Jake
Jake entered the shoddy roadside stand and looked around for Ridge. He didn’t see him, but saw an attractive brunette girl propping a surfboard up against the wall.
She turned on a megawatt smile and widened her bright sea foam green eyes. “Hi, what can I help you with?”
He smiled back. “That’s quite the cutter you have there.”
“Yeah, she’s a sweet stick, but the water was plowed today.” She wiped her hands on her tight black shorts. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”
“I’m looking for Ridge.”
Her smile instantly turned into a quiver-lipped frown. “Ridge is gone.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
She just shook her head and didn’t reply. Then she muttered under her breath, “He’ll never be back.”
Jake narrowed his eyes. “He doesn’t work here anymore? I thought he owned the place.” It wasn’t until the end of his sentence that he figured it out.
She shook her head solemnly. “No, I mean, he’s gone. He passed away.”
“What?” Jake looked around with reactionary suspicion. “How? When?”
“A couple days ago. The funeral is Saturday.”
Jake pushed the back of his hand to his top lip. “What happened?”
The girl walked behind counter, tears lined her face. “A freak accident.”
“Accident?” Jake knew.
She wiped tears from the corner of her mouth that had run down her apple checks. “He was out early morning. Sets were rolling in.”
“A surfing accident?” Jake interrupted.
“A boating accident. A hit and run.”
“What?” Jake had a sinking feeling.
“Apparently a boat got too close to the surfers, hit Ridge and another guy named Dizzer.”
Jake looked down. “I know Dizzer.
She nodded. “Dizzer made it, broken collarbone and wrist. Ridge wasn’t so lucky, took a shot to the head. He never woke up.”
“And they never found the boat?”
“Oh, they found it, but the owner wasn’t there. He’s a thousand miles away in Massachusetts. Someone stole the boat, took it for a joyride.”
Jake blew a breath. “Holy shit…unreal.”
“Oh, it’s quite real.” She turned up her palms. “This is all that’s left of him. He put his life into this shop. Now it’s mine and I don’t even really want it.” She broke down in tears, salted with uneasy, ironic laugher.
“Hey, don’t cry.”
She quickly bucked up reeled it in with a hard sniffle. “I’m okay, really. I’m fine.”
“Was Ridge your father?”
She nodded. “Ridge—was Ridge, but he was my father…sort of, I guess. I don’t know.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Jesse. How well did you know him?”
“You call your father by his name?”
“He was my sperm donor, he didn’t raise me.” She put her hands on her hips. “We just reconnected a few years ago when I turned eighteen and got the hell away from my psycho mother.” She nodded. “Ridge was a lot of things that didn’t make him parent material. But he was good, and smart. He didn’t do drugs, he loved me, and he loved to surf.” She bumped a balled up fist into the counter. “He left me this place and his house on the beach. I’m all he had.”
“I only met him a couple times, but he left quite the impression on me.”
She smiled. “He did that to everyone. Tourists he met a single time would come in here asking for him a year later. He just had that way about him.”
“Yeah.”
Jesse handed him a piece of paper. “Here’s info on the funeral if you want to go.”
“Thanks.” The paper looked more like it was announcing a concert. “This is a funeral?”
“Not as much as a festival. Ridge wanted people to have fun, to be thankful for their lives. Just because his was over didn’t mean everyone else had to question their mortality with a boring black coat affair. He didn’t want people to mourn his death. He wanted people to celebrate his life.”
“That’s a good thing, I guess.”
“Why were you looking for him?”
“Umm, I just had talked to him about some stuff the other day and wanted to follow up on it. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Well, if there’s anything I can do.”
Jake looked up on the wall at the mermaid picture. “Is that for sale?”
She turned to look. “The mermaid picture?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at it closer. “Oh, that’s for sale, I guess.”
“Did he ever tell you about it?”
Jesse nodded. “Yeah, he did.”
“He said it’s real,” Jake said under his breath, not really realizing he said it out loud.
“It’s real, all right, from a real bad movie they shot here in the eighties.”
“A movie?”
“Yeah, there was a movie called Mermaid of the Atlantic. It was a low budget deal, totally B-movie that never even made it to theaters.”
“Huh, never heard of it.”
“No one did. Ridge used to rent props. Half the stuff you see around this property was used in a movie at one time or another.”
“No kidding?”
She pointed to the far wall at a large chair. “See that ridiculously huge chair?”
“Yeah.”
“That was from a version of Alice in Wonderland.” She pointed to the other wall. “See that spaceship hanging? That was used in a movie called They Came from Venus.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, there’s all kinds of weird stuff around here. I guess that’s the one thing about Wilmywood, there’s no shortage of lame movie junk.” She looked back at the picture. “Did you still want to buy the mermaid?”
