They swung around the headland to a narrow inlet, not more than eighty feet across, with houses on either side and decks built right over the water. Directly ahead was a short bridge, spanning the entrance to the small bay beyond.
She didn’t recognize where they were until they were gliding under the bridge itself, where their breath produced metallic echoes, ringing off the rusting iron gridwork above them. South Mill Pond opened up before her, a gourd-shaped body of water between a park . . . and the Portsmouth Police Department.
Most of the buildings around the pond were dark, but the police department and the parking lot alongside it were lit up like a football stadium on game night. From where she sat, Harper could see two big hills of waste burning in the lot. Each pile was almost twenty feet high. Harper wondered what they were destroying—contaminated clothing? A few fire trucks were parked nearby, the fire department managing the blaze. Harper spied men in helmets and fire jackets moving here and there about the bonfires. The burning mounds produced an evil-looking smoke that climbed into the night, blanking out the stars.
The Fireman began to paddle toward the police station.
“Oh, John,” Father Storey sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
The pond was no bigger than a soccer pitch and bisected by a causeway, which lay directly ahead of them. There was no crossing the causeway to the water on the other side without portaging the canoes. Harper wasn’t sure where the Fireman intended to beach them, but one way or another, they’d be on shore soon.
Harper leaned forward and hissed, “We’ll talk more when we get back to camp. Of course, though, I’ll do what I can to help you. If I had the proper drugs, I’d be willing to sedate the thief, after you confront her . . . but only as a last resort. I can’t believe it would come to that. If you and Carol approach this person together, privately, and show her the kind of empathy and understanding you were talking about in chapel—well, I can’t imagine anyone in camp who wouldn’t respond to that.”
Tom Storey turned his head to look back at her, his brow furrowed in puzzlement, a question in his eyes, forming on his lips . . . as if she had posed a very baffling riddle. Harper wondered at it. She felt she could not have been more direct or clear. She wanted to ask him what he didn’t understand, but there was no time. The Fireman was bringing them into shore, close to the causeway. Harper pointed with her paddle, and Father Storey nodded and turned away. Later, she thought, not imagining that there wouldn’t be a later.
Not for Father Storey.
9
The embankment was made of rough-hewn granite blocks, rising from a ribbon of sand. The canoe made an agonizingly loud crunch as it came into the shallows. Ben was already waiting to pull their boat up alongside the other two.
The Fireman squeezed Allie’s shoulder and pointed toward the causeway. He murmured something into her ear and Allie nodded and began picking her way along the little ledge of sand, staying low.
“Where’s she going, John?” Harper asked in a whisper.
“The men we came here to rescue are on the other side of the causeway, and the only way to get to them without being seen is through that.”
He pointed again and this time Harper saw one end of a drainage pipe beneath the causeway. At high tide the opening would be underwater, but right now it was nearly dry. Allie crouched and began clearing away the dead branches and rusted beer cans that choked the entrance.
“You’re sending a sixteen-year-old girl to talk to a pair of felons?” Ben asked. “What happens when one of them grabs her by the hair and pulls her out of the pipe?”
“She doesn’t have any hair to grab, Ben, and she knows her business. This isn’t the first time she’s helped someone out of a tight spot,” the Fireman said.
He reached back into his canoe. Steel chimed. He rose with his halligan.
“I trust you, John,” said Father Storey. “As long as you can promise me Allie will be safe.”
“I couldn’t promise that even if she stayed behind to knit with Norma Heald, Tom. But I’m not afraid of the two men hiding on the other side of the causeway. They want to get away, not get caught.”
Michael said, “That pipe looks pretty small. You sure they’ll be able to follow her back through?”
Allie was wrestling with a rusted shopping cart that partially blocked the entrance.
“I’m sure they won’t,” the Fireman said. “One is as tall as Boris Karloff and the other is roughly the size of a water buffalo. If they tried to follow her through, they’d be even more stuck than they are now. No, they’ll have to go over the causeway, as soon as it’s safe to cross without being seen. Ben, Michael, Father: you just be ready to help them. I don’t know how well they’ll be able to walk.”
“What do you mean, they’ll have to go over the causeway?” Ben asked. “When will it be safe for them to go?”
The Fireman clambered up the steep pitch of the embankment, using the halligan’s pick end to hoist himself along. He glanced back and whispered, “When the screaming starts.”
He reached the top of the wall, stood for a moment at the edge of the parking lot with the bronze glow of the firelight shifting over his features, then leaned his halligan against one shoulder and walked away whistling.
“Does he make you feel dumb?” Ben asked no one in particular. “He always makes me feel dumb.”
“What now?” Harper asked.
“I guess we hunker down,” Ben said. “And wait to see if anything goes wrong.”
The Fireman had been gone not a moment—the strong, carrying sound of his whistle had only just faded away—when Allie reared back from the drainage pipe with a mewling cry of horror, stumbled, and sat down in the water.
“That was fast,” Michael said.
10
Harper was the first to get to Allie, helping her to stand.
“What?” Harper whispered. “What is it?”
Allie shook her head, her eyes bright spots in the holes of her Captain America mask.
Harper went around her and crouched at the entrance to the drainage pipe. A mound of mud and sticks and leaves was wedged in there, a brushy, thorny mass, just beyond arm’s reach.
The mass of leaves rose, shifted, and turned sideways.
It was an animal. There was a fucking animal in the pipe, a porcupine the size of a Welsh corgi.
Harper spied a stick, two feet long and forked at one end. She had an idea she could reach the stick past the porcupine and pull him toward her, drag him out into the open. Instead, the forked end of the stick jabbed the porcupine in the side. Quills bristled. The porcupine grunted and crept farther into the pipe.
She looked back for Allie. Michael had scrambled over to her and put his jacket around her. Her jeans were soaked from her spill into the water and she was shivering steadily. Shivering . . . and regarding the drainage pipe with a bleak look of alarm. Harper had never before seen the slightest trace of fear in Allie Storey, and in a way it was a kind of relief to know something could get to her.
Harper didn’t blame her. The idea of squeezing into a three-foot-wide pipe with a fat, pissed-off porcupine was appalling, nearly unthinkable.
So she didn’t think. Harper got down on all fours and put her face into the pipe. She smelled rotting garbage and a warm mammalian reek.
“The hell you thinking?” Ben asked. “Aw, Harper. Aw, don’t do that. Don’t go in there. Let me—”
But when he reached for her, she twitched her arm away and pushed her shoulders into the pipe. Ben was six feet tall and over two hundred pounds and had as much chance of getting through the drainage pipe as the rusted shopping cart Allie had tossed into the shallows.
Harper, though, was only a little taller than Allie, maybe fifteen pounds heavier, and she knew if any of them were able to squirm through the pipe, it was her. It was going to be tight, though. She could feel that already, the walls forcing her shoulders in close to her body.