Boar Island (8 page)

Heath bared her teeth and braced her hands on the arms of her chair. Murder could be done in a state such as this. Had her legs been viable, she would have probably left the Edlesons in a squad car, never to see the outside of a prison cell again. As it was, blind rage could not be sustained more than a moment. Anna swept up behind her. Heath leaned back into the loving embrace of Robo-butt to be rolled unceremoniously over the sill and onto the brick walk. “You assaulted Sam,” Terry shouted. “I helped you! So you can’t call the police. They won’t believe you. You promised!” She glared at Heath.

“I did,” Heath said.

“You are a witness,” she yelled at Anna.

“I am,” Anna said.

The door slammed. The dead bolt thudded into place.

For a moment Heath and Anna stared at the door.

“Now we call the police?” Anna asked.

“Now we call the police,” Heath agreed.

Empty and exhausted, she slumped back in the seat and said nothing more, letting Anna push her down the walk. The long summer dusk had settled into true night. A streetlight made shadows stark and colorless on the concrete sidewalk beside the asphalt. Black and white, Heath thought, and missed a time when she saw right and wrong that clearly delineated.

“Ms. Jarrod?” came a whisper.

Anna stopped pushing. Heath came out of her slump into full alert.

“Ms. Jarrod, it’s me, Tiffany.” The girl, her blond hair gray in the cold light, separated herself from the side of her dad’s truck and crouched down by Robo-butt. At first, Heath thought it a sign of unusual sensitivity in a teenager, but realized it wasn’t. Tiffany didn’t want her parents to see her consorting with the enemy.

“I gotta get back,” Tiff said. “Tell Elizabeth it’s not me; my folks won’t let me call. They took my phone and my laptop and I’m like in a black hole. I can’t call anybody or get on Facebook or anything! I hope she’s okay. Tell her I’ll write her and put the note under the hedge where we used to crawl through when we were little kids. Nobody’d ever think of that.”

“Elizabeth’s being cyberstalked,” Anna said curtly. “Do you know who’s behind it?”

“I know about the stalking—everybody at school does. I don’t know—”

“Tiffany!”

“Gotta go. I know what Dad … I … gotta go.” She stood and ran, probably hoping to get back inside the house before Mom and Dad figured out she’d defected.

Anna pushed. Robo-butt rolled. Heath rode. Only the crunch of the chair’s rubber tires on bits of escaped gravel accompanied them back to the kitchen door. Gwen, Elizabeth, and Wily were waiting for them on the couch, tense and wide-eyed.

Anna parked the chair, then sank down in her former place. Heath set the brakes.

“Well, open the envelope, for heaven’s sake!” Gwen exclaimed.

“No winner,” Heath said wearily. “It probably isn’t Tiff, which is good news. She couldn’t, her folks confiscated her cell phone and her laptop.”

“Gosh,” Elizabeth breathed, evidently shocked at the draconian nature of the punishment. “What did she do?”

“She saw,” Anna said.

“Tiff said she would write you about it and leave the note under the hedge where you kids used to crawl back and forth to each other’s yards,” Heath said.

“On paper?” Elizabeth asked.

“No. She’s going to scratch it on a piece of slate with a stylus,” Heath retorted.

“That Tiffany wasn’t doing it, that’s good, isn’t it?” Gwen asked.

“Not really,” Heath said.

“We haven’t a clue as to who is behind it,” Anna said. “So we have no way to make it stop. Nobody to come down on. We don’t have a motive. We don’t, do we, Elizabeth?” The adults again stared at the teenager in her pj’s like hawks at a baby duckling.

“No,” Elizabeth said sadly. “At school everybody likes me, or I don’t even know them. You know how it is. There’s a bunch of boys who make a game of getting girls to have sex with them, and they keep score. They’re creeps, and they’ve done some creepy things—you know, posting about the girls who put out, and even meaner posts about the ones that didn’t. Both Tiff and I got asked sort of out by one of their bottom feeders—not like a date or anything, just stupid stuff by a guy who wants to be in on the game but is a total loser. Maybe the creep boys could be doing it. I don’t think so, though. I mean, at school, I’m not all that
important.
Why take the trouble to stalk me? I’d probably be worth, like, half a point.”

“Half a point?” Anna asked.

“You know, a cheerleader’s worth five points, a girl on the student council two points. Like that.”

“Time to cull the gene pool,” Anna murmured.

