Boar Island Read online

  Through the muffling of the coastal fog, now reaching halfway to Boar, Heath heard what sounded like a dog’s yip. Then nothing. She blew a blast on the whistle. “E!” she screamed. “Elizabeth! Answer me!”

  A thin, reedy bark pierced the fog.

  “There,” Anna pointed to where the mother-of-pearl of the sea met the pearl of the mists. A dark shape, trapezoidal, about the size of an old shipping trunk, touched the water. Then an orange smudge showed above it. The smudge moved suddenly. As they heard the splash of a body hitting the water, a girl screamed.

  Anna shoved full throttle.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Denise sat at her small neat table in a space between the living room and kitchen called “the dining room” on the lease. In front of her, on the shining black wood, was a spiral notebook of college ruled paper. The cover was bright red.

  She laughed. The sound startled her. Covering the notebook with her forearm, she glanced around as if the laughter had emanated from another source.

  She was alone.

  No. That was the old Denise Castle. She had been creakingly, hauntingly alone. An open wound walking through a world of salt and thorns, she’d not dared let anyone close.

  Being alone was not being lonely.

  People liked to say that. People were full of shit. Alone echoed down hallways of the mind, shrieking with the shrill voice of icy wind through winter-bare branches. Denise had thought that she would be alone forever, but that was just a lie the world told her. She wasn’t even alone sitting by herself in her one-bedroom apartment in her single dining chair.

  That was the first huge change. Massive. Making her not a ghost, but a guest, at the party. Better than a guest, family. For so many years she’d had to watch sisters and brothers, wives and husbands and children, being families while she was just herself, one hand clapping, a loose end, a fifth wheel. Families didn’t even show her the courtesy of knowing they were the lucky ones. They fought and complained, disrespected each other, went years without speaking over a trifle, yelled at their children as if children were annoying pests they were forced to deal with.

  Aborting babies.

  Getting divorces.

  Choosing not to be together on Christmas.

  As if everybody had that choice, as if, for Denise, holidays hadn’t been an inescapable nightmare, where, like a bird with no place to perch, she circled cold and alone high over lighted windows and laden tables, hoping that someone would invite her in, if even only for an evening. Then, if they did, it was worse because she knew she did not belong. They knew she did not belong. Once she was surrounded, all she wanted to do was get away, be by herself where the pain and shame wouldn’t show.

  Family cared enough to poke and nag, call too often and hug too tightly; they fell asleep with their head in another’s lap, were carried to bed. They gossiped and worried and gave unwelcome advice. Family cared if you showed up for birthdays, chided if you forgot anniversaries, because your presence, mentally and physically, mattered. Family stimulated the psyche. Without it part of a person fell asleep, like a foot held in one position too long.

  A part of Denise had gone to sleep like that. It was still alive, but didn’t feel alive. It felt like concrete or asphalt. As time passed, the thought of trying to wake it, to suffer the miserable tingling of life returning, had become worse than knowing a portion of her being was as deadwood on a living tree.

  Paulette had woken her without a twinge. Denise was fully alive for the first time in forever.

  Then she’d killed a man.

  Another huge new thing: life and death, both in her hands.

  About life, she felt … That was it; that was the whole thing, she felt. Resentment, jealousy, spite: The stuff she’d been sustaining herself with for so long was not feeling. It was what replaced feeling, fake pain directed outward so the real pain would not eat the host alive. Becoming partially dead to keep the other parts from being flayed.

  Life felt good. What did adults say when she was a kid? “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” She’d thought they were idiots. Now she knew what it meant to have her whole life ahead of her.

  About killing Kurt, she should feel something. Like sex, or reading Siddhartha, people were supposed to be changed by the experience, somehow different afterward. Killing another human being should be like that. One day she was Denise Castle who had never killed a person. The next she was Denise Castle who had taken a human life in sweat and blood and a plastic shower curtain with yellow fishes on it. Those two Denises should be different, but they weren’t. Sex and Siddhartha had been like that for her as well. Not as big a deal as advertised.

  For a moment she marveled at the things that had changed in the past week. Denise Castle: alive, feeling, killer, family woman.

