Unhinged (31 page)

And comprehended utterly, the way he knows what weather is coming out on the water: not the details, maybe, but enough of the drift to know just what to do.

“Hey,” he said kindly to me. “You don’t need this.” He took the gun, which I’d picked up again.

“Hey, yourself,” I said gratefully, hating the way my voice trembled.

After a little while Bob Arnold came back looking grimly resolute. “I need to know what happened here, Jacobia.”

By then George and Ellie had arrived, too, summoned by Bob. I said the man we’d called Harry Markle had come into the house and surprised me, that he’d attacked me.

That Mr. Ash—I was still calling him that, of course—heard the struggle, rushed upstairs just as I’d fired the little .32 semiauto I had been carrying in my sweater pocket when I was alone in the house.

That I’d shot my attacker twice when he wouldn’t back off. He’d fallen on me, and then down the stairs: end of story.

And although I could see in Ellie’s eyes she was skeptical, and Wade figured out that something else had happened, and Bob Arnold knew I’d been carrying the Bisley, not a .32, they all took my story as gospel anyway. Why would I lie?

Two shots fired, two bullets missing from a recently fired weapon. The only part missing from my story was two shooters and I wasn’t telling that. If I brought Lian Ash into it, Bob might feel it was necessary to look into his background.

So I shut up, glancing around dazedly. But when I did, a new terror struck me: Sam wasn’t here. Maggie, either.

After I finish up here in Eastport.

Your son
.
His girl.

“Where were they going?” I demanded, jumping up.
The world only wheeled a little bit, then straightened. “Did they tell anyone?”

Wildly I ran to the door, yanked it open, peering out to the street and the driveway. But they weren’t there, either.

“Wade?” I turned helplessly. It was dark out now.

“I’m on it,” he called, already at the telephone. “I’ll try Victor. Maybe Sam talked to him lately.”

But when Wade got through to the hospital they said Victor wasn’t available. A man had come in earlier in the day asking for him and the two had gone off urgently together. A man with close-clipped greying hair, wearing a leather jacket.

“He’s got them,” I said. “He’s got them, he’s done something to them, and he’s dead. I killed him.”
The last laugh . . .

“I killed him . . . so now,
he can’t tell us where
.”

“Harriet’s house,” Ellie said decisively, already halfway out my back door. “He
wants
us to know.”

As soon as she said it I knew she was right. Finding bodies wouldn’t be bad enough, cruel enough, for
his
last laugh. No, he was setting us up for something worse than that.

Much worse, as we discovered upon walking into his place: Prill was unconscious. The big dog’s breathing was shallow and fast, her eyes rolled back in her glossy, reddish-gold head.

That son of a bitch. “Call the vet,” Ellie told George, “and can you get someone to take her out there, right away?”

George nodded grimly, grabbed the phone and found it dead—another joke, ha-ha—and hustled out to his truck’s cell phone.

“Poor thing,” Ellie was crouched by the animal. “He must have poisoned her.”

Wade and Bob Arnold were in the kitchen, searching it for a clue to what this mad evil bastard might have had in mind for us. But I didn’t have to search. Deep down in the coldest place in my heart, I knew where to look.

“There,” I said, waving miserably at the map of Eastport on the corkboard over the mantel, at the murders and accidents we’d suffered marked on it.

In reality of course he’d been keeping score. There was his own house with a cute little smiley-face drawn on it; looking at it made me want to put my fist through it. And there the Danvers’ house elaborately decorated with two horrid stick figures, eyes fatally x-ed in, to represent Harriet and Samantha; jagged lines of waves for the water in the cellar, inked-on lightning bolts.

“Guy was an artist,” Ellie commented acidly, looking over my shoulder.

From the Moosehorn Refuge: cartoon bubbles and a balloon-captioned word:
glub!
Dear heaven.

There was even a receipt tacked to the map, from an on-line weird pet dealer called Captive-Raised Invertebrate City. The receipt was for a dozen brown recluse spiders—
Loxosceles reclusa
—via FedEx.

Oh, this guy was hilarious. The spiders were a real hoot. I felt their legs on my arms again as I went on scanning the map.

A word captioned over my own house: boom! A sketch of Sam’s speeding car flying downhill . . .

Okay, you son of a bitch,
I thought, my fury growing.

