Boar Island Read online

  Elizabeth snorted. She sounded like Anna, Heath realized, and was careful not to smile, not to notice at all.

  A metal ramp borrowed for the occasion was laid from the boat to the jetty. Heath and Robo-butt debarked in a maneuver as complex and intricate as the landing on Omaha Beach. Gritting her teeth against what she knew was going to be an event fit for the Special Olympics, she rolled to the first of the stone steps soaring in zigzags up the face of the cliff.

  That she wouldn’t make it, that she would slip off and tumble into the Atlantic, or worse, the rocks, that she’d get halfway and give out, and there’d be the huge humiliation of a ranger rescue: These thoughts she shoved deep into the well of hopeless thoughts in the back of her brain.

  She wasn’t taking Elizabeth back to Boulder. She was taking Boar Island. The temptation to yell, “Charge!” was tempered by the fact she’d be advancing butt first.

  “I’m not climbing that,” Elizabeth said. “No wonder Ms. Zuckerberg had heart failure.”

  “Elizabeth!” Gwen admonished, then said to Heath, “Let’s wait and call Anna.”

  “For what?” Heath responded irritably. “Her to carry me up on her scrawny back?”

  “Maybe she could drag you like a sack of laundry,” E suggested.

  “That I’d like to see,” John said. “Still and all, if it was me, I’d take the lift.”

  Heath and Gwen glared at him. He squinted into the wind and puffed his pipe complacently.

  Heath’s hope of a Batcave-like super-elevator bored into the living rock was quickly dashed. The lift was a wooden platform with rails made of old pipes. Steel cables were attached to the four corners, then tied off ten feet up on a ring at the end of another cable that snaked to the top of the cliff, where it disappeared into a rusted iron wheel.

  “Electric winch,” John said as he led them to where the conveyance sat, graying wood and dull pewter-colored metal rendering it almost invisible against the granite. “When Ms. Zuckerberg had her first heart attack, and Mrs. Hammond came to look after her, she got this put in. Steps too hard for carrying groceries and what-all.”

  “First heart attack?” Aunt Gwen asked.

  “This was the third.”

  “She didn’t tell me that. Neither did Dez,” Gwen said, her voice sharp with concern.

  The boatman swung open a hinged section of the welded railing. “Who’s first?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Elizabeth said.

  “I’ll do it,” Gwen said tentatively.

  “No,” Heath decided. “It has to be me.”

  “Right,” Elizabeth said scornfully. “Who’s going to hold it while you roll off? Could we please go back to the real world now?”

  “The real world sucks at the moment,” Heath said.

  “Will it haul us all at the same time?” Gwen asked.

  “Might could,” John said.

  “Forget it. I’m not getting on that thing,” Elizabeth said, and got back into the boat.

  Gwen and Heath would go first, leaving John to unload and get the luggage on the lift. Heath harbored no expectations that this new Elizabeth would help him. Wily whined and yipped and showed no inclination whatsoever to get on the thing, with or without people.

  “Come here, Wily,” E said. She lifted the dog back into the boat with her.

  Once Heath, with chair, was rolled onto the lift, she locked her wheels. John handed her a small metal box hooked to a cable. The box had two buttons on it, one red, one green.

  “After you’re off, just push the button. That’ll send the lift back down,” John said.

  “I take it green is up,” Heath said with a look at John.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “Tally ho,” Heath said idiotically, and punched the green button. Had she not been half blind with terror, the trip up would have been stunning. Through the waves of panic that crested each time the lift lurched, or Aunt Gwen squeaked, she barely managed to register the glittering expanse of unbelievably blue sea and sky, the dense green of the hardwood forest above the cliffs, breaking waves painting white lace around their feet. These were the good things. Heath kept her eyes resolutely on them. The one time she looked down, her daughter, her dog, and John were growing ever tinier, looking more and more like specks of chewed food caught in the sharp teeth of the rocks.

  She wished controlling what she heard was as simple. Fear honed her ears to batlike sensitivity. Each creak of the winch wheel or groan of the platform signaled failed machinery and a splatty death before the eyes of her only child. In the end, she gave up, stared skyward at the wheel reeling in the cable, and prayed that God would not let a nice lady in a wheelchair die on such a sunny day.

