Wreck the Halls (31 page)

“Of course it's working. George fixed it.” Ellie peered out. “I don't get it, though. There aren't any lights at—”

Melinda's house: everything on the way to it was lit up, streetlamps shedding yellow cones through the rain subsiding to mist. Christmas decorations on houses shone merrily: laughing Santas and packs of elves frolicked everywhere.

But Melinda's compound gaped like a black hole. We went up the driveway to the house, dark and deserted looking. “Let's go home,” Willetta suggested nervously.

“No. Maybe we should knock, see if…”

“No one's here.” Ellie's voice was definite. “I think we'd better look for her. Let's try the beach.”

Willetta looked more doubtful. “You should go home, anyway,” she said, meaning Ellie. “Take a hot shower and make sure you're really all right. We don't know they're even together, not for sure. And besides…”

“And besides, you don't want to confront Peter Christie on the beach in the dark,” I guessed.

No streetlights illuminated the shore by the old gas plant, and the sound of the water rushing beneath the old, crumbling wharf blocked out other sounds.

“Right,” Willetta admitted with a show of embarrassment. But I understood: down there at night, you could feel a million miles away from anyone and anything.

Away from help. “Let's just look,” Ellie said persuasively. “It's on our way back to Jake's. And if they're not there, we will go home, call Tim Rutherford and ask him if he's seen them.”

“And if they are there, we'll call him, too,” I added, no more anxious to provoke anything with Peter than Willetta was, alone in the dark.

Willetta drove down Water Street, turned on Clark Street toward the bay, and stopped where the road ended above the steep slope down to the edge of the bluff. The glow of the streetlights turned the wave tops the color of gleaming pewter, a hundred yards out, but close to shore the massive legs of the old wharf staggered darkly into them, unlit.

It was high tide; only a narrow stretch of gravel and round-shouldered old bricks showed at the waterline.

“Let's go,” Willetta said anxiously.

“Wait.” Ellie peered down. “What's that, a footprint?”

The remnants of slush here were grey and rotten looking. She snapped on her little flashlight. “It is.”

Willetta looked impatient. “Anyone could have made that…”

“No, they couldn't. It's been raining and sleeting. Someone made this footprint not very long ago. And there's…”

Another one: blurred but distinguishable, the toe-mark aimed at the shore. I peered at the old wharf, pitch-darkness beneath it, deep water moving against the massive old pilings.

High up under them, deeper pockets of darkness yawned. Big iron spikes for the plant workers from the old days to climb were barely visible against the water beyond. The footprints seemed to emerge from the heaving waves.

In summer, birds nested in the sheltered cubbies of the wharf ruins. Feral cats scrambled up to the support formed by the crossing of beams, planks, and the old wharf pilings, to have their litters there. At low tide, skunks and foxes prowled the beach, eating mussels and urchins, waiting for the eggs, newborn kittens, and baby birds that fell occasionally into their jaws.

But now it was winter: nothing, no one. “The tide was lower,” Ellie said. “Half an hour ago, maybe, someone was under the wharf. They walked back on the beach that's covered with water, now. And here, they angled up toward the street.”

“But only one set of…”

Footprints, I’d been about to say, but the sudden pair of headlights shining straight into my eyes interrupted me. Then the lights cut off and Peter Christie slammed from his car, ran down onto the beach toward us. “Is she here?”

Sounding alarmed. “I went home to get ready for our outing,” he added. “I was supposed to go back and pick her up but she's not home, her lights are off…”

He spotted Willetta. “What are you doing here?”

“I guess I should just drop off the face of the earth,” she spat furiously. “Well, let me tell you, you're not going to get away so—”

“Never mind that.” I stepped between them. “Peter, you were meant to pick up Melinda at her house? When?”

“An hour ago, we were going to do it right after you two left.” He spread his hands helplessly. “We were going to come down here, we thought it would be wild out, but fun. We had no idea the storm would get so bad.”

Something about that old wharf made me uneasy. The masses of water moving lazily beneath it: so deep, now.

And something else. A reflection? Halfway to the end of the old structure… I squeezed my eyes shut, looked again.

