HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (32 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

“Jim said something to me earlier, when we were on the phone.”

Maddy raised her eyebrows, listening.

“He said he was doing what he should have done a long time ago,” said Tom. Tom imagined Jim as he sat in behind the steering wheel, gripping it with both hands, his spine curved into the seat, his waxen complexion and the hollowness of his eyes, the stubble along the back of his wide neck.

“At first I thought he meant, I don’t know, take his life, suicide by cop, something . . .”

Beside Tom, Maddy was nodding.

“What?”

She licked her lips and composed herself. She wasn’t the jovial, can’t-get-me-down Maddy anymore.

“Have you ever noticed, Tom, none of us have families? Not you, not me, not Jimmy. Either we couldn’t work it out, or we weren’t interested to begin with.”

Tom thought of Steph. In his mind, her face was dimmer, now. He thought of her and Brian, pulling out of the driveway in the Acres. Brian, who always reminded Tom of the boy placing that phone call from the convenience store, a kid Tom had never even met but had connected to his would-be stepson, as if they were two versions of the same human being.

“Okay,” said Tom. “So we’re not very compromising people. I like to fart in bed, what of it?”

He smiled and looked at her. She manufactured a small grin.

“Then what? Because none of us are happily married with a bunch of baby mice running around, Jim’s going to put us all out of our misery?”

She turned her head and looked at him. “You think that’s what this is?”

Up ahead, they were getting off 81 to take a lesser route from here to the ferry. Tom glanced in the rearview mirror at the train of police following them, water fanning out to either side of the cars. Civilian vehicles were slowing down and moving over onto the shoulder, slushing more water along. At the bottom of the off ramp, a family in a pulled-over SUV stared at them with slack-jawed expressions as Tom and Maddy drove past.

“No,” Tom said, “I don’t.”

“I think I
feel
it, I think I feel what Jim means. You know? But I don’t think it’s something you could write down in a report.”

Maddy ran a hand over her face. Tom thought he saw that her hand, wrinkled with age, was trembling. Her bracelets clinked together as they accordioned into one another.

“At some point you awaken the demons, Tom. We could have ended things right there, right then, right at the pond, right when we were kids. I think Jim feels that. I think Jim feels we should have ended
something
. This,” she waved her arms around in the air, her bracelets clattering some more, “all this that’s going on, Tom, whatever it is, miracles, second coming, I’m not sure, Tommy, but what I am sure is that part of it is not good. Part of it comes from some place very bad, you’re right. But it’s from some very bad
thing,
Tommy. Something in that pond. Something we have to stop.”

Tom looked out the window, where the dawn’s light was spreading along the blur of trees to the east, small farms, vinyl-sided homes. To the west, the world was all darkness and rain. Lake Champlain, its banks spilling over, lined with the twirling yellow lights of highway department vehicles and volunteer firemen, was just beyond.

“This lake was formed millions of years ago by glaciers,” Tom said. “It used to go all the way to Red Rock.”

Maddy shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”

“I’ve seen a map. Pretty impressive. It was a big, big lake. Left a lot of the ponds and rivers behind. Someday, they’ll be all dried up, too.”

He coughed, tried to stifle it, foolishly.

“Not by the looks of it.”

Tom smiled. “Yeah, right.”

He watched the Caprice ahead of them. Jim swerved a little over the double yellow, fishtailing water, but he had dropped his speed since getting off the freeway. The cops stayed close behind. “I don’t know if we’ve totally lost Jim, or not.”

“What do you mean, honey?”

Tom liked Maddy calling him
honey
. It meant part of her was returning. Hell, it meant, in its own way, that maybe the world wasn’t ending just yet.

“Because I know what Jim must know,” Tom said.

“And what’s that?”

“That the lake isn’t going to be crossable. The ferry’s not going to be running. The water’s too high, and now there are gas fires spreading over parts of the lake. We’re going to get up there to South Hero, and that’s going to be it, ladies and germs. We got nowhere to go.”

PART VII

TALISMANS

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

It happened three months ago. The plumber had shown up while Jared and Liz had still been in bed, sleeping off some
Drambuie
from the night before.

