Soundkeeper (25 page)

When she finally opened her eyes and wiped away the tears, she realized she was covered with blood. Hers, Arnold’s, Blondie’s. She felt the inside of her mouth with her tongue. A few of her teeth were loose. Her left eye was almost swollen shut and her vision was blurred. She thought she might have a concussion. She had survived yet again, but Arnold had not.

She looked at his body and did not understand. He had held her prisoner for almost two weeks. Twice he had saved her from death, and she never knew why. She didn’t even know his last name. He had never defended himself against Blondie, but he fought to the death to protect her. Who was he?

Chapter Forty-One

Hall’s plan to get back home as soon as he could was a good one, but it didn’t quite work out that way for him. Everyone at the Penn Center, including the kitchen staff, was at the worship service when he arrived. The heat was oppressive, the humid, early-summer air confirming the promise of afternoon thunderstorms. He waited in the shade of a century-old live oak for someone to arrive, and after a while an old man came out of the sanctuary carrying the offering baskets. When he saw Hall he motioned for him to follow him into the kitchen.

It was at least ten degrees hotter in the kitchen. Three large, institutional-grade ovens were hard at work, and whatever was inside them smelled delicious. When he finished checking on lunch the old man gave Hall a tall glass of iced tea and they went around to the back of the building and began to clean the fish.

They worked together without conversation and several more men joined them at the long wooden table. Hall guessed that most of them were in their eighties and noticed their large, strong hands moving without effort with the slippery fish. These were hands that had tonged oysters and thrown nets for shrimp and fish for decades. How they felt about the changes they had lived through, Hall could only imagine. The islands they had been born on were now gated and fenced luxury communities. Every day there were fewer farms, and shrimp houses were replaced by fancy marinas overnight. Luxury cruisers outnumbered hand made skiffs more than one hundred to one, and most of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren lived in cities far away. Hall felt like an intruder, not because he was the only white person there, but because he was from another world.

Soon they were finished, and Hall realized that while he looked like a war casualty, not one of the men had a single bloodstain on their white dress shirts. He was too hungry to pass up an invitation to stay for lunch and knew it would have been impolite to refuse the homemade desserts. He left with a piece of pound cake wrapped in waxed paper and promised to come by for lunch again soon. Once he was alone on his boat he took off his gun belt and adjusted it one space larger. He was embarrassed but felt much better and like he wouldn’t need to eat again for several days. The tide had dropped during his stay, and despite his best efforts, he ran aground within sight of the sound. He prodded the bottom with a boat hook and realized the bottom was so soft and gooey he would sink past his knees if he tried to push the boat off the sandbar.

After checking the tide chart he thought he should float free in a little over an hour or so. He positioned himself so that he was in the shade from the T-top and looked at the tall cumulus clouds that were building inland, to the east. One massive group of clouds was beginning to flatten out on top, and he wondered if the thunderstorm would form on top of him or out over the ocean.

He sat and watched the muddy sandbar begin to rise from the water as the tide dropped even further. At the water’s edge several immature roughtail stingrays fed with their domed backs and slotted eyes protruding from the water. They looked like aliens as they made gentle slurping noises and shuttled along the muddy waterline feeding on small minnows and shrimp.

He opened his eyes when a dolphin blew close to his boat. A much better navigator, the dolphin swam only a few feet away from Hall where the water was deep enough for it and deep enough for the patrol boat to float if he had only taken that route. Hall stood and shaded his eyes against the sun and tried to see if he recognized the dolphin. “His” dolphin had the scar on its neck from the fishing net and there was another with a propeller scar on its dorsal fin he’d seen at several locations in Port Royal Sound. His schooling told him the sound and the surrounding waters could support hundreds of the mammals, but he also knew dolphins could recognize the sounds of individual boats. They knew the difference between a shrimp boat that would soon be culling its catch and a passenger ferry that traveled the very same route. Hall wondered if the dolphins recognized his boat when he sped past them. They probably referred to it as the boat that got stuck a lot, he thought.

