John Saul - In the Dark of the Night

Whatever it was that lay behind the bricked-up doorway.

“If we just stack the bricks inside that back room, nobody would ever know the door had been bricked up.”

Eric’s brows knit uncertainly.

“The photo shows the door,” Tad said. “And if we slide that plywood back over it after we see what’s there, nobody would even know we went inside.”

“So what do you guys think is in there?” Eric asked, realizing even as he spoke that whatever they finally decided to do with the bricks and the plywood, the decision to find out what was behind them had already been made.

“Stuff that somebody doesn’t want us to see,” Tad said.

Kent nodded.

And despite the sun shining overhead, a shiver crept up Eric’s back. Tightening his grip on the control, he held the boat on a steady course.

As he eased the boat up to the dinghy tie-up on the fuel dock at the marina, Tad tossed a line around a cleat, used it to pull the skiff snug to the dock, then waited for Kent to make the stern fast before dropping the fenders over the side and hitching the bow line. It took them no more than ten minutes to find what they were looking for, but ten more to pay for it, and in the twenty minutes they were gone, something had changed at the marina.

A familiar figure was standing on the fuel dock, filling the tank of his family’s boat. And the dinghy tie-up was at the far end of the fuel dock.

“Crap,” Eric said quietly. “There’s Adam Mosler.”

“And Ellis Langstrom,” Kent said.

“Ignore them,” Tad said. “We’ll just walk by.”

But Adam wouldn’t be ignored, and as the three of them approached, he centered himself squarely in the middle of the dock, feet spread, arms crossed over his chest.

“What are you dickheads — oops, I mean cone heads — doing on our dock?”

“Just leaving,” Tad said.

“And it’s not your dock,” Kent added.

“In your little girlie boat?” Adam asked, ignoring Kent. “Better hurry or you won’t make it all the way home before dark.” His lips twisted into a sneering grin. “Bad things can happen to coneheads after dark.”

Doing his best to ignore Adam, Eric moved quickly around the other boy, walked to the end of the dock, and tossed the new rope into the Pinecrest boat. As he was climbing in, Kent and Tad caught up with him, untied the boat, and shoved it away from the dock before Adam had a chance to try to pick a fight.

Eric offered a silent prayer to the god of little outboard motors and pulled the rope.

Miraculously, it started.

He gave the engine a little gas and the boat moved away from the dock, leaving Adam glowering after them.

“Why does he want to be such a jerk?” Tad asked, neither expecting nor getting an answer to his question.

Eric guided the boat out of the marina and away from town, and as they pulled out into the open lake, he finally began to relax. Only a moment later, though, he heard the roar of a powerful outboard, and his guts told him what it was even before he glanced back over his shoulder. Sure enough, Adam Mosler was steering his father’s runabout straight toward them, racing at full speed. Ellis Langstrom was standing behind Adam, hanging onto Adam’s seat with one hand, clutching the boat’s rail with the other. Only at the last possible moment did Mosler throttle back and let the runabout’s bow drop into the water, bringing the boat to a stop alongside their little dingy.

“Going fishing, girls?” Adam mocked, then eyed the bait bucket on the floor of the dinghy. “Eeewww, worms!” he said in an exaggeratedly girlish voice. “Who’s going to bait your hooks?”

Eric held his course steady, silently praying that Kent wouldn’t try to pick a fight out here in the middle of the lake.

Once again his prayers were answered.

“Okay,” Adam said, finally deciding that neither Eric nor his friends were going to rise to his taunts. “We’ll leave you to your summer fun.” He shoved the throttle forward; the motor roared, the boat surged, and Adam flipped the wheel and cut sharply away from Eric’s boat, executing the maneuver so quickly that Ellis Langstrom nearly lost his balance.

The spewing rooster tail built so quickly that Eric had no time to escape it, and as Adam’s boat shot away, a cascade of water poured into the dinghy. Tad Sparks instinctively tried to dodge away from the deluge, but succeeded only in slipping off the seat and banging his shoulder against the side of the boat as he fell. Soaked to the skin once more, the three of them could hear Adam laughing as he sped back toward town.

“Bastard,” Kent said. “I’d like to kill that guy.”

“Forget him,” Eric said.

“I don’t want to forget him,” Kent said. “You okay?” he asked Tad.

Tad scrambled back onto the seat, rubbing his shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “I shouldn’t have tried to duck.”

“It’s not your fault,” Kent said. “What a jerk. Maybe we should go back to town, find him, and teach him a lesson.”

“Or maybe,” Eric countered as he turned the boat back on course toward Pinecrest, “we should just go home and forget about Adam Mosler.” As Kent opened his mouth to argue, Eric grinned. “My folks are off playing golf, and Marci’s going to that Summer Fun thing at the school. Which means we’ll have plenty of time to unbrick that door and see what’s behind it.”

Kent looked once more at Adam Mosler’s boat. “Okay,” he said. “Besides, who knows? Maybe there’ll be something in there I can use to get that loser.”

Eric twisted the throttle and the boat picked up speed. A moment later they rounded the point, and Adam Mosler’s boat disappeared.

But, though Adam Mosler and Ellis Langstrom were no longer visible, they were not forgotten.

RITA HENDERSON SAW the sheriff’s car pull up and silently rehearsed what she was going to say to the two boys who were sitting in the backseat. She didn’t care much for Adam Mosler, and was fairly sure that sooner or later he’d take a wrong turn on the road of his life and wind up in prison, if not worse. But Ellis Langstrom was another matter, and when she’d recognized him in the boat with Adam, she called Floyd Ruston, who had been the sheriff as long as Rita could remember and was every bit as eager as she herself that nothing happen to dent the tourist trade that was all that kept the town alive. It had taken her no more than a minute to convince Ruston to throw a scare into the two boys, and no more than ten to bring them to her. Now Rita swiveled in her chair and made a few notes on her pad as she heard three car doors slam and footsteps come up the wooden porch steps to her office door.

She looked up when the door opened, then stood and held her hand out to Sheriff Ruston. “Thank you, Rusty,” she said, deliberately using his nickname to make it clear to the boys just how close her relationship with the sheriff was.

“If you hadn’t called, I’d have impounded that boat and arrested these boys,” Ruston replied, sticking perfectly to the script they’d worked out on the phone.

Rita set her mouth in a grim line and inspected the two who stood before her.

Adam Mosler was on the verge of a smirk — no surprise — but Ellis Langstrom looked positively terrified.

Good.

“Reckless endangerment,” the sheriff went on, starting to tick off the boys’ various offenses on his fingers. “Exceeding the five mile per hour speed limit in the marina. Ignoring the no wake rule.”

Rita nodded.

“If it were up to me, they’d both spend the rest of the summer attending Power Squadron classes and doing a whole lot of community service. Not to mention the six hundred and twenty dollars Adam’s father would have to pay to get his boat out of impoundment.”