A Face at the Window (21 page)

Eyeing Anthony darkly, he fingered his black leather lapel in a suggestive manner. Suggestive of the gun…Anthony noticed that the tape player he'd seen on the table earlier was gone, as was the telescope-ish item whose purpose he'd decided not to pursue.

He had enough on his plate. "No problem," he said hastily. "Good idea with the sound effects," he added, hoping to get Marky into a better mood.

The scream, he meant. It had come out of the little tape machine while Marky was on the phone, the first time. Marky grinned. "Yeah, huh? I thought of that. Got my sister's kid to do it, my niece. Kid screams like you're murderin’ her."

Then he saw Anthony's expression, which Anthony had not been quick enough to hide. "What, you don't think I got a family like anyone else?" Marky asked insultedly " ‘Course I do; everyone's got a family, you moron."

Anthony changed the subject. "So they're gonna trade for the kid? Money, or—?"

Because that had to be it, didn't it? Some kind of a ransom thing. But Marky's eyes narrowed at this, too.

"Hey, Anthony? Why'n't you mind your own freakin’ business? You just go do exactly what the freak I tell you, then you don't have to worry."

"Okay, okay," Anthony replied resentfully. For one thing, he
didn't see why he couldn't know as much as Marky, being as Marky was obviously no genius. And for another, he was already worried.

Very worried. But since the kid still wasn't showing up, he might as well go find the boat; probably she was hiding somewhere like he'd told her and would show up when she realized he'd quit looking, that she was no longer the focus of his attention.

On his way out he heard Marky cursing the broken lamp again, shouting obscenities like he could scare it into doing what he wanted. Which was another thing starting to frost Anthony, the amount of cursing Marky seemed to feel it was necessary to do.

Freaking this, freaking that and the other as if he couldn't think of any other words to use, and so had to rely on that one. Anthony wondered if Marky knew how stupid it made him sound.

Anyway, the boat. Waving a flashlight he'd grabbed out of the cardboard box—Marky scowling but not saying anything about it—Anthony spotted a boatlike shape down on the beach. Making his way to it carefully, because the stones here were slippery and he didn't want to break his neck, he found it tied by a rope looped through an iron ring that was bolted into a boulder.

No lock. Just the knot. Seeing that made him wonder again about how different it must be living here, if you could leave a boat sitting around unlocked. All anybody had to do was untie it.

But that turned out not to be quite as easy as he expected. Time and moisture had compressed the sodden rope until it was as solid as concrete. He had a junky little jackknife in his pocket, though, so he used that to saw away at the rope until he felt frayed ends separating.

The boat was a wooden one, pointy-shaped at the front end, broad at the middle, and flat at the rear, with three wooden seats and a pair of oarlocks. The flat rear end must be so you could mount an engine on it if you wanted, Anthony figured. Along with a large coffee can that he supposed uneasily must be for bailing, the oars and life jackets were in a wooden lean-to nearby on the shore.

He figured out how to get the oars into their oarlocks and did it. But they weren't going to be rowing anywhere tonight, he knew right away, no matter how mad Marky decided to get about it. Only a little ways out from the beach, the water moved violently, racing like a river. Shove that boat in there and you were going where the water wanted to go, nowhere else.

But it would be better to let Marky come to that conclusion himself. Anthony hauled the boat around until the pointed end aimed at the waves, then crouched to examine its flat end. Deep grooves on it said an engine had been clamped to it at some time or another, but no engine had been in the lean-to.

He hoped it was locked up somewhere up at the house, and that they would find it. Then without warning he found himself wondering about the girl he hadn't shot, whether or not she was still alive out there in the woods.

He'd felt bad about even leaving her there, but he hadn't had much choice. Shoot her. Or not shoot her. Those had been his choices, and of the two he wasn't sure now which one had really been better. A cold, salty wind off the water cut through these musings, filling his head with the same scoured-clean sensation that the long-ago raw oyster had given him. But he didn't know now what to do with the feeling any more than he had back then.

Suddenly his foot slipped and the next thing he knew, both feet were in the air; landing hard on his back he felt the air get
smacked out of him with a thudding whoosh while the side of his head connected painfully with the boulder the wooden boat had been tied to.

