Boar Island Read online

  Heath took both electronic gadgets and dropped them into the saddlebags on her chair. Another twenty seconds and she was back in the living room parked beside the couch. “Elizabeth,” she said in a tone that cut through the soft fuzzy outpourings of Gwen and the somber attentions of Anna. Elizabeth looked up, eyes and cheeks wet, lips red and swollen.

  Heath held up the pink cell phone.

  “Noooooo,” Elizabeth begged. She covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut as if waiting for the fuse to burn down to the dynamite.

  “Yes,” Heath said. “Rotten ice.” Rotten ice was their code for This will try to kill you. Face it or run away fast.

  Gwen glared at Heath. Anna nodded slightly. In the minute or less Heath had been gone, Anna must have figured it out. Heath pushed the message button. Seventeen new messages in the in-box. “I’ve never had seventeen messages in my entire life,” Heath said. A small whimper from Elizabeth. Not funny. Heath opened the first message and read it. Then she read it aloud in a flat voice. “‘Have you been on the page? Dweeb said you did the basketball team. TNT?’”

  “Kimmy?” Heath asked as she noted who it was from.

  “She’s in my geometry class,” E said miserably.

  “TNT? Explosive?” Anna asked.

  “Totally Not True,” Elizabeth said. “How could she have to ask?” Tears started. She knocked them from her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  E was going to be brave. Heath hoped she was. She opened the second. “‘Check The Page.’ Tiffany sent this one,” Heath noted. “The Page?” She raised an interrogative eyebrow.

  “It’s a blog the kids all read.” E hid her eyes with the tail of Anna’s braid. “Somebody posted that I did things I didn’t do.”

  “Like the basketball team?” Anna said dryly.

  “Like that,” E said.

  Heath opened the third message: “‘Who hasn’t screwed you yet?’ My God, this stuff is insane. Somebody is going to get their skull bashed in if I have any say in the matter.”

  The fifth had a picture attached, an image of a woman being mounted by a Great Dane. Heath didn’t read it aloud. She passed the phone to Gwen.

  “‘I guess you like being done to by dogs.’”

  “Holy Mary Mother of God,” Gwen whispered.

  Anna had taken the laptop from the saddlebag and had it open on her thighs. “What’s the address of the blog?”

  E told her. Anna typed it in.

  Heath rolled her chair over to read it. “‘EJ pulled a train—you hear that? After the game.’”

  “‘True. I was the caboose.’ That one’s signed Spike,” Anna said.

  “It’s this creep everybody calls Dweeb. He signs himself Spike,” Elizabeth said. “God, the Dweeb!” E cried. “Nobody could think I’d have anything to do with the Dweeb!”

  “‘No sloppy seconds for me.’ This one is signed IceBlow.”

  “A slime bag Dweeb hangs with. You should have let me kill myself,” E whispered.

  “‘Sloppy twenty-seconds more like,’” Anna read on relentlessly. Heath considered stopping her, saving Elizabeth the pain, but she believed Anna was right in what she was doing. Elizabeth already knew what they said. Aloud, in Anna’s flat, almost bored tone, they lost some of their snickers-in-the-dark malice and sounded as stupid as they were. Almost.

  “‘Not in all orifices.’” Anna looked around. “Orifices?” she asked no one in particular. “Big word for this moron.” She returned her attention to the computer and read the last two quickly, as if the whole thing were too foolish for words.

  “‘No shit?’ asks bozo,” Anna said.

  “‘Meat sandwich with a blow job topper.’ This from thug number two. Who started this ball rolling?” she asked Elizabeth in cold even tones.

  “I don’t know,” E sobbed. “The only names I recognize are Dweeby Spike and his creep pal, IceBrain. If cooties weren’t extinct, they’d have them big-time.”

  Of course, Heath thought. Once the story was out, the dweebs and the creeps wanted to be part of the action. If a girl was having sex with the other boys, why not them? “This is good,” Heath said. “Nobody cares what they say. They’re creeps.” That sounded good and might even be true.

  “Your Facebook password?” Anna asked.

