My mouth brushed Stacey’s hair as I drew her close.
“I know who we’ve been following. It’s Bear Goodale’s sternman, Chris Beckwith. These butts are Swisher Sweets. Beckwith chain-smokes them.”
Now it was her turn to press her lips to my ear. “Are you sure?”
“Not until I see him. But I know he wears boots that match these tracks. He’s been here often from the looks of things. And I think he is here now.”
“Are you saying this Beckwith guy…?”
“Is the one who killed Kendra and Hillary? He’s been around Baker Island a thousand times and probably knows the location of that secret landing, if he didn’t rig that camouflaged mooring ball himself. He’s strong enough to have wrestled the shotgun away from Kendra.”
“But why? He has no connection to the Markhams.”
“No connection we know about yet.”
I reached into my front pocket. “Here, I want you to take this.”
My gift was my Gerber 06 automatic knife. She pushed the button, and the razor-edged blade swung out of the handle. Unlike other knives that have benign uses, the 06 had been designed as a man-killing weapon of war.
“I wish you were giving me a gun.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I need to ask you an important question now. Do you think Clay Markham’s life is in danger?”
“No.”
I had expected her to say yes.
“I asked the question because, if I end up having to shoot Beckwith, the attorney general will want to verify that I acted either in self-defense or to protect the life of a vulnerable person.”
“In that case, yes, I think his life is in danger,” she said. “But so is Beckwith’s. You see Clay as an old man with heart trouble. But he has a lot of muscle mass for someone his age. I wouldn’t underestimate Markham.”
“I guess we’ll have to find out for ourselves, then.”
“Find out what?”
“Which of them is the more dangerous.”
The moonglow caught the sharp edge of the knife in her hand. “You’d better not tell me to wait here.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said honestly. “Just stay a few steps behind me.”
We hunched over as we neared the lip of the quarry and went down on our hands and knees. A yellow light was rising from the flooded pit as if the water itself were generating the sickly luminescence.
On the mainland, there were quarry ponds so deep, with such polluted bottoms, that their lowest reaches were anoxic. Fish could not survive in those depths because the water contained no dissolved oxygen. Nor did man-made objects decay the way they did where bacteria could go about their business. At the bottom of one abyss in Rockland, a diver had discovered a near-perfectly preserved mahogany captain’s desk from the golden age of sail. It sold at auction for ten grand.
Somewhere in the dark spruces, a bird sang a few notes, then went silent. I recognized the tune. It was a parula, a warbler that had no business being awake before dawn.
“Maybe it had a nightmare,” Stacey whispered.
“Can you blame him, living here?”
Flat on our stomachs, we peered over the edge.
The source of the sulfurous glow revealed itself as an ungainly building at the edge of the pond. It seemed to consist of several mismatched structures, hammered together to make one. Some of the sides were newly shingled, others had clapboards that were decades old. Solar panels on the roof powered the machines inside. There were also two propane tanks for days when the fog refused to lift.
High-tech and no-tech, new and old, straight in places and off-kilter in others—Clay Markham’s studio was Frankenstein’s monster as a work of architecture.
Incandescent light streamed out a back window onto a stubby dock facing the mercury-colored water. Other windows faced the land. But Markham had drawn the blinds, and so they appeared to us as orange rectangles. A mud-spattered ATV was parked outside the main door.
I decided to approach the studio from one of its windowless sides. I slipped over the rise and then, with my back bent, jogged down a weedy slope that became progressively soggier. I reached the building without incident, as far as I could tell, followed close behind by Stacey.
I pressed my back to the wall and heard a squish. I felt a slimy object creep down my neck and sent a hand grasping for it down my collar. What I held before my eyes was a spotted slug as long and thick as my index finger. The wall was crawling with slugs.
“Look at them all,” Stacey, the former wildlife biologist, said with hushed excitement. “I’ve never seen so many leopard slugs in one place. Tawny garden and gray garden slugs, too. It must be the humidity.”
I pressed my finger to my lips. It tasted of slug.
I listened while Stacey examined the creepy-crawlies.