“God, I’m glad you’re here, Anna,” Heath burst out as a boil of anxiety burst inside her. “For all we know this could turn to physical stalking.”

Anna said after a moment: “Starting next week, I’ve got a twenty-one-day detail in Acadia National Park. Acting chief ranger. Their chief is fighting that big fire in Southern California.”

This last was said without affect, but Heath knew it rankled with her friend. Like many rangers, Anna neighed and fretted like an old war horse when fire season came around. Heath couldn’t understand this love of fighting wildfire. For some it was about overtime and hazard pay.

For others it was an addiction. Anna belonged to the latter group. She’d taken a bullet during the Fox River adventure, and her left arm never fully recovered. Though Anna’d never admit it, she probably hadn’t the strength to swing a Pulaski for long.

To be acting chief in a park as important as Acadia would be welcomed by most rangers, a nice step up the ladder to being permanent chief somewhere else. Anna had dithered about the promotion to district ranger. Money meant little to her. Being out of doors and away from human beings meant a lot.

“You’re leaving?” Elizabeth wailed.

Heath flinched, not because her daughter cried out like an abandoned five-year-old but because, for an instant, she thought she’d done it herself and was mortified.

“They don’t need you!” Heath said, then stooped to threats. “They’re liable to give you a promotion.”

“I’ll be sure and offend the higher-ups,” Anna said with a dry smile.

“Send someone else,” Heath said, hating the whine in her words.

“Wildfires in California. Everybody is short-handed,” Anna said.

Heath said no more. She’d already said too much.

Gwen, whose usual upbeat enthusiasm seemed to have been squelched by the points game and creeps and stalkers, perked up. “Acadia National Park? In Maine? Of course in Maine! For heaven’s sake, I’m getting dotty. My first job out of med school was near there. I have to make some calls. Heath, Elizabeth, pack. We are going to Maine with Anna!”

Gwen kissed the air around everybody’s cheeks, snatched up her black medical bag, and blew out on the wind the way she had blown in.

“Mary Poppins,” Heath laughed.

“Who does Aunt Gwen know in Maine?” Elizabeth asked.

“Dez Hammond and Chris Zuckerberg. A couple of old hippies from the day,” Heath said. Heath had met them on two occasions when they’d visited Boulder. She remembered liking them. “Chris comes from money. She inherited an island off Acadia. They spend most of their time rehabbing an old mansion and hosting artists.”

“Where’s Arcadia?” E asked.

“Acadia,” Anna corrected. “Northern Maine, lobsters and nor’easters.”

“I’m going to be marooned on an island with four old ladies,” Elizabeth cried.

“In a crumbling old mansion,” Heath said.

“You’ll be there, won’t you?” Elizabeth begged Anna.

Heath was annoyed that, though she had more years under her belt than Heath, Anna was not among the designated Old Ladies.

“Not me,” Anna said. “A desert isle in the vast Atlantic? Too boring for this child.”

Elizabeth groaned.

EIGHT

“Do you want to see where I really live?” Paulette asked. The question should have seemed sudden or peculiar, but it wasn’t. In her core—her soul if the metaphor held—Denise knew her twin, her other self, could not truly live in this tragic wreck of a place with paper peeling from the walls and ancient linoleum curling at the corners and buckling along the seams.

They stood at the same instant, laughing at themselves and one another simultaneously. Denise felt as if scales, dirt, fragments of rotting lumber, cracking mortar, and broken roof slates were sliding off her. In the dim light of the bedroom’s single shaded lamp, Denise imagined she could see dust rising from the cascade of debris as her old, worn-out, worthless, piece-of-shit life crumbled. When the dust settled, a new, clean, sun-filled life would be built around her and her sister. Denise communicated none of this. Paulette, she was positive, was feeling the same sense of sloughing off a diseased and decrepit skin.

Wordlessly, Paulette led the way through a dilapidated kitchen—appliances right out of Sears circa 1970—and through the back door of the cottage. As they crossed the small weedy yard, a children’s swing set, one chain broken, a rotted seat dangling like a broken limb, formed the yard’s epitaph.

Paulette reached out. Hesitantly, Denise took her hand and was led into the black night forest.

“I don’t go home much, and I always go a different way,” Paulette whispered as they made their way through the darkness beneath the trees. “If Kurt found out, he’d spoil it just to be mean; just because he likes to hurt me by ruining my things. He thinks it’s funny. Hitting isn’t enough. He can’t hurt me bad enough with his fists short of putting me in the hospital, which costs a lot, or killing me.”

