A Face at the Window (10 page)

Silence from her dad, while he decided whether or not to call her on the fib. Then: "All right," he said finally, and hung up just as a third squad car raced by the house. In its wake came Tom Godley in the pickup truck with Wadsworth's Hardware Store stenciled freshly in white on the new, candy-apple red paint.

Tom slowed, leaning toward the passenger-side window when he saw her coming out.

"They've found something," he said.

She had to
get away. And she had to get Lee away, too.

Helen Nevelson lay half on and half off the wide backseat of the old car they'd bundled her into, trying to think through the blinding pain in her head.

And the terror in her heart. They were on Route 1, heading toward the town of Calais and the Canadian border just beyond.

But they couldn't be trying to get out of the country; the border control officer would see her, gagged and tied back here. So they must be going somewhere else, but where?

Lee was still asleep, her hair fanned out over her smooth, pink cheek. Tears leaked from Helen's eyes; she hadn't protected the little girl. She'd tried, but she hadn't. They'd been too strong. And now, unless she thought of a way out of this, something awful was going to happen.

The gag in her mouth had compressed between her teeth so
it wasn't choking her so much, now. But it wasn't slipping off, and neither were the ropes around her ankles and wrists.

The guy behind the wheel hummed a tune to himself over and over.
By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful…

Bastard, Helen thought. Evil, cruel…She hiked herself up painfully so she could see out the front window. Cars went by in the opposite direction, coming from Wal-Mart or the Shop ‘n Save. People on errands, not knowing she was in here screaming at them in her head.

Screaming for help, but there wasn't going to be any, she knew that now. Not unless she did something—and anyway, the best help, her stepfather Jody Pierce always liked to tell her, was the help you gave yourself.

A sob swelled in her chest as she thought of the look she'd always given him when he said things like that. Stupid Jody, boring Jody. Wanting her to do stupid, boring things, like fishing or hunting. Or hiking around in the woods, where he was always full of useless advice, like what to do if you got lost.

Yeah,
she'd thought, slapping at a mosquito or smearing on more greasy sunscreen lotion.
Like that's ever going to happen. Like I'm ever going to be in the woods without you forcing me to go on one of these stupid outings with you.

Like we're ever going to be friends.
Now she'd have given anything to see him again, hear his dumb outdoor safety rules and the routines he made her follow. Such as wearing sturdy shoes or boots instead of sandals when you went out hiking, and right this minute she was barefoot. She hadn't been wearing shoes or socks when these guys burst in, and they wouldn't let her take the time to find some, just started hitting and grabbing.

More tears…God, she was so scared. But then just ahead she saw a cop car coming toward them in the southbound lane.

Coming fast. Quickly she slid sideways behind the driver's
seat. Then she bent her knees up tightly under her chin. If she shoved both feet hard into the back of the front seat, it might slide forward.

The driver guy might lose control and swerve, even if only a little. The cop would see. And then…

The driver guy glanced at her in the rearview. "You wanna die right now? Want me to put a bullet in your freakin’ head?"

The cop car sped past. He might have seen her if she hadn't slid down below window level to get her feet up high enough to kick with.

But she had, so he hadn't. Then: "You ready for later?" the driver guy asked the guy in the passenger seat. His name was Anthony. The driver had said it earlier, dragging the name out sarcastically for some reason she didn't understand.

"You better be getting it straight in your head," the driver went on to his partner. "Wouldn't hurt, you have another look at the map, there. Make sure you remember the road by the thing, the whaddyacallit."

"Promontory," said Anthony distractedly. "They got it marked on the tourist flyer I picked up in the hardware store. And those whirlpool signs lead right to it, that we saw on the way there."

The cliffs, Helen realized; they were talking about the high cliffs back in Eastport at the south end of the island. She knew the area well; it was one of the places the kids went in summer, at night. Boys mostly, but girls, too, when their boyfriends talked them into it. For a while over the summer, Helen had slipped out at night and gone to the cliffs with Tim pretty often.

