Boar Island Read online

  “I know you sexually assaulted Elizabeth,” Heath said to Sam. “Elizabeth’s sixteen. In Colorado that makes your behavior child molestation. A felony.”

  Sam stopped leaning. He, at least, was scared. Not so Mrs. Edleson. Clacking her mug down on the tray, she tried to nail Heath to the wall with a malevolent glare. “Now see here, Heath, Sam didn’t do anything! Do you hear me? You daughter, your adopted daughter, is no better than she should be, and you don’t know the half of it.”

  Heath looked over Terry’s head. “Sam, I know you arranged to be alone with Elizabeth, then assaulted her. I’m thinking the only reason it wasn’t rape was that your wife and daughter got wind of it and came home before they were supposed to.”

  Terry was on her feet. “Your daughter made advances to my husband!” she shrieked, looking like she might fly at Heath and claw her eyes out.

  Anna’s voice cut cold from where she still leaned against the sideboard, ankles crossed. “Elizabeth’s sixteen. Sam’s forty—”

  “Thirty-eight,” he interrupted, his first words since entering the fray.

  “She’s a minor. He touched her. Either way it’s a felony. Either way Sam goes to jail,” Anna finished.

  Terry quivered, fumed, sat, took up her coffee cup, breathed, sipped. “There’s no need for that kind of talk,” she said softly. “There’s no need to embarrass yourself—or your daughter—by calling the police. I don’t blame Elizabeth. Girls like Sam. He’s a very handsome man.”

  A snort from the sideboard, and a murmured “Chinless wonder.”

  Heath suppressed a smile. Terry pretended not to hear. Sam’s hand flew to hide the lower half of his face.

  “Elizabeth made a pass at Sam,” Terry said. The threat of jail hadn’t silenced her, but it had toned her down.

  “Just like the girl in Idaho made a pass at Sam?” Anna asked. She pushed out from the table she’d been tucked against and stepped into the light from the kitchen. Menace radiated from her. Heath could never figure out how she did it. It was just there, palpable, a sense of imminent threat that could be felt against the skin of the mind.

  “That girl … that girl was … she…” Terry, her righteous anger temporarily damped, was flailing for words to fan it back to life. Heath took this moment of vulnerability to unlock Elizabeth’s cell phone and open a text. Wheeling close enough that she bumped Terry’s knees, she thrust the cell phone into the other woman’s hands, where she couldn’t miss the photo of a woman and a dog fornicating.

  “Is that why you sent this to my daughter?” Heath demanded. Terry dropped the pink cell phone as if it were a used tissue.

  “This is sick,” Terry hissed at Heath. “Your daughter is disgusting and sick. This proves it.”

  Sam pushed his wife aside, then reached down to retrieve the phone. Heath watched him narrowly as he turned the phone right side up on his palm and pushed the button to unlock it. “Shit!” he said in what sounded like genuine shock. Terry tried to slap it from her husband’s hand, but he dodged her blow. Anna moved from the shadows to stand behind Heath’s chair. Making plans for a quick retreat, no doubt.

  Before the Edlesons could stop their squabble to launch a counterattack, Heath broke into their concentration.

  “Sorry to introduce that into your world so suddenly,” she said acidly. “Someone has been using the Internet and cell phones—Twitter, texting, you name it—to cyberstalk Elizabeth. I need to find out who is behind it. Since the girls were at odds, I thought Tiff might be able to help me.”

  “Tiff had nothing to do with that!” Terry snarled. “Nothing. I kept her away from your … daughter.” She made the word sound like an epithet. “Because Tiff is a good girl.” Terry’s doughy round face hardened and took on a sly look. “Since there is no problem, but you are troublemakers, what about I help you, and you promise not to try and get my Sam in trouble with the police?” she asked shrewdly.

  “I promise,” Heath said solemnly.

  “What about you?” Terry glared at Anna.

  “Elizabeth doesn’t want the police involved,” Anna said.

  “We don’t know anything about these … these filthy things,” Terry said. “We don’t know people who even know where to get filth like that. Nobody we know would ever get anything like on your daughter’s phone. There. Now we’re out of it. That’s all the help I can give you.”

  The bitch was throwing it back on Elizabeth. Heath said nothing, and that nothing burned in her throat like fire on gasoline.

