Wreckage: An Addictive Psychological Thriller Packed with Twists, page 14
I’ve gone no farther than two kicks of a can when I hear shoe heels crunching in the muddy road-gravel behind me. Three or four pairs of feet. Moving as a unit. About ten or twelve yards back. This time there’s no attempt at stealth. My followers want me to hear them.
They’ve been waiting for me outside Jeannie’s. I should have expected this.
I stop. The footsteps stop.
I walk forward again. The footsteps walk forward.
I stop. The footsteps stop.
So that’s the game we’re playing? It’s such a primitive scare tactic, it would almost be laughable... if it weren’t so damned effective. Few fears are more deeply embedded in human DNA than that of being followed in the dark by an unseen enemy.
“Piss off, gentlemen,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant.
No response.
I can’t imagine they would really try to assault me, or worse, right here on this open road, in one of the most populated parts of the island. Even in the pitch dark. If I screamed for help, a dozen people would come running with flashlights. But still.
I walk again. The footsteps follow again.
I stop. They stop.
I take a stutter step just to catch them off guard. Then I peel off at a full sprint. Their flashlights turn on and light my back as the men take up pursuit. When I turn my head to look behind me, their lights go off again.
I grind to a stop in the gravelly dirt. My pursuers stop. They wait patiently in the dark, thirty feet behind me.
I stand there silently for a full minute. Two minutes. Can they hear my heart thumping?
I crouch in the roadway, wait some more.
I’ve got all night, lads.
If I just camp here indefinitely, how long will they stay back? At some point, will they get bored and make a move on me? What if I remain here till sunrise?
Despite my terror, I’m feeling an urge to engage them, to draw them into action and get this over with—whatever this is going to be. But my unarmed state makes that a foolish option. Why have I stepped out without a weapon?
I put on my gamer hat again. If I were a game character, how would I create some advantage in this situation? I almost laugh as I remember an actual puzzle from a game I helped design. I pat the dirt road around me and lay my hand on a nice, egg-sized stone the rain has laid bare. I stand, take my shoes off, and remove my socks. I insert one sock into the other to make a double layer, then drop the rock inside, creating a homemade blackjack. I slide my gritty feet back into my shoes and swing my new weapon around. It whishes, slicing the air.
Dang—this thing could do some serious damage. It’s got a nice reach too.
Suddenly I don't feel quite so vulnerable. I’m guessing my pursuers have weapons of their own, but even so, if they try to come near me, they’re going to have regrets.
“Got your lopper with you tonight?” I call out to them. “Why don’t you bring it over here? I’ve got something for you too.”
No response. No movement.
“Or do you only attack people who are drugged and strapped into chairs?”
Again, nothing.
I turn to start walking, and my foot slips on some more wet rocks. I’ve stumbled upon a cache of excellent throwing stones, loosened by the rain’s erosion. I gather six or eight of them and stuff them into my pockets. If these guys continue to follow me, I’m going to start pelting them with rocks. I can sense their general location well enough that, even in the dark, I’m confident I can score some hits.
I start walking. They start walking.
I stop and turn around. They stop too. I’m about to hurl a rock in their direction when I freeze my arm. They haven’t technically threatened or assaulted me yet. If I injure one of them, I might be guilty of criminal assault. I probably owe them a warning.
“Listen up. If you follow me one more step, I will consider that a threat. And I will defend myself. With rocks. I have a good throwing arm and you will get hurt. If you try to come near me, I’ve got a weapon I will use. With force. Consider yourself warned.”
I turn back toward the road ahead and start walking again. I am gratified to note the men don’t immediately follow. I’ve at least put a hiccup in their confidence.
They start walking again, but farther back now. Good. Still, I warned them not to follow at all. I stop, turn toward them, draw my arm back like a fastball pitcher’s, and throw a rock as hard as I can. It sails in silence, then goes skittering and clacking down the dirt road. I’d better be careful not to bust someone’s window.
No reaction from my pals.
