imagine why any of you would,” I replied as we went back into the darkened house.

“Plenty of locals probably wouldn't have minded putting his lights out,” I added, shining the flash ahead so we could find our way through the kitchen. “Overall, he was what my son calls a crude dude. But I doubt anyone in your group ever met him.”

And at that stage I hardly cared if anyone had. I just wanted two things, the first being to get back home as soon as possible.

In the living room the others had finally gotten a fire going in the stove and were gathered around it as if attempting to soak up its feeble cheer.

“You tell them,” I said to Jenna. “I'm going out to try the phone in the truck, just in case.”

Because the other thing I wanted was the cops notified, and as swiftly and efficiently as possible, too, since it seemed now that an evil deed might have been committed and not just a sad or foolish one.

Pushing my way out the front door I met a battering ram of rain and wind-driven debris, sticks and leaves whipping into my face and getting tangled in my clothing and hair.

Gasping, I hauled the pickup's door open, barely catching it before it could fly back in the wind and spring the hinges, then scrambled up onto the seat. I sat there catching my breath while turning the headlights on.

As I'd feared, the dark hulking shape of a fallen tree lay a few hundred feet away, downed power lines gleaming in the truck's high beams. But the tree didn't seem to be blocking the road.

Hallelujah, I thought, shutting the lights off; no sense wasting the battery. Sudden darkness closed in, broken by distant gleams from the eighteen-wheelers moving over the causeway on the far side of the cove, headed for the freighter in port.

Next I tried the phone wired into the dash.
No signal,
the blinking icon reported. But I'd expected that, too, and I
could
just call the police from home; Jenna's doubts notwithstanding, I'd been out in far worse, and the phones might be working there. Driving back would be a hellish chore, I thought resignedly, but not an impossible one.

But then over on the causeway a row of orange running lights came around ninety degrees from behind one of the moving truck cabs, dimly visible in the others' headlamps. From where I sat it appeared that the truck's lights were swerving in slow motion.

To the driver, though, what happened next must've felt nearly instantaneous. The cab itself moved oddly, its headlights shining upward, creating bright nearly-vertical bars in the night sky. . . .

The cab lights vanished. I felt my fingernails biting into my palms as I imagined the trailer slammed by a wind gust on the rain-slick road, pulling the cab out of control until it and the trailer toppled over together.

Blocking the one road to town . . . oh, fiddlesticks, I thought, still hoping against hope.

But already more headlights were lining up on the causeway, nothing moving in either direction. So even if the cell phone had been working it was useless to me now.

No one could get here past the crippled rig. Worse, until it was cleared, I couldn't get home. Instead, I was stuck with a dead guy, five witches, and—

I checked around the dark interior of the truck. A hunting jacket of Wade's, a pair of his old boots, two sticks of Black Jack chewing gum, and a paperback price guide to American rifles, its pages dog-eared to mark the most important and/or valuable of the weapons.

But—drat, no magic wand.

Inside, the tenants
had found the utility candles Ellie and I had left in one of the kitchen drawers, and lit them in the kitchen and living room. All the flickering flames made the place seem ready for an impromptu funeral, which considering the body out in the shed I supposed was appropriate.

But Greg Brand's reaction to my return from the great outdoors wasn't. “What's the idea?” he demanded. “What's going on, and what if anything are you doing to take care of this situation?”

It was the “if anything” part that got me. I was soaked to the skin, not to mention a little shaky from discovering the late Eugene Dibble, and Brand's attitude wasn't improving my state of mind.

“Mr. Brand, I have no idea what ‘this situation' even is,” I retorted. “All I know is, there's a dead guy in the house. Somebody shot him and I gather that you all are the only other ones who've been in the place recently.”

Their eyes widened at the implication; only Wanda seemed unmoved, silently tending the fire with her back turned.

“Oh, now wait just a damned minute,” Brand replied. “None of us is even from around here, we wouldn't have any possible motive to—”

“That shed door doesn't lock right,” Hetty Bonham pointed out with a toss of her blonde mane. “You should've repaired it before you rented this place. Anyone could have gotten in,” she added accusingly.

True; the door from the shed to the outside was so crooked in its frame that it was a struggle to get it to latch, though once you did, you couldn't get it to open again. Besides, as I'd told Jenna, Eugene Dibble was such a scuzz that he might as well have lived on another planet from any of these people.

And finally, with the exception of Jenna herself—although considering the company she kept I was having my doubts about her, too—my tenants had pretty well proven they lacked the ability to change a lightbulb, much less kill a guy.

“Okay,” I conceded grudgingly. “A lot of things could have happened. And you're right, it probably has nothing to do with any of you, so there's no need to get upset.”

I pulled my wet jacket off. “The police will be able to get it all figured out. But,” I added cautioningly, “not tonight.”

I explained about the truck on the causeway. “So we'll just have to wait until the authorities can clear the road,” I finished.

“You mean,” Hetty asked, “the body has to stay
here
? With
us
?” She touched her long scarlet-tipped fingers to her crimson lips in a theatrical gesture.

Greg narrowed his eyes at her. “He's not going to get up and pester anyone, Hetty. Your virtue is safe.”

Her answering tone was bitter. “Yeah, Greg, with you around, everyone's is.”

Jenna rolled her eyes; from her expression I gathered this kind of bickering went on between Hetty and Greg pretty much nonstop.

Then she went to kneel by Wanda, putting a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder. But Wanda shrank from the gesture.

“Oops, sorry,” Jenna said. “I forgot you don't like being touched by people.”