  Almost a family woman. That would come, she decided.

  Alone and not alone, she returned to her notebook and her list, items that had to be checked off before the whole life she had ahead of her could officially commence.

  Kill Kurt (Denise)

  Sell Land (Paulette)

  Quit NPS (retirement pension) (D)

  Find out about “Legacy” (if it exists) (P)

  Car, car seat, etc.

  Give landlord notice

  Arrange for family—Mt. Desert Hospital (D&P)

  Leave MA for GA or SC or NC (D&P&O)

  Rent (D&P&O)

  Buy (D&P&O)

  “Kill Kurt” was checked off.

  “Sell Land” had a tentative pencil mark next to it. Kurt’s house was worthless, but the land was not. The land was paid off; Kurt’s parents were dead. He had no brothers and sisters, and no children. Paulette said it was to pass to her on his death. Ownership wasn’t an issue. Denise figured Paulette could get around four or five hundred thousand for the place. They should take less if it would move the property more quickly. Timing was important.

  They would skip the balancing act of selling and moving. There was no way to know if it would sell in a week or six months. Banks had gotten paranoid after the big savings-and-loan scandals, but given location, location, location, Denise guessed it would move fast. They’d have to find a way to do the paperwork from out of state. By the time it was all settled, they had to be long gone.

  The land sale would mean a big infusion of cash, which was good. Denise had about a hundred thousand of her own in investments, and her pension should come to around forty thousand a year, less everything. Maybe a net of thirty. They had enough.

  Again she bent over the list.

  Between “Sell Land” and “Quit NPS” she penciled in in tiny letters “Remove Obstacle.” Not that she’d forget to take care of that particular problem. Denise had an excellent memory—or had until her nerves started going bad. Still, the lists weren’t a memory aid; she made lists so she could check things off, have the satisfaction of seeing in black and white what she had accomplished.

  “Obstacle” was the second most complex item on the list.

  Changing from a pencil to a pen, she underlined it in ink. Denise had hoped she could erase it as unnecessary. That hope was growing slim to nonexistent. There was no doubt in Denise’s mind that Anna Pigeon would remember who the Denise in the photograph reminded her of. Those kinds of things tickled at the brain until they were solved. Anna would remember it was Paulette. Given what a nuisance the pigeon was, she would put two and two together and get Murder. If they could move the project along quickly, Anna would only have to be put off for a couple of days, three at most.

  Denise overwrote the underlined word in ink. To the side, in parentheses, she wrote “triazolam.” Google said triazolam was common enough. As a nurse, Paulette would be able to lay her hands on a few tabs at the hospital. Needed or not, it was important to have the drug option.

  For a moment Denise stared at the wall, eyes unfocused.

  “Family” was next on her list, the most difficult of all the tasks. She and her sister would be getting a family. Denise smiled. Wh
en she was a kid, people would say of a pregnant woman, “She’s in a family way.” There was something lovely about that. Denise and Paulette were going to be in a family way.

  It was poetic justice that lovely fertile Lily was going to be their accomplice.

  Lily took ergotamine for her migraines. Denise had Googled the side effects.

  God, but Denise loved Google.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The surface of the sea had embraced the night. Foam and tendrils of mist sketched the waves with iridescence. There was no horizon; the line between water, earth, and air had been erased by the fog. As the boat leapt up onto plane, Heath, in her electronic bones, was thrown backward. Nothing looked real or solid, yet the hull of the boat slammed into the Atlantic as hard as if it traveled a surface of packed dirt. For a few heartbeats, half lying along the plastic bench, Heath thought she was falling, not just to onto the bench but out of the boat, into the sky or the sea.

  Since fate or bad luck had decreed Heath had to have one part of her body that refused to work and play well with the others, she was glad it was her legs. Losing her wits—even for a few moments—scared her a whole hell of a lot more than not being able to run and jump.

  Sudden silence snatched her mind back into the boat. Anna had shut the engine down. Sucking the quiet into her lungs and mind, Heath struggled to right herself, ears tuned to the sound of the yip, Wily’s yip. The happiest sound in the world. Second happiest.

