Boar Island Read online

  “That’s it?” Heath asked carefully. “You went for a ride with a friend?”

  “I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody,” Elizabeth said.

  Anna snorted.

  Heath waited. E could occasionally keep secrets from her and Gwen, but never Anna.

  “Wouldn’t tell anybody what?” Anna asked innocently.

  “You know, about him, and stuff.” E had a pleading note in her voice. Anna ignored it.

  “If there is something about him so dangerous that he made you promise not to divulge it to your mother, I think you’d better divulge it to your mother. And me,” Anna said flatly.

  “Not dangerous to me,” E said. “Just him. He—oh God, I’ve told you he’s a boy!” she almost wailed.

  “Twice,” Anna said. “Believe it or not, given we had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right, we got that part right. We’re betting a cute boy.”

  Elizabeth smiled and looked down.

  “Now we know we got that part right,” Anna said.

  Heath said nothing. Anna was much better at this sort of thing than she was.

  “So,” Anna said. “You’re on the back of Boar, down by the water, emancipating crustaceans, and a cute boy in a rowboat floods in. Merriment ensues, and you and Wily go for a ride.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth admitted.

  “Being as he was adorable, and you’re adorable, and everything is adorable, you become ‘friends’ and lose track of time,” Anna said.

  “I guess,” E said.

  “Then, when he realizes grown-ups are about to ruin this idyll, he chucks you and your poor old dog into the freezing ocean so he can save his sorry ass,” Anna said.

  “It wasn’t like that,” E protested. “I was the one who wanted to do it. To help.”

  “And he needed help because…” Anna said.

  E’s face took on a mulish cast. She studied her fingers. Wily licked his paw. Anna stared at E. Heath tried to fit the information E had shared into a coherent picture.

  “I didn’t hear a boat engine,” Anna said. “And I didn’t hear oars in oarlocks or paddles on the gunwale. So your new pal—who cannot be named—muffles his oars? Fishy.”

  Studying fingers, licking paws, staring into flames, thinking.

  “You know I’ll find out who fishy boy is,” Anna threatened.

  E said nothing.

  Gradually it became clear that the boy’s identity was one secret E was going to keep. At least for now. Heath quashed the urge to bargain or plead. E’s new “friend” had not killed or molested her, and when she asked, he’d let her go free. That, and the fact that Elizabeth was happy, allowed Heath to keep her peace. In a bizarre way she was pleased that Elizabeth refused to divulge the boy’s—and of course it had to be a boy—name. It showed backbone, honor, a sense of being in control of her own world that the Internet creep had stolen from her.

  Quiet ticked by to the comforting sound of Wily working the salt from between the toes of his right paw with his tongue.

  “Hey,” Anna said finally. “On a lighter note, your stalker is here in Maine and wants to meet you.”

  Elizabeth toppled over on her side and pulled the afghan over her head.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Denise sat cross-legged on her bed. In front of her was a silver laptop. On the screen was a full-color fish-eye view of the nursery in Peter Barnes’s home. Baby Olivia slept upstairs across the hall from Peter’s room. Peter and Lily’s room, she reminded herself. Where they slept on the bed that Denise had bought secondhand and refinished with such care.

  Lit by the light of a Blue Fairy lamp, Olivia slept in a pink bundle. They’d let the room get too warm, Denise noticed with irritation. The baby was kicking her tiny feet, trying to get free of the rose-colored burrito Lily had thought suitable for swaddling. Why didn’t the woman just stick Olivia in a papoose pack and lace it up tight?

  It had been a week or more since Denise had allowed herself this particular torture. Paulette had taken her mind in other, more satisfactory directions. Directions that didn’t all lead to a dead end. She’d missed watching Olivia. In a way, she was more a mother to the baby than Lily was. A couple of days after the baby was born, Lily had one of her migraines and checked herself back into the hospital. When she got out, though, of course Lily didn’t have to work for a living; she went back to her “activities.”

  Not Denise. Denise had always been there.