Noises down in the kitchen. Jared descended the stairs with a rifle in hand.

The plumber’s pink ass was showing where he worked beneath the sink, a tuft of lower back hair glowing in the morning light. He banged his head when Jared racked the slide on the A-bolt.

The plumber scrambled out. He was an older man with droopy eyes and stubble. His mouth worked to form the words. “Hey, I didn’t think anyone was here.”

Jared said, “I don’t know about just coming into my house like that.”

The plumber repeated, looking at the rifle, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was here.”

Jared had called the plumber a week prior, frustrated after he had tried to fix a sink problem himself. He had only succeeded in making a bigger mess of things by pulling off an elbow joint that had not been easy to get back on, and discovering that there was more to the problem than he could fix.

They argued, but in the end Jared sulked off, and the plumber went about finishing the job.

That was how it had gone, but in this dreamed version as Jared rode in the back of the trooper’s Caprice, he strode across the yellow linoleum to the man, the morning bright white outside with fresh-fallen snow, and wrapped his fingers around his neck and squeezed, watching those droopy eyes light up with panic.

Yet he couldn’t quite strangle the plumber. As Jared buried his fingers deep into the rumpled gooseflesh and unshaven hair of the man’s neck, his fingers only sank deeper, as if the plumber’s body was composed of caulk that had yet to dry. They toppled to the floor where the plumber flopped like a fish now, Jared on top, his entire hands burrowed into the man’s skin, into his body, when the clicking sound came from out on the porch.

Jared lifted his head to look. The kitchen door was left open — the son-of-a-bitching plumber had left it open — and only the screen door remained. A coyote looked in on them. Jared watched it lick its chops. Another one hopped up the three steps to the porch, a bit of snow on its muzzle. They looked in together, the two ragged dogs, waiting for their meal.

One snarled, and Jared saw its teeth and red gums. Just when he thought the mongrel was about to pounce, to tear through the fine, soft mesh of the porch screen, there was another noise, and both dogs jolted, startled, and made room.

There came a rustling sound in the air and then a thump that shook the room, the beating of great wings. Jared watched through the square screen as the dogs slunk off to the side.

First he saw the hooked beak and a flare of slit-like nostrils. Then the eyes, black as coal, yet seeing, spinning, looking in, locking with Jared’s eyes. A huge nectarine-pit of a body with scaled legs beneath, taking steps over the warping porch floorboards.

The thing was prehistoric, a pterodactyl, only red, covered in long, coarse feathers, woven together like the webbing of a bat’s wings. Fibrous, gnarled hairs covered the crenellations and swirls — like knots in a tree — of the basketball-sized body.

Jared looked down. The plumber was gone — all that remained was a pool of viscous water.

And now Jared, too, was evaporating, no longer in the kitchen or even out on the porch, but incorporeal, a spirit hovering around the bird-thing as it morphed, there in front of the screen door.

Its bones cracked and reformed; the squishing sound of churning, recapitulating guts, the rewiring of arterial circuitry. It sprouted copious hair with the sound of rushing hot wind through dried reeds and dead goldenrod, and the thing became a coyote, and turned, and looked at Jared, and in its coal-black eyes Jared saw the pond, and the water in the center of it swirling.

He started to drift towards it, to float into the eyes of the coyote and further and into the pond, to fall into it, still dreaming, hearing the hushed voice, like the wind speaking:

“
Ven aqui, vacié. Getränk. Lessen Sie mich Sie fullen
.”

* * *

The water surged all around him. Christopher found himself floating, tumbling, caught in the thrall of the thing in the pond as it thrashed. The mini-tsunami had swept Christopher off his feet, and its undertow had pulled him into the pond

Now, the thrust of the creature’s tail, back and forth, side to side, like the body of a shark, created even more suction.

Christopher swam away from the darkness, his lungs hot and exploding. He could see the sky above. He kicked and struggled to draw his body back to the air. His lips trembled. His eyes blinked through the thick pond water. For a terrible moment, he thought he would never breathe again.