Nothing. “Then I went back to her place, still no one home, walked around it calling for her,” Peter complained. “Pounded on the doors. All the drapes are open, and I had a flashlight, so I could see in. In case,” he added defensively, “she was there, hurt or something. Then I went home, figuring she'd have called. But she hadn't.”

The wind was falling, drifting billows of fog now just sitting, barely moving on the waves. From under the wharf came the faint slop-drip of water draining as the tide ebbed.

“You did something to her,” Willetta snarled. “Why'd you come down here? Because you saw Ellie's flashlight, and you thought we might figure out what you've done, isn't that right?”

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so that everything was in shades of grey.

“The way you did something to Merle,” Willetta rushed on. “Killed him to get Faye Anne in trouble. You drugged her, didn't you? The same way you drugged me. So she wouldn't remember, or be able to tell anyone what you did…”

His mouth fell open. “Is that what you're telling people? That I— It's not true!”

“Oh, yeah? That's what you say. But when they find those drugs in your house, that you used on me and Faye Anne, then we'll see who people believe. You still have them, I’ll bet, and the police are going to find them. And then…”

She stalked away from him as a shout came from above: “What the hell's going on down there?”

It was Ben Devine, scrambling down the steep slope onto the beach with Mickey Jean behind. He strode up, slammed his hands into Peter's chest.

“Where is she, you little son of a…”

“I don't know! God damn it, get your hands off…”

Great; a testosterone-spewing contest. Just what we needed. “Shut up, both of you,” I snapped. “Ben, how did you know to come here? Just took a sudden notion to visit the beach, did you?”

His bulk towered above me. But the question took him aback. “She… she said they were coming here. You heard her. For that goddamned little picnic the two of them cooked up together.” He swung back to Peter. “I swear, if anything's happened to her I’ll take you in the woods and feed your eyes to the crows.”

“But I didn't…”

Mickey Jean came up to me. “We tried to call her once Ben got the generator running, make sure she was okay.”

Oh, for pete's sake, of course they would have a generator. The two of them were set up for anything short of Armageddon. Which Peter and Ben looked just about ready to have between them; the shouting was escalating.

“But there was no answer,” Mickey Jean said. “The power company had turned off the electricity on account of that downed line, but even then we couldn't get the truck out; half a tree fell on it.” She took a deep breath. “But my Honda was
okay. So we came in to make sure she was all right. Or Ben did, anyway. He feels he owes it to her, to take care of her.”

“Right, Melinda's good at making people feel they owe her,” I said. Because it had suddenly occurred to me, why we were here on a beach in the freezing darkness, fighting and worrying:

For Melinda, who despite all our fears was probably sitting somewhere nice and warm, now, drinking wine and thinking up lots of reasons to criticize us.

But Mickey Jean looked surprised. “You don't know? Why he feels that way? But no, of course you wouldn't…”

“What?” I turned at her tone. Willetta had climbed the slope again, looking down at Peter and Ben, still arguing.

“Ben wasn't always a strong guy,” Mickey said. “Kidney failure, it hit him out of the blue. Three times a week dialysis, until…”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding Ben's devotion.

“Melinda stepped in,” Mickey Jean said. “She found out what he needed, and over his protests she gave Ben a kidney.”

Which, in a funny backwards way, sounded just like Melinda. The big, dramatic gesture from the drama queen. But then I caught myself; it was more than that, way more. The one thing she really could have bragged about, only she hadn't; suddenly I had another picture of the drama queen, entirely.

Frivolous, maybe; even foolish. On the surface. Underneath was someone who delivered when push came to shove. And kept quiet about it.

Discouragement washed over me. So many possibilities weaving together in interlocking patterns of deceit. And in the center of them something missing, something I kept looking for, not knowing anything except that when I saw it, I would know it.

But by then it might be too late. “She's not here now,” I
began, turning to head back up the slope toward the car. Ben and Peter went on shouting. “I guess we'd better go somewhere, call Tim after all.”

And see Wade, let him know I wasn't dead in a ditch. It was time to go home and face the music.

“Come on, Ellie,” I said. The men were pushing one another again, Willetta taking verbal potshots from the darkness on the slope above—her voice barely audible in the noise of wind and waves—Mickey Jean down on the beach, still trying to separate them without success.

