Riptide

  “Ah, good, here’s Hatch. Is that cigarette smoke I smell, Hatch? Adam won’t like that. He’ll probably take a good strip off you for that, maybe hit you with his walker.”

  She watched the two men argue, smiling. Sherlock came up behind her and said, “Everything nearly back to normal, I see. Let’s watch CNN. Gaylan Woodhouse is going to be on in about a minute. He’s speaking for the president, and you’re going to love this spin.”

  Good grief, she thought, watching the TV, she was now a heroine. Someone, she had no idea who, had somehow taken a photo, very grainy, showing her facing Krimakov on that burning roof, her white nightgown blowing around her legs, her Coonan held in front of her in both hands, pointed straight at Krimakov. Gaylan Woodhouse wouldn’t shut up. “Oh dear,” Becca said. “Oh dear.”

  “It’s been a long haul, and you came through,” Sherlock said, and hugged her tightly. “I’m really glad to have met you, Becca Matlock, and I like your being a heroine. I have this feeling that you, Adam, and your father will be coming to lots of barbecues over at our house, beginning when they get out of this joint. Did I tell you that Savich is a vegetarian? When we barbecue, he eats roasted corn on the cob. We won’t know about Sean and his preferences for a while yet. Have you agreed to the date and that marvelous Presbyterian Church your in-laws have been members of for years and years?”

  “Not yet,” Becca said. “Hey, I’m so famous maybe I’ll ask if the churches want to place bids for our ceremony.”

  “You’re a writer, you could write a book, make a gazillion bucks.”

  “She’ll have to make it fast,” Savich said, coming up and squeezing his wife against his chest, “fame is fleeting nowadays. Another week, Becca, and you’ll be a last-page footnote in People magazine.”

  The next day, Becca fle w to Portland, Maine, rented a Ford Escort, and drove up to Riptide. It was cooler this trip, the breeze sharp off the ocean. The first person she saw was Sheriff Gaffney, and he was frowning at her, his thumbs hooked in his wide leather belt.

  “Ms. Matlock,” he said, and gave her his best intimidating cop look.

  “Hi, Sheriff,” she said, grinned at him, and went up on her tiptoes. She gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “I’m famous, at least for a week, that’s what I was told. Be nice to me.”

  For the life of him, Sheriff Gaffney couldn’t think of a thing to say except “Humph,” which he did. “I’ll want to speak to you about that skeleton,” he called after her. “I’ll come to Jacob Marley’s house this evening. Will you be there?”

  “Certainly, Sheriff, I’ll be there.”

  Then she ran into Bernie Bradstreet, the owner and editor of The Riptide Independent. He looked very tired, as if he’d been ill. “My wife’s been sick,” he said, then he tried to smile at her. “At least all your troubles are over, Ms. Matlock.” He didn’t mention how she’d lied to him that long-ago night when Tyler had taken her out to dinner at Errol Flynn’s Barbecue on Foxglove Avenue. He was a good man, bless him.

  And then she was knocking on Tyler’s front door just as the sun was setting. The insects were beginning their evening songs. She heard a dog bark from a house farther down on Gum Shoe Lane. She wished she’d brought a cardigan. She shivered, rang the bell again.

  Tyler’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

  Where was he? Where was Sam?

  She didn’t understand it. She’d told him when she’d be here and she was only ten minutes off. She got back in her rental car and cut over to Belladonna, to Jacob Marley’s house. She’d paid the rent through the end of the month, so the place was still hers. She planned to use this time to pack up the rest of her things, have the place cleaned, and return the keys to Rachel Ryan. Surely Rachel was spending a lot of time with Sam, helping him. She hoped Rachel was also trying to convince Tyler to take Sam to a child shrink.

  She turned the key in the lock and shoved the door open.

  “Hello, Becca.”

  It was Tyler, standing there, Sam in his arms, smiling really big. “We decided to wait for you here. I left the car just down the road. We wanted to surprise you. I’ve got champagne for us and some lemonade for Sam. I even bought a carrot cake; I remembered that you liked it. Come in.” He set Sam down, and Sam stood there staring at her.

