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  Unless they’re done dragging and they’re waiting to see what the divers bring up. Abandoned cars or the skeletons of ancient suicides or the bodies of his best friend on Kraven and his angry lover. Who?

  A cold, wet nose grazes his wrist and he reaches out. You followed me! Touched, he sets his hand on the dog’s bony head, and feels its whole body shivering with love. Yes, Ray’s dog slipped off the bed and came running out into the night to look after him. Oh Dude, he thinks, but can’t bring himself to say. Oh, Dude. Quick and furtive, he keeps to the shadows, scared of being seen and scared nobody will see him because without him knowing it had happened or how it happened, David Ribault of Charlton, Yale and the offshore islands no longer exists.

  It makes this not better, but easier, knowing the Dude is walking point. When Ray comes back I’ll tell him this is the dog’s real name. Running ahead of the darkness, he pins his heart on the return in spite of the shuttered store windows lining Bay Street, the gaping jaws of the Episcopal church, everything in this town dead empty. Deserted. Apt analogy for David Ribault’s soul. At least the dog. Oh, Dude.

  It’s odd. The back door to Weisbuch’s store is open— guess this event, this kidnapping or vanishment, this whatever it was caught Marlon out back. Right. Randolph Flatley would have come in with the first catch of the day, but that was hours ago. Randolph’s truck smells pretty high, and whatever Marlon was buying is rotting in the road. The Dude is pretty excited. Davy grabs his collar and wrestles him away from the dead fish and into the deserted store, growling, “Dude, don’t! It’ll make you sick.”

  Then, what? What? A voice comes back at him from somewhere below. Flat. Dull. Whut. “Whut, Dave? Dave, whut done it?”

  “Holy crap, Boogie, is that you?”

  When he got out of the hospital after the botched adenoid surgery, Marlon Weisbuch made a place for Boogie at the back of his store. When they saw that the damage could not be fixed, Marlon fixed up a sweet room for Boogie in the basement— pine paneling, Barcalounger and bath, all that. Now his big, confused friend’s voice comes upstairs ahead of him. “How did I get this way?”

  Davy’s flash lights up that round, empty face. “The operation, Boog, remember?”

  Boogie wails, “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Shh, Boogie, it’s all over cops out there. When did you get back?”

  “Back?”

  “Back from Poyntertown, Thibault’s creek, wherever you were when it came down.” Went up?

  “Never went nowhere. Been here.”

  “Like, before it happened?”

  “I done tole you.” Boogie’s voice spikes. “I been here!”

  Easy, don’t start him caterwauling. “You saw it?”

  Boogie gulps down a sob. “Almost.”

  “What do you mean, almost?”

  “Everything shook, the world, my bed. It shook so hard I put the pillow over my head and hunkered down.”

  You’re supposed to go easy with Boogie because he’s different now, take it slow to match his pace, but Davy’s wound so tight that he seizes Boogie by the wrist. “Now, why would you do that?”

  “Ow!”

  “Oh crap, Boog, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” He pats the hurt place on Boogie like a mom curing an imaginary cut.

  The sob explodes. “I was so scared. I hid under the bed.”

  Davy tries to gentle him with a sweet, mom voice. “It’s OK, Boog, it’s OK, everybody’s scared.”

  “You don’t get it. God come for ’em, but I was hiding! Time I come outside, they was gone and it flashed green.”

  “What did?”

  “In the sky. Don’t you get it? They was raptured up.” He shakes his head and big tears fly. “God come down and I was hiding!”

  With an effort, Davy pares the hard edge off his voice and comes in nicer, as close as he can get to soft. “Oh shit, Boogie, don’t cry.”

  Too late. He wails, “God took everybody but me.”

  So they stand there in the dark not knowing. He can’t comfort Boogie but he does his best, clamping his arms around the heaving form until finally, Boogie runs out of sobs and, gasping, recovers his breath. He busies himself behind the counter, fumbling around in the dark and Davy lets him until the dog’s head comes up. There’s somebody approaching. The Dude knows. Cops, feds or clandestine looters coming back from Merrill’s neighborhood? Who?

