Trap Door by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online

paler sand-and-water expanse of Carryingplace Cove to the left. It was low tide. Gulls swooped and flapped among smaller, delicate-legged terns moving in flocks on the gleaming clam flats.
    “You look different,” I said to Jemmy.
    “Yeah, I’ve been transforming myself. No disguise like a surgical disguise,” he added matter-of-factly. Glancing into the rearview mirror, he ran a hand over his shiny forehead.
    “Next time they’re going to give me more hair,” he added with a lilt of anticipation.
    He’d started balding in his twenties. “Will you look at that?” he said, eyeing himself admiringly. “Joan Rivers’d kill for that jawline, wouldn’t she?”
    He’d always been vain. But also realistic: “Someday I’ll go back, though, have the surgeon take out the implants and put it all the way it was before,” he went on. “In a heartbeat I’ll look like that guy in the story about the painting, that Dorian Gray.”
    He laughed then, just making conversation; about himself of course. He’d always been that way, too easily entertained by his own cleverness. The thing about Jemmy, though, was that he made you feel clever right along with him.
    Except sometimes. Like now, for instance. What the hell was going on? “Sorry to hear about Victor,” he said in a completely different tone.
    I didn’t know how he’d heard about Victor. But Jemmy had his methods. Must have, to stay alive this long. Also, he’d despised Victor.
    “Thanks,” I said. “It was very fast.” My ex-husband had been a brain surgeon and he’d died of a brain tumor so virulent that it belonged in a horror movie.
    “Not that it felt fast when it was happening,” I added. For the thousandth time since his death I averted my thoughts from what Victor had been reduced to in those final days.
    “Yeah. Well. He must’ve had his good points,” Jemmy conceded generously.
    This was so transparently not what Jemmy had ever thought of Victor that I laughed aloud, and the mood lightened.
    Mine did, anyway. Ellie just kept driving, as fast as she dared through the speed trap just over the causeway, then faster, her gaze fixed stonily on the road ahead. When we got to Route 1 she waited for a log truck to pass, then turned north.
    “So,” he began as she stomped the accelerator again; the truck took off as if supercharged.
    I shut up, hung on, and let Jemmy talk. “So listen, Jacobia, I hate to put you to any trouble but the truth is, I need a place to hunker down for a while,” he said.
    As if I hadn’t come to that conclusion already. “Guys who’re looking for me got a whiff of me back where I was before,” he added.
    By “whiff,” he could’ve meant anything from “I had a funny feeling” to “a slug from a .38-caliber automatic made a whizzing sound as it passed through what’s left of my hair.”
    The road wound through the forest, deep evergreen mingled with stands of gray-trunked hardwood and thorny bramble thickets. The leaves weren’t out yet, so the undergrowth looked deceptively penetrable. But even now, any more than a dozen or so yards off the pavement and you could get lost so badly you might never find your way out again.
    Another eighteen-wheeler, this one loaded with pulp from the paper mill twenty miles north, roared by in the opposite direction on its way to the loading docks in Eastport. Six inches of clearance between our fender and its massive spinning tire was apparently regarded by Ellie as plenty; she didn’t flinch.
    But in the truck’s buffeting backwash she spoke up. “How’d that happen? Them getting a whiff, I mean.”
    Jemmy shook his head ruefully. “Electronics. Guys who want me, they’ve got these programs, watch the e-mails to and from all a person’s contacts.”
    That was so clearly and massively a crock, I didn’t bother commenting. First of all he didn’t use e-mail anymore; he wasn’t stupid. And second, he didn’t have any contacts. In the past couple of years he’d become