  “We’re here,” Aunt Gwen said as the last terrifying clank announced the end of the line. Heath was pleased to hear the quaver in her aunt’s voice. It was not good to be the lone coward in a group. Moving from platform to clifftop wasn’t as formidable as Heath had feared. The lift rose through a square hole in a larger platform, where it could be secured in place by four sliding metal plates about the size of a magazine. Ms. Zuckerberg had clearly envisioned a day when she might be commuting by wheelchair.

  When the plates were set, the lift was as stable as the platform. Heath wheeled easily out onto solid ground. High, certainly, but solid, and worthy of a quick word of gratitude to the almighty.

  The luggage followed, with John to unload it. He sent the lift back down. Heath refused to roll near the edge and holler at E to come up. Not yet.

  “Used to be only a lighthouse here until city folk began piddling around in 1922,” John said. “Waste of a good rock, if you ask me.” He left them to get a cart for the luggage.

  High on an island in the ocean, Heath could feel the elements in a way she usually didn’t. The sun was a force against her skin, the wind a living thing twining in her hair; the light refractions from the sea were as sharp as the salt smell. Suddenly she felt very alive. Leaning her head back, she looked up a hundred and fifty feet to the top of the old lighthouse. The base had to be at least forty feet in diameter, and the walls fourteen feet thick, at least at the bottom.

  The lighthouse was the single bit of architectural grace. The rest reminded Heath of the Winchester House in California, as if each owner had been driven to keep on building regardless of how haphazard the design. Forming an awkward V, with the lighthouse at the point, two wings—one of them two stories, the other three—blew back from the original tower, then petered out in drunken angles to finally die in piles of stone and timber. A century of winds had piled the debris along the skirt of the high granite wall on the northeast side of the island.

  “If this place isn’t haunted, I want my money back,” Gwen said.

  “I’m afraid we’ll turn out to be the evil spirits,” Heath said, thinking of the sudden—and to her, inexplicable—changes in her daughter. “Elizabeth has gone from Junior Jekyll to Rising Senior Hyde. It’s like she’s turned into a different person in a matter of days. Did I ever act like that?”

  “For a year or two. You went through a bad patch when your dad remarried.”

  “Everything I do is wrong.” Tears of self-pity and frustration flooded Heath’s eyes. “Wind,” she said, wiping them away. “I haven’t a clue how to respond to her this way.”

  “Do what she asked you to do about a million times,” Gwen said.

  Her aunt’s sharp tone offended Heath. It was as if Gwen thought she was a fool, or worse. “And what is that?” Heath snapped.

  “Give her electronics back,” Gwen said.

  “You’re joking,” Heath said, aghast. The night of Lady Schick and the tub, Heath had taken everything of E’s that needed a charge to run.

  “That’s what she wants. I think she’s made that clear enough,” Gwen said.

  E had complained bitterly for a few days, then quit speaking of it. Why? Heath asked herself. Because she accepted that Mom was right? Decided her cyberlife sucked and she was glad to be out of it
?

  “Give her back her iPad, iPod, iPhone—whatever-all teens carry these days. Life as she perceives it is in the toilet, and now you’re forcing her to go through withdrawal. Electronic media is an addiction of E’s generation,” Gwen said with exasperating patience.

  “Addiction my ass!” Heath grumbled. Cocaine was an addiction. Heroin was an addiction. A telephone was not an addiction. It was an affectation.

  “You saw the crap she’s getting on her phone and laptop,” Heath said.

  “So did she. She knows what is there; is it any worse imagining what’s there? Not being able to communicate with friends because it is there? Because we don’t understand being addicted to social media doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Addicted isn’t even the right word. It is the new normal. She feels like you’re punishing her for something she has no control over,” Gwen said.

  Heath resented the intrusion into her maternal bailiwick as much as she wanted her aunt’s advice. Lose-lose situation. “The last time I checked, there was one of a threesome with her face Photoshopped over the woman’s. I can’t bear the thought of her looking at that stuff,” Heath said.