  Tyler walked to her and wrapped his arms around her back. He kissed the top of her head. “I like your hair. It’s natural again. God, you’re beautiful, Becca.” He kissed her again, pulled her more tightly against him. “I thought you were beautiful in college, but you’re even more beautiful now.”

  She tried to ease away from him, but he didn’t let her go.

  He gently pushed her chin up with his thumb and kissed her. It was a deep kiss, and he wanted to make it deeper, he wanted her to open her mouth. Sam was standing there saying nothing, just looking at them.

  “No, Tyler, please, no.” She shoved hard against his chest and he quickly stepped back.

  He was still smiling, breathing hard, his eyes bright with excitement, with sex, lust. “You’re right. Sam is standing right here. He’s four, not a baby anymore. We shouldn’t do this in front of him.” He turned to smile down at his son. “Well, Sam, here’s Becca. What do you have to say to her?”

  Sam didn’t have anything to say. He just stood there, his small face blank of all expression. It scared her to her toes. She walked slowly to him and went down on her knees in front of him. “Hello, Sam,” she said, and lightly touched her fingertips to his cheek. “How are you, sweetie? I want you to listen to me now. And believe me because I wouldn’t lie to you. That bad man who kidnapped you, who tied you up and put you in the basement, I swear to you that he’s gone now, forever. He’ll never come back, ever, I can promise you that. I took care of him.”

  Sam didn’t say anything, just suffered her touching his face. Slowly, she brought him against her even though his small body was stiff, resistant.

  “I’ve missed you, Sam. I would have come sooner, but my father and Adam—you remember Adam, don’t you?—they were both hurt and I had to stay with them in the hospital. But now I’m here.”

  “Adam.”

  One word, but it was enough. “Yes,” she said, delighted, “Adam.”

  She turned her head when she heard Tyler say something, but he shook his head at her. “Sam’s okay, Becca. I also brought some barbecue from Errol Flynn’s for our dinner. All the fixings, too. Would you like to have dinner now?”

  And so they drank champagne, Sam drank his lemonade, and everyone ate barbecue pork ribs, baked beans, and coleslaw in Jacob Marley’s kitchen. The carrot cake from Myrtle’s Sweet Tooth on Venus Flytrap Boulevard stood on the kitchen counter.

  After she’d answered countless questions about Krimakov, she said, “What about the skeleton, Tyler? Have the DNA results come in yet? Is it Melissa Katzen?”

  Tyler shrugged. “No word yet that I know of. Everyone believes it is. But that’s not important now. What’s important is us. When do you want to move up here, Becca?”

  Becca was handing Sam another rib. Her hand stilled. “Move back here? No, Tyler. I’m here to see Sam and pack up my things.”

  He nodded and tore meat off the rib he was holding. He chewed, then said, “Well, that’s all right. You’ve just reconnected with your dad, so you need to make sure he’s okay, get to know him and all that, but we need to set our wedding date before you go back to see him. Do you think he’ll want to move up to be near you after we’re married?”

  She set down her fork near the coleslaw. Something had gone terribly wrong. She didn’t want this, but there was no hiding from it now. She said it slowly, calmly, aware that Sam was now very still again, not eating, listening, but she had no choice. She said, “I’m truly sorry if you’ve misunderstood, Tyler. You and Sam are my very dear friends. I care about both of you quite a lot. I’ve appreciated all you’ve done for me, the support you’ve given me, the confidence you’ve had in me, but I can’t be your wife. I’m very sorry, but I just don’t fee
l about you the way you want me to.”

  Sam continued to sit there on two thick phone books, still and silent, the half-chewed pork rib clutched in his small fingers.

  She forced a smile. “We should probably have this talk after Sam’s gone to bed, don’t you think?”

  “Why? It concerns him. He wants you for his mother, Becca. I told him that was why you were coming back. I told him you were going to fix everything and you’d be here for him forever.”

  “We should speak of this later, Tyler. This is between us. Please.”

  Sam looked down at his plate, his small face drawn, pale in the dim kitchen light.

  “All right then,” Tyler said. “I’m going to put Sam down with a blanket in the living room, on that real comfortable sofa. What do you think, Sam?”

