Boar Island Page 30

  “Let’s hope so,” Heath replied grimly. “We’re here.”

  John had cut power. Under his experienced hands the boat was gliding effortlessly alongside a dock below a large parking lot that served the picturesque downtown area of Bar Harbor. Nimble as his own grandson, John Whitman leapt over the gunwale to snick two yellow lines fast, one at the bow and one near the stern.

  Walt had wanted to be a member of the party. Anna had nixed that. Heath had no doubt the nixing was a waste of breath. What red-blooded young hero wouldn’t want to save the damsel if he got the chance? Walt would be lurking somewhere around the town square. Since he had been unknown—even to her—until the previous day, Heath wasn’t worried his appearance would scare the cybercreep into hiding or precipitous action. In fact, Heath hoped he would disobey Anna. If Heath had her way, the town would be full of young, strong, kind, brave boys in love with her daughter.

  Young, strong, kind, brave, sane boys.

  Were boys who bullied, took sexual advantage, loved pornography, and the shame and subjugation of women, technically insane? Given that society at large behaved in much the same manner, didn’t that make the nasty boys the norm? Was virtue, once its own reward, now a symptom of a mental disease?

  Physical demands chased away the bitter thoughts as, with the help of John and Elizabeth, Heath disembarked and got herself squared away on the pier: hat firmly on head, crutches in hand, tunic over thick waist and legs, feet pointed toward the landing ramp.

  From the low dock, Heath could see that the town was lit up and the parking lot was full, but little else. It wasn’t more than a couple hundred yards—and two ramps—to where she had chosen to plant herself for the duration. Over the past couple of weeks, she’d gotten good with Dem Bones. Two canes were still needed for balance, but her gait was relatively smooth and her endurance far greater than it had been at the start. Still, she didn’t want to use up her strength getting up to city level and through the parking lot, so she waited while John unloaded Robo-butt and Gwen unfolded it.

  Gwen stayed with the boat while John rolled Heath up to the pavement, then halfway down the long parking area. There, he took the wheelchair and left her and Elizabeth standing in the shadow of a Chevy Suburban. He and Gwen would wait with the boat, ready to leave if leaving suddenly became necessary.

  The time was eight fifteen; the sun was low in the west, veiled with clouds, the sky a deep lavender. Heath’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright lights and big city. They had expected some foot traffic at this hour, but the square was packed with bodies. “What in hell…”

  “People are wearing their pajamas!” Elizabeth exclaimed.

  “And bathrobes and slippers,” Heath said. “And I thought I looked silly.”

  For a minute or more they stared at what looked like a combination sleepover and shop-a-thon. “Lookie,” Elizabeth said, pointing east of the parking lot where a lush lawn stretched in a smooth green apron down to the Atlantic. A vinyl sign, hung between two poles, read SEASIDE CINEMA! TONIGHT SHOWING THE PAJAMA GAME. Though it was not yet dark enough to start the movie, blankets were already spread, and pajama- and nightgown-clad moviegoers were lined up buying popcorn and sodas at a snack bar made to look like an old horse-drawn wagon.

  Around the grassy area, the shops had doors open and lights on. Handwritten signs advertising Night Owl Specials, Midnight Snacks, and Pajama Party Sales were stuck on sandwich boards on the sidewalks and taped in windows.

  “Holy shit,” Heath breathed. “Talk about the unexpected.”

  “I bet this is why Creep-O wanted to meet ‘day after tomorrow.’ I wondered about that, but just thought he had a dentist appointment, or date, and wasn’t free to torture people yesterday. I bet he was waiting because there’d be this big crowd today.”

  Heath bet her daughter was right. She bet she wanted to call this whole thing off, run—or walk mechanically—back to the boat, escape to Boar Island, disable the lift so nobody could call it down, and barricade her daughter in the tower.

  Anna was here, she reminded herself, and a beefy ranger named Artie. Walter was surely here somewhere. Elizabeth was wearing a bulletproof vest. She knew not to eat or drink anything given to her by anybody, including waitstaff. She would never be out of Heath’s sight or Anna’s.

  Damn, but Heath wished she knew where Anna was. It took an effort of will not to try to find her in the flannel-and-fleece crowd.

