He watched her eyes break from his and go to the pail of bloody water.
“The mess you’ve got on your hands,” he said, “isn’t the sort you clean up with a mop.”
19
HE WOKE TO THE sound of the generator.
It was well into the morning, and he lay on his stomach on the boathouse floor. Somehow he’d thrashed his way off the blanket in his sleep, and his cheek was pressed to the bare boards. He was lucky he hadn’t pitched himself into the water. Dreams of a woman in a yellow dress had stalked him.
He pushed himself upright now and blinked and cocked his head, listening. Yes, it was definitely the generator; he could hear the distinctive hammering of the cylinders. The timing was off, making it sound like the motor had a limp, but it was running. The damn thing was running.
He got up slowly, feeling stiffness in every joint, then leaned off the edge of the dock and splashed briny water into his face, licking the salt off his lips. He groaned and rolled his head around on his neck and then started up the path. In the yard, he could see the indentations the cars had left the night before. He thought of the sheriff’s car and the woman in handcuffs and the way he’d let them drive off into the darkness, and he felt his chest tighten.
In front of the porch, Paul stood beside the generator with a wide grin on his face. Rebecca Cady had her hands at her temples as if she couldn’t believe it. When Arlen joined them, Paul kept smiling but didn’t say a word.
“I figured it out last night,” he said finally. “Woke up at dawn, thinking that everything was ready to move the way it should mechanically. I had all that done right. But it wasn’t even catching, and so I thought the problem had to be in the electrical. It’s an electrical ignition, you know. You turn that crank to make the current that fires the ignition, and then the batteries take over. The engine charges the batteries.”
“I get it,” Arlen said. “But what did you do?”
“Checked the cutouts to see if the circuit was alive or if one of them was open. Turned out two of them were. I closed them, and it started on the first try.”
“Hell of a job,” Arlen said, but he was looking at Rebecca Cady instead of the generator. The gaze she returned was as cool as winter wind. No trace of the nearly broken woman that had showed last night in the trembling hands that held the mop, in the tears that slid down her face.
“I’ve got to adjust the timing,” Paul said, shutting the generator off, the bangs slowing and then silencing altogether. “But I’ll wait until we have it back in place to do that. Then we’ll need to get that little shed put back together.”
“I guess we have a full day ahead of us,” Arlen said.
Rebecca didn’t offer a word of objection. I’d like you to leave, she’d screamed at him last night, but now she stood by silently.
Paul was right, Arlen thought. She’s scared, and she doesn’t want to be alone anymore. Won’t tell anybody a damn thing, though, so she’s nearly as alone now as she would be if we were gone. You can’t find much company from inside a padlocked, stone-walled fortress.
He had to get her to talk. If they were spending so much as another night in this place, he had to understand what in the hell was going on. And they’d be spending another night, because what he’d told her before was bullshit—he couldn’t convince the boy to leave. Not anymore. Paul was anchored here by a love that Rebecca didn’t even see.
Love is a powerful thing, and like all powerful things, it can be used to harm, the woman named Gwen had said the previous night, just before her face became a skull. The memory left Arlen wishing for his flask, even though he hadn’t yet tasted coffee.
“Going to need lumber,” he said, just to fill the air with talk. “Not much left of that generator shed that’ll be usable.”
“Going to need some for the dock and boathouse, too,” Paul said.
If she wanted them gone, now was the time to say so.
“I’ve got enough money to get it started at least,” she said. “If you know what you’ll need, I can give you enough to get it started.”
So there it was. They were staying. The proclamation had been issued quietly, but it rang loud and clear to Arlen, and from the satisfied smile he saw on Paul’s face, he knew the boy had registered the implication, too.
“We’ll take some measurements,” Paul said, “and figure out what we need. It shouldn’t be too expensive to get started. We’ll build that generator shed first and then work on the dock. I think that would make the most sense.”
Off he went, talking a mile a minute. Rebecca Cady was responding, but Arlen was no longer listening to either of them, was instead gazing up at the house and the empty expanse of sand and sea behind it.