Triple Witch (17 page)

Which I ignored, removing the sheaf of papers as Hank gaped in dismay. “They don’t,” I told him, “come to your house and shoot you for this,” and he harrumphed disapprovingly but didn’t offer further objection.

Scanning the autopsy reports, I found Kenny’s to be what I expected. There were a lot of exotic latinate phrases, but they all boiled down to
gunshot wound to the head
. Tim’s, however, was a surprise.

He hadn’t died by hanging. He’d been dead when somebody put him up there, of a heart attack that happened while someone was in the process first of strangling him and of finishing the job by smothering him. Probably with a pillow, the report said; the fabric weave was imprinted in his skin. Thumb bruises showed on his neck, partially obscured by the rope marks but not entirely.

Which cleared up a small mystery I’d been pondering: how had somebody gotten Tim onto his makeshift gallows? Surely he’d have seen what was intended, I’d believed, and would have fought like a dozen demons, yet there hadn’t been any marks of a struggle on him, or any sign of a blow to the head to knock him out.

Now I understood: he’d already been dead, and the ligatures were all applied later, in part perhaps to cover up the thumb indentations. So at least we didn’t have a torturer on our hands.

Only a multiple murderer.

Meanwhile, we continued heading to the back of beyond with a couple of corpses in tow, as evening gathered around us.

“What was that?” Hank glanced fearfully in the rear-view.

“The plastic.” I stared ahead. Just a few miles more and we would be out of the Bangor area, with only tourists and small-town local traffic to contend with.

“They’re rolled,” I added, “in plastic. Taped and zipped in bags. They couldn’t get out if they tried.”

I meant this as reassurance; instead, the idea of Ken or Tim trying to get out of their wrappings made Hank’s eyes widen unhappily.

“Oh, Lord,” he mourned, “I feel like I’m going to faint.”

Which, even in what in Bangor passes for heavy traffic, wouldn’t have been a good idea. “Hank. Get a grip on yourself. I hate to break it to you like this, but dead is dead. D-E-A-D. If you want a scary idea, think about us ending up in a ditch.”

Hank was a sandy-haired bruiser with a square, solid jaw and shoulders that bulged like beef roasts, but right then he looked like a little kid. “I can’t help it. When I was a boy, my grandma told stories. I think she gave me a complex.”

If she had, I thought—unjustly, as it turned out—it was the only complex thing about Hank.

“And it ain’t true, neither, what you said about deadness. I got a personal experience.”

He glanced hopelessly into the rearview again. “Oh, Lord, that damn bag is moving.”

The ambulance swerved toward the shoulder, surprising a pair of pedestrians who seemed to think we were trying to drum up business. One of them shot a middle finger at us as we missed him by inches.

“Pull in,” I ordered Hank firmly. “Right there, in the driveway of that store. Put the brake on, turn the key off, and take some deep breaths.”

Hank obeyed shudderingly. “I can do it,” he gasped faintly. “Just let me get my nerves back together.”

Another small crackle of morgue-issue plastic emanated from the back of the ambulance: Ken or Tim, settling from the sharp turn we’d made.

Hank moaned. “You city people,” he managed between juddering inhalations, “think you know everything. Why, I could tell you a story about your very own house—”

Only a hundred and thirty or so miles to go, and it was already past six o’clock. “Hank, get out of the driver’s seat. I’ll take the wheel.”

“But I’m the only one who is supposed to drive the—”

“Do you want to break the rules, or do you want to be going through the Moosehorn Refuge in the middle of the night with these two?”

The Moosehorn is barren and desolate-feeling even in bright day, the narrow road winding between granite cliffs and under old trees that seem to be stealthily reaching down for you.

“There will,” I added, “be a full moon.”

“Ohh,” Hank groaned defeatedly, and moments later we were back on the road again.

“Now, what was it you were telling me about my house?”

I doubted I could unscare him entirely, but if I could get him talking about dead folks other than those we were transporting, he might be a little distracted. And as I’d hoped, he warmed to his favorite subject immediately.

“Ain’t nothing to tell,” he began, but this is the standard Eastport way of beginning a story, so I was not discouraged.

He cracked the window, pulled a pack from his pocket, and lit a cigarette. “Mind?” he asked, glancing at me.