Then the creature was gone, and the water began to settle, and Christopher, with one last tremendous whipsaw of his body, broke the surface.

He took huge, ragged gulps of air. After he’d floated on his back for a moment, his eyes stinging as he looked up at the baleful, overcast sky, at the rain coming down, he turned himself over to look.

He thought he could see the tops of the trees swaying where something had just brushed its way through. Something from the water which now flowed out of the pond and through the woods towards the river, towards Vermont, melting residual snowpack and gathering more flood power as it went. But it was the storm ruffling the treetops, raking its cold fingers of wind through the forest, and nothing else.

The thing had not escaped yet.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Tom and Maddy sat in the Blazer, staring in disbelief at the moored ferry, bucking and frothing in the water. The vehicles denied boarding were slowly trundling off toward the parking lot. All except for one car — Jim’s Caprice, which sat waiting to drive aboard.

Ferry workers scurried about, directing traffic, along with a mixed crew of municipal and volunteer workers, cops and firemen tending to endless tasks, it seemed. A fire truck sat in water up to its tire wells. The fires over the lake had been mostly put out — only a few flames could be seen licking the sky further out, beyond anyone’s reach.

Maddy had become somewhat frantic. “Why are they boarding him? How are they letting him on?”

Tom looked around, taking it all in. “In the midst of all this, I don’t know. I was wrong. No one or nothing can stop him.”

“But there’s
FBI
involved now, Tom. Haven’t they radioed to stop the boat?”

“I’m sure they have. And I’m sure Jim has told them he’ll kill his hostages unless it takes him across.”

Tom’s cell phone was ringing. He checked the incoming number, hoping. But it wasn’t Jim calling. It was DA Rory Blaine.

“Tom? Are you okay?”

Tom glanced at the Caprice up ahead. Jim and his passengers were driving onto the ferry. The boat was tethered to pilings that were half submerged. Soon there would be nothing to secure it to land. The helicopter thudded overhead. It would be only minutes now.

“He’s getting on,” Tom said to Blaine in a low voice, almost inaudible underneath the rain drumming on the car’s roof.

“Cruickshand ordered everyone back,” said Blaine. “If anyone boards after you he said he’d kill the girl and the baby. He’s on the phone now.”

Tom looked at Maddy and raised his eyebrows. She looked back at him with a quizzical expression.

Tom peered out at the stunned ferry workers. Two young men in orange raincoats watched intently as Tom drove the Blazer aboard.

“My God,” said Maddy. She had turned around to look behind them. At least twenty law-enforcement vehicles sat in the confused mayhem of civilian vehicles, state workers, the phone-company people working on the toppled pole, and all the raincoated human beings looking at them.

Tom was about to say something when Blaine went on, blurting out, “Tom, something’s going on there . . . at the place. The Kingston place.”

“I know, Rory.”

“I took a picture. Yesterday morning. I took a picture of the pond.”

Blaine was an ambitious, thirty-five-year-old DA. Not only was he present at crime scenes to ascertain whether warrants were necessary and to help obtain them, but he liked taking pictures of everything, too.

“And?”

“I think there was something in it.”

This wasn’t surprising to Tom. And he suspected, well, he knew, of course, that Blaine wasn’t referring to a floating needle or lost inner tube.

“Okay,” said Tom, “I understand.”

“You understand?”

“I can’t get into it, Rory, I’m sorry. Are you at the Kingston place now? Is the Sheriff with you?”

“He’s coming.” The connection was spotty.

“Okay,” said Tom. “Rory? Can you hear me?”

“—es.”

“What about at the other dock? They’re going to be waiting at the New York dock.”

Tom squinted into the night as he piloted the Blazer into the lane, parking behind the Caprice. Lake Champlain was too wide to see across, but he thought he could detect the faintest twinkling of red lights in the distance.

“They’re backed off, too.”

“Rory, he’s going to get to that house.”

“What’s happening? What’s Cruickshand —oing? He’s gone —uts, Tom, totally—”

“It’s not only Jim I’m worried about. He’s got an accomplice.”

“The —ingston —oy? —ostage?”

