She could neither run nor hide. Even there, even in a place where she'd thought there was nothing left TO lose, the darkness had found her. The darkness had found something to take, found a way in, found Gaffer.
Dropping the gull back into her pocket, beads of blood welled from the two small holes. And all she'd had was Gaffer.
She hadn't realized.
From the mouth of the alleyway, Maggie watched people handle the tarp-wrapped shape that had only a little while ago breathed and walked and been a part of those docks, that life, her life.
Now what was she supposed to do? How did she make things right now?
The manager and his friend sifted back to the outskirts, near the steps leading up onto the back plant platform. "Who the hell could Gaffer have pissed off enough to do something like that?" someone behind her asked. Around her the same question was asked in a dozen voices and variations. Nobody protested the dead man's worth. There was no innocence around the water. In place of surprise was only a rueful indignation.
Gaffer. It wasn't even his name. She didn't know what his real name was. Odds were nobody did. He'd picked the name Gaffer for himself, after the steel spike on a long wooden handle used to bring larger fish aboard, or secure them when someone was removing a hook. A gaff. Something handy to have around. A foolish name that helped make him invisible.
She'd only met him because the kid she'd stuck up for once or twice had turned on her when she'd tracked him down to give him a message about a court date. Because for one brief and intense moment Danny had intended to brain her with a chair. That was the only reason she'd met Gaffer. He'd been there. He'd - interfered - with the boy's temper tantrum.
And with her.
She didn't belong there. She shouldn't have BEEN there. This shouldn't have happened. Not to him. Not to her. Not to them.
The rescue people steered the wheeled stretcher up the dock. A state trooper followed. The big man in his impressive gray uniform with the black storm trooper boots didn't seem aware of the pointlessness of his presence when he was way too late to help anything. He just looked relieved as he stepped off the dock back onto solid ground and concerned about the salt water that had splashed those black boots, drying in whitening streaks. Hooking the radio microphone out of his car, he glanced down and frowned before propping his arms on the roof of the gray car and keying the mike.
Less than fifteen feet away, she could hear the static from his car radio as orange jacketed workers went about wrapping up and loading what had been a man into the rescue truck.
"Car eight calling portable twenty-four," he repeated. "Pick up, Ken. I know you've got a portable and I've used twenty-four. You can hear me unless you're someplace you shouldn't be."
The 'rescue' truck made a lumbering three point turn. Her eyes followed it into the alleyway as it left without using either lights or siren. Static and sounds of another voice came from the car and her attention slid back to the big cop.
"I'm supposed to be sitting here all quiet in the dark looking for bad guys," a tenor voice came back. "Not talking on something that looks just like a police radio." There was a static-filled pause into which the man before her failed to leap. "It's your dime, Louis," the disembodied voice pointed out.
"I just thought you'd want to know. I'm down at the Point and they just pulled a body out from under one of the docks... I don't think you need to go looking under any more cars."
Maggie's dark eyes sharpened on the face of the man leaning upon the car's roof. She took a step out of the shadows without realizing. What did finding Gaffer have to do with looking under cars? What did some man named Ken have to do with Gaffer?
Louis broke the silence first, watching the rest of the spectators milling around the end of the dock. "Did you copy that? I thought you'd want to know. I could be wrong, they called him something else, but sure looks like him to me."
This was Gaffer they spoke about. As suddenly as she'd stepped forward, she backed away till rough cement pressed against her arm.
"I copied," came back tersely. "Thanks for the call." A click put period to his words. Louis reached inside and dropped the mike back into its cradle on the dashboard.
Whoever was on the other end of that radio, he had to be a cop. What did a cop have to do with Gaffer?
Steadying herself against the cement wall, Maggie flinched at the sound of sand grating beneath a foot and spun around to see Danny creeping up on her.
Danny - a spoiled child in a man's body who'd set things in motion that others had paid for. She couldn't let herself see him, not right then, not with - It was probably money he was after, another of the interminable and never repaid loans - he had that pathetic, hangdog look preceding his better pitches as he hesitated just out of reach. A man's length away. The length of that tarp covered shape...
Whatever the kid saw in her face made him back away.