I’d have let him sniff chloroform if it would calm
him down. “Nope. You said your grandmother used to tell you stories.”

But he didn’t answer, just sat there shaking and smoking. We were out of the suburbs, now, shooting for the hill towns between Bangor and Ellsworth. After that it was a long poke of curving blacktop, the danger of a moose wandering out onto the road ever present; if you hit one of them, it could be all over for you.

“Want coffee?” I asked as the lights of fast-food places in Ellsworth twinkled garishly in the thickening dusk.

Hank shook his head as we took the turn away from Blue Hill and Castine, up toward the real downeast.

“My grandma,” he offered finally, beginning to answer my question an hour after I’d asked it, “she told me one about the Holbrook House. You know, that big old captain’s mansion on the way to Lubec, it got turned into a bed-and-breakfast.”

He chuckled grimly. “Guess the tourists get their money’s worth
there
, all right.”

“Why, what do they get?” The road wound through crossroads towns: church, post office, country store.

“Old Captain Holbrook,” Hank related, “back in the 1800s, he went to the South Seas, and when he got there, he got all hooked up in some heathen religion. Not the regular religion the people there had, but some real old, evil kind. Came back with all sorts o’ trinkets, gold and jewels. Each of ’em by itself would’ve made the old captain rich. An’ they did, too. But,” Hank paused significantly, “they had a price.”

I sneaked a sideways peek at him. “And the price was?”

“The price,” Hank intoned heavily, “was his soul. The beings as had bought it from him, well, they come and took it. He used to go out on the water in a dinghy, to communicate with ’em, so folks said. An’ finally, one night, the dinghy went out but when it came back he wasn’t on it.”

He took a breath. “Out of the sea they’d come up in darkness, those strange awful creatures, all that way from them heathen islands they must’ve swum. Folks who was there, and ones heard of it afterwards, they said those heathenish beings plucked his soul from his living body, as he had promised it to ’em. And the screams he gave out, they all said, while the beings did it. The screams was purely horrible.”

We were in the real country, now, through Milbridge and climbing into the blueberry barrens south of Machias. Hank spoke up again, his tone matter-of-fact.

“You don’t want to spend the night there, is all I’m saying. He don’t show himself to everyone, that captain, but if he does, he comes in your dreams. And the dreams,” Hank emphasized, “ain’t ones as you will ever forget.”

Behind us on the stretchers, the two wrapped bodies rode silently, their bulk in the utility light of the boxy compartment now shadowy and portentous-looking. Machias went by in moments: first the college, then the bridge over Bad Little Falls, the short business street and Helen’s Restaurant. Once we got over the smaller bridge in East Machias we were in the boondocks again.

The full moon was rising, coming up out of Penobscot Bay like a coin dripping silver. A flock of black cormorants vee’d across the indigo sky, heading for evening shelter. A too-fast curve—I touched the brake pedal—made the plastic shrouds of the dead men whisper and crackle.

“Oh, mother,” Hank muttered, getting nervous again. “Out at night, haulin’ a couple of corpses, under a full moon.”

“If you light another cigarette,” I began irritably, “it’s not those corpses you’ll have to worry about. They don’t have to breathe in all your—”

“Look out!” Hank gripped the dashboard.

You don’t see their eyes in your headlights or their bodies in your way. All you see are the moose’s legs, looking too long and spindly to hold up that massive body.

I hit the brakes, spun the wheel, and yelped as the tires hit the shoulder, bounced, and swerved us up toward a big pine. A moment later the front end of the ambulance bounced off the tree’s trunk, nosed around wildly, and smashed into another with a vicious thud, stopping us suddenly.

After that, the only sound was a loud hissing, there in the pitch-darkness. I knew we hadn’t hit the moose—the impact, I’ve been told, is unmistakable—but if he was still out there somewhere we couldn’t see him, or anything else.

“Why aren’t there lights?” Hank cried in a sudden panic.

I just sat, feeling like a computer that has crashed and needs a minute to boot up again.

“I … don’t … know.” I was pretty sure I wasn’t bleeding, and nothing hurt very badly. I’d banged my knee on the dashboard and the steering column had broken off on impact as it was designed to do, smacking me in the chest but fortunately not impaling me.