Soon the dolphin moved on and the stingrays quit feeding at the waters edge. The spartina grass dancing in the shimmering heat was not enough to hold his attention and he fell asleep with his chin on his chest.

When Blondie came back into the bedroom he had on a clean pair of khaki pants and a golf shirt that once had been white but was now a dingy gray with yellowed bleach stains. His face was puffy and swollen and his hands were stained pink where he had not been able to wash away the blood. When he walked toward the bed he limped and Gale prayed Arnold had crushed his testicles. Without saying anything he grabbed her chain and turned back around, pulling her out of the bedroom. She had to step over Arnold’s body on the way out of the room, trying to keep up with Blondie so he didn’t pull her off her feet with the chain.

The girl, whoever she was, was gone. There were liquor bottles on the floor and some empty plastic baggies on the kitchen table. His bloody blue jeans were piled on the floor next to a red plastic gasoline can. Blondie grabbed it when he walked by and headed for the front door. She watched him pour gasoline on the carpet, throw down a lighted match, and felt the heat when the fumes ignited with a whoosh. He closed the flimsy front door and made her climb through the driver’s door of the same truck Arnold had driven to the trailer yesterday.

“Get down,” he said. He was hard to understand with his mouth and cheeks swollen, but she knew what he wanted her to do. She sat down on the passenger floorboard and pulled her knees close to her chest. After lighting a cigarette, Blondie put a sandwich bag with ice in it on his lap and put the truck into gear with a lurch.

By watching shadows and catching a glimpse of the sun, Gale reasoned they were going back to the barge. The boat must be the only link to him, she guessed. He needed to get rid of the contaminated soil and sell the boat before he could disappear. The ocean would hide her body as well. A few minutes after they turned onto the paved road she heard a fire truck pass with its siren screaming. Burning the mobile home hid the evidence of the murder, at least for a while, and had the added bonus of attracting all the attention. No one would notice her boarding the barge, so she wouldn’t be missed when Blondie returned without her.

She thought her buttocks were numb from the cramped ride, but when the truck bounced over a pothole as they pulled into the parking lot of the marina, a sharp pain shot through her hips and up her back. Blondie sat in the truck drawing heavily on the cigarette with every other breath. He threw it out when it burned down to the filter and lit another one right away. She stole several glances at him, trying to guess what he was going to do next and wondering why he hadn’t left her chained to the bed when he set the place on fire. Gale knew it really didn’t matter, but she did take a small measure of solace in knowing her final resting place would be the sea, a place she loved more than any other. Sitting in the sweltering heat of the rusty old truck she could smell the marsh, the scent of fish and crabs that had been etched into the wooden docks, and the smell of approaching rain. A gull protested loudly against some unseen tormentor. The same yesterday, today, and tomorrow even if she wouldn’t be here to appreciate it.

Halfway through his third cigarette another fire truck roared past and Blondie opened his door. He pulled on the chain and indicated for her to follow him. Once she was out of the truck, she looked around the small gravel parking lot. There were several pick-up trucks with empty boat trailers parked near the oyster-shell boat ramp, but no one was here. The bait shop was closed, and Gale realized it was Sunday. Two decades ago it would have been illegal for the bait shop to be open on a Sunday, but the “Blue Laws’ had been legislated into extinction when she was a little girl. For most people Sunday was no longer God’s day. It was just another day to sleep late, go fishing, or watch a ball game.

Gale had been born on a Sunday. She knew that because her mother had saved the Savannah Daily News from the day she had been born. Because of the hurricane that had raged on her birthday, the Beaufort Gazette didn’t have an edition on that Sunday and wasn’t published again until she was a week old when the water had receded and the electricity had been restored. The first post-hurricane edition announced the arrival of Beaufort’s newest citizen, Gale Ruth Pickens. She could not know the same newspaper had printed her obituary just a few days ago.