Once when she'd been there, a guy visiting from Bangor had clipped his belt to the big steel cable that ran to the survey marker on the rocks out in the water, trying to play Spider Man. There'd been a party there just last night, but she hadn't gone.
She'd had to get up early this morning to get ready to take care of Lee, and besides, after hanging out with Tim Barnard for most of the summer she'd had enough beer drinking and pot smoking to last her the rest of her whole life.

Now she wished she'd gone to the party and gotten stupid on booze-laced energy drinks, the big fad now among kids too young to be drinking at all, then stayed in bed this morning pleading a headache instead of doing what she'd promised to do. Maybe then she wouldn't be in this fix.

But she was, so now she lay tied up in the backseat of a speeding car, listening hard in hopes of hearing something else that might help her.

"Yeah, well, make sure you know how to get away from your big fancy word, not just to it," the driver said sourly. "It's the away part we want to be clear on, you dope."

He hadn't liked it that Anthony knew the word "promontory," Helen could tell. He seemed mean like that, as if he enjoyed getting the chance to make somebody else feel bad. Helen didn't know what his name was, and by now she was pretty certain neither one of them meant to give her the chance to find out.

Not that she cared. But she had to try to listen and find out everything about them so she could tell someone, later. Jody, the police…

If there was a later. "How far we gotta go?" the driver demanded. "Jeeze, these rural areas go on freakin’ forever."

"Not far," Anthony said, frowning at the map spread across his knees. "Half a mile, maybe, on the left. Little dirt road; I think we gotta watch for it."

She hiked herself back up. On either side of Route 1 spread rolling fields full of goldenrod and black-eyed Susans. Here and there long driveways led off through fields of wildflowers to the treed hills on one side, or the sparkling bay on the other.

The trees were just barely beginning to turn, red and gold flaming amidst the green leaves. A herd of black-and-white cows stood in the shade of a cedar windbreak; on the mainland the sun still got hot in the daytime, although the nights were already bitter previews of the coming winter.

Half a mile … it passed in the time it took her to realize where they must be going, and then they reached the turn onto the old abandoned logging track that meandered around Money Lake.

The car bottomed out with a huge bang, then bounced through a series of holes and craters while the driver cursed loudly. He didn't slow down, though, as if he were in a hurry to get deeper into the woods.

Lee whimpered fretfully in her sleep. "Freakin’ place," the driver commented as they bumped along.

Nobody maintained this road, which was rarely used by anyone but hunters and, in winter, a few ice fishermen and snow-mobilers. Logging trucks had beaten it into grooves that the weather and an occasional all-terrain vehicle's passage had only deepened.

But once all the logs were cut and hauled off, the trucks had gone, leaving the rough ruined land littered with stumps and piles of dead branches like blackened miniature mountains.

"You do that thing okay, with her car?" the driver guy asked his partner.

Anthony nodded. "Like it said," he replied, angling his head at a spiral notebook on the dashboard. "I don't get why, but—"

"Yours is not to reason why," said driver-guy "Just that you got it where the book said to put it, wiped the prints out of it good and got it covered up enough. But not too much," he added cautioningly

"Yeah. I did all that. That's taken care of," said Anthony.

They're talking about my car,
Helen realized. Putting it somewhere; that must've been what happened during the hour or so she couldn't account for, while she was out cold. Hiding the car, but only partially, because they wanted it to look as if…what?

They bumped through more ruts and potholes. She'd never been on this road with Jody, although in his attempts to befriend her after he married her mother he'd hauled her down just about every other lousy backwoods track in the whole county.

Too wrecked, he'd said of this swamp-pocked, mosquito-ridden acreage. In fifty years, Mother Nature might fix it, but now even the ATVers didn't like wilderness areas this rough. Thin stands of popple and tiny pines pocked the tan soil, leaves yellowing with the end of summer and the pines like baby Christmas trees. Old gray cedar posts bore twists of rusted barbed wire, marking pastures long gone.

