Locked Doors (32 page)

It should’ve been a lovely morning, sitting in that warm sunlit nook of the
Ocracoke
Coffee Company, amid the smell of fresh coffee beans and newspapers and baking pastries and the murmurs of browsing customers in the adjoining Java Books.

But Horace was a wreck.

It had been four days now since he’d watched Andrew Thomas board the Island Hopper with that pretty young woman and taxi out through Silver Lake harbor into the sound.
 
He’d waited and waited, staring through the windshield as the sky dumped cold unrelenting rain.
 
An hour had passed and the Island Hopper returned without them.
 

By nightfall there was still no sign of them so he made his way back to the Harper Castle B&B, had supper, and went to bed.
 

First thing Friday morning, he returned to the Community Store docks.
 
The Jeep Cherokee that Andrew and the woman had arrived in was gone.
 
Horace drove to Howard’s Pub, saw that the Audi Andrew had rented wasn’t there either.

Behind the wheel of his own subcompact rental, a tiny white Kia, Horace felt the hot tears begin to roll down his cheeks.
 
Up until a few days ago he’d sensed that he was fated to tail Andrew Thomas and record his story.
 
He’d managed to follow him nearly three thousand miles from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Denver International Airport.
 
There, he’d lost Andrew in security, waited all weekend in despair near a stand of payphones in the food court of Terminal B, berating himself for flushing his savings on this ridiculous endeavor.
 
Watching the stream of travelers, he resolved to fly back to Anchorage, apologize profusely to Professor Byron, and finish his MFA in the creative writing program.
 
This last year of his life had been derailed by a twenty-four-year-old megalomaniac who fancied he would write a book about Andrew Thomas and become famous.
 

As Horace gathered his backpack and came to his feet he stared down the terminal and watched in astonishment as the man he thought he’d lost glided toward him on the moving walkway.
 
Andrew Thomas walked right up beside him, grabbed a payphone, and with his back turned to Horace, proceeded to make a phone call.
 

Horace felt certain he was hallucinating but he stood there and listened as Andrew called the North Carolina Department of Transportation and inquired about the ferry schedules from the mainland to a place called
Ocracoke
Island.
 
Had Horace any lingering doubt about whether
fate
and fortune were in his pocket, he then observed Andrew hang up, redial, and book a room at the Harper Castle B&B on
Ocracoke
for the following week.

His rejuvenation was instantaneous.

Once on
Ocracoke
, Horace spent Wednesday and Thursday following Andrew’s movements throughout the island—the two trips to the stone manor on the sound, Andrew’s visit to Tatum Boat Tours, Bubba’s Bait and Tackle, his peculiar meeting with the pretty blond at Howard’s Pub, and finally, Andrew and the
blond’s
departure on that boat in the middle of a nor’easter.
 

Apparently they had returned late in the night and for some reason left the island.
 
Had Horace waited by the docks he might be with them now.
 
Instead he’d come thousands of miles only to lose Andrew permanently on a small island off the coast of North Carolina.
 
He’d let the story of a lifetime slip away.
 
Andrew was long gone by now, pursuing Luther Kite, in a story that Horace would never get to tell.
 

No question, he’d missed the party.

Horace set the coffee mug down on his little table and lifted the purple notebook containing the first four chapters of his book on Andrew Thomas.
 
He didn’t have the heart to write about Andrew this morning.
 
Thumbing through the pages, he relived the thrill of finding him and standing outside the window of Andrew’s cabin in Haines Junction, watching the master write.
 
For a month at least, Horace had known hope.

Rising from the table, he acknowledged that this would probably be his final morning on
Ocracoke
.
 
But he wasn’t going to waste it as he’d done the last three days—driving aimlessly around the island searching for Andrew’s Audi and that blue Jeep Cherokee.
 
Tonight he would try one last thing and if that proved futile (as he suspected it would) he’d fly back to Alaska, beg his parents for a little money, and never again do anything this reckless and stupid.

51

BETH and Violet stirred as we entered our fourth period of light.
 

It passed through a crack in the stone and slanted through darkness—a dusty shaft of daylight come to illuminate our miserable faces for an hour.

We sat across from one another in a cold stone room, our wrists manacled and chained to an iron D-ring, bolted to the rocky floor between our feet.
 

A doorway opened into a dark corridor, through which spilled the disconcerting sounds of hammering and drilling that had been ongoing without respite for what seemed like days.

I raised my head.
 

