HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (29 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

A day, in itself, is constructed like a lifetime, thought Tom Milliner. Birth is around seven in the morning. From eight to ten is the early years, stumbling, just learning to walk, half-asleep, stained by dreams and otherworldly knowledge, not quite part of the world. Ten until noon was puberty, and at noon you got your meal, your rite of passage — you are now officially part of the day, and it starts to move quickly. Noon to five is the prime of life. The main act. You toil, you travel, or maybe you just stay in the same place, working away. The subset here was the two-to-four-in-the-afternoon section, parallel with the late-twenties to early-forties of life; you had to get over that hump around four, that slog hour, where things were changing, people were changing, taking late meetings, deciding what to do with the rest of their day, making dinner plans. Around six and seven in the evening, you were finally comfortable in your skin, enjoying the fruits of your labor, to some extent, but still working, maybe around the house, doing the dishes, preparing a meal, cleaning out the garage. You might even still be puttering into the evening, but eventually you hung up your hat, you settled in to watch the evening news, to read the paper, to talk with a loved one, until finally, as the evening wore on towards night, with aches and pains in your body, you grew sleepy, you wound down like a toy. Until at the end, the bed claimed you and there you rested, laid out, one hand over your heart, one over your guts, as if protecting the source of the appetites which brought you so much grief, and, if you were lucky, so much joy.

If this was a good analogy, then what was dawn, then? Was dawn some unconscious, preparatory phase for what lay ahead? Like a backstage before the curtain came up, stomach filled with butterflies, heart pounding, pacing back and forth in a world of props and wigs and makeup and other actors exercising their vocal chords?

Everything we did, thought Tom, every play, every machine, every dance, every sport — was a metaphor for life itself.

“Sir? Hello, Tom. Good to have you back.”

It was the nurse, a Latina woman with capable forearms and light-brown eyes the color of creamy coffee. She reached out for him; he noticed her rolled-up white sleeves.

Sanctification
, thought Tom, remembering Sophie and her speech standing on the bed.
What is holy protection
?

The Latina nurse was checking his vitals, some distant part of Tom realized.

“I don’t wear my uniform,” said Tom. “Haven’t for years. Since Steph and Brian left.”

“Mmhmm,” said the nurse as she took his blood pressure. “You had a little accident outside. Do you remember? You’ve had what we call a fugue. You may not be getting enough oxygen.”

“Sheriff let me drive my own vehicle, too. ‘You act like a goddamn PI,’ he said to me.”

He looked at the nurse’s face, but not really her eyes. She was looking at him with pity, like he had gone crazy. He had. He’d decided for himself that he had, for the time being, anyway.

“Let’s let it all go, okay?”

“Whatever you say, honey,” said the nurse. “The doctor will be in soon.”

Honey
, thought Tom.
Babylove.

“Forces at work,” he said distractedly, somewhat to the nurse. “What does that mean to you?”

“It means you need to get some rest,” she said, not without compassion, but with a hint that she needed to get him squared away quickly; she had other things to tend to.

What had Jim meant,
what I should have done a long time ago
? What was he planning? Was he suicidal? What had happened to him — that was, what had
really
happened to him, when he was in-country over there, when the war was almost over, when some of the worst nightmares had still to reveal their gruesome faces?

And where had Maddy gone? Had she ever even been there? Had he dreamt that she’d driven there with him? Everything else?
Honeylove
, he thought. He seemed to have no control — it was all slipping away. Something else was in charge. He hadn’t been able to determine if that was a good thing or not. He just didn’t know.

“Where are the coins?”

“Hmm?”

“Did he arrest those boys?” Tom started to sit up.

“Everything is going to be fine,” said the nurse. She eased him back down. “We’ll look after the young woman and the baby boy. That’s our job, too. You need to get some rest.”

Tom looked at her and then stared at the wall. He watched for a shift in the shadows, a dark streak along the floor, against the wall, perhaps.

I’ll come back
, thought Tom.
I’ll just rest for a moment
.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

I know you
.