  “Blow your whistle,” Anna said. Her voice was steady, familiar; it poured into Heath’s ears like a homing signal.

  The whistle was clutched so tightly in Heath’s hand it felt hot when she put it between her mist-chilled lips. She blew two short sharp blasts.

  “Elizabeth!” Anna yelled. “E!”

  A litany of prayers babbled through Heath’s brain: Please God let me find her, please God, let her be okay, please God, please, please, please.

  The only sound was the lapping of the waves against the hull like a beast lapping at the blood of its prey. Again Heath had the sensation of falling, but this time it had nothing to do with vertigo. The place she was tumbling into was where the mothers of dead children fell. It had no bottom and no way out.

  “Wily!” Anna called. She turned on a spotlight mounted on the gunwale next to the steering wheel. The beacon lanced out, an impotent light-sword. In the fog and dusk it hid as much as it illuminated, the light catching particles of water and refracting back.

  A tiny scrap of orange flared for an instant between the glazed obsidian of the water and the gray blanket of fog. “There!” Heath cried, pointing. “Move the light back. There!” A bit of orange flickered in, then out, of vision as the swells moved up and down. “Keep the light on it!” Heath shouted.

  Anna didn’t reply. Leaving the light where it was, she pushed the throttle gently forward and nosed the boat in the direction Heath was pointing, following the long bobbing finger from the floodlight.

  The ocean heaved another great sigh, and the scrap came into sight fifty yards ahead and to the right. “One o’clock,” Heath shouted.

  “I see it,” Anna replied.

  Unfortunately, Heath did, too. Every cell in her body was straining toward that orange scrap. The apparition stayed in view a moment longer this time. Not a lovely child in a life jacket. A monster. Short truncated arms poked through holes too big for them. A misshapen skull was sunk into the body of the flotation device. It looked as if the thing were covered in rotting seaweed.

  Heath opened her mouth to scream.

  Anna beat her to it. “Wily!” she shouted again.

  “Over here,” came a faint reply.

  “What the…” Heath’s mind cleared. Wily, the dog, was in the life jacket. For an LSD moment, Heath thought Wily had called out, “Over here.” Elizabeth! E was invisible in the dark water, but she must be swimming next to him. Alive.

  “Coming! Hang on,” Heath yelled as she pushed the button to lift herself into a standing position. At the faint whirr of the machinery Anna shot her such a repressive look she immediately whirred her butt back down onto the bench.

  Anna had the spotlight on the dog in the life jacket. Heath could see the sleek head of Elizabeth beside Wily, her face a pale oval against the black water. At idle, Anna eased the boat toward them.

  Heath’s mental litany turned from “Please, please, please” to “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the two fundamental prayers of mankind.

  As they neared, Anna ordered Heath to throw Elizabeth a life jacket. Heath pulled off her own and threw it hard in her daughter’s direction. Her arms were stronger than they’d ever been, and, thanks to wheelchair basketball, her aim was good.

  Elizabeth clung to the life jacket with one hand and to Wily’s scruff with the other, her head barely above water. Anna picked Wily out of the water first and deposited him at Heath’s feet with a slosh of cold seawater. Never had he looked so much like Wile E. Coyote as he did at that moment, water running from his ears and muzzle, orange vest hanging on his bony shoulders.

  E was next, fished out and dumped on the deck with little more ceremony than Wily had received. The light was going fast, and Heath could not tell if Elizabeth or the dog was bloody or bruised.

  “What happened? Are you hurt? We’ve been looking for hours.” Questions and comments poured out of Heath so rapidly there was no time for answers. She knew it but could not help herself. Connection to her child demanded it of her, and, denied the luxury of grabbing the girl and holding her so tightly she could never escape again, words had to suffice. “Why is Wily wearing the life preserver!” she demanded as she ran out of breath.

  Into the silence that followed, E said calmly, “He can’t swim, Mom.”

  “He can swim,” Anna stated flatly.

  “Oh, yeah, right, dog-paddle,” E retorted.

