Death by Chocolate Raspberry Scone, page 22
Around us, the bay lay dark and silent except for the small waves slapping our hull. The shorelines were all still dark, too, although I imagined that by now there were candles lit and flashlights turned on everywhere.
“I’m hoping to persuade you to come back with us,” Lizzie answered Ellie. “This isn’t safe. Of course you’re right that I can’t make you come, but—”
“Okay, here’s the situation,” I interrupted, because not only did we not want to be towed home, but if we were going to get to Walk Island tonight, we’d need Lizzie and Dylan’s boat to get there on.
So I laid out all we’d done and learned in the couple of days since Sally Coates came to us asking for help: the sunken barge with a rumored-to-be witch trapped in it, the life vest and the empty shoe, the taken-down security system and re-homed dog, and the things that Julio had told me.
Also: “He says Bailey Lyman was basically a creep, and Paul Coates went from annoyed bitching about it to practically encouraging it for some reason,” I said.
“Don’t forget the hidden phone number,” Ellie put in, so I told Lizzie about that, too. By now she was listening intently and so was Hudson.
“So the thing is this,” I finished. “Every cop in the world, and every volunteer, too, is out looking for Ephraim. And they don’t want to hear about pirate gold or missing fishermen.”
I took a breath. “They probably know by now, most of them, that someone took him for their own reasons. But they don’t know who, or why.”
Hudson’s lean face in the battery-lantern’s sallow glow had gone still as he listened.
“So where’s the harm in following up on other angles?” I went on. “It’s not like the police need us on shore, and the things I’ve been telling you are . . . curious. Right?”
Lizzie and Dylan looked at each other: right. “But your boat’s crippled,” he said, “you’ve got no electronics, and—”
“Neither do you,” Ellie pointed out. “Or any lights. And you must have an old engine without any of the modern electronic components, or it wouldn’t run, either.”
I’d been wondering about that.
“But what I’d like to know is how you found us,” she added in the reasonable tones that she generally uses just before she hits you over the head with some unwelcome—but absolutely correct—logical conclusion. “Seeing,” she added, “as we don’t have running lights, or anything else you could’ve picked out just by looking.”
Suddenly I realized what she was getting at. There was only one way they could have found us.
“So, Dylan,” I spoke up, “how come the solar flare didn’t fry whatever tracking gadget you put on Ellie’s boat?”
Another shrug: caught. “More cop gear,” he admitted as I recalled the ridiculously tiny tape player he’d had. “And it did fritz out. But we’d located you by then.”
“Hmm,” remarked Ellie, not sounding pleased, and I wasn’t, either. Back in the bad old days, my ex-husband used to track me in case I was dallying with any boyfriends (I wasn’t). This was pretty funny—or anyway it was funny later—since my ex was so non-monogamous, he was practically a legend to those who knew him.
“Anyway,” said Lizzie, “why not just come back to Eastport on our boat and when the power comes back on, we’ll—”
“No,” said Ellie, and we all turned to look at her. With her strawberry-blond curls turned reddish-purple by the lantern light, and the shark in a crimson pool at her feet, she still gripped the oar’s handle firmly in both red-streaked hands.
“We’re going to Walk Island to find Ephraim, if he’s there. We’re going now, and we’re going in your boat.”
Turning to Lizzie, she smiled in the half dark. “Unless you want to explain to the city council why the new police chief’s boyfriend is stalking women with a stolen tracking device?”
I nearly laughed. Checkmate, Dylan’s look said clearly, and Lizzie’s answering glance agreed.
And then—poof!—the distant shoreline lit up all at once, like a magic trick. The Bayliner’s gauges and instruments glowed greenly to life, the radio spat static, and our running lights winked on all at once.
While the rest of us were still looking around in silent wonder, Ellie jumped up, crossed the deck in three strides, and reached past Lizzie to turn the ignition key. And—
Vroom. We were back in business.
* * *
So we didn’t need Lizzie and Hudson’s boat after all, and minutes later after unlashing the two vessels, we were again on the open water in the Bayliner with the lights of Grand Manan Island gleaming ahead of us.
