Boar Island Read online

  The package had no return address. The postmark was Walla Walla, Washington. A dead end, undoubtedly. Whoever was after E had spent God knew how much money to frame Heath for drug dealing. That was a lot of malice, a lot of planning—even if it was bad planning.

  What they’d considered high school bullying was taking on a whole new level of threat.

  Surely nothing would come of the drug charge. Surely Artie wasn’t that stupid. Surely.

  Idly, she wondered if jails were handicap accessible. In the movies they all had miles and miles of metal stairs.

  Heath readjusted her pillow. Her shadow flashed on the tower’s curving whitewashed walls. For a few minutes she amused herself making shadow puppets on the old plaster. A bunny, a duck, a wolf with its tongue lolling. At that, Wily groaned. Coincidence or not, Heath laughed. Taking that as an invitation, the dog jumped up onto the foot of her bed—not in one try, but he made it.

  Doctor’s orders were no lying down with dogs for Heath. Without sensation in her legs, the possibility of accidental damage was too great. Still, she didn’t order Wily off. He’d worked too hard to get up, and she’d loved him too long to insist.

  Scratching him between the ears, she felt the bed shake as he echoed the pleasure with a scratching hind leg. A year or more before, that leg had been broken, leaving Wily with a limp, but it still worked well enough. At least as well as Anna’s left arm.

  “If not Tiffany, then who?” Heath whispered the question to Wily. “Who would set me up—us, me and E—for a drug charge? Why? Ruin our reputations? Make us less believable to the powers that be? Make me look like an unfit mother?” That seemed most likely. If Heath was a drug dealer and her daughter a whore, then … Then what? No one would care when one or both of them disappeared? Or died?

  A sudden and desperate need to see E flooded Heath. She sat up abruptly. Rather, her mind told her body to sit up abruptly. Not a great deal actually happened. She twitched like a landed fish, then pushed herself up on her elbows.

  Having thrown off the covers, she shoved her legs over the edge of the bed, then laboriously worked her slippers onto her feet. Gone were the days when she could unthinkingly run around barefoot. How would she know if she injured herself? Caring for her legs often felt like caring for ungrateful children.

  Wily whined from his place on the foot of the bed. “It’s okay, pal. Nothing you’ve got to catch or kill,” Heath reassured him. He thumped his tail on the coverlet.

  Her electronic suit, with its gyroscope-that-wasn’t-a-gyroscope thingy Leah was testing, was designed to be ultrastable. Even though there was a good sturdy handrail running up the curving wall, Heath had no desire to try the suit on the narrow stairway that corkscrewed up the tower. The wheelchair, of course, was useless. There was no way she could climb the stairs in a dignified Homo erectus sort of way.

  In the 1860s paraplegics were SOL.

  Lowering herself to the cold stone floor, Heath scootched backward using her upper-body strength—a mode of travel at which she’d become quite proficient. If she could ever figure out how to do it without dragging her pants off, she would petition the Special Olympics to add the Backward Butt Traverse to their sports roster.

  Wily was accustomed to Heath’s unusual modes of locomotion. He eased off the bed, stretched, sketching a deep bow, and then padded over to collapse with a gusty sigh near the foot of the spiral stairway.

  “Easy for you, my four-legged friend,” Heath grunted.

  At the bottom step she stopped, pulled up her pajama bottoms, positioned herself with her back to the step, legs out in front of her, and caught her breath. The Backward Butt Traverse might be the best way to move without mechanical aids, but it wasn’t easy. Heartbeat returned to near normal, she began the long circuitous ascent. Elbows back, palms on the step behind her, push up, swing her fanny back, settle, palms on the step behind her: twenty-three steps, twenty-three ten-inch lifts.

  I shall have the triceps of a god, she promised herself.

  She could have simply hollered for Elizabeth to come down, or blown the whistle that E insisted she wear around her neck, but where was the challenge in that?

  When she was about three-quarters of the way up—eighteen of the twenty-three steps, and sweating like a pig—the query “Mom?” came from above.