  The intruder tries Weisbuch’s front door, turning the knob this way, that way. Coming out from behind the counter, Boogie whimpers. Davy has to shush him. He secured that door as soon as he came in. He puts his hand on the dog’s head and the dog understands and settles. Nice dog. Intelligent. He won’t bark now, but Boogie is something else.

  They can’t be here. The Dude will be OK, he can put out food for him, come back for him when this is over, but he and Boogie have to go.

  He begins. “It won’t be dark much longer.” It’s like moving a mountain of grief with words. “How about you get up so we can leave?”

  Sucked back into his pool of misery, big old Boogie sinks to the floor by the counter and starts sobbing all over again. He truly believes that everybody he cares about got raptured up yesterday except him. They’re all up there floating in the sweet hereafter while he is here, grieving for something he doesn’t know about.

  “Now, OK? Before they get done at the lake.” Thinking fast, Davy adds, “There’s people running around out there that you don’t know, ravaging the neighborhoods, that was probably one of them messing with Marlon’s front door just now.”

  Nothing.

  “You don’t want them to bust in here and catch us, Boogie, right?”

  “Shuh, it don’t make no nevermind.”

  “We don’t have much time.” He can’t leave Boogie alone in here, not the way he is, clinging to the last barstool at the far end of Weisbuch’s lunch counter. He’s desolate, down enough to jab a fork into his big heart while you weren’t looking or hang himself from Weisbuch’s ceiling fan.

  “If they catch you they’ll beat up on you or kick you off the island for good.”

  “Let me be.”

  “Don’t you get it? They could put you away.” The tone he has to use shames Davy but he croons, “You could end up in the state hospital. Do you know what that’s like?”

  Boogie doesn’t care what that’s like. “Not going. No way.” Bowing that huge head, he locks his arms around the base of the barstool to make his point.

  “Fuck, Boogie. Can you at least stand up and look me in the face?” It’s a struggle, but Davy gets him to his feet. “OK then, that’s better. Now, let’s go.”

  Snorting up a mess of tears and snot, his big friend hocks up two words. “I can’t.”

  “The hell you can’t.” Davy plants a hand on his friend’s arm, thinking to turn him gently. “OK now, buddy. Move!”

  Everything in Boogie explodes all at once. He roars to raise the dead and bring down the living on Weisbuch’s store, “I can’t!”

  “Shit, keep it down, just be quiet, OK? Oh, Boogie, hush!”

  Davy’s been born, grown old and died several times during this exchange and the more Boogie digs in, the more he knows it’s time for them to go out there and look for root causes. Physical evidence. Tracks left by unknown captors. Somebody who saw it happen. Something they left behind.

  Boogie tries to shake him off but Davy turns him, aiming him at the front door. “Easy, Boog, OK. OK?” If he can only nudge Boogie to that door, shove him outside … “We have to get out of here.”

  The bubble forming across Boogie’s mouth pops and he wails, “I have to stay!”

  “For fuck’s sake, Boogie, why?” He keeps forgetting that although his handsome friend looks like a grown man he is, at an essential level, somewhere around seven years old.

  It’s so hard for Boogie and takes him so long to dredge up the right words that Davy could have died and been buried and dug up again by the time he finds the answer. Squeezing it out between sobs, he whi
spers, “God might come back for me.”

  “Ooh, Boog.” But Davy is grieving too— for everything Boogie should be, that was lost when some fool doctor removed his adenoids and the scalpel cut too deep. More: because at this point he, David Armstrong Ribault, who moved out here from the mainland for the sake of this lovely woman he may never see again— clueless Davy— has no way of knowing exactly how much of his own life is lost along with her.

  He makes a frantic grab for Boogie’s wrist, digging his nails into the soft tissue so hard that blood comes; he is that desperate to make his point. “Boogie, listen.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  Davy leans in close. He says, “If God loves you he’ll find you no matter where you are.”

  In the next odd second Boogie breaks his grip so fiercely that every joint in his fingers pops. Sobbing, he turns on his old friend Davy, and snarls, baring his teeth like a Rottweiler fixing to rip his face off. He isn’t sobbing now. He sets down words meticulously, like a row of cement blocks. “If God loved me, I’d be up there with all the rest of them.”