Jared stepped out of the vehicle. The ferry plunged, and he had to grab onto the side of the Caprice as a huge fin of water vaulted over the gunwales, crashed, and broke apart into a foaming shower of water.

I know you,
the big trooper had said, when Jared was arrested the night before. Cruickshand had looked right at him then, and seemed to accuse him, not of being guilty of any crime, but of being familiar, as if from a dream.

Jared staggered to the bulkhead, where the engines thrummed. He headed to the bathroom marked “Sailors.” Brushing against the wall for support he reached the steel door and squeezed inside the small room.

He braced himself with both arms, holding himself steady within the narrow walls. There were pipes overhead; the thicker-gauge ones above, and the smaller ones running along the wall behind his head in parallel turns. The bathroom was rounded, making Jared think of a can of sardines. He relieved himself in the urinal.

When he’d finished, he looked in the mirror. There was some soapy residue on it, as though someone had done a careless job of cleaning it, or as if someone had purposely smeared something on it. He could hear the muffled roar of the furious lake outside, and the ferry’s attempt to sluice through it — the sound:
SHUSShhhhhh,
each time one tremendous wave crashed over the decks of the boat.

He looked at his face in the smeared mirror.
I’m sorry, Liz
. He wasn’t coming for her, was he? He’d have to get his revenge on Christopher another way. This was a nightmare he needed to leave behind. But where would he go from here? He could lay a story on some passenger on board, hide out in their car. The big trooper couldn’t check them all, not before they got to the other side. Crazy as he might be, he
was
a state trooper, after all. He could delay the whole ferry if he wanted to, check every car thoroughly. But, of course he wouldn’t do that — he was on the run. They were being chased by the proper authorities, the sane law enforcers.

A knock on the door made Jared jump. The sound reverberated in the steel bathroom. Was it the cop? Had he grown impatient? Had it just been a test, to see if Jared would get out of the car or not, what he would do next?

“Out in a second,” Jared called.

He turned the faucet on. A sign above the small sink read:
Water Not For Drinking
. He decided against splashing it on his face, but pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, wet it, and blotted his eyes and cheeks and nose. Even though it was cold out on the lake, and the rain was icy, it still felt good. It felt normal. He wadded up the towel and chucked it in the trash bin. He left the bathroom.

Jared expected someone to be waiting by the door, but no one was there.

He looked at the Caprice. He steadied himself against the wall. The ferry still heaved and lurched through the water. He thought he could make out the head of the trooper inside his car.

“Sir!”

Jared turned the other direction. Toward the back of the ferry, just past the overhang, in a yellow jacket with the ferry insignia on it, a woman was standing. “You should get back in your car!” she yelled to him over the noise of the engine, the sea, the rain.

Jared nodded, his mind working fast. He made his decision. He went towards her. The ferry vaulted up and landed violently — a big one. Jared crashed against the side of the camper van.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Your car! Get back in your car!”

Something will keep them
, he thought.

He made his way to her, holding out his hand when he could, the symbol of
wait
,
hold on
, and he didn’t dare look back over his shoulder to see if the trooper had heard, or was coming.

She was holding onto a thick rope, with a walkie-talkie in her other hand, Jared saw. He was close to her, now out from underneath the overhang. There were stairs on his right, leading to the upper deck and the small enclosed waiting area. He thought he saw a figure up against the railing, looking down at him. The silvery-gray spray of the rain and the lake made it hard to see. He reached the female ferry worker. He was surprised to find she looked familiar.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He got as close to her as he could, his leg spread wide and his arms out for balance. He could see her clearly now — she was older, late-forties, perhaps, with pock-marked smoker’s skin. She had sparkling, hard eyes.

He had to yell above the cacophony of the water. It ran along the deck, splashing over his feet, soaking his hiking boots. It came up over the prow, it came from the sides. The water seemed to be rising by the second.

“You were at the booth.”

“Yeah?”

The yellow hood flapped about her head, and a wet clump of hair was stuck to her cheek, strands of it between her thin pinkish lips.

“You’ve got to help me.”

“You’ve got to help yourself,” she said, “and stay in your vehicle.”

Jared shook his head. He was drenched, his hair soaked, the curls flattened against his head, his nose dripping.