  The day Olivia was brought home, Denise stuck a Nice Lady No Bad Feelings face on the front of her skull and trotted right over to her old home, where Peter kept his family. In a beautifully wrapped box was an expensive fragile figurine of a guardian angel.

  A smile pasted so tightly to her face that her lips stuck to her teeth, Denise told Lily it was to watch over the baby.

  Nice, good, little Lily had put it on a table overlooking the baby’s crib, right where the tiny camera hidden in the angel’s armload of brightly painted flowers would capture the entire room.

  Denise had invested in several snazzy little wireless cameras. This was the only one she’d planted in Peter’s house, but it wasn’t the limit of her knowledge of the Barnes family.

  Before Paulette, when Denise had been scarcely more than a festering sore, barely able to keep her mind from pouring out through her eyes like molten lava, she’d kept herself alive by spying on the happy couple, then, when baby made three, the happy family.

  She knew Lily’s routine better than Peter did. Maybe better than Lily herself did. She knew when the baby napped and how often she was changed, when she was fed and what. She knew dear Lily was dry as an Arizona gully in August and never produced a drop of milk from her pert little tits to feed her child. Denise knew what kind of formula she used and where she kept it.

  After he’d summarily thrown Denise out into the cold, thinking himself oh so clever, Peter had changed all the locks. He was too stupid to remember the dog door. Denise had been in that house dozens of times over the past three years. She knew Lily preferred Tampax tampons, the kind that looked like pink bullets; she knew when Lily’s period was and how many days it lasted. She knew Lily suffered from migraines and what she took for them. She’d discovered Peter took Cialis. That had been a good day when she’d found those in his medicine cabinet. He also suffered from periodic constipation and kept Playboy magazines in the back of his closet.

  During those awful times, all Denise thought about was revenge, years fantasizing about how she would get justice. As an employee of the American justice system, she’d thought justice was catching and punishing the bad guys. She had been wrong. What American law enforcement did was not justice, it was revenge, and revenge was for people who were helpless to obtain justice.

  Paulette had taught her that.

  Paulette coming into her life was the first justice Denise had ever experienced. Justice wasn’t about the bad guy. It was about the victim. Justice made what was wrong right again. Justice made the victim whole. Justice put the jewelry back in the jewelry box, the car back in the rightful owner’s garage. Justice was restoration. When Paulette came, Denise’s lost soul was restored to her. That was justice.

  Understanding this changed Denise’s worldview. Revenge was not necessary—not even desirable—if justice could be had.

  However, her years spying on Peter Barnes’s family weren’t wasted. It was serendipity—or fate, kismet—that she’d done this groundwork. At the time, she’d spied and pried because she couldn’t help herself. Or so she’d thought. Some part of her brain must have realized that this information would become important to the planning of the whole life she had ahead of her now.

  Not revenge; justice.

  “Good night, baby girl,” Denise said, and closed the laptop’s cover.

  She checked her watch. It was nearly three A.M. Time to leave to meet with her sister. Given how fast things were moving, and how small Acadia National Park was, meeting in the flesh, even in the dark of night in the woods, was risky, but after D
enise had gotten off work she found a note Paulette had left in her mailbox; their cell phones neither texted nor took voice messages.

  The note read I have to see you. Please come tonight. We have to … The last words were scribbled out.

  Clutching the note, Denise feared she would have a heart attack in the foyer. Paulette had waltzed right up to the boxes in Denise’s apartment building, in broad daylight, and popped a motherloving note, with her handwriting on it and, undoubtedly, slathered with fingerprints matching those at the crime scene, into Denise Castle, Law Enforcement Ranger and Identical Twin’s mailbox.

  Had Denise been a dog, she would have been mad enough to froth at the mouth. Thank God Paulette hadn’t signed the thing. Might as well just add P.S. We killed the prick. Love, the Bobbsey Twins.

  If anyone saw Paulette slip the note into her mailbox, Denise hoped they thought nothing of it. It had been with two bills and a flyer for used tires. Had Paulette come after the mailman, or had the mailman opened the box to put in the letters, seen the note, and read it?