  Sam didn’t tell them what he thought.

  “I’ll be right back, Becca.”

  He scooped Sam up off his phone books and carried him out of the kitchen. She shivered. The house felt uncomfortably cool. She hoped Sam would be warm enough with just one blanket. She hoped Sam had gotten enough to eat. She wished Tyler had wiped Sam’s fingers off better.

  What was she going to do? Was she the one off base here? Had she given Tyler the wrong impression? She’d known he was jealous of Adam, and that’s when she had pulled back from him, even cooling her friendship toward him. But still he’d misunderstood, still he’d come to believe that she wanted to be his wife. How could it be possible? She’d said nothing, done nothing, to give him that idea. And he was using Sam, which was despicable of him.

  Sam. What was she going to do? There was something very wrong, triggered, she supposed, by Krimakov’s kidnapping of him. She heard Tyler walking back toward the kitchen. She had to clear this up, quickly and cleanly. She had to think what she could do to help Sam.

  She’d gotten the name of a really good child psychologist in Bangor from Sherlock. She would start there.

  But she didn’t have a chance to start anything because Tyler said from the doorway, “I love you, Becca.”

  32

  “No, Tyler, no.”

  Tyler just smiled at her, an intimate smile that chilled her to the bone. “I’ve loved you from that first time I saw you in Hadley’s freshman dorm at Dartmouth. You were looking lost, wondering where to find a bathroom.”

  She smiled at that, no recollection at all of that meeting. “You didn’t love me, Tyler. You dated lots of girls in college. You married Sam’s mother, Ann. You loved her.”

  He came into the kitchen and sat down across from her. “Sure I loved her for a while, but she left me, Becca. She left me and she didn’t plan to come back. She was even going to take Sam, but I didn’t let her.”

  What was he talking about? Of course things couldn’t have been smooth between them, since Ann had ended up leaving him. They’d faced off about it? There’d been a confrontation? But that didn’t concern her now. She said, “I’m really sorry if you’ve gotten the wrong idea, Tyler. Please believe me. I am your friend and I hope I always will be. I would like to see Sam grow up.”

  “Since you’re going to be his mother, of course you’ll see him grow up. You’ll make him well again, Becca. He’s been silent and withdrawn ever since his mother left.”

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Sure, if you’re going to make some.” He watched her measure the coffee into the machine, then pour in the water. He watched her press the switch, watched it turn red.

  “Tell me about Ann,” she said, wanting him to remember the woman he’d loved, distract him from her. Why had Ann left him? Had there been another man? Why hadn’t she taken Sam with her? So what if Tyler had tried to fight for custody? Sam was still her child, not his. But she had just run away without him.

  Tyler was still watching the coffeemaker. She watched him breathe in the aroma. Finally, he said, “She was beautiful. She’d been married to a guy who left her the minute he found out she was pregnant. We hooked up kind of by accident. She couldn’t get the gasoline cap off her car. I helped her. Then we went to Pollyanna’s Restaurant.” He shrugged. “We got married a couple months later.”

  “What happened?”

  He said nothing for a very long time. “The coffee’s ready.”

  She poured each of them a cup.

  He took a drink, then shrugged. “She was happy and then she wasn’t. She left. Nothing more, Becca. Listen, I swear I’ll make you happy. You won’t ever want to leave. We can have more kids, yours and mine. Sam was Ann’s kid anyway.”

  “I’m going to marry Adam.”

  He threw the coffee at her. He roared to his feet, sending the wooden chair crashing against the wall, and shouted, “No, you’re not going to marry that goddamned bastard! You’re mine, do you hear me? You’re mine, you damned bitch!”

  The coffee wasn’t scalding anymore, thank God, but it hurt, splashing on her neck, on the front of her shirt, soaking through to her skin.

  He leapt toward her, his hands out.

