Boar Island Read online

  “That’s when I fell into a kind of sleep, I think. I gave up on the house, except for keeping it clean enough to be sanitary, and I’d come back here and tidy up. Bit by bit, this room became what it is. While I was walking in my sleep all those years, this was the dream I was dreaming. Does that sound crazy?”

  “No,” Denise answered. “It’s a beautiful dream. A wise dream. I must have fallen asleep, too. I dreamed of dark places and rotten people. Walking around this park we so loved when we were little, I would see nothing but my pain. Finally, my world was made of pain, and that world got smaller every day.”

  Denise knew she hadn’t been a child in Acadia National Park. While her twin was being raised by kindly old folks on Isle au Haut, Denise was being kicked around trailer parks in Brewer and Bangor and Winterport. Still, she wasn’t lying; she knew that their childhood playing in tide pools was more real than hers playing on train tracks and around warehouses. Paulette would know this, too.

  For an instant she was outside herself, looking at the two of them sitting in the painted room. Panic surged up her throat; she was going crazy, had gone crazy, Paulette did sound crazy.

  Then she was back in her body. The terror abated. She looked around the space her sister had created, calming herself with the fabric art pieces, the windows that showed the world as it should be rather than as it was, the crib with the stuffed bear, bright-eyed, head tilted inquisitively. The true insanity was not what she and her sister dreamed. It was the actions of those who had made their lives so miserable they needed to dream it.

  “Then I woke up,” Paulette said simply, cutting into Denise’s thoughts. Still on the little chair, her skirt flowing to the floor in a bright blossom, she spread her hands with a shrug. “About a year ago … six months … I don’t know. Around that time I started feeling again, then I started feeling everything was odd, off somehow. At first Kurt didn’t notice I’d woken up. When he did, he didn’t like it. He knocked me around some—not a lot, but I could feel he meant it this time. Meant to kill me.”

  “The Burning Bed,” Denise said.

  “I loved that movie.”

  “Self -defense. There’s no way around it.”

  They were quiet for a moment, the only sound the soft beat as the rocker rocked back and forth on the wooden floor.

  “Do you know how to kill people?” Paulette asked. “Rangers have guns and all. Do they teach you that?”

  “Not in so many words,” Denise said. “They use the word ‘stop.’ A gun has to have ‘stopping’ power. We shoot at targets shaped like people, and we learn to aim for center body mass—bigger and easier to hit than the pinhead of the usual criminal. We learn to hit people with batons in places that will disable them.”

  Paulette thought that over for a couple of minutes. Denise rocked and thought about killing. Death was standard operating procedure: Cows died for hamburgers, grass died for cows. Little lambkins were slaughtered for Easter dinners. Turkeys died by the millions for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Animals were different, the people who ate them always insisted. People pretended that killing people wasn’t the same as killing animals, that killing people was horrific. Then they voted to fight in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Libya—always somewhere, and mostly not because anybody wanted or needed soldiers marching around their backyards shooting. Humans liked killing humans. They were good at it. They celebrated it with medals and movies and songs. Then they pretended to themselves that a woman killing a violent bastard like Kurt Duffy was so horrible she had to go to prison forever. It made no sense. Either it was okay to kill people deemed bad or it wasn’t. It was pretty obvious to Denise that in America, as well as the rest of the world, the consensus was in: Killing was fine and dandy, good even. Admirable.

  The only thing bad about killing was saying it was okay. Like the “family values” politicians: They could fornicate, whoremonger, go with same-sex hookers, commit adultery, and still get reelected by the Evangelicals as long as they said those things were wrong.

  So nobody was going to care that Kurt Duffy was killed. Not a bit. They only paid lip service to the idea that killing a Kurt Duffy was wrong. Really, most people didn’t care at all; they just wanted to curl up on the sofa and watch Saw III or Dexter. What she and Paulette needed to do was find a story that would help people explain the murder of Kurt Duffy to themselves so they could stop thinking about it, stop pretending it was bad, and get back to their own rat killing, as one of her old high school teachers was fond of saying.

