Granite Harbor, page 23
Always keep a roll—better, two—of duct tape with you, Ivan had counseled him.
* * *
Three days later, he found it was surprisingly easy to get into Prouts Neck in the middle of the night. All the wooden fences and their young guardians were gone. The streets were deserted. He was able to drive right up to the hole in the hedge surrounding the Buells’ house. There were no lights on—except for the blue streetlight he remembered.
Time collapsed. It all looked so familiar. It seemed just an hour since he had come out the back door onto the deck. The flat spot beneath the tall oak tree was where they’d pitched the tent.
He looked up at the house. Maybe Sally was still in there. Was she with her husband?—Did she have a husband? Was she all grown up, big like a woman? He pictured her still small like she was when she was taking her development pills.
She would be impressed by him now. He’d acquired Byron Pugh’s essence. He would be sexy now. But he didn’t need her.
He set up his two-by-fours to make a proscenium.
She would see it in the morning.
51
Oh my God…”
Alex heard her voice fall away as she dropped her arm—he could see it, the hand holding the phone falling to her side. He heard other voices, conversations some distance away. She was at the Settlement. He could see the scene, the visitors walking around the log cabins. She raised the phone to her mouth again. “This can’t be happening.”
“Isabel, can you please help me? I’ve got to go tell Kathy. Can you come with me, please? She’ll need somebody—you.”
They met at Isabel’s house. He was there first, parked on the street. She shot into the driveway, just behind him, got out of her car and into his Subaru, her costume piling around her.
“Tell me.”
“What?”
“Is it the same thing?”
“I can’t tell—”
“For God’s sake, Alex! Is it the same? Just tell me that.”
“It appears to be. Sort of.”
She stared at him. Her face went white in seconds. “Ethan’s next.”
“No—why do you say that?”
“Can’t you see? The three of them were always together, and now they’re being targeted. You need to, to stop this!”
He tried not to let his voice betray him. “We’re doing everything we can.” We indicating the larger crime-solving machine he wished he was or had access to.
“This is crazy, Alex. You have to catch this person. You’ve got to do more.”
“It’s police work—”
“It’s obviously not enough!” She threw open the door. “I can’t go over there like this. Two minutes.”
* * *
Kathy knew the moment she opened the door, the moment she saw both of them. Her eyes flying between them trying not to see or know. Her face coming apart in small places not even identifiable as components. Isabel held on to her for a long time. Kathy barely made any noise. Except a gasping.
Alex put on the kettle—because I’m English? he wondered. Tea, the British national panacea for every calamity. Cliché of the culture. But it had gotten them through two world wars and everything since, and it was the only thing he could think of doing. He poured water over the bags in mugs and put them on the table.
Finally, Kathy said, “How?”
He felt Isabel’s eyes on him.
He told Kathy where he’d been found. “He was naked. Hypothermia, we think.”
“My God … Was he … harmed?”
“There was a wound. On his stomach. We’re not sure what made it. But that wasn’t the cause of death.”
One last awful appeal, her voice, low and quiet but filling the air as if out of a ceramic vessel: “Are you sure it’s him?… Jared?”
Alex pulled out his phone and handed it to her.
Kathy dissolved in Isabel’s arms.
“I’m sorry,” he said. And to Isabel, “I have to go.”
* * *
“A toad, yes,” Phil Gressens told him over the phone. He’d arrived at the house on Thorndyke Road after Alex had left. He’d be doing the autopsy early in the week, but he had some preliminary information. “It was still alive. We’ll look for a DNA match with your other toads. But no water in the body cavity. He got there dry.”
“So he was brought and dumped there?”
“I wouldn’t say dumped. The arrangement of the body, the limbs, was consistent with a natural self-determined position. Looks more like he lay himself down, curled up, and went to sleep. Right there on the lawn where he was found.”
“Cause of death?”
