The Voice inside My Head (16 page)

“You’re almost there,” he says, straightening up.

“Show me,” I say, and continue walking.

Zach trots to catch up. “Slow down, man, it’s just past the next house.”

I stop when I come to a laneway running between an empty lot and a boarded-up home. Looking around, I see that all the buildings out here are deserted. What kind of mindset was Pat in to come all the way out here on her own? She could have been attacked and no one would have heard her screams. Back home she would have been way more sensible than that. Pat was a risk-taker when it served a purpose, but she wasn’t foolhardy.

“Is this the way to the dock?” I start down the path without waiting for his answer. Zach is right behind me, so I guess I’m heading in the right direction.

The dock’s in bad shape; several planks are missing and it’s completely caved in at the end. Seawater smashes over
one side, briefly submerging it with every wave. I’m hesitant to walk out on it. The opaque water gives me the creeps. I peer into it, searching for a telltale fin. Sharks hunt at night. Pat knew that as well as I do. I take a deep breath and step onto the dock. It writhes like a living thing beneath my feet. I have to force myself to hold my ground and not retreat to the safety of the shore. I feel Zach step onto the dock behind me.

“Do you know where they found her clothes?” I ask.

“Right at the end.”

“How is that even possible?” I turn to him and see my own anxiety reflected in his eyes.

He shrugs.

I take a few more tentative steps, feeling the swell of the surf as it batters the dock. I think the boards will give way any minute. I look apprehensively at the water hammering against the planks. I’m sure it’s not very deep this close to shore, but I have no desire to test that theory. The dock shudders and I shudder right along with it. For my sister to venture out on a dock like this, she’d have to have had a good reason. If they hadn’t found her clothes piled at the end, I could believe she was swept into the sea by accident.

Is it my imagination or are the waves getting bigger?

“Storm’s close,” says Zach in reply to my unasked question.

I expect him to suggest we take cover, but instead he lurches past me, almost running, right to the point where the dock splinters and slopes into the sea. He drops to his knees and pukes over the edge.

“Treat for the fishes,” he shouts, grinning sheepishly back at me.

“You been drinking, Zach?” I have to raise my own voice to be heard over the sound of the surf.

He nods and stays crouched over the water. It’s not safe for him to be out there.

“Come back now,” I shout.

Zach clings tightly to the planks as he shifts to a sitting position and swings his legs over the side, inches above the foaming ocean. A wave crashes over the end of the dock, soaking him. The dock sways.

“Zach! Get back here, now!”

“Can’t.” I can hardly hear his voice over the breakers. He rests his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.

“I’m not kidding, Zach,” My heart is pounding now, just like that other night. The intervening years dissolve into my fear and I’m nine years old again. “Get back here!” I bellow, as angry as I am scared.

A huge wave crashes against the dock, soaking him again.

And then the rain starts. It pelts down so thick and fast that I lose sight of Zach. My heart jumps right out of my chest when I think he’s been swept out to sea. But a crack of lightning gives me a flash of him, hunched over his hands and knees, clinging limpet-like to the thrashing dock.

“ZACH!” I scream.

His answer is drowned out by another wave cresting over the dock like a tsunami. Against every instinct in my body, I sprint toward the wall of water and catch his shirt just as his legs slip out from under him. The dock tips us both seaward, but I scramble back, tugging him with me.

“We have to get off the dock,” I cry, catching sight of another foamy white monster barreling toward us.

We scuttle on all fours (actually three for me, because I don’t let go of him until we reach land). The rain is bucketing down. There are no trees this close to the shoreline, so we hop the fence of the abandoned house and dash underneath it. Maybe that’s why most of the buildings in town are on stilts. We collapse on the cement foundation, shivering.

“Tropical storms come up fast,” Zach says.

“Ya think?”

I lie flat on my back, listening to the rain pounding on the metal roof of the house, and I close my eyes.

“Cripes!” Zach’s voice jolts me upright. “I almost forgot. Mini Mike gave me a message for you.”

“Mini Mike?”

“Yeah, you know, Spiny Starfish Mike.”

“The owner?” I recall the Goliath I served coffee. “I never got his name.”

“It was something about the radio.” Zach wrinkles his forehead.

“What about the radio?”

Zach puts his head between his knees.

“Was it about last night?” I suggest. “Dr. Jake said there was chatter about us on the radio.”

“No.” Zach says. “More important than that. About Tricia.”

He starts taking raspy, deep breaths. “I think I’m going to puke again.”

I count to ten in my head to stop myself from dragging him to his feet to give him a good shake. He leaps up and runs to the edge of the house, kneeling down and dry heaving over the grass.

“Sorry,” he says, staggering back and plopping down beside me. “There was a distress call from the Shark Center the night Tricia went missing. No one knows whose voice it was, just some guy saying there’d been an accident and asking Dr. Dan to come quickly. He’s the only doctor on the island.”

“An accident? What kind of accident?”

“No one knows,” he says. “When Dr. Dan got there, the place was completely deserted. He figured it was some kind of prank, so he never bothered mentioning it until tonight. Mike was asking everyone where they were the night Tricia went missing and it just came out.”

We’re both quiet for several minutes, trying to make sense of this new information.

“Did you know Tricia got on the wrong side of some drug dealers?” I ask.

Zach looks at me in surprise. “She did go a little ape-shit when this drug plane dumped its stash offshore. But I didn’t know she actually did anything about it.”

“She didn’t invite you to any kind of anti-drug meeting?”

He shakes his head. “Seriously, man, that’s not exactly my scene.”

“Yeah, I’m with you there.”

“So you think they had something to do with her disappearance?”

