Boar Island Read online

  Before—as in before she was ruined and dumped—Denise used to enjoy the short drive on Route 233 to Bar Harbor. August, high summer, hot days and cool nights greened the park. The coast, with its islands like jeweled rock gardens scattering in a sea of whitecaps and blue water, took on a fairy-tale beauty.

  Beauty was not yet on the list of things she hated, but she supposed it would come under the pall eventually.

  Bar Harbor, draped in schmaltzy cuteness, was a place she’d used to avoid during tourist season. Alcohol, in its myriad forms, was another thing she’d once scorned. This evening, after suffering through another picnic with the royal family, she craved a place as fake as the promise of Happily Ever After, and a beer. Beers. One had ceased being enough long ago.

  On the outskirts of town she pulled into the wide circular drive of the Acadian Lodge. In the 1940s and ’50s—the heyday of lodges and camps—the almost-wealthy summered at the Acadian, basking in the shadow of the truly moneyed.

  There were cottages then. Denise had seen pictures of them—trim, freshly painted, lawns and gardens in careful rustic disarray, and “campers,” looking happy and coddled by armies of servants, mostly girls who’d come up from the cities by train to earn a little money and enjoy a summer by the sea.

  No more.

  The cabins had long since been torn down and the property sold off in half-acre lots. The lodge had grown as sad and tacky as a drunken old woman. Touches of new paint, sporadically and inexpertly applied, soaked like cheap drugstore makeup into the wrinkles and cracks of wood that had weathered too many winters.

  In its glory days, the bar had been a fashionable watering hole. Now it was the haunt of locals, lobstermen mostly. It was dark and smelled faintly of the sea and dead fish. Stale cigarette smoke had permeated the walls and carpets so deeply that all these years after indoor smoking had been legislated into a crime, the smell persisted.

  Usually Denise drank at home and alone. For reasons she didn’t understand—and didn’t want to—she was drawn to the Acadian when things in her mind got too ugly. Slipping into a dark wooden booth in a dark corner, she took off her sunglasses. The room was dominated by a once-elegant long bar backed by a mirror easily six feet high and fifteen feet long. Black age spots pocked the silvering around the edges, contributing to the sense that the place was diseased or moldering back into the stone and lichen upon which it was built.

  The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Draft, dark,” Denise said, and then worked herself into the corner of the booth until the shadows closed around her. Other patrons had no business seeing memories ripping at her flesh, sharp-taloned and as vicious as harpies.

  A couple of lobstermen on barstools were talking about the old guy who’d shot another old guy by the name of Will Whitman for robbing his traps and moving in on his territory. Yet another skirmish in the lobster wars that had been waged along these waters for generations and showed no sign of letting up. Law enforcement was worthless for the most part. Whose traps were where, and who ran which lines, was a mystery to everybody but the men who harvested lobsters for a living. They knew the bottom of the ocean around Maine as well as landlubbers knew the streets of their own neighborhoods.

  Denise had heard that the dead man’s son, Walter, had been excommunicated from the fishing community because everybody figured his dad was guilty of robbing traps—sins of the father, acorns falling near trees, chips off the old block. She smiled to herself. The bozos knew nothing.

  Lobsters disappeared, lobsters were never there in the first place, lobsters were poached. These jokers in their little boats on top of the water could only guess who or what happened right underneath them.

  A young couple—tourists, lost or slumming—slid into a booth on the end wall. Both on the same side. The old Denise would have thought it romantic. This new Denise wanted to bite their heads off and spit them into their imported beers.

  At the near end of the bar, where the wood curved gracefully toward the mirrored wall, a lone woman sat hunched over a glass. Bleached-blond hair formed a curtain between her and the lobstermen. Denise’s booth was on the opposite side of the ersatz veil, so she could see the blonde’s face. She was sporting a black eye and a split lip.

  Revulsion swept through Denise in a sick-making wave. She couldn’t stand that the woman’s outside was a public image of her own insides: battered, abused, ashamed, and drinking alone.

