Maggie had to find Gaffer and straighten things out.
She'd had a couple of weeks to calm down and she'd managed not to run away for once, at least not after she freaked and spooked him, and he was -
She didn't know what he was. Alone. Dark and wire-nerved. Intense. Old in some way that had nothing to do with normal time stretching from now to ahead or behind, but time starting from outside and stretching inward, into a place deep and rock-lined and ancient.
A place she recognised. Not that it really mattered. He was just Gaffer and she needed him, needed things to go back to how they had been. Before.
If she hadn't been upset about getting dragged into court on account of the kid she'd stuck up for, none of this would have happened. Things wouldn't have gotten all twisted and awkward and dangerous. She wouldn't have gotten scared, wouldn't have flinched away from him, wouldn't have let old pain bleed through into those mahogany eyes again....
Wrapping her arms around her ribs, Maggie shivered in the slowly creeping shadows between the fishplants. Shadows carrying the chill of blank cinderblock walls on either side of the alley spitting her and the others out at the edge of the docks.
The others. She wasn't the only one caught up by something strange going on. For this, a handful of loners suddenly congealed into a group - some misplaced herd instinct surfacing too late to do anyone any good. Like her regretting her reaction to being stranded in some courtroom, no matter what the question was supposed to be. Like her regretting - all kinds of things.
She'd stayed away from all the places he usually found her while she reasoned it all into numb obedience. And then she'd hung back a bit longer out of shame for being so easily spooked. Now it seemed like she'd been looking for him for days, needing to get things straight, needing to apologize, needing to make things right.
But there WAS no making some things right - Ken had long since given up on that. There was little chance of even making things bearable. Not with the claim she and Greg had on him. The hold she had on him that nothing could loosen - the hold drawing him back time and time again...
For nearly three years he'd gone out to that old house on the beach every couple of weeks. For three years, he'd made sure she was okay, made sure she was still there. Three insane years. And after all that time, Ken Stoner still did not know why he did this to himself. Nothing that had happened had been his fault.
Not the beginning, not the middle and not the ending.
In a spatter of flying gravel, the fair-haired man backed out of the lot without looking behind him and then cut the wheel sharply to continue backing up onto the shoulder till the approaching car passed. That was all he'd need. To back out and sideswipe some unsuspecting tourist in front of her house. THEIR house, he corrected himself savagely.
He didn't even know what the ending was. With open road around him, he stepped hard on the gas and gravel and grass sprayed out behind him as the primer black Chevy screwed down the road, away from the beach. Away from that place. He didn't know why the hell he kept stopping by there, let alone what had happened. God knew SHE wasn't about to tell him...
Late summer sun boiled off the macadam of the old road. Groping around on the seat for his sunglasses, he found them and slid them on, for what good they did. Tinted lenses did not remove the sun, any more than they blocked out the image of a man who was not there.
Nor did running, but Beth had been running for too long to stop. They had ALL run too long. It was too late for any of them. Even as the primer black car screamed down the beach road, folds of ice green cotton swirled around the woman who fled to her gardens.
But not because of her visitor. Beth had been running before he'd turned up again. She'd been working in the front room and the shadows had held no more pain than on any other day, but suddenly the painting she worked on had opened up on her, let her see something else beneath.
That wasn't so bad. That telescoping was something she'd grown accustomed to over the last twenty-odd years. It was just a byproduct of having found her mother in a pool of blood on a sea of white tiles.
Twelve had been an impressionable age, but she had learned to capitalize on that telescoping. She looked at one thing and saw other things beneath and in her paintings, she caught some suggestion of those other layers. Some suggestion that made people willing to pay obscene amounts of money for her paintings.
But this - this had been something new. This had been like what was happening at night, when the telescoping carried her away, carried her to some other place. Somewhere dark and empty, where she lost herself till she suddenly found herself waking, tired and stiff, before a canvas she didn't remember.
This time, it hadn't waited for darkness and whatever she'd seen, or thought she'd seen, had changed again and the second layer had collapsed in turn and folded in on itself again and vertigo had seized her. This was something different. This had only happened over the last couple of weeks and whatever she'd grown used to before, this came without warning and stopped when it chose and any reaction outside of her control terrified her.
Beth slid deeper into the wilderness of the old gardens where the branches grabbed at her and wooden fingers dragged her hair out of its carelessly twisted knot, letting the black curtain unroll around her shoulders, to be dotted by bits of leaves and dusty webs. Framed by its mad tangle and touched by green shade, her face gleamed like rain-washed bone.
When she was frightened, she sought the gardens and she'd been frightened since HE had gone. These visits from Ken - they were just shadows on the wall behind the monkey cage. There wasn't anything to say. There wasn't anything to do. There were only the outlines left from where another had been. There were only walnut burls dark with age and earth browns touching the blue-purple night air and ebony browns like his skin and hair and eyes. Especially his eyes...