Rather than come an inch nearer any of them, kid or cop, she waded through the weedy tangles pouring from the crack between building footing and alleyway. Fighting through thin sharp branches that grabbed at her ankles, she made her way along the alley fringe and out into the night beyond before taking a breath.
Out of the alley - it was just - empty.
Under the floodlights washing over the main street, people lingered around the pier, waiting for the last ferry to arrive. Others clustered around the takeout window of the restaurant across the street. Her sandals whispered on the gritty pavement and the salt laden breeze swirled around them all.
Only hours ago, she'd stood at that takeout window. Only hours ago, she'd taken a break, gone to look around for Gaffer, had her landlady tell her the cottage she rented was up for sale. Only hours ago, she'd been thrown off balance by the thought of losing her cottage. By the thought of losing a PLACE...
If that father and son hadn't happened to be fishing off those farther docks, how much would there have been to find come spring? Enough even to identify?
By spring, she'd have thought he'd just run away. People ran away all the time. Running was in her blood. Her people, whoever they'd been, they had run. At least they'd run away from her. And she had run, for what good it did. It wasn't a big deal. If she'd taken it personally...
Everybody just did what they had to do to feel okay. To feel cared about. To feel or not feel - something.
It was nothing to do with her. The same things would have happened around anyone who'd stood in her place. None of it had been - personal.
If they hadn't found him, she would have thought he, too, had run away. A deeper, harder chill gripped her, stiffening her shoulders inside the gauze shirt. God, she needed a storm. It would take the mother of all storms to get the taste of this out of her mouth.
At the corner where the street turned to follow the bend of the shore, she hesitated. Her cottage lay to her left, four houses past the corner. To her right, across the street, was the narrow channel by which the outer harbor was connected with the sheltered inner pond.
There was a niche in the rocks of the seawall near the beginning of the breachway, where the passage was narrow and the water roiled, part heading inland and part heading back to sea. A puddle of sand had collected in the cup between three boulders, down three feet or so from the parking lot level, and when she had retreated there, she had been invisible. Nobody could have seen her, except for the boats on their way in or out of Point Judith.
And Gaffer.
Like her, he watched. Everything. That was where he'd found her that first time, a while after Danny's introduction. He'd appeared and waited to see if she would object to his presence, reading her like she read her cards.
He'd surprised her, but she had wanted to thank him and there'd been something about him, some impression seized in the instant one of those lean brown hands had clamped onto the chair leg, an impression of a will stronger than any muscle and bone...
Maggie peered off into the twilight, seeing things written in the shadows. More than two years ago, that had been, but it was clear in her mind. She'd recognised something in him. She didn't know what. Or why she'd trusted the instincts that had led her far enough for falling and not far enough for landing anywhere safe. Not that he hadn't warned her. He'd seen her lack of objection and perched on a boulder a few feet away and a foot or two lower than hers, like the gulls he'd compared himself to, and she'd offered him one of her clamcakes and he'd told her to be careful...
That state cop who'd made a call to a faceless voice had a well-fed look. Even for someone intended to be lean and whippy, Gaffer had been too thin, the angle of his jaw too sharp, the bones of his wrists and shoulders too clear even through his shirt, like someone emerging from a prison camp. But something more than an emaciated drifter had looked back at her from those dark eyes and she'd said maybe HE should be careful.
After a startled moment, he'd grinned and she'd seen something else - something dark and intense and aware - and that had been behind them. She'd extended the bag again and after a second, he'd taken one.
Over an hour's time, he'd even eaten most of it, except for the bits he shared with the gulls. And after that, she hadn't gone out onto the wall, or anywhere she was likely to run into him, without having something to share, if only a candy bar. Only after he'd accepted something, would she look at whatever he handed her, whatever he'd spent the day carving...
That might have been part of the problem. To eat, he had to fold up his knife and set aside whatever he worked on and the constant search of his knife for whatever shape lay in the wood, that had been as much Gaffer as the watching.
Just a few weeks ago. Gaffer had handed over a carving of a man in oilers, the chest-high rubber pants worn by most of the men when they worked. No more than three inches high, it had been perfect in every detail, even to the hat drooping around his face and the creases around the eyes and a cut in the rubber boots. The wheel he gripped was modeled from those on the old boats and when she'd tried to hand it back, Gaffer'd shook his head.
