Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm all right. So get on with your life. Go."

So Pete went. He glanced back once, in time to see Ted disappearing down the ladder into his pit. Ted didn't wave, or even look at Pete.

Back in the workshop, he reported the drift of the brief conversation to Frank Lowry. "He looks a bit tired," Pete said. "But nothing weird."

"He was down in that old dock, right?"

"Yeah."

"Except that he isn't working on it. He's taken an old chair down and set it on a flat piece of board to stop the legs sinking in. He just sits there, like he's waiting for something to happen."

"Like what?"

"Try asking him," Lowry said darkly, "and see what you get."

There seemed to be nothing more that he could do at the yard. So Pete drove home in his own car, and Diane followed in the pickup. He could see in the mirror that it was a bumpy climb for her. The Zodiac had put down ruts over the months, and the Toyota didn't fit them. They both had to brake hard when a rabbit dashed out into the lights and froze, something that Pete had found to be a regular hazard when night-driving along this stretch. He felt as if his life had begun to spin so fast that it was in danger of tearing itself apart. He felt as if he'd become accountable for responsibilities that he wasn't even aware of. He felt as if he was beginning a long slide into one of his own nightmares

And when they finally reached the old wooden cottage, they found it closed-down and dark.

"She's not home," Pete said.

"She could be sleeping."

"I don't think so. The van would be here. We'll have to wait for her. Can you do that with me?"

"Of course," Diane said.

They got out of the pickup. The porch steps creaked as they climbed them.

She said, "Let's be careful anyway."

"She once said that she wouldn't ever want to hurt me. This could be her chance to prove it."

He went inside, and switched on the hall light. Within moments there were a couple of craneflies and a moth dancing around the shade, lured in from the darkness outside. Pete led the way down to Alina's room. Her door was slightly ajar, no light inside. He gave the door a push, so that it swung inward.

A single, metallic click.

"If you were shorter and better looking," a man's voice said, "I'd have blown your head off."

Alina's bedside reading lamp came on, revealing Ross Aldridge in the act of reaching across for the switch. He was in a chair that had been positioned so that it faced the door square-on, and the lamp was beside him. His free hand held a rock steady shotgun that was pointing directly at Pete.

Pete said, "Is this how the police say welcome home?"

Aldridge didn't smile. He didn't show any inclination to lower the shotgun, either; it was as if he considered himself to be in a strange land where there are no certain allies.

He said, "Where is she?"

"Gone, by the look of it."

"Until when?"

A good question, and one that Pete wouldn't have minded the answer to; but then he found it in a single glance around.

"Quite possibly for good." He pointed toward the empty dressing-table. Aldridge didn't even move his eyes to follow. "Her scrapbook of home, it isn't there. It's the dearest thing she owns. It's just about the only thing she owns. She wouldn't be without it."

Diane moved into the room behind him now, as Aldridge said, "So the next question is, why?"

"I think the next question ought to be what do you think you're doing, sitting here in my house with a loaded gun ready to blast anyone who walks in. Or is that the latest trend in rural policing?"

"I can think of one reason," Diane said quietly from behind Pete. "That it's all true, and he's seen what she can do."

Nothing moved for a while. There was no sound, other than that of the death dance of the craneflies in the hall behind them.

But finally, Aldridge lowered the shotgun.

"I think we need to trade some information, here," he said.

When the sun came over the Step the next morning, it found the three of them still talking. In all that time Alina didn't come home, as Pete had guessed that she wouldn't.

Aldridge told them about what he'd seen up at the ski lodge, and what had happened to him there. He said nothing about anything else. Diane showed her cuttings and repeated Pavel's story, and Pete finally found a release in pouring out everything that had been troubling him about Alina since those first days when he'd brought her to the valley. He'd been afraid that some of it might sound stupid and trivial. But nobody seemed to think so. Their accounts all meshed together with a kind of quiet perfection… and it all traced a line back to that one moment in the motorway services, when he'd looked up into those grey eyes and made a choice instead of an excuse.

She'd even warned him, in her way.

But he hadn't listened.

Aldridge was the one that he couldn't quite make out. He'd no car, and apparently he'd scrambled all the way up to the house the previous night, stalking its windows like a raider until he'd realised that there was no one around. Then he'd broken in.

"Any ideas on where she might have gone?" Aldridge said, standing at the window and watching the dawn light as it filled out the sky beyond the ridge.

"I don't know," Pete said. "But I don't think she'll have left the area completely." This made the most sense to him. He'd watched Alina's growing love affair with the valley, one that had become deeper and darker with every midnight tryst, and he didn't think that she'd ever be able to tear herself away.

And what was a Rusalka, after all, without a lake to call its home?

"Did she make any friends?" Aldridge said. "I mean, anyone she might run to who'd hide her?"

"I can think of someone," Diane said.

Aldridge said that he wanted to pick up some equipment before they went up to the Hall, and so they stopped off in the village. He didn't seem to want them to go with him into the house; seemed to make a point of it, in fact. So they waited with the vehicles at the end of the close. Pete was frowning as he watched Aldridge walk away. "What's wrong?" Diane said, but he made as if to brush the worry aside.

"Nothing," he said. "Unless you count the obvious."

"Well, the obvious ought to be enough."

"I know. But I'm not so sure about him, Diane."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that we spent all last night hammering out what we knew about Alina, and what's he doing now? He's planning for the three of us to go looking for her. That's not my idea of a police response. He ought to be calling someone."

"He could be calling someone now."

Pete said, "Come on. This is hardly going by the book. He broke into my place with a shotgun. You know what he said to me last night, one time when you weren't around? He said he'd looked into her eyes and he didn't think she was human."

Diane looked toward the house. Pete had noted that even though it was daylight, the upper-storey curtains were still drawn. Apart from that, Aldridge's world seemed like a pretty regular one.

"Just a way of putting it," she said uncertainly.

"That's what I thought at the time. Now I'm not so certain."

Aldridge was coming out again with an armload of stuff. He turned and carefully locked the door behind him.

And then it seemed to Pete that he stopped for a moment, and for no obvious reason; he stood with his free hand gripping the door handle and his head bowed slightly, like a programmed thing that had hit some momentary gap in the instructions that it was receiving.

For a moment, it was as if the birds didn't sing.

And then Aldridge straightened, and started back toward them.

Dizzy's black limousine was on the forecourt when Diane arrived, and she parked alongside it. She glanced around as she got out, remembering Aldridge's warnings. But this was daylight and familiar ground, and she sensed no danger.