Authors: Nevada Barr
By the time she reached the hospital, the sun was going down. The long summer afternoons were golden, the light softening trees to a dark haze and turning the ocean to navy blue.
When she and her sister were ready, Denise decided, they would move somewhere there was no ocean, no winter, where the world wasn’t made of rock and snow and ice water. Georgia maybe. Georgia in the pines, a little cabin. That would be perfect. Maybe a lake. Too dangerous, she decided as she parked the Miata in the darkest corner behind the building. Kids drowned in lakes all the time. In Georgia there might be alligators. Alligators liked children and little fluffy dogs. She’d read that somewhere.
Turning off the ignition, Denise lay back in her seat and waited. Paulette might not be able to get away instantly, but she’d come. Denise knew she would. They were twins. They had the exact same blood and bone and brain. They didn’t have identical fingerprints. Had she ever Googled that in a hurry! What a drag it would have been if Paulette’s fingerprints at the murder scene lit up Denise’s own on IAFIS, the federal print identification base.
In everything that mattered, they were identical. Paulette would never let her down.
Ranger Pigeon and that damned picture. “Is this
you
? You remind me of
somebody
.” The memory bit Denise in the butt again. In a fit of paranoia, she leapt from the car to put the top up. Nobody would be looking; still, it was best if she and Paulette were not seen together.
With the lowering of the sun, clouds came scudding from the southwest, and fog began to tease in from its hiding places out to sea. Good, Denise thought as she clipped the top securely down. Once she had hated the fog, hated the clammy dead touch of mist, and the confusion of veils across her eyes. Now it made her feel safer. To be hidden was calming, centering, like the world beneath the sea.
As she settled behind the wheel in the tiny car, a slash of light cut the deep shadow in the back of the building; the fire stairs, that was where the nurses left the building. There were no reserved spaces; their cars had to be parked in the back lot, the dark lot, the lot where bad things could happen.
“Screw men,” Denise whispered. “Screw them all. Bastards.”
She thought to flash the headlights to identify herself, but there was no need. Paulette would know where she was. She would feel her in the gray cloak of encroaching fog the way one hand felt the other in a game of cat’s cradle. Such an old game. Denise couldn’t remember anyone teaching it to her. No cheery childhood memories of doting grandmamas or loving aunts.
Poor little Anna Pigeon and her poor little Elizabeth suffering from a surfeit of love. “Such a burden!” Denise mocked, her voice pitched low. “God, how does one bear it!” She should have gouged Pigeon’s eye out with a spork.
Nope, nobody had bothered teaching poor little Denise a nice game like cat’s cradle.
Maybe it was a memory of Paulette’s that had traveled into her head.
God damn Anna Pigeon. God damn Denise Castle for letting her into her apartment, leaving her alone in the bedroom, for not hiding the photograph.
Now she and Paulette were going to have to speed things up. The luxury of time was gone. It had drained away like water down a gopher hole during the time Anna Pigeon was with her. Beady eyes licking over everything, foxy ears perked, the pigeon watched and thought while Denise did everything but spray-paint
GUILTY
on the clean white walls of her apartment.
Paulette had to move faster on the land sale, and Denise on tracking down the legacy advertised in the papers. If there was a legacy. She also had to give the NPS notice and get her pension papers filed. Everything had to be in place so they could tie up the loose ends and be gone before anybody knew there was any reason to think there were two of them, that they had anything to do with Duffy’s demise.
“I don’t have long,” Paulette said as she slid in the passenger door. “I said I was going out for a cigarette. The head nurse is cool with that. She smokes a pack and a half a day.”
“We’ll have to quit when the family is complete,” Denise said, though she’d never smoked a cigarette in her life.
“Complete?” Paulette questioned.
That Paulette didn’t inherently understand annoyed Denise. She pressed the sensation down hard. Paulette was her sister, her other self; she could never be annoyed with her. Not ever. “We’re going be a family,” Denise explained patiently. “Like we wanted. Like we are supposed to be. It’s the last thing we have to do before we go. We got rid of Kurt. Now, as soon as we are complete, we can go. Have to go, and sooner rather than later.”
Paulette looked confused. Or maybe Denise just felt her confusion. The little shards of streetlights and security lights refracting in the rearview mirrors weren’t sufficient to read a face.