He'd given her the first carving the second time he'd found her there. His gesture when she tried to hand it back had startled her, but the sudden stillness cloaking him as she hesitated had told her not to protest.
That had been the first carving she'd taken home and studied and then wrapped in a twist of tissue and stashed under her clothes. Not until third one joined the others had she realized what he intended. The box held all but four pieces of a chess set now. All but four pawns filled the box at the bottom of the wicker trunk holding her clothes. A chess set where fishermen working at different tasks assumed rook and knight and bishop and king roles and likenesses of women mounted on the bows of antique boats tilted upright for the queens and fish stood on curled tails for pawns.
Only a few weeks ago, when he'd given her the second king, she'd asked him if he'd come play chess with her when the set was finished...
He'd been staring off over the water, watching the gulls swooping around an incoming boat. "It's not that bad a life," he had said. "I'd trade eating dead fish for that kind of freedom."
Maggie remembered thinking that seemed to be pretty much what he had done, and remembered not saying it, knowing he would return to her question in his own time. "I don't know. Depends on how things go," he'd said finally. "I'll think about it."
That was the last time she'd talked to him - the last SAFE time.
Maggie backed away as though the seawall were a gateway into chaos. An opening she could feel waiting behind her as she approached her cottage. Only from the edge of what little grass found root in the sand, did she turn and look back to those rocks past the market, seeing that day in the sun and hearing his words again.
Away from the water, it was warmer, steamy still, the green-brined air laden with ozone just below the critical discharge level. She was only a hundred and fifty feet from that corner, a thousand feet from where people still milled around in the mouth of a dark alley. A thousand feet from where whatever iron will had held him together for so long had let go or been ripped away.
Gaffer - balanced on the rocks, coming to meet her - taut, aware, intense....
Gaffer - motionless, touched by strangers, empty - gone. Gone into the night, past her seeing, touching.... It was the last day of summer and Gaffer - she couldn't make herself just go inside. In the quiet, all Maggie heard was the heavy tarp being wrapped around Gaffer. That too, she remembered. More than the waiting and questions, that rubbery sound haunted her.
The sound of choices being taken away.
A sound Russ heard when the russet haired woman came quietly through the open front door of his restaurant somewhere after ten that night.
Shit, he'd actually hoped he'd be wrong.
For the end of the season, there was a fair number of people. Some two dozen people spread out through a room capable of holding three times that number.
For a second, Maggie toyed with backing away. With stepping back into the night, retracing her steps, taking back the tiny carving she'd managed to scoop into her pocket along with a ten dollar bill and her housekey when she'd changed into clean clothes, locking herself up with the emptiness she'd avoided since she could remember...
The table in the back right corner was empty. But before she could start towards it, the man at the end of the bar pushed aside the slips he totaled and spoke.
"What the hell are you doing here?" His voice was such a deep bass, it slid effortlessly under the chatter and music and pinball without disturbing any of them. "The season's over. Its not summer any more."
No. It was the last day of Labor Day weekend, a knife-sharp cutoff date for her summertime routines, like the three or four nights a week she spent at that back table, relieving tourists of their money.
She'd more or less worked for him for more than two years. He was the one who'd told her about the cottage for rent, after she'd worked there for the second weekend in a row and had done one 'reading' after another for five straight hours for the fourth night in a row. Russ was a bull of a man, thick chested and shouldered, running to a paunch and not much of a butt. He didn't look anything like she'd have expected for the owner of the largest tourist bar, but he'd had that place for more than ten years and ran it with an iron fist and hard-eyed business sense.
She was used to him. Occasionally she was aware of liking him in a cold practical way. And the blunt challenge stopped her where she stood.
"Is there a problem?" Maggie turned to regard the owner, unconsciously braced, a sliver of nighttime surrounded by thick yellow air.
"Didn't you hear about Gaffer?"
The dark eyes meeting his sharp bright gaze flickered and then stilled before she simply turned her back on his question. Settling at her regular table, she asked for a soda and took out her cards to begin laying them out in different patterns, waiting for someone's curiosity to draw them closer.