  “WilyCoyote2015,” Elizabeth said softly. “Capital W, capital C.” At the sound of his name, Wily thumped his tail on the floor. Pushing to his feet, the old dog ambled over and stuck his head under Heath’s hand. It was as comforting as it always had been.

  Anna looked up from the laptop. “More of the same,” she said. “Where else?”

  “Everywhere,” Elizabeth said hollowly. “There’s a website the kids go to, like a Mean Girls thing. That blog. I’ve found three others. Things are forwarded to my whole class sometimes.”

  Cyberbullying: vicious, anonymous, all-pervasive. Heath forced her voice to calmness, then asked, “Who started sending these first?”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth whispered. “Honest, I don’t know. Don’t tell anyone,” she begged. “Anna, promise me, no cops. No cops, Heath, nobody. Gwen, no doctors, and please, please, please don’t talk to any of my friends’ parents. Pleeeeease!”

  For a second, Heath suspected Elizabeth knew, not only why she was being targeted, but by whom, and her sixteen-year-old mind was telling her that if she ratted out the culprit, it would dump her into a hell worse than the one she was already in. The one that could only be escaped by razors to the wrist.

  Heath changed the subject. “When did”—and she waved the cell phone rather than speak the evil words—“this stuff begin?”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said automatically. Then, “About a week after school let out for the summer.” Elizabeth was a rising senior at Boulder High. Not in with the in crowd or the jocks, but at the moderately comfortable level of acceptable anonymity that allows a majority of kids to survive high school without permanent scarring.

  “Who?” Anna demanded.

  Shocked into honesty by Anna’s tone, Elizabeth said uncertainly, “Tiffany?”

  “Tiffany? Tiffany’s your best friend,” Heath said. Not a friend of Heath’s choosing. The girl’s parents were Christian fundamentalists, or at least her mother was. Heath figured Elizabeth had suffered enough at the hands of religious fanatics for several lifetimes, but Tiffany seemed like a nice girl.

  In Heath’s opinion the friendship was more one of opportunity than genuine attraction. Tiffany, her folks, and her two-year-old brother, Brady, moved into the house next door; she and Elizabeth were the same age and starting their freshman year together; both settled at the same level in the high school pecking order. Admittedly, Elizabeth seemed to enjoy Tiffany’s company. Most days either she was at Tiffany’s or Tiff was over here. It suddenly occurred to Heath she’d not seen the girls together for a while, a week or more.

  Rotten mother, she scolded herself. Blind as a bat.

  “I don’t think we’re friends anymore,” Elizabeth said.

  “Did you guys get in a fight?” Heath asked. She should have asked this a week ago. She should have been paying better attention.

  “Not exactly. Momma, could I have some more tea? It really helps.” When Elizabeth called Heath “Momma,” either they were having a moment or Heath was being conned. Obviously Elizabeth really, really did not want to talk about this. All three adults homed in on the vibe like hounds on a scent.

  The only thing missing was the baying.

  FOUR

  Bad idea to be doing this drunk, Denise thought, but continued dragging the straps of her scuba tank up over her wetsuit. Cold water would sober her up quick enough, she rationalized. If it didn’t, and she drowned, that was all right, too. Since all of her children had been murdered, and Peter had thrown her away like so much damaged goods, death didn’t seem like such a bad option.

  Except that Peter would be glad she was dead.

  Except that the son of a bitch would go right on living his sp
iffy little life. With his precious Lily and the baby. They would watch the baby that should have been hers grow up without caring that Denise was fish food.

  Mouthpiece adjusted, gear hooked to her harness, she made a final check of the gauges with her flashlight. How drunk could she be if she remembered to check gauges? It wasn’t as if she was planning on going deep or staying down long, half an hour max. Hell, I dive drunk better than I do sober, she thought. Drunk diver. The phrase amused her, and as she went over backwards into the ocean, she forgot to hold on to her mask. Cursing and sputtering, she managed to catch it before it sank and get it back on. So much for the “better drunk” theory of diving.