No one would be out here. They were taking her here to kill her, and Lee, too, for reasons she would never know, and there would be no one to stop them. No one would know what had happened to them until someday, some hiker or hunter found their bones…

"Jee-sus!" Driver-guy hit the brakes in a sudden panic stop, hurling Helen forward against the front seat. Beside her, Lee slid limply to the floor, her head down and her neck bent so her chin jutted into her chest and her body's weight kept her pinned there.

A string of drool dangled from her lips, which began turning blue. Helen screamed, slamming herself against the front seat and jamming her elbow into it, shrieking against the slimy rag in her mouth.

"Shut her up, will you?" driver-guy demanded, not taking his eyes off the thing in front of the car.

Helen drove the top of her head against the seat back again,
ignoring the driver's implied threat and the agony it cost her. A cut over her eyebrow opened, warm blood trickling from it.

Looking pained, Anthony twisted around and saw the trouble. Hoisting Lee up by the back straps of the blue corduroy overalls she wore, he deposited her on the seat.

The blue went out of her face. "Shut up," Anthony told Helen in a calm, unthreatening tone. But from the look in his dark eyes she knew that even if she obeyed, in the long run it wasn't going to make any difference.

He just didn't want her freaking out again. With her breath still coming in shudders she nodded shakily; he turned away.

Think,
she could hear Jody saying. You get in a tight spot outdoors, you think about it and
do
something.

Don't just sit waiting to get rescued,
he would tell her.

Had told her, about everything from an allergic bee-sting reaction to an overturned canoe. Because nature's a bitch. Not like in the cartoons, cute little talking animals you can reason with and they'll behave right.

Eat or get eaten is nature's motto, Jody had emphasized. Kill or be killed. Remembering, Helen peered out the windshield through a haze of renewed pain. The side of her face where driver-guy had punched her felt as big as a watermelon, and the ache in her jaw was like a hammer that was threatening to burst that melon open.

They'd stopped in a swamp, black water thick with rotting tree stumps bordering both sides of the road, which had narrowed to the width of a single car. Directly in front of them stood the reason that driver-guy had slammed on the brakes: a moose.

A big one, with an enormous antler rack. "Holy Christmas," breathed driver-guy.

It was about six feet high at the shoulder, with big, round, rolling eyes and a massively muscled, rust brown body atop
long, improbably slender legs. Up close like this she could see the hide's coarse texture, ratty-looking from bug bites and from rubbing up against trees because the bites itched.

Those eyes were as big as tennis balls, and from his voice Helen could tell that driver-guy was a little frightened by the animal.
Good,
she thought at him.
I hope you have a heart attack.

"Too bad we didn't bring a shotgun, huh?" he joked, trying to sound unfazed. "Bag ourselves some moose meat."

Rifle, she corrected him mentally; a shotgun would destroy too much of the meat and pollute much of the rest with buckshot. Jody would want to shoot it, too, though, if it were in season. Afterward, he would hang it for a few days to age the meat, then dress it out and butcher it into steaks, chops, and burgers.

All of which she hated, especially the days when the moose carcass dangled practically right outside her own bedroom window, strung up from a tree branch in the yard. Also, moose meat was gamy and tough.
Why can't we go to McDonald's?
she would complain when it appeared on the table, while her mother tut-tutted and Jody sat there, slowly shaking his head at her.

This moose stood calmly, white dripping roots of water grass from the swamp dangling out of the side of his mouth as he slowly pulverized them with his huge yellow teeth. Twitching his tail he brushed away some of the insects pestering his rear end.

The two guys from the city sat silently staring at the moose with their own mouths hanging open, forgetting about Helen and Lee for the moment. It was like the scene from the movie
Jurassic Park,
she thought, where the people in the cars sat waiting for the dinosaurs to spot them, and bust through their windshields to get at them.

She wished the moose would do that. But it wasn't going to. In mating season, the males were irritable and would charge you, and later in the year females would defend their calves.

This one, though, was just munching along placidly. "Honk the damn horn at it," Anthony said impatiently, reaching for the wheel.

Driver-guy slapped his hand. "What're you, nuts? Just wait. Maybe it'll…"