“This is just a needle in a haystack,” Dylan complained, but then Ellie spotted the tiny rock we were looking for once more; tiny at high tide, that is, which it still nearly was now.
“Ellie,” I said quietly as she stood at the wheel, “what if we don’t get there until the tide’s gone out too much?”
We needed to fetch up as close to the cabin as we could, and for that we needed deep water.
“We’ll think of something,” Ellie answered, her eyes on the helm’s gauges. She could’ve locked our course in and walked away for a little while; we had twenty minutes or so yet to go.
But she wouldn’t, because after the solar flare she didn’t trust the electronics, and that’s how she happened to be there when the oil light flashed on.
“Jake?” I’d sat down on the deck with my back against the rail. At her voice, I lifted my chin muzzily up off my chest.
“Wha—?” Beneath me the boat thudded along, bump-bump-bump.
“Jake,” Ellie repeated. The flat lack of urgency in her voice told me something was up.
“Go pull the cowl off the engine,” she said, to which of course I did not reply, What are you, crazy?
Instead, feeling a mixture of determination and impending doom, I stepped cautiously past the inert shark body—we’d tried, but even with the four of us he was too heavy and slippery to shove overboard—to stand by the engine. Luckily the shark wasn’t quite big enough to sink the boat’s stern; I braced my feet and bent over the cowling, which is the engine’s cover; big, heavy, and fiendishly unwieldy.
My searching fingers found the latches that held the cover down; naturally the latches were stiff, but I only sprained two fingers prying them up, and next came lifting the cowl itself.
I’d seen Ellie do it, so I knew it was possible. Bending my knees and wrapping my arms around the cowl the way she had—and may I remind us all here that the engine was still running, so if I fell in, I’d be mincemeat?—and lifted.
The cowl didn’t budge. Dylan climbed to his feet. “Give you a hand, there, little lady?” he asked with a grin that was about as subtle as a poke in the ribs.
But I did need someone’s help, so I watched him—and after that, Lizzie—try and fail, too. Finally, Ellie put me at the helm while she lifted the cowl easily and set it on the deck; I guess you just had to know how.
“Hudson, hold this.” She handed a flashlight to Hudson and by its light opened a small tank mounted on the engine’s side.
“Darn,” she said, then waited until the dark fluid in the tank rose up to the brim and snapped the top back down fast.
“Have to check it when we get home,” she said, unperturbed, and I figured that next she’d jump out and take a few steps on the water. But instead the warning light on the console went out and we were back to normal again.
Well, sort of normal. “How much farther?” Lizzie asked.
“Not far. We should see it, soon.” Ellie consulted the GPS once more. “We saw a light earlier, but—”
But not now. To our east, the moon rose blood orange. In a few minutes Ellie spoke again, just one syllable.
“Huh.” She frowned in the glow of the GPS, then suddenly dropped our engine into neutral, followed by reverse.
The boat started backing up. “What?” said Lizzie, getting up off the deck. Hudson stepped out onto the bow, peering around, and that’s when I saw the pointy tops of the jagged granite ledges we’d somehow blundered into a cluster of.
Then Walk Island appeared, its rough shale beach half-exposed; as I’d feared, the tide had gone out considerably. It had taken us longer to get here than we’d thought it would.
“Drat. Now we’ve got to climb that beach,” I said. Also there was the little matter of getting to it at all. I squinted unhappily at the remaining distance between us and land.
Ellie had gone below to haul something big from the storage area under the foredeck. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it; then from the cabin came a hissing sound.
I couldn’t place that, either, although I’d heard it somewhere before. “You figure there’s any more sharks out here?” Hudson asked as he eyeballed the situation.
“You figure there’s anybody in that shack?” Lizzie asked, coming up behind him.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” I said, still not understanding what Ellie was doing or why the thing she’d hauled out onto the deck seemed to be growing.
Nor did I care, turning my gaze to the island where all was still dark. Nothing moved, and I spotted no sign of the barge that had sunk near it, either, although the dinghy tied up to the precarious shack still floated.
