She felt overjoyed to be back on Ocracoke. The safety was palpable. She could sense the seven hundred sleeping residents all around her.
She started to say a prayer of thanks.
A car approached from behind.
Stepping back onto the shoulder, she watched an ancient pickup truck come rumbling slowly toward her. It pulled up beside her and squeaked to a halt.
The passenger window rolled down and Rufus Kite leaned forward from the driver seat, his eyes hollowed in the absence of light—two oilblack pools.
“Miss King? Thank God.”
“What are you doing—”
“Oh thank God. Everyone’s looking for you.”
“Who’s looking for me?”
“Someone saw you with Andrew Thomas in Howard’s Pub. Everyone’s looking for you. Come on, get in.”
The passenger door swung open.
“I’ll take you back to the house,” he said. “We’ll get you cleaned up. I imagine you have some very important phone calls to make.”
“Well, yeah I do, but… No, I think I’ll just walk over to the Silver Lake Inn.” She motioned down the street to a three-story motel on the waterfront. “I’ll wake someone up if I have to, but I don’t want to trouble—”
“No trouble at all. Hop in. Besides, I don’t think anyone’s there, Miss King.”
An odd tone in his voice. Not mere insistence.
Something rustled in the back of the truck.
“Look, I appreciate the offer, but—”
Maxine Kite sat up from the truck bed and climbed out of the back wielding a mallet. Vi was backpedaling, on the verge of running, when Maxine cracked her skull open.
Vi’s knees went to jelly and her cheek hit the cold pavement, blood running across her eyelid, down the bridge of her nose, over her lip, between her teeth. She heard a door screech open, saw Rufus step down onto the road on the other side of the truck, watched his boots come toward her, wondering if this throbbing sleepiness at the base of her neck meant she were dying.
Vi rolled onto her back.
Swallowed blood.
Warm liquid rust.
The spindly branches of a live oak overhung the road. Between its limbs the night sky shone in pieces—cloudless, black, filling up with stars.
Rufus and Maxine stood arm-in-arm grinning down at her.
A walkie-talkie crackled.
Rufus pulled it from his back pocket, pressed the talk button, said, “Yeah, son, we got her. See you back at the house.”
Vi’s brain told her arm to unzip the poncho and take out the gun but she remembered that she didn’t have it and besides the arm wouldn’t move.
“Now that’s what you call a good ol’ fashioned wallop,” Rufus said and chuckled.
Then the old man kissed his wife on the cheek and leaned down toward Vi, all gums tonight.
“Her lips are still moving,” he said. “Go ahead and clonk her again, Beautiful.”
S W E E T – S W E E T
&
B E A U T I F U L
However, there is a locked room up there
with an iron door that can’t be opened.
Behind the wheel of his own subcompact rental, a tiny white Kia, Horace felt the hot tears begin to roll down his cheeks. Up until a few days ago he’d sensed that he was fated to tail Andrew Thomas and record his story. He’d managed to follow him nearly three thousand miles from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Denver International Airport. There, he’d lost Andrew in security, waited all weekend in despair near a stand of payphones in the food court of Terminal B, berating himself for flushing his savings on this ridiculous endeavor. Watching the stream of travelers, he resolved to fly back to Anchorage, apologize profusely to Professor Byron, and finish his MFA in the creative writing program. This last year of his life had been derailed by a twenty-four-year-old megalomaniac who fancied he would write a book about Andrew Thomas and become famous.
As Horace gathered his backpack and came to his feet he stared down the terminal and watched in astonishment as the man he thought he’d lost glided toward him on the moving walkway. Andrew Thomas walked right up beside him, grabbed a payphone, and with his back turned to Horace, proceeded to make a phone call.
Horace felt certain he was hallucinating but he stood there and listened as Andrew called the North Carolina Department of Transportation and inquired about the ferry schedules from the mainland to a place called Ocracoke Island. Had Horace any lingering doubt about whether fate and fortune were in his pocket, he then observed Andrew hang up, redial, and book a room at the Harper Castle B&B on Ocracoke for the following week.
His rejuvenation was instantaneous.
Once on Ocracoke, Horace spent Wednesday and Thursday following Andrew’s movements throughout the island—the two trips to the stone manor on the sound, Andrew’s visit to Tatum Boat Tours, Bubba’s Bait and Tackle, his peculiar meeting with the pretty blond at Howard’s Pub, and finally, Andrew and the blond’s departure on that boat in the middle of a nor’easter.