Boar Island Page 4

  After a minute or two she saw them winking as the boat rose and fell on a gentle swell. She swam toward it. Having tied her sack of squirming arachnids to the starboard cleat, Denise heaved herself over the gunwale. As always, her first action was to remove and stow her dive gear, then pull on Levi’s, a sweatshirt, and a ball cap to cover her wet hair. She’d established her reputation as a woman who enjoyed night diving. Still, diving at night, alone, was considered dangerous enough to raise questions she’d rather not answer on the off chance she ran into anyone. The lobsters she could always cut loose back into the ocean if need be.

  An innocent, if nocturnal, ranger once again, enjoying the resource and preserving it for blah, blah, blah, she started her motor and headed back toward Somes Sound. Bear Island loomed to her port side, dark and forbidding, its mysterious, reclusive owners seldom in evidence, then Boar Island, smaller and virtually treeless. Boar had a jagged silhouette that reminded Denise of a ruined castle, the turrets half crumbling. The lady who owned it had a bad heart and was currently in a convalescent home in Bangor.

  That’s what happens to women who have no children to care for them, Denise thought. In old age they become orphans and are thrown on the state for their keep. Denise did not want to end her life the way it had begun, an unwanted orphan beholden to the state of Maine for a meal and a roof over her head.

  That brought her back to the battered blonde, Paulette Duffy.

  And all the new possibilities.

  FIVE

  Elizabeth knew she’d stepped in it, Heath could tell. As three adult stares bored into her, she groaned and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. This show of sass did more to cheer up Heath than a thousand clowns in a barrel full of monkeys. “You said you ‘didn’t exactly’ have a fight. What is ‘not exactly’ having a fight?” Heath asked.

  Regardless of the incidents that should have aged Elizabeth before her time, she retained that magnificent innocence of face one seldom sees in anyone over the age of ten. When she was with people she trusted, or too tired to keep her guard up, her emotions could be as easily read as those of a two-year-old. Heath watched in loving fascination as Elizabeth decided to lie, thought better of it, decided to cry, changed her mind, and, finally, began.

  “You know Mr. and Mrs. Edleson, Tiff’s mom and dad?” Elizabeth asked. The question was meant for Gwen and Anna. Of course Heath knew them. Sam was around forty, thick sandy hair, nice build. If he hadn’t been cursed with a seriously weak chin he would have been a handsome man. A chin implant probably would have changed his life. As it was, Heath noticed, Sam vacillated between arrogance and obsequiousness. Terry, his wife, said he worked as an apartment and condo manager for a company that rented real estate to vacationers by the week or month. Ostensibly this job was what brought the family from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Boulder, Colorado. Terry was a part-time bookkeeper for an auto-body company. In her mid-to-late thirties, she ran to fat, twenty pounds or so overweight, no longer particularly obese by American standards. Her hair was the same color as Sam’s, but hers was from a bottle. Overall she seemed pleasant: pleasant face, pleasant voice. Heath couldn’t think of any serious drawbacks to her as a neighbor—or even as the mother of Elizabeth’s best friend—except that Terry talked too much in general, and too much about her God and her husband in particular.

  The moment she’d spot Heath outside, words would begin to flow, a river with no end in sight. Heath wasn’t as quick at escaping as she’d been in her salad days. There was a long trek from the mailbox to the ramp beside the kitchen steps with nothing but a low hedge between her property and the Edlesons’. During these rolling social events, Heath had been informed in far more detail than she cared for that Sam was cut out for bigger things, Sam was unhappy in his job, Sam had always thought … God had a plan for Sam, but …

  “I vaguely remember the Edlesons,” Anna said, cutting into Heath’s thoughts. “You had Paul and me over as backup when you invited them for dinner last summer.”

  Last summer. Heath was surprised. She’d thought she’d made it a point to socialize with her neighbors, and especially the parents of her daughter’s best friend, at least two or three times in the past year. Evidently not. There’d always been an excuse not to set herself up for an evening of Sam’s seesaw personality and Terry’s mouth.

  “I say hi whenever I see them,” Gwen said. “Though if it’s Mrs. Edleson, ‘hi’ can take a chunk out of one’s day.”

