Dead Water Zone - Kenneth Oppel [8]
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He couldn’t sleep. He was all wound up. With a sigh, he angled his watch face to the moonlight: 2:18. He stood, pacing the room, trying to relax. At the window he paused: a clear sky littered with stars and a half-moon reflected brilliantly in the black lake water. Someone was there, on the pier.
Monica. Her long hair fell free against her back. Her skin seemed luminous in the moon’s light. She paused at the edge of the pier, knelt, and stared down at the water. Her hands dipped in and came back cupped with water. She held it up to her face, then let it slither through her fingers, trailing in silver rivulets down her wrists and forearms.
Without warning, she pivoted and looked up at him. Their eyes met. He quickly turned away.
4
PAUL GAZED DOWN at the opaque green water swelling against the boat’s side. He shivered in the sharp morning chill. He wished he’d brought a sweater. Tendrils of mist swirled around them like miniature tornadoes, and overhead, a pale sun was waiting to burn through.
The water was strewn with debris, but Monica nosed the boat expertly around jagged timbers, car tires, plastic canisters, oil-slicked wooden spools.
He’d slept poorly—like some machine that wouldn’t shut itself off—and this morning his body ached, and the inside of his mouth felt like cheap carpeting. He found himself sneaking glances at Monica’s face. In the diffuse white light of the mist, she didn’t look as pale as she had last night on the pier. He felt like a voyeur, peeping through windows, hoping for a bit of excitement. He should mind his own business.
“So why’d he run away?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the water.
Paul hesitated, then said, “Things weren’t good for him at home.”
That much was true. Sam had been so eager to get away from Governor’s Hill, from Mom and Dad. From him. It was a kind of running away.
“He skipped a lot of grades at school. He didn’t have many friends. He was way smarter than anyone his age but too small to mix with the older kids. He was always getting beaten up.”
“So you were the bodyguard.”
Paul nodded slowly, pleased. “I was always running interference for him on the way back and forth from school. Couldn’t be with him all the time, though.” He paused, uncomfortable. “A lot of it was his fault. He was lippy, pissing everyone off. If he’d have shut up, it would have been better for him.”
“It must have been a pain, babysitting.”
“It wasn’t babysitting,” he snapped angrily. But she was right; how many times had he used the same word himself?
Babysitting. It was a complicated feeling. He’d always felt like Sam’s protector. Sometimes he’d have been happy to let him fend for himself. But whenever he thought of that one time, his throat contracted. They’d made him watch. No. He’d be seeing Sam soon, and everything would be all right.
Dark shapes loomed, then broke through the mist, a long line of decaying boathouses, some half submerged.
“That’s the one,” said Monica, pointing.
“How many times did you see him around here?”
“A couple,” she answered.
“What was he doing?”
“Looking around. That’s how I knew he was a stranger. It was funny, because at first…” She trailed off.
“What?”
“Nothing. You sure don’t look like your brother.”
“You never talked to him?”
“Why would I?”
She maneuvered slowly through the tangle of broken jetties. The outer doors of the boathouse were wide open, and she pushed the gears into neutral and swung inside. At the back, a set of stairs led up to a loft, partially concealed behind a low wall.
Monica nudged against the deck, looping the painter deftly around a rusted metal cleat.
Paul was over the side at once.
“Sam!”
No answer.
“You sure this was the place?” he asked.
“This is it. Watch the planking. It looks rotten.”
“Sam!”
He climbed up to the loft.
It was the disorder that sent the first shriek of alarm through his head. Clothes were scattered about, jeans, shirts, socks, underwear—he even