I see how clever you’ve been
.
Now tell me
—

“There.” Ellie pointed to a mark that I’d taken at first to be a printed icon: small, neat, unlike the cartoonish scrawls of other annotations.

But upon closer inspection the icon was inked in: a small, round, black object with a fuse burning at the top of it.

“Wade . . .” He was at my side in a heartbeat.

“They’re down at the boat basin,” I said. “Sam, Maggie, and probably Victor, maybe with explosives.”

Over in her dog bed, Prill sighed heavily and didn’t breathe again. “Oh, no,” Ellie mourned.

But then the dog took another sighing, shuddery inhalation, just as a big bearded guy I didn’t know rushed in, some friend of George’s, lifting the dog as tenderly as a baby, cradling her.

“I’ll take care of her,” he promised, his hugely muscled arms wrapped protectively around the animal, and went out again.

Peering out after him, I saw he was tucking her into the sidecar of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which ordinarily I wouldn’t have been in favor of at all, but now I had no choice.

Not to mention no time. “We can all go there in the back of Wade’s truck,” I said, “and . . .”

We moved in a rush toward the back door, which was nearest. All but Lian Ash—I still called him that, in my mind, and I had a feeling I would be doing so for a long while, maybe forever—

—who hung back alertly. “Wait.”

His command could’ve cut through lead sheathing. We halted as he stepped in front of us, leaning down toward a length of something barely visible stretched across the doorway opening.

“Trip wire,” he pronounced. So we all went out the front again, feeling a good deal more nervous than when we had arrived. But not as nervous as we were about to be.

Not by a long shot.

“It’s a bomb,
all right,” Mr. Ash said ten minutes later.

The cloud-filled sky had darkened early. We stood on the finger pier, gazing along a flashlight beam into Sam’s boat, where Sam, Maggie, and Victor had been tied up on deck.

Seeing them, I felt my heart go dead in my chest. Their eyes were closed and for a moment I thought they’d been given whatever Prill had, only a lot more. Then I spotted Sam’s chest moving.

“Alive . . .” Wade squeezed my shoulders. Bob Arnold was going around under the big lights that made the dock resemble a stage set at night, talking to boat owners and Coast Guard guys, asking them to get the vessels out of the boat basin, onto open water.

Wisely, he’d decided not to tell them that if they didn’t, a bomb might blow them all up; as it was, the scramble of activity that resulted began making me anxious: engines, and boat wakes.

“I can’t stand it,” I said, “I’m going aboard and—”

A big hand stopped me. “Hold your horses.”

Lian Ash assessed the contraption tangled under the wooden deck chairs the three prisoners sat on. “Let me think about this a minute,” he said calmly.

“What’s there to think about? It’s a—”

Victor’s eyes opened. “Bomb,” he snapped viciously. “It’s a clock and some explosives, any
moron
can see that it’s a—”

“Correct,” Lian Ash interrupted mildly. “An old-fashioned alarm clock with two brass bell-domes by the winding stem, hooked to a wire tied to four sticks of good, old-fashioned dynamite.”

For a moment it was a toss-up which would explode first: my ex-husband, or the device. “
Do
something about it, you big—”

“Don’t move,” Mr. Ash said sharply. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he added, echoing my earlier thought. Then:

“Got it. It’s that stuff he’s tied you up with. And the material that’s under the dynamite. Was it there when you got here, do you recall? Also, how much of it was there? Say, a cupful? Or more?”

Another boat motored out past the concrete mooring dolphin, sending another wash of waves glittering under the lights into the boat basin, rocking the pier we stood on and the boat we were peering into.

“Hey,” Sam protested, waking, trying to get his hands free. “What—?”

“Oh,” Maggie moaned groggily.

“Stay still, everything’s fine. Do as I say, please,” Victor told them, and they obeyed at once: that voice of his. I thought I despised it.

But now I’d have fallen on my knees and thanked God for its instant effectiveness, if the backwash from the parade of exiting boats weren’t threatening to knock me off the finger pier.

“What do we do now?” The water was the deep, pure blue of fountain-pen ink, the breeze off the waves fragrant with cold sea salt mingled pleasantly with a whiff of diesel. No stars, and the smell of rain drifting with the other scents, but you just couldn’t believe anything could go wrong on a night like this.