"Ugh," he said, mostly just to see if he still could. Cold, wet, and hurting, he lay there for a moment gathering his wits and processing what had happened. Then he tried struggling up, discovering that the slippery seaweed all around him made this difficult, too. But at last he managed to crawl.

Amazingly, nothing felt broken. Through the damp, chilly darkness he heard Marky ranting and raving again, up in the house. Anthony couldn't hear the words, only their tone, like an engine revving uncontrollably higher and higher. It meant that once again, Marky was angry about something.

And that he was nuts. Listening, Anthony felt a needle of fear dig into the place in his mind where the oyster memory had been. From the needle's tip came a shining drop of clarity:

Marky really was crazy. Loony tunes. Wackola. And what they were doing here—the girl, the kid, most of all the idea of going out there on that water in a boat equipped with a pair of wooden oars and a couple of life jackets—all that was crazy, too. And there was nothing Anthony could do about it.

He hoped to hell Marky hadn't started looking for the kid. She couldn't get outside; the chain on the only door she could get to without being seen immediately was too high. So if he was methodical about it he would locate her, Anthony felt certain. If Marky found out she was missing, though…well, he'd better get back up there and eliminate that possibility, Anthony decided as he struggled miserably to his knees. But into the midst of this thought came a bright, sharp
crack!

An instant later, the burning pain in his arm told Anthony that he had been shot.

•••

"Come on, it's
only a flesh wound," said Marky.

Anthony wasn't sure how he'd made it back up to the house. His scraped hands suggested that he'd crawled part of the way; a bump on his forehead said he'd fallen at least once.

Marky slapped him hard on the back; the pain nearly made him faint. "See? Hardly even any blood," Marky said cheerfully.

The telescope-type thing was a telescopic sight, Anthony realized now; an eyepiece, like, for a handgun. You held it up to your eye with one hand, the gun with the other.

The living room smelled of fireworks. Anthony guessed Marky must've been trying the thing out.

On Anthony. Or for the hell of it. Or maybe Marky'd shot him by accident, never used the eyepiece at all.

Whatever. "Freakin’ bullet went right through you," Marky said. "Lucky you, it'll heal by itself."

Yeah, lucky.
Anthony glanced down at the small, purplish hole in his upper arm, like a little mouth. Or an eye, winking slyly at him, sending a wave of nausea through him.

He didn't feel lucky. He didn't think the bullet had gone all the way through, either; if it had, where was the hole that it had come out of?

"Here, lemme tie a bandage around it for you, you'll be fine in no time," said Marky, yanking on a strip of bedsheet he'd torn up for the purpose.

"Right. Now you're a first-aid expert," said Anthony through clenched teeth. He could still leave here. He could get in the car and…

"Why'd you have to shoot the gun off, anyway? You already broke the window, why d'you have to—ouch." He took a
shuddering breath and held it, as Marky finished tying the bandage, Marky's face gone suddenly as hard as stone.

"Jesus. That hurts," Anthony said, inspecting the strip of cloth. Blood seeped through it already.

"Yeah, it hurts. Big deal, you freakin’ baby. Ask me any more of your stupid freakin’ questions," Marky said, "I'll make all your pains go away, shoot you through the freakin’ head. You got that, you little punk? Right. Through. The head."

On the
word punk,
spit drops flew out of Marky's mouth. He flicked Anthony's skull hard with his fingers.

"Do you? Get it?" He shoved Anthony in his wounded arm.

"Y-yes," Anthony replied, staggering partly from the roaring pain and partly from the blackness that kept threatening to close in over his head. "G-got it."

If he left, Marky would find him. Marky would catch up with him sooner or later, or the guy who'd hired them would. And what happened after that wouldn't be good.

Marky turned away. "Now go get the freakin’ kid. We haven't got much time, we're already running late. It's your own fault," he added petulantly "If you'd left her out where I could get her ready, none of this would've happened."

So that was it. Marky had been searching, and he hadn't been able to find the kid, either.
Hide,
Anthony had told her, to keep her from driving Marky any more crazy than he already was.