  “I don’t want to disable Kurt,” Paulette said. “I think he needs to be dead for a long, long time.”

  “For the rest of his life,” Denise said, and they both laughed at the absurdity.

  “My gosh!” Paulette gasped, covering her mouth. “Are we awful? I mean, we’re laughing about killing people. Killing Kurt! I don’t feel awful, but I know I should.”

  “Don’t feel awful,” Denise said when they’d stopped giggling. “He does need to be dead.”

  “Poison?” Paulette ventured.

  “Do you know anything about poison? I don’t,” Denise replied.

  “We’d have to buy it somewhere. That would make a trail,” Paulette said. “I could burn him in bed, like Farrah Fawcett did in the movie. She got off on a self-defense plea.”

  “It wouldn’t work a second time. Too obvious,” Denise decided. “Besides, you can’t be anywhere around when it happens. You have to have an iron-clad alibi. We could screw with the brakes on his truck. I know how to do that.”

  Paulette shook her head. “He only drives from here to Bar Harbor and back. Nothing bad would happen, not bad enough anyway.”

  “Yeah. Bad idea. Even if it worked, we wouldn’t know the exact time it would happen, so maybe no alibi. How about the lobster boat?” Denise asked.

  “I don’t know how to sink one even if we could get near it, and his crew would go down, too. Probably they’d all drown and Kurt would swim to shore and come kill us both. If he knew there was a both. Me for sure.”

  “Push him off a high place?” Denise mused.

  “No. He’s too big and too lazy. When he’s not on the boat he doesn’t exert himself at all. If you managed to get him to go up on some rock, somebody could see. You can’t be seen to be with us, with me.”

  Denise sighed. “Okay. We shoot him.”

  “We shoot him three times,” Paulette said firmly.

  TWELVE

  Heath lay in the ground-floor bedroom of the tower, exhausted from the sheer effort it took to go to bed. Before she’d been hospitalized, this had been Gwen’s friend Chris Zuckerberg’s bedroom. Other than a few pieces of truly stunning artwork, the decor was not what Heath had expected from a woman who owned an entire island. Though the mattress and the bedding—down comforter over fine cotton sheets—were excellent, the bed was narrow, an old-fashioned kid’s bed. The armoire, obviously made for this lighthouse or another round dwelling, was an antique but in bad condition. The single wooden chair and writing desk were scuffed with use.

  Gwen said Chris was land- and house-poor. The place was a money pit on a grand scale. Probably most of it went to fixing leaks in roofs and buying better mousetraps. There had to be mice. The decaying wings of the house looked like prime rodent habitat.

  The room still held Ms. Zuckerberg’s scent, faintly spicy; her clothes still hung in the armoire, and papers were strewn across the desk as if she’d expected to return. Something Gwen thought was unlikely. In the days since they’d arrived, and Dez Hammond had phoned to welcome them to the abandoned house, Ms. Zuckerberg had suffered several more transient ischemic attacks.

  Heath found the Spartan utility of Chris’s room pleasing. Simplicity had always suited her. The world presented enough treats and turns for her eyeballs that she didn’t feel the need to spread too many of them around indoors.

  The room above Heath had been used by Dez Hammond. Dez was a childhood friend of Ms. Zuckerberg’s. Aunt Gwen said Ms. Hammond moved
in pretty much full-time after her husband died and Chris’s health began to fail.

  This second-story room was claimed by Elizabeth of the young strong legs. It boasted two wide windows. The view, so Elizabeth said, was spectacular.

  The topmost room, where the lighthouse’s lantern had been housed, had a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. It had been Chris’s before the first heart attack had driven her to ground level. The penthouse suite was where Gwen had chosen to bunk.

  Heath’s ground-floor room had only two windows, slits that medieval bowmen would have found claustrophobic. Despite the lack of a view, she liked the space. There were times when only a fortress on a crag surrounded by a cold, deep moat could make one feel safe.