“Maybe. What do you know about drug planes refueling at the airport at night?”

“I dunno … there’re always stories.” He pauses to give it some thought. “I have an idea!” he exclaims. “We should do a stakeout, bring a few beers, sleep up in the woods behind the runway. If there are drug planes refueling, we could catch them in the act!”

I nod. “Worth a try. It still won’t prove they did something to Pat, but maybe it would be enough to get the police to start looking for her again. But, first, I need to speak to Jamie about a fight he had with my sister. The way I see it, either the drug lords did something to her, which would go together with trying to scare her with voodoo dolls, or she had some kind of fight with Jamie and did something reckless to herself — though I’m not really buying that theory.”

“Or a voodoo witch put a hex on her,” Zach adds.

“Yeah, but I think we should consider that our least likely option.”

“The main thing is, she’s still alive, right?” Zach looks both hopeful and frightened at the same time. “Because she speaks to you, so she has to be alive.”

“Absolutely,” I say. I wish I felt as confident as I sound.

Zach smiles. “Okay.” He gets unsteadily to his feet and walks to the edge of the house nearest the road. “So, are we gonna jet?”

“It’s still pouring,” I point out.

Zach lifts the edge of his shirt and twists it so water streams out. “You worried we might get wet?”

“Fair enough.” I jump up and follow him out from under the house.

——

We run most of the way to Jamie’s house, making only brief pit stops under trees to catch our breath. We slide and hit the pavement several times on sodden, rotting fruit, treacherous as ice, so we’re scraped up pretty bad by the time we finally arrive. We keep up the pace straight up Jamie’s path and hesitate only when we get to the steps. Neither of us wants to drip water on Reesie’s veranda.

“Do you think we should shout from here?” Zach roars over the sound of the storm.

“No,” I shout back, a little more forcefully than I intended. The thought of Reesie catching us outside her house at this time of night actually makes me sweat. “You don’t happen to know which bedroom is Jamie’s, do you?”

Zach walks around the side of the house, looking up at the darkened windows. I follow him around the back, where he stops, fixated on one window in particular.

“Have you been in his room before?” I ask.

“Once,” he says.

“Is this it?”

“I think so. Yeah, I’m sure it is. Definitely.”

He’s already hunting for pebbles to throw at the window so I help, and before long we’re both standing under Jamie’s window with our hands full of shards of wet coral.

“You want to go first?” I ask.

“Cosmic.”

Zach winds up. I have a moment of panic that he’s going to chuck it so hard, he actually breaks the window, but his pitch goes wide and doesn’t even hit the house. Considering there’s at least eight feet of wall on either side of the window, I find that strangely impressive.

“Sports were never my thing,” Zach sighs.

“I wouldn’t say that, buddy. It takes real skill to miss that bad.”

I toss my own pebble and hit the window dead on. Pat always said I’d be good at sports if I gave up the drugs. But I really only had time for the one hobby.

We wait, but there’s no response. I pitch a couple more bits of coral. They all hit their mark, to no effect.

“Maybe he can’t hear us over the rain,” suggests Zach.

“Good point.”

I look at the one fistful of ammo I have left and the one Zach’s still holding.

“All together?” I suggest.

“Let’s rock ’n’ roll,” he agrees.

We launch our missiles like there’s no tomorrow, and also like there’s no glass in the window, which there is. Unfortunately.

Who would have guessed you could shatter glass with a few bits of coral?

The window, what’s left of it, flies open and Reesie’s head pops out.

I
turn to glare at Zach, who has totally disappeared. It takes me a second to track him to where he’s scurried under the house.

“Don’t tell her I’m here,” he hisses. Since he’s now immediately under her and closer to her than me, he’s wasting his breath.

“Get out from under my house, Zach O’Donell!” Reesie barks before she turns her ire on me.

I consider joining Zach. If we make a break for it, we could probably get past the gate before she catches us. But knowing her, she’d be on my doorstep before long, and even if we tried to wait her out at a bar, I’d have to go back to my room eventually.

“Good evening, Reesie.” I smile innocently. “How are things?”

“You come to break my window, at midnight, in the middle of a thunderstorm, to ask me that?” she demands. “What’re you smoking?”

I decide a different approach is in order.

“You’re looking lovely tonight.”

“Don’t say that to her, man,” groans Zach, surprisingly full of advice for a guy who’s still hiding under a house.

“Oh, I see, you’re thinking you’re Romeo,” she says, her eyes darker than the night. “You just wait here, Romeo. I need to go fetch something. Now where did I put that buckshot?”

She’s going to kill me. I should’ve hidden when I had the chance.

“Reesie, who’s that you be talkin’ to?” An older woman appears at the window.

Reesie pauses and gives me a warning look before she answers. “It’s just a friend, Mama.”

“What your friend be doin’ callin’ at this time of night?” scolds Reesie’s mom, barely glancing in my direction. “You know better than that, girl. What have I told you about boys? You gotta respect yourself if …”

“What’s goin’ on out there?” calls a third voice. A tiny wrinkled woman, with hair shooting straight up like a Muppet, nudges Reesie and her mother out of the way to give me the once-over.

“Who you be?” she demands.

“It’s the brother of that girl, Nanny.” Reesie’s disembodied voice is barely audible.

“I told you not to call her
that girl
, Clarice Doreen,” says the Muppet, not taking her beady eyes off me. “She be your brother’s fiancée. Don’t matter whether she be dead or alive. You pay her some respect.

“What you be doin’ here this time of night, boy?” she goes on. “And why you be playin’ around in the rain like a duck on Fish Friday? You a duck?”