Silence.
“Paul!”
Silence.
“Damn them,” he said, and his voice shook a little now. “Damn them.”
He went back through the yard and inside the house. Rebecca was still on the floor, but now she’d lifted her hands to cover her face. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.
“What?” Arlen said.
“Get him down,” she said, and this time he heard it through the sobs. “Please get him down.”
He laid his hand on her back. “Rebecca, we’ve got to get out of—”
“Get him down!”
He straightened. “All right.” Logic screamed at him to get her the hell away from here immediately, back to Barrett before the bastards who’d done this showed up again, but instinct told him they were gone now and wouldn’t be coming back. Where was Paul, though?
“We can’t leave him like that,” Rebecca said, not looking up, her voice heavy with tears. “We can’t.”
“I’m going for him,” Arlen said.
He stepped out onto the porch and gave the beach another one of those slow, panning stares, saw nothing but sand and shells and water. Just as it always had been. There were no indentations in the beach where a boat had been put in. Anyone coming from the water would have used the inlet.
He stepped over to the dangling corpse, taking care to avoid the blood, and dragged a porch chair behind him. Then he climbed onto it and took hold of Owen’s legs, making sure to keep his eyes on the shoes and not look down into the poor dead kid’s face.
I didn’t see it in you, he thought. I’m sorry. It wasn’t there this morning. Something changed after we left. I couldn’t have warned you. I wish I could have, but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.
He was thinking this as he took a firm hold of Owen’s legs and drew his pocketknife out. At the touch of the dead body, he thought of Paul Brickhill and said, in a whisper, “I’m coming for you, Paul. I don’t know if there’s time left, but I’m coming for you.”
He lifted the knife to the rope as he said the words, and when the response came he nearly sawed through his own finger.
There’s time.
Two words, spoken right in his ear, right inside his damned head. He stumbled and fell from the chair, upending it. The gun was on the porch rail, and he snatched it up.
Nothing but silence now. Those two words only a memory. He turned and pointed the gun in first one direction and then the other, still backing away from the body, and saw nothing, heard nothing.
It had been Owen’s voice.
“No,” Arlen said softly. “No, it wasn’t.”
But it was.
For a moment he was frozen there, but then the sound of Rebecca’s sobbing from inside shook him loose, and he stepped up to the body again. This time he didn’t touch Owen’s legs but reached higher on the rope. He grasped the lower portion of the cord with his left hand and sawed away above it with his right, and eventually the rope parted and the body was deadweight tugging his arm down. He let him go as gently as he could, laid him on the porch in his own blood. Then he picked up the gun again and went back inside.
“He’s down,” he said gently, kneeling beside Rebecca and lifting her face so he could see her eyes. He regretted it as soon as he got a glimpse of the terrible pain trapped in them. “He’s resting easy now, okay? But I’ve got to go have a look around. I’ve got to see…”
“Paul,” she said.
“Yeah.” He got to his feet again and flicked open the cylinder on the gun, checked the load, then spun it shut and walked to the stairs. It was very dark inside now, lights off and the clouds thickening, and he went up the steps in the gloom with the gun held out in front of him. Five rooms upstairs, five checks, five views of undisturbed furniture.
Back downstairs, he saw Rebecca crawling out onto the porch. He frowned, not wanting her to see that sight again. It was her brother, though, and if she was going to insist on seeing him, he wouldn’t stop her. He followed her onto the porch and pressed the gun into her hand and said, “Here. Use it if anyone comes. I’m going down to check the boathouse for Paul. Then we have to leave.”
She didn’t answer. He dropped her hand and she held on to the gun and stared out at the ocean. He watched for a few seconds and then told himself that there was nothing to be done for her right now, left the porch and jogged down to the boathouse.
It was incomplete, no roof on it yet, the smell of sawdust mingling with the brine of the sea and decaying fish. He checked the boathouse and walked the length of the dock and stared into the water and saw nothing. The boat was where it had been. He looked at it for a minute, hesitating. He didn’t want to take the time to go out to it, but he remembered that it was where Rebecca’s father had been left six months earlier, and maybe the act had been repeated with Paul.