He nodded. “Yeah, how much?”
She pulled it off the wall and flipped it over. “Huh, it says forty bucks. That seems excessive.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll pay it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.” He handed her the cash and took hold of the picture. “Thanks.”
“Thank you.” She put the cash in the old-fashioned register. “I need all the cash I can get from this place.”
Jake glanced around. “What’re you going to do with the place?”
She shrugged slowly. “I don’t know yet. I’m not really keen on sitting around here talking to tourists about movie props and random junk.”
“You could hire someone.”
“Yeah, I suppose I could. But this is prime real estate here. At least a dozen big names have come in here over the last few years trying to buy it from him. He never wanted to give it up. But I could sell the place and fund an endless summer of sand and surf for the rest of my life.”
Jake laughed. “You probably could.” Another customer walked into the store and Jake took that cue. “Okay, well, I’ll leave you to your work.”
“Thanks, and hey, if you need anything, you know where to find me. I hope to see you again at the festival-slash-funeral.”
Jake nodded and ducked around the older couple walking in wide-eyed and smiling. He sat in the car and looked at the picture. If it was a movie picture, he should be able to verify that easily enough. He used his phone to look up the title of the movie on the movie database. Sure enough, it was there. The mermaid was played by an actress named Kate Marie Dixon. Though it was hard to tell, she could be the girl in the picture. It was plausible enough. But why would Ridge say it was a real mermaid? Maybe he was just saying what he thought Jake wanted to hear. Maybe Ashley was right and he was just trying to sucker him into paying a fortune for the picture. In a way it worked, he did pay too much.
Wheeling the car out of the lot, he headed back to the house to pick up Ashley. She’d finally been cleared to go back into the house. She wasn’t going to stay, she was just packing up some things.
A shudder of guilt crawled up his spine over Ridge. He didn’t know why, but it felt like his fault somehow. The fact it wasn’t likely an accident didn’t get past him for a split second.
First Mike, and now Ridge. If you add in Cassie and Paul, he’d left a string of death in his wake that he was starting to feel sick about. The overwhelming sadness of that idea nearly brought him to tears, but he had a sinking feeling that made him push the gas pedal to the floor and his old Volkswagen to its limits.
Taking corners at ridiculous speeds and screeching into Ashley’s neighborhood, the panic in him didn’t go away when he saw her car in the driveway.
Skidding to a stop, he jumped out and ran to the house, through the door, and into the foyer, where he called for her. “Ashley?”
There was no immediate answer, and he thought for sure his suspicions were confirmed. But then he heard her voice, “Help, help.”
He ran around the corner into the kitchen. Her voice was there but she wasn’t. It was just her phone, sitting on the kitchen counter playing an audio file of her repeating the words, “Help, help. Help me please, Jake, help,” over and over again.
But the tone was weird, there was no urgency in her voice. He picked up the phone and stopped the recording, bringing silence to the house. With one hand, he eased her phone into his pocket, with the other he eased out the pistol.
He’d never held this gun with the concept of shooting anyone but himself, but right now he wanted to kill. If something happened to Ashley, he didn’t know if he could handle that. He didn’t even want to try.
Creeping through the silent house behind the sights of the gun, he tried to control his breathing. His nervous tick of biting the inside of his cheek calmed him. He peered into the bedroom and saw some luggage, half filled with clothes. There were no signs of a struggle, which told him Ashley was playing it smart. It wasn’t because she lacked the toughness and instinct to fight back, because she knew better.
After checking the last room, he hurried back down the steps and out to his car. He was about to call the police when Ashley’s phone rang. He answered, “Hello?”
“Don’t call the cops or you’ll never see her again.”
“If she dies, you die.”
The man laughed. “I disappear for a living. You’ll never find a trace of me or her.”
“Just let her go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“What do you want from us?”
“I don’t want anything from you. I’m just doing my job.”
“Who’s paying you?”
“That’s not important.”
“It is to me.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Make time.”
“If you want to see her again, you’ll do as I need you to do.”
Jake was both angry and helpless at the same time. “What’s the point, you’re going to kill us both anyway. You’ve already killed two people.”
There was silence on the other end until he replied, “What I’ve done is inconsequential compared to what I’ll do.”
“I think it matters a little.”
“No, it doesn’t. I do my job as contracted.”
Jake paused then said, “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to drive down to Fort Fisher tonight at sundown. I think you know the place.” The call ended.
Jake sat in the driveway, numb. He needed a plan and he needed it quickly.