Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(73)
“Could I have your attention please?” he said loudly and held his ID above his head. “My name is Sergeant Ryan DeMarco of the Pennsylvania State Police and I need your assistance. I am looking for a place, probably within a couple of miles of here, where it would be possible to see across Lake Erie to the lights of Canada. Can anybody think of anyplace like that?”
The man at the dairy cooler said, “That’s like forty miles across.”
The clerk said, “You can see lights from that far, I think.”
The man with the milk came toward the front. “No, because of the curvature of the earth. It would be like trying to look over the horizon.”
DeMarco said, “A high place. Somewhere a person would have to climb. A hill, a tower, something like that.”
The clerk said, “There’s a cell phone tower just a mile or so up the road toward North Springfield.”
“The lighthouse,” the teenage girl called out.
“What lighthouse, miss?”
The man said, “Would that be high enough?”
“Miss?” DeMarco said again. “What lighthouse?”
To her boyfriend she said, “You tell him.”
“Just out at the point,” the boy said.
“Tell me exactly where.”
The man said, “I don’t think it’s high enough. Besides, it’s all fenced off. I don’t think you can even get to it anymore.”
DeMarco crossed to the teenage couple. He looked directly at the boy. “This is extremely important,” he said.
The boy said, “It’s high enough. And you can get to it. You just can’t take your car up to it because the road is blocked off. And you have to climb over a chain-link fence.”
DeMarco said, “Tell me how to get there.”
“Just take 531 east until it swings south. There’s a dirt road there that veers off to the left, straight toward Perry Point. But you can only drive about twenty yards, then there’s these three metal poles you can’t get past. The old lighthouse is another couple hundred yards up that road. Behind an eight-foot fence.”
“And you’re sure you can see the lights from there?”
The boy said nothing for a moment. Then, “I, uh…that’s what I heard anyway. I mean there’s No Trespassing signs all over the place so…”
DeMarco looked at the girl. She smiled and said, “We’re sure.”
Forty-Nine
His headlights blinked out behind him when DeMarco was thirty feet or so beyond the three metal security posts. He stood in the middle of the lane in sudden darkness. Low trees and sumac and a heavy tangled wall of fox grape vines on both sides of the lane blended with the now-black sky. He felt enclosed in a long, narrow closet, and because all directions were now uniformly black, he felt a dizziness swoop into him, and he lurched a step to his left before catching himself, standing still with his legs spread wide. He knew that it was only an illusion that he was falling—he had both feet on the ground; the earth was still flat beneath him. He could hear his engine ticking as it released its heat, as hot oil flowed back into the oil pan, as hot metal cooled and contracted.
He felt an urgency, yet knew that it would do neither him nor Huston any good if he went rushing headlong into the bushes. The lane was still there. It had not disappeared from existence just because his headlights went out. His eyes would adjust. A step at a time, he told himself.
He was carrying his flashlight but decided not to use it here. It would have cast a powerful beam, enough to illuminate the path for two hundred feet ahead. But if Huston was indeed up ahead somewhere, and DeMarco felt certain he was, he would see the light coming toward him, jerking back and forth, and some vague premonition told DeMarco that the only productive approach would be a cautious one, that he needed to move in on Huston as carefully, as reverently, as one might approach a wounded animal that had crawled into the brush to die.
He thought for a moment about taking out his cell phone and using its dull blue glow to illuminate his path, but he did not want to chance even that. His eyes would adjust. He was moving north toward the lake, and in all likelihood, Huston was facing north, if indeed he was not already facedown on the boulder-strewn shore. But an anomalous blue light bobbing up the lane might still catch Huston’s attention, might force a tragic decision that had not yet been implemented. Most suicides, DeMarco knew, were anything but sudden. Most victims sat a long time with the gun in their lap, the razor pressed between finger and thumb. It took a long time to summon the courage or despair sufficient for the next step.
DeMarco drew hope from the fact that Huston had reached out twice. Unfortunately, the first call had been answered by a machine. Nathan would have had the prescience and empathy necessary to intuit Huston’s motives and might have swayed the man’s resolve somehow, might have pulled him in. Danni, however, was very young—too young to know the depth of Huston’s sorrow. Too far away, in a sense, to extend a hand into the chasm of Huston’s grief.
DeMarco wondered why Huston had chosen Danni and Nathan to contact. A stripper and a student. Did the man have no friends, no trusted confidante? At first, DeMarco thought this very strange. Then he asked himself, Do you?
DeMarco knew that his only choice was to proceed cautiously under the assumption that the implication of Poe’s poetry had not yet been fulfilled. His own arm was long enough to reach into any chasm. No chasm was deeper than the one gouged out by the loss of a child.