Boar Island Page 15

  Anna gazed at her. Denise wasn’t being a smartass. From what Anna could read on her face she had forgotten—more than forgotten—she’d said she had a call. Her eyes were a total blank, as if the moments before had been taken from her brain and destroyed.

  Everyone reacted to violent death differently. Most people were inured to it by years of seeing it on television, on the news, in the movies. If it didn’t happen to a personal friend, most people just clucked, “Oh my, how awful,” and went about their business. Except in politics and football, people cared very little about anything that didn’t apply to them directly.

  But for the crime scene, Denise had evinced little interest in the incident. Anna realized she been braced for the usual discussion. How much blood? How many bullet holes? Denise didn’t start the conversation.

  Anna sighed. She had lost interest as well. The instinct for the hunt had vanished with the sight of the pathetic dead man in his pathetic bedroom. Maybe she was mellowing with age. Maybe she was just getting old.

  “Lunch is good,” she said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Heath wasn’t sure whether she was making any headway or not. There was no end to sites, articles, and blogs about cyberstalking on the Internet. As often happened, there was not a lot of content in any of them. Most simply described the phenomenon: stalking via electronic media, the cell phone the most common method. As in the schoolyard, the incidents could be anything from a snide remark to a death threat. Sex and shame were favored tools, and, though she’d thought it unique to Elizabeth, children telling other children to kill themselves wasn’t all that rare. School and government sites had tabs marked “Prevent Cyberbullying,” but they were little more than advice columns on how to police your own children and teach them what to post and what not to.

  Several sites were informative as to how to report the incidents and get them removed from personal media. She learned there were things called “bashboards,” sites where visitors could vote on who was the fattest or ugliest or meanest kid in class. There was one for Elizabeth. Someone else had already reported it. It still existed, but Heath couldn’t open it.

  On the subject of how to track down a cyberbully—or stalker, as she thought of the individual tormenting E—was vague and spotty. There was no clear path through the ether if the sender was even halfway clever.

  A scream snatched Heath out of cyberspace.

  Shoving the laptop off her legs, she yelled, “Elizabeth, are you all right?” Then, “Aunt Gwen!” Moving as quickly as long practice allowed, she levered herself off her bed, where she’d been sitting working, and into Robo-butt parked next to it. “Gwen!” she yelled again as she rolled across the old painted concrete floor of the lighthouse and toward the archway leading to the newer part of the house.

  In reality the archway was a tunnel cutting through walls thirteen feet thick. Ms. Zuckerberg had painted the sides and curved ceiling with Peach Dawn at floor level and Midnight Blue with stars overhead. Heath shot through it like a mechanized comet.

  “Elizabeth!” she shouted.

  Wily began barking frantically.

  “I’m coming,” she heard her aunt call from the top of the lighthouse.

  A wide living room formed an arc around the base of the lighthouse. Curved windows gave views east and west. Large overstuffed chairs and sofas, backed by heavy dark wood tables, lent the peaceful air of an old library or a high-end lodge from the turn of the century.

  Heath rolled through the charming room, seeing nothing except that her daughter was not in it.

  The barking escalated.

  Another scream cut across Wily’s shrill cries.

  “I’m coming!” Aunt Gwen again. Heath could hear her footsteps rattling down the circular stairs.

  The nightmare sensation of moving in slow motion through an atmosphere as thick and unyielding as bread pudding caught Heath. She felt as if her hands could not spin the wheels of the chair, as if she couldn’t see properly, her vision dusky at the edges. Had she not been able to hear rubber squeaking loudly on the tile floor as she took the corner from the living room into the kitchen, she would have thought herself trapped like a fly in invisible amber.

  Ms. Zuckerberg’s kitchen was spacious and modern, with antique touches tying it to the island’s past. The floors were of wide planks, aged and scarred, either salvaged from old ships or made to look old by an artisan. A kitchen island stood in the middle of the space. The sides were of dull beaten tin, the top of dark marble. Beyond was the sink, and more counter space beneath cupboards built of dark wood with perforated tin where glass might have been in another home.