“A family. More than just you and me?” Paulette asked.
Again the stab of irritation; again Denise shoved it down. “Families have children,” Denise said too sharply.
“You said Peter had murdered your babies,” Paulette said in a gentle voice. “Tell me how it was.”
The irritation Denise was suffering wasn’t for her sister, her twin. It was like the twitches, a case of nerves. She took hold of Paulette’s hand and leaned back in the seat. The memory didn’t come; it was always there, sharper and more detailed each time she revisited it.
“Four years ago I got pregnant,” Denise said. “It was Peter’s, of course. I loved my baby. I knew I wasn’t getting any younger, and I loved my baby so much.”
“Did Peter beat you?” Paulette asked. That was how her babies had been murdered.
“He said he didn’t want our baby. He said he never wanted children. He said he couldn’t face it. He made me get an abortion.” He’d said he’d leave her if she didn’t get an abortion, that’s what he had said, but it was the same thing.
“Something went wrong,” Denise said. “Something got ripped. I was told I couldn’t have any more children. Then Peter left.”
“And married Lily and had a baby,” Paulette finished softly.
“My baby,” Denise said.
Paulette squeezed her hand. “Is that why you came? To tell me about the baby?”
Denise opened her eyes, suddenly back from the ugly trip down Memory Lane. Peter had turned what should have been a sentimental journey into a nightmare on Elm Street. “No. I came to tell you we have to move faster. It’s that ranger, Anna Pigeon. I caught her looking at a photo of us. Then she peers into me. Icepick eyes. I got that shivery feeling you get when something bad is about to happen.”
“Who took the photo of us?” Alarmed, Paulette jerked her hand out of Denise’s. Hot snaps of anger cracked up Denise’s spine.
Not for Paulette. Nerves.
“It wasn’t us exactly,” Denise said. “It was me, before I got my teeth capped. My hair was blond then, and wild.” For a moment she believed that, but it wasn’t right. Her teeth hadn’t been capped yet, true, but in the picture her hair wasn’t like Paulette’s. It was the same boring brown as it always was. For a moment, in her mind, she’d seen it blond and big like her sister’s. Rubbing her face, she mumbled through her fingers, “Anna Pigeon knows. She stares at the picture, then gives me this smirky look and says, ‘Is this
you
? You remind me of
somebody
.
’
She spent a lot of time with you at the house. She knows. Why would she say ‘you remind me of somebody’ unless she wanted me to know she knew I had a twin?”
There was a wrongness to her logic, Denise knew that; still and all, she felt it to be the truth. Knew it to be the truth. “Anna Pigeon will ruin everything.”
Paulette sat quiet for a long time. Denise could feel twitches building in her hands, her feet. The sparks of anger flared in her esophagus until she thought she might breathe fire.
“Anna Pigeon, she’s the ranger who came with you when the police were at my house?” Paulette asked, her words coming slowly, as if her mind were working hard between each utterance.
“That was her,” Denise said. “Shit!” She slammed the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. “I never should have let the bitch out of the car. She’s got a nose as long as a dachshund’s, sticking it where it doesn’t belong.”
“I think maybe she knew I was me,” Paulette admitted. “She looked at me like you said she looked at the picture, like she knew I was inside, there behind my eyes, and she was going to scrape me out like an oyster out of its shell.”
Denise became still, no twitches, no angry motions. Staring at her sister, she let the awe that had been building since they’d found each other fill her whole being. Paulette knew everything that happened in Denise’s head just as Denise knew everything that happened in Paulette’s head. “Exactly like that. An oyster from its shell,” Denise whispered.
“Oh God,” Paulette moaned. “Maybe she looks at everybody like that. She’s probably just the kind of person who really looks at things.”
That wasn’t it. Denise knew. Paulette knew, too; she just didn’t want to admit it.
For a long time neither one of them spoke. Denise didn’t feel alone in the silence. She felt
together
in the silence. Mostly.
“What do we do?” Paulette asked at last.
“I’ll think of something. It’s us against the world.” Denise laughed because she knew it was true, the only truth.
