Page 85 of The Summer Guests

His next move was so sudden she had no time to react. He lurched toward her, and she almost expected a blow or a shove. Instead, he pulled the door shut behind him and moved in so close they were almost nose to nose.

“My sister’s sleeping. I don’t want her to hear this.”

“We’ll go somewhere else, then. Somewhere we can talk.”

He considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “No, it’s better if I just take you there.”

“Take me where?”

“Come with me.”

He headed up his driveway, toward where the Volvo was parked. Abruptly he halted, staring at Declan, who had just climbed out of the car and now stood ready to spring into action, or whatever qualified as action for a man on crutches.

“This is Declan Rose,” she said to Reuben. “He’s my friend. You can trust him.”

“He can’t come with us.”

“If Maggie’s going with you, so am I,” said Declan, swinging toward them on his crutches.

Reuben snorted. “You’ll never make it. Not on those things.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Reuben pointed up the road. “The trail starts down that way, and it climbs halfway up the mountain. It’s all overgrown now, can’t bring a car up anymore. Which means we have to walk.” He looked at Declan’s cast. “You’d just slow us down.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said to Declan. “Please, just wait here.”

Declan was clearly uneasy about the situation, but even he had to concede that he couldn’t hike up a hill on crutches. He gave Reuben a hard look. “I’ll be waiting right here until you get back.Bothof you.”

Reuben nodded and started walking up the road. She followed him.

It was soon apparent why this was the less desirable side of Maiden Pond. The shore here was largely marshland, and the water was spiky with cattails and sedge. There were also biting clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies that bred on this boggy shore, and they tormented her, swarming up from the puddles left by two days of rain. The bugs did not seem to bother Reuben. He didn’t even wave them away but just tramped ahead, undeterred by such minor irritants. She had studied the dossier that Ingrid and Lloyd compiled on Reuben Tarkin, so she knew a great deal about him, on paper, anyway—his birth date, family tree, school transcripts, and arrest records—but those were cold data points, lacking texture. She knew he was descended from a long line of Mainers. She knew his sister, Abigail, had spent most of her life in awheelchair because of a spinal astrocytoma that required surgery when she was a child, and their father, Samuel, had been a well-regarded carpenter in town.

Until the day he massacred four people on Main Street before being shot to death by a Purity police officer.

Data points, that’s all they were, mere details she could read on a page. Human beings, though, were not so easy to read, and the silent man striding ahead of her was little more than a featureless figure in the gloom, leading her to an undisclosed destination.

They reached the remains of a gravel road that sloped up a hill overlooking Maiden Pond. Clearly, no car had climbed this slope in years, and the path was now overgrown with saplings. Soon it would be swallowed up entirely by the forest, nature’s relentless invader. Reuben started up the hill.

He moved at the pace of a far younger man, not pausing to catch his breath, or to glance back to see if she was still behind him. She struggled to keep pace as they kept climbing, past a storage shed, past a sagging chain-link fence. There was nothing to indicate where this gravel road might lead, but a fadedNo Trespassingsign and a coil of rusting barbed wire told her this had been forbidden property. Now that the fence had fallen, there was nothing to stop any trespassers, except for this demanding climb.

Reuben came to a halt, and she stopped beside him. Only then could she see, through the trees ahead, why they had trekked into these dark and claustrophobic woods. It was starting to rain again, not a heavy downpour, just a steady drip, drip onto the fallen leaves.

“They called it the Lodge,” Reuben said.

He pointed to what must have originally served as a rustic retreat, before time and termites took their toll on the structure. Now the roof sagged and the porch railings had rotted and collapsed. The porch faced west, and the panoramic vista once would have included Maiden Pond, all the way to the mountains and beyond, but the trees had since grown too tall, smothering the view.

“What is this place?” Maggie asked.

“This is where they brought the people. ‘Want to make fifty bucks? Come up to the Lodge,’ they’d say.” He pointed to the porch. “My dad repaired those steps, built that railing for them. He made it good and solid, better than it ever was. Look at it now.” He shook his head. “Nothing lasts. Nothing stays the same.”

“Your father worked for them?”

Reuben nodded. “Fixed up their houses, down on the pond. If you needed someone to swing a hammer, he was the first man they’d call. He installed their cabinets, replaced their skylights, built their decks. Worked seven days a week, just to pay the bills. All the operations my sister needed. So when they asked him if he wanted to earn a little extra, of course he said yes. And this is where he came.”

She’d already guessed what Sam Tarkin agreed to, but she said nothing. She allowed Reuben to fill the silence, in his own time. Instead of saying more, he climbed the disintegrating stairs to the porch and stepped gingerly over a gap left by a collapsed plank. Although the door was not locked, summer humidity had swelled it in place, and it took him two hard kicks to dislodge the door. It swung open with a bang.

She followed him inside.

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