A yew, rising from a cloud of old-fashioned nasturtiums, stood watch before a section of split rail oak fence. Ferns and roses surrounded a scruffy blue spruce. Behind lilies, herbs and straw flowers, drifts of grape vines curled over crumbling stone walls. Everywhere, oak or granite, the walls wore slowly down.
Shifted. Depended on plant life to hold the line. The stones slid off one another so slowly, one didn't notice that what had once been a wall had collapsed into so many stones tumbled among the asters...
Like her walls. Behind a sagging door swinging open on roofless walls, she crouched in a corner of a leaf-filled space sacked by wind and rain, unable to call out, unable to defend herself from any who chose to tramp through and defile what remained, while the man who'd just left thought she stood with her shoulder braced against the door, barring him above all others. As though she would close out the only one to perceive the ruins, even if she could.
As though Maggie would turn and walk away from that grim place beside the docks, even if she could.
She could go no closer. Not to the boats. Nor could she leave. It made no difference now why she'd seen the trucks. Why the late afternoon sadness had opened her to what had happened. All she knew was that a nameless 'wrongness' had hung around her as that last tourist had left her rooms, an emptiness so strong it had drawn Maggie out onto the porch.
Nearly five it had been. The breeze had dropped off. The light had taken on the golden clarity of late afternoon. And when the third salt-pocked pickup in as many breaths had passed by, she had known something had happened.
There was a tide to that place. Lord knew she'd had time enough to study it. The one thing fishermen didn't do was walk. Anywhere. Trucks passing like that, one after another - meant something was going on in the heart of the Point. On a one-way street loop, the only way to get from the middle of town to the beginning of town was the long way around. Was past her porch. Those who had been somewhere on the middle of that street were making the loop around and back to the beginning of the boats and plants.
Stepping inside, she slid her sandals on and grabbing up her key, she locked the door behind her and went down the steps.
A ten minute walk took her to the first corner and then down the single main street. From there, she could see trucks coming out of that loop and crossing over to turn onto the tarred road running between two brushy lots dotted with cars and trucks and lobsterpots and abandoned machinery.
Shoving her hands into her skirt pockets, she crossed the street and took the same path. Following the low steel fence separating the road from the inner lots, she picked her way through puddles of smashed glass and wads of car flattened aluminum, while folds of faded cotton tangled around her bare legs, only to discover too late what had drawn them all.
She was cold now because the sun was dropping. Not because she'd seen how much she'd forgotten. Seen how careless she'd let herself be. Seen that she'd allowed the cobweb feeling of safety to thicken around her, collect dust and substance, whisper to her of HIS fears, as though hers had vanished... Seen what she'd found only as it was ripped away as thoroughly as breath had been ripped from whoever waited below.
She should have been sitting on her porch, celebrating the last day of summer. That was where she should have been at the end of the tourist season. But things were different around the water. At the ocean's edge, other boundaries faded. At the ocean's edge, things sucked a person in - like all those passing trucks had sucked her into this.
Maggie told herself she was cold because the temperature had dropped more than ten degrees. Not because noone knew yet who the body was - or had been...
She just wished she believed herself.
Everyone died. She'd felt loss in so many faces, so many questions. If she grew colder each time she saw something doomed, she'd have long since turned to ice. And she wasn't ice yet, was she? She could still feel some things. She could feel a furtive shame for wishing for the king of all storms to break this horrible waiting...
Her driver's license said she was twenty-seven but somewhere inside, part of her was still five years old, wanting to find a single truth, a single answer, the knowledge that gave others the skin she seemed to lack.
Shoving her hands deep in her pockets, Maggie jabbed her finger on something sharp and shivered again,
even before she withdrew her hand and opened it slowly. A coppery taste filled her mouth as she regarded the carving. A tiny seagull, less than an inch and a half across the outspread wings - where had this one come from? How long had it been in her skirt pocket?
She'd watched Gaffer carving enough of them. She supposed he could have handed her one and waved for her to keep it. He must have, since she had one, and she'd already argued this out the first time she'd found it. The thing was - she'd thought she had put it in her jewelry box , but if she had, it wouldn't keep turning up in her pockets...
She was cold because the temperature was dropping. Near ninety all day, it had fallen into the high seventies and six o'clock just passing. More than ten degrees drop in three hours was chilling, regardless of where the drop began or ended. That was why she wrapped her arms around her ribs and fought back shivers.
It had nothing to do with standing around waiting until the scuba divers had examined what one of the tourists' kids had managed to hook into with fishing tackle so ridiculously expensive that the father had paid one of those who hung around the dock ten bucks to dive down under the end of that dock and free the kid's hook. It had nothing to do with what that diver claimed to have found when he surfaced, gasping. It had nothing to do with there being a dead body down under the end of the dock.
Someone had colored outside the lines. Someone had found a single answer. Someone had gotten to freedom.