  “Coming,” Heath gasped back. The tower, with its coil of stairs, didn’t allow for doors. As Heath looked up at the rectangle of golden light where the steps passed through the plank floor of Elizabeth’s room, her daughter’s face appeared, long, straight brown hair falling down around it like the tentacles of a particularly relaxed jellyfish. Whenever she caught a different angle of Elizabeth’s face, Heath was struck all over again by the girl’s beauty. Part of it, she suspected, was a lack of objectivity on her part. Regardless, Elizabeth was lovely, tall for her age, willowy, with flawless skin, eyes that seemed too big for her face and were the brown of expensive chocolate.

  Pride in her child went cold with the realization that images of that sweet face were being defiled in the public forum. Facebook, MySpace, Google: Elizabeth’s junior varsity girls soccer team made the state championships. Even though they didn’t win, a team photo could have made its way into cyberspace. Elizabeth was in an online yearbook. Any pictures taken of her by her friends and posted on public media were out there. Every pervert in the world had access to her daughter’s face.

  “Privacy is dead,” Heath said to the face floating above her.

  “Yesterday’s news. Can’t a girl can go a whole evening without her mom bum-thumping up her stairs? Why didn’t you call? I’d’ve come down.”

  The mixture of irritation and concern gave Heath the strength to make the last five steps, and even hide some of the strain as she did so.

  “Did you have a reason for this, or is it just your version of jogging?” E asked as Heath levered herself onto Elizabeth’s floor, her feet dangling over the dark stairs.

  Heath hadn’t much of a reason. I had to see you with my own eyes, know you were real and alive was too much emo to dump on one’s child in the night. “I had a question,” Heath said, hoping she’d think of one.

  “Um … you lost one slipper and couldn’t wait to ask me where it went?”

  Heath looked down. During her ascent she’d lost a shoe. Damn. “I’m still better off than those with no slippers at all,” she said unctuously, then admitted, “I just came up to see how you’re doing.”

  “Okay, I guess.” Elizabeth stared down between their dangling feet. “You don’t have to come up, Wily.” Wily laid his chin on the bottom step and made a whuffing noise.

  “Any more interesting slurs on your character?” Heath asked carefully.

  “I asked Tiff to keep an eye out, and I’ve been to all the regular places. The porn gets cleared out by the websites after a while. The ‘die bitch die’ stuff isn’t showing up too many places. I guess it’s the personal touch. My phone only.”

  Heath was pleased E could still make jokes, and scared that she was using humor to cover uglier truths.

  “Will you get arrested?” Elizabeth asked suddenly. “You know, as a drug dealer?”

  “You’d think even a blind carpenter could see this was a frame job,” Heath replied.

  “Ha, ha,” E said, then automatically corrected Heath. “Visually challenged.”

  Surprised, Heath asked, “Isn’t ‘blind’ still okay?”

  “I don’t know what’s okay anymore,” Elizabeth said miserably. Heath knew she was talking about more than politically correct language.

  “If I go to jail, would you bake me a cake with a file in it?” Heath asked to cheer her daughter up.

  “So not funny.”

  “Anna doesn’t think it will amount to anything,” Heath said seriously. “We don’t even know for sure if it is heroin until they test it. That ranger guy, Artie, and Peter Barnes were here when it came; they could see I wasn’t expecting it. There was no return address. Juries like nice middle-aged
ladies in wheelchairs. They’d never get a conviction. Besides, I don’t even know where you could buy heroin.”

  “I do,” Elizabeth said.

  Heath cocked an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know it like been-there-done-that,” her daughter amended, “but I’ve heard there used to be a place called the Silk Road on the Internet where you could get anything except hit men. There were codes and secret e-mails and special wallets—the whole bitcoin thing—all untraceable.”

  “I remember,” Heath said. “Then they captured the Dread Pirate Roberts and it was shut down.”

  “Tiff says there’s another Dread Pirate Roberts,” Elizabeth said. “There’s always another Dread Pirate Roberts.”

  The Princess Bride was one of Heath’s favorite books. She’d read it to E when she was ten.

  “Maybe there’s another one up now where you could buy something and have it mailed to anybody you wanted,” E said. “Maybe somebody did that with the package you got.”

  “What would be the point?”