The agony that stretched Heath’s skin thin over the bones of her face fueled Anna’s own fears. “Let’s get started,” she said, and turned away from her friend lest their terrors coalesce into panic. Eyes long since trained to look for spoor darted over the natural patio and the boulders surrounding it. A half-chewed bone—a project of Wily’s, no doubt; flecks of brown tobacco, blowing in idle circles, eddying in the breeze where the walls formed a corner; faint tracks—the tread of Robo-butt’s rubber wheels leaving bits of dried mud in the light burnishing of dust.
“It hasn’t rained,” Anna said.
“No. Why are we talking about the weather?” Heath was fighting tears. Anna could feel fear and shame and guilt boiling off of her like heat from pavement.
“Your wheelchair left tracks. See. Dry now, but you rolled through water. Why?” Anna asked. In the zone where spoor and prey are all that matters, Anna barely heard Heath’s sputtered curses as she backtracked to where the wheels had found enough water to make mud.
“The lobsters,” Heath cried suddenly. “They were in a bucket there. Gwen put them down, and we forgot all about them.”
“No lobsters, no bucket,” Anna said. “Do you think John Whitman took them? Maybe when he came for Gwen, he took them home to eat them himself?”
Heath thought for a moment, then said, “No. I watched Gwen and John go down the lift. Gwen had her little book-pack full of things for Ms. Zuckerberg, and her purse. John wasn’t carrying anything. Both hands were empty. I’m sure of it.”
“Somebody took lobsters and bucket. E? Returning to the scene of the crime to rescue the lobsters from the pot?” Anna suggested.
“Yes!” Heath almost shouted. “Yes! She would have come back and gotten them. She would want to set them free. Save their creepy crustacean lives out of the goodness of her heart. Yes. Oh, God. How long does it take to let a couple lobsters go? Ten minutes? We’re in the middle of the goddamn ocean. Not even five. She’s been gone three hours and twenty-three minutes,” Heath wailed. She looked at her wristwatch. “Twenty-six minutes,” she amended.
Anna didn’t bother to ask Heath if she’d called 911, the Coast Guard, or the army. She knew the drill: Nobody looked for adults—and for this, E counted as an adult—until they’d been missing for forty-eight hours. Nobody looked for an emotional teenager out of sight for a few hours.
Heath’s eyes filled with tears. Anna turned her back lest the contagion spread.
Elizabeth, worrying her mother into a state of frenzy, and risking Anna’s wrath, by vanishing; that wasn’t the child Anna had godparented. E cared what people thought of her, especially the people she loved. Often Anna had wondered if she cared too much, spent too much of her childhood being a parent to those around her, taking care of everybody at the expense of taking care of herself.
It would take a momentous event to lift that burden from E, to make her as thoughtless as the average person. Unless Barnum & Bailey had pitched a tent on Boar Island, or Brad Pitt made an unscheduled stop, Anna couldn’t think what might distract E from her customary responsibilities.
If Brad, Barnum, and Bailey were out of the picture, the landscape became darker. Either E was not on the island or she was on the island but could not get back to the lighthouse. Anna tried to picture her curled up in the fetal position beneath the overhang of a boulder, Wily beside her. Asleep maybe.
Several hours was a long time to sleep on a rock.
A sixteen-year-old girl, possibly suicidal, definitely tormented, gone for hours on a rock not big enough to register on most charts.
That line of thought served no one.
“So, E came back and got the bucket with the lobsters,” Anna said. “Describe it.”
“It was a bucket. A regular bucket,” Heath said. Then she threw her head back like a cat and yowled, “Elizabeth!”
Anna had seen Heath under pressure before. In life-and-death situations, physical stress and emotional pain, but she’d never seen her like this, losing control, becoming a victim herself.
“Think,” she demanded. Then went on, “Bucket full of water and lobsters, the bucket would weigh close to thirty pounds. So E could lift it, but not carry it easily. Buckets are awkward. So she’s got the lobsters, and she’s planning on emancipating them. Elizabeth would know they’d die if she just turned them loose on a rock in the sun. Might as well go ahead and boil them, if she was going to do that. At least it would be faster.” Anna followed a slopping trail where water had mixed with sand particles and dust, then been dragged through with a smooth shoe, probably Elizabeth’s flip-flop. It led to the wall that protected the patio from the fifty-foot drop to the ocean. Anna leaned out and looked down the precipitous fall to the rocks below. “So she dragged the bucket to the cliff and looked over. That’s a long way down. If she poured them over, the fall might kill them.”