Useless Bay(13)

Something was coming. I could taste it in the air, hear it on the wind. All I could think to do was hide things for later, when I needed them.

So I camouflaged the Kalashnikov in such a way that you’d know it was there only if you looked for it. It must’ve been a bitch to shoulder, although I had no intention of doing that unless someone threatened Grant.

I didn’t know where he’d gone, but he was the son of a wealthy man. Easy prey. I imagined him chained to a radiator, force-fed Froot Loops every other day, wallowing in his own pee, forced to poop in a bucket.

Even worse, I could practically feel his weight in my arms as I carried him home and knew that, skinny as he was, he would break me.

Firing a Kalashnikov would be nothing compared with that.

When I went back to the guard shack, Henry was still staring at Yuri’s monitors. I doubted he even knew I’d been gone. He was like his dad that way—put a puzzle in front of him and the rest of the world melted away.

He was studying the monitor that pointed at the garage.

I didn’t see what was so exciting that it held his attention, but Henry was Henry.

“Where is everyone?” I said. “Is Lyudmila around?”

As far as I knew, Mr. Shepherd was still searching my house for Grant, which was the logical thing to do, even though Grant wasn’t there. But that left several people unaccounted for. Not just the Shepherd family, but its entourage as well: Yuri; Joyce, the super-admin; Hannah, the cook (because apparently the family couldn’t even boil hot dogs on their own); and Edgar, who ran errands with a “Yes, sir” and made a hell of a spirulina smoothie.

“Wait,” Henry said. He pointed to the monitor displaying the garage. “Do you see that?”

I looked to the monitor where he was pointing. There was the Lexus taking up most of the space, the rowboat in the opposite corner, the walls hung with kayaks and life preservers. I didn’t understand what he was seeing.

“What’s happening?”

Henry didn’t look away from the bank of monitors. “The CCTV has been set on a loop.”

He toggled two keys on a master keyboard.

Suddenly I understood.

In one picture the wooden rowboat—the one I’d used earlier—was in its correct place on the side of the garage.

In the second, it wasn’t.

Before.

After.

Before.

After.

I didn’t need to look at the time stamp to know which picture the after was.

The boat was gone.

Oh no. Grant wouldn’t. Not by himself.

Earlier, when I’d talked to him in that rowboat, with a light mist just beginning to fall around us, crabs hadn’t been on his mind.

Escape had.

He’d been so scared by something, he hadn’t wanted to go back—not even to Henry. That, along with the fact that the security tapes had been tampered with, made me think that Mr. Shepherd had been right to involve the law. There was something at stake here that went beyond feuds about property boundaries or one little boy who deliberately sabotaged his busy father’s schedule every Sunday night.

I hadn’t understood earlier when we were out in the rowboat. I just thought he wanted to do the impossible, like my brothers and I did every day.

Please don’t take me back, Pix, Grant had said when we’d rowed as far as the Shepherds’ orange buoy. How hard would it be to row across the Sound?

It looks easier than it actually is. At some point, the depth drops off. The closest land off-island is Point No Point. To get there, you’d have to go through the shipping lanes. And you’d have to get past the wreck.

What wreck?

Never mind. Why do you want to go anyway? You’ve got nothing to prove.

I want to disappear.

I should’ve been more sensitive to him and asked more questions about why he wanted to get away. But he seemed to want to disappear every Sunday. So, instead, I said:

Disappear? Like that? Not on my watch, dude.

I was already sprinting out of the shack and running the perimeter of the Shepherd house, over the flagstone patio that surrounded the main building, eight motion-detector lights flicking on as I went.

I vaguely heard Henry calling, “Pix? What’s going on?”

There was one thing I needed to check before I pulled in Patience to start sniffing.

The buoy. The orange one that marked where the Shepherds dropped their crab traps. I couldn’t see the rowboat attached to it. But what was that? A knot of rope? Something was there. It was even darker now. I had to make sure.

I dropped my kit at the end of the Shepherds’ boardwalk and was already stripping off my rain gear and sweats before I got to the water’s edge. I dove and cleaved the bay like a knife.

Three feet of water. That was all it was. But the water was so cold it sent a drag with each stroke. It felt as if my arms and legs were twisted up in bulb kelp.

When I reached the buoy, I stood up. The water reached my waist.

I felt underneath. There. Thick cable covered with barnacles. Something was attached. Something that wasn’t floating.

I gave the rope a good tug, expecting it to come away easily.

Instead, it had no give. There was something heavy on the other end.

I felt along the cable’s length to the end and found a wooden hull. An upside-down one, covered in barnacles, but still a hull. Even under water I could tell that something was wrong. The boards were uneven or sticking up, as though someone had taken an ax to it.