Free Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace by Sarah Graves

the cold somewhere, as sleet spattered the windshield; she ran the wipers again.
    Sam, where are you?
    “So the only safe place to leave a stolen car,” Chip said, “where the police won’t be able to draw any conclusions about you from it, is back where you got it. Someone knew that, and cared.”
    She glanced again at him, surprised; he shrugged modestly in reply. “Hey, I told you I worked for a crime writer. I’m used to thinking about this stuff.”
    But not to living it. No one ever was. Out on the water, the Coast Guard’s orange Zodiac and her crew practiced water rescues, tossing and retrieving a man-shaped dummy. Cold duty, but at least once ayear they did it for real, so they rehearsed. At the wharf by the Chowder House restaurant, closed for the season, a few lobster traps were being put onto the deck of a tubby little wooden boat.
    It was the season for lobster fishing now that the creatures were done with their yearly molting. Soon the boats would be out in force, no matter the weather.
    Randy Dodd had gone overboard in November. If he had.
    Funny thing about work in Eastport, that somehow the best season for it was always the worst weather for the people who did it. Warm day, though, she recalled, when Randy went over.
    “A car you used to transport someone … or something?” Chip mused aloud. “To a boat, maybe? That’s the only other way to get off this island efficiently, right?”
    She nodded. “Which brings us to the guy in the mask.”
    On the dock the night before … Because if you knew from personal experience, as Randy would have, that local kids hung out on the dock at night, and if you wanted to be prepared to get rid of them if you needed to, so they wouldn’t see something—or see you—that’s what you’d bring along. A fright mask, or something like it.
    “Maybe Sam did see someone on the breakwater,” Chip said. “While he was helping to haul the boat, or afterwards. Did he know Randy Dodd? Would he have recognized him?”
    “He used to crew for Randy,” she replied. “A few years ago, before he went away to school. So yes, Sam would know him if he saw him.”
    But then it hit her how ridiculous she was being. She wanted an answer to where Sam was, and in the absence of anything else she was fastening on to Chip’s theory.
    Trouble was, Randy being alive still didn’t make any sense. The fingernails that had been found stuck in his trapline showed that, even if nothing else did.
    She bit her lip hard, drew warm blood before she trusted her voice enough to speak. For almost a year now, Sam had been as sober and as reliable as the tides.
    He could’ve fallen off the wagon again. But she didn’t think he had. Something had happened to him, something bad. She wished her husband, Wade Sorenson, was home.
    For a moment she pictured Wade, tall and solid with brush-cut blond hair and pale eyes that were blue or gray, depending upon the weather. Wade was calm and silent, a man prone to doing things instead of talking about them.
    A native Mainer, he knew everyone in the county, too, and if he was here he would be calling them, thinking of more things to try, and trying them. And perhaps most usefully of all, they could lean on each other.
    But he wasn’t here. He’d left that morning to go on a deer-hunting trip, before she was awake. She didn’t know if she could even reach him.
    “Randy Dodd’s dead, Chip. I don’t know what happened to your friend, Carolyn”—
Sam, where are you?
she thought helplessly—“but Randy’s not lurching around here like some zombie, kidnapping people.”
    When they were boys, Chip and Sam had been fans of all things horror-related: books and comics, films and video games. Probably one or both of them had owned a scary mask like the one the guy had been wearing on the breakwater last night.
    “Zombies don’t kidnap people,” Chip said with a small smile, seeming to follow her thought. “They eat ’em. Vampires just drink your blood.