The handcuff dug into Gale’s raw ankle, and she walked awkwardly across the dock as Blondie pulled on the chain. He was limping and grunting in pain when he climbed over the boat railing. He took her into the pilot house and ran a bolt though the chain that he looped around an exposed pipe. Blondie tightened the bolt with the same greasy crescent wrench that he’d hit her with when they’d first met. He disappeared below decks, and she heard him hammering on something and then felt the old diesel struggling to turn over. Finally the old motor coughed and wheezed and belched nasty black fumes into the air.

A few minutes later Blondie climbed out and loosed the barge from the dock. Gale noticed he left the lines lying on the dock when he untied the boat. When the boat lurched away from the dock Gale felt a solid bump and heard a loud crack when the planking gave way to the heavy mass of the boat. Blondie responded by increasing the throttle. Finally clear of the obstacle, the boat entered into the wide river channel and turned into the wind.

Chapter Forty-Two

A distant rumble nudged Hall back into consciousness. When he opened his eyes it took him a moment to orient himself. The bright summer sun was gone, and the wind on his face was cool and pleasant. When he looked behind him he saw where the wind was going.

Above him a massive cumulonimbus thundercloud sucked air into its base while forty thousand feet higher the dark, black cloud flattened out against the cooler air of the upper troposphere. Inside the storm cloud, warm and humid air rose to the top of the cloud until the moisture accumulated into raindrops and then froze into hailstones when they passed into yet colder, higher air. With violent speed the air mass within the cloud suddenly shifted directions and began to race back towards the earth, carrying the rain drops and ice crystals in the violent downdraft.

The first flash of lightning awed Hall with its beauty, and he saw the streak pulse as the raw energy passed back and forth between the cloud and the ground. He lowered the antennas on his boat and barely got his slicker on before the rain started. He saw it come across the water in sheets and felt it on his cheeks. Then hail began to fall and ricocheted off of the deck of the boat and stung his bare legs. The boat was still stuck on the sandbar, but there was enough water under the stern of the boat for him to start the engine. Lightning flashed again, much closer this time, and he had only counted to ten when thunder clapped in his ears.

Hall put the engine into reverse and used his body weight to rock the boat from side to side until it slid free from the mud. Once he was far enough away from the shoal he shifted into forward and tried to see into the wall of water that was falling from the sky.

The lightning concerned him the most. He knew a thunderstorm could produce winds that were strong enough to flip his boat over, but that was unlikely. The aluminum frame of his boat top towered above the water and marsh grass like a giant lightning rod, and for once he was grateful for the inflatable life jacket he was required to wear. He wanted to reach the river and head toward Beaufort. There were several homes along the water in that direction, and he would tie up to the first dock he came to and wait out the storm. Visibility decreased to the point where he could see less than ten feet in front of his boat. The hail became more intense and stung the back of his hands as he clung to the wheel. He couldn’t see the edge of the marsh anymore and steered his boat by watching the depth finder, keeping his boat in the deeper water in the middle of the creek.

He knew he had reached the river when the waves began to pound against the front of his boat, and the wind tried to push him sideways. He continued out into the river for a few yards and then turned his boat to starboard until his compass pointed north/northeast. He traveled just fast enough to maintain a course against the wind and the waves and strained to see something other than whitecaps and bolts of lightning. When he turned slightly more to the north the rain seemed to lessen, and he was able to see fifty or so feet in front of the boat. He reached for the throttle to increase his speed, but when he pushed it forward the motor stopped.

With the noisy outboard quieted Hall heard the full fury of the storm for the first time. Lightning flashed, and the crash of thunder was instantaneous. Hall knew he was in trouble. He took the anchor from the locker and slipped it into the water. As the line slipped through his wet hands, a strong wave rocked the boat and he was almost thrown overboard. He dropped to his knees and played out the line. The anchor hit the bottom fairly quickly, but Hall let out all two hundred feet of rope before he cleated it off on the windward side of the bow.