The moon had risen all the way up over the horizon, casting the many-angled dwelling into a jagged black silhouette of jutting stovepipe, slanting roof, and a rusty glint of reflected moonglow like a long, red blade in one of the dark windows.
Ellie climbed out onto the Bayliner’s bow to drop anchor; we couldn’t get closer without impaling the boat on one of the ledges. We heard the clanking of heavy chain and the anchor’s splash, then the rest of the chain rattling up out of the chain locker.
Finally she returned, dusting her hands together, and the next thing I knew I was climbing over the engine and transom, hoping to land in—I kid you not—that damned rubber raft that Sam and the kids were so fond of. That’s what Ellie had been dragging up from the cabin and inflating.
Now she looked back from the helm at me. “Bet you’re glad I brought it, though, aren’t you?”
I rolled my eyes at her; just because Ephraim was worth it didn’t mean I had to like it. Still, it was better than landing into the water, I thought as I jumped.
Then my feet hit the bouncy, rubbery rim of the raft. I felt like a trick seal balancing on a beach ball, then slipped off the rim and landed on my butt.
Inside the raft, fortunately. Hudson came next, and after that Lizzie landed lightly and settled herself; Ellie got in last. The thing bounced and wobbled alarmingly and any instant I expected a dunking, but the waves were cooperative in washing us closer to the rocky shore.
And then I got the dunking; Lizzie slid easily and fast off the raft’s balloon-like rim where I’d found, I thought, a secure perch. But as her side lowered nearer the water, the other side rose suddenly, flipping me backwards into the cold shallows.
I staggered and spluttered, then sprawled. But somebody grabbed my collar and someone else seized my sleeve, and then I was scrabbling uphill over wet, sharp stones.
“Nobody’s here,” Hudson muttered in a voice that suggested his patience was dwindling rapidly.
“Ssh.” A dark figure I thought must be Lizzie put a hand up. We were nearly to the shack; I could see through the stumpy wooden pilings beneath it to the moonlit water beyond.
The hand went down again. “I just thought I might’ve seen something move,” a familiar voice murmured.
It was her; I let my breath out. Lizzie scrambled past me up the exposed rocks at the top of the beach, and from there scampered nimbly onto the shack’s narrow wooden porch.
“This isn’t a building, it’s a heap of driftwood,” Hudson grumbled, then followed Lizzie’s example. But Ellie stayed back on the beach with me.
“What’s wrong?” She bent to me but I turned away, not wanting her to see my face.
“Hudson’s right,” I said bleakly. “Ephraim’s not here. This is a fool’s errand.”
She stood up straight. “We don’t know that,” she insisted, and grabbed my shoulders until I had to look at her.
“We don’t know that at all,” she repeated, urging me along until the others could take my hands and haul me up beside them.
But now that we were here, I knew I’d fallen for wishful thinking, no real evidence at all, and the truth was that I was afraid to go in and have that terrible truth proven to me.
But the shack’s open door beckoned darkly to me, and when I balked, Ellie muscled me toward it.
“We came to find out, and we’re going to,” she said. The smell of damp ashes in a cold woodstove drifted from inside, the smell of nobody home.
Ellie’s flashlight beam bounced around the tiny, cluttered interior, picking out a teacup here, a broken lobster trap there. On the floor a small object, not sun-bleached or sand-smoothed.
I picked it up. “Ellie?” It was a kazoo. A familiar kazoo.
She peered at the thing in my hand. It was Ephraim’s toy musical instrument.
So he was here, I thought, buoyed for a moment by sudden, wild hope. But . . .
But where is he now? A cold feeling squirmed in my gut and curled a tentacle around my spine and squeezed.
A shout cut the shack’s ominous stillness; we rushed out to the porch where Hudson pointed at the water.
“What the hell is that?”
I looked, but by now I was nearly weeping again with misery and self-blame. I’d been so sure of myself, but—
“Hey.” The tears shut off suddenly as my mouth fell open and the word dropped out of it. The tide had receded more since we’d arrived, and now where only flat water had been something big and dark stuck up from beneath the water’s surface.