I load another rock into my right hand, an angular one, and go into my windup. This time the rock whistles through the air and thwhacks one of their rain-jacketed bodies.
“Ahh! Shit!” cries a voice. Direct hit.
All at once, three flashlights turn on and the men start chasing me at a gallop. I run. Their lamps light the road for them, enabling them to run full throttle. But they also light the road for me, letting me keep pace ahead of them.
The men chase me till we’re about twenty-five yards from the village, and then, as if on cue, they shut off their lights and melt into the night. Like they never existed.
.....
The upstairs rear hallway of Harbor House is dimly lit by a rechargeable night-light. As I pass the room where Mr. and Mrs. Bean—I probably should learn their real names—are staying, a faint glow illuminates the crack under their door. A laptop or a Kindle in use. For some reason, I take comfort in the presence of my new neighbors. I don’t want to be alone tonight.
I raise my homemade blackjack as I unlock my door with my low-security skeleton key. The room is black. Reflexively, I flip the wall switch, knowing full well the electricity is off till morning. I have never felt more fear of a dark room. I know I left my stalkers outdoors, but still, I feel certain someone is hiding under the bed or behind the door.
My phone is on the dresser, where I left it charging. That is, it should be there.
I cross the room in one bound, grope for the phone, and find it. I quickly locate the flashlight app. It lights the small room like a crypt in a ghost-hunting show.
No one behind the door. No one under the bed. No one under the worktable.
No dead fish anywhere, at least that I can see—or smell.
I jam a wooden chair under the doorknob and allow myself to relax a bit. I take off my jacket and shoes and flop on the bed with my phone. I find a text message from Jeannie: Be safe. A well-intentioned, if utterly non-actionable, sentiment. There’s an earlier text from Miles too: Talked to Jim. We were right. Call me! Right about what? Intriguing, but too late to call.
There’s also a voicemail from Angie. It arrived just minutes ago. This one fills me with unaccountable dread. I tap the “play” arrow.
“Finn? It’s me,” says recorded Angie. She’s drunk. Kind of like saying Yao Ming is tall.
“We need to talk. I don’t understand what’s going on. Why is everybody calling me? Why is everybody so interested in ancient history? What’s going on? Call me.” She mumbles something unintelligible, then says, “You’re a good person, Finn. Don’t let anyone tell you different. You’re a good person. Call me.”
Ange, over and out.
Hmm, strange. Who does she mean by “everybody”? Has she talked to someone besides me? About the accident? About something else from the past? I wonder who and what.
I punch Angie’s number. Might as well get this over with; I know she’s still up. Sodden as a mezcal worm but up. The call rings through and she picks up, but then the line goes dead. A moment later, a return call comes through from her. I slide the answer bar, but again the line goes dead. I try calling her again. Same thing.
The Musqasset phone gods are not going to cooperate tonight. Oh well, I tried. I’m about to fall asleep right there with my clothes on when the phone bloops the arrival of a text-message.
I look at the screen.
A single character. An emoji. Of a dead fish.
Before I can identify who the sender is, the message disappears from the screen. Poof.
My brain can’t handle any more. I shut down.
20
Dreams are so mysterious. Dagnabbit, if only I could unravel the arcane symbolism behind this one: I’m on the ferry to Musqasset. I’ve just sold my parents’ house, and the new owners are scheduled to move in later that day. I suddenly remember that I’ve left three dead bodies in the basement. I buried them years ago and forgot all about them. I need to get back to the house now and move the corpses before the new owners show up.
I lurch from the mattress, gasping for air, my heart jackhammering.
Oddly, it isn’t the dream itself that has awoken me at two forty-five, but rather a blast of mental urgency. Yes, I’ve woken myself up from an anxiety dream with an even more anxious waking concern. My brain is telling me there’s something vital I need to remember from earlier in the evening.
I strip off my jeans and shirt—damp with sweat—as I try to think. What could it be?
It has something to do with an encounter that occurred in the village.