  Sam, still staring at the phone, as if loath to take his eyes from the image of the woman and the dog for fear it would vanish, sat down on the sofa with a thump. “I’ve never seen anything like this stuff.” He was thumbing forward on the touch screen, no doubt hoping for more.

  Terry snatched the phone from her husband’s hands. Heath was willing to bet she knew what Sam was, knew the lies she told herself so she could stay in the marriage.

  “Is Tiff home?”

  “You are not going to show this to Tiffany!” Terry exclaimed in horror. Marching over, she dropped the phone in Heath’s lap with an exaggerated moue of distaste.

  “The girls are estranged,” Heath said. “Maybe Tiffany is doing this because she’s angry, because you told her Elizabeth tried to seduce her dad.”

  “Tiff wouldn’t do this,” Sam said. “Tiff wouldn’t even know what this is.”

  Heath could feel Anna hovering behind her like a brewing storm cloud. She shot her a warning glance; they needed to talk to Tiff. “I don’t need to show her the photograph,” Heath said with as much patience as she could muster. “But I would like to talk to her. The girls are close; Tiffany might know who wants to hurt Elizabeth.”

  Terry’s eyes narrowed. “We’re done here,” she said. “Take your daughter’s filth and get out.”

  “We need to talk to Tiffany,” Heath insisted. “If you want to be around when we do, go and get her.”

  Sam stood, trying to pull his manhood up around him despite the missing chin. “You heard my wife,” he said, and took a threatening step toward Heath.

  Anna moved from the shadows behind Robo-butt. Her right arm shot out, stiff and sudden, the heel of her hand catching him in the solar plexus. With an oof he sat again, his moment of macho a thing of the past.

  “The girls are not close,” Terry hissed. She stomped past Anna and jerked open the front door. “Elizabeth brought this on herself. She probably gets stuff like that all the time. She probably likes it.”

  Anna had turned the wheelchair so Heath was facing the harridan at the door. Throughout this adventure in futility Heath had remained relatively calm. Terry’s smugness and accusations blasted her self-control. The old Heath rose from the ashes of the one born of the ice fall. Heath never moved, but she saw, actually saw, an image of herself rise from her chair like a zombie from the grave, arms outstretched, fingers curled into claws the better to tear out and devour the flesh of Terry Edleson’s throat. Maybe Terry saw the projection. Heath didn’t know. All she knew was that a look of abject, pants-wetting terror deformed the other woman’s face.

  Heath bared her teeth and braced her hands on the arms of her chair. Murder could be done in a state such as this. Had her legs been viable, she would have probably left the Edlesons in a squad car, never to see the outside of a prison cell again. As it was, blind rage could not be sustained more than a moment. Anna swept up behind her. Heath leaned back into the loving embrace of Robo-butt to be rolled unceremoniously over the sill and onto the brick walk. “You assaulted Sam,” Terry shouted. “I helped you! So you can’t call the police. They won’t believe you. You promised!” She glared at Heath.

  “I did,” Heath said.

  “You are a witness,” she yelled at Anna.

  “I am,” Anna said.

  The door slammed. The dead bolt thudded into place.

  For a moment Heath and Anna stared at the door.

  “Now we call the police?” Anna asked.

  “Now
we call the police,” Heath agreed.

  Empty and exhausted, she slumped back in the seat and said nothing more, letting Anna push her down the walk. The long summer dusk had settled into true night. A streetlight made shadows stark and colorless on the concrete sidewalk beside the asphalt. Black and white, Heath thought, and missed a time when she saw right and wrong that clearly delineated.

  “Ms. Jarrod?” came a whisper.

  Anna stopped pushing. Heath came out of her slump into full alert.

  “Ms. Jarrod, it’s me, Tiffany.” The girl, her blond hair gray in the cold light, separated herself from the side of her dad’s truck and crouched down by Robo-butt. At first, Heath thought it a sign of unusual sensitivity in a teenager, but realized it wasn’t. Tiffany didn’t want her parents to see her consorting with the enemy.

  “I gotta get back,” Tiff said. “Tell Elizabeth it’s not me; my folks won’t let me call. They took my phone and my laptop and I’m like in a black hole. I can’t call anybody or get on Facebook or anything! I hope she’s okay. Tell her I’ll write her and put the note under the hedge where we used to crawl through when we were little kids. Nobody’d ever think of that.”