“As with the other boy, not the incision. A clean cut through the rectus abdominis—the abdominal wall—but not deep. No fatal loss of blood. No internal organs cut or nicked. But no sign of asphyxiation this time. Cause of death most likely hypothermia—exposure. Looks like he’d been there all night. The low last night was around forty-two. He’d have probably made it if he’d gotten to a hospital.”
Alex wished Phil hadn’t said that.
“Then there’s the abrasions on the wrists and ankles. Looks like severe rope burns. Much more pronounced than the other boy. A real struggle. Like he was restrained by a synthetic fiber rope—polypropylene, common stuff, often yellow. A coarse plastic, not smooth and pliable like nylon. Cheap, strong, but prone to chafing. Also, it’s slippery, knots don’t hold well in it. Not my place to make a reach this far, but I would say it’s possible he was tied down with poly, then left long enough to struggle until he either chafed through the restraints or the knots unraveled, or he freed one and untied the rest, something like that.”
“While his stomach was cut open?”
“He’s young and strong. That chafing around the wrists and ankles, he did that to himself, struggling. For a long time. Then—maybe—he got away. Crawled there somehow. No other marks on him. Got there, lay down, and died.”
“But he hadn’t swum ashore?”
“I can only tell you he had not been immersed.”
52
Alex strapped his kayak to the top of his Subaru, drove to the “camp” on Thorndyke Road, carried it across the lawn, and pushed it into the water.
Moody Pond was part of the Loon River waterway, which had its source somewhere deep in Maine, far inland from Calder County. From there, the water flowed in a series of runnels, streams, rivers, ponds, occasionally widening out into lakes. How much of it was navigable, Alex didn’t know.
But it all flowed one way: from the higher inland elevations toward the sea.
He clambered in, settled quickly into his seat, and pushed off from the small rocks at the edge of the lawn. He paddled only a short distance from the shore, then raised the paddle and let the wind and current carry him where it would. He resisted dipping the paddle to keep his bow oriented to the direction of travel. He let go and watched to see what the kayak would do.
The closed houses next door and their garages and outbuildings had been entered and searched and revealed no signs that could be associated with what had happened to Jared. Other houses in the neighborhood had also been visited.
Alex felt sure Jared came ashore from the pond behind the house. But he hadn’t been in the water—“not been immersed”—no water in his body cavity. His hair had been dry.
So he’d come by boat. Alex saw it clearly in his head. Somehow he’d freed himself, found a boat tied to a dock, crawled in, untied the line, pushed off or drifted away. Not strong enough to row or paddle, he lay down and went where the boat took him—downstream—until it bumped into the pondside backyard of 27 Thorndyke Road. There, Jared crawled out, across the grass toward the house … but had not made it. Cold, horribly injured, he curled up and went to sleep.
But the boat kept going. Lightened of its load, not tied to the shore, turned by current, buffeted by wind, it would have drifted on. Alex wouldn’t find it where it had come from, one of hundreds of properties with boats tied to docks on the waterway upstream. Jared’s boat, hopefully identifiable by name or registration number, lay somewhere downstream.
The kayak soon reached the eastern end of Moody Pond. As the shore drew closer together on each side, the speed picked up as water funneled into the narrow entrance back into Loon River. Alex had looked on a map, but this had told him nothing of the depth and navigability of the rocky bottom ahead. He knew only that Loon River led into Fellows Brook, which in turn debouched into Coleman Pond, and from there the flow ran in twisty stretches to Fairhaven and the sea … but he didn’t think he’d have to go that far.
Rocks hove up without quite barring his way into Loon River. He dipped the paddle a few times to avoid the rocks but he tried to let the kayak find its own way. That was the whole plan. Float, drift, spin, run aground in the wake of Jared’s boat after it left the Thorndyke Road lawn.
Then—what he hadn’t noticed or taken in on the small-scale map—the river divided ahead into two forks on either side of a small “island,” a midstream mound no larger than a tractor trailer, but solid enough to be overgrown with small trees. The water flowed into each narrow fork with the same force.
