Life Guards in the Hamptons (22 page)

“Yeah, Willow. I got all that. Bottom line, you didn’t want to talk to the chief.”

Ah, the joys of Paumanok Harbor.

That call made, confrontation postponed, I considered my own unsettled situation. I liked Matt, more every time I saw him. I know I was waffling again. I wanted him, I didn’t want him. I’d given up men, but gave part of me to this one. So I decided Peg could have him.

Good sense told me to back away before I lost more. And I had good reasons:

A: jealousy. Matt was a chick magnet, and I hated how that caustic emotion made me feel.

B: distance. Paumanok Harbor wasn’t as far from Manhattan as, say, London, where the man I almost married lived. But I didn’t want to live out here. Matt wouldn’t want to give up his practice to live there.

C: scruples. Because of that distance, we’d only have a brief affair, which might be nice, judging from the good night kiss when he walked me to my car. I always felt cheapened after a physical affair, though, not like Susan, who lived for the moment. If our emotions deepened past lust and infatuation, I’d be shattered afterward, when I left.

D: my status as Paumanok Harbor’s resident tsetse fly of epidemic disasters. Matt might be the only person in the village who didn’t hold me to blame, but he would. Or his practice and popularity could suffer.

E: as if there weren’t enough barriers to a happy outcome of what started as a warm friendship, add in a hundred-and-fifty-pound blockade that I helped erect. Matt had Moses now, a big, galumphing puppy who’d grow that big, at least. Smuggle him into my no-dogs-allowed apartment? Have both of them share my bed? And what about Little Red? What if Moses wanted to play with Red like a squeaky toy? I couldn’t do that to my own dog.

Add it all up, and I had reason enough not to let any tender new feelings grow into a major heartache.

But that brief kiss did feel good, tingly to my toes.

You’d think I’d drive the car off the road, the way I vacillated with my own life. It pissed me off, too, that there were always issues. Nothing straightforward, like the way I wrote my books. Kids didn’t have patience for equivocation, if they knew what the word meant. Instant gratification, that’s what they liked, all action without introspection.

Too bad I wasn’t a kid.

Too bad there was a familiar car in front of my house. The big white Ford SUV had the village logo on the doors. And a bubble gum light on the roof. I guess Uncle Henry didn’t get my message.

He hadn’t waited until tomorrow to hold his own council, either. The heavyset man sat on the living room sofa in front of the TV, sandwiched between the two big dogs, while Little Red hid under a chair, one of my socks chewed to a wad of thread. Damn, I should have bought more of them, too, when I shopped with Peg.

Uncle Henry had a mug of coffee in hand and a plate of brownies on the table in front of him.

Thank you, Susan, for making him comfortable.
As if I wanted the grizzled old truth-maven grilling me about things I didn’t know or understand!

I kissed his cheek—I’d known him since I was born—and picked up Little Red and kissed his nose. He let me, after I showed him the piece of pizza crust I’d packed up for him when Matt wasn’t looking. The big dogs got some, too.

Uncle Henry wasn’t as easily mollified. “We need to talk, Willy.”

No, we needed to move inland away from danger. I didn’t say that aloud. Why cause panic? Since outright evasion hadn’t worked, I tried going on the offensive. “I have nothing whatsoever to do with your crime spree. Or your electronic thefts.”

“Both of them are out of our hands now. So many initial agencies are on it, they’ll be tripping over each other by tomorrow.”

“I can’t believe they think Russ is involved. He spent the whole night organizing the search and rescue efforts from the command center, so everyone knew what everyone else was doing.”

“That’s why they suspect him. He’s too damn good, with no explanations for how he does what he does. But it’s not only our tech they’re looking at. They’re pretty sure the cybercrimes originated at Town Hall, whether by us or someone using our computers from a distance with spyware they’ve installed. They’ve interviewed the mayor, too, on record, on tape. Problem is, they ask him where he was on such and such a night of a robbery, and he says he can’t remember.”

“Mayor Applebaum can’t remember a lot of things.”

“Which is damned suspicious in any person of interest, especially the mayor of a whole village. Only the county cops can’t remember asking the questions, so they keep repeating them.” He sipped his coffee. “It’d be laughable if it didn’t expose Paumanok Harbor to even more investigation. I’m out of the loop now, but I get the feeling they think a whole bunch of us locals banded together to steal a fortune. They’ve done background checks on everyone, even Lolly, who cleans at night.”