  Mask adjusted, she got her bearings. The night was perfect. Warm, overcast, and as dark as the inside of Jonah’s whale. Her navy blue runabout on a midnight sea in a great big ocean was as close to invisible as a corporeal body was likely to get.

  She upended.

  Following the anchor line toward the bottom, she thought about Will Whitman, the lobsterman who got shot for robbing that old guy’s traps. Whitman might have been rustling lobsters, but the traps he got shot over were in her territory. The murder had renewed hostilities in the long-running feud.

  Not that she cared. People shot people. People did a lot of awful things to other people. Nobody gave a damn. Her own mother had dumped her. She’d been adopted by borderline assholes. Cry me a river; nobody cares about anybody other than themselves.

  Enough! she told herself and quieted her mind. Stopping thoughts from spinning was hard. It was like her mind had developed a mind of its own, and maybe neither one was her friend.

  No! she shouted silently. The dueling minds couldn’t have this place. Clenching her jaw, she forced herself to look outward.

  She loved that only the circle of her lamp and the anchor line existed. Under the Atlantic at night was the only time she felt anywhere near free or whole anymore. Contained in apparatus and silence, held in weightlessness and peace, she savored the balm to her soul. Above, in the light, in the world of men, she devoured herself, ripped the flesh from her bones with her teeth, like a coyote chewing off its own leg to free itself from the jaws of the trap.

  Watching the line play through her gloved hand as she descended, she let herself think about the woman she’d just met in the bar of the old Acadian Lodge.

  Neither one of them had said anything for the longest time after the blonde slid into the booth and made her cryptic announcement. “I’d begun to think I’d made you up.”

  They sat and stared at each other in the dim light of the bar. Denise was struck dumb. She’d never quite known what was meant when people said that. She did now. There were no more words in her head at that moment. Had there been, she wouldn’t have been able to move her tongue or push out the breath to say them. Words had become futile pathetic little things, not fit to bring into the immensity of the idea that had slipped in with the blonde.

  “Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? I’ve been thinking on it for months now, so I’ll talk while you get your mind around it, how’s that?” the woman said. Her voice sounded creepy, the way Denise’s always did when she heard herself on a tape recorder, familiar but alien. Not right.

  “My name is Paulette Duffy. I’m forty-one.” She smiled. Denise drank down the last of her beer, then waved at the bartender for another. Paulette’s teeth weren’t the same. Denise had gotten her front incisors busted in a schoolyard fight and had neat straight caps. Paulette’s leaned in as if they needed each other for support.

  “I think I’m forty-two,” Denise managed. “But that could be off a year either way.”

  “Forty-two on March sixth of next year,” Paulette Duffy said. Her hand shot out for no reason Denise could see and banged the metal napkin holder. “Sorry,” she laughed. “I guess I’m turning into a klutz in my old age.”

  “Nerves,” Denise said to be saying something. “Happens to me more and more.” Her head was swimming. Too much beer. Too much everything. Sitting back, she let her head fall against the cracked leather of the booth. “Forty-one,” she whispered. “Forty-two on the sixth of March. That kind of makes a person real, doesn’t it? Knowing when you were born, knowing somebody cared enough to write it down.”

  “You never knew?” Paulette asked softly. Denise hated being pitied for her rotten childhood, hated talking about it, wouldn’t talk about it. Peter was the only one to whom she’d told all the grit and grime, and now, every time he looked at her through the scrim of his new clean wife and spotless baby, she could see every bit of shit she’d ever been through clinging to her in his eyes.

  Now she wanted to spew it all out like vomited beer here in this booth for Paulette Duffy. “Never knew,” she said. “I’m not ready for any of this.” She pulled the man’s wallet she favored out of the hip pocket of her pants, then dumped the contents on the table. It was probably enough to pay for her drinks three times over. She didn’t care. “I’ll never be ready for any of this.” Standing unsteadily, she waited a second for the room to stop spinning.

  “Here,” Paulette said. She scribbled on a bar napkin. When Denise didn’t hold out her hand to take it, Paulette shoved it in Denise’s pants pocket. “This is my address and the number of my cell phone. I got one of those prepaid ones at Walmart. I have lots of minutes left. Call me. Promise. Promise you’ll call me.”

