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"We’re here," he said. "Come on. I gotta get back to Gloria."

Vi followed Sam back out onto the aft deck. The night was colder, the moon now unveiled and shining down upon the harbor.

Sam offered his hand and Vi took it. He helped her step up onto the dock.

"Thank you, sir," she said. "I know this was a big inconvenience, and I hope Gloria feels better." Sam just rolled his eyes and walked back into the salon.

As Vi headed up the dock she heard the twin diesel engines come to life again. Glancing over her shoulder, she watched the yacht cruising back out into the harbor.

Vi reached Silver Lake Drive and stopped.

Sam had deposited her near the deserted Coast Guard station and the ferry docks.

The lights of Ocracoke shone and reflected in the harbor—a cold twinkling silence. It was midnight and she didn’t have a key to her room at the Harper Castle B&B.

The Coast Guard station was dark.

I’ll just have to wake somebody up.

She would’ve run but it was all she could do to walk, her legs still burning from the sprint across the tidal flat. As she walked along the double yellow line she thought of Andrew Thomas, wondered if he’d still be alive when she saw him next.

She felt overjoyed to be back on Ocracoke. The safety was palpable. She could sense the seven hundred sleeping residents all around her.

She started to say a prayer of thanks.

A car approached from behind.

Stepping back onto the shoulder, she watched an ancient pickup truck come rumbling slowly toward her. It pulled up beside her and squeaked to a halt.

The passenger window rolled down and Rufus Kite leaned forward from the driver seat, his eyes hollowed in the absence of light—two oilblack pools.

"Miss King? Thank God."

"What are you doing—"

"Oh thank God. Everyone’s looking for you."

"Who’s looking for me?"

"Someone saw you with Andrew Thomas in Howard’s Pub. Everyone’s looking for you. Come on, get in."

The passenger door swung open.

"I’ll take you back to the house," he said. "We’ll get you cleaned up. I imagine you have some very important phone calls to make."

"Well, yeah I do, but… No, I think I’ll just walk over to the Silver Lake Inn." She motioned down the street to a three-story motel on the waterfront. "I’ll wake someone up if I have to, but I don’t want to trouble—"

"No trouble at all. Hop in. Besides, I don’t think anyone’s there, Miss King."

An odd tone in his voice. Not mere insistence.

Something rustled in the back of the truck.

"Look, I appreciate the offer, but—"

Maxine Kite sat up from the truck bed and climbed out of the back wielding a mallet. Vi was backpedaling, on the verge of running, when Maxine cracked her skull open.

Vi’s knees went to jelly and her cheek hit the cold pavement, blood running across her eyelid, down the bridge of her nose, over her lip, between her teeth. She heard a door screech open, saw Rufus step down onto the road on the other side of the truck, watched his boots come toward her, wondering if this throbbing sleepiness at the base of her neck meant she were dying.

Vi rolled onto her back.

Swallowed blood.

Warm liquid rust.

The spindly branches of a live oak overhung the road. Between its limbs the night sky shone in pieces—cloudless, black, filling up with stars.

Rufus and Maxine stood arm-in-arm grinning down at her.

A walkie-talkie crackled.

Rufus pulled it from his back pocket, pressed the talk button, said, "Yeah, son, we got her. See you back at the house."

Vi’s brain told her arm to unzip the poncho and take out the gun but she remembered that she didn’t have it and besides the arm wouldn’t move.

"Now that’s what you call a good ol’ fashioned wallop," Rufus said and chuckled.

Then the old man kissed his wife on the cheek and leaned down toward Vi, all gums tonight.

"Her lips are still moving," he said. "Go ahead and clonk her again, Beautiful."

[Alternate ending of Locked Doors begins here...]

S W E E T – S W E E T

&

B E A U T I F U L

However, there is a locked room up there

with an iron door that can’t be opened.

It has all your bad dreams