Boar Island Page 9

  The bedrooms in the lighthouse, accessed one through the other by the original circular iron stairs, and the rooms around the lighthouse’s base had been renovated. The rest of the place, two wings, blew northeast and west like a tattered cape in a gale. Damp, winds, and harsh winters had had their way. The remains were more ruin than mansion.

  “That was quick,” Heath said as the lift creaked the last few inches to its mooring fifty feet above the rocks. “And with reinforcements,” she said, not sounding particularly pleased. Heath, in Robo-butt, was sitting in the shade, an iPad on her lap. Wily lounged beside her, his chin on his paws. With a deep groan he forced himself to his feet and ambled over to greet Anna. Anna and Wily were old friends; they were pack. She was glad of the sun on his old bones, and the new interesting scents for his nose.

  Scratching behind Wily’s ears, Anna introduced Heath to Peter and Artie. The young district ranger was looking at Heath keenly, undoubtedly hungering for a perp worth his ambitions. Anna had never worked with Artie, never met him before coming to Acadia, but she suspected he would have been happier on a SWAT team than a bucolic island getaway. She also suspected he thought—hoped—Heath might be a major drug dealer and Anna a co-conspirator.

  Suppressing a sigh, she asked, “Where are Elizabeth and Gwen?”

  If Artie was going to get all Long Strong Arm of the Law, she didn’t want Heath accused of drug crimes—or, gods forbid, arrested—in front of her daughter.

  “John took E and Gwen into Bar Harbor for mail and groceries,” Heath said.

  Peter shot Anna a look. Clearly he knew his district ranger and wanted Anna to take the lead. Anna folded down with her legs crossed Indian-style, the better to commune with Wily. Peter and Artie remained standing.

  “You’re looming,” Anna said.

  Peter sat down on the waist-high stone wall separating the patio from the drop to the sea.

  Artie, continuing to loom, said, “I’ve never been on Boar. I’m not classy enough for Ms. Hammond and Ms. Zuckerberg. Mind if I poke around a bit?”

  “Poke to your heart’s content,” Heath said easily.

  Anna wished she hadn’t. It was always a bad idea to let law enforcement—especially guys like Artie—“poke around.” But then, Heath thought they were here to help her with weird shit, not investigate an anonymous tip. Before Artie could go more than a step or two, Anna said, “Artie got a tip. An e-mail that said you were receiving contraband goods. Drugs. That you and Elizabeth were dealing to the kids in Boulder.”

  “You’re kidding,” Heath said, obviously—at least to Anna—stunned. Heath laughed. “You are kidding?”

  “Nope,” Anna said.

  “You’ve stolen my thunder for weird shit today. This is what I got.” Seeming completely unconcerned with the accusation, Heath rolled over to where Anna and Wily sat shoulder to shoulder and handed her the iPad. “Hit REFRESH,” she said.

  Anna did as she was told. Reading the screen was almost impossible in the direct light of the sun. Shielding it as best as she could, she squinted at the line of comments scrolling down the right-hand side.

  “That’s usually where the comments of people Elizabeth follows on Twitter show up,” Heath said. “This guy—or girl—has been tweeting like a damned canary since last night.”

  The expected obscenities were in evidence, but the thrust of the argument had changed. Anna read aloud, “‘Kill yourself. The world will be better off when you’re dead. Slit your wrists. Your Mother tried to abort you. When that didn’t work, she dumped you. Put a bullet in your brain. You alive will make Heath kill herself. Die, bitch, die.’”

  Peter rose to his feet. Artie decided this was more interesting than poking around.

  “I kind of like that last one,” Heath said. “It has a certain simplicity the others lack.”

  “Has E seen these?” Anna asked.

  “All but the last few. They came in after John took them in the boat. She may have seen them by now. She has her phone with her.”

  “I thought you were keeping her away from electronics,” Anna said, her voice flat to keep the censure from leaking through. Anna had not rushed headlong into the twenty-first century. People scarcely noticed as life was remade by cell phones, GPS, Amazon, YouTube, Google, and Facebook. Big Brother was a mere piker compared to Amazon and its fellows. Clicking “accept, accept, accept” to unread contracts, whole countries and their children became citizens of this sudden and stunning world of bread and fabulous circuses without a thought or a backward look.