“Isn’t Lolly … ah … ?”

“Handicapped. Slow. She is, but she comes on time, does a good job of cleaning, and never breaks things like the last night janitor we had. The idea of Lolly running some way-technical computer scam is absurd. She can barely spell to leave a note when we need more soap or vacuum bags. They had the poor girl in tears.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, but Russ is working on it on his own. He’ll find whoever’s been messing with our computers. I’m not really worried about that.”

And he wouldn’t have tracked me down to discuss town business. I tried another diversion. “So have they found the missing passenger yet?”

He shook his head. “No, but they’ve got an ID on him. A troubling one.”

“I heard he was old. That can’t help his chances in the water. It’s been almost a full day.”

“More troubling than that. His name was—is, until we get a body—James Everett Harmon, PhD from London, England.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yup. A direct descendant of Harry Harmon, who was the illegitimate son of the Earl of Royce who founded what much later became the Royce-Harmon Institute for Psionic Research. That first Harmon married the daughter of a Gypsy fortune-teller and a horse trainer. Same genes as a lot of us, now.”

I took a brownie. “That’s why Royce and DUE have been so worried about finding him?”

“That and he was a beloved professor of creative writing.”

I swallowed a bit of brownie wrong and had to go get myself a drink of water. I poured a cup of coffee, too, while I was in the kitchen. God knew I could use the caffeine. This was going to be a long night.

The chief didn’t wait for me to ask questions when I got back and tucked my feet under me in the big easy chair. “There’s more. They say Harmon imagined things, fantastical beasts and odd humans, and he wrote about them. Kind of like Lewis Carroll, who I always figured was on drugs. Maybe he was a relative, too, who knows? Anyway, Professor Harmon never published his stories; he just used them as examples of what the human mind can conjure, for his students. The problem was, he got the ideas when he went off in trances. Dangerous if he was driving, scary if he was giving a lecture. They checked for seizures and sleeping sickness and psychedelic drugs. Nothing. When he returned from wherever his mind took him, he came back enraptured, as if he’d seen the heavenly angels, and full of new stories. Some people thought he was crazy.”

I didn’t.

“Harmon saw things. I don’t know if he spoke to them like you do. He never called them here, like you do.”

“I do not call them!”

Uncle Henry finished his coffee and set it down, nearer me. I got the hint and got up again to refill his cup.

He blew on it to cool the coffee, then took a sip before talking. “Three passengers saw him at the railing, wearing his life jacket, yelling at the wall of water before it hit the ship. Foul worm, he called it, as if the thing were alive, not merely a storm-driven wave or waterspout.”

“Wyrm with a ‘y.’ It’s an ancient word for dragon, or sea serpent.” I gave up. I went to get my sketch pad for the newest book, along with the printouts of the drawings I’d done on the computer.

Uncle Henry flipped through the drawings of the pet store owner who became a superpower. “Looks a lot like someone I know.” He gave me a wink.

Then he got to pictures of Spenser Matthews’ companion. He studied the bird with the fish tail, then the fish with feathers. “I take it this is the rare bird everyone was chasing?”

“Very rare.”

“Talks, thinks, vanishes?”

“And helps rescue people and dogs. I think she came to warn us, the same as those dolphins.”

While he studied the drawings, from when I tried different combinations of colors and sizes, I rushed to tell him there were no dolphins in my book, super powered or not. Not yet, anyway.

He flipped the page and inhaled sharply. N’fwend.

He saw how I’d drawn a huge, transparent sea serpent rising from the swirling water that gathered to make it bigger, eyes whirlpools, mouth a bottomless pit big enough to swallow a small boat. Or twenty elderly professors.

Uncle Henry took a silver flask out of his pocket and poured some of its contents into his coffee.

“Uncle Henry!”

“What? I am not on duty. And I can’t have a cigar. You ever hear about driving a man to drink? Your foot’s on the accelerator.”

“I didn’t call it!”

“No? Somehow the wave that’s caused millions of dollars in damage and expenses, not to mention lives lost or people injured, suddenly appears when you write about it. What am I supposed to think?”

“Maybe the professor saw it in a trance!”

