HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (25 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“Investigator, we need to talk.”

And, just like that, it was all gone. Tom’s eyes snapped open — he hadn’t been aware that he’d closed them. He looked at the child — Caleb was sitting there, his posture more relaxed, his body planted on the bed, subject, like all bodies, to the law of gravity.

Somehow the child had managed to stick his red pacifier back in his mouth and was sucking on it, looking a bit tired, twirling his hair with one small, fat hand.

The boys were standing in that same way, looking down at Caleb, only now they seemed a little sheepish, a bit fatigued. Tom looked at Sophie, he let go of her hand and smiled at her. She smiled back, but he saw a lie in that smile and instantly hated it, wishing he could say something.

She turned away, gripping her clipboard against her chest, and gave a wide berth to Sergeant Mahoney, who had interrupted it all, as she left the room. He strode over to Tom.

“Investigator Milliner,” he said with the air of a high-school football star talking to a geek. “Let’s you and I have a talk, what do you think?”

Tom sighed. He absently rubbed at his shoulder.

“Yeah. Right,” he said. He stuck his hand out. “After you.”

* * *

Tom watched the television in the corner of the cafeteria. Mahoney had wanted to come down for a coffee. His urgency had quickly diffused once he had Tom’s attention.

Tom wished he could have waited for Elizabeth to have returned before he’d left, so he could have told her what had happened. He wished Maddy had been there, too. Now he was downstairs, away from all of them. Away from the incredible, levitating, singing child. Was he losing his mind at last? Tom felt like things were too scattered, like the people involved should have all been together, but weren’t. Now, on his own, he grew worried.

He heard Mahoney jangling his coins in his pocket to pay for the coffee, heard the deep timbre of his cop-voice talking to the cafeteria worker, but Tom kept his attention focused on the television. Other people in the room were watching too. A kid with a UVM sweatshirt and dyed-blonde hair, who had been bent over his phone, looked up at the TV. A woman, with a mesh shopping bag in front of where her enormous boobs rested on the table, was telling her skinny husband to
shaddup
, so she could pay attention.

Tom felt the attention of the room homing in on the new, flat-screen Sanyo mounted in the corner. He saw another television in the opposite corner, and a group of people were gathered round it, too.

Outside the cafeteria’s glass walls, scattered flakes were still coming down. The ground was mostly bare — it was always a little warmer on the East side of Lake Champlain — and the spring snow wasn’t sticking. In the lobby, Tom saw the security station and the blue glow of a TV there, too, shining on the dark skin of the security guard.

“Okay,” Mahoney said, returning. “Let’s sit down right over here, Milliner.”

Tom held out his hand, just raised it slightly above waist level, and raised a bent index finger, indicating
hold on
.

“What?” said the sergeant indignantly.

On the screen was a young man whose face looked scrubbed. It was the same reporter from earlier, his tie thrown back over his shoulder. He was standing along the edge of Lake Champlain, which he’d waded into, his pants rolled up around his ankles. Earlier, the same reporter had worn a big smile on his face, his eyebrows jumping and waggling for the camera. That story must have been a recording from the previous day. This was live, the five AM news. It was dark all around the lake. The man was poking into it with a yardstick, and, no longer wore the goofball face. He looked tired and grim.

There was some commotion at a nearby table. Now it was the kid with the UVM sweatshirt who had drawn a small crowd.

Tom walked over. Mahoney followed, his coffee forgotten.

Tom pushed through as politely as he could to get a better look. The kid had his phone out — one of those Smartphone deals. He had a YouTube video playing. The people gathered around the table all leaned in and watched what an amateur videographer had captured only a few hours before, probably using a phone just like this.

“What is that?”

Tom didn’t see who’d spoken. Someone else answered. “The Northern Lights, maybe.”

“No,” said an Asian woman across the table from Tom. “Not Northern Lights. That’s the sun.”

“It can’t be the sun.”

The conversation went around in circles. Tom watched the video, probably captured from someone’s front yard. The sky brightened and rippled with the same iridescent colors he’d seen while driving with Maddy. The video-maker then focused the camera on his wristwatch, the LED display reading 10:45 PM.

“This is no joke,” the scratchy voice said in the recording. “I’m not faking this. It’s almost eleven at night.” He turned the camera back to the sky in time to catch just a blurred dot of something rising into the air. It was followed by another. The camerawork grew shaky, as the kid started chanting “Holy shit, oh my God,” over and over.

“UFOs,” someone at the table said.

Someone else made a scoffing sound and walked away.

Tom became aware of someone breathing down his neck. Mahoney was there right beside him, pressing in. “You saw that coming here?”

Tom had to pull himself away from the group. He felt lightheaded for a moment, like he could faint. He stepped away to the next table and leaned against one of the chair backs, gripping it until his knuckles turned white.

“Milliner?”

Tom shut his eyes. He squeezed the lids together. When he opened them, the cafeteria was a blur. After a moment, tables, chairs, and line servers swam back into focus.

“Yeah,” he said.

Someone turned up the volume on the TV in the corner. Tom turned and looked. The broadcast had turned back to the anchor, who wore a grim expression similar to the reporter’s. There were words ticker-taping across the bottom of the screen, issuing an alert.