The seat belt had saved my bacon. Too bad it hadn’t saved the radiator; as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see that the hissing sound was engine coolant, boiling up out of—I suspected unhappily—the cracked engine block.

“Oh my gosh, where’s the light?” Hank fumbled in the supply box, found the flashlight and snapped it on with fingers made clumsy by terror. Being Hank, however, he didn’t use it to make sure that I, his living companion, was all right. He shone it into the rear of the ambulance, to check that neither of his deceased passengers was creeping toward him.

“Oh!” The shriek Hank let out was terrible. “Oh, oh, oh—”

I grabbed the flashlight and aimed it where he was looking. “Damn it, Hank, I’ve had about enough of your silly—”

Our passengers were gone.

26
“Hank, they’re out here. They’ve got to be out here.”

A mosquito the size of a B-52 took an enormous bite out of me, causing me to be grateful for the multitude of little brown bats swooping and flapping all around me, feeding on the mosquitoes.

Or almost grateful; after the story I’d heard, a bat under a full moon was not the most reassuring image I could think of.

“That,” Hank replied quaveringly, “is what I’m afraid of. I
know
they’re out here, somewhere.”

We kept trudging, shining our flashlights—Hank had found a second one and given it to me—into the shallow ditch along darkened Route 1, in the Moosehorn Refuge. Behind us the back doors of the ambulance still gaped wide, blown that way by the impact and now impossible to close.

When the doors burst open, the stretchers—each with a body on it—had flown out. The stretchers had wheels, so if they had hit the pavement, they could have rolled.

“You sure you’re okay?” I scratched a fresh mosquito bite.

“Yeah. Little bounced around, that’s all. Sure wish a car would come along, though.”

“Hank, you better pray we find those bodies before one does. Do you know what kind of story this is going
to make in Eastport? Lost the dead guys—they’ll hear ’em laughing at us in Canada.”

“Come on,” the paramedic replied defensively, “it’s not our fault the damned—
gurk
.”

That was the sound he made, leading me to believe that at least the dead guys weren’t lost, anymore. And I was right: when I reached Hank he was holding one hand over his mouth and aiming a flashlight with the other, gazing down goggle-eyed.

Ken Mumford wasn’t on his stretcher any longer. He wasn’t in his body bag, either; a broken pine bough had ripped hell out of that. And he wasn’t in his plastic morgue wrappings; they’d come apart on impact.

Also, owing to the postmortem surgery that had been done on him, to track the path the bullet took in his head and so on, he was not looking very attractive. The big line of heavy black sutures where his hairline had been sewn back to the top of his face, plus similar stitches put in to hold his eyelids and mouth shut, reminded me irresistibly of a B-movie zombie in the moment just before the creature clambers to its feet and begins shambling toward you.

I grabbed Hank’s shoulder. “Come on. You don’t need to see this.” I sat him down in the ditch by the ambulance.

“Hank? Listen to me, Hank. He’s dead. Really. There’s not a thing he can do to hurt you. You don’t have to be scared of him.”

“I’m not scared.”

I shone the flashlight past him, so I could see his face. But in the glow it was not fearful, as I’d expected. Instead it was gentle and full of sorrow.

“I’ve been an ambulance guy for twenty years,” he said, seemingly apropos of nothing.

But I understood: Evil beings, or haunted houses, or bodies in bags lying silent behind you—all those things were the stuff of Hank’s nightmares: the awful unknown.

What he’d seen just now, though, was different, and in Hank’s job he saw it all the time: the face of someone he’d known all his life, after catastrophe.

A tear rolled down his nose. “I wish those things didn’t happen to people,” Hank said.

Just then a pair of headlights shone out of the dark at us, and not long after that we had bagged up Ken again, found Tim, and were riding toward Eastport in an old grey Econoline van with the legend, “S & M Remodelers, We’ll Whip Your House Into Shape!” lettered in white script on the side.

Only after we were moving did I learn that the van had an engine problem, limiting its top speed to twenty-five carburetor-clogged miles per hour. Which was when—

—owing to the fact that the van only had one seat and the driver was presently sitting in it, so Hank and I had to sit in the back with a dozen gallons of paint, two extension ladders, a toolbox, and four disassembled sawhorses, plus the bodies—

—I really did start wanting that champagne.