  Anna knew there would be a reckoning. Even in the twenty-first century she doubted there was anything like a free lunch.

  “Aunt Gwen made a good argument against it,” Heath replied a bit defensively.

  “Like E needs to see this stuff?” Anna growled.

  “Like E needs to have a sense of control. That and addiction,” Heath said with the exaggerated patience Anna knew she’d inherited from her aunt.

  “Addiction?” Artie asked. Had he been a dog, his ears would have been pricked.

  “Evidently,” Heath said. “Aunt Gwen said it’s common, almost epidemic.”

  “Gwen Littleton is a pediatrician,” Anna explained to Artie and Peter. To Heath, she said, “Elizabeth is not an addict,” and then, “Addicted to what?”

  “Electronic media,” Heath said.

  Anna snorted. Peter wore a neutral ranger mask, the kind put on when taking reports of flying saucers and sightings of Kokopelli.

  “Be that way,” Heath said to no one in particular. Shaking a cigarette from a pack kept in Robo-butt’s saddlebag, she went on. “For all the reasons we had talked about, I did take E’s iPhone, iPad, laptop, everything but her Kindle.” Cigarette in her teeth, Heath cupped her hands to protect the lighter’s flame from the onshore wind and lit it. “E grew sullen, irritable, had trouble sleeping, had little appetite, trouble focusing, exhibited obsessive behaviors, paranoia, hypersensitivity—all the things she would have if she’d been a cocaine addict and I’d cut her off cold turkey.”

  “Or heroin,” Artie said.

  Heath glanced at him, mild confusion in her eyes, then went on. “The only thing missing was hallucinations.” Taking a deep drag of the smoke, she glared around at the three of them.

  Wily, Anna noted, was not included in the malevolence.

  “She’s been under a lot of stress,” Anna said.

  “That, too. But after Gwen convinced me, I Googled it.”

  “That’s asking the dealer about the junkie,” Anna said.

  “As Ripley said, believe it or not,” Heath retorted.

  “So you just handed her back everything? Fornicating threesomes, goats, pederasts, and donkeys—the whole filthy business?” Anna asked.

  “We talked. I told her she had to show me everything. If it was so shaming she just couldn’t bring herself to let me see it, she had to forward it to you.”

  “Thanks a heap,” Anna said, but was honored.

  “I gave her electronics back and the symptoms cleared up almost immediately,” Heath said.

  “Freaky,” Anna said, shaking her head. To her, social media was about as entertaining as mosquitoes whining around her ears.

  “Yup. Strange but true,” Heath said, the wind whipping the cigarette smoke from her lips.

  The bell on the pole by the lift clanged; then, with a piteous groan, the machinery began paying out steel cable.

  “That will be my little addict now,” Heath said.

  The love in her voice made Anna smile.

  Minutes later the platform appeared filled with bags, Gwen, Elizabeth, and John. When the retired lobsterman saw the field of green and gray, his eyes narrowed and his teeth clamped harder on his pipestem. Acadia was one of many parks that had frequent interface with previous residents, inholdings, shared or debated boundaries, and clashing cultures. Locals often eyed park rangers askance, figuring they were only around to make up rules about things that were traditionally none of their damn b
usiness. Conserving resources for the next generation was of little interest to those of the present generation who were just trying to get by.

  Anna didn’t blame them, but it was of greater importance that the native plants and animals survive and thrive. Humans had much in common with kudzu, Russian thistle, and other invasive species. They needn’t be wiped out entirely, only uprooted where they threatened the natural balance.

  Gwen, her hair made wild with salt wind, looked fifteen years younger than she had in Boulder. The sea air? The change of scenery? No, Anna decided; it was John. Gwen was enamored. The boat pilot had the same sort of sex appeal as Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and Robert Mitchum. The kind that doesn’t depend on youth or good looks.

  Even E appeared happy enough. When she saw Anna studying Gwen, she rolled her eyes and made a face. At sixteen, geriatric romance was grossing her out. A wonderful problem, given the other things that had been grossing all of them out for the last weeks.

  “John, get the cart so we can get the perishables in the fridge,” Gwen bossed him happily. From the look on the man’s face, he was teetering between enchanted and terrified.

  “Got a present,” Gwen said as she dumped envelopes and a shoe-box-sized package on Heath’s lap.