Above the anchor’s shoulder, a superimposed graphic declared FLOOD WARNING.

Mahoney stood next to Tom, looking at him. “What’s the matter?”

Tom swallowed. He wanted something to drink. Something strong. “It’s going to happen fast now,” he said.

He turned and looked at Mahoney’s bloodhound eyes. “Is there a gift shop in here?” he asked.

Mahoney’s droopy eyes blinked, uncomprehending.

“Gift shop,” Tom repeated.

Mahoney pointed out of the cafeteria. His lips barely moved when he spoke. “Other end of this floor.”

Tom nodded and walked away, knowing Mahoney now thought he was a crazy son of a bitch after all, but not able to help it, not caring. Life was full of stranger things.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Stranger things, Elizabeth thought, stranger things indeed. She often marveled, though, that people referred to anything in life as “strange,” that we made any distinction in it all. It was quite ridiculous, wasn’t it? What
wasn’t
strange in life? She had never quite understood it. You took a person, you looked at these things called ears, eyes, a nose — all these holes in a head,
holes
in a head for God’s sake, a hard shell carrying around a squishy pink control center — and what
wasn’t
strange? So, she then decided for herself, standing in front of the mirror, removing an eyelash that had gotten folded back against her lens, how about just calling it
new
. That was all. Just something new.

She thought then, of Caleb, of prosencephalitis, and she felt herself go cold in the abdomen and tingle around the base of her spine and she shivered, thinking of a brain in distress, thinking of a wrinkle in consciousness. She didn’t know why — Jared had told her before that it wasn’t good for chicks to think about “shit like that” — but Liz couldn’t help wonder where the physical ended and the metaphysical began. Or, really, how they coexisted, how they were entwined expressions of the same thing. A brain was the physical manifestation of consciousness — not all consciousness, but one epicenter among many, kind of the jewel in the crown, broadcasting and receiving.

She imagined the whole of consciousness like a sheet, and the brain a rivet, or a button. The sheet then extended to all persons, and all of their minds were these affixed buttons. Until, that was, you got to a troubled mind, perhaps what some would call a “defective” mind, and there the sheet of consciousness was drawn and folded and wrinkled.

“You’re crazy,” she said to her reflection, and dabbed some water on her lips, and pressed them together.

Sitting on the toilet just now, she’d daydreamed about Macmaster Pond, that the water had drained almost to the bottom, where viscous, swampy shoals remained. She’d seen, as she perched there on the porcelain, slumped to one side, something black and slick knifing through the turgid waters. Then the water had started to climb, the surface of the pond had risen to the edge of the banks again, and stayed there for a moment, and she spotted her loon, her guy-loon, his usually beautiful, masculine, free, otherworldly self, bobbing in the center, rising into the sky. Her ass ached by the time she left the toilet stall.

Now she was in front of the mirror, trying to get herself looking human again.

But the loon hadn’t been the
last
thing she remembered dreaming, or thinking — had it? No. She had also seen Jared in the vision, if that’s what she could call it. Jared coming into the hospital, Jared walking down the hallway to the room where Caleb was, Jared meaning to take him. And Jared wasn’t soaked from head to toe, like Christopher had been.

No, he was something else

She blinked at herself in the mirror. She leaned forward onto her palms, her arms turning around so that the inside of her elbows stuck out. She stuck her tongue out and hung it there over her chin, examining it for spots, for whiteness. She looked at the inside of her elbows and she thought she could still see the bruises. Maybe nobody else would be able to, but she could see them.

What the hell was wrong with her? Nodding off like that, like she was on methadone, for Christ’s sake. Dropping-out in the middle of taking a shit, no less.

Well, she figured, she was in the best place to be if there was something wrong with her — if she was having some sort of narcotic flashback, or fugue, if that was possible. She was somewhere she could get help, wasn’t she?

Her daydream would not let her go, and she cranked on the faucets and splashed icy cold water on her face that took her breath away.

Jared kept coming, no matter what she did, kept walking down the hallway, perpetually on his way to Caleb’s room, perpetually coming to take him away. Not wet, not streaming with water like Christopher had been, but burning. In her daydream, in her mind, Jared was burning.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Milliner and Mahoney were standing outside, next to a cop wearing a clear poncho over his orange and yellow vest. Rain was pattering on the brim of his hat — in the past few minutes the snowflakes had turned back to liquid for the umpteenth time. Rain, then snow. Snow, then rain. Tom looked up, squinting as drops of rain burst on his nose and sprayed his eyes.

“A unit will be at the South Hero crossing in just a few minutes, Sarge.”

Tom looked from the cop to Sergeant Mahoney, and back to the cop again.

“That’s it? One unit? One officer or two?”

“Two,” said the cop in the poncho, with a look of poorly concealed antipathy. “You want I should call the FBI?” He smiled on one side of his mouth, and his chest jerked once with a laugh, the same way, Tom imagined, it had jerked when his wife realized he was an asshole and divorced him, and he said,
What? You want I should call a lawyer
?

“Watch your mouth,” said Tom.

