Клэр Донелли - Hiss And Tell

“Sunny? Ken Howell here.”

Does he ever sleep? Sunny wondered blearily, trying to make out what time it was. Two a.m. Wonderful.

“Sorry to call so late, but—Look, I just got a tip that something happened out on Neal’s Neck. I’m heading out there, and frankly I could use a photographer.”

“What happened?” Sunny’s reporter side was instantly awake and coherent.

“I’m not sure. Somebody spotted lights on the shore. Not party lights, searchlights, up on top of the cliff. That’s never happened before. There may be an accident or some other kind of trouble.”

Sunny found herself sitting up. “I’ll be there—”

“Hello? Hello? What’s wrong?” Mike’s voice came over the line, sounding old and frightened. He always equated late-night calls with bad news.

“It’s Ken Howell, Mike,” Ken said. “Sorry to wake you, but I need to borrow Sunny’s services.”

“She’s got work in the morning,” Mike protested. “Of all the damn fool—”

“Dad, I’m going to go,” Sunny told him. “Ken, I’ll meet you at the paper in twenty minutes.” Yes, she might be stumbling around like a zombie tomorrow—or rather, later this morning. But her taste of the reporting life the previous afternoon had been like a long-withheld dose of a forbidden drug. She had to have another fix.

Sunny started getting dressed under the disapproving eye of Shadow, who’d appeared in the doorway. He didn’t like changes in schedule, especially when those changes involved people getting up and going places in the middle of the night.

“Sorry, fella,” Sunny told the cat. “I should be home before sunup. And if not, Dad will feed you.”

She drove to downtown Kittery Harbor, where the town still had its original crooked cobblestone streets cramped close to the harbor. Ken Howell ran the Courier from an ancient structure that had probably started off life as a waterfront storehouse. Now it was home to a virtual museum of printing presses from more than 150 years of putting out the paper. Plus, of course, the equipment to produce today’s editions.

Sunny suspected that there was also a bed hidden somewhere on the premises. Although he supposedly owned a house, Ken seemed to live at the Courier offices.

He greeted her at the door, carrying the camera case. “Ready to go?”

“Are you driving, or am I?” Sunny asked.

“Neither.” Ken led the way onto a dock where a man waved to them from beside a cabin cruiser. As she got closer, Sunny recognized him as Ike Elkins, an occasional fishing buddy of her dad’s. Ike had cleverly figured out a way to subsidize his hobby by offering coastline tours, a service he advertised on the MAX website. If Sunny had any more doubts about how they were getting up to Wilawiport, Ike offered the clincher by handing her and Ken life jackets. “Get those on, and we’re set to go.”

Sunny buckled herself into the vest and clambered aboard, taking the camera case from Ken. Then he donned the safety gear and joined her on the deck. Ike boarded as well and led the way to the bridge, indicating a couple of comfortable-looking built-in chairs. “Have a seat. And do me a favor: stay there. It’s going to be interesting enough heading up the coast in the dark without any distractions.”

With that, he turned off the cabin light and dimmed the displays on the instruments. Sailing in darkness required excellent night vision for the person steering, so—lights out. Sunny had gone on fishing expeditions with her dad before the crack of dawn, so she understood. From her seat, she saw that Ike had more than the average amount of high-tech sailing equipment; besides the GPS display by the wheel, she also saw what looked like a radar screen.

Ike returned from casting off the lines that held them to the pier and followed her eyes. “Yeah, sometimes I like to take the old girl out at night. When I do, I try to make as certain as possible that we’ll come back.”

Sunny couldn’t fault that. No sense in becoming a statistic.

Ike started up the boat, and off they went. Sunny listened to the throbbing of the engine and the occasional burst of radio chatter as they moved away from the lights of town into seeming emptiness. She was thankful the sea was relatively calm, because they were sailing blind. The usual landmarks and points of reference were gone. They might as well have been sailing on another planet.

Cruising up the rocky shores of Maine was a heck of a lot less scenic in pitch darkness, and a little unnerving, too. What if one of those rocks turned up in front of them?

Ike certainly worked hard to avoid that scenario. Besides his high-tech gadgets, he sometimes consulted a chart, using a flashlight with a red lens. “Doesn’t affect the night vision,” he explained when Sunny asked about the red light.

Ike stood behind the wheel, glancing at the GPS and checking the radar screen, but also constantly turning his head, scanning conditions not just ahead of them, but to the sides and even behind. Sunny had no idea what, if anything, he was seeing out there; the only things she could see were bright stars up above—lots of them—if she craned her neck.

Ken sat in a very stiff pose, leaning forward as if he were propelling the boat onward by sheer force of will. In the dimness, Sunny could see his expression grow more and more frustrated. “Can’t we go faster?” he finally asked Ike.

“Sure, if you don’t mind running into someone—or something,” Ike replied, changing course slightly. In the distance, Sunny now made out little green and white flashes—the running lights of another vessel. “This speed gives us enough leeway to react if something turns up on our path.”

“If we’d driven, we’d be up there in half an hour,” Ken grumbled.

“And you’d be stuck at the roadblock closing off Neal’s Neck.” Ike turned his head, keeping an eye on the other boat, then glanced back at Ken. “If you’re in such a hurry, too bad you didn’t have a friend with a helicopter instead of a boat.”

From time to time, they passed areas of gauzy brightness, street-lit downtown areas of various ports. For the most part, they might as well have been traveling in outer space.

Another bright spot appeared ahead. Ike checked his navigational aids. “Okay. This is Wilawiport.” He sent the boat in a wide curve to avoid crashing into Neal’s Neck.

Was this what it would have been like ninety years ago, when fast-moving motor launches delivered crates of contraband booze to the Neal mansion? Sunny wondered. Aside from the lights, she thought as she suddenly found herself squinting against a blinding blast of light. After some blinking, the glare resolved itself into a trio of floodlights, arranged on top of a small cliff, focused down onto the rocks and the water.

“This is it!” Ken grabbed the camera case, taking out one for himself and one for Sunny. It felt awkward in her hands, unbalanced, most of the weight ahead of her hands.

A telescopic lens, she thought.

Ken was already snapping off pictures, and she joined him. But as the lens brought what was going on in the distance into focus, she almost dropped the camera into the drink.

Men in the black Windbreakers of the Kingsbury security team and a guy in state trooper gray were down on the tide-tossed rocks, hanging from ropes, trying to get some sort of a harness onto a pale white form . . . a dark-haired woman in a bikini, who lolled lifelessly in the would-be rescuers’ arms.

5

“Oh, my god!”Sunny blurted out. That was as far as she got before one of the lights atop the rocky height suddenly shifted to pin them in a shaft of radiance sixty feet long.