Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [137]
He’d just wanted the sensation, however fleeting, of being Andrew Thomas the Almost Famous Writer, when that name was the best thing he owned.
In the morning I took I-40 through Raleigh, then Highway 64 into eastern North Carolina and the flattening coastal plain, through towns called Tarboro, Plymouth, and Scuppernong. At sunset I crossed the Alligator River, then the sounds of Croatan and Roanoke. The eastern fringe of North Carolina had softened into marsh and swamp as it dissolved into the Atlantic.
Sixty-four ended at the Outer Banks in the town of Whalebone, and from there I glimpsed the Bodie Island Lighthouse to the south poking up out of the pines. Coupled with Orson’s journal entries, the fact that my former fiancée was found hanging from that lighthouse erased any doubt I may have had about whether Luther Kite was currently in operation somewhere on the Outer Banks.
I took Highway 12 south for seventy miles through the beach communities of Rodanthe, Little Kinnakeet, Buxton, and finally Hatteras Village, the end of the line.
I caught the 9:00 p.m. ferry to Ocracoke Island and as the noisy engines gurgled through the water I walked up to the starboard.
I’d never been to Ocracoke. According to a brochure I’d picked up at a gas station in Buxton, it was a skinny island, sixteen miles long, less than half a mile wide in places. Its seven hundred residents inhabited a village at the south end on a small harbor that faced the sound. The brochure had bragged that it was the quaintest remotest village in all of the Outer Banks.
In light of Karen’s very public execution, an unsettling possibility occurred to me as the ferry crossed Hatteras Inlet and the full devastating reality of what I was doing set in: What if my coming to the Outer Banks isn’t a surprise at all for Luther but precisely what he wants me to do? What if those murders were for me? What if they were bait?
Now the ferry neared the tip of Ocracoke, the wind whipping cold and salty in from the sea.
I leaned against the railing and stared out into the soundside darkness.
O C R A C O K E
31
AT 6:00 a.m. Wednesday morning on the third floor of the Harper Castle B&B, Violet knelt over the toilet in her suite, waiting for the nausea to pass. After fifteen minutes of dry heaves she went back to bed and slept until ten o’clock.
She felt much better when she woke again. Turning over onto her left side, she stared through the window at the bay around which the village of Ocracoke had been built. In the windless cloudy melancholy of the morning, Silver Lake Harbor maintained a veritable supernatural stillness.
As Vi rolled up her sheer black hose she noted the cheerful island décor of the tiny room—the pastel painting of a five-masted schooner in rough seas above the headboard, the coral wallpaper patterned with little white sand dollars. Max would love this place, she thought, placing a small tape recorder into her purse and fastening her shoulder rig: a holstered .45 Smith & Wesson with a twin magazine-carrier. Max had surprised her with the horsehide holster last February on Valentine’s Day.
Vi primped in the bathroom, dusting her cheeks with blush and adjusting a purple suede headband that matched her suit. Then she grabbed her purse and headed downstairs through the sprawling wood "castle," across oak floors, between walls of cypress, into the dining room, lured by the promise of a complimentary continental breakfast.
The buffet had been heavily grazed. She chose one of the three remaining bran muffins and filled a glass with cranberry juice. Except for the snoozing old man (his mouth dropped wide open, an Ocracoke Observer still in his grasp), the dining room was empty.
Vi sat down at a table