  Elizabeth laughed. If the sound had been a dead fish, both Heath and Wily would have rolled in it. A child’s laughter, particularly after tears, wasn’t something Heath had ever fancied getting dewy-eyed over, but she was, and not for the first time, either.

  “Well, me and Tiff—”

  “Tiff and I,” Gwen corrected, then looked abashed that she’d interrupted at such a time.

  “You and Tiff,” Heath said to get Elizabeth going again. She didn’t want to give her time to reconsider that lie she’d seen sneaking across her face earlier.

  “We were supposed to be looking after Brady, Tiff’s little brother,” she explained to Anna and Gwen, in case they’d forgotten about him. “He’s a monster. A real monster—he bites and spits; he just never lets his mom see him doing it, so she thinks he’s like this little angel and Tiff and I are the evil stepsisters or something. Anyway, we were supposed to be watching him because it was Wednesday night—remember, Mom? I wanted to go over even though we’d be babysitting so Tiff and I could decide what to wear on the last day of school? Not like it matters, but there’s always stuff on the last day and, well, you know.”

  Heath nodded, though she didn’t know, and didn’t remember that particular Wednesday.

  “Wednesday nights are big church nights. Usually Tiff and her brother both go, and sometimes her dad, but Brady had been pretending to have the flu all day, so Mrs. Edleson let him stay home if Tiff would watch him. Mr. Edleson stayed home, too, though I got the feeling Mrs. Edleson wasn’t happy about that. Then, around eight or so, Brady disappeared to pull the wings off of flies or whatever—”

  “Does the kid torture animals?” Anna asked darkly.

  Elizabeth was untouched by the ice in her voice. “No,” she said. “He’s not like a little Hannibal Lecter in the making or anything. At least not that I’ve seen. He’s mostly into torturing high school girls, as in Tiff and me.

  “So Tiff went out to the backyard—you know what a big yard they have, part of it borders on the creek—because that’s where the little monster likes to hide out in the dark and leap out and scare the bejesus out of us. I didn’t want to deal, so I stayed in the living room, where we’d been watching boring kid movies to keep Brady happy.

  “Turns out Tiff wasn’t in the yard looking for Brady.” Elizabeth faltered to a stop.

  Heath, Anna, and Gwen waited in respectful silence. Heath wondered if they worked as hard as she did not to demand answers.

  Elizabeth sighed deeply and resumed. “Her dad had intercepted her coming in and sent her and Brady out for something at the drugstore. So, anyway, I was sitting on this big couch they have in the living room playing solitaire on my phone, and Mr. Edleson comes down from upstairs and sits on the couch and starts asking me the usual lame questions. How do I like school and what do I want to be when I grow up. Then he asks if I have a boyfriend, and I say don’t I wish, and he starts in this long thing about some tribe in darkest wherever, and how fabulous it is that the old guys, uncles even—gross—introduce the virgins into womanhood. Way gross.”

  She looked up from where her hands were picking at the edge of a fray on the hem of her pajama top, swept an inclusive glance over Heath and the others, then returned to her hands. “It reminded me of something Father Sheppard would say.”

  Father Sheppard—Dwayne Sheppard—was the leader of the pseudo-Mormon cult Heath and Anna had rescued Elizabeth from when she was nine years old. Sheppard believed in multiple wives, the younger the better. Heath could feel her blood pressure rising.
Anna and Gwen were as stone.

  “Then what happened?” Gwen asked softly.

  “He like put his hand on my thigh and leaned in and kissed me. A wet sloppy kiss that Wily would be disgusted by. I was, you know, so totally freaked, for a second I didn’t do anything. I mean, I didn’t kiss him back, but I just froze. I guess he thought I was saying what he was doing was okay.” Elizabeth’s eyes filled again, and her hands came up to hide her face.

  Gwen took hold of Elizabeth’s wrists, prying her hands from her cheeks. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing. Nada. Zip,” she said firmly.

  “And he didn’t think what he was doing was okay,” Anna said. “He’s nearly forty, he is your best friend’s father, and he’s married. He knew it was not okay. You did not bring this on yourself. Mr. Edleson is a scumbag.”