  God! Davy yips, “How the fuck do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  Davy digs into his own agnostic heart and heaves the words at Boogie one at a time. “Stubborn asshole! You don’t. Get this, and let’s get out of here. Nobody knows.”

  Boogie bunches his shoulders and rams him in the gut, shoving hard. “I just know. And you…”

  “Wait!”

  “And you…” He bulldozes Davy out the door and into the street. The last shove is so hard that it almost topples him: “You don’t know shit!”

  It’s true, Davy thinks, waiting for all his breath to knife back into his chest. While he mulls it, Boogie slams the door and shoots the bolt before Davy can, what? Give him the last blessing?

  He says anyway, “be safe.”

  Then he leans against the brick façade, considering. He needs a moment but all he has is whatever time it takes for the first flashlight beams to hit the far end of Bay Street, signifying that they’re done at the lake.

  It isn’t long before voices sift into the muggy pre-dawn air: good old boys, grumbling. He guesses they’ve dredged, they’ve sent down divers in scuba gear and failed to stop the volunteers who stripped naked and plunged to the bottom; they’ve done it all and come up empty. There are no EMT trucks in this procession, so no paramedics working over survivors, nobody carrying stretchers, no gurneys with body bags that he can see. Either everybody he cares about is dead— or worse. Davy studies the matter for a split second too long. Blinded, he ducks as one of the searchers’ beams sweeps past. His face gleams like a slab of fresh meat in the light. Someone shouts. Davy runs, but nobody follows. Maybe failure at the lake confused them, he thinks. Or they saw him and don’t care.

  Unless they’re saving him for last.

  He can’t be here. He can’t be on Kraven island, but he can’t leave yet. Before he sneaks back to Ray’s dock and casts off in the skiff tied up in the shadow of Ray’s houseboat, there’s one more thing he has to do.

  Gone forever or not, bedded down in some new place with Davy’s one— and only— love, he realizes. His heart chokes and he has to start over. Gone or hunkered down, conniving to control or destroy Merrill along with Dave Ribault and everybody else, even a man like Rawson Steele doesn’t vanish without a trace. Whether he’s out there fucking Merrill in the great unknown or masterminding this operation from corporate headquarters; whether he’s holed up right here on Kraven island fixing to bushwhack me, I’ll hunt him down and then. What?

  If he has Merrill— wait!

  If he’s hurt her, I’ll kill him dead.

  Crazy, but after hours of blundering around the mainland and Poynter’s island and the waters off Kraven not knowing, spinning in Merrill’s bedroom bereft and ignorant and powerless, he has a place to start.

  Nobody inhabits a frilly hotel suite in a small town for more than a week without leaving something behind. Whether Steele engineered this from some big city or got, what— transported with the others— there will be luggage tags in his trash, crumpled papers, bathroom detritus left behind. Before he can quit Kraven island, he has to check out Steele’s room at the Harbor City Inn.

  He picks up what he needs from the tool drawer at the Caltex station and ducks into the alley that runs along behind store-fronts the length of Bay Street, heading for the Inn. They’ll be dragging bawling Boogie Hood out of Weisbuch’s store by the time Davy comes back this way, gritting his teeth as he skulks along in the shadow of dumpsters, garbage cans, abandoned vehicles, because he’s just one guy and he can’t stop them and he should have coldcocked Boogie and dragged him out to the boats and left Kraven before they could ever …

  He should have fought to the death for Boogie and gone down fighting, he should have sprayed them with, OK, what? But they’re too many; they’re armed and walleyed and belching testosterone and besides, he had this to do.

  He has to do this and even if he didn’t, nothing he does here on the island will stop what’s going on, although by God, tomorrow he’ll come back with a platoon of Charleston lawyers if he has to, whatever it takes to break Boogie out.

  Davy is aware of all this, past and present, as he rushes along. He won’t turn on his flash until he’s safe, as in, hunched behind the reservations desk at the Harbor City Inn, grateful that Martha Anne Calhoun still records guests’ names and room numbers in the ledger her grandfather started the day he got married, to Emily Ann Kidder, and the two of them decorated the renovated Victorian with curly maple and flowered chintz, and opened the hotel. Then he’ll break in and search Rawson Steele’s second-floor room. That’s the easy part. Getting back to Azalea House unseen will be somewhat harder, as he spends too long inside the old hotel, and won’t come out until the sun is up, shaken and too conflicted to process the papers he uncovered in Steele’s room where, oddly, even his shaving things were still in place.