  “Doesn’t matter,” Denise said aloud. By the time the shit hit the fan, Paulette would be gone. One battered widow, no family, no friends, vanishes. A nonevent.

  Denise changed out of her old pajamas. The new ones she’d ordered for her and her sister had arrived, but she didn’t want to wear them until she and Paulette could wear them together.

  Clad in dark clothes, she slipped quietly down the stairs and into her Miata. As on the night she’d disposed of Kurt, she would take the runabout to Otter Cove, then hike the short way overland. Covering the same ground more than once made her uneasy, but not as uneasy as taking the road. The inky shadow of the boathouse by the government dock on Somes was the only place she felt safe parking the Miata. Night diving was known to be her habit. If by chance the car was seen, no one would remark it there.

  The NPS was understaffed and, at present, underfunded. Two weeks ago this would have pissed Denise off. Now park poverty was her friend. Acadia couldn’t afford twenty-four-hour ranger coverage. On Friday and Saturday nights the last shift ended at midnight, on weeknights at ten P.M. Even Eager Artie would be abed by three A.M.

  The Miata snugged into darkness by the boathouse, Denise rowed the runabout out a hundred yards. Probably an unnecessary precaution, but just because she was paranoid didn’t mean somebody wasn’t watching her. This was the downside of breaking the law—even when the law needed to be broken. Denise did not have a guilty conscience. In doing away with Duffy, she’d done the world a good turn, but it was like after she’d finished reading a mystery story. Once she knew exactly who, where, how, and when the crime was committed, it seemed it would be obvious to a two-year-old. To soothe her nerves she had to keep reminding herself that most people weren’t all that bright. Better yet, most people didn’t give a flying fuck unless it was a cop killed, or somebody they could use to make political hay.

  Having shipped the oars, Denise fired up the engine and, at slightly better than idle, motored slowly down the sound. Air and water temperatures had reached sufficient equilibrium that the fog was shredding into thin feathers along the coast, eerie fingers given life by the light of a waning moon.

  Boat firm beneath her, cool, fresh sea air in her lungs, Denise felt the iron band that Paulette’s hand-delivered note had locked around her lungs loosen sufficiently to let her breathe deeply.

  Please come tonight. We have to … Then the tangle of ink lines crossing out whatever it was Paulette decided they had to do. What could she have thought of that Denise hadn’t? A few days before, Denise would have answered, “Nothing.” The note and a few other things Paulette had done lately led her to believe identical twins weren’t identical, as in exactly the same.

  Denise shoved that thought aside. She and her twin were two sides of the same coin, peas in a pod, identical DNA. In everything that mattered there wasn’t a particle of difference between them. She patted the front pocket of her black jeans where she had the list she’d made. Tonight they should be able to check off the meds and maybe the house. Paulette had had time to contact a Realtor, as well as two entire shifts to pinch the drugs.

  Calmed by the eternal strength of the Atlantic surrounding her, Denise decided she wouldn’t say anything about the hand-delivered note. Too many years in law enforcement had made her hypervigilant. That was all. Paulette, an infant-care nurse, couldn’t be expected to see threats lurking behind every set of eyes. Denise loved that about her sister. Or she would, once there weren’t threats lurking behind every set of eyes.

  Denise expertly docked the runabout out of sight between two rocks, then followed the narrow beam of her tiny flashlight over the familiar ground between Otter and the old shed that Paulette had made into a nursery and was now their sanctuary from the world.

  No light showed under the door. Clicking off her flashlight, Denise stepped beneath the roof overhang and put her ear against the wood of the door. Not a sound. Tapping softly, she whispered, “Paulette?” No answer.

  Turning, Denise stared toward dead Kurt’s shack. The back porch light was a blazing beacon through the trees. Paulette got off work at three A.M. She should have beat Denise to the nursery. Why was she in that rotting tomb of a house instead of in their secret place?

  Paulette had been arrested for stealing drugs.

  She’d collapsed of a heart attack.

  Been run down by an SUV full of drunken tourists.

