Nail Biter by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

a wooden dory last year's boat school students had built and brought it out here for me as a surprise. I kept it across the road, pulled up on the beach in the cove.
    “You tied it up after you used it?” If not, by now the dory would be halfway to Greenland.
    “Oh, sure. Everyone else was back when I got in. Hetty was complaining about the noise,” she added wryly. “I think Marge had already called you, in fact.”
    It sounded right, timing-wise. “Anybody come out here? Of the other tenants, that is, after you got in from the water and before I arrived?”
    She shook her head. “Don't think so. I didn't, I know that much. But I wasn't really paying attention to what everyone was doing.”
    Sure, why should she? I had the sense Jenna didn't find the other tenants in the house particularly congenial, and I wondered again why she'd come here with them.
    But now wasn't the time to get into it. Eugene's eyes gazed sightlessly up at the shed's low ceiling, rain still beating hollowly on it.
    “Come on,” I told Jenna. “We'd better tell the others what we've found.”
    “I guess.” Then, “Listen—you don't think one of us did it, do you? Because when I said watch our backs, I didn't mean . . .”
    “I can't imagine why any of you would,” I replied as we went back into the darkened house.
    “Plenty of locals probably wouldn't have minded putting his lights out,” I added, shining the flash ahead so we could find our way through the kitchen. “Overall, he was what my son calls a crude dude. But I doubt anyone in your group ever met him.”
    And at that stage I hardly cared if anyone had. I just wanted two things, the first being to get back home as soon as possible.
    In the living room the others had finally gotten a fire going in the stove and were gathered around it as if attempting to soak up its feeble cheer.
    “You tell them,” I said to Jenna. “I'm going out to try the phone in the truck, just in case.”
    Because the other thing I wanted was the cops notified, and as swiftly and efficiently as possible, too, since it seemed now that an evil deed might have been committed and not just a sad or foolish one.
    Pushing my way out the front door I met a battering ram of rain and wind-driven debris, sticks and leaves whipping into my face and getting tangled in my clothing and hair.
    Gasping, I hauled the pickup's door open, barely catching it before it could fly back in the wind and spring the hinges, then scrambled up onto the seat. I sat there catching my breath while turning the headlights on.
    As I'd feared, the dark hulking shape of a fallen tree lay a few hundred feet away, downed power lines gleaming in the truck's high beams. But the tree didn't seem to be blocking the road.
    Hallelujah, I thought, shutting the lights off; no sense wasting the battery. Sudden darkness closed in, broken by distant gleams from the eighteen-wheelers moving over the causeway on the far side of the cove, headed for the freighter in port.
    Next I tried the phone wired into the dash.
No signal,
the blinking icon reported. But I'd expected that, too, and I
could
just call the police from home; Jenna's doubts notwithstanding, I'd been out in far worse, and the phones might be working there. Driving back would be a hellish chore, I thought resignedly, but not an impossible one.
    But then over on the causeway a row of orange running lights came around ninety degrees from behind one of the moving truck cabs, dimly visible in the others' headlamps. From where I sat it appeared that the truck's lights were swerving in slow motion.
    To the driver, though, what happened next must've felt nearly instantaneous. The cab itself moved oddly, its headlights shining upward, creating bright nearly-vertical bars in the night sky. . . .
    The cab lights vanished. I felt my fingernails biting into my palms as I imagined the trailer slammed by a wind gust on the rain-slick road, pulling the cab out of control until it and the trailer toppled