  Working in the dark and working fast, he pulls out certain paperwork he thinks will prove his point, although he’s too rattled and exhausted to know exactly what he got. Footsteps hit the hardwood floor below. They’re inside. He’s out of time. Shaking, he discards the packet of photocopies of Carolina sites and the distressed war-era tintype in a crumbling fake morocco case; they mean nothing to him. He hears voices. Boots on the stairs. Time to hit the back stairs.

  He tries to stuff the papers he’s found inside his shirt but they’re too bulky. He can’t run like this. He takes what he can carry and stashes blueprints and site plans in the galvanized Von Harten Dairy box outside the kitchen door. Given the number of early-morning search parties returning from the neighborhoods, he has to back and fill, dive for cover, duck and run all the way to Azalea House, so the mile between here and Ray Powell’s dock will take more than an hour to cross.

  He can’t be sure he hears Boogie’s voice above the others as he runs along behind Weisbuch’s store; that could be guilt, roaring into his head because it’s too late to do anything about it. Wherever he is, Boogie is suffering and even if he wanted to, there’s no way he could help.

  He’s laid wide open now, torn by all the things he’s failed to do, he comes thudding onto Ray’s property, Azalea House spreads its porches like a Carolina matriarch: whatever you did while I wasn’t looking, child, come on in. Davy would like to go in and find Ray, sit down and ask him about the stuff he took, item for item, so Ray can tell him what just happened. Is happening. Will happen, starting now.

  He’d like to dump the whole mess on Ray’s breakfast table—shuh, he’d like to eat, but Ray’s long gone and there are cops or looters or both stalking the porches, so he crunches along behind the azaleas with no detours to the water. He wades out in the shadow of the dock.

  It’s easy enough to untie Ray’s skiff. He goes flat against the bottom and lets the current take him out into open water. He won’t turn on the auxiliary motor until he thinks it’s safe. Then he can head back to Poynter’s is
land, where by this time Earl’s up and frying eggs or, if he’s lucky and the gods are kind, this morning’s catch.

  18

  Merrill Poulnot

  Late

  Merrill blinks. Why do I see myself from a distance? As if the camera just pulled back.

  There’s no time for reflection, now that they are in it. Everything is present tense, accent on the tense. For the first time since she got here, people fill her sterile living room: Neddy, a study in stop-motion; Steele, vibrating like a hawk arrested in midflight; Merrill, poised for whatever comes next.

  Ned: “Outside the rim, Mer. For true!”

  She gives Steele a long, hard look, as if to see through his pale eyes and into the area behind the saturnine grin, to divine or identify whatever he’s hiding, but at this hour in this place, truth is elusive. “Outside the rim,” she says. “Really.”

  “Yep.” Steele winks at Ned, as in, Thanks for the setup line. “Pretty much.”

  Damn that reckless charm. Scowling, she hangs tough. “OK then. Is it the way out of here?”

  “One way. Maybe.” He spreads his hands. “I’m not sure.”

  “Then we need to find out.”

  “OK then.” He strips his hoodie and throws it at her head with a gotcha grin. “You’ll need this.”

  She snags the thing, but not before it wraps itself around her face like a parasite in a science fiction movie. For a minute, it’s hard to breathe. Not Axe, she thinks. God, woman! It smells of him. “What for?”

  He’s in the doorway, his face a blur. “While you’re waiting.”Waiting for what?

  Weedy Ned’s at Steele’s elbow with his face taut and his eyes too bright. “Me too, right?”

  No. “It’s too late. I don’t know what’s out there.”

  “Fuck!

  You’re just a kid! She tries to take his hands in hers, but he pulls away. Tears start. “I have to keep you safe!”

  “Fuck!” Her kid brother’s head inflates and his fists clench; he’s about to self-destruct and when he does, there’s no stopping him. She reaches out, trying to make it better, but he shakes her off. “Fuck that, Merrill, bloody fucking fuck!”