  “Maybe to get you out of the way. If you went to jail, who’d get me?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Anna,” Heath said. “That’s what godmothers do.”

  “That’s okay then,” Elizabeth said.

  Heath laughed. “Thanks a million.”

  “You know what I mean,” E said. Heath did.

  For a while they sat, each lost in her own thoughts. Then E asked, “Do you think the heroin sender guy was my stalker guy?”

  Heath wanted to lie, say no, she didn’t think it was in any way related, so she could save Elizabeth the angst of thinking herself a danger to her family. Parents lied to children all the time to calm their fears—or to increase them.

  “You’ll put your eye out with that.”

  “If you hold the knife that way, you’ll cut your fingers off.”

  “If you make that face again it will stick forever.”

  “Girls who whistle come to some bad ends.”

  “Boys seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

  Heath had been careful never to lie to Elizabeth. The girl had been brought up in a multilayered matrix of lies, half-truths, myths, and monsters. Their first two years together, Heath spent a lot of time sorting carefully through Elizabeth’s tangled belief system trying to ascertain which lies the child needed to hang on to in order to feel secure, and which were increasingly damaging the longer they took root. Even the dangerous lies could not be snatched away. They had to be replaced by a truth that would fill the resulting hole, or heal the wound the old belief engendered.

  Rescued children didn’t come with baggage; they came with unexploded ordnance from former wars.

  For a while neither of them spoke. Elizabeth, her long lovely legs hanging down the trap across from Heath’s, was swinging her feet idly, a trick Heath would have given ten years of her life to be able to do again.

  “I expect it’s part of the same deal,” Heath said finally. “Stalker/heroin guy is trying to make you feel responsible for the damage he’s doing. It ties in with the kill yourself, kill yourself messages. He hurts me, you blame yourself, you get depressed, etcetera and so forth.”

  “In a way it is my fault,” E said.

  “If you go there, you’re basically stalking yourself. We’ll have to check with Anna on the legality of that,” Heath said.

  For a while Elizabeth said nothing. Heath couldn’t tell if she was processing or sinking into the depression that had followed her around like a black dog waiting to be fed since the bullying began.

  To Heath’s immense relief, the girl screwed her face up, closed one eye, and looked at the ceiling with the other.

  “Well, when you put it that way…” she said. Then they were both allowed to laugh. Laughter, even when forced, is a good thing.

  “Aunt Gwen thinks this place might be haunted,” Elizabeth said, clearly needing a change of subject. Heath wasn’t sure ghosts were the best direction the conversation could take.

  “She said it ought to be haunted,” Heath corrected.

  “It is,” Elizabeth said sincerely. “I saw a light sort of flickering around in one of the dead wings.”

  E meant one of the two crumbling arms that swept back toward the northeastern crag.

  “Are you making this up to scare me?” Heath asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Broken glass, trick of the light, squatters, enterprising tourists, could be anything,” Heath said.

  “Or it could be a ghost,” Elizabeth said.

  “I think a few ghosts would be groovy,” Heath said. “Maybe we could catch one.”

  E gave her an annoyed look. Elizabeth believed in ghosts. Sometimes Heath believed in ghosts. She’d read somewhere that forty-five percent of Americans believed in ghosts, spirits of the dead walking the earth. Ninety percent said they believed in God, which was more or less the same thing, but on an impersonal, galactic scale. Dead saints answering prayers, angels averting car accidents, the Virgin Mother healing a child: all were just ghosts costumed in robes and feathers. The cult E had been raised in was a bizarre mixture of rogue Mormonism, Christianity, spiritualism, and carnival act. The compound was funded by the myriad wives working what used to be called welfare scams: money for unwed mothers, orphans, food stamps, single-parent households; Medicaid, Medicare, any social service that could be conned, was.

  The children were taught to hate the United States government, love their spiritual leader in the person of the prophet Father Dwayne Sheppard, and believe every single thing he told them. He told them if they left the compound, ghosts of late Latter-day Saints would get them. If they didn’t say their prayers, Satan would reach right up through the floorboards and snatch them into a fiery pit. He told them God wanted them to serve Him by serving him—Dwayne Sheppard. He told them that the Mormon Church had the power to bring the dead into the Mormon faith, and that all their ancestors back to Adam and Eve stood by their beds at night watching them from the beyond.