Tom kept his eye on the backseat of the Caprice. Jared Kingston’s head lifted, as if stirring from sleep. “Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t think Jared’s a hostage. Not Jim’s, anyway.”

“Tom? —om?”

The connection was lost. Tom hung up.

The water splashed against the ferry and broke over the deck. Tom glanced in the rearview mirror as they cast off. He watched the dock, the land, and the police on shore begin to fade.

“I don’t know how this is possible,” said Tom.

“I do,” said Maddy.

They saw, positioned at various spots along the ferry railings, young men in their dark clothes. They stood on top of the railings, and, in unison, spread out their arms.

* * *

Tom made his way through the sheeting rain, watching the young men who seemed to miraculously unburden the ferry, making it just light enough to skate across the water.

Most of the time, we can’t interfere directly
, Samuel had said.

This was interfering directly, Tom thought. And why? Didn’t they want to keep Caleb and Elizabeth away from the Kingston place?

He approached slowly up along the driver’s side of the Caprice, his hands out in front of him.

Jim was still on the phone. He glanced at Tom and then jerked his head to the passenger side, indicating that Tom go around and get in. Tom went around the front of the car, looking over at his car. Maddy stared back out at him, her face was pale and ghostly. She winked at him.

Tom opened the passenger door and got in.

“Wet, huh?” Jim hung up his cell phone and set it in the console between them.

“Yeah.” Tom glanced into the back seat. The girl was motionless, propped against the door. Caleb slept next to her, one hand draped across her abdomen, the other tangled in his own hair. Jared Kingston was asleep, too. His head lolled, as though dreaming, uncomfortable.

“What do you think of that?” Tom asked, jerking his head towards the nearest young man standing atop a railing.

Jim shrugged. “Milliner . . .” he said.

Tom looked over at him. Jim watched the sweep of the rain over the lake. The ferry still rose and fell as it made for the opposite shore, despite the preternatural aid of the young men. “You carry too much guilt with you,” Jim stated.

Tom asked, “What are you going do once you get where you’re going?”

“First, you feel like some sort of failure because your draft card never got pulled. You or your brother. What did I do? I enlisted, but I ended up in a tank unit that never got deployed until the last minute.”

“Well, at least you served.”

“Yeah. I served. I ran over a civilian woman once with that fucking tank.”

“You never told me that, Jim.”

“Then you’re on the force, you’re pulling beat, and you get the call about the kid from the convenience store.”

Tom bristled. The ferry lurched again in the lake swell. Tom glanced out the window. In the distance, fire still burned on the surface of the water. It silhouetted one of the young men. They seemed to be lifting the ferry just enough so that it wasn’t overcome by the deluge.

“You know, Tommy, nobody could have known. You can’t keep beating yourself up for it. The kid was a deadbeat. I’m sorry, but he pitched himself down a well. That’s one fucked up way to do it, if you ask me. Not very manly. Imagine your ma seeing that, seeing you get pulled out of there, pieces of you all sticking out, bones. But that’s not on you, Tommy. Any more than Charlie’s suicide. You can’t keep getting yourself all emotionally involved. You’re trying to save these kids, and for what? What’s it doing? You coulda married Stephie, Tom. She was a good woman. Fuck cares what her kid is like? He’s not your kid, but you hadda get involved. Try to show him a thing or two — he doesn’t care for it and neither does she. Mothers always side with the kids. That’s why my old man never bothered to show me anything.”

Jim blew through his lips, making a dismissive sound.

“But you, Tommy, you keep trying. You’re like
The Catcher in the Rye
. Don’t look so astonished; yeah, I remember a book from high school besides
Lord of the Rings
. But for what? So you can have these sleepless nights. Drink your coffee, roam around, still trying to save the next kid before he pops off down that well. Now look where you are, Tommy.”

“I don’t mind where I am.”

Torrents of water crashed over the flat deck. The rain came down, pelting the concrete and steel, hammering the roof. Fresh thunderheads rumbled in the distance. The fires flickered on the southern horizon.