Which one? The kayak had to decide. He let himself be sluiced sideways, to the right, into the faster fork.
As the island slid past, he saw where the two forks merged ahead in a jumble of rocky shallows, and there it was. Lodged in a thicket of fallen tree trunks on the right bank. He stepped out of the kayak. The water was no deeper than the ankles of his hiking boots.
It was the sort of boat you saw everywhere in Maine. A johnboat, they were called. People hunted from them, or just tooled around ponds and lakes. Wide, flat hulled, easily driven by a small outboard. Nothing to tell one from another. This one was plain aluminum. The small outboard engine was still clamped to its stern, but tilted up and sideways, its propeller lodged into a rock as it trembled and bobbed on the water coursing beneath it. The hull was dented, maybe from before, maybe from its passage down Loon River and over the rocks.
He reached it and looked inside. A plastic red gas tank in the stern with a line to the outboard. Water lay in the bottom.
On one of the wide aluminum seats stretched across the middle was a broad thin smear of brown, not quite dried, blood. Alex pulled his collection pack out of his jacket: a Ziploc bag and his own business card. He scooped up a teaspoon of blood with his card and popped it into the Ziploc.
He walked to the bow. There were the little black adhesive letters and numbers, peeling, but all there: NC 3704 JH.
He shot a photo of the numbers, another of the boat, and sent them to Kevin Regis, with the message: Find me this boat’s owner, address, phone.
53
The response to the press and media release that a second Granite Harbor High School student had been found murdered was unsurprising. Trucks, generators, cameras, reporters, and a small but growing crowd watching them, appeared outside the William P. Merrill Station almost immediately. The further announcement from inside the station that there were no details, no location, time, or cause of death, that the Granite Harbor Police Department would provide information “soon,” only added to the noise outside.
Inside the station foyer, Morgana and her group of “concerned”—they called themselves—parents staged something like a protest, until Chief Raintree invited them into the conference room.
Then it felt like a private harangue aimed directly at Detective Brangwen by his ex-wife.
“Our children are not safe,” Morgana barked at him, at commanding volume. She stood in the conference room in her Texas horsewoman outfit, raising a fist with a forefinger sticking out of it, like a Colt 45 aimed straight at Alex. “And we need to know, now, what you’re doing about it.”
The other parents—Morgana’s posse of Realtors, Rotary Club members, business owners, and Tinker Bell—stared, first at her, and then at Alex. Another scene straight out of a western: the fearful citizenry mobbing together, in the church or saloon or outside the jail, clamoring for protection by the clearly overwhelmed, outgunned, harried law officer.
Chief Billie Raintree, front and center in the conference room, waited until Morgana had finished speaking, then raised a hand. Raintree’s bearing, commanding physical presence, implacable demeanor, and not least her unassailable straddle of social dichotomies brought the clamor to a sudden silence.
“Ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate that ‘doing everything we can’ may sound to you right now as effective a measure as ‘thoughts and prayers.’ But it’s no less applicable, and I promise you it will be a lot more effective. We are engaged in multiple crime and scientific detection procedures, with the cooperation of many people and agencies. It may seem slow or vague to you, but it has to be, as you can imagine, deliberate and painstaking, and it will produce results. This is police work. And I ask you to please let us get on with it. That is all we can tell you now. You can help by maintaining contact with us and with each other. By staying close to your kids and families and friends. Our officers all have children too, right here in Granite Harbor. We share your concern. But a gathering like this keeps us from our work. It doesn’t help us right now. Or you. Thank you.”
As in a western, the citizenry disbanded. Muttering, some placated, some disgruntled. Morgana mounted her Ford and drove away.
