Authors: Nevada Barr
On such a sunny afternoon, in the middle of a town set above the glittering blue of the Atlantic, and Disneyesque in its adorability, kidnapping, raping, and pillaging seemed an alien concept. Surely a species that invented ice cream, kites, and flip-flops would be incapable of harming a hair on a puppy’s head.
The mystery of humanity wasn’t that people were starkly evil or magnificently good but that they were both all the time. Sanity and insanity dwelt side by side in the human brain. Only when one grew so big it overshadowed and starved the other was it noticed.
People tended to either keep their crazy to themselves or gather with others sharing the same delusion. Churches, synagogues, temples, covens, mosques: If enough people believed a thing, it was declared sane. One person speaking to invisible beings was a nutcase. A thousand was a cult. Ten thousand, a religion.
Fortunately, most human madness was harmless, creative even; it made life rich and memorable and annoyingly real.
“Any clue as to what we’re looking for?” Denise asked, cutting into Anna’s thoughts.
“Nope.” Anna took a small bite of pistachio ice cream and let it melt on her tongue for a moment. “Early on I would have said teenage boys or girls, but they aren’t the sort who track victims across land for a couple thousand miles. That takes money and autonomy.”
“Any Dirty Uncle Ernies on the radar?” Denise asked.
“Not since she was nine.”
“Goddamn sons of bitches,” Denise said.
Two white high-school-aged girls and a woman who could have been their mother sat at one of the tables. Both girls were on iPhones. Mom, evidently old school, read a paperback novel. An older white male with a fat dachshund on a pink leash sat at another table and read a newspaper. Two boys came, opened their laptops on the third table, and ignored each other.
The older man finished his coffee. He and his hound ambled off. A barista cleared away his paper cup. Two middle-aged black women, both in capri pants and high-heeled sandals, took his place, sipping iced coffee. Obeying some psychic—or cyber—signal, the boys simultaneously folded up their laptops and left, still not speaking.
Time for the rendezvous came and went.
As afternoon on the square melted into evening on the square, Anna told Denise the details of the bullying. “At first we figured it must be a kid—or kids—in her school. As it turns out, if the victim doesn’t know the bullies or the bullies don’t ID themselves, or friends rat them out, there is virtually—and in this sense I mean virtually literally—no way to track them.”
“There’s got to be,” Denise said, settling on a bench near an old cannon on a concrete slab. “They can hack into your computer and record every keystroke you make, redirect your browser to ad sites, turn on the volume when they want to sing you a slogan, pinpoint your position anywhere on the face of the earth, find out what color panties you’re wearing, then try and sell you Viagra. How can they not track some pricks bullying a girl?”
“I guess we’re talking different theys,” Anna said as she spooned up a bit of the green dessert and laid it neatly on the end of her tongue, where it would melt over as many taste buds as possible on its journey to her esophagus.
“The capitalist theys are more motivated and tech-savvy than the don’t-bully-children theys,” Anna finished.
“And you can bet not one of them gives a flying fig about lost girls. Not one,” Denise said as she savagely attacked the chocolate chunk with her spork. “What makes you think it isn’t scumbag kids?” she asked around a mouthful of ice cream. “It stinks of scumbag kid fun to me.”
“Asking for a face-to-face,” Anna replied as she watched the people coming and going at the coffee shop. “To make a trip cross-country suggests an adult with the independence and money to travel.”
“What does the girl … Elizabeth?”
Anna nodded.
“What does Elizabeth think of the new development?” Denise asked.
“She doesn’t know yet. Her mother said she needed some time by herself. The combined concern of her mother, her great-aunt Gwen, and probably me can’t be all that easy to deal with. Poor kid.”
“Yeah, poor kid,” Denise echoed dully.
Anna was thinking of her husband, Paul. Never had anyone loved her like he did. More than she deserved. More than she could accept sometimes. There were moments it was as if she dared not feel pain because he would feel it as well, when she could not choose to spend herself as she would like because of what it would cost him.
“Unconditional love, in large doses, can be a burden,” she mused.
“I wouldn’t know,” Denise said.
Her tone snapped Anna out of her reverie. “There’s an odd one,” she said to deflect the feeling of guilt Denise’s sudden exposure had awakened. Using her spork, she gestured toward a woman nearing the coffee shop. She was plump, tall in platform sandals. Screaming red hair was styled in a short curly cap and set off by oversized glasses framed in turquoise. An enormous straw bag flapped at her legs as she walked, gripped by a hand as round and dimpled as that of a child, though the woman was probably in her mid-to-late thirties.