The encounter itself was seemingly insignificant. I stopped at the Mercantile on my way to Jeannie’s, to buy the wine. As I approached the store, I noticed a trio of young men sitting on the covered porch of the closed gift shop next door, trying to stay dry.
“Excuse me, sir?” spoke the tallest of the three from under a hooded rain visor. “My friend T-Bone here is twenty-one,” he said, pointing to one of his buddies, who flashed an insincere grin, all teeth. “Honest to God, but he left his I.D. on the ferry. Right, T? We wondered if you could possibly grab him a twelve-pack of Coors Light.” He held out a twenty and said, “Keep the change?”
Tempted as I was to risk prosecution for a cool $4.71, I declined their business offer and wished them well. And that was that. Finis.
So why is this scene playing insistently in my head, driving me from sleep?
Finally, “Light dawns on Marblehead,” as my mother used to say. Twenty-one!
The reason I can’t remember buying that bottle of scotch for Miles all those years ago is that I didn’t buy it. I wasn’t 21 yet. In college, I was a year younger than my classmates, thanks to an accelerated academic program I was pressed into in high school. I didn’t like to advertise my age difference, but when I graduated from Godwin, I was still only 20. Anytime I’d gone into a liquor store during my student years, I’d been with Miles or some other older friend.
I couldn’t legally buy booze yet, and I couldn’t ask Miles to buy that particular bottle for me, because it was a gift for him. So, I asked someone else to buy it for me.
With a shudder, I remember who that someone was.
.....
A knock on the door yanks me from the sleep of the dead. My phone shows five past eight. I must have crashed heavily when I finally fell asleep again.
“Who is it?” I ask, groping for my makeshift blackjack.
“Me.” Miles.
I throw on last night’s clothes, remove the security chair from beneath the doorknob, and open the door. Miles enters, holding two large coffees from Mary’s Lunch. He sets them on our worktable and sits down as if ready to dig into another day at the office.
“I can’t stay long,” he explains. “Beth’s on the warpath. Her folks are coming for an unplanned visit, as soon as they can get over, and she’s freaking out.” Right, she’s freaking out. “I promised I’d help with the shopping and cooking and housecleaning.”
“You and Beth do your own housecleaning?” Gasping, I pull back in silent-film horror.
“Our help’s not on the island this weekend,” he replies, straight as a board. The human tragedy of it all. “So, listen…” He slaps the table. “I talked to Jim.”
“And?”
“He talked to the Mass police. He confirmed that the cops did find bottle fragments at the scene. Mostly in Goslin’s car—the bottle punched through the windshield as it broke. There were fingerprints on a couple of the shards too”—a muscle in my neck tightens—“but no matches popped up in the database. But listen: the investigators did figure out the make of the scotch by piecing the label together.”
“Holy crap.” It’s exactly what we deduced, but still I’m shocked to hear we were right.
“According to Jim, they tracked down three local sales of those ‘special anniversary’ decanter bottles of Glenmalloch. All three bottles, evidently, were bought with credit or debit cards. They were able to ID the buyers.”
A current of chill hits my blood.
“Here’s what’s weird, though,” he says. “You weren’t one of them.”
“Are you sure?” I’m sure, but I don’t tip my hand.
“Yes, because they talked to all three buyers. Two of them still had the bottle on their shelves. The third guy said he had finished the booze and put the bottle out in the recycling bin the previous week. The police had no reason not to believe him. Plus, he had an alibi for the night of the accident, and his prints didn’t match.”
“Who was this person, this third buyer?”
“Jim didn’t say. Anyway, the bottle angle dried up after that. But obviously the cops didn’t know what we know.”
“Which is...?”
“That at least one other bottle was sold. Somewhere nearby. The one you bought. I wonder why that one didn’t get reported by any store owners.”
I know one very good reason: because I didn’t buy it. But I am not ready to tell Miles that detail just yet, or to remind him I wasn’t 21 in the spring of ‘99. My mind is laser-focused on the almost certain identity of that third buyer and why he told the police the story he did.