“Go on, Tommy. Go on and get back in with Cruder. I always wondered why you two never got it hooked up. She likes you, Milliner. God knows why, bald, paranoid, getting fat — yeah, you’ve put it on, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

Tom sat for a moment, smiling, looking at his hands. The ship gimbaled and slapped down, rocked and surged. Tom wondered if the kids were losing their grip out there, and felt a flash of fear in his belly.

“Lucky we got this last ferry,” Jim said, as if there was no one outside in the storm, no one miraculously helping them survive.

“You know,” said Tom, musing, “Charlie and I had our chocolate lab. You remember that old dog?”

“Sure,” said Jim. “Sure I do.”

“When he got old, that dog had gas. Used to sound like a rodent being squeezed to death when he let one go.”

Jim started laughing, and Tom laughed, too. He glanced behind him, looking to see if the Kingston kid had come around. Jared’s head was down, his chin resting on his chest.

Jim wiped his eyes, breathing and slowing his laughter down.

“Poor old thing,” said Jim.

“Yeah,” Tom said, “poor old thing.”

* * *

The rest of the trip went quickly. They disembarked on the New York side without incident, Tom having got back in his car with Maddy. The young men disappeared without a flourish — there one minute, gone the next. No explanation — leaving Tom with the vague sense that Caleb, Liz, and everybody else had all been spared what would’ve otherwise been a catastrophic attempt to cross the violent lake.

They’d been there just to keep everyone safe, he realized. Including him.

The helicopter tracked them above, but no other law enforcement trailed in their wake. They were alone along Route 33, driving through the night, the rain finally, unbelievably, tapering off. Tom was sure it wouldn’t last, any of it. Pretty soon the rain and the cops would be back. It was inevitable.

They turned down Donna’s Road. Their heads wobbled as they drove over the bumpy terrain, following the red eyes of the Caprice taillights.

“Wow,” said Maddy.

“Been a long time since you been here?”

“Yes, it has.”

As promised, no one else was there. Tom sensed them close, but the Kingston home was quiet.

Except for one person.

Christopher was walking toward them along the dirt driveway as they drove in. Tom leaned forward and gripped the steering wheel. “Holy shit.”

Christopher was soaking wet. Tom brought the Blazer to a stop and got out. At the same time, Cruickshand had already exited the Caprice and was fishing the Goldfine girl out of the back seat.

Christopher walked slowly towards them, his coat flapping heavily about him and his exposed shirt torn and drenched. Tom felt his sparse hair whipping atop his scalp; the wind was picking up again, heralding yet another storm. It would be the third big storm in the last seventy-two hours. Three days, three big storms. Cold rain, snow. Spring in the mountains, only times ten.

Jim pulled Elizabeth out of the Caprice, one hand on her elbow, the other on her head to keep it from whacking the roof of the car. Caleb followed, scooching his butt along the bench leather seat. He swung his legs out the door and hopped onto the dirt, twirling his hair again. The child made a loop with a bunch of strands, held it pinched with his little thumb and forefinger, and with his middle finger flicked it back and forth. He regarded them all calmly, and he smiled when Maddy appeared. She scooped him up and kissed him.

Tom peered into the car at Jared Kingston, who was awake, though he was just staring into space.

“Kingston,” said Tom, “you’re home.”

Whether it was the gruffness in his voice or something else, Tom started coughing, and pulled away from the car, a balled fist pressed to his open lips, coughing and gagging until it passed, and then turned and spat behind and away from him. By this time, Christopher had reached them. The Kingston boy was blinking and looking around, his eyes swollen and red from his thin, troubled sleep.

Christopher stopped in front of Elizabeth who stood motionless. He put a hand to her face. She didn’t react. He squatted in front of the little boy who was playing with his hair, holding onto Maddy’s hand, and sucking his pacifier.

“Hi,” said Christopher.

“Hi,” said Caleb.

The boy reached out and touched Christopher’s face. “Wet,” he said.

Tom observed all this, still a few paces away, simultaneously keeping an eye on Jared Kingston, who was now climbing out the other side of the Caprice.

Jim Cruickshand took his Western .38 out, and also pulled his cell phone out.