And she had. She'd done it real well. But that might've been a mistake, he realized now.

The hiding part. Not the crazy part.

Standing in the
kitchen at a few minutes to midnight, Jake tried washing the dirty dishes still sitting in the sink, gave up after only a few cups had been rinsed.
That scream…

For the hundredth time she banished the sound from her head. But it came back; it was in the water running over her hands, the night outside. It was in each breath she dragged in and forced out once more, only to have to do it again.

She threw the sponge down, cranked the faucet off. Without even the dogs here, the house was incredibly silent, their steady breathing—her usual remedy for nighttime worry—now painfully absent. She let herself look at the clock on the kitchen mantel again, found that the minute hand had moved only a fraction since the last time she'd checked.

Four o'clock. You cant be there until…
Three whole hours, or better yet, three and a half, would have to pass before she could take any useful action. Until then, she had to stay clearheaded, keep her courage up, and most of all, stay silent.

Because if she didn't do this right, if she messed anything up or she broke down and told someone…Her cell phone lay on the kitchen table. The urge to pick it up and call someone on it was nearly overwhelming. Without looking at it again she snatched it up, dropped it into her sweater pocket, and left the room, shaky as someone newly recovering from a serious illness.

In the parlor she paused, pressing her fingertips to her lips. Somehow these next few hours must pass, and at the end of them she had to be focused, purposeful, and calm. And although it felt absolutely foolish, irrelevant, and out-of-this-world silly, there was really only one way to accomplish that.

Straightening, she regarded the fireplace mantel. Andirons and a set of fire irons stood on the hearth; these she moved from their places into the hall, setting them on a pad of newspapers to keep the soot off the carpet.

Careful, competent, step-by-step: In this way, she knew, she might manage to keep her mind working competently, too, even though everything in her shrieked insistently—overwhelmingly,
almost—that what she really ought to do was panic, fully and irretrievably.

She clipped a work lamp to the mantel's thin top board and by its good, strong light examined the repair job she hoped would rescue her state of mind. Somewhere in the back of her head that child's scream replayed itself; grimly, she let it, because right now there wasn't a single thing she could do about it.

Nothing but wait…and work. From her toolbox she selected a razor knife and with it began carving away the loose paint and splinters from in and around the deep, uneven gouge in the mantel trim; painting the ceiling in here a few weeks earlier, she'd swung the stepladder around clumsily and taken the ragged chunk out of the old wood.

The fix was much like patching up Hoke Sturdevant's canoe, only in the case of an architectural repair like this one, it was a multiple-step job; now, with the flaked paint chips and other loose material cut out and the ragged gouge trimmed clean with the razor knife, she spread more newspaper sheets on the hearth to protect it, then pried open the half-pint tin of architectural primer with the tip of a flat-headed screwdriver.

Around her, the old house creaked and sighed, shifting and settling, expanding a little with the warmth of the daytime and shrinking with the chill of night. She used a cheap, disposable brush to paint the raw wound in the wood—it was, she reflected, the first time in almost two centuries that wood had been out from under a coat of paint—to swab the clear liquid primer on.

Otherwise the repair would look good at first but eventually it would fall out. And she meant this to be a permanent fix.
Let dry,
the instructions on the primer tin said.

Nuts to that,
she thought, and went upstairs past the clock in the hall, its white face sneering, for the hair dryer. Back in the parlor she set the dryer's handle into a coffee can half full of pebbles
so it wouldn't fall over, then set the can on the top step of the stepladder. Twelve thirty, twelve thirty-five…

With the dryer aimed at the repair, she set the heating element to Cool and the power to Low and turned the thing on.

The elegant fireplace trim was original to the house, like the medallions in the door trim and the carved wooden baseboards. As she left the dryer to do its work, she noted distantly that her heart's frantic thudding had eased, even though actually doing the tasks one by one instead of running screaming from them had taken all the restraint she possessed.

Twelve forty-five. One o'clock. Under the rush of lukewarm forced air, the epoxy primer dried swiftly while she spent the interval selecting her clothes—warmer sweater, thick corduroy dungarees, heavy socks, and her good pair of sturdy hiking boots—and putting them on.