Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (16 page)

“Look,” said Ellie as she emerged from a small room under the cellar stairs. “I think Randy Dodd’s been here. I think he’s been—”

The tiny, granite-block-walled room looked as if it might once have served as a bomb shelter. “Back in the fifties a lot of people around here built rooms like this,” Bella told them. “Stocked them with supplies. But I didn’t know the Langs had one.”

They went in. The room had no windows, just one thick, heavy wooden door, and many wooden wall shelves loaded with water jugs and old, unappetizing-looking cans, their once-bright labels now faded, mouse-chewed, or absent altogether.

But it also held a low iron bed, a bedside table with a lamp on it, a wooden chair with a denim jacket thrown over the back of it, and a card table with a spiral notebook open on it.

Tattered paper bits in the notebook’s wire spiral said that pages had been torn out of it. Otherwise the room was bare—no books or newspapers, no radio or TV. It was more like a cell than a room where anyone actually lived.

A place where the life of the mind had been extinguished, or had never existed at all … but then, Jake guessed Randy Dodd didn’t care much about what went on outside his own head. On the other hand, what went on inside his head creeped her out very thoroughly, never more so than now as she took in the undeniable fact that he was real.

Not an imaginary bogeyman, one others had seen recently but not her. A living man, who slept in a bed, wore clothes, and ate—she
looked into the small metal basket by the table—Ritz crackers and Campbell’s Chunky soups.

“Do you think Roger knew Randy was down here?” Ellie asked as she lifted the denim jacket and stuck her hand in each of its pockets.

Jake shook her head as Ellie’s search came up empty. “If he was.” But as a hideout it made sense. No windows down here, so no light spied by anyone outside …

Jake recalled Roger saying that Randy had found the tunnel while scavenging the cellar for valuables. So he would have known about the room. “I’m betting it was him, though,” she finished.

She snapped on the bedside lamp, its bulb casting a weak yellow glow on the room’s dingy walls. “I wish I knew what he wrote in this,” she said, eyeing the notebook.

Bella plucked it up, angling it this way and that in the sallow lamplight. “Hey,” said Jake, “what’re you—”

Bella put the book down again and left the room hurriedly, returning a moment later with her hands extended in distaste. It was the way she held them at home, Jake recognized, when they had gotten filthy and she wanted to wash them, pronto.

But this time, the stuff on her fingers was furnace soot. Brushing past Jake and Ellie, she positioned the spiral notebook on the table under the lamp. Something had been written in it, and urgently, too; with the light at this angle, grooves showed where someone had pressed down hard with a pen or pencil.

Lightly, Bella smoothed a finger across the blank top page. Sooty smears appeared, but not in the grooves. Whatever had been written on the torn-out page showed as faint white lines in the blackened soot marks.

Around them the Dodd House seemed to hunker down for another evening of lonely misery. Another mouse squeaked, cousin no doubt to the one the cat had dispatched. A timber settled; a floorboard creaked.

Bella’s hand trembled, resting on the sooty page. Suddenly, Jake was again aware of the silent kitchen upstairs and the happy hours Bella had probably spent there with her friend, before Anne Dodd was found stabbed to death on the linoleum floor.

She looked down at what the touch of Bella’s hand had revealed.

It was a map.

“
SO YOU’RE AWAKE.”

Hours after he’d grabbed her off the street and bundled her into the trunk of a car, the man who’d taken her crouched beside Carolyn Rathbone on the deck of a boat bound for who knew where.

By now it was dark again; twenty hours or so, she thought, since her old life had ended and this new, terrible existence had begun. The boat had sat idle for a while, she did not know where or how, but now they were under power once more.

She fought to keep her eyes open, her mind clear. But it was no use; the damp, cold hours she’d spent lying there injured on the hard deck, weeping and suffering and fearing she was about to be killed at any moment, had taken their toll.

Everything hurt: her head, her hand, her neck, her legs. No physical part of her had escaped the constant battering of the boat’s
bump, bump, bump
across the waves. As for her mind-Better not go there, some tiny surviving part of her sanity instructed. No siree, best not lift the lid of that particular booby hatch, or what flies out at you—

He put the point of his knife to her neck. That woke her up, all right, that tiny sharpness in her vulnerable flesh.