In the twilight I could see that the women were also conscious.
 

A stream of water trickled down the stone beside Violet.
 

Two roaches crawled through the oval patch of daylight at my feet.
 

A strained and hopeless silence bore down upon us.
 

Beth wept softly as she always did when the light appeared.
 

Violet sat stoical, a line of dried blood streaked from her scalp across the left side of her face.
 

There was nothing any of us could say.
 

We just stared at each other, three souls in hell, waiting for the darkness to come again.

52

LUTHER drilled the last hole into the right armrest.
 
Rufus was screwing a leather ankle strap into the left front leg of the chair.
 
Because the wood was oak the old man had to lean into the Phillips head to make the screw turn.
 

“
Lookin
’ good, boys.”

Maxine stood in the narrow stone doorway, a glass of lemonade in each hand, the single bare light bulb accentuating deep creases in her face.
 
“My Heart Belongs to Jesus” was spelled out in rhinestones across the front of her bright purple sweater.
  

Father and son lay their tools on the dirt floor.
 
Rufus grunted as he struggled to his feet.
 
He walked over to Maxine, leaned down, planted a kiss on her forehead.
 
Her big baby black eyes sparkled, her only feature that showed no age.

“Bless your little heart,” Rufus said and he took the glasses of lemonade from her and went and plopped down beside his son, their backs against the cool stone.

They drank.

Maxine stepped into the small room and sat in the chair.

She lay her forearms on the armrests, looked over at her boys.

“
Zzzzzzzzzz
!”
 

The old woman shook violently and laughed.

“Beautiful, you rattle that chair apart, we’ll strap you in for real.”

Luther finished off the lemonade, set it down.

“What’s for supper, Mama?”

Maxine got up, walked over to her son, framed his face in her hands.

“Whatever my good boy wants.
 
What does he want?”

“Boiled shrimp.”

“You
gonna
help me peel ’
em
?”

“
Yes’m
.”

Maxine gently slapped his pale drawn cheeks and lifted the empty glasses.

She said, “Boy, I thought you were
gonna
take care of Andrew’s and that detective’s cars.”

“I moved them both over to the Pony Island Motel parking lot this morning.”

“Ah.
 
Good.
 
Well, can I say for the record what a colossal waste of time ya’ll are spending on this chair?”

Rufus stood, pushed back his white tresses.

“Now hold on there, Beautiful.
 
Is it a waste of time to spend hours preparing for a fine dinner?
 
You have to think of this as a gourmet meal.
 
It takes a little more time, but it’ll all be worth it in the end.
 
And this isn’t a one-time deal.
 
Once the thing’s built, my God, it’ll last forever.
 
Besides, I’m happy.
 
Down here working with my boy.
 
Making memories.”

Maxine said, “Well, I’m
gonna
go feed the guests, let them do their business.
 
It’s funny—Andrew still thinks I’m senile from that Alzheimer’s bit I pulled on him.”

She disappeared into the dark corridor.

Rufus gave Luther a hand, helped pull him to his feet.
 

“All right, son.
 
Once you get that copper plating screwed into the arms, what say we call it a day?
 
I’ll help you and Mom peel the shrimp.”

The downstairs runs the length and breadth of the hundred and eighty-six-year-old house, unique to the island as the vast majority of residences sit several feet above ground to protect them from the flooding nor’easters and storm surges of hurricanes.
 
Consequently, this basement has been underwater numerous times since its construction.
 

It served as slave quarters in the 1830’s.
 

Servant quarters at the turn of the century.
 

One of the most extensive wine cellars in North Carolina in the 1920’s.
 

A decade ago Rufus wired several rooms and passageways for electricity.
 

The rest are lit by candle or not at all.
 

The stone in one of the rooms is charred black all the way up to the ceiling.
 

In another the rock is stained burgundy.
 

Though Luther has spent a great deal of time down here, he’s still prone to losing his way, particularly when he ventures beyond the cluster of rooms near the stairs, a maze of confusing corridors that were lined with wine racks eighty years ago.
 
Broken glass and pieces of cork can still be found in some of the nooks and crannies.

Now Luther slips soundlessly through a
pitchblack
corridor, feeling his way along the wall.
 
His parents are busy upstairs preparing food.
 
He’ll join them shortly.
 

At last his fingers register the break in the wall—the alcove where Andrew and the women wait.
 

Luther stops, leans against the stone, listens.
 

No one is talking.
 
He hears breathing.
 
Chains clinking.