Peter took a roundhouse swing at Ben Devine, who replied with a clip to the side of Peter's head that sent him staggering, ankle-deep in the frigid water; if there'd been any beer bottles handy they'd have been breaking them over each other's heads. Shouting and cursing…

“What a mess.” I trudged upward, the sand dragging at my feet. “I don't think we've done a darned bit of good, tonight.”

God, but I was tired. Mostly, though, I was thinking about going home and facing Wade. All the energy seemed to be leaking out of me; a slick stone made me stumble.

“Wait.” Ellie's voice pierced the shouting and the sound of the waves.

“What?” I turned, peering to where she aimed a finger.

She'd taken off her glasses, and without them my face was no more than a pinkish blur to her, her own hands rounded blobs. But at a distance…

“There,” she said. “At the end of the wharf, on the water. See it? Something…”

Once she'd pointed it out, I did see it: floating. A bit of driftwood or a gleaming rag of rockweed; even a dead harbor seal could look that way in the moving water. But it wasn't any of those, because none of them had—the thing turned sluggishly in the waves—fringes.

“It's a scarf,” Ellie said. “Drifting.”

I was already running. It was a scarf, all right, but it wasn't drifting. Tide going out, currents swirling, but now I could see that it hung by a piling, snagged, its fringes turning like the rag-ends of seaweed anchored to the rocks.

As if it, like the waving rockweed, were firmly attached.

Tied there. I plunged into the water, my legs hammered by mallets of cold. Ben saw me, uttered an oath, dove in behind me.

“I’m calling for help!” Mickey yelled down from where her car was parked, as Ben surfaced, bellowing, and dove again.

Peter was in the water, too, cringing at it but striding on. Ben came up a third time, the Randall knife unsheathed, its blade a glinting horror in the murk under the wharf pilings.

Down again. Gasping with the cold, I watched the water where he had gone under, Peter still struggling toward the spot, but Ben didn't reappear. In the distance a siren began wailing, coming closer.

I couldn't feel my legs; as they started to go from under me Ellie grabbed me and pulled me in. “You can't do anything,” she said. “You don't swim well enough to go under the—”

“Hey!” The Eastport squad car slid to a halt above us, Tim Rutherford at a run almost before the car's wheels had stopped turning. The headlights lit up the whole beach, the wharf's underside, and the water with Peter Christie slogging out of it.

No Ben. No anyone. “Tim,” I said, my teeth chattering, “we think maybe Melinda's down there…”

Ben surfaced, something in his arms. “Ambulance!” he shouted at us, nearly falling, struggling onto the shore.

Another vehicle pulled in: Wade's truck, George Valentine in the passenger seat. The two of them sprinted down, faces anxious.

“Ellie?” George shouted. Then he spotted her, his shoulders
sagging with relief. “Tim called us, said you were here…”

Wade grabbed me, peered into my face. “Damn you, don't you ever do this to me again.”

I fell against him and as his arms went around me I could feel the anger go out of him; not that I wasn't going to get a brisk talking-to, later. But now all I could think about was that he had found me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “So sorry, you must have been so worried.”

“Christ.” His arms tightened. “I swear, Jacobia.” Then both of us realized what it was that Ben had been carrying over the rocks. Melinda…

Motionless. Peter and Ben began working over her while Tim ran for the squad car and the radio in it. Willetta ran with him.

Peter knelt on the rocks beside the body; Ben, too. Around its sodden middle was her scarf and a length of nylon rope. And the tide had fallen enough now so I could see where it had been tied before Ben's knife cut it.

In my mind's eye, I saw how it had happened: Melinda lying unconscious on the beach. The rope tied halfway up the piling. As the tide came in, she would drown. Or if she woke…

The hideous cleverness of it made me gasp. If she woke, she would have to climb the piling, using the spikes, to reach the rope and try to free herself. But by that time she wouldn't be able to undo the knots, because her fingers would be numb with the devastating cold. So she would cling up there until the water reached her or until she lost consciousness, and fell.

Knowing that she was dying. Screaming, probably, for as long as her voice lasted. No one to hear her.

“Dear God,” Ellie murmured. “It was a torture-killing.”