“You still don’t remember buying that bottle?” Miles asks.
“No,” I say, which is the truth but not the whole truth. “Did Jim find out anything else?”
“He got some dirt on this Goslin character too. The guy’s more than a sleazebag; he’s an ex-con. Did time at Walpole. Runs with some seriously shady people. And apparently, he had alcohol in his system the night of the accident, but just below the legal limit. He’d also had a run-in with his wife—live-in girlfriend, whatever—twenty minutes before the accident. So, he may have been ‘emotionally impaired’ if not quite drunk enough to blow a point-oh-eight.
“They think he was speeding too,” Miles continues. “And listen to this: the bottle didn’t hit him; it hit the passenger side of the windshield and blew a hole. If he’d been sober and alert, he should have been able to pull the car safely into the breakdown lane. But instead, he freaked and started swerving. And that’s when he smashed into the Abelsens.”
I see what Miles is doing: trying to paint Goslin as partially, if not mostly, responsible for the accident himself. It’s a touching gesture, meant to lessen my guilt. Little does he know, I’m not the one who needs the moral strokes.
“Oh, and something else,” Miles says with an ominous note. “It seems Goslin’s... junk was crushed in the accident. When the steering column got pushed in. That wasn’t in the papers. I don’t know how much repair work the surgeons were able to do, but...”
A wave of queasiness moves from my stomach to my groin.
Miles looks at his watch. “Oh, I’ve got to get going.” He stands, grabs his coffee, and says, “Text me, call me, keep me in the loop. I’ll be in touch later.” And with that, Miles blows out like an island squall.
All-righty, then. Thanks, Miles. I’m surprised, considering what I heard in his recorded chat with Beth, that he is continuing to help me at all. He thinks I’m delusional, so why is he still invested in this thing, or even pretending to be? Maybe Jim’s new info has swayed him?
Whatever his motivation, I wish he could have stuck around this morning. Two heads are better than one. When I work with Miles, all this stuff feels real to me. Like we’re getting somewhere. When I work alone, I feel like a crazy person.
And I’ve just been given a fresh load of crazy-making material to digest here.
I open my coffee lid and fire up the laptop Miles has lent me. As I wait for it to boot, I think about Edgar Goslin. Considering what he lost in the accident, and the kind of guy he seems to be, it’s easy to believe he would have a major ax to grind, even after all these years.
One thing’s for sure, Goslin is the best “lead” we’ve turned up. I need to find out more about him, but I don’t know if Web-surfing can help any further, even if the Wi-Fi cooperates.
Talk to him directly. Yes. Call Goslin under some phony pretext. Try to push his buttons, see what he spills.
To do that, though, I’d need his contact information.
Okay, so that’s a place to start. Maybe I’ll try one of those “people finder” services and see what I can turn up. If I can get on the Internet. Major if.
I give Safari a whirl on the laptop. Still no Wi-Fi. I try my phone’s 3G network. Nothing but a spinning circle.
I lean my chair back, sipping my coffee and staring at the ceiling.
Sitting in my room at Harbor House—alone—is making me feel like a lobster in a trap, just waiting to get pulled up onto someone’s boat. The feeling is more than poetic. I’m getting a strong sense of actually being watched.
I stand and pace around the room, trying to shake it off. No luck. Some people think it’s hokum, this idea that you can feel when you’re being spied on, but ask anyone in the surveillance trades: the sensation of eyes on you is palpable.
I walk over to the window. I feel framed and exposed, but there’s not a soul to be seen in the storm-whipped village below, except a poncho-clad Dorna Caskie collecting bags of recycling from the shops in her electric cart. So why this under-a-lens feeling?
I return to my chair and lean back. That’s when I notice it: a brand-new white plastic smoke detector on the ceiling.
21
Was the smoke detector there when I checked in? I didn’t notice it, but that doesn’t mean much. Across the ceiling is another detector made of yellowed plastic. Why would there be two detectors in one room? One for heat and one for smoke? Nah.