  Elizabeth had shaken a lot of that spiritual olio from her proverbial sandals, but, like most Americans, she’d never quite given up the feeling that Something Was Out There.

  “Should we buy it some chains to clank, or have they evolved, like vampires, into cute boys with dietary issues?” Heath asked.

  “Don’t, Mom. Ghosts hate to be laughed at,” Elizabeth said, superstitious fear lowering her voice so phantom ears wouldn’t overhear.

  At that, the lights went out.

  No flickering, no browning down: a sudden plunge into darkness.

  “Holy shit!” Heath squawked.

  Elizabeth squeaked, then laughed nervously. Power on Boar Island was capricious.

  “Gosh, I hate that!” Elizabeth whispered, as if an entity in the dark might be listening.

  “It takes some getting used to,” Heath admitted. Ghost stories around the campfire always put the fear of God into her. She could remember when she was a Girl Scout kneeling beside her sleeping bag in a tent praying as hard as she could to keep the guy with a hook for a hand, who escaped from the insane asylum, from getting her. Forcing herself to speak in a normal tone, she said, “Time for bed anyway.”

  “Right,” E said. “You talk about ghosts, then, bang! The lights go out for no reason, in the middle of the night, in a haunted house, on a deserted island, and you think I’m going to go to my little bed? I at least get Wily.”

  “I get Wily,” Heath insisted.

  “You can’t get downstairs without a light,” Elizabeth retorted. “I won’t help. Don’t help her, Wily,” she called down into the inky darkness.

  Wily whined.

  Down was harder than up. Moving up, Heath used her arms and towed her legs along. Since she really couldn’t push noodles, the only way to go down was on her belly like a reptile, the legs bumping along behind in more or less a controlled fall. In the dark it could be dangerous.

  “Loan me a blanket and pillow,” Heath said. “I’ll bunk up here until the lights
come back on.”

  “You can have my bed,” Elizabeth said with a sigh. “I’ll sleep on the cold hard floor with the rats.”

  Heath laughed. “Such a gracious invitation is hard to resist. I don’t mind the floor. I’m used to hard beds. Better for my back.”

  A sniff in the darkness, then, “Yeah, right, and Aunt Gwen comes home from her big date and sees me all snuggled in a nice comfy bed and my poor old crippled mother in a heap of rags on the floor. Like I’d ever hear the end of that!”

  Heath smiled as she listened to Elizabeth creep across the room toward her bed. Eyes recovered from the sudden onslaught of night, she could see stars through the two windows and yellow gleams from houses on shore. They had power. They always had power. Boar seemed to suffer from an intermittent short somewhere in the system between it and Mount Desert, the main island. A match was struck, the sharp smell of sulfur, then the steady warm glow of the kerosene lamp.

  “I like the lamplight,” Elizabeth said. Heath heard wistfulness in her daughter’s voice. Had they had kerosene lamps at the compound where she’d spent her childhood? Did she ever feel homesick? Heath knew the compound had electricity. That Dwayne might have kept the electricity for the “elders” and the computer cons, and made the women and children use oil lamps, wasn’t beyond the pale.

  From downstairs came the sound of the door to the front room opening. Then a faint susurration, like the shush of waves against the cliffs, maybe footsteps. Elizabeth heard it as well. Before she could say anything, Heath put a finger to her lips. Boar was a private island. Still and all, Heath had been a fool not to check the doors. She didn’t even know if they had locks on them.

  “Blow out the lamp,” she hissed.

  Eyes, wide and frightened, shone above the glass chimney, and then Elizabeth and the world disappeared in a puff of breath.

  Heath listened with all the intensity a dark house and surreptitious sounds can put into human ears. The lighthouse was thick-walled and nearly as solid as the granite upon which it was built. The windows, a modern addition, rattled gently in the onshore breeze. Through the open casement came the sound of the sea. Elizabeth’s bare feet whispered over planks worn smooth by more than a century of use.