What flies out at you might scare you to death
. A whimper forced its way up her swollen throat; on top of everything else she was thirsty, so thirsty …

Now she knew what those other girls had endured, the ones
whose pictures she’d seen, whose case files she’d read through, while writing her first book. She licked the salty mist from her cracked lips, knowing it would make her feel worse but unable to stop herself.

The man touched the tip of the knife to her throat again, drawing it lazily across her skin and then, suddenly, moving it to her eyelid. “Here,” he murmured. “Or … here.”

She cringed, holding her breath. Something in his face said he wanted to kill her, wanted to very badly. His weird, worked-on face with its tiny white scars and odd, lumpy places …

Right now, he wanted to do it. Right this minute. She looked past him, up into the sky at a white seagull sailing on a sea of darkness.

She hadn’t known the birds flew at night. Maybe they didn’t, maybe it was a hallucination. Or a sign: that if he did kill her, she might sail away, too.

Her spirit, maybe. Or maybe nothing. But she didn’t find out which, because as he leaned over her with the knife in one hand, his other hand patted his shirt pocket unthinkingly, then froze.

A puzzled look came into his eyes, replaced at once by one of consternation. He straightened, patting both shirt pockets and then his pants in urgent succession.

Turning away, he searched the dimly lit deck with his eyes, then began pacing, back and forth, peering into and under everything. His left foot dragged slightly, but it didn’t slow his search.

Where?
His whole body seemed to be saying it as he lifted the life ring from its hook, raised the lid on the wooden bench, patted himself all over again anxiously.

Carolyn cringed at the sight of three mutilated fingertips on the man’s right hand, the nails gone and the tissue there all scars that hadn’t healed right. That paper, she thought as he went on searching himself, the one he’d lost overboard and hadn’t noticed. Maybe he’d been too distracted by the thrill of having captured her.

It gave her a brief moment of grim satisfaction to think she had spoiled part of his plan. But he
had
gotten …

The money
. She’d forgotten all about the money. Now, as the memory of it flooded back to her, another low groan came from the hatchway. Someone down there.

She’d forgotten that, too, but now she realized she’d been hearing the sounds all along. The man came back and stood over her.

Maybe he was thinking about whether he should just kill them both, get it over with. Carolyn, and whoever it was down there in the cabin beyond the hatchway, too.

Probably he was considering it. After what he’d already done, he couldn’t very well leave them alive, could he? Because for one thing, she’d seen his face.

So if she lived, she could testify against him. And he knew it. She could see it in his eyes, that for his purposes …

—Whatever those were, no don’t think that—

… she was already dead, and so was whoever she’d heard groaning down there.

Dead and gone; the only question was when. A pair of bodies he’d need to dispose of …

—
When he was finished with them, oh dear God when he was—

All he needed was the right time and place.

But not right now. Not yet
.

Please. Just not quite yet
.

SHIVERING IN THE CHILL OF A NOVEMBER AFTERNOON ON
the water in downeast Maine, Chip Hahn blinked astonishedly at the object in his hands. It was a hand-drawn map, he could see even before he got done peeling the plastic wrap from it.

The thing had come bobbing by, very different from the half-submerged chunks of driftwood and matted clumps of seaweed that Passamaquoddy Bay was full of. Curious, he’d leaned out from the motorboat he’d stolen and grabbed it.

Stolen. Oh, he was going to be in so much trouble. What, back on
land, had been explainable now seemed much less so, with the shore a mile distant and the streets and houses of Eastport fast diminishing to toy-town miniature.

On the other hand, a little thing like a stolen boat was not going to matter if Carolyn and Sam Tiptree didn’t get back okay. You couldn’t find money that might be floating on the bay without going out there, either.

Could you? No, you couldn’t. And anyway, the deed was done and it was too late to worry about it.