  Panic drowning caution, Denise sprinted to where the porch hung precariously on the rear of the house. She leapt up the two steps, then stopped. The police might be inside, rangers, the sheriff, anybody. Denise stepped softly to the door. The knob turned easily. With three fingers, she pushed the door open a crack so she could see inside.

  Paulette was sitting in a straight-backed chair at the small, beat-up kitchen table. Overprocessed blond hair was caught back in a purple scrunchie. She’d chewed off all of her lipstick. In pink scrubs, figured with Pooh-bears and daisies, she looked very young and helpless. A cup of coffee was between her hands. She was gazing into it as if the dregs would foretell her future.

  “Hey,” Denise said.

  With a shriek, Paulette jumped to her feet. The mug toppled. Coffee poured over the edge of the table, dripping onto the dirty linoleum floor.

  “God, but you scared me half to death,” Paulette said with a shaky laugh. Before Denise had time to do more than blink, her sister had thrown herself into her arms and was hugging her with such force Denise could hardly move.

  A rush of sensation overwhelmed her. Since Peter, three and more years ago, no one had touched her except strangers shaking her hand, or drunks bumping into her on their way to the men’s room at the Acadian.

  Babies needed to be touched. She’d read that. If they weren’t touched they could fail to thrive, outright die.

  Maybe adults were no different. Touch was life.

  “Sorry I scared you,” Denise apologized, all thought of the ill-considered note gone from her mind.

  Paulette stepped away to grab a roll of paper towels off the counter. Ripping off half a dozen, she let them flutter to the floor, then used her foot to push them around, sopping up the coffee. The towels didn’t get it all. What was left mingled with the yuck on the floor.

  Perhaps not all the squalor had been Kurt’s doing, Denise thought uneasily.

  Didn’t matter. They weren’t going to be here much longer.

  “Why didn’t you wait in the nursery?” Denise asked as Paulette dropped the towels on top of a bunch of other trash in an open-topped can near the refrigerator.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Paulette said vaguely. “I wanted a cup of coffee. I thought this would be more comfortable.”

  The sordid kitchen in the murder house more comfortable? More comfortable than the nursery, with its art and painted furniture and promise of things to come?

  Denise let it go, just like she’d let the leaving of the note in her box go. “Why did you need to see me?” she
asked.

  Paulette pinched up a packet of Nescafé, shook it, ripped off the top, and dumped the contents into a plastic mug. Taking the kettle from the stove, she offered, “Coffee?”

  Instant.

  “I’m good,” Denise said, and waited. Her nerves weren’t in shape for waiting, not in the wee hours of the morning in a trailer-trash kitchen. Her knee began bouncing, her heel never quite hitting the floor.

  Paulette sat down across from her and repeated her gazing-into-the-cup routine. The spill on the scarred vinyl tabletop wasn’t quite dry. Denise watched a tiny finger of it being absorbed into the cuff of the pink long-sleeved T-shirt Paulette wore under her scrubs.

  “Did you have trouble getting the triazolam?” Denise asked, forcing an end to what was becoming an awkward silence.

  Paulette hung her head. “I didn’t get it,” she murmured.

  “Why the hell not?” Denise demanded, shocking herself with the outburst.

  Paulette reached into the pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a handful of hypodermics with capped needles, each in its sanitary packet. “I got the needles,” she offered pitifully.

  Afraid to speak lest she batter her twin with abuse a second time, Denise stared at the empty hypodermic needles and nodded slowly. When she felt she could speak normally, she asked, more gently, “Did you put the house on the market?”

  Paulette shook her head.

  Gentleness vaporized.

  Paulette hadn’t done anything. Nothing. Anger geysered up Denise’s throat, hot and sulfurous as the fumes of hell. Given that Denise had shot Paulette’s husband up close and personal three times, pilfering a few pills didn’t seem like a big deal. Denise tried to force the bile down, calm herself. Pilfering a few pills, no big deal; Paulette would see it that way after Denise explained it.

  The problem was Denise shouldn’t have to explain it.

  How could Paulette be sitting like a lump of raw dough in this filthy kitchen and not see how important this stuff was? Crucial.