  Denise didn’t promise. She made it to the Miata. Then to the runabout. Then to the sanctity of lobster rustling under the sea.

  The ocean floor coalesced out of the gray-green circle of gloom at the farthest reach of Denise’s light. Turning herself so her feet pointed earthward, she came to a gentle landing on the sand. Froglike, iridescent green in the glow of the lamp, her swim fins squeezed small swirls of liquid dust puffed from beneath her.

  The depth gauge read twenty-six feet. Habit was all that made her check it. This stretch of Davy Jones’s locker was, metaphorically speaking, the back of her hand.

  Moving with the slow grace of a hippopotamus on the bed of the Nile she turned, letting her light drift in a circle until she saw the yellow line snaking down from the buoy she’d anchored near, the marker of a line of lobster traps. With a lazy kick she rotated to the horizontal and swam toward it.

  Traps were on the end of lines connected to Styrofoam buoys on the surface. Lobstermen checked their traps every day, putting fresh bait in if they needed it. The buoys were marked with the license number of whichever fisherman owned the trap.

  The traps on the ocean floor out from Somes were the old variety, wooden crates covered in rope mesh, with a circular opening just big enough for a lobster to crawl in. Occasionally, Denise mused, surely a lobster, smarter than her fellows, after having consumed the bait, would crawl back out to live and reproduce. Maybe man had created the ultimate evolution facility, and one day the giant spiders would take over Silicon Valley.

  The first trap had two lobsters in it, but they were small. She passed them by. The next had one enormous old fellow. Lobsters could live a hundred years, though most didn’t make it more than ten or fifteen. This guy looked to weigh close to two pounds. He had been around a while.

  Careful to avoid the claws, Denise reached in and dragged him out. Her hand twitched as if she’d been hit by an electric shock, much the way Paulette Duffy’s had. Her knuckles rapped on the side of the trap, and her fingers opened. With a flick of his tail, the lobster shot into the darkness.

  Nerves.

  Over forty and falling apart, Denise thought. The big spider would have been a good addition to the canvas sack trailing from a tether attached to her dive harness, but, in a way, she was glad it had escaped. Sad to end one’s life in a tourist’s stomach.

  When she had ten good-sized lobsters, she switched off her light. Her bag could easily hold as many as fifteen, but she made it a rule never to take every one she found. If a trap had a couple of lobsters in it, she’d take only one. Those she emptied, if there was any bait left inside, might lure in an
other crustacean before the licensee came to check his catch. This way she figured the lobsterman would be pretty sure his traps had been poached, but not a hundred percent sure.

  Denise rotated her lobster rustling through four different patches. All they had in common was that they were shallow and easily accessible from Somes Sound, where she moored her little boat. Other than running into somebody night diving—and probably up to no good either—while she was in the act of robbing the traps, there was no way she could get caught.

  Denise liked that the lobstermen knew they’d been had, liked that she was thumbing her nose at the holier-than-thous in the park service, the Peter Barneses. Liked the feeling that, at least in this, she was the one in control. It was she, Denise Castle, who was making fools of them all. That was as important as the money she got for her catch with the less than honest owner of the Big Fat Lobster Trap, a seafood restaurant on the outskirts of Bar Harbor.

  Lobster rustling was petty payback for what had been done to her since she was old enough to remember. Pathetic, if she thought about it, but it was the best she could do.

  Until now.

  Paulette Duffy.

  There were possibilities opening to her that hadn’t existed before.

  Kicking off the bottom, she let herself rise gently to the surface. She had not been deep enough, nor down long enough, to make any decompression stops necessary. At the surface, she bobbed, a black sea creature in a black sea. Finding her boat was the most challenging aspect of her midnight forays into the seafood aisle of the Atlantic.

  Under the gunwale, on either side of the bow, she had mounted three small LED lights. They were green. She’d been careful not to put them in a line or evenly spaced—the telltale marks of a work of man, not nature. Glimpsed by anyone, they’d be taken for a reflection, a bit of phosphorescent sea vegetation, or a trick of the light. For her they were homing beacons.