He unfolded the sheet and squinted through the mist at it, through the chill drizzle that was developing.
X marks the spot
, he thought. Only there was no X, just an outline of a something or other that he didn’t recognize, blue ballpoint ink marks pressed in hard, as if someone who felt very urgent about something had drawn it.

In the bluish-gray light of the fast-fading autumn afternoon, Chip reopened the chart he’d found in the boat and tried comparing it to the markings on the paper. There …

A little rock called Digby Island was the same tiny comma on the hand-drawn map as on the printed one. It was surrounded, too, by the same dangerous-looking periods and parentheses, asterisks and exclamation points.

Which if he was not mistaken meant that Digby Island, a tiny hunk of land sticking out of the northern end of Passamaquoddy Bay, was surrounded by submerged spurs, ones that would munch the bottom out of his small vessel like so many sharp teeth.

Local boaters might know how to pick their way through them, but he didn’t. He didn’t even know if that was really where Randy Dodd was going, or if this was even Randy’s map.

Why, after all, would a guy like Randy need one? He’d been fishing these waters for years, and must surely know his way around them competently. He probably knew all the places to hide in or escape through, and how to navigate by sight wherever he wanted to go.

So, why would he need this? The bit of paper could’ve been
dropped in anywhere, by anyone, Chip realized with a bad sinking feeling.

Maybe it was some kid’s science project, or a joke. Maybe it had blown out of a car window, or the back of an old pickup truck on its way to the dump.

Or it might be a trick. Huddled in the open boat, Chip considered the many unpleasant possibilities this bit of paper could offer if that were true: shipwreck, drowning, being marooned.

Or … capture. Suddenly the prospect of venturing off to save Carolyn and Sam seemed worse than foolhardy. The smell of the sea, pleasantly exciting back on the breakwater, now tickled an anxiety nerve Chip hadn’t even known he possessed.

Big icy droplets leaked down his neck, soaking his jacket collar. The steady collision of the boat’s keel with the waves made his rump sore.

If only he could run parallel to them for a while … but when he tried, the boat wallowed dangerously, the chop rocking it back and forth violently until the craft threatened to swamp, bucking and rolling.

So he eased away again, turning the bow so it angled at the rollers and cut though them. By now they were the only things he could see, as evening kept coming on and fog thickened around him with shocking suddenness.

The shore he’d left so confidently
(stupidly
, the mean voice in his head commented) had long ago vanished into the equivalent of dark gray cotton balls, and the Canadian island of Campobello, only a mile or so off, according to the chart, might as well have been on the far side of the Atlantic.

A bell buoy clanked somewhere. He couldn’t see that, either. It was getting dark so fast, and now it occurred to him that the massive freighters he’d read about before coming to Eastport—it was, he’d learned, the deepest undredged U.S. port, second only to Valdez—must navigate through this passage.

One of those freighters, he realized with an inward shiver, could
cut him in half without anyone on it even noticing. All he would know of it himself was the deafening blast of the horn as the ship plowed through him on its way to the freighter terminal.

Whichever way that was. The open boat had been stocked with a lot of gear, including a compass. But in the fog he couldn’t see it. For a moment Chip wished heartily that he was in Central Park again, running a shiny toy boat on the pond with a remote control, instead of sitting on a real one here.

He’d have turned back, given up, and admitted this foolish effort was doomed, taken his lumps for stealing the boat, too—at least the Evinrude was still rumbling along well, fortunately—but by now he was fairly sure he wouldn’t find his way back to land at all.

Certain of it, really. Or find his way anywhere; until this fog lifted, the lights of the shore, no matter how nearby, might just as well not have existed.

Suddenly the fear he’d been trying to hold down got free with a vengeance, climbing from the pit of his stomach right up into his throat. He looked down at the map that he’d plucked from the water again, but he couldn’t see it, or the chart, either.

Or even own his hands. Panic invaded him as he realized he should turn the running lights on. But he hadn’t noted where the switch for them was back when he could see it, and now he couldn’t even find that.

He was lost, and in planning this little adventure it now seemed he’d left too much to chance.

Way too much to chance.

Like, a hundred percent too much.

Yeah
, he thought.
You’re an idiot, is what you are
.