  Elizabeth was on her hands and knees atop the utility island. Wily was on the floor, hind end up in the air, forelegs on the planks, barking like crazy at something Heath could not see between the island and the sink. Heath jerked her wheels to a stop, and her chair slid another couple of feet. The floor was covered in water.

  “What in the hell is going on?” she roared, panic making her voice big and angry.

  Elizabeth snatched her eyes from whatever Wily had cornered and, to Heath’s relief and fury, began to laugh. She was laughing so hard she was holding her sides and gasping, feet dangling over the edge, rear end on the cutting board, when Gwen came running into the room. Before Heath could shout a warning, Gwen hit the water-slick and careened across the floor in a comic-book slide, arms windmilling, to fetch up against the island.

  This sent E into another round of hysterical giggles.

  “She could have fallen and broken a hip!” Heath shouted at her daughter. “We both could have been killed.”

  For reasons that Heath had no interest in, this struck not only E as funny, but Gwen as well.

  “Damn it, Wily, shut up!” Heath roared. To her surprise he did. He grinned at her foolishly, then trotted over to her chair. Grabbing his collar, though he was the only one who appeared to be paying any attention to her, she waited with grim patience until Elizabeth and Gwen saw fit to stop snickering.

  “Are you done?” she asked acidly when they’d quieted. Careful not to look at one another lest they burst out all over again, they both nodded.

  “What the hell is going on?” Heath demanded.

  “Elizabeth was playing with her food,” Gwen said. That set them off again. Heath sat and fumed. She’d have lit a cigarette if she’d been anywhere but inside a house. There was nothing she could do when Gwen was encouraging E. Aunt Gwen was in her seventies, but when the two of them got going Heath could easily see what her aunt had been like when she was thirteen. Finally they wound down to intermittent giggles.

  Wily whined.

  A skritching of hard, sharp objects clawing at the floor emanated from behind the island, where now both E and her great-aunt sat swinging their legs, heels banging lightly against the tin sides. Gwen was in lime green capri pants and aqua tennis shoes, E in sweats, T-shirt, and purple flip-flops.

  Brownish green and curved, a claw protruded from behind the island, then another, smaller, then the rest of the lobster.

  “There are two,” Gwen managed, fighting to keep her face straight. “John dropped them by for dinner tonight.”

  Gwen had come home at two in the morning. Heath had checked the time when the lift bell awakened her. Then she’d heard her aunt and John giggling in the kitchen. By the time Gwen had tiptoed through her bedroom and up to her tower room, Heath had been asleep. Now Gwen’s paramour had come by to drop off gifts. Things were certainly moving along in that quarter, Heath thought sourly—the sourness of the proverbial grapes, she suspected.

  “I took the lid off that bucket.” E pointed to an overturned metal pail by the refrigerator. “And they just came out.”

  Again she and Gwen went into gales of giggles. Regardless of the shock of thinking her only child was being slaughtered by barbarian hordes, Heath could see the humor and allowed herself a smile.

  Gwen hopped off the island. Expertly, she grabbed the first lobster behind its claws. A
fter a lifetime of dealing with squirming children, lobsters evidently were no challenge. While E squealed, “Eeew!” Gwen dropped it in the bucket and then caught the second one.

  “I’ve got to go down the lift and get a bucket of seawater. Our friends here will die if they stay out much longer.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to die?” E asked. “They’re food. Shouldn’t they be in the refrigerator or somewhere? Not running around the kitchen frightening the children?”

  “You cook them live,” Gwen said.

  Elizabeth’s face went stiff with shock, her mouth open. “You do not!” she exclaimed.

  “You do. It doesn’t hurt them,” Gwen said matter-of-factly. In her soggy sneakers, her pail of lobsters at her side, Gwen marched out of the kitchen toward the lift.

  “It doesn’t hurt them?” E asked incredulously. “How can being boiled alive not hurt them?”