  Despite that, every few minutes, Denise’s gaze found its way back to the blonde on the barstool. Denise had been in law enforcement all of her adult life. A national park ranger, she’d seldom dealt with city-cop stuff. Parks were peaceful places for the most part, even in Acadia, where park and town and resort and sea came together in a patchwork of populations, each with its own agenda. Not once had she pulled her gun, used her baton or her pepper spray. What minimal compliance and self-defense training she’d gotten at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia had long since been forgotten.

  Black eyes and split lips, though, were a form of violence she was familiar with. Family troubles don’t go away on vacation; they get worse. The damaged face wasn’t enough of a novelty to hold Denise’s interest, but something was. As she sneaked peeks over the rim of her first beer glass, her second, and then her third, she tried to figure out what was so fascinating.

  It became evident that the battered blonde was known to the bartender. Maybe a regular. Denise hadn’t seen her here before, but then she never came to the Acadian this early in the evening. The lobstermen came here a lot. Usually, by the time Denise slunk in, they were three sheets to the wind. They might know the woman. Either the acquaintance was slight or they didn’t like her. Both pointedly refused to look in her direction. This suited Denise. If they didn’t look at the blond barfly, they couldn’t look at her.

  There was something bizarrely familiar about the woman. Had she arrested her? No. that process was long and, in many ways, intimate. Denise would have remembered.

  Acadia, for all it had a large and fluid population in the summer months, was a small town for year-round inhabitants. Had she seen the blonde in a grocery store or, given the face, a hospital emergency room? In her capacity as an EMT she had been to the ER at Mount Desert Island Hospital enough times with injured people.

  The woman looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. The barstool made guessing her height tricky, but Denise figured she was about the same height as she was—five foot six—and probably weighed about the same, one hundred thirty pounds. Her face—without the obvious damage—was the kind that can be dressed up or down. Makeup and a good haircut and she’d be pretty. Without it, she was fairly ordinary. Still, there was something …

  After a while the blonde began looking back. Their eyes met, and Denise stopped her furtive surveillance. The last thing she wanted was to get into a “what’re you lookin’ at?” bitchfest with a stranger.

  Another beer, a trip to the ladies’ room.

  The lobstermen got up and left. As they passed the blonde, working on her third drink since Denise arrived, one ducked his head and said, “Miz Duffy.” The other nodded politely.

  Miz Duffy. No lobsterman Denise had run across would call a woman “Miss” unless she was their kid’s schoolteacher. Miz Duffy must be Mrs. Duffy. As Denise made her way unsteadily back to her booth, she wondered if they’d made a point of ignoring Mrs. Duffy because they didn’t think a married woman should be alone in a bar, or because they were acquainted with Mr. Duffy, and the fact that he’d beaten on his wife made social intercourse awkward.

  Mrs. Duffy watched them go, a tired look on her face, and something more energetic in the curl of her upper lip, disgust possibly.

  The blonde shifted on the stool. Again their eyes met, this time in the long mirror backing the bar. Realization hit Denise with the force of near-sobriety. Not disgust. Hatred was what burned in the blonde’s eyes. She knew. Denise had seen it. It greeted her in the bathroom mirror every morning. For a long time they sat
, eyes locked, watching a slurry of emotions, memories and shocks flickering across the faces in the glass at dizzying speed. Never breaking eye contact, the blonde stood, picked up her drink, and carried it over to Denise’s booth. She slid into the shadows on the opposite side.

  “I was beginning to think I’d made you up out of whole cloth,” she said, and laughed.

  The laugh made the hairs on the back of Denise’s neck prickle.

  THREE

  Elizabeth wouldn’t tell Heath why she’d been contemplating slitting her wrists. When pressed, she cried and looked so desperate it scared Heath into silence.

  Dem Bones hung like a Space Age suit of armor on its stand in the corner; Heath, collapsed in the familiar embrace of Robo-butt, was putting water on for tea. While the water heated, she rolled onto the back porch to call Gwen in her persona of doctor and great-aunt. She also called Anna Pigeon in her persona of law enforcement ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park and Elizabeth’s godmother. Surely, between medicine, the law, and Heath’s blind determination, they could find out what had driven Elizabeth to despair and put the child back together again.

  Curled up on the oversized leather sofa, and in her pajamas though it was not yet sundown, Elizabeth accepted the tea without comment. Elizabeth couldn’t care less about tea, but it was all Heath could think to offer, and she was grateful her daughter took it.