Great, a neurotic teenager; just what we needed to give this witch's brew of an evening another stir. Meanwhile Hetty Bonham and Greg Brand were already healing their quarrel at the drinks cabinet.

Watching them, it struck me suddenly that their interaction wasn't at all what I'd have expected from a teacher and a newly recruited student. Their arguing, for one thing; it sounded too personal. Then there was the way she seemed to know without asking what to put in his glass, and the easy gesture she used to hand it to him. . . .

“Not that I expect it will be, but
is
the name Eugene Dibble familiar to anyone here?” I addressed the group.

Because if Hetty and Greg did know each other, maybe I had other things wrong about them, too. Maybe one of them
had
known Eugene.

Stranger things had happened. Like for instance his corpse out in that shed.

“Not to me,” Jenna said; Marge nodded agreement, and though Wanda said nothing her blank face was answer enough.

But at my question Brand's highball glass tilted abruptly, spilling some of its contents.

“Jesus, Greg,” Hetty protested, brushing angrily at herself. “You clumsy—”

“Shut up, Hetty,” he replied, crouching to retrieve fallen ice cubes.

Only not so fast that I didn't get a chance to see the color draining out of his complexion. Even by candlelight the change was striking, and when he stood again the ice chattered in his glass.

Oho, I thought as he gulped down the contents; the plot thickens. Because not much was clear about this horrible night, but one thing was. Greg Brand had heard Dibble's name before.

“Will your family
at home be awfully worried about you?” Marge Cathcart asked kindly a couple of hours later.

The power was still out but she had put together a dinner of packaged things and canned goods heated on top of the woodstove, and Jenna had lent me some dry clothes.

“I hope not,” I told her. “I left a note and my husband will know about the jackknifed truck. He'll figure out where I am pretty quickly, I think.”

In fact Wade was probably out there now helping to clear the mess. But it could take hours for a big enough wrecker to arrive and make the road passable.

“All right, then,” Marge said. “You try to sleep.” Carrying a flashlight, she went away, closing the door and leaving me in the makeshift bed she and Jenna had helped me make on the floor of the upstairs spare room.

Outside, the wind went on howling. Rain thrummed on the roof slanting a few feet from my head. A wave of homesickness swept over me as the rest of the house grew silent, the others gone to bed, too.

But even as tired as I was, no way would I be able to sleep. Instead I lay there in the dark, eyes open and ears alert for the slightest sound.

Tap, tap
. I sat up suddenly. The sound came from the window.

Rain dripping from the eaves, probably. I lay down again. Just a few more hours, I told myself. By morning the storm would surely pass and the wreckage of the truck would be hauled away.

Tap, tap
. I pulled the blankets over my head, then checked my watch once more. In the dark, the radium-green numbers said it was 12:31 A.M.

Scuff-scuff
.

I popped out of the blankets. Something crept quietly just outside the door to the spare room. But before I could react . . .

Tap!
Another sound came at the window. A
purposeful
sound. But I was upstairs and so was that window, and I happened to know there were no ladders at the Quoddy Village house. So
how . . .
?

Grimly I scrambled across the room and shoved the window open, stuck my head out, and squinted into the streaming night.

“Wade!” His rain-slick face grinned up from the darkness at me. “What're you doing here? And how'd you get here?”

Not that I cared. I'd have ridden a flying carpet home by then if that's what it took.

“Come on down,” he whispered back. “No sense waking the rest of them.” He dropped the handful of small stones he'd been tossing one by one at the window.

“Got the ATV, you can ride behind me. Come on, Jake.”

Moments later I'd flown down the stairs and out the door, barely pausing long enough to pull my shoes on, and was seated on Wade's oversize-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, affectionately known around our house as The Beast.

“Hey,” he said, “don't I get a hello kiss?”

Oh, did he ever. “How'd you know I was up there?”

He shrugged. “Process of elimination. I knew which rooms the tenants had, didn't think you'd be bunking in with any of them.”

Just the thought made me grimace. “That's for sure. But didn't they need you for . . . ?”

“The wreck?” He shrugged. “Yeah, probably they did. But I did my share, and after a while I had a feeling maybe you needed me worse.”

And that in a nutshell was Wade. “Thank you,” I said.

Wade smiled back at me, a tall, broad-shouldered, craggy-faced knight in rain-soaked armor, riding a squat, four-wheeled steed that belonged in a heavy-artillery battle.

Then he fired up The Beast with a roar loud enough to wake everyone in the Quoddy Village house, including possibly Eugene Dibble.

“Hang on,” he yelled, his voice snatched away by the wind as we turned into it.

The trip home was a wet, noisy, bruising assault on every muscle and bone in my body, The Beast howling as it powered through flooded gullies, swerved around huge uprooted trees, and muscled its way up steep embankments, only its small yellow headlamps glaring ahead of us until we'd bypassed the causeway.

So it wasn't until the lights of town spread welcomingly before us that I thought again of the sound I'd heard coming from just outside the spare room, back at the tenants' house.

The deliberate sound, soft but unmistakable, of footsteps oh-so-stealthily approaching my closed but unlocked door.

Ellie and I had a sort of game we played back and forth
sometimes, called 1823. In it we took turns coming up with facts related to the year in which my old house was built.

For example, “In 1823,” Ellie said early the next morning after the fiasco out at the rental property, “Edgar Allan Poe was fourteen years old.”

We were on my front lawn contemplating the porch wreckage; I'd already brought her up-to-date on all that had gone on at the tenants' place.