  “Do you want me to come help put groceries away?” E asked, batting her eyes innocently.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Gwen said.

  E flopped down beside Wily and Anna. “I just offered to annoy her. For a while there in Bar Harbor I thought she was going to ask him to carry her books or give her a ride home on his bicycle. That or get a motel room. Yuck.”

  “Amore,” Anna said, and sighed deeply.

  “Somebody to sit next to at the old age home more like,” Elizabeth said. Then, “Sorry, Mom. I know she’ll want to park her wheelchair next to yours.”

  “Not if I take my medicine,” Heath said, waving her unfiltered Camel. “The cure for old age.”

  E was not amused.

  Nor was Anna.

  “What’s in the box, Ms. Jarrod?” Artie, the district ranger, cut in. Anna had totally forgotten why they’d been called to Boar, the anonymous tip that Heath and E were drug dealers come to the East Coast to corrupt the youth.

  Now a box appears right on cue.

  “Haven’t a clue,” Heath said and began ripping at the paper.

  “Don’t open it,” Anna said suddenly.

  “Think it’s a bomb?” Heath asked, laughing as she smashed the paper beneath the box so the wind wouldn’t snatch it away. She was as gleeful as a child on her birthday. Relief from stress, Anna guessed.

  “It’s not ticking,” Heath said as torn paper revealed a shoe box.

  “Bombs don’t tick anymore,” Anna said as she leapt to her feet.

  Heath lifted the lid off. “What in the hell…,” she said.

  The District Danger Ranger was beside Heath’s chair in an instant. “I’ll need that box, ma’am.” Before Anna could snatch the box or slap Heath upside the head, Artie had it in his big, long-fingered hands.

  Wide-eyed, curious, Heath waited like a sitting duck.

  “Looks like heroin to me,” Artie said with barely suppressed glee. He bounced the box in his hand as if weighing it. “An eight-ball or thereabouts.”

  “Like heroin heroin?” Elizabeth asked.

  “This could be serious,” Heath said. Now that it was too late, she was finally catching on, Anna thought, but Heath wasn’t paying any attention to the drugs in the ranger’s hand; she was staring at the wrapping paper spread across her knees.

  “This wasn’t forwarded from Boulder,” she said. “This was sent to the PO box we rented in Bar Harbor.”

  “The e-mail was sent to Acadia,” Anna said.

  Unconsciously, Elizabeth raised her hands to her throat. “Whoever it is knows where we are,” she said softly.

  ELEVEN

  Denise and her sister had neither seen nor spoken to one another since they’d decided something had to be done to keep Kurt Duffy from beating—or killing—Paulette. Not that Denise wanted to be alone; she never wanted to be alone again. Space to think was what she needed. After three days of thinking, of no contact with Paulette, she went to her sister’s house during the day when she knew Kurt would be at sea. She moored her runabout in Otter Cove, a tiny inlet with little to lure visitors. From there she hiked overland to Otter Creek and her sister’s back door. This way no one would see her car parked anywhere near Paulette’s. The car was one of the things she had thought of while she was in her lonely thinking space.

  Not phoning Paulette was another thing. Cell phones were wired to record every call, every text, and, with GPS, where the phone was at any given time. Denise didn’t know how many of these invasive pieces of technology dwelt in her phone—it was four years old—but if they were going to do something serious about Kurt, she didn’t dare take chances.

  The previous night she had taken her phone apart, cooked the SIM card in the microwave for a few minutes, then cut the nuked card into pieces with tin snips. That done, she smashed all the parts of the phone that could be smashed with a three-pound sledge hammer. Over the remaining rubble, she poured lighter fluid and burned what would burn, melted what would melt. The resulting black mess she tossed overboard where the channel was deepest.

  It never made sense to her that criminals couldn’t destroy evidence properly. She had to suppose they never really put their minds to it. Paulette’s prepaid cell from Walmart would have to be destroyed as well.

  The way her sister’s face lit up when she saw who was tapping on her kitchen door made Denise’s heart fill her throat. Along with her soul, she’d thought unconditional love went missing when she was born. The open trust and joy she saw in her twin’s eyes she’d only ever expected to see in the eyes of her newborn child.