  “Are we ready?” Elizabeth asked. “I feel overdressed.”

  To Heath’s eyes Elizabeth looked beautiful, and as fragile as a butterfly fresh from the cocoon. She wore skinny jeans, tennis shoes—for running, Anna had insisted—and a loose boy’s plaid shirt Walter lent her to disguise the thickening of the vest. Heath gazed at her daughter so long that Elizabeth started to roll her eyes. “Sorry,” Heath said. “You look fine.”

  “Fat,” E said. “Somebody should tell Anna that Kevlar makes you look fat.”

  “Go,” Heath made herself say.

  E walked farther down the parking lot. A few rows before the street, she stopped and hid in the shadow of a pickup truck, the kind that look like they’re on steroids and have never hauled anything heavier than the ego of their owner. Both E and Heath would stay out of sight until twenty minutes of nine. At that time, Heath would make her way across the grassy square and pretend to window-shop in the stores to either side of Cecelia’s Coffee Shop. At ten minutes of nine, Elizabeth would enter the square from the parking lot, walk straight across the center of the lawn where the most light and people were, and take a seat at one of Cecelia’s outdoor tables. If no tables were free, she would stand with her back against the wall of the coffee shop, watching the square, until she was contacted. Artie, the only person other than Walt that they were sure would be a stranger to the cybercreep, would already be in place, seated at an outdoor table absorbed in the American obsession of drinking caffeinated beverages while staring at electronic devices.

  If the creep did contact Elizabeth, and did not attempt anything hostile, both Heath and Artie would photograph him with their devices. Artie and Anna would tail him when he left. No attempt to capture him would be made near Elizabeth. Less dangerous that way.

  If the creep made hostile motions, Artie would take him down.

  Heath ran through this in her mind as her legs were propelled off of the concrete and, with scarcely a hitch, onto the lawn. Canes were a great help. People tended to make way for a wheelchair, not so much for canes, but some. When they didn’t, she batted them gently with the end of the cane, and apologized. Dem Bones was miraculous, but running obstacle courses and doing ballet had yet to be programmed into it.

  Crowds. Dense crowds.

  This bothered Heath more than the time and the place.

  Artie was armed, and licensed to carry concealed weapons when off duty, as was Anna. The density of the crowd made that problematic. A bullet could easily pass through the villain and into two or three innocents before it came to a stop. At the moment, Heath didn’t care if it mowed down all of Pajama Land, as long as E was safe.

  Anna would care, as, Heath presumed, might Artie. Better no guns, she told herself as she maneuvered around a big man with a bushy beard wearing blue footy pajamas and a Red Sox baseball cap. E would be too close to the action; it would be too easy for a bullet to go astray. If the cybercreep had a gun—

  No, Heath told herself firmly. That was not a thought she had allowed herself to entertain for the past forty-eight hours, and she wasn’t going to entertain it now. If the bastard had a gun he wouldn’t need all this meeting business. He could wait outside their house, or E’s school in Boulder, and just blow her away at his convenience: no waiting, no air travel, no coffee date.

  Sweating so profusely her hands were slick on the rubberized handles of the canes, Heath reached the far side of the square where Cecelia’s was located. Twelve o’clock—that was what had been decided so they could tell one another where to look: The green was a clock face,
Cecelia’s was twelve o’clock, the grassy point—now the cinema—was at nine o’clock, the parking lot where she and E entered six o’clock, and the west part of town three o’clock.

  Heath was across the narrow street from the coffee shop at twelve o’clock, the outdoor movie theater at nine o’clock on her left. For a minute or two she stood still, breathing, trying not to sweat, to fit in as a general-issue tourist at a pajamarama. If such a thing existed.

  After a moment she spotted Anna. Had she not seen her in costume before she left Boar, she wouldn’t have recognized her. Munching popcorn, Anna was leaning against a tree at about ten o’clock, ankles crossed. Her long braid was concealed beneath a loose flowing shirt over wide-legged soft palazzo pants. A Greek fisherman’s cap, the cheap kind available in most of the souvenir shops, was pulled low on her forehead. The greatest disguise was the makeup. Anna Pigeon wore red lipstick, smoky eye shadow, and mascara. Beautiful and urban on someone else, it was oddly disturbing on the ranger, rather like seeing false eyelashes on a young Clint Eastwood.