  “No, Tyler.” She ran, but he was blocking any escape out the back door. There was no place to go except down to the basement. But she’d be trapped down there. No, wait, there was another small entry on the far side of the basement where long-ago Marleys had had their winter cords of wood dumped. She saw it all in a flash, and ran to the basement door, jerked it open, then pulled it closed behind her. She locked it, flipped on the light, saw the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling by a thin wire, even as she heard him pulling on the knob on the other side, yelling, calling her horrible names, telling her that he would get her, that she wouldn’t leave him, not ever.

  She ran down the wooden stairs. She looked at the wall where she’d found Sam propped up, bound and gagged, then at the far wall that still gaped open from when the skeleton had fallen out of it after that storm.

  She heard the basement door splinter. Then he was on the stairs. She pulled and jerked at the rusted latch that held the small trapdoor down. It was about chest high. Move, move, but she was shrieking it in her mind, not out loud. What the hell was going on with him? It had happened so quickly. He had snapped, just snapped, and turned into a wild man. Oh God, a crazy man.

  She heard his feet clattering to the bottom steps. The latch wouldn’t give. She was trapped. She turned to see him running across the concrete floor. He came to a stop. He was panting. Then he smiled at her.

  “I nailed that trapdoor shut last week. It was dangerous. I didn’t think we should take the chance that a kid could open it and fall through. Maybe hurt himself. Maybe even kill himself.”

  “Tyler,” she said. Be calm, be calm. “What’s going on here? Why are you acting like this? Why this rage? At me? Why?”

  He said, all calm and serious, and he actually waved his finger at her, like a lecturing teacher, “You’re like the others, Becca. I hoped you would be different, I would have wagered everything that you were different, that you weren’t like Ann, that faithless bitch who wanted to leave me, wanted to take Sam and go far away from me.”

  “Why did she want to leave you, Tyler?”

  He shrugged. “She thought I was smothering her, but that was just in her mind, of course. I loved her, wanted to make her and Sam happy, but she started pulling back. She didn’t need all those other friends of hers, they just wasted her time, took her away from me. Then she told me that night that she had to leave me, that she couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “Stand what?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to give her everything she wanted, both her and Sam. I just wanted her for myself, wanted her to commit herself only to me, and all I asked was that she stay close to me, that she look to me for everything. And she did for a while, and then she didn’t want to anymore.”

  “She left?”

  In that instant, Becca knew that Ann McBride hadn’t gone anywhere. She was still here in Riptide.

  “Where did you bury her, Tyler?”

  “In Jacob Marley’s backyard, right under tha
t old elm tree that was around when World War One began. I dug her deep so no animals would dig her up. I even gave her a nice service. She didn’t deserve anything, but I gave her all the religious trappings, the sweet and hopeful words. After all, she was my wife.” He laughed, remembering now and said with a smirk, “Old Jacob had been dead by then nearly three years so I didn’t worry about getting rid of him that time.”

  He started laughing then. “I killed that ridiculous old dog of his—Miranda—a long time ago. The bitch didn’t like me, always growled when I came near. The old man never knew, never.”

  She remembered the sheriff telling her how much Jacob Marley had loved that dog, how she’d just up and died one day. Her heart was pounding, slowly, painfully. Somehow she had to reach him. She had to try. “Listen to me, Tyler. I didn’t betray you. I would never betray you. I came here to Riptide because of what you’d told me about it. I was here to hide out. This was sanctuary for me. You helped me, so very much. You don’t know how much I appreciate that.” Were his eyes calmer now? Maybe, but he frowned and she tried to still her fear, said quickly, “That madman was trying to kill both me and my father. The last thing I wanted to think about was falling in love with anyone. I never meant for you to believe there was more to it than friendship.”

  His eyes were darker now, a barely leashed wildness that scared her to her soul. He said, his voice sarcastic, “You didn’t want to fall in love, Becca? Then why are you marrying that bastard Carruthers?”

  For a moment, her brain refused to work. He was right, oh God, he was right. She had to think, she had to do something. She was alone in the basement with a man who wasn’t sane, a man who was somehow twisted, a man who had murdered his wife and buried her in Jacob Marley’s backyard. Sheriff Gaffney had been certain that Tyler had murdered his wife. Everyone believed that the skeleton that fell out of the basement wall had been Ann McBride. But it wasn’t.