“What’s that in her bag?” Denise asked.
“Damn,” Anna said, then laughed. “It looks like a welding glove.”
“I think we’ve lost our window of opportunity,” Denise said finally.
“Maybe a no-show,” Anna said.
“Maybe,” Denise replied.
“Got cold feet?” Anna wondered.
“Made us?” Denise suggested.
“More likely, we didn’t make him.” Two college boys online, one old guy with a dog, one fat guy with badly behaved offspring. Woman with a Bozo hairdo. Nothing screamed stalker.
“We’re nowhere,” Anna admitted. Her cell phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” she said as she looked at the screen. “It’s our victim’s mother, probably wanting to know how we’re doing.” Anna poked the green phone icon and put the cell phone to her ear. “Heath,” she said.
“Elizabeth has gone missing.”
“You said she needed time alone,” Anna said, surprised at the terror in Heath’s voice.
“Hours ago, damn it! Hours ago. This island is the size of a postage stamp. She hasn’t come back,” Heath said.
Her fear awoke Anna’s. This wasn’t like E, to worry people she loved.
“Is Wily with her?” Anna demanded.
“I guess,” Heath said distractedly.
Anna smothered the urge to say, “That’s okay then.” Absurd as it was, the fact that the old dog was with E reassured her. Anna and Wily had forged an odd connection in the North Woods of Minnesota. It wasn’t something Anna chose to talk about. She doubted Wily did either.
“Anna, I’m pretty sure she’s not on the island,” Heath almost wailed. “I’ve looked everywhere I can, and called until I’m hoarse.”
While Anna had been neatly occupied eating ice cream in Bar Harbor, E had disappeared. Were the two connected? Had Anna been made a patsy? “Is Gwen with you?”
“No, Gwen and John went to Bangor for the evening. Dinner and a visit with Chris Zuckerberg.”
“I’m on my way. Give me half an hour,” Anna said. It would take her that long to talk somebody out of a boat and get to the island. Elizabeth’s body—Anna shuddered as she thought the word—would be found only by boat if she had fallen.
Or jumped.
Heath half crouched near the wall of boulders ringing the area that had been leveled to build the tower and house. She had on Dem Bones, her high-tech robotic walking suit, legs and belly strapped in, bright silver lozenge-shaped pieces of machinery on the outside of her thighs and calves, hinges at hip and knee. The arm-brace crutches lay fifteen feet away where she’d flung them in a rage when they got in the way of her attempts to get this so-called wonder of modern technology to complete the simple task of moving her bony ass up and over the chunks of stone calved off the granite wall.
“Goddamn useless piece of shit,” she cried. Her hands clawed at the slick rock as the weight of her lower limbs, and the titanium skeleton, dragged her down. Using the motions available to her, she could only manage to kick uselessly at the rock with feet like senseless clubs, and knees not worth the effort it took technology to bend them.
As she slid back for the third time, leaving long white scratches on the glossy silver finish of the thigh and calf pieces, she screamed like a wounded panther.
Frustration consumed energy that, left alone, would turn to thoughts. There was nothing Heath could think that wasn’t insupportable, that wouldn’t sear the marrow in her bones. Someone was stalking her daughter; now her daughter was missing. Heath had been a fool to think cyberfilth would be the sum total of it. She was a fool not to have taken E to London, put her into witness protection, hired bodyguards. Such was her arrogant stupidity, she had thought a cripple, an old dog, and a septuagenarian pediatrician could keep her child safe.
E hasn’t been missing all that long, she told herself.
“Damned she hasn’t,” she said aloud. Only a few hours, but Boar Island wasn’t a few hours’ worth of adventure. Heath automatically reached down her right hand. No wheelchair, no saddlebags, no cigarettes. “Piece of shit,” she muttered.
Never would E intentionally scare her or Gwen by staying away so long. Wily would have come back if he could have, if for no other reason than his dinner was served at five every day. If E was hurt, Wily would have howled when he heard Heath calling his name. There was no girl and no dog, and the only way that could happen was if they’d been taken.