The waitress set a tall glass beside her. She glanced up to thank her and then separating herself from that one too, her eyes slid to the side door.
Russ propped it open on warm nights. Framed in gleaming pine, softly moving air and patient darkness waited outside. Waited for her to give up this odd notion, this extra night, this place she hadn't needed to be. But for what?
Her eyes fell back to the cards. It could have been such a lovely evening. A heedless, perfect summer night bled silently into a different darkness.
Darkness that bit into his very bones. Sitting in a dull black car with its lights and engine off, backed into the end of a fire trail, Ken Stoner tossed the portable radio onto the seat beside him and reached for a cigarette.
His hand shook. The tiny lighter flame dipped and swirled unpredictably. It took two passes to catch. Dropping the lighter on the seat beside him, he studied his outstretched hand for a moment and then splayed it out flat upon his thigh where it looked steady enough.
The red ember of his cigarette flared and dimmed while the blond man peered off through the dark. It had burned almost back to his fingers before he moved again. Lighting a new cigarette from the last, he pitched the butt out towards the road and made a call on the portable radio.
As an afterthought, he made another call before tossing the radio back onto the seat in revulsion. Pitching the cigarette viciously out onto the tarred road, Ken Stoner reached for the keys and the big engine roared into life. The car lunged up onto the road, made the turn back towards town, and then slowed. The speedometer needle fell from sixty-seven, to fifty-eight, to fifty-three before it steadied. It was way too late to hurry now.
Like it was too late for Max to waste time wondering how he'd fucked up this time.
The ocean sure as shit didn't care. A disinterest he found relaxing, in a twisted kind of way. The wind had dropped off and the wooden hulled fishing boat rode the ground swells like the princess she was. The Peggy Sue, an Eastern rigged trawler, was twenty-six hours out of her home port. Lights mounted on the wheelhouse and the mast gleamed off silver pools of fish pouring onto the wet, shifting deck. Only the rumble of her engines pushed back the night, leaving that deck and five men and a tide of dying silver, cupped between dark palms.
The hold was nearly full. In a few hours it would be time to start in. Three months ago, that wouldn't have entered his mind. Now, he felt like a dog who'd lunged towards freedom and hitting the end of his chain, been yanked ass over elbows by the collar around his neck.
Max had really screwed up this time. The kind of screw up he couldn't just walk away from or even run away from. Five years fishing, right in their back yard, five years of hard clean work after twenty years spent running away. Not that he wasn't still running, only not as far and not as fast. And he'd had the misfortune to make a friend.
Milt had needed a partner. Max had liked Milt. And he'd gone and stepped into something too tricky when it was that close, and not far enough in to really help his friend. Half in and half out, doing nothing but harm to everyone.
He should never have retired out of the military. Mindless violence, surviving, that was something he'd been good at. Long fingers with battered knuckles tightened to white-boned tension on the wheel. This wasn't safe. He'd spent too long being good at all the wrong things to go and let someone take a risk on him. If he'd wanted to help a friend, he should have picked up the life he'd dropped twenty years ago.
All he'd have had to do was accept responsibility for running away and destroying his own family. Then, he could have handed Milt something.
Of course, if they happened to stumble over him first - if one of the corporate splinter groups got the notion to protect themselves - they'd crush Milt's embryo boatyard like a bug on their way to polish Max off.
He should have just stayed with the fishing. Little or no time ashore, hard, clean work - it had been the first time he'd found some kind of peace in years. He'd just picked the wrong time, wrong place, wrong boat. He'd had to hook into someone looking ahead, someone he respected, someone who had a need for what he'd been piling up for too long. He'd just had to get hooked into this, far enough to be as much risk as help, far enough to have cut his fishing time in half, far enough in to begin to sweat again, like he was still goddamn nineteen and running for his life.
Bright blue eyes the color of painted water peered out over the sun-bleached waves. When people were pushed, they reached for what they knew best. And what he knew best - Max got the signal and throttled back, slowly ending the tow, aware of what would be happening on deck, the ache in his hands making him ease up. For what he knew best, it was long past too late.