“Det cord,” Lian Ash said to Wade and George. “It looks like colored clothesline, but . . .”

The Coast Guard crew was setting up barricades at the end of the fish pier, the sawhorses yellow in the lights from Rosie’s hot dog stand. A hundred yards away on Water Street, folks were beginning to gather under the streetlamps, their shapes mere dark silhouettes against the lighted store windows.

“It’s the cord they use to set off explosives,” Wade told me. But I already knew that, and the picture of what had been put together here was coming horridly clear.

“So cut the cord,” Victor grated. “What’s hard about that?”

“It’s not that simple,” Lian Ash answered. “For one thing, it’s not fuse cord, which is what you’re probably thinking of. Safety fuse burns slow, thirty or forty seconds per foot and doesn’t explode. It’s designed that way, to be less volatile.” He frowned. “Detonating cord has an explosive core that goes up at twenty-five thousand feet per second, flame ball around the cord about eighteen inches in diameter. And that’s not the half of it. See that mound of grey stuff, sort of clayish looking, by the fake bomb?”

“Fake bomb?” Victor began apoplectically, and started to get up, whereupon Wade fixed him in the pale-grey stare he’s been known to use on guys bigger than he is.

“Sit your butt on that chair and pipe down,” he said.

Victor did so.

“Fake by comparison, I meant,” Lian Ash clarified. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure that grey stuff’s C4,” he went on quietly. “Commonly known as plastique. Cord’s in a ring, little length leading from it to the explosive.” He shook his head slowly. “Bottom line is, I’m not sure what all booby traps are laid for us here. Do something wrong, whole dock would go. Lot of other stuff down there, too. I see an M14 land mine, for one thing.”

“What’ll it do?” Victor asked. “How
do
we get out of this?”

“Well, it could be complicated,” Mr. Ash said. “In order to activate the M14, the safety clip is removed and the pressure plate is rotated from its safety position to its armed position.”

Somehow he seemed to understand that the details would calm Victor. He went on: “There are letters on it, A for armed and S for safety, on the pressure plate. You align an arrow to arm it.”

“And then?” Victor demanded.

“Once it’s armed, pressure can cause the mine to detonate. When pressure is applied it pushes down on the Belleville spring underneath the pressure plate.”

“Oh,” Victor said faintly.

“The spring pushes the firing pin onto the detonator which ignites the main charge. In this case, it’s probably tetryl.”

“So what
do
we do?” Bob Arnold asked. It hadn’t escaped him: Lian Ash was smarter about high explosives than your average stonemason.

Deep, contemplative breath from Mr. Ash. “Well. Nothin’ for it, I guess, but to get down there and undo it.”

“Wait a minute,” Victor piped up, “I’m still not so sure I want you down here fooling around with this stuff.”

“Dad,” Sam put in quietly.

“How do I know,” Victor demanded argumentatively, “that
you
know anything about this at all, that you’re not just some fake with a big mouth and a fancy line of talk, just trying to impress people?”

“Dad, shut up,” Sam said again as Maggie’s eyes, alert until now, drooped alarmingly.

The sight sent a fresh pang of anxiety through me: What had that bastard dosed them with?

“How do I know,” Victor ranted unstoppably, “you won’t blow all
three
of us to
kingdom come
?”

Sam groaned, and for a moment I recalled being his age, and feeling so immortal. Being tied up over a bunch of explosives was bad enough, apparently, but now his father was embarrassing him.

But Lian Ash didn’t seem the least bit affronted by Victor’s question. Instead, a beatific smile spread on his lined face as he bent to answer Victor’s question.

“First sensible thing you’ve said since we all got here,” he replied. “And the answer is . . .”

He stepped down onto the deck of the little boat, bobbling dangerously for a moment until he got his sea legs under him.

“. . . the answer is you don’t. And till we’re sure I
haven’t
blown you up,” he added uncomfortingly, “neither do I.”

He frowned at his task. Maggie was unconscious again, beads of sweat on her lip and not much color in her face.

“Wade,” Lian Ash said, “can you come down here with me? It’ll take more than one pair of hands to untangle all this rat’s nest.”

Despite the clear danger, Wade moved forward alertly. He’d have stepped in front of a freight train for Sam.