  Anna rose to her feet. Heath, tuned in to the finer details of human locomotion, noticed she didn’t move with the effortless grace she once had; still, she rose fluidly. Only the faintest of grunts and the crack of a knee or ankle attested to the effort.

  “What are you doing, Anna?” Heath asked warily.

  “I’m going to pay a call on the neighbors,” she replied.

  “Noooo,” Elizabeth wailed.

  “I’ll take care of that end of things,” Heath said, a hint of territorial challenge in her tone.

  For a moment Anna swayed like grass in a gentle breeze. Heath waited to see if she would respect the role of mother or if she would go tear Sam Edleson’s house down. Heath wasn’t sure which outcome she was hoping for. Anna settled, folded down, and took up her position on the floor beside the sofa.

  “Was that the whole of it?” Heath asked, sensing it wasn’t and dreading the rest of the story.

  “No,” Elizabeth admitted. “While he was slobbering on me, and grabbing, Tiff came in. She hadn’t gotten all the way to the drugstore. He’d given her the keys and told her to take Brady with her in the car! Tiff has a learner’s permit, but it’s not a good idea for her to be driving at night, even if it’s only to the Walgreens. And not with Brady screaming and bouncing around.”

  Maybe because of what she’d been through in Sheppard’s house of wives, Elizabeth seemed to censure Sam Edleson more for endangering his children than for making a sexual assault on her. At that moment, Heath loved her daughter so fiercely she thought she might explode.

  “How long was she gone?” Anna asked. Heath moved rapidly from angry and proud of Elizabeth to shaking inside and terribly cold. Had the cretin stopped at a slimy kiss and a grope?

  “If she’d’ve gone to the store, it would have been maybe half an hour. I don’t know exactly. We’ve kind of quit speaking to each other. I guess she came back for something, and she came into the room while her dad was grabbing at me. I’d got over myself and was shoving and hitting to get him off me, and he was sort of flopping around. I don’t know if he was trying to stay on me or get off me without getting kneed in the balls, because that was what I was trying to do.

  “Tiff started screaming, and Mr. Edleson fell onto the floor. Right then Mrs. Edleson walked in, back way early from her church thing. It usually goes till nine.”

  “My guess is both Tiff and Terry felt there was something fishy going on,” Anna said. “It probably wasn’t the first time good old Sam had tried to get time alone with the girl next door. He may have been run out of Idaho for all we know. I’ll check it out.”

  Elizabeth went on, “I managed to get up. Mr. Edleson had torn my blouse—not torn it, really, three of the buttons just popped off—and I was holding it shut, not knowing what else to do. Mrs. Edleson starts yelling, and Tiff stops screaming and starts yelling. Mr. Edleson is a creep, but I didn’t want to hang around to watch him get chewed out. TMI big-time.” Elizabeth stopped again and fell into what looked almost like a trance.

  Staring at her hands, she turned them back and forth as if she’d never seen them before. After a few seconds Heath saw a tear fall like a raindrop on her left palm.

  “Momma, they weren’t yelling at him,” she whispered. “They were yelling at me.”

  SIX

  It was late when Denise parked her Miata a few houses down from the address Paulette had given her when they were at the Acadian. Several days had passed, full days for Denise. Acadia was at the peak of its busy season. That wasn’t the reason she’d put off visiting, however. Twice Paulette Duffy had called her cell. Denise hadn’t picked up.

  There was a lot to think about before she could distill even part of it into words. Paulette Duffy—Paulette—had had years to grow used to the idea. Until they’d met in the old lodge, Paulette had no proof, but she’d long had suspicions. Not Denise, not the trained law enforcement officer, taught to seek out disparities and make sense of them. Denise hadn’t had a clue.

  She had always been at pains to give as little thought as possible to her so-called family. Home wasn’t “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” as Frost had written. Home was where, if you had to go there, you might as well put a gun in your mouth and blow your brains out. You’d be doing yourself a favor. The Denise who had suspicions was a deep-secret Denise, a Denise that Ranger Denise Castle had thought long dead.

  Three days and two phone calls passed, and finally, at quarter past ten in the evening, Denise was parked on the outskirts of the small village of Otter Creek on a two-lane road that cut through a dollop of public land still extant in the midst of Acadia National Park.