“And shouted at it so the thing could suck him in?”

“Why else was he on that cruise ship, anyway?”

“No one seems to know. He packed up one day, told people he was going sightseeing, and left. He’s not senile or sick, so no one could stop him. Poor bastard.”

“I bet he knew what he’d see. He must have spotted the horrible beast in one of his trances and came to verify its existence, to prove his own sanity or to confront it. You don’t think they’ll find him?”

The chief tapped my sketch. “Harmon’s old, like you
said. How long could he live in the water, if he didn’t get swallowed? This thing could have dropped his body anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard.”

“So we’ll never know?” If I were Peg, I’d be crying. The man was almost family. Almost like me.

He shrugged. “DUE wants us to keep looking. Harmon’s that valuable. We’ve got patrols up and down the beaches, aerial spotters doing quadrants, and they’ll get dogs and divers back on the ship as soon as they right it, in case those witnesses were mistaken out of their own panic.”

No. N’fwend was evil. If he sensed an enemy, he destroyed it. I assumed he came to vanquish his old nemesis, M’ma, or M’ma’s friends. Maybe the sea dragon felt the power in Paumanok Harbor, or the power in Professor Harmon, power that he could usurp, or slurp as the case might be. Wasn’t that a tradition in wizard wars, winner take all, and the loser shrivels up? Paumanok Harbor stood as a locus of the secret gates between worlds. Most of its inhabitants held unimaginable talents. Did N’fwend want them? Us? Me?

“What does DUE say about those other passengers who saw Professor Harmon talking to the wave?”

“They say when Harmon was a young man, barely out of Royce University, he flew to Bermuda for one spring break without telling anyone. Once there, he hired a small vessel and sailed it right into the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, where so many ships had been lost.”

“Wow, what a brave fool! He lived through it, obviously.”

“And no more ships go down in the area, no more than other places in bad storms and such.”

“You mean … ? He … ?”

Uncle Henry held out the flask. Alcohol wasn’t my drug of choice. I ate another brownie.

“We need him. They’re thinking maybe you can find him. You found the lost colt.”

“He found me. And I am not getting in a boat and searching the Atlantic Ocean.”

The chief poured the rest of the whiskey into his cup. “Maybe you can talk to the thing like he could.”

Go face-to-face with a wave as tall as a skyscraper?
Talk
to a wall of water? Hell, I didn’t even swim in the ocean. “No, you’d need a Translator for that. Ask them to send Agent Grant back. Or find someone who can communicate with the deceased, to channel whatever Professor Harmon knew. Hell, DUE must have a hundred psychics on their staff who can find the professor if he’s alive and bring him back to life if he isn’t.” I wasn’t sure about the revivification stuff, but anything had to be better than sending me out in a boat.

“They’ve been trying. Nothing.” He held his mug up toward me before pouring its contents into his mouth. “You’re our best bet. Heaven help us.”

“Un-uh. You are not pinning this whole salvation thing on me. Besides, we have more help than you know. We have Oey, if she didn’t take herself back home to where she got her orders. She came to help, to warn us. So did the dolphins. Not on their own, I believe, but on someone else’s urging. Someone who can defeat this monster. So we are not alone in the battle. We’ve got some big guns on our side, too.”

That cheered him up. “You think we’re out of danger, then? That this water demon has had its fun and gone away?”

“Truly?”

“What else would a truth-seer want?”

“Then, no, I don’t think it’s finished. I don’t know that it has anything to do with us, actually. It’s like
Clash of the Titans
, with two powerful foes from the otherworld fighting for domination.”

He sighed. “An epic battle, eh? You know who suffers most in those movies?”

“Yeah, the extras. The foot soldiers and spear carriers.”

“And the innocent villagers the armies trample.” He sighed again. “So what are you going to do about it?”

Good question. No answer. “Ask Oey?”

“The bird? It’s a parrot, for crying out loud. How much help could the blasted thing be?”

“She saved the lost dogs. And got help to keep the boat from sinking entirely.”

“And no one can see her but you?”

“Not the way she really is. No one except Matt.”

“Ah.”

I didn’t like the sound of his “ah.” “Did you hear he’s got a dog of his own now? One of the Newfoundlands Oey helped save. And he’s got Peg, the breeder, staying with him.”