  Heath had not seen E this hopelessly totaled since, at nine years old, she had wandered out of the night woods weeping and nearly naked.

  A year earlier, during a nightmare canoe trip on Minnesota’s Fox River, Elizabeth had been as strong and canny as any battle veteran. Heath had almost forgotten she wasn’t Rambo; she was a sixteen-year-old girl. Evidently, whatever this evil was, it was of a variety that struck at the heart of where that wonderful, vulnerable girl lived.

  Anna arrived first. Soundless in moccasins without socks, she appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room. She must have dropped everything and left work as soon as Heath called. Heath probably sounded as panicked on the phone as she was. She refused to feel guilty. They were talking about Elizabeth’s life.

  Anna had changed out of her uniform. She was wearing Levi’s so worn the knees were white and stringy with age, not artifice, and an oversized, man’s white shirt, probably her husband Paul’s, rolled up to the elbows.

  A while back Anna had turned fifty. More gray twined through her braid now than when Heath had first met her. Decades in the sun had freckled and creased her skin in a way that suited her skull and her soul. Anna had grown to look like a person you would want to tell your darkest secrets, all the while harboring an uneasy sense she already knew what they were.

  “Hey,” Heath greeted her. She didn’t expect a hug. Anna was not a touchy-feely kind of woman. Both in greeting and departing, Anna nodded. A modified bow of respect, Heath guessed. Or dismissal.

  Perhaps because Elizabeth was so young and damaged when she’d met Anna, she had crept through those boundaries. Leaping off the sofa, the girl threw herself into the ranger’s arms. As tall as Anna, and a few pounds heavier, Heath expected Elizabeth’s onslaught to knock Anna back into the kitchen, but Ranger Pigeon stood staunch as an oak and wrapped her arms around the clinging girl.

  Relief only slightly tainted with jealousy washed over Heath. Chest muscles loosened. She drew her first deep breath since she’d found Elizabeth in the bath. It saddened her that, physically, she could not be Elizabeth’s rock. Without bitterness, Heath knew she’d gotten the harder job, to anchor and support her emotionally.

  Anna folded down onto the floor, her back against the sofa, legs crossed Indian fashion. Elizabeth curled up on the seat behind her and played with Anna’s pigtail the way she’d done when she was a little wreck of a girl, still in shock from the multiple ordeals that brought her into Heath’s life. Holding on to the braid, Elizabeth whisked the tail over her eyes and cheekbones as if sweeping away cobwebs.

  “I wish you hadn’t changed out of uniform,” Heath said to Anna. “I was kind of looking forward to having a gun close to hand.”

  Before Anna could respond, Gwen blew in through the outside door. Gwen was in her late seventies, small-boned, fragile-looking, with wildly curly hair that she ignored with the exception of taking time every three weeks to keep it as resolutely red as it had always been. Dr. Gwen Littleton was the antithesis of a little old lady. Heath thought of her aunt as a whirlwind, a dust devil, a genie in a tiny bottle, a force that, though small in size, was most definitely to be reckoned with.

  She gusted into the living room, dropping the black leather doctor’s bag she’d been given when she graduated from medical school—and still carried every day—on the floor. The air that came in with her was the kind that can only be found during dry high-mountain summers, a draft so light and crisp, so warm and full of optimism, you feel that if only you could spread your wings wide enough you could fly.

  “I left the door open,” Gwen announced. “Fresh air. My unbottled, unpatented, priceless, free cure-all.” Dumping her purse, Heath’s mail, and a long turquoise-and-gold scarf she’d been carrying for some reason, she put her hands on her hips, surveyed the three of them, and said, “Okay, now, what’s this all about?”

  Elizabeth started to cry again, mopping at the tears with the tail of Anna’s braid. Though it had to be absorbing a bit of snot on the side, Anna didn’t look like she had any intention of rescuing it.

  Gwen swooped down onto the sofa and folded her great-niece in her thin arms. Anna took one of Elizabeth’s narrrow feet between her roughened hands and began to massage it gently. Heath rolled nearer, closing Elizabeth into a circle of love. An impenetrable circle? Probably not. Love did not conquer all, but sometimes it made it bearable.

