They had once been three. Now because of her there were only two. Soon, however, he intended that there would be only one left in the game.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
IT HAD BEEN A LONG AND STRESSFUL DAY, AND JESSIE, physically and mentally tired, slept more soundly than she intended once she had fretted herself to sleep with the unanswered questions that kept running through her mind. More than half asleep and groggy, she had no idea what had roused her sometime very late in the dark of what had been Don and Sandra’s small bedroom. She lay facedown, eyes shut, listening without moving in the snug warmth of her sleeping bag.
She remembered that as she had drifted off she had heard Don quietly leave the common room, where he had evidently been unable to sleep, and go outside, closing the kitchen door behind him. Poor Don. It was evident that he sincerely cared for Sandra and she for him. They made a nice couple. It had to be terribly frustrating for him to find himself more or less at a dead end in terms of finding Sandra or learning what had happened to her, particularly with no way to contact anyone who could help mount a more extended search. Hearing him go out she had been tempted to go join him so he wouldn’t be alone with his dark worries and speculations, but sleep had swallowed her while she was still wondering if he would welcome company, or not.
She had a feeling that she had almost subconsciously heard other stirrings during that period of sleep, but couldn’t remember for sure and had no idea who or what had made them—Don, Karen, someone else?
She was considering going to see if Karen was still in her bed when, awake and listening in the dark, she heard someone bump a chair that moved with a small screech on the tile floor of the common room.
Probably Don coming back inside,
she told herself, wondering what time it was. She could understand why he couldn’t sleep for worrying. Sandra’s absence disturbed her too. The most reasonable and discouraging answer was that she had somehow fallen into the sea and drowned, only to be swept away in the tide as it moved through the sound. The sinking of the Seawolf made it impossible to search the waters around the island.
Jessie thought again of the cocaine on the floor of the cooler. Happening within hours, it seemed that somehow it must all be connected—but how? With the Seawolf in her moorage, out of sight below the platform, there was no way of knowing when she had been sunk—or who had sunk her, for that matter—if it had not happened by accident somehow, which was a slim possibility. But a purposeful sinking must have been done by some member of the work crew. No, she decided, that wasn’t the only possibility. Tim, the dead man at the other end of the island, could have accomplished it before being killed, whenever that had been, the night before. But why would he or any other person have sabotaged Jim’s boat? There had to be a reason someone, part of the crew or not, wanted them to be stuck on the island without communication or possibility of escape. Why? And who . . .
There was suddenly another screech of the chair moving, then a muffled human sound from the common room—the sort of
hm-m
that is made with lips closed.
Hit his toe on it,
Jessie thought.
Whitney sighed and turned over in her sleep, obscuring another small sound of motion in the common room.
Jessie rolled over and sat up in bed, listening intently. Something was going on out there with someone besides Don, for she could now hear the murmur of voices.
Well . . . as long as I’m awake anyway,
she told herself, unzipped her sleeping bag, and swung her legs over the side of the bed onto the cool floor.
Quietly barefoot, she padded to the door and peered through the crack she had left open into the hallway. It was very dark, but as the beacon swept around in the tower overhead it cast enough vague secondary light through a rectangular kitchen window to make silhouettes of two figures coming toward her. She stood still and watched as the nearest figure opened the door to the stairway that led to the basement and disappeared through it, followed by the second person, and the door closed behind them. She thought the first had been Don, but the open door had concealed, and kept her from identifying, the second. Maybe it had been Curt, she decided. Hearing Don moving overhead, he must have invited him down to the basement to talk where their voices wouldn’t wake those sleeping upstairs. If so, it was thoughtful of him to keep the bartender company. Nice guy, Curt, if a bit quiet and watchful.
Without further thought Jessie opened the door, slipped across to the door to Karen’s room, and opened it as well.
Dummy!
she told herself, realizing that without her flashlight she couldn’t see if Karen was still there or not. Careful not to stub her own toes on the bed legs or Karen’s suitcase, she crossed the room and stood still and silent, holding her breath to listen for that of the supposedly sleeping woman. Not a sound. With care, she laid a hand very lightly on the woman’s bed and found nothing but a jumble of blanket and sheet. The bed was empty. Karen had clearly once again abandoned sleep to roam the night.
Hurrying back to her room, Jessie yanked on her jeans, crammed her feet into socks and running shoes, grabbed her jacket, a flashlight, and her daypack before starting out the door.
“Hey,” Whitney said in a half-awake voice from her bed across the room. “Where ya goin’?”
“To see where Karen’s gone,” Jessie told her. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be back shortly.”
“N-kay,” muttered Whitney, and Jessie heard her turn over and snuggle down again. “Have a good time.”
A good time? Jessie questioned that as she closed the door behind her and headed down the hall to the kitchen door, willing to bet she wouldn’t find Karen on the helipad this time, or inclined to make time pleasant. Leaving the flashlight off so as not to spoil her night vision, relying on the limited amount of ambient light from the tower, she stepped outside and closed the door behind her, heading for the helipad. Might as well start there.
As expected, it was empty. So where the hell had the woman gone this time? Remembering her reaction to the dead man, she doubted that Karen would go anywhere near him and would instead probably stay somewhere on this north end. Maybe she had gone downstairs to be with Curt and Don, who were obviously awake. It was worth a look.
Heading for the stairway that led to the lower platform, she heard a voice and stopped halfway down to listen, but heard only silence for a moment or two.
There was a sudden, half-familiar-sounding clank, as if someone had set down something quite heavy, a metal tool or piece of equipment, and the voice continued, moving away from her now.