Way too late for all of them, and the worst still to do.
Ken emerged from the bowels of the hospital and looked around him blankly. In the parking lot beyond the lit area by the doors, he slumped back against the cool brick wall, dragging in deep breaths of clean air. In his dark shirt and jeans, he faded into the night. Only his shaggy white-blond hair and the glowing ember of his cigarette betrayed him.
When two more cigarette butts lay beside his feet, ground into smears, he pushed himself away from the wall and climbed back into the car. But the primer black car seemed to have a mind of its own. It headed first out towards the beach and then swung back towards town and the police station, where its driver found one reply and relayed another question. When he came out of the station, the car seemed to remember its earlier goal, heading for the beaches again.
Ten minutes later, after grinding another fragment of tobacco and filter into the graveled parking lot, he pushed the gate open and went along the walk and up the steps to the door of an antique house, waiting without any movement until the door swung open at his knock.
It was a big door and heavy. Hand polished oak, restored to a dark gleam, whose raised and sunken panels toyed with the light from the inner hall. After a handful of words, it swung open far enough for him to enter and then closed behind him.
Going inside was more than Maggie seemed able to do.
Stranded outside her cottage, she was trapped between worlds, unable to move, forward or back. She was exhausted. All she could taste was stale cigarette smoke. She was a hundred and twenty dollars richer, three hours older and more alone than she remembered ever being. Suspended, she hung there in the night, halfway between the shabby little seaside cottage and the car parked on its bed of crushed shells.
There was more to her life than just that place and the last - was it almost three years? Suddenly, she couldn't imagine why she'd been there so long. She hadn't intended to be. She'd only come there -Maggie stopped herself. It didn't matter why she'd come there. She'd been - looking for something - and since she'd never even hoped to have the chance to look, failing just couldn't be that big a deal. She had found something.
And lost something.
There HAD been other places, faces, times. She hadn't always been there. She had money, more than she liked to think of, made in a way bitter to her. There was a full tank of gas in the car parked beside the cottage. She knew just how it would feel, racing down dark roads in the night. Moving towards the rust on green Dodge, she stopped ten feet from the shape looming in the shadows.
She could drive - somewhere. She could DO something, put distance between herself and that place. See something else. BE something else. Be SOMEONE else. Someone complete. Someone with roots, with a before and an after. Who knew what they came from. THAT was what she wanted...
An image of what she wanted walked towards her in the darkness only to dissolve, whisked away by a vagrant breeze. Gaffer, lean and dark, deep - as though a textured past stretched out behind him like some trick that fooled the eye, reduced to one dimension, wrapped in a plastic tarp, carried away by strangers.
The night had already closed seamlessly around his passing, leaving no sign of his having existed.
Except for her pain, and a tiny carved gull and most of a chess set. And the car.
Gaffer had told her about this car when her old one had died. He had found it for her. Told her it was a good deal... Told her it looked worse than it was.
Everybody did what they had to do. It wasn't anything to do with her. That was just the way things were. It wasn't personal. She didn't need to get sucked up into it. Flying down dark roads in that old car, aware only of escape, of surviving - all instinct again and skin awareness... Whatever she was, she would FEEL whole. Separate and cut off from anyone and anything, she would know what was HER because of feeling what was NOT. She wouldn't feel herself thinned and dissolving into others' worlds, others' needs and pains and questions.
She wouldn't be cringing under the night air, as though what had been Gaffer flowed on the night breezes, within reach but for her fear. She wouldn't be stranded in the night, halfway between her cottage and her car, feeling the weight of the keys slowing drawing her hand down to her side.
Maybe she'd run far enough. Tired suddenly, as though her bones held fatigue her brain ignored, she unlocked the porch door and went inside. Maybe they'd both run far enough.
It was a theory that let her lie down after a while. Let her sleep fitfully after a longer while. Even let her take a cup of tea out onto the back step in a mercilessly bright morning, where the sun screamed of a dark shape that would not walk up nighttime streets again - a fact that held her there, trapped, while time pinwheeled past.
A theory collapsing into rubble around her when Lea called out from the porch.