Off Season - Jack Ketchum [19]
“We should be able to find her car. Must be an empty car parked somewhere along in there. Maybe got some identification in it, too. She’s not a local woman, we know that. Get Meyers and Willis on the radio and have them look around some. How long before we get to talk to her?”
“Doctors say she’ll be out a few hours yet.”
“Okay. Have them call in as soon as she gets her eyes open.
“And Shearing.”
“Yeah?”
“Get some damned lunch, will you? State pays you a salary, I assume. Yesterday I counted you had one beer. That ain’t enough, boy. You got to take care of that cold. And you look skinny as a cedar post. You want this chair, you got to fatten up to fill it, son.”
“Who says I want the damn chair, George?”
“Who says Nixon was crooked? I say. Now get outahere.”
Peters shifted again and pushed aside some of the clutter on his desk. He tore a leaf off his note pad and began drawing, sketching the marks he’d seen on his Jane Doe’s back. He had a good memory and drew them well. That sure was a whipping, all right. Most of the marks were clustered in the area of the lower back. He stood up and went to the wall map.
They’d found her just to the north of Dead River. Not much around there off season. A mile offshore was Catbird Island, where that fishing party—four of them, he recalled—had disappeared summer before last. That had been a strange one. Came from Cooperstown, New York, as he remembered. They shared a summer place in Lubec. They’d rented a small fishing boat from a fellow named Short in Dead River and never came home.
They’d found the boat anchored just off the island’s northern landing. No evidence of foul play, no evidence of trouble. So they’d searched the island for days, ten good men, and all they’d come up with was the surprising evidence that somebody had been living out there now and then—there was nothing on Catbird but an old, abandoned lighthouse and a lot of puffins. Probably kids, they’d thought at the time, partying with their girlfriends. But they searched it anyway, just in case. Nothing. They’d had to assume that, despite Short’s warnings to the contrary, the men had gone swimming off the boat and, not reckoning with the current out there, drowned.
There was one other incident out that way, but he couldn’t recall it right now. He knew it was a few years back. Maybe Shearing would remember. But apart from that, he could think of no other trouble in the area. No trouble at all.
He sighed. By now whoever had done this to her could be well into Canada. He hoped she’d talk soon. If not, may as well not bother talking at all. They’d never catch him.
He thought about those crabs again. One of the most ancient forms of life, the crab was. Right up there with sharks and cockroaches. In all those years, it hadn’t needed to learn a thing about the way the world had changed; nothing had crossed its mind but its next meal. A simple, straightforward, brutal form of life. How anybody could make a meal of crab he couldn’t figure. The tourists, naturally, thought fresh crab was a pretty big deal. But the tourists were dumb as dirt. Not Peters. He’d grown up in this country.
A crab was nothing but a carrion-eater. A feeder off the dead or—as in this case—the dying. Same thing as a vulture. The thought of those claws on her nearly made him shudder. But he was not the kind of man to shudder. He was more the kind of man to shrug and say life was life; and to suppose that, like anything else, the crab had found its evil little niche.
5:20 P.M.
There were finally in Washington County (the most depressed county in the nation, Carla had told her, even worse than Appalachia—and that looked about right to Marjie). They had turned off Highway 1 onto 89. Now they were to go past a lake, make a left at a blinker light onto Palermo Road, pass a couple of trailers and a big dilapidated barn, and get on the dump road for Dead River. Once they were on the dump road, Carla’s road was the first right, and her house the first they would come to. Marjorie was glad there would still be some