  Anna had to have seen her; Heath looked like the Mayflower, as envisioned by Peter Max, under full sail, but her gaze wandered past and through without a flicker of recognition.

  Encouraged by the sight of her friend, Heath managed the step off the curb and crossed the street to the shops. Artie looked up as she passed. He didn’t recognize her. Heath felt a mild lift of her spirits.

  Facing a children’s bookstore as if she were shopping, she watched the reflection of the front row of cars in the big parking lot at six o’clock appear and disappear as waves of people ebbed and flowed over the green space. She didn’t see Elizabeth until she was halfway across the square, seeming very small in the big shirt and dark, tight jeans. Shoulders slightly hunched, she looked around as she walked, peering into the faces of the people she passed.

  That was okay. Cybercreep would expect Elizabeth to appear frightened. After all, he’d spent weeks carefully fraying every single one of the girl’s nerves. One of these happy people in bunny slippers was feeding on E’s fear at that very moment. Anger, so intense it dimmed her vision, flooded Heath’s entire being.

  Her vision didn’t clear. The world was viewed through a glass dimly. Heath’s head swam; her balance faltered.

  Lights had gone from the windows. Gone from the square.

  Her tenuous vision of her daughter’s reflection had vanished.

  FORTY-THREE

  First the streetlights around the green went dark, then the lights on the storefronts. The sky had faded from lavender to deep blue. The pajama-clad throng melted into amorphous shuffling grays and blacks, an occasional spark of red or green as beams of flashlights startled color from a sleeve or back.

  Sharp pieces of the previous night flickered through Anna’s brain: shadows shifting into ninjas, gun falling from her hand, darkness sucking her down. Dizziness overtook her. Blindly, she reached out for the tree trunk. Coarse bark brought her back to her body; the ancient strength of the tree steadied her.

  Slowly, Anna squatted, carefully set her box of popcorn on the ground, then rose, stepping away from the tree.

  Music began, a loudspeaker playing the Broadway overture to The Pajama Game.

  Specters that had been born on the residue of Rohypnol faded. This was not a flashback, not a vast conspiracy to throw Elizabeth into the dark. The movie was about to start. Simple, prosaic, Pajama Game in pajamas, quaint, colorful, charming, and a huge pain in the ass.

  Irritation burned in the pit of Anna’s stomach. She had not foreseen this. A blind woman should have known that when the movie started the lights would go down. Cybercreep had known it. The people in the square had known it. Anna was the fool. Had she time, she would have cursed herself. Taken by surprise, none of them might have time, especially Elizabeth.

  A chill of hypervigilance shivered through Anna. Cold tingled in her feet and hands and the top of her scalp. Whatever was going to happen would happen now, while people were on the move, while the lights were down and the area still crowded.

  Counting on the invisibility cloak created by her shade tree and the lowered lights, Anna leapt onto a park bench. Her skinned left heel cursed her with a stab of pain. She ignored it. From the higher vantage point, she could see over the milling crowd. Most were drifting toward the lawn in front of the movie screen. A few continued to shop, eat, and talk in the shadows beneath awnings of stores and branches of the maples in the park. Blankets were being shaken and spread. Last purchases were being made at the snack bar.

  Soft, fleecy, plaid stuffed animals in the arms of children and some adults, pillows and blankets in baskets: This was not the stuff of creepiness. Who looked like a sexually perverted bully in footy pajamas? Fuzzy slippers and terry robes could disguise a lot of sinister intent.

  Despite the sudden change in atmosphere, Elizabeth was staying on track, walking a little slower than before but still heading straight—or as straight as she could through the pajama swamp—for Cecelia’s.

  Good girl, Anna thought.

  Keeping E in her peripheral vision, she began searching in ever wider concentric circles out from her goddaughter, automatically discarding the very young, the very old, and families holding hands as parents walked children toward the cinema. A young man, rising and walking in the opposite direction of the crowd, his stride that of a man on a mission, caught her attention. Walter Whitman. He had been sitting on a low stone wall between the grassy movie space and the sea. As she could have predicted, he was making a beeline for Elizabeth. Clearly he, too, had been watching her.