  Pulling the comforter up under her chin, she stared at the electronic suit Leah had so generously allowed her to bring. In this historic environment it looked at home on its hanger, more like a suit of armor than an exoskeleton. Though she had yet to try it on Boar, Heath liked having it in sight.

  Hah! And they said she’d never walk again.

  Through the hole cut in the thick plank flooring for the stairs, Elizabeth’s music—real music, thank God—trickled, punctuated by the occasional thumping footfall. Light and lithe as a gymnast, yet the girl had a habit of walking on her heels. She made more noise coming and going than a troupe of clog dancers.

  The noise, like the fortress of a house, was comforting. Elizabeth was safe. Anyone who wanted to harm her would have to cross half the continent, swim icy seas, scale cliffs, and pass through Heath’s bedroom.

  Lord knew, tonight, if they/he/it ran the gauntlet she wouldn’t be asleep when they reached her room. Annoying, vaguely electrical twitches in her legs were driving her nuts. Horrid buggers felt nothing, were useless for anything but making laps for cats; still they leapt and kicked and jerked. Obviously they could move. They just wouldn’t take orders. Most irritating.

  Since sleep was off the menu, Heath sifted through the poisons someone was dripping into her daughter’s world. After Tiffany Edleson fell through as the favored suspect, Heath, Anna, and Gwen had assumed the cyberstalker was one—or more—of Elizabeth’s fellow students at Boulder High School.

  Heath had spoken with E’s high school principal and her English and geometry teachers. They’d been kind but useless. As it was when Heath was in high school, the phys ed teacher was the one to whom the kids opened up. Ms. Willis knew about the points game E had mentioned. The clique of boys who played the game boasted they wouldn’t date any girl who couldn’t be counted on for a friendly blow job.

  “They’re considered the cool boys, the BMOC, go figure,” Heath told Gwen.

  “They are nasty pieces of work,” Gwen said succinctly. “Is oral sex de rigueur?”

  They’d both looked at Elizabeth, who, by choice, was in on what they’d come to call the Cybercreep Councils. Heath and Gwen were reassured by the spontaneous “Gross, like way gross!

  “The girls they get? You know, who hang with them and do the blow jobs and whatever? You’d think they’d be the school skanks, but they’re not,” Elizabeth told them. “They’re real hotties. I think it’s that Stockholm thing, where the hostages fall in love with the terrorists.”

  Heath hadn’t thought of it that way, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Elizabeth was on to something.

  Gwen said, “The boys are the skanks, Elizabeth.”

  A sigh and an eye roll were her reward.

  Could the jerk boys, the high school rotters who made a game of degrading girls have smelled Elizabeth’s virgin soul, and set on the trail like hounds on the scent of a rabbit? Heath wondered as she listened to the tattoo of her daughter’s feet on the planks overhead.

  Bullies tended to pick on the strays, the oddballs. Though she’d never say so to Elizabeth, the child’s peculiar upbringing didn’t make it easy for her to blend in, be one of the crowd—an essential survival skill for a teenager.

  From age four until she was nine E had lived in a polygamist compound that called itself Mormon, though the Mormon Church would have vehemently denied the relationship. Before kids in the cult reached puberty—the age when girl children were “married” off to the chosen elders, and boy children were run out of the community lest they become sexual rivals—they lived like the children of an enormous and amiable family circa 1898.

  No Internet, no TV, no video games, newspapers, or magazines; they were seldom taken into the nearby town of Loveland. Their clothes were mostly homemade. All were homeschooled. They grew up knowing of the outside world only in a shadowy way. Though such an upbringing left them woefully unprepared for the challenges of the modern world, it did allow them an innocence denied children exposed from infancy to an overcommercialized, oversexualized, violent society careening into the future on laugh tracks and Big Macs.

  Miraculously, Elizabeth still retained that aura of innocence. Once, Heath had attributed it to her early cloistering. Now she believed Elizabeth would have been the same had she been raised in London during World War II, Berkeley in the sixties, or New York City in the new millennium. Nature winning over nurture.