“I came in with the cop. The state trooper. Remember?”

She scowled at him through the rain and spray.

“I’ve been kidnapped.”

He regretted it a split-second later. It sounded ridiculous.

“Oh?”

She looked at him with the expression of someone who’d heard a lot of bullshit in her days. She seemed to be deciding whether he was drunk or on drugs when her eyes wrenched away from him and she looked to the upper deck — Jared turned his head and followed her gaze.

“Hey!” she called out. There was more than one person standing at the railing now, holding on, seemingly look down at them. “Get back inside!”

She grumbled to herself. Jared only caught snippets. Something about the end of her shift. Last ferry home.

She pulled herself along the rope towards the bottom of the stairs and started up them. She turned back around briefly and called to Jared, “Back in your car, sir, now!”

Jared stood there with that wide-legged stance, and watched her go up. He looked up — now there were three people on the upper deck. He followed her, stumbling left and right with the rocking of the ferry before he got to the stairs and gripped the railing tightly and started climbing up himself. He had to convince her. He had to convince somebody.

Above him, a young man stood in a short trench coat which flapped violently about. The worker gesticulated as she spoke to him. The other two passengers with him wore hoods, and now a fourth seemed to materialize out of nowhere, but Jared imagined that he must have come from inside the waiting area. The ferry worker was trying to usher them back inside.

Jared hauled himself up the steep stairs, mindful not to slip, careful not to look back and see who might be at the bottom now, looking up at him, that face blank and staring.

As he reached the top, the ferry worker managed to get the group of guys corralled back into the waiting area, all but the one in the coat, who was looking right at Jared.

Jared gripped the railing with both hands, blinking water away from his eyes, and looked back at the young man, who was not hanging on to anything. He seemed completed unaffected by the storm.

The ferry worker and the others were inside. Jared saw her still talking to them, yelling at them, maybe. She was waving her arms about, her back to him and this other guy. The ferry rose and fell, and the rain battered down.

“Jared.” The young man didn’t shout, but his voice was clear and audible.

Still, it was strange for Jared to hear his name spoken aloud. It made no sense.

“Who are you?”

“Samuel,” he said.

Jared squinted through the storm at him. “How do you know my name?”

I know you.

“You have to make a decision,” said Samuel, not holding on to anything, unperturbed by the storm.

“About what?”

“I think you know. And I can’t do anything to force you one way or the other.”

“Fucking right, you can’t.” Jared had no idea why he was suddenly so defensive. He had felt, at first, momentarily relieved, but now felt offended, invaded. He thought about going back to the car where Jim was waiting. The big old son-of-a-bitch wasn’t that bad, was he? He was kind of fun, in a way. A little nuts, sure, but you had to be in this fucked-up world. The way he’d plowed through that deer, the way he’d pinned the needle at ninety most of the drive.

“This is important, now, Jared. Be honest with yourself.”

“The fuck’re you talking about?” Jared looked past the young man into the waiting room. He thought about going in and explaining his situation to the ferry woman again. But what good would that do? What could she do, even if she believed him? Would he hide out with her, cling to her leg like a little boy? No, it wasn’t any good. She was busy with this little emo gang now, anyway. Soon they would be docking. She had other things to take care of. Jared wasn’t a coward.

“I’m sorry,” said Samuel. “It’s not a perfect state. Sometimes I can still be wicked. I don’t want to be.”

Jared swallowed and wiped rain from his face, still gripping the railing with his other hand. It dawned on him that he was still hanging on, and he decided to let go. If this guy could stand there like that, so could he.

The young man was watching him. It was unnerving. The ferry came crashing down over another swell and Jared nearly fell and had to grab the railing again.

“It’s almost here,” said Samuel. “They’re not going to be able to stop you on the other side. Get to the detective — he can help you. Make the right choice, Jared. Whether we think we are or not — we’re always choosing one side or the other. There is nothing else.”

“You’re a fucking head case,” said Jared and went back down the stairs, back to Trooper Jim Cruickshand.

He left the kid, Samuel, standing there, his coat tossed by the rain and wind.