  “Baby, what is it? You have to tell us,” Gwen crooned.

  “Or we’ll never go away,” Anna added.

  “Not even to go to the bathroom,” Heath said. “How disgusting would that be?”

  “I am so ashamed,” Elizabeth mumbled through her tears and the soggy end of Anna’s braid. “I swear I’m going to die of embarrassment. Just die! I want to die,” she said with bone-chilling sincerity. “I’m so ashamed.” Tears clogged her throat then, and she sobbed into Gwen’s boney bird-shoulder.

  “I accidentally fell on a friend of mine and killed her,” Anna said. “That was pretty embarrassing.”

  Heath almost blurted out, “What the fuck?” Leading technical climbs for much of her adult life, Heath was fluent in the modern vernacular, and “fuck” was such a jolly good bad word. But when Elizabeth came into her world, Heath had determined to clean up her language. Saying the F-word was one thing; hearing it on the lips of a fairylike little girl was obscene. Worse, it was tacky, low rent.

  Anyway, it had been ruined. On the Fox River one of the thugs had, quite simply, used it up. He had used all possible, probable, and improbable applications of the word, finally rendering it absurd. Now, when E and Anna and Heath heard someone say “fuck,” they’d lift an eyebrow, exchange a smile.

  Left without it, Heath fell back on the classics. Twelve apostles and forty thousand cowboys couldn’t be wrong. God damn it to hell, bastard, SOB. All were workable.

  “The hell you say,” she amended. From the corner of her eye she noted Elizabeth was listening. The sobbing had quieted.

  “No kidding,” Anna said somberly. “Squashed her throat. Now that’s something to be ashamed of.”

  “I once told a woman her fetus was going to be stillborn,” Gwen admitted. “She mourned and wailed through seventeen hours of labor. The baby never moved, its heart never beat, I swear it! The moment she was born, that baby girl was wiggling and giggling. The wretched little thing had been lying doggo, or hiding behind Mom’s liver or some darn thing. I thought I was going to die of humiliation before the mother killed me for scaring her to death. Thank God that was back before mothers sued for every little birthmark. I was so ashamed I didn’t show my face at the hosp
ital for nearly a week. When I did, doctors, and even some nurses, started calling me Dr. Lazarus.”

  “I never killed anybody or scared anybody half to death,” Heath said. “But in college I got drunk and made a bet with this guy that I could free-climb the front of the administration building, no lines, no belays, no shoes, no gloves, no nothing. Bet him a hundred bucks. He upped it to a hundred and fifty if I did it totally naked. I was halfway up and doing great when the cops showed up with the spotlights. I was charged with drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, and—this hurt worst—defacing university property, apparently by plastering my bare-naked ass on it.”

  “You did not!” Gwen exclaimed.

  “Spent the night and half the next day in jail. I was too ashamed to call you. The only reason I wasn’t expelled was that the boy who made the bet with me was the president of the university’s son. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Elizabeth stared at her wide-eyed, completely engaged now. “Oh gosh, Mom, how did you stand it?” she cried.

  Absurdly pleased that her tale had trumped accidental death by falling on, and nearly terrifying to death by misdiagnosis, Heath said, “This was before everybody had iPhones. I was only totally humiliated in front of twenty or thirty people, not millions on the Web.”

  Elizabeth’s face went deathly pale. Heath had read the phrase “deathly pale” many times, but this was the first time she’d ever witnessed the phenomenon. It was as if she watched the blood drain from beneath her daughter’s skin, leaving a gray pallor in its wake. For a moment she thought E was going to faint or scream or vomit. What she did was far more frightening. She began striking herself in the face with her balled fists.

  Heath ached to hold her. She knew that the best she could manage was to lurch upon the pile like Frankenstein’s monster. Cursing the ice that had bested her, she turned her wheelchair sharply and sped from the room, left the hardwood and hit the carpet without slowing down. Robo-butt had never moved so fast. In an instant she was down the hall and in Elizabeth’s room. The pink iPhone, a gift from Gwen, was on the bedside table. Elizabeth’s laptop was on her desk, holding pride of place in the midst of a landfill’s worth of cosmetics, tissues, magazines, earrings, and whatever else had been dropped there over the past two years.