Once again she started quietly down the stairs, listening as she went, her running shoes making almost no sound on the cement steps.
Whoever was speaking turned and came toward her like a walking shadow in the dark and she realized that it was Curt’s voice she was hearing. As if he were holding a low-toned conversation with someone, there were pauses between his sentences. But she could not determine what he was saying, and even listening intently she could not hear a response in those pauses. Maybe Don was answering from inside the basement, out of audible range. But who was Curt talking to?
As he approached some of his words became audible.
“. . . told you. Yesterday morning . . . take care of . . . the tank.”
As he neared the stairs Jessie caught a whole sentence or two.
“Yes—all four of them—the two couples. I’m going back for the others now.”
What the hell was he talking about?
As he came closer, Jessie, astonished and confused by what she had heard, knew there was no time to figure it out, or to go back up the stairs without revealing her presence. She flattened herself into the deep shadow of the wall and stood still, scarcely breathing, expecting him to round the corner and confront her at any second. But he unexpectedly turned back and walked away again, his conversation fading into indistinct mutters with a few discernable words.
“. . . the musher woman, and . . . Yeah . . . her too . . .”
Holding her position like a statue against the wall she immediately realized two disturbing things from what she had just heard. He was talking to someone
on a cell phone,
and
she
had to be the “musher woman” to whom he had referred.
Turning, she went swiftly and silently, two at a time, back up the stairs, started to go into the lighthouse, but hesitated, then altered that intention. His words lingered unpleasantly in her memory, calling to mind a dead man on the other end of the island that someone had “taken care of.” Maybe it hadn’t been Karen, as she had suspected. And where was the once again missing Karen? Had Curt “taken care of” her too? Who else? He had mentioned two couples. That had to be Don and Sandra, Laurie and Jim—the only couples in the group. What had he done with them?
It all spun confusingly in her mind. But one thing she did know for certain. Avoiding him was the most important thing she could do at the moment.
The lighthouse was a box of walls within which she did not want to be trapped. If he came up the outside stairs behind her he would block the kitchen door, leaving only the interior stair to the basement for escape. If he elected to use the interior stair from the basement to the hallway, she might be able to get out the kitchen door, but only if she were not in the bedroom beyond it where Whitney was sleeping, totally unprepared for confrontation and needing to be warned. Could she get in and out fast enough to wake and alert her? It was probably not worth trying, knowing she would wake groggily and want some kind of explanation that would take too much precious time given the situation.
And there was Aaron, who must be asleep and unknowing. There was no chance she was going up that narrow winding stairway in the tower—an absolute trap with no possible exit.
One thing she could do. Stepping quickly into the kitchen, listening closely for any sound that would warn her of anyone’s approach, she opened the freezer and felt around for the handgun Jim had found in Karen’s suitcase. Hard, cold packages of meat and vegetables were all that met her searching fingers. The handgun was gone.
The scuff and sound of feet coming up the interior staircase decided her next move. Closing the freezer lid quietly, she slipped back out into the dark through the kitchen door she had left open, taking care to shut it as soundlessly as possible behind her.
Outside it was, as before, somewhat lighter, but not by much.
If he was coming up the interior stairs, she could use the outside ones. Quickly, quietly, she went down them to the concrete platform and across it past the basement doors, one of them half open to darkness inside. Between the lighthouse and the carpenter shop, in the dim reflection of starlight on water and from the overhead beacon she could make out the end of the wooden steps that led up to the trail through the woods.
Glad she had been able to escape, but concerned about the people she had left behind, she went quickly to the steps and quietly up them to the trail. Hurrying along it in the dark, she stumbled twice over the uneven ground—once falling to her knees. In the shelter of the trees, it was so black she couldn’t even make out the trail. Not knowing if she was far enough away from the lighthouse to be out of sight, she risked taking out the small flashlight and directed its beam at the ground, filtering it through her fingers. Speed at this point might be more important than secrecy, and there was a fifty-fifty chance she wouldn’t be the object of a singular search. She went hurriedly on, looking for some way off the path, somewhere to hide and watch.
As she trotted south she remembered another fearful time in the dark woods of an island. Then it had been an island in Kachemak Bay, where she had been trapped with a stalker and an old man who had drowned while trying to escape by boat in the violence of an October storm. She recalled the sickening terror of being hunted like an animal and knowing that she might not make it through the ordeal. But she had, thanks to her own determination and abilities, and Alex and his pilot friend, Caswell. This was different. Alex wasn’t likely to show up here. He was not on the trail of a stalker as he had been back then, but at home thinking she was fine and just having the cell phone problems she had warned him were possible reasons why he might not hear from her and couldn’t reach her.
And Curt evidently had her cell phone, or one of his own, and was using it. Anger burned in her, as she wondered exactly what he had meant about “taking care” of people.
About a third of the way along the trail she stopped, turned out the light and stood looking back toward the lighthouse, listening intently, hoping to hear or see if anyone was following. She saw nothing but the inky blackness, and there was nothing to hear but the waves of the outgoing tide lapping gently against unseen rocks to the east, the soft rustle of a breeze through the brush around her, and its whisper in the trees overhead. As far as she could tell, no one had seen her go or followed her.
Satisfied, she took a deep breath, turned the flashlight back on, and almost cried out in shock at the face that appeared in its light directly in front of her, waiting with a leer of anticipation for her to discover it. Staggering back, she almost dropped the light in the trail, but recovered and held onto it, focusing its beam on the face she had seen.