  “How do you think she feels having you see it? Or me? Though I’ve delivered hundreds of babies, she sees me as a little old lady who doesn’t know where babies come from.”

  “She doesn’t see you that way, you know,” Heath said.

  “Elizabeth is drowning in shame.”

  “She’s been through worse, real threats, and she was so strong,” Heath almost wailed, and cursed herself for being a weakling. For respectable mothers, children are Achilles’ heels.

  “But she can’t fight this one. You can’t fight this one. The enemy has no face. The enemy might be her friends. Her friends might be sniggering at the pictures and talking behind her back. It’s anonymous, horribly personal, and public all at the same time.”

  “We should have stayed in Boulder. I should have gotten her a psychiatrist,” Heath said. A second mortgage on the house and it would have been feasible. Cheap if it helped E.

  “Maybe. Since you didn’t, you have to let her be an adult with you. She survived the Fox fiasco because she fought back. This is her fight, and you’ve confiscated the field of battle. You two have to come to terms about how you’re going to deal with this as a team.”

  “So sayeth the goddess of youth,” Heath said with a wry smile.

  “So sayeth the goddess,” Gwen affirmed.

  The winch groaned to life and began spinning up steel cable.

  “Give her back her electronics,” Gwen said. “I’m going to help John.”

  TEN

  Anna sat across the kitchen table from Lily, sipping extremely good coffee and watching Peter Barnes make goofy faces at Olivia.

  “Nice being your boss,” he said. “We don’t have much crime here, so I may order you to babysit.” He grinned.

  “Sure,” Anna said. “I met a baby once.”

  “This may be Gris’s last fire. He’s been muttering about retiring for ten years. I wouldn’t be surprised if he up and does it. Your duty station here might end up being for more than three weeks. Maybe for years.”

  “That’s a lot of babysitting,” Anna said somberly.

  Anna had known Peter nearly twenty years, since law enforcement training at FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia. In the day, he’d been the epitome of “tall, dark, and handsome”: black hair, brown eyes, a few inches over six feet, with thick thighs and upper arms. In a test of endurance, Anna could best him. When it came to sheer physical power, she was as a spider monkey to a bull ape.

  In his forties, Pete was still tall and handsome, but the dark at his temples had been painted gray—enough to suggest he was experienced, not enough to suggest he was getting old. Fatherhood was the big change. The Pete Anna knew always referred to children as ankle-biters and rug rats, harped on overpopulation, and eschewed the institution of marriage as nothing but a piece of paper.

  Yet here he was, married and dangling a wee daughter on his knee, familial bliss oozing from every pore.

  “They’re pretty doggone cute, aren’t they?” his wife, Lily, said with a smile and a wink at Anna. “I think Peter wanted progeny because a big man with a tiny baby is a megawatt chick magnet.”

  Anna laughed because it was true. Even she, happily married to the finest man on earth, was finding Peter positively adorable.

  “I told Anna she could be chief babysitter as well as chief ranger,” Peter said, never taking his eyes off baby Olivia’s face.

  “I could keep her alive,” Anna said seriously. She was mildly offended when they laughed. “In Texas, I kept a younger baby alive under seriously adverse circumstances.”

  “They don’t all make it,” Peter said, gooey-eyed over Olivia.

  “Culling the gene pool,” Anna said.

  “You don’t mean that!” Lily said in the warm tones of a good person.

  Actually, Anna did mean it, but had learned not to flaunt her darker side. Much as she liked Peter, her personal jury was still out on his new wife. So far she’d seen nothing not to like about Lily. Still, it was good to wait a few years before rushing into these sorts of decisions.

  “I’d best go make myself presentable,” Lily said. Having stopped to kiss first Olivia, then Peter on the head, Lily escaped upstairs.

  “Sorry about the quarters. The fancy digs are getting repainted. Are you settled in on Schoodic?” Peter asked.

  “I am,” Anna replied. She liked the Schoodic Peninsula. Situated across Frenchman Bay from Bar Harbor, an hour by car, less than half that by boat, it was part of the patchwork of public lands that made up Acadia. The forested peninsula was mostly owned by an absentee landlord. The NPS had only the stony tip where it thrust into the sea.

