Locked Doors (31 page)

Now he led Vi through the curved glass curtain wall that opened from the aft deck into the salon, where she sat down at the end of an L-shaped sofa.
 

Cherry wood everywhere.
 
Italian leather.
 
A flat-screen TV.
 
Wet bar.
 
Expansive windows, port and starboard.
 

Vi imagined that on a sunny day in the middle of the sea, the view was nothing but miles and miles of sky and green water.

Pedro, the ship’s mate, emerged shirtless from the crew quarters deep in the hull.
 

“Gloria no come?” he asked.

“She went back ashore.
 
Head on up and get us going.
 
You know
Ocracoke
Inlet, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know him.
 
Be bad tonight.
 
Bad any night.
 
No good idea.”

“I know, Pedro.”
 
Sam glanced at Vi.
 
“Can’t be helped.”

As Pedro ascended to the pilothouse, Sam said, “There’s the phone.
 
I’ll be up with Pedro.
 
Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to get there if we don’t ground her.”

He flicked on more lights as he walked through the galley and disappeared up the curving staircase into the pilothouse.
 
After a moment Vi heard the engines fire up, little more than a muffled gurgle in the insulated recesses of the hull.
 

Her stomach lurched as the boat began to move.

She picked up the phone, then set it down.
 

She put her face into her hands and took long penetrating breaths.

Taking up the phone again, she dialed her sergeant’s home number.
 

Talking with Sgt. Mullins before anyone else (911, Coast Guard, SBI) would be the smart move.
 
He’d tell her exactly how to proceed.

A sleepy voice answered, “Hello?”

“Hey, Gwynn, it’s Vi.
 
Look, I’m sorry to be calling so late, but I need to speak with Barry.
 
It’s—”

“He’s on call tonight, and you just missed him.
 
He had a suicide.”

“Oh, well, I’ll just page him then.
 
Thanks.”
 

Vi hung up the phone.
 

Her hands still trembled.
 

She looked down the companionway that accessed the master and VIP staterooms.
 

It all felt so surreal.
 
The violence, the fear, the sudden luxury.
 

She thought of Max and almost called him.
 
But the gentleness, the everydayness in her husband’s voice would have broken her in two.
 
If she didn’t ease herself out of this nightmare it would shatter her.

Reaching for the phone to page Sgt. Mullins, she realized she didn’t know the number for the yacht.
 
She rose from the sofa but the moment she started for the staircase, a wave of nausea engulfed her.
 

She barely made it to the galley before spewing her lunch into the sink.
 
Turning on the spigot, she washed the mess down the drain and splashed water in her face.
 
Her forearms against the countertop, she held her head over the basin for ten minutes, eyes closed, praying for the nausea to pass.

Her stomach finally settled and she had just started for the pilothouse to get the phone number for the yacht when Sam came quickly down the staircase.
 

“We’re here,” he said.
 
“Come on.
 
I
gotta
get back to Gloria.”

Vi followed Sam back out onto the aft deck.
 
The night was colder, the moon now unveiled and shining down upon the harbor.

Sam offered his hand and Vi took it.
 
He helped her step up onto the dock.
 

“Thank you, sir,” she said.
 
“I know this was a big inconvenience, and I hope Gloria feels better.”
 
Sam just rolled his eyes and walked back into the salon.

As Vi headed up the dock she heard the twin diesel engines come to life again.
 
Glancing over her shoulder, she watched the yacht cruising back out into the harbor.
 

Vi reached Silver Lake Drive and stopped.
 

Sam had deposited her near the deserted Coast Guard station and the ferry docks.
 

The lights of
Ocracoke
shone and reflected in the harbor—a cold twinkling silence.
 
It was midnight and she didn’t have a key to her room at the Harper Castle B&B.
 

The Coast Guard station was dark.
 

I’ll just have to wake somebody up.
 

She would’ve run but it was all she could do to walk, her legs still burning from the sprint across the tidal flat.
 
As she walked along the double yellow line she thought of Andrew Thomas, wondered if he’d still be alive when she saw him next.
 

She felt overjoyed to be back on
Ocracoke
.
 
The safety was palpable.
 
She could sense the seven hundred sleeping residents all around her.
 

She started to say a prayer of thanks.

A car approached from behind.

Stepping back onto the shoulder, she watched an ancient pickup truck come rumbling slowly toward her.
 
It pulled up beside her and squeaked to a halt.
 

The passenger window rolled down and Rufus Kite leaned forward from the driver seat, his eyes hollowed in the absence of light—two
oilblack
pools.

“Miss King?
 
Thank God.”

“What are you doing—”

“Oh thank God.
 
Everyone’s looking for you.”

“Who’s looking for me?”

“Someone saw you with Andrew Thomas in Howard’s Pub.
 
Everyone’s looking for you.
 
Come on, get in.”

The passenger door swung open.

“I’ll take you back to the house,” he said.
 
“We’ll get you cleaned up.
 
I imagine you have some very important phone calls to make.”

“Well, yeah I do, but…
 
No, I think I’ll just walk over to the Silver Lake Inn.”
 
She motioned down the street to a three-story motel on the waterfront.
 
“I’ll wake someone up if I have to, but I don’t want to trouble—”

“No trouble at all.
 
Hop in.
 
Besides, I don’t think anyone’s there, Miss King.”

An odd tone in his voice.
 
Not mere insistence.

Something rustled in the back of the truck.

“Look, I appreciate the offer, but—”

Maxine Kite sat up from the truck bed and climbed out of the back wielding a mallet.
 
Vi was backpedaling, on the verge of running, when Maxine cracked her skull open.
 

Vi’s knees went to jelly and her cheek hit the cold pavement, blood running across her eyelid, down the bridge of her nose, over her lip, between her teeth.
 
She heard a door screech open, saw Rufus step down onto the road on the other side of the truck, watched his boots come toward her, wondering if this throbbing sleepiness at the base of her neck meant she were dying.
 

Vi rolled onto her back.
 

Swallowed blood.
 

Warm liquid rust.
 

The spindly branches of a live oak overhung the road.
 
Between its limbs the night sky shone in pieces—cloudless, black, filling up with stars.

Rufus and Maxine stood arm-in-arm grinning down at her.
 

A walkie-talkie crackled.

Rufus pulled it from his back pocket, pressed the
talk
button, said, “Yeah, son, we got her.
 
See you back at the house.”

Vi’s brain told her arm to unzip the poncho and take out the gun but she remembered that she didn’t have it and besides the arm wouldn’t move.
   

“Now that’s what you call a good
ol
’ fashioned wallop,” Rufus said and chuckled.

Then the old man kissed his wife on the cheek and leaned down toward Vi, all gums tonight.
 

“Her lips are still moving,” he said.
 
“Go ahead and clonk her again, Beautiful.”

S W E
E
T – S W E
E
T

&

B E A U T I F U L

However, there is a locked room up there

with an iron door that can’t be opened.

It has all your bad dreams in it.

It is hell.

Some say the devil locks the door

from the inside.

Some say the angels locked it from the outside.

The people inside have no water

and are never allowed to touch.

They crack like macadam.

They are mute.

They do not cry help

except inside

where their hearts are covered with grubs.

—Anne Sexton, “Locked Doors”

F o u r
 
D a y s
 
L a t e r

50

MONDAY morning, 10:00
a.m.,
Horace Boone leaned back in his chair and sipped from an enormous mug of coffee, watching through the window as the sun made its brilliant ascent above the Outer Banks, whetting the sky into cloudless November cobalt.