  Wily shook, spattering them with water and making the orange vest flap around his skinny form.

  Elizabeth laughed.

  How could she be so goddamned calm! Heath was shaking so badly she could hear her legs rattling in their shells. Her chest muscles contracted until drawing breath was nearly impossible, and she could feel her heart pounding so hard it shook her clothes.

  “How did you get out here?” Anna demanded.

  “A boat took me,” E said.

  Heath could almost hear the “Duh!” in her voice.

  “Kidnapping is a federal offense,” Anna said as she snatched the radio mike from its metal holder.

  “No!” E cried. “Don’t go all law enforcement on me. A friend took me on a boat ride. A nice person.”

  Anna stopped and stared hard at Elizabeth in the growing gloom. “And you forgot you weren’t Jesus Christ and decided to walk home?” she asked.

  “My friend wanted to take me back, but I insisted. When we heard you calling and I realized how long we’d been gone, I was afraid you’d arrest…”

  Silence followed that.

  “Why would I arrest a nice friend?” Anna asked.

  A person. A friend. Heath could guess why this mysterious individual was genderless. The friend was a boy. Heath had been asking herself what would make a wonderful, considerate child like Elizabeth so forgetful that she would terrify her mother. A boy. A nice boy. A boy/friend. God was good. She was going to shackle E to the iron stair railing in the tower and feed her nothing but bread and water until she was forty years old.

  For another moment, Anna just looked at E and said nothing. Elizabeth was hugging her arms, shivering. Anna opened the tiny door under the hull, pulled out a blanket that looked as if it was made of tinfoil, then tossed it to E. “We’ll sort this out later. Wrap up. Both you and Wily.” She shot Wily a hard look. “You should have known better,” she said to the dog.

  With that, Anna pushed the throttle to full and turned the boat back toward Boar Island.

  * * *

  Both Wily and E had bathed and toweled off. Anna built a small fire in the great hearth in the outer room skirting the
tower. The evening was mild, but girl and dog had gotten thoroughly chilled. Anna also made tea. Elizabeth wrinkled her nose, then sighed. “Hot drinks, I know, the wilderness cure-all. Does Wily have to drink tea, too?”

  Neither Heath nor Anna answered. Heath was seated in Robo-butt, her knees almost touching the overstuffed chair where her daughter was curled up. Elizabeth’s feet peeked out from beneath a hand-knitted throw of purple and green. In T-shirt and sweatpants, her hair damp from the bath, and no makeup, she looked like a little girl. A delightful fact Heath knew better than to share aloud.

  Sprawled in front of the hearth, Wily looked old and tired, his fur ragged and spiked with damp, his pointed ears at half-mast. Elizabeth might have deserved a ducking in icy water for being so thoughtless, but Wily didn’t. The cold was hard on his old bones.

  “Enough,” she said to her daughter. “Tell us every single thing from the beginning of time.”

  “Billions and billions of years ago this was a vast inland sea,” Elizabeth droned in a mockery of PBS specials.

  “Don’t,” Heath warned. She wanted to be angry. It was spoiled by the fact that she had not heard such sauciness from Elizabeth since before the razor-in-the-tub incident. That, and the fact her daughter was alive and in one piece.

  “Just tell it,” Anna said quietly.

  “Aunt Gwen was going to boil some lobsters alive,” E said. Heath saw the wince in Anna’s gaze at the same moment it clutched her own chest.

  “I freaked,” E apologized.

  Heath had come to the conclusion it was she and Aunt Gwen who needed to apologize.

  “I mean boiling alive, how rotten is that? So Wily and I took the lobsters in the bucket and went over to the far side of the island to turn them loose. We’d got ourselves down to the water and were dumping the lobsters into the ocean when, whoosh! This little rowboat rushes in between the rocks and almost smacks my feet.” She laughed, and then shared the memory that brought the laughter. “I dumped the lobsters right in the boat and they started sliding all around.”

  She sobered. “It wasn’t funny then, really, only now. What with the cyber stuff and everything, I got scared. Anyway. We became friends and I went for a boat ride, me and Wily.”