Katie was the first to admit it wasn’t her best work, but it wasn’t until the morning it was due that Katie remembered she had to do it. She was supposed to hand something in by fifth period and only had her lunch break to pull something together, and that was the best she could do without doing a “cut and paste” off the Internet. The school was pretty hard-nosed about this whole plagiarism thing, so if the teachers suspected you’d failed to write an assignment in your own words they Googled what you’d done. If the exact same wording came back, well, you could kiss that B-minus goodbye.
The thing is, Katie might have remembered to do the assignment were not it for — and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the third reason why she was wide awake at three in the morning — Jeremy Buttram. They’d kind of gotten into it a few nights earlier at a party and he’d tried to put her hand on his crotch, which, she supposed, was not that big a deal, and it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d grabbed that particular part of a young man’s anatomy, but there was something about Jeremy that turned her off, and she was wondering if it was because everyone called him “Buttface.” He didn’t have a bad face — it was, she figured, about a six, with a good chance of becoming a seven once he got older and his acne cleared up — but she just wasn’t sure she wanted to hang out with a guy with that kind of nickname. And as she lay awake, she couldn’t help but wonder whether this revealed something bad about her. That she could be so shallow as to shun a guy because he had an easily mockable name. But come on. Would he go out with a girl whose last name was Titfield, or Beaversmith?
When she grew weary of tossing and turning, she threw back the covers and swung her feet down to the floor. She went to the window to see whether Chief Joe’s car was parked way up the street. Before the Arrival experiment, he’d park his own car — a green, well-rusted Jeep Cherokee — up at the corner. Parking his work car, with garrett island police plastered all over the side, well, that was definitely going to attract a shitload of attention. And now that the department had been given a fleet of Arrivals with similar markings on the side, he couldn’t show up in that, either, so he’d been driving the one Arrival had given him in exchange for his personal set of wheels: a black one you could barely see when he didn’t leave it parked under a streetlight.
She didn’t see it anywhere on the street. So, Mom was not getting it on tonight.
It all seemed so silly. Katie understood that just because you were a mom you didn’t lose interest, right? She was entitled to move on with her life, have a boyfriend, maybe even find a new husband one day, although Katie hoped that she’d be out of the nest before that happened. Katie was betting her mother was worried she’d see that as some kind of betrayal, like she was cheating on Adam.
Mom needs to give me some credit, Katie thought.
Katie was pretty sure Archie didn’t have a clue what was going on, and she was not going to tell him.
She was about to move away from the window and try crawling back under the covers when a flash of light caught her eye.
It came from the garage across the street. Bruce Clifford’s place. The horizontal line of five small square windows set into the garage door glowed.
“What are you up to?” Katie said under her breath.
Archie, who had woken up enough times in the night to see those garage lights come on, had maintained for some time that Mr. Clifford was up to no good. Cutting up bodies was Archie’s number one theory.
“Okay,” his mother had said one morning, challenging him, “if Mr. Clifford is a serial killer, why aren’t there any reports of missing people? Who are these people he’s supposedly killing and chopping up?”
Archie had not needed long to come up with an answer. “It’s visitors, and the Garrett Island tourism board is keeping it all quiet. If people find out there’s a crazed killer on the island, people will stop coming here for their vacation.”
Her brother was a full-blown conspiracy theorist. Katie wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or impressed.
He added: “The chief is probably in on it. He’s helping to keep it quiet.”
Katie, knowing her mom’s relationship to the island’s top cop, had shot her mom a look, wondering how she’d react.
Her mother managed to stay stone-faced, but said, “Well, I highly doubt that. I’ve met the chief a couple of times and he’d never agree to anything like that.”
Katie had been unable to stop herself. “So, Mom, how do you know him?”
Her mother busied herself looking for something in the refrigerator. “Oh, somewhere, I can’t remember where. Some sort of island function.” When she turned around and closed the fridge door, her face was flushed.
“You okay, Mom?” Katie had asked. “You look all overheated, which is weird, considering you just had your head in the fridge.”
“I’m fine,” her mother had said.
But even if Archie’s theory about the neighbor’s activities seemed farfetched, Katie did wonder what Mr. Clifford was doing in that garage in the middle of the night.
Katie slipped into her jeans and pulled a sweater on over her head. She tucked her feet into a pair of deck shoes, designed for grip on slippery boat decks. Katie didn’t exactly own an expensive yacht, but on Garrett Island, you might as well look as though you did.
She crept noiselessly down the hall, careful not to wake her mother or brother, and descended the stairs without making a sound. There was a set of binoculars in the family room that her mother kept to try and identify any unfamiliar birds that might be making a pit stop on the island. Katie grabbed them, went to a ground-floor window, and focused on Mr. Clifford’s garage door windows.
Nuts.
She saw faint shadows of someone moving around in there, but the windows were so heavily coated with dust she couldn’t make out anything. It looked as though the corners of a couple of the windows were free of enough grime that if you were standing right there, peeking in, you might see something.
As if she would do that.
Katie lowered the binoculars. Raised them again. Watched the shadow moving around.
“Fuck it,” she whispered. She thought of the line in that movie her dad had liked to watch over and over again, where the bank robber’s looking down the barrel of Dirty Harry’s gun, wondering if he’s got any bullets left.
I gots to know.
The light over the front door of the Montrose house was on, so she couldn’t slip out that way, and she couldn’t kill the light because that might draw attention. So she exited the house quietly through the side door, came up alongside her house, then tiptoed across the yard, not because it was any quieter, but because the grass was wet with dew.
She sprinted across the street and sought cover behind a tall hedge that divided Mr. Clifford’s house from his neighbor to the right. Heart hammering in her chest, she took a moment to compose herself. All she had to do now was creep up the driveway, crouching, get right up against the garage door, then slowly raise herself up until she could steal a glance through one of the two panes with clear spots in the corner.
The good news was that Mr. Clifford hadn’t left any outside lights on. The ones over the front and garage doors were dark. If he really was cutting up people’s bodies in there, Katie had to admit, that did kind of make sense.