* * *
Back in his office, Alex looked at his phone, which had been vibrating inside the pocket of his jeans. A message from Kevin Regis, the department’s IT guy: “Boat reg info sent to your dept email.” Alex sat at his desk and opened his email:
North Carolina registered watercraft. NC 3704 JH; Year: 1993; Length: 11’; Material: Aluminum; Mftr SEARS. Model: Swampfire Jon Boat. Engine: Johnson 12 hp, 2005.
Registered to: Frederick Maroni. #14, Neuse St, Oriental, NC, 28571.
Maroni is a tax resident of Oriental, NC, receives his credit card bills, etc., at that address; but owns lakeside property at 31 Beaucaire Ave., Granite Harbor, ME 04842. Only phone number found so far: NC area code: (910) 357-1608. Working on it. Kevin.
Nothing fit. Apart from the wild-card North Carolina stuff, the Beaucaire Ave. address was on Lake Meguntic, miles east and downstream from Moody Lake and not part of the Loon River waterway. No way could that boat have reached Thorndyke Road by water from Lake Meguntic.
Alex called the phone number. “The number you have called is not available. Please leave your message after the tone.”
“Hello. This message is for Frederick Maroni. I’m Detective Alex Brangwen from the Granite Harbor, Maine, Police Department. I’m calling about your boat, North Carolina registration NC 3704 JH, which is here in Maine. It is urgent that you give me a call back as soon as you can. Thank you.” He gave his cell and department numbers.
54
Sophie’s voice on the phone had been small, shaky, and at the same time shrill. “Come and get me, please! I’m scared! I don’t want to be alone!”
She was waiting for him outside her father’s house on Mountain Street when Ethan pulled up in the van. School was out again. Kids were home.
“Go,” she said, climbing in.
“Where? My place?”
“No, your place is freezing. I don’t want to go there. Go!”
Ethan floored it and the van rumbled up Mountain Street.
“Okay, where?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere. Let’s just drive around. Anyway, it’s warm in here.”
“You want to get some weed? We could go—”
“No, I don’t! I’m freaked out already, I don’t want anything. Ethan, what is going on? Jared’s dead? What’s happening? I’m so scared.” Sophie sat hunched into herself in the passenger seat, where she’d been crammed against Ethan only a week ago when Jared had driven them to the Settlement. “I don’t understand. Why Shane and now Jared? Someone’s killing kids? Who’s next?”
“Me,” said Ethan.
“What do you mean? Why you?”
“I don’t know. But, you know, Shane. And now Jared. So I must be next.”
“What did you do?”
“We didn’t do anything! Jesus! What do you think?”
“I don’t know! But why you?”
“I don’t know either! But, like, it was the three of us, and now”—Ethan started to cry, but forced himself to look ahead through the windshield—“it’s just me.”
Sophie leaned sideways and took his nearest arm in both hands. “Ethan, I’m sorry! Do you want to stop?”
“No! I don’t know what to do.”
She stroked his arm. “But … did the three of you do something together—”
“Yeah! We fucking went skateboarding!” He tried blinking away his tears. “We went skateboarding, and we went to the lake, and the beach, and we went to camp and school and parties, and we played video games and did crazy-ass stuff together—all our fucking lives! And now they’re both gone!” He shouted through the windshield: “What am I going to do?” He began to cry again, his body racked as he tried to hold on to the wheel.
“Ethan, pull over. Right here. Stop. Stop driving now.”
He pulled violently toward the curb and the van stopped abruptly. He dropped his face into his hands and sobbed. Sophie unclipped her seat belt and put her arms around him.
“Ethan … I’m sorry.”
“Oh, God, what is happening?” he cried through his hands. “Shane and Jared gone. Dead. What the fuck is happening?”
“I don’t know. But I’m here. I know it’s not the same—”
Ethan turned sideways and hugged Sophie with all his strength.
She held on to him while he shook, and they said nothing for a while.
Then Ethan rubbed his eyes and looked up, again through the windshield. “I can’t take it in. I don’t know what to do.” He looked at Sophie. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