  Before Heath could think of an answer, Elizabeth had run out of the kitchen. Heath rolled to the doorway, but E was not standing at the lift waiting for her aunt to return. She was nowhere in sight,

  Unexploded ordnance, Heath thought miserably. Gwen should have known. She didn’t know who to pity most, Elizabeth for her memories, or Gwen when she realized what she had done.

  EIGHTEEN

  Elizabeth couldn’t run far. There was no “far” on Boar. Besides, Maine wasn’t flip-flop country; it was all rocky ups and downs. She wouldn’t dare be gone for long. Because of her depression and suicidal impulse, she knew if she was out of Heath’s sight for too long, Heath would call in the marines.

  Worse. She’d call Anna.

  Heath had tried to make E know she understood thinking one wanted to die, thinking what a relief it would be to let all the pain and ugly drain away while she went to sleep. She also tried to bring home to her daughter the fact that that sleep was forever. A permanent solution to a temporary problem. What life had taught Heath, and what she clung to, was that if you didn’t die, things got better.

  Then, of course, you did die, Heath thought as she tried to decide whether it would be better to shout for Elizabeth to come back or let her have a little time by herself. But that wasn’t the point.

  Heath wanted desperately to talk to E about the lobster thing, though she knew Elizabeth was drowning in talk, advice, reassurances, and platitudes. “Love claustrophobia,” E had self-diagnosed, suffering from too much love in too small a space. Occasionally, Heath wondered if E couldn’t take love at the level she and Gwen were dishing it out because she had gotten too little love as a child. At other times, she assumed she and Gwen were a tad overbearing, both having been childless until Elizabeth.

  Parental EMO. Elizabeth insisted it was enough to shrivel a person into a Cheeto.

  Heath smiled at that, then yelled, “Elizabeth! Come back! We need to talk!” despite her better judgment.

  When E was nine, a psycho had captured her and two other girls. Jena, E’s therapist, had helped her work through it. Fervently, Heath wished Jena were on Boar Island. Without giving advice or passing judgment, Jena had the gift of herding a patient’s thoughts the way a dog would herd sheep until they were all going in the right direction, then keep the patient company until she reached the place she needed to be.

  Heath knew she and Gwen committed the sin of listening too hard. They couldn’t help themselves. Sometimes Heath listened so hard she could almost hear her eardrums cracking. Aunt Gwen’s face looked like Wily’s when somebody had a piece of cheese he really, really wanted but was too well behaved to beg for.

  Because of conferences with Jena, Heath knew what the kidnapper had tried to do to Elizabeth and the other girls. Making them kill mice was only the half of it. What the kidnapper had tried to do—had done—was rob them of themselves, then implant a version of his horrific psycho self in their brains.

  The cyberstalker was trying to do the same thing, Heath realized. Using filth and threats and shame to take away E’s sense of who she was and replace it with horribleness. No wonder she wanted to kill herself.

  “E! Come back! Let’s talk!” Heath shouted.

  Wily trotted across the natural stone patio in the direction of the landward wing of ruins behind the lighthouse.

  “Thank God,” Heath breathed. There was no hiding from the nose. Elizabeth would never jump off a cliff in front of Wily, and Wily wasn’t fool enough to jump off a cliff just because the other kids did, Heath consoled herself.

  Elizabeth might not want a fairy god-dog along. She might try to evade him. E thought she knew all Wily’s tricks. She didn’t. Nobody knew all Wily’s tricks.

  Heath rolled herself across the flat apron until she could see a sliver of what existed behind the imposing buttress of granite that backed the house. Huge blocks with deep fissured shelves tumbled down toward the ocean. Beyond was a light fog, breaking like liquid in pure white waves against the shore of Mount Desert Island, poking feathery fingers into low places and humping up over rocks.

  The lift bell rang. Machinery clanked. Gwen returning with her freshly seawatered lobsters. The platform clanked into place, and silence fell.

  “Elizabeth!” Heath cried again.

  There was no sound but for the ocean murmuring its secrets to the rock.

  Gwen, slopping water from the bucket, crossed to Heath. “Why are you shouting?” she demanded.

  Heath told her.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad.” Gwen’s optimism sounded strained. “Lobsters are just big brownish green spiders, after all.”