Not jumped or fallen, Heath thought. E wouldn’t take Wily with her into the grave, and Wily wasn’t the type to leap off a fifty-foot cliff even if E did. Besides, Elizabeth was past suicide. She was.
The lift bell rang. Frankenstein-like, Heath turned, then lurched toward where the elevator would release its passenger. “It better be you, Anna,” she shouted as she monstered across the level rock. Anna didn’t deserve that. Scarcely thirty-five minutes had passed since Heath called. The superwoman suit didn’t deserve to be called a piece of shit either, for that matter. Heath didn’t care. Choices were limited: She could rage or she could fall apart.
The lift clattered into its dock with a groan that, no matter how often Heath heard it, seemed to presage immediate disaster. Anna stepped off. “It’s me,” she said unnecessarily. She was in her full ranger costume, gun and all. Heath was so glad to see her, she could have burst into tears.
“About time,” she said.
Anna paid no attention to the snarling dog that had possessed Heath. Undoubtedly she’d seen that fear hound more times than she’d care to remember. Heath was grateful.
“Where have you looked?” Anna asked.
“Goddamn nowhere,” Heath admitted. “I got back into the ruins a ways and called. There is so much crap on the ground and the floors are so rotten, I couldn’t do much inside. The rest of this godforsaken rock might as well be Mars. I can’t get out of this bear pit. I went up and down the lift a few times and saw what I could from the dock. I butted myself up the whole piece-of-shit tower, one hundred and seventy feet of metal stairs, and couldn’t see a damn thing from the windows. Couldn’t hold myself up to look over the sills for more than a second. That’s it. That’s it.”
“How long has she been gone, and how did she go?” Anna asked.
Heath sputtered out the tale of the lobsters and Wily. “John picked Gwen up a few minutes later. It never occurred to us that E wouldn’t be right back. I am an idiot,” she finished.
Anna nodded as if Heath had given her a measured professional report of the search to date. She looked around the open space at the rocks and rubble, then up at the sky.
“Light’s going,” Anna said. “We’d better figure out where she headed and then get moving. You want to come?”
Heath wanted to. She wanted it so much she could feel her fingers curling around Anna’s from where she stood.
“No,” she said through stiff lips. “You’ll move faster alone.”
Denise sat behind the wheel of her car shaking. Not shaking. Twitching like a doll with its legs stuck in a garbage disposal. Tears—a luxury she seldom enjoyed—poured down her face. Before Paulette came and gave her permission to feel, one of the few times she’d cried was the day she heard Peter was engaged. Those tears had been turned to steam by white-hot anger before they’d reached the air. She’d almost missed the days when her tear ducts had been welded shut. Now great fat drops ran down the side of her nose to drip on the black linen of her trousers.
Ranger Pigeon was finally gone. She’d been in Denise’s bedroom—again—changing out of Denise’s clothes, then used Denise’s bathroom, no doubt rummaging through the medicine cabinet, and the towel cupboard, and under the sink, looking for anything that would trigger the memory of who Denise’s photo reminded her of. Her ferreting brain ticking like a bomb.
Denise had screwed up royally at the scene. She’d acted guilty as hell, searching the murder room for traces she might have left while the pigeon watched from the doorway, running back to the car and hiding, practically running the woman over to get her away from Paulette, going part postal over the old picture. Anna Pigeon was one of those people who saw, who looked and saw the person behind the eyes. Denise had run up about a dozen red flags.
“God damn me!” Denise cried and struck a fist against the steering wheel. “I didn’t think. I didn’t fucking think!” When she’d offered Anna a change of clothes, and the use of her car for the undercover stint, she hadn’t thought of Paulette, of the plan. She had a family now. She had to think of them first, before the job, before cyberstalkers, before endangered citizens, before herself. Family came before everything. Family was everything.
“Don’t screw this up,” she muttered fiercely, then turned the key in the ignition, bringing the Miata to life. She had to see Paulette. They needed to talk this through. Denise was still in her civvies, still in the Miata, her radio on the passenger seat monitoring the traffic. It would be a risk, but the sense of urgency driving her made it imperative. She looked at her watch. Seven fifteen. Paulette was a nurse. Three days a week she worked the two-to-midnight shift in the infants ward at Mount Desert Hospital. This was one of her nights. Pulling out of the NPS headquarters’ parking lot, Denise texted:
mt me H pking lot. 10 min.