Holding tightly to Paulette’s hand, Denise followed blindly, her story—her sister’s story, their story—surging through her veins and arteries, down the capillaries until each and every cell in her body was caught up. Waves of fury crashed over deep valleys of sorrow; seas of compassion rose and receded. It had been a while since Denise had felt anything for anyone but herself. The hatred she harbored for Peter had hardened into bitterness. Wormwood and gall had been all she could taste, smell, see, touch.

Dead; she’d been dead to herself in every way that counted. Coming alive in this womb of pine-scented darkness, her hand warm and safe in her twin’s, was so overwhelming she staggered like a drunk and fell to her knees, dragging Paulette with her.

Denise felt her sister patting her hand. “Shh, shh,” Paulette murmured softly. “It’s okay. We’re together.” Those words were the first and only lullaby Denise had ever heard. She began to cry.

Usually sick helplessness came on the heels of Denise’s crying jags. This time, when the tears finally stopped, she felt renewed, as if the tears were poisons her body had expelled.

“We’re almost there.” Paulette’s voice came from the darkness. Denise allowed the gentle tugging to bring her to her feet. “This land belonged to Kurt’s mom,” Paulette whispered as they crept along. “His grandma lived here. When she died we moved in. It’s not like a city lot. It’s only about forty feet wide where the house is, but it runs way way back, getting skinnier and skinnier like the tail of a comet. Kurt doesn’t care anything about it except that it’s his. I wanted him to sell at least part of it because he could get a lot of money for it and we wouldn’t have to live in a shack. ‘Shack’s good enough for the likes of you’ was his big-deal answer. If he ever found this, he’d kill me.

“We’re here.” Paulette let go of Denise’s hand. The connection broken, for a second Denise felt as though she were falling, falling and freezing. It was only a dream: the twin, her soul, the Acadian blond barfly. All of it. A dream. A wail rose in her throat, as lonely as the howl of the last wolf on earth. The sound of fumbling, the scratch of a match being lit, then a flame that, born into such a lightless universe, hit Denise’s eyes with the force of a supernova, aborted the cry.

Her sister was there. No dream. Tears began to flow again. No paroxysms of grief or wrenching sobs, only warmth and joy in liquid form. Fleetingly, Denise remembered a self that was not given to emotion, a self made stoic by life. No more. In the past months emotions came in sudden overwhelming waves. These were the first that didn’t threaten to tear her apart.

Paulette lit an old kerosene lamp she took from beneath a rusted overturned bucket, adjusted the wick, then handed the lamp to Denise to hold. They were standing at the door of a small shed. The eaves cleared Paulette’s head by less than six inches. They would have to stoop to pass through the door without banging their skulls.

By the light of the lamp, Paulette found a short piece of dirty frayed string caught in a crack between two pieces of weathered siding. She pulled it out to reveal the key tied to the end.

“There are so many park visitors, folks would be wandering in all the time,” she explained as she turned the key in the padlock that secured the door. “Visitors don’t seem to know what’s public land and what’s private.”

“Or care,” Denise said.

Paulette pushed open the door, stepped inside, took the lamp, and held it up so Denise could see the room. Bitterness vanished. Delight took its place. The room—the entire house—wasn’t more than a hundred and fifty square feet, roughly twelve by twelve, and the ceiling closer to seven feet than eight. On each of the four walls was a large many-paned window, the mullions, frames, and sills clean and painted white, the glass old, from back when glass had ripples and imperfections in it. The walls were painted soft gray, the color of a dove’s breast, and hung with pieced fabric stretched over wooden frames, the bright bits of cloth making flowers and mountains, trees and ponds.

On the worn planks of the floor was a simple rag rug. A white crib with a small stuffed bear looking through the bars, a three-drawer chest painted China red, a round table with a lamp of the same color, and a rocking chair completed the nursery. Nothing fussy, nothing out of place, everything clean and necessary and beautiful.

As Paulette closed the door behind them, Denise walked around the room. The windows weren’t windows at all. Frames with glass, sills, and half-pulled shades had been mounted on the wall. Behind them were paintings of a forest, much as it might look were the windows real and she was looking through them in the early morning. Shafts of sunlight slanted through dark trunks. The shadows of leaves dappled a small green clearing. Wildflowers surrounded a granite boulder. A bunny grazed fearlessly on new grass.