The air stank of the storm that refused to break. The very light had a bitter greenish tinge like tarnished brass as it poured over the too-quiet group waiting at the end of the dock had that feel to it. Two men sat on Bert's bait barrels. Another dozen men, booted and dungareed, with variously grimy and sloganed tee shirts, swarmed around the end of the dock, as near as they could get without falling in themselves. A handful more clustered around the loading dock on her right. And all of them gripped by horror and the need to know. A hurricane would be about right. Something wild and cataclysmic that would overturn old balances and sort things out right.
Beyond that illuminated fringe, night crouched patiently, reaching out to the twilight edges of the nearest boats, pouring down the steel and wooden flanks into the shadows where the water waited.
She walked along the dock edges on hot nights when she had had trouble sleeping. And on cold nights as well. From shore, from solid land, the waiting water roiling around the hulls had always seemed companionable. She wondered if it had seemed so to whoever had already waited overlong for rescue.
"The diver's come up again." One of the men on the dumpster passed the word.
"Maybe his camera got wet," someone offered sickly. "Or he got over exposed." There was a nervous snicker.
"I wouldn't expose shit down there," a flat, older voice said.
"Not less it was greased up," the plant manager agreed. "Like my crew keeps their hair."
Two swarthy and distinctly Mediterranean looking men grinned and floated a "Fuck-you," his way.
"Loyalty," the man beside the manager said.
More rubber boots clumped down the alley behind her. Maggie took a step sideways and looked only long enough to see who the shape was NOT before her eyes returned to the end of the dock where lines were passed down to the second of the divers.
How long did tanks of air last? What could take all that time? How long could it take two divers to free whoever it was and end this nightmare?
It was the unknown that was so clammily frightening. The waiting while something lurked just past the corner of her eye - that was the true hell. Unless the nameless body they brought up turned out to be someone the waiting people knew. Unless it turned out to be someone she knew. But she would know, wouldn't she? With no solid ground behind her, her inner walls all ripped open by listening to the cards, could this be someone who mattered to her and she not know?
Photographing what lay beneath the water's surface... In the perpetual green twilight beneath the dock, a body would look like fleshy rotting leaves. Like rot with a soul.
There was a thick splashing sound. A jeaned and booted figure watching from the deck of the boat almost beside the tangle on the dock turned and said something to the men perched on the dumpster.
"They're bringing it up," the one on the end relayed. "Don't look like he's wearing oilers."
It was a vote against fishermen and in favor of dock workers. Two of the older men came forward through the others and one of them stopped at the beginning of the dock while the plant manager kept on towards the official cluster.
She WOULD know, wouldn't she? If this were someone who mattered to her? Her impatience vanished suddenly, in fear of her question being answered.
The sun had sunk lower. Shadows were near the beginning of the alley now, twenty or thirty feet away from the sand splattered tar edging the docks. She was no longer eager for the answer to the question and she wasn't the only one. The man a few feet away from her, she thought he was regular crew on a boat tying up near the ferry, was muttering under his breath. "Goddamn tourists. Stinking goddamn clamdiggers..."
The rescue people, two men and a woman, came up the dock and went to the big box-like van parked off to one side of the alley. A metallic snap vibrated down the little alley as the legs of the stretcher dropped and locked into place. The older man left behind snapped a cigarette into the space past the pier. In a moment, one man and the woman returned pushing a stretcher, with the third man in his bright orange jacket carrying a black tarp. Without a sound, like the water itself, the waiting people parted and let them through and closed behind them.
Maggie wrapped her arms around her ribs and looked out past the boats to where the setting sun blazed a golden sheet across the quiet saltpond. More splashes and quietly serious words inaudible except for the tone came from the dock. Around her even the idle chatter had died away. But it was the plant manager who turned away and came back up the dock, speaking to his friend first.
Maggie was only a few feet away from them. She heard him quite clearly.
"Its Gaffer," he said to the other man. Around her, she felt the name sifting back through the others, like the last ripple from a stone flung into a puddle. "Somebody tied him all to hell up to cement blocks down there."
In the reflected light from the setting sun, her dark eyes turned from midnight to moonlight, silvering, going opaque and reflective, before she blinked and took a step backwards only to have every muscle tighten to screaming agony...
Like a child's nightmare, emptiness spread out all around her, her feet on one small fragment of stone, one solid thing in a swirl of nightmare. Nightmare where Gaffer had been taken from her. Nightmare where all that had been turned suddenly to lie. Nightmare where one wrong thing destroyed everything...
Fear, always fear, pushing everything else away... Pushing HIM away...
She swayed on that tiny solid scrap in a swirling nightmare, half drawn to the dark tides sucking around her feet, till one tiny pain found its way through. One single, sharp, pure pain...
In a damp, cool alley, surrounded by strangers, Maggie shivered and pulled her right hand from her skirt pocket, unfolding her fingers to expose where clenching her hand around the thing that should not have been there had driven tiny carved wings deep into her palm.