  When she’d first bought the Miata, the only concession to good sense she’d made was disabling the interior light, a practice customary in police vehicles. No sense in lighting oneself up for whatever miscreant might be waiting in the dark to take a potshot at the local constabulary.

  Denise was grateful for that moment of sanity. Tonight she didn’t want to be seen entering or leaving Paulette’s place, wasn’t sure she wanted the two of them to be associated with one another. Not sure she wanted any of it to be real. Not that she loved the devil she knew, but she was used to him. Paulette would change everything.

  Moving quietly and casually, she sauntered the hundred yards between her car and Paulette’s cottage. Should one of the scattered residents happen to look out a window, she would appear to be an innocent out on a stroll enjoying the sweet-smelling night.

  Paulette’s home was what Denise’s high school art teacher used to call a two-bit picture in a thousand-dollar frame. Because of its location, the smallish plot of land had to be worth a fortune. The tiny but picturesque shack squatting on it was hardly worth the match it would take to burn it down. It had to be family land. Paulette’s husband’s, Denise guessed. Had it belonged to Paulette, surely she would have sold it and run away on the proceeds.

  Paulette’s husband, Kurt Duffy, wasn’t home. Paulette had said that in the text that finally brought Denise to Otter Creek.

  She stepped into the deeper shadow of the dilapidated porch. Through the four frosted panes in the front door shone the bluish wavering light from a television. Either the volume was off or the old house had better soundproofing than its gaping weathered siding suggested.

  Denise rapped lightly on the frame of the screen door.

  The door opened so suddenly it startled her. Paulette must have been waiting and watching for her. “Come in,” she whispered, as if she shared Denise’s desire for secrecy.

  The house’s interior was as sorry as its exterior. A battered, stained sofa, cigarette burns on the arms and one of the cushions, slumped against the left-hand wall, facing off with a huge television. The TV was the old-fashioned kind with a rounded glass front and three feet of tubes forming an ugly black hump on its back.

  A scarred coffee table filled the space between, cup rings overlapping on the ruined finish, the surface littered with orange crumbs from a single-serving bag of Doritos. Blinds with broken slats, dents in the plaster walls, dirty finger marks on the woodwork, and the cracking linoleum floor attested to the misery Denise had sensed in
the battered blonde on the barstool.

  Nausea tinged with panic rose quivering and cold in Denise’s midsection. Like Paulette’s bruised face, the room was an outward manifestation of the ruin Denise carried inside herself. Scrupulous attention to her outsides kept it hidden. She hoped. Her apartment was spotless, neither cluttered nor Spartan; the art was tasteful, the dishes carefully selected. The same could be said for Denise—sharply pressed clothes, well-cut hair, clean unbitten nails, painstakingly maintained so no one would suspect that her life was no better than if she were living it out in this sad room.

  Anger at the tawdriness of Paulette’s house flared up, hot and bitter. This place was a slap in the face, insulting.

  Paulette read her expression, or maybe her mind.

  “It’s not me,” Paulette said hurriedly. “This room, it’s not mine. What I mean is…” Shoving the ruin of bleached hair back from an eye now haloed in the faint yellows and greens of a fading bruise, she let her eyes wander over the desolate interior landscape. A sigh of such exhaustion Denise’s anger was blown away on it emptied Paulette Duffy’s lungs. “I made it nice, not rich, but orderly and clean, and, believe it or not, it had charm. I’m good with my hands.”

  Denise was good with her hands. For Peter’s house she’d sewn curtains and created flower beds, stenciled bathrooms, and carved tiny animals on each kitchen drawer pull. For Peter’s house. For Lily’s house. For the baby’s house.

  “Kurt liked it once. Then, I guess, he knew how much it meant to me … I don’t know. Things changed. Things got broken,” Paulette finished with a resigned smile.

  For Denise, too, things had changed. Things had gotten broken.

  “Please, please, come,” Paulette begged, and to Denise’s surprise, Paulette took her hand and tugged her farther into the house. More to Denise’s surprise, she didn’t jerk her hand free. It was okay. It was good. It was right that her hand was in Paulette’s hand. Nothing had ever been so right before. It was like she and Paulette were alone, alone together.