Excerpts

Chapter One You're awfully quiet," Carolyn Rathbone complained as Chip Hahn pulled the Volvo sedan into the empty parking lot and turned the ignition off at last. He looked down at his hands. He'd had a bad feeling about this trip all along. Still did. She tried again: "Don't you like these people you're going to see tomorrow, or what?" It was just past eight in the evening. He'd been driving all day to reach Eastport, Maine, before nightfall and had missed by about four hours. God, it got dark early here in November. "I like them. It's been ten years since I've seen them, is all." More than ten, actually, so long ago that he hadn't even called to let any of them know he was coming. He just meant to stop in and say hello if they were at home. And anyway, his silence had nothing to do with his old friends, but Carolyn had stopped listening and got out of the car before he could finish saying so. Sighing, he hauled the heavy satchel containing her laptop, BlackBerry, iPod, and vodka bottle plus six hardcover copies of her latest book, Young Savages: Bad Drugs, Sick Sex, and Bloody Murder in the Richest Town in America, out of the Volvo's back seat. The parking lot overlooked a wooden pier sticking out into Passamaquoddy Bay, he knew from his map. The long, narrow body of salt water divided Moose Island, which the little bayside town of Eastport perched on, from the Canadian island of Campobello. Tonight the bay was inky black, with thin, silvery crescents shining atop the waves, reflections of dock lights illuminating a long concrete breakwater about a hundred yards distant. The salt air smelled of seaweed, creosote, and wood smoke. "Come on, Chip," Carolyn called petulantly from across the street. "Hurry up." The cold wind off the water cut through his jacket, adding another complaint to his already full list of them. He was tired, hungry, and unaccountably nervous, and the sharp tang of sea salt in the night air somehow made him feel worse. As he shouldered Carolyn's satchel another unpleasant shiver went through him, as if he not only wanted to be home in his own small, familiar Manhattan apartment, but that he should be. That something bad might happen because he wasn't. And so far, nothing about Eastport was doing much to change that. Old two-story brick commercial buildings lined the main street. All were dark now except the one open restaurant on the corner, a half-dozen cars clustered in front of it. Other than that, this end of the street was dead. A few of the storefronts had plywood sheets nailed over their windows. Kids hung out near the benches at the far end of the parking lot, laughing and cursing, showing off for one another. A police car cruised past, slowing to give the kids a long looking over. Other than that, hardly anyone was around. Well, but it was nearly winter, Chip reminded himself. Any tourists this remote, thinly settled coastal area got in summer had gone home weeks ago. He felt another pang of homesickness for the city, where sirens and garbage trucks and the low, constant thrum of human activity at least reassured him that someone was alive 24/7. "Come on, Chipper," Carolyn whined from in front of the restaurant. With the satchel digging what felt like a trench into his neck, he hurried to catch up with her, looking both ways unnecessarily before he crossed the street. "So, does this place meet with Madame's approval?" he asked her when he reached the other side. He'd have been happy to get a sandwich and fries at a burger joint on the mainland. But Carolyn had vetoed those, supposedly on the grounds that she wanted to eat authentic Maine seafood. Why that could be gotten only on an island she didn't bother explaining, and anyway he wouldn't have believed it. He knew the real reason was t Excerpted from Crawlspace by Sarah Graves All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.