  “It was the alive part. Boiling them alive,” Heath said dully. “I don’t know if she still does, but back when she said her prayers aloud she prayed to mice—prayed to rodents—begging them to forgive her. I don’t want to hear her praying to arachnids.”

  “And me fetching a bucket of saltwater, toting living sacrifices to toss in the pot like cannibals toss missionaries in old cartoons! How could I have been so stupid!” Gwen moaned.

  On the tail of the moan rode silence, the kind that sets like concrete in the ear.

  NINETEEN

  Anna stood at the edge of Thunder Hole, a favorite tourist spot. A keyhole-shaped inlet in the granite cliffs forced waves into a narrow aperture, creating wondrous booming thunder and geysers of silver spray, some a hundred feet high. A walkway with metal handrails descended partway into the hole for those who wished to be misted—or drenched, as the sea saw fit.

  Lunch with Denise—Subway sandwiches gobbled in the car—had been uphill work. Denise said little, showed no interest in talking of the park or the park personnel, yet the silences were not comfortable. Anna had the same feeling around Ranger Castle as she had around a kid with a balloon and a pin. Any minute there was liable to be a big bang that would scare her half to death.

  As acting chief, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in reality. An ambitious “acting” on a short-term assignment could louse up a lot of paperwork. Anna had stepped in for other district rangers often enough to know that unless something momentous occurred—and the state of Maine had snatched the only good murder on the books—general housekeeping was the rule.

  With nothing important to do in the office, Anna opted for foot patrol, asking Denise to swing back around the Mount Desert Island loop to pick her up in a couple of hours.

  Being free of the Crown Vic and Ranger Castle was more of a relief than it should have been. Castle put Anna on edge in some indefinable way. The woman wasn’t right. She was out of sync. Anna was a great believer in vibes. The eye and the subconscious mind were often better at reading the small print, and making sense of it, than the conscious mind.

  Leaves swirling on waters suggested deep and troubling currents. Denise had enough swirling leaves to make Anna’s scalp prickle. It lent her a greater appreciation of having escaped to blue sea, golden sun, salt breezes, tourists to annoy, and cigarette butts to pick up.

  She was happily ensconced with a trio of visitors, holding forth in excellent ranger style, adroitly avoiding admitting
she knew zip about the flora and fauna on the coast of Maine, when her cell phone vibrated.

  “Excuse me,” she said as she took it from its wallet and glanced at the face. “It’s a call I need to take,” she apologized.

  As she turned away, she heard the woman say, “Isn’t that nice! She apologized!” The teenaged son said, “For what?”

  “The stalker is here,” Heath said without preamble.

  Caller ID had done away with the need for most of the old rotary niceties, an advance Anna appreciated.

  “In Maine. In the park. Or says he is,” Heath said.

  Phone to ear, Anna walked across the loop road and into the trees. Talking to a ranger in uniform was too great a temptation for visitors to resist, regardless of what the ranger was in the middle of. She switched the phone from her left to her right hand. Since she’d taken a bullet in her left bicep a year or so before, the arm had been opposed to remaining in static tension for any length of time. Unless she kept it moving, it stiffened and ached.

  Oddly, that the stalker was in the park jolted Anna. With Heath sequestered on Boar, she’d fallen into the trap of feeling Elizabeth was safe, as if she were vacationing in a secure resort, and being stalked was no more real than a death at a Mystery Dinner.

  Cybercreep was here.

  “This is good news,” she decided, settling cross-legged on the pine straw, careful not to lean against the tree. Sap was impossible to get out of polyester.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Heath asked.

  “No. In cyberspace we had the chance of a snowball in hell of finding him. In a national park, it may be doable.”

  “Good point.” Heath sounded relieved. “Except that he intends on doing more than slinging porn at E. He wants to meet with her.”

  Cybercreep had escalated. Anonymous bullies usually stayed anonymous. If this one was calling for a face-to-face, it was because he wanted to do something more than shame and frighten. He wanted a hands-on experience.

  “Start at the beginning,” Anna said.