  Heath was in front of the children’s book store beside the coffee shop, her back to the windows. By the panicked way her head bobbed and craned, she had lost sight of her daughter.

  On the west side of the grass, at about two o’clock on their imaginary clock face, a single man wearing khakis, a short-sleeved blue shirt, and sandals with socks stood on the sidewalk. In the dim light, age was hard to guess, but he had a full head of dark hair and stood, hands in pockets, with the slouch of a man in his twenties or thirties.

  Anna punched WM2 into the text line on her cell phone, then hit SEND. Artie, attention torn from his laptop by the change in illumination, turned back to it. Heath took her cell phone from a pocket in her smock and looked down into the pale blue square of light. Then both looked for the white male at two o’clock.

  A shake of the head let Anna know Heath didn’t recognize him, but then she wouldn’t necessarily.

  Artie stayed with WM2. Anna continued her scan. Elizabeth was nearly across the grassy area, about fifty feet from the coffee shop. Two of the tables had been vacated by moviegoers. Once E was seated, she could take out her cell phone, put it on the table, and see the texts. Anna had wanted her to keep her hands free at all times and, when approaching the meeting place, to do nothing that might scare Cybercreep away.

  Three doors down from Cecelia’s, a dumpy woman emerged from an ice cream shop, her head a puff of pink lace in a many-tiered curler cap, her robe a tatty old blue-and-white-striped cotton. Plump doughy hands clutched a large satchel to her chest. By the contours of her figure, Anna guessed it must be filled with Red Hots, Jujubes, Goobers, and other treats one only ate at the movies.

  A stride or two behind Elizabeth, and five yards to her right, a man paralleled E’s path. Paunchy, hair thinning, stoop-shouldered: Anna put him in his early forties. He wore red-and-blue plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a pale blue, zip-front, lightweight jacket. On his feet were hiking boots. His face was unremarkable except for a simian brow that didn’t match the ordinariness of his other features.

  WM//E3, Anna texted. She knew they would understand the white male at three o’clock and hoped they would understand the parallel mark.

  Artie glanced in WM3’s general direction. Sitting, he wouldn’t be able to see the man. Heath was having trouble spotting the guy as well, her head moving back and forth and looking suspicious as hell.

  BCOOL, Anna typed.
Shrinking in on herself, Heath settled. Then the shrinking ceased. Heath regained her stature the way a resurrection fern will after a good rain. Heath had seen Elizabeth.

  E had reached the road that separated the shops from the grassy space. Walter, Anna noted, was making his way toward Cecelia’s using the sidewalk. A clever boy. Anna was sorry she’d nixed his coming.

  No one else stood out from the thinning crowd. No beady-eyed perverts slinking around in their pj’s. Had the cybercreep seen Heath or Anna and disappeared back into whatever hole he lived in? Was he standing them up to throw them off guard the next time he called for E to meet with him, or the time after that, so he could strike when they were no longer alert?

  The crowd on the green had thinned to twenty or so stragglers. Stores were still doing a desultory business. The man in sandals went into the ice cream shop. Paunchy ceased to parallel E’s path and veered onto an intersecting course. The woman in the curler cap stumped stolidly down the sidewalk, evidently bent on getting a Frappuccino to wash down the candy.

  Elizabeth reached the coffee shop. She slid into a chair at one of the abandoned tables, took out her cell phone, and began fiddling with it.

  The man with the paunch stopped fifteen feet shy of Cecelia’s. Standing on the curb before the narrow street, he squinted as he stared across the road to where E was sitting. Artie moved his laptop so he could watch him without seeming to take his eyes off the screen.

  Paunchy shoved both hands into the pockets of his windbreaker, his protruding brow shadowing his face.

  Anna’s brain, still tainted with the Rohypnol, reeled: the doughy hands, the oversized bag clutched to the woman’s breast. This was important, this was trying to take her mind from its set track.

  The man on the curb pulled a black rod from his pocket. Anna couldn’t make out what it was, but it wasn’t flat; it wasn’t a cell phone. Pink Curler Cap was almost to Heath, her small sneakered feet marching determinedly along the dull gray concrete of the sidewalk.