  “Elizabeth’s being cyberstalked,” Anna said curtly. “Do you know who’s behind it?”

  “I know about the stalking—everybody at school does. I don’t know—”

  “Tiffany!”

  “Gotta go. I know what Dad … I … gotta go.” She stood and ran, probably hoping to get back inside the house before Mom and Dad figured out she’d defected.

  Anna pushed. Robo-butt rolled. Heath rode. Only the crunch of the chair’s rubber tires on bits of escaped gravel accompanied them back to the kitchen door. Gwen, Elizabeth, and Wily were waiting for them on the couch, tense and wide-eyed.

  Anna parked the chair, then sank down in her former place. Heath set the brakes.

  “Well, open the envelope, for heaven’s sake!” Gwen exclaimed.

  “No winner,” Heath said wearily. “It probably isn’t Tiff, which is good news. She couldn’t, her folks confiscated her cell phone and her laptop.”

  “Gosh,” Elizabeth breathed, evidently shocked at the draconian nature of the punishment. “What did she do?”

  “She saw,” Anna said.

  “Tiff said she would write you about it and leave the note under the hedge where you kids used to crawl back and forth to each other’s yards,” Heath said.

  “On paper?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No. She’s going to scratch it on a piece of slate with a stylus,” Heath retorted.

  “That Tiffany wasn’t doing it, that’s good, isn’t it?” Gwen asked.

  “Not really,” Heath said.

  “We haven’t a clue as to who is behind it,” Anna said. “So we have no way to make it stop. Nobody to come down on. We don’t have a motive. We don’t, do we, Elizabeth?” The adults again stared at the teenager in her pj’s like hawks at a baby duckling.

  “No,” Elizabeth said sadly. “At school everybody likes me, or I don’t even know them. You know how it is. There’s a bunch of boys who make a game of getting girls to have sex with them, and they keep score. They’re creeps, and they’ve done some creepy things—you know, posting about the girls who put out, and even meaner posts about the ones that didn’t. Both Tiff and I got asked sort of out by one of their bottom feeders—not like a date or anything, just stupid stuff by a guy who wants to be in on the game but is a total loser. Maybe the creep boys could be doing it. I don’t think so, though. I mean, at school, I’m not all that important. Why take the trouble to stalk me? I’d probably be worth, like, half a point.”

  “Half a point?” Anna asked.

  “You know, a cheerleader’s worth five points, a girl on the student council two points. Like that.”

  “Time to cull the gene pool,” Anna murmured.

  “God, I’m glad you’re here, Anna,” Heath burst out as a boil of anxiety burst inside her. “For all we know this could turn to physical stalking.”

  Anna said after a moment: “Starting next week, I’ve got a twenty-one-day detail in Acadia National Park. Acting chief ranger. Their chief is fighting that big fire in Southern California.”

  This last was said without affect, but Heath knew it rankled with her friend. Like many rangers, Anna neighed and fretted like an old war horse when fire season came around. Heath couldn’t understand this love of fighting wildfire. For some it was about overtime and hazard pay.

  For others it was an addiction. Anna belonged to the latter group. She’d taken a bullet during the Fox River adventure, and her left arm never fully recovered. Though Anna’d never admit it, she probably hadn’t the strength to swing a Pulaski for long.

  To be acting chief in a park as important as Acadia would be welcomed by most rangers, a nice step up the ladder to being permanent chief somewhere else. Anna had dithered about the promotion to district ranger. Money meant little to her. Being out of doors and away from human beings meant a lot.

  “You’re leaving?” Elizabeth wailed.

  Heath flinched, not because her daughter cried out like an abandoned five-year-old but because, for an instant, she thought she’d done it herself and was mortified.

  “They don’t need you!” Heath said, then stooped to threats. “They’re liable to give you a promotion.”

  “I’ll be sure and offend the higher-ups,” Anna said with a dry smile.

  “Send someone else,” Heath said, hating the whine in her words.

  “Wildfires in California. Everybody is short-handed,” Anna said.

  Heath said no more. She’d already said too much.

  Gwen, whose usual upbeat enthusiasm seemed to have been squelched by the points game and creeps and stalkers, perked up. “Acadia National Park? In Maine? Of course in Maine! For heaven’s sake, I’m getting dotty. My first job out of med school was near there. I have to make some calls. Heath, Elizabeth, pack. We are going to Maine with Anna!”