  Paulette came out onto the porch. She was wearing a calf-length skirt in lime green and pink. The pink was in geometric patterns and the green in paisley swirls. The waistband and the bottom third of the skirt were green, the rest bold pink. On her feet were mules of tan-colored canvas with green ankle ribbons and wedge heels. Over the skirt she wore a white tunic, belted with a narrow lime green ribbon.

  Denise wore trousers. Always: for work, for home, for fancy dress. The palette of her wardrobe ran the gamut from dull Park Service green and gray to totally grim. Seeing “herself” in a bright skirt, she was startled at how pretty she was, they were.

  Without any need for discussion, Paulette headed toward the trees. Again she led Denise in a circuitous path to the nursery so there would be no obvious trail worn in the duff. Neither spoke until they were closed behind the wooden door, lamp lit against the artificial night inside the windowless shed. This time Denise sat in the rocking chair and Paulette on the child-sized chair with the trumpet carved on the back.

  “That’s a nursing rocker,” Paulette said of the chair Denise had taken. “That’s why the arms are so low and curved; so you can hold the baby and rest your forearm on the wood.”

  Unconsciously rounding her arms as if she held an infant, Denise rocked gently. “It feels right, good,” she marveled. For a long moment, both she and her sister gazed out at the never-changing forest painted behind the window frames, a world no one but they could inhabit, no one but they could alter.

  Paulette began as if telling a story that would be important to Denise, one that Denise had been asking for in her head. “I first brought the baby things out here fourteen years, two months, and nine days ago; you don’t forget the day you lose a child. I was just storing them, you know, for the next baby. Hiding them from Kurt so he wouldn’t sell them or break them. He wasn’t too bad back then.”

  “He beat you so hard you miscarried,” Denise said.

  “I guess. Yes, I mean, I know he did,” said Paulette with a wan smile, her head shaking slowly from side to side. She looked as if she were fighting clear of a fog she’d been lost in for a long time. “I guess what I was thinking was that
back then, when he hurt me, he didn’t mean it like he does now. He’d get stirred up over money, or he’d get jealous of the way I supposedly looked at some guy, or he’d get mad because I wanted to go visit Mom and Dad or whatever. He’d get mad for some reason, lose his temper, and take it out on me.

  “At the hospital we’ve got this old man who comes in every few months. He’s got this awful abscess on the side of his calf that fills up with yuck and bursts. We clean it up, the doctors prescribe salves and antibiotics, and it seems to heal. Then, in a month or two, he’s back in. Kurt used to be like that, this abscess that filled with yuck. Then he’d get drunk and beat up on me, and he’d be okay for a while. Even sorry in the beginning. Shoot, by the time I was twenty-six we’d been married nearly ten years. What else did I know? I guess I figured most men slapped their wives around. I didn’t have much in the way of girlfriends to compare lives with.” She smiled at Denise. “I didn’t have a sister.”

  Denise smiled back without thinking, and realized she had been so strung out, weirded out, on guard, and paranoid for the last few months that she’d reacted in the same way Paulette had to Kurt’s abuse. It had become the norm, the real, the way life was. This sudden relaxing of vigilance was a revelation. Abuse was not the way life was. It was the way men made it. Women could subject it to change without notice.

  “After I lost the first baby, I never forgave Kurt. Him beating me, I could forgive that. But not beating the baby to death inside me.”

  That was why Denise couldn’t forgive Peter. Dumping her? Sure. Marrying a younger woman? That, too. The loss of her baby? Never. Maybe Peter was another person who needed to be dead. He hadn’t beaten her, but he had certainly browbeaten her into getting an abortion. Murder twice removed was still murder. Even in a species gorging on death every day, killing babies was genuinely despised. Nobody cheered baby killers. They didn’t get medals. People paid more than lip service to wanting to stamp them out.

  “Then, three years, three months, three weeks, and five days later, I lost a little girl, my daughter. She was fairly well along. Tiny hands and fingers, a nub of a nose, ears, all perfect. I saw her in the the bathroom overhead light. That’s where I miscarried. Kurt looked sick seeing us there on the floor. I thought he was going to pick us up, but he sort of shook all over like a goose walked on his grave and said, ‘Clean up the mess.’ He didn’t come back for a couple of days, and when he did it was like nothing happened. Nothing. He comes through the door, turns on the TV, and says, ‘What do you have for supper?’ That was it. After that he didn’t hit me for a long time. A year or more.