  With fewer tourist amenities, the peninsula received only a fraction of the park’s visitors. On Schoodic, Anna could occasionally feel a hint of how it must have been when it was wilderness.

  Peter was humming “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” as he fed the child from a bottle.

  He looked up and saw Anna watching. “Formula’s not the best, I know, but sometimes, well, the magic doesn’t work. Lily has no milk,” he said as if Anna had asked, as if she cared, which she hadn’t and didn’t.

  “You’re the most beautiful girl in the world, yes you are, yes you are,” Pete crooned, bobbing his big square head back and forth.

  “You do know you look like an idiot,” Anna said kindly.

  “I feel like an idiot! I’m a prisoner of love,” he said with an exaggerated sigh and a hand to his heart. “Who knew? Your own kid is different.”

  Anna would have to take his word on that. She’d never wanted kids, never had kids, and never regretted the choice. Kids were great; watching them was fun, talking to them edifying, and working with them occasionally revelatory. Anna liked kids. Then, too, she liked Irish wolfhounds. She just never much wanted one in the house.

  The first few notes of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” sounded from the other room. Peter groaned. “Here, you hold her.”

  “I can,” Anna said defensively as she took Olivia into her arms. Peter went to answer his phone.

  “Hello, little citizen,” Anna said. Round blue-gray eyes stared unblinkingly into hers. The infant interrogation technique. Anna always felt she was being asked, “Are you worthy? Can you keep me safe?”

  “No,” she said, and, “I’ll give it my best shot.”

  Olivia stared at her in the unfathomable way of infants. Then her eyes squeezed shut. Her pretty little mouth formed an ugly square. She started to cry. Anna sighed. Babies almost always cried when she held them. It hurt her feelings. Was it that she smelled funny? Or was it that she was so paranoid about dropping the squirmy little beggars that her muscles tensed up until the creatures felt more as if they’d been nailed into a peach crate than enfolded in loving arms?

  Peter appeared in the kitchen doorway, cell phone in hand
. “That was Artie, the district ranger for Mount Desert. Courtesy call. They got an e-mail tip that your pal on Boar is receiving contraband.” The look he gave her reminded Anna of how long it had been since they’d spent any time together, as if he was thinking that if he could turn into Father of the Year, maybe she could have turned into a person who consorted with underworld types.

  “I told him we’d meet them at the jetty on Boar,” Peter said. “Lily!” he roared, sounding like the old Peter. “We’ve got to go.”

  Anna’s cell phone buzzed. She pulled it from its case. A text from Heath: Weird shit getting weirder. Come when you can.

  “Ready when you are,” she said to Peter. He led the way to the white Crown Vic, an older model. The NPS was a frugal organization. Anna slid into the passenger side, buckled her seat belt, and prepared to enjoy the view.

  Visitors often asked her which park was her favorite. She’d never come up with a satisfactory answer. Today, a body of water encompassing a universe of light and life, a thousand blues in waves that rose and broke in sun-silver celebrations, the surf whispering secrets just out of hearing, it was Acadia.

  The fancy houses infesting the multitude of islands scattered in the ocean should have made the coast feel cozier, more inviting of human habitation. Instead, on the rugged coast of the Atlantic, the grandest homes man could devise seemed mere shacks. They hugged the rocky shore as if afraid to venture from sight of land. Those on the tiny islands were like orphans lost at sea.

  Anna loved it when nature made humanity seemed trivial. It was a comfort to pretend that she was of a relatively harmless race; she felt safer when she could delude herself that in the battle of Man against Nature, Nature had a chance. For the short duration of the boat ride out of Somes Sound to Boar Island, she could almost believe Internet bullies and weird shit getting weirder did not matter.

  The ride up the lift, accompanied by the towering form of Peter Barnes and the hulky muscle-bound district ranger, Artie Lange, was a tad more exhilarating than Anna liked. Not for the first time, she wished more of her compadres were small-boned women, less inclined to strain machinery. Still, she appreciated the view.