  Gwen kissed the air around everybody’s cheeks, snatched up her black medical bag, and blew out on the wind the way she had blown in.

  “Mary Poppins,” Heath laughed.

  “Who does Aunt Gwen know in Maine?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Dez Hammond and Chris Zuckerberg. A couple of old hippies from the day,” Heath said. Heath had met them on two occasions when they’d visited Boulder. She remembered liking them. “Chris comes from money. She inherited an island off Acadia. They spend most of their time rehabbing an old mansion and hosting artists.”

  “Where’s Arcadia?” E asked.

  “Acadia,” Anna corrected. “Northern Maine, lobsters and nor’easters.”

  “I’m going to be marooned on an island with four old ladies,” Elizabeth cried.

  “In a crumbling old mansion,” Heath said.

  “You’ll be there, won’t you?” Elizabeth begged Anna.

  Heath was annoyed that, though she had more years under her belt than Heath, Anna was not among the designated Old Ladies.

  “Not me,” Anna said. “A desert isle in the vast Atlantic? Too boring for this child.”

  Elizabeth groaned.

  EIGHT

  “Do you want to see where I really live?” Paulette asked. The question should have seemed sudden or peculiar, but it wasn’t. In her core—her soul if the metaphor held—Denise knew her twin, her other self, could not truly live in this tragic wreck of a place with paper peeling from the walls and ancient linoleum curling at the corners and buckling along the seams.

  They stood at the same instant, laughing at themselves and one another simultaneously. Denise felt as if scales, dirt, fragments of rotting lumber, cracking mortar, and broken roof slates were sliding off her. In the dim light of the bedroom’s single shaded lamp, Denise imagined she could see dust rising from the cascade of debris as her old, worn-out, worthless, piece-of-shit life crumbled. When the dust settled, a new, clean, sun-filled life would be built around her and her sister. Denise communicated none of t
his. Paulette, she was positive, was feeling the same sense of sloughing off a diseased and decrepit skin.

  Wordlessly, Paulette led the way through a dilapidated kitchen—appliances right out of Sears circa 1970—and through the back door of the cottage. As they crossed the small weedy yard, a children’s swing set, one chain broken, a rotted seat dangling like a broken limb, formed the yard’s epitaph.

  Paulette reached out. Hesitantly, Denise took her hand and was led into the black night forest.

  “I don’t go home much, and I always go a different way,” Paulette whispered as they made their way through the darkness beneath the trees. “If Kurt found out, he’d spoil it just to be mean; just because he likes to hurt me by ruining my things. He thinks it’s funny. Hitting isn’t enough. He can’t hurt me bad enough with his fists short of putting me in the hospital, which costs a lot, or killing me.”

  Holding tightly to Paulette’s hand, Denise followed blindly, her story—her sister’s story, their story—surging through her veins and arteries, down the capillaries until each and every cell in her body was caught up. Waves of fury crashed over deep valleys of sorrow; seas of compassion rose and receded. It had been a while since Denise had felt anything for anyone but herself. The hatred she harbored for Peter had hardened into bitterness. Wormwood and gall had been all she could taste, smell, see, touch.

  Dead; she’d been dead to herself in every way that counted. Coming alive in this womb of pine-scented darkness, her hand warm and safe in her twin’s, was so overwhelming she staggered like a drunk and fell to her knees, dragging Paulette with her.

  Denise felt her sister patting her hand. “Shh, shh,” Paulette murmured softly. “It’s okay. We’re together.” Those words were the first and only lullaby Denise had ever heard. She began to cry.

  Usually sick helplessness came on the heels of Denise’s crying jags. This time, when the tears finally stopped, she felt renewed, as if the tears were poisons her body had expelled.

  “We’re almost there.” Paulette’s voice came from the darkness. Denise allowed the gentle tugging to bring her to her feet. “This land belonged to Kurt’s mom,” Paulette whispered as they crept along. “His grandma lived here. When she died we moved in. It’s not like a city lot. It’s only about forty feet wide where the house is, but it runs way way back, getting skinnier and skinnier like the tail of a comet. Kurt doesn’t care anything about it except that it’s his. I wanted him to sell at least part of it because he could get a lot of money for it and we wouldn’t have to live in a shack. ‘Shack’s good enough for the likes of you’ was his big-deal answer. If he ever found this, he’d kill me.