Lizzie pointed her flashlight at the thing. “What the . . . ?”
Ellie stared, too, but she knew what it was, I could tell by the look on her face. Maybe she’d even expected this.
“It’s the barge,” she said, and as the tide receded even more it was clear that she was right. The rusty old hulk emerged slowly but surely as the water receded: first the wheelhouse, then the sagging rail, finally the deck.
The sound of the water draining from the vessel froze my heart; if Ephraim was here anywhere, it had to be in there. The barge had been submerged . . .
But I’d been in it only the day before, and I knew that the raddled old tub still had some watertight compartments.
In fact, I’d been in one of them.
Fifteen
“This is ridiculous,” Hudson groused as we all waded back through cold salt water to that infernal rubber raft. Getting into it meant getting wet again; it took me three tries to hoist my uncooperative backside up over the raft’s rim and then swing my legs in.
“You want to swim out there instead?” Lizzie asked as she steadied herself once more on the raft’s wobbly rim.
She’d thought that she and Hudson could check the barge out all by themselves until I informed them that if they went alone, I would swim there, dammit, and Ellie said so, too.
So we all got in and Lizzie started paddling with the big oar that Ellie had clobbered the shark with. Ahead, the barge’s wheelhouse windows looked like the black, multiple eye of some strange drowned insect.
Lizzie wielded the paddle determinedly. I could see the ladder leading up the side of the barge’s rusting hull, now, because. . .
“Hey,” I said, “that’s reflecting tape.” Inch-wide, bright-red strips of the stuff. It hadn’t been there last time I’d seen the Carrie. “New reflective tape.”
“Huh,” said Ellie thoughtfully, and Hudson and Lizzie seemed to catch on right away, too.
Someone had been here. Maybe, if I was right about parts of the barge still being watertight, they still were.
Lizzie paddled the raft up close to the ladder. Then: “Any of you have a belt? Shoelace, anything?”
But my sneakers were pull-on, Ellie’s, too, and Lizzie and Hudson’s athletic shoes had Velcro fastenings. So—to Hudson’s disgust, but we outvoted him—we all quickly rock-paper-scissored who’d stay with the raft, and Ellie lost.
Or maybe she won, I thought once Lizzie and Hudson had gone ahead, because now it was my turn, and getting onto the barge’s ladder—the raft’s squishy rim had all the stable solidity of your average beanbag chair—was a challenge.
Then at each step the ladder’s rungs sagged warningly, and from all around me came a soft grinding and grating as of metal rivets slowly loosening from the crumbling hull.
Also, a sort of unhappy groaning was coming from somewhere deep in the ruined vessel; no doubt I’d find out later what that was, and at the worst possible moment, too. But for now I hurried to follow a flashlight beam bouncing toward the darkly looming wheelhouse structure.
“Hey, wait up,” I called, and as if in reply, the light vanished.
Annoyed, I stalked after it and at once tripped face first into a snarled mess of wires and cables, where I promptly became entangled. My dropped flashlight rolled away into the darkness; then, flailing around, my hand landed on something small and metallic.
It was another flashlight, not mine. Instead it was a tiny one that someone must’ve lost here very recently; using it, I found a handhold to pull myself up out of the wires, then crept forward once more.
Someone had marked the barge so it would be visible in the dark, then lost a bit of equipment. Whoever it was might even still be aboard.
And Ephraim might be aboard . . . Thinking this, I slid into a crouch and hunkered along in deep shadows, looking for the hatch leading down to the area below the deck.
The paling yellow moon cast my shadow onto a paint-peeling bulkhead where someone a long time ago had stenciled DOWN →. Encouraged, I reached out for the door just as a second shadow popped up beside my own.
A hand seized my shoulder, another gripped a fistful of my hair, and together they shoved me toward the hatchway.
“Eep,” I said. Then, “You don’t have to shove me.” I was, after all, going just where I’d wanted to go.
“Quiet. I’m sorry about this,” said a familiar voice.