“Do you hear voices inside?” I asked.
“No.”
“I want you to stay here while I take a peek.”
I glanced around the edge of the building and saw nothing to give me pause. Keeping my head ducked, I turned the corner and slunk along the clapboards until I was inches from the casement of the first window. I saw a sliver of light around the blind, almost like a white frame. The illuminated crack wasn’t wide enough for me to see through, alas.
Then I heard it: a murmur of voices.
I had no choice but to press on to the next window. It would bring me closer to the room where the people were talking. I would risk being heard myself.
This time, I found that the blind had not been fully drawn. There was a crack no wider than an inch above the sill. I tilted my head sideways.
Whatever I had expected to see, it wasn’t this. Clay Markham sat at the end of a long sofa. Chris Beckwith lay, like a child on the verge of drifting off to sleep, with his head in the photographer’s lap. Clay was stroking his tuft of blond hair and gazing down at the man’s ruined face with an expression I could only describe as affectionate.
“It’ll pass,” I heard Markham say consolingly. “You’ll answer their questions, and it’ll be all over.”
“It won’t be over in my head.”
“You can master your memories, Christopher.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your brain has the power to obscure your past. Think of it like writing over something on a piece of paper. You keep doing it until there’s no trace of what was there before.”
“I can never understand you, Clay. Your mind is so…”
“We’ll do it together,” said Markham soothingly. “Say it for me. ‘I was never there. I was never there.’”
A tear ran down Beckwith’s scarred cheek. “I was never there.”
“Keep repeating those words, and one day, I promise you, it’ll be the truth. No one will be able to convince you otherwise.”
Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Stacey creeping toward me. She had been right about Markham. She had seen through the gentility in which the fiend cloaked himself.
Absently, I took hold of the sill to help myself to my feet. It was a dumb move. The rotten wood crumbled in my fingers.
“What’s that?” I heard Beckwith say.
I rushed to the nearest door and, not knowing if it was locked or not, announced myself, “Police! Don’t move!”
I kicked the knob, the bolt gave way, and the door broke apart.
Both Markham and Beckwith had jumped to their feet. I sighted my Beretta on the sternman’s center mass: the area around his heart and lungs where a bullet strike would be fatal.
“On your knees, Beckwith,” I said. “Hands on top of your head.”
Markham gathered himself to his full height and stepped in front of the other man, color rising to his cheeks. His furor was almost demonic to behold.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he huffed. “What the fuck is the meaning of this?”
“Markham, stay where you are!”
The photographer refused to comply with my command. Instead, he continued to advance, blocking my shot. “How dare you! You have no fucking right to be here!”
His smooth accent was gone. His fine manners were gone.
“Markham!”
But it was too late. Beckwith lunged for a walking stick leaning against the wall.
I sidestepped the photographer. “Drop it, Beckwith!”
Markham made a lunge for my left arm. He didn’t have the strength to wrestle me, but I was forced to abandon the two-handed grip on my Beretta. I lifted my elbow to ward off the old man and caught him in the face with my forearm. The blow to his jaw sent him spinning. He dropped hard to the floor.
Seeing Markham collapse, Beckwith let out a snarl and hurled the cane at my head. I had a split second to raise my arm. The black stick hit me squarely on the wrist. The wood was heavier than it looked. The pain went all the way to the bone.
Before I could take aim again, Beckwith darted through an open door behind him.
Stacey crouched over the prone form of Clay Markham. The knife lay in the doorway where she’d dropped it. Her shoulders blocked my view, but I heard wheezing coming from the photographer and got a glimpse of his face, as red now as a balloon.
“I think he’s having a heart attack,” she said.
From farther in the building came the sounds of doors flying open, sometimes with splintering force.
Is there a firearm in the studio? Is Beckwith making for it?
“I’m going after him.”
“I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this!” The anguish in Stacey’s voice sounded as if she were in excruciating physical pain.
“Stacey?”
“Go, Mike!”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to save his miserable life.”
She leaned over Clay Markham’s rib cage to begin a series of chest compressions.