Mahoney reached out and brushed Tom’s arm.

The cop’s smile faded, and he turned his attention to some other policemen in similar ponchos, standing nearby in the rain.

Mahoney said, “Look, Tom — tell me again, why do you think this trooper would come to the hospital?”

“Because of the little boy: Caleb.”

“Kidnapping? The trooper told you this on the phone, when you talked to him?”

Tom nodded warily. He watched the two other rain-slicked cops stop a car coming into the lot and talk to the driver. Tom realized that his chest was starting to ache again. He’d barely been paying attention, but for quite a while now he hadn’t had a cough or a stitch in his side, but now the discomfort had returned.

Mahoney’s eyes showed fatigue. “Isn’t this something for your New York boys to handle? If this trooper abducted some kid from jail, he’s not going to get far.”

Tom thought about his “New York boys” pursuing him and Maddy, stopped by the young men levitating along route 33. Also stopped, though, because there were no bodies to be found anywhere on the Kingston property, no grounds to proceed with a murder investigation. Still, Tom had been warned, and he knew he was still violating some serious laws. His own sheriff had threatened to call the FBI if he didn’t have the girl back in what was about five hours now. Maybe that was why the Vermont cop’s comment about the FBI had ticked him off. But Tom mentioned none of this, and Mahoney seemed to let it go.

“What’s the story with the kid he’s got with him?”

“He says he killed some coyotes. I thought I smelled them. The trooper, Jim Cruickshand, thinks it was young women.”

Mahoney brought his coffee to his lips, sipped, and said, “More than one woman?”

“Yes,” said Milliner, getting a bit exasperated, knowing where this was going, and hating it. He felt like he was twenty years old again, trying to convince Charlie not to leave for California, telling him he had a bad feeling about it, something he’d felt, an instinct . . . and Tom himself hadn’t listened when those kids outside the convenience store had tried to warn him, had he?

He realized the two Burlington cops were looking at him.

“And now you think the kid, who may have killed coyotes . . . or women, is coming her? With the crazy statie.”

“Alright, look. Just keep an eye on the ferry crossings. If they make it over before they’re stopped, yeah, it’s going to be a federal issue.”

Tom glanced at the cop who’d made the FBI remark.

The cop looked away, and so did Mahoney, looking in through the glass to the cafeteria, where the TVs showed footage of Lake Champlain, various docks and crossings. Big waves bucked against the pilings of a ferry port. “It does seem high, doesn’t it, Bader?”

The poncho-clad cop, Bader, said, “Sure does. But then, maybe it’s psychosomatic.”

“How’s that?”

Tom’s cell phone rang. He snatched at it, “Hello?”

It was Rory Blaine, the DA. Tom said “uh-huh,” several times, trying to keep Mahoney and the cop looking at him, to keep them focused. He cut the call as short as possible, “Thanks, Rory.” He snapped the phone shut and returned it to his belt.

Mahoney looked at him over the rim of his coffee cup, his eyebrows raised.

“They’re being followed by the Red Rock Sheriff’s Department and the state. It’s confirmed that Jared Kingston is with him.”

Mahoney looked only partly satisfied.

Tom called to the cop named Bader. “What about crossing at Rouse’s Point? What about Whitehall? Port Kent?”

“Port Kent isn’t running until May. Neither is Freeport,” said Bader, looking at his other two officers who were stopping another car, a minivan.

“So there are only three ways across?”

“More or less.”

“More or less?”

Bader looked at him sharply. “There are only three ways across, detective.”

“Okay,” said Tom.

The cop’s mouth stayed open. He glanced at Mahoney, as if seeking permission for something, and then ended up saying what he wanted to say anyway. “You know what I think?”

“What?” asked Tom.

“I think you got so much smoke blown up your ass, detective, it got into your brain.”

Bader then did an about-face and briskly walked away in the spitting rain.

Milliner smiled wanly at Mahoney.

Mahoney spoke. “Don’t throw him under the bus, Tom. There’s good cops here. He’s coming off the night shift, and we’ve got three water-crossings to cover, plus the idea that the Feds are going to come in and start giving us orders.”

Tom didn’t care. Any nascent anger suddenly sluiced off him. He felt like he’d ridden an emotional roller coaster in the past few minutes, and now he was getting off the ride. “Thank you,” he said.

He would have to trust Mahoney.
Maybe,
Tom thought sardonically,
I should bring him into the child’s room. We could have one of those psychedelic experiences together
. But, then again, the likelihood that Mahoney had ever been anywhere near Woodstock — he was far too young — or ever heard The Grateful Dead play, was highly unlikely.

“I’m going back up,” Tom said, and started for the sliding doors.

He stopped and turned back to them. He felt his arms come up, like they belonged to someone else. And with a surrender-like gesture, he said, “Please . . . just . . .” He didn’t know how to finish, but Mahoney didn’t look like he needed Tom to. The big man nodded.

Tom felt his stomach do a flop, and wondered when the last time he’d eaten was. Maybe a liquid breakfast would help. That old familiar urge wasn’t just rising and falling like it usually did, it had settled in like an uninvited guest.

Tom quickly went back inside Fletcher Allen Hospital.