  Innocence was an almost irresistible target for kids who have lost theirs.

  When Heath was in school, bullying had a bricks-and-mortar aspect: hallway taunts, locker vandalism, heads stuck in toilets. Bullies were a hands-on bunch; they liked to see the results of their work, enjoy the public humiliation, soak up the fear.

  Since the Internet, things that used to be spray-painted under bridges were published for the world to see. Besides her personal electronic pages, a lot had been posted to a blog popular with Boulder kids, whosewhoandwhocares.net. The site was known for unflattering pictures with “funny” captions, outing romances, derogatory remarks about fashion, belittling football players who screwed up, and naming cheerleaders who—so said the blog—didn’t wear panties.

  Whoever was bullying Elizabeth was too cruel for a bulletin board invented for petty cruelty. The kids who ran the blog deleted the graphic attacks on Elizabeth the moment they saw them, then blocked the source. The bully got multiple URLs and reposted after every block.

  Messages, fielded by the Boulder police while Elizabeth’s phone was quarantined, leaned toward the threatening. Nothing overt; crawling, spiritual cockroaches afraid of the light. The wording got darker, the pictures more sadistic. Though sympathetic, the police considered cyber malice out of their jurisdiction.

  Sam Edleson was in their jurisdiction, but without witnesses or evidence, there was little they could do. A couple of female cops went to the Edlesons’ home and scared the stuffing out of Terry. Two of their male counterparts “had a talk” with Sam that left him the worse for wear. Or so said the kid who raked Heath’s leaves.

  The detective assigned to Elizabeth’s case wasn’t so user-friendly. He murmured about kids being kids, modern moms being oversensitive, letting ’em duke it out—a song that he should have known went out of fashion in the eighties.

  Snug behind her castle walls on Boar Island, Heath pondered the metaphorical roaches. She was not being a hysterical overprotective mom. Heath had never been given to the vapors, not even during the dark days when she was newly disabled and Gwendolyn feared she’d off herself. Easier said than done when one can no longer access high places from which to leap.

  At present Elizabeth was living on a rock made of nothing but high places and deadly falls. Heath thought of the messages urging her to kill herself. How many would it take to turn E’s mind back to suicide? Ten? A hundred? After all that had happened, had the vicious words lost their ability to influence her? Heath hoped so. Hope and vigilance: Those were the only weapons she had.

  Her thoughts left that miserable abyss and turned to the package of heroin and the anonymous tip, a tip given before the heroin had arrived. Obviously whoever tipped off the rangers sent the heroin. This attempt at a frame job was ludicrously amateurish. That fact would have been more reassuring had the excitement the district ranger evinced made her
think he’d never smelled a three-day-old red herring before.

  He’d scrutinized the contents of the box. It was filled with small rectangular packets wrapped in tinfoil. There had to be a hundred of the things. Heath had thought it was a box of toothpicks, two to a pack, the way they offer them in cheaper restaurants. With a look first at her, then at Anna, suggesting they might be in cahoots, Artie bundled the box into a paper bag, which he sealed and marked with a black Sharpie.

  “Evidence,” he said darkly.

  Heath laughed remembering his barely concealed glee. The drug bust of the century, and he was on it! She doubted it would be as amusing if he got anyone else to take it seriously. In the justice system, things did go horribly awry now and again.

  As soon as the rangers left, Heath jumped on the Internet. The tiny packages—if they even contained heroin and not baby powder or whatever—were probably one-twentieth of a gram and cost ten dollars on the street. Nicely set up for resale. An eight-ball was supposedly three grams. Eight-ball. Behind the eight ball? Was that the legal limit or something?

  It was so absurd, so obviously part of the harassment of E, it had not crossed Heath’s mind that the district ranger would consider her guilty. But he did. He might even have arrested her had Anna not laughed when he mentioned it. In the end he said, “Well, it shouldn’t be hard to catch you.”

  Heath smiled to herself remembering Anna’s muttered “That’s what you think.”