Authors: Nevada Barr
“The lift,” Heath said.
“The bell ringing would bring you and Gwen running,” Anna said.
“And she didn’t want to see us. Didn’t want to talk to us. Couldn’t believe we would talk about boiling living things alive so we could watch them die.” Heath’s voice was climbing and diving as her mind drove it from self-hatred to despair.
“I need you to focus,” Anna said. “Was the bucket metal or wood?”
“Metal,” Heath managed, then pressed her lips together as if holding back a horde of wasps wanting to swarm out of her mouth.
“Five gallons or thereabout?” Anna asked. Five was a standard bucket size.
“About.” Heath let the word out before resealing her lips.
“Full of lobsters and water,” Anna said. “Heavy.” She studied the granite above where the water had spilled, then dried. “There.”
“I don’t see anything,” Heath said, coming so close she rolled one wheel half over Anna’s toes.
Anna ignored the pain. Heath had enough on her mind. “There,” she pointed. “See where the metal bucket scraped the rock. E hauled it up here. Dragging.” Following the marks, Anna climbed the sloping face of the boulder on hands and feet. Her left arm ached. Since she’d been wounded it had never recovered its full strength. Physical therapy had only gotten it so far. After that, Anna treated it with denial.
Eyes to the ground, she climbed and boulder-hopped past the ruined wings of the old house and around the broken upthrust of granite.
The north side of the island, scarcely as big as two football fields, was formed of enormous chunks of granite that had cracked and worn over the eons until it created steep rounded steps descending in giant leaps to the sea. Sunlight caught shining facets, making them sparkle. Scrubby mosses and lichens grew between the rocks as if they’d been there forever. Anna smiled at the thought. Of course they’d been there forever. They were rocks.
Fissures wide enough to accommodate the passage of a slender girl and a skinny dog made a grid pattern. The lines were not straight or square enough to look man-made, but nearly so. Varying heights of rocks blocked any view of the island’s shoreline.
As she stared into the distance over the swells, it struck Anna how much bigger the Atlantic seemed than the Pacific. The Atlantic and Pacific would be the only two oceans Elizabeth had ever seen. Before Heath found E, she knew nothing about the world. She was homeschooled. Her reading skills were strong, as were her math skills. She scored high on the IQ test the therapist Heath had hired gave her. Elizabeth could cook and sew better than most grown women. She knew the names of the major stars and constellations. But about the world’s geography and sociology she’d been taught very little.
A lot of nine-year-olds at least knew there were seven seas. Elizabeth hadn’t. She hadn’t even known there were fifty states. Heath said she hadn’t been aware there were people of different colors or who spoke different languages. She hadn’t known people were gay or monogamous.
No television. No movies. No radio.
The world of the cult compound had little variety; everybody was considered a brother or sister or cousin whether they were blood relations or not. Polygamous, white, religious, and completely contained between the dusty gold walls of a canyon west of Loveland, Colorado, was the only life Elizabeth knew until Heath had adopted her. For the seven years since, she’d been in Boulder learning to be a twenty-first-century little girl. Then a high school girl.
Then a shamed and shunned pariah.
Now she was suddenly half a continent from Colorado, from her friends, marooned on an island. A lot for a person to deal with, Anna thought.
There was little in the way of earth or plants to mark the passage of girl and dog, but Elizabeth had not been trying to cover her tracks, so Anna followed the trail easily. The heavy bucket had slopped, leaving traces of disturbance in the fine dust. Where Elizabeth slid off of one boulder and onto to a lower one, the bucket left scrapes on the stone when she’d dragged it after her. Wily, probably not with the intention of helping Anna, but one never knew when it came to Wily, had lifted his leg several times, leaving a faint darker stain on the sparse dusty grasses that clung in the wisps of blown earth.
Following the trail, Anna wended her way downward in zigzags between boulders until she reached a point where she could finally see the edge of the little island. Twenty feet directly below where she’d stopped, water lapped the rugged shore. Anna stared at waves beating themselves to a froth on ragged rocks.
E wouldn’t have dumped the lobsters here; there were too many rocks to ensure they’d have a safe landing.
As Anna picked her way through the maze of giant granite blocks tumbled together around the base of the island, she lost sight of both sea and mainland. In a slot between two great chunks of rock no more than six feet apart, the maze ended abruptly in a three-foot drop to dark water. The slot between the boulders continued several yards farther, creating a narrow inlet protected from the wind and much of the power of the sea.
Anna squatted, studying the lip of the stone above the water. The edge was sharp, squared off at a neat ninety degrees, the face making a straight line down toward the water. Getting to her hands and knees to take advantage of the low-angled afternoon light, Anna could see where Elizabeth had smudged the dust as she sat on the edge of the rock, her feet dangling over.
A wave rushed up the narrow channel and exploded against the island, coating Anna’s skin with chilling spray. Beyond the mouth of the slot was a thin feathery line: fog cat-footing in.
The wave was sucked back into the gullet of the ocean, baring the boulders walling the slot. Along the stones at the waterline were scrapes of brown and a single sketch of blue. A small boat had docked here more than once.
Any legitimate visitor would bring his boat to the jetty, ring the bell, and walk in the front door.
As Anna leaned forward to study the marks, a wavering fishy silver flashed beneath the water. Fourteen inches beneath the water, on a ledge, lying on its side, was a bucket. The bucket.
This was the end of the trail. This was where E had loosed Gwen’s dinner guests.
Anna lay down on her belly and reached into the water, icy even in the heat of summer, and managed to snag the handle of the bucket and haul it out of the water. Setting it carefully aside, where it wouldn’t drip on anything vital, she made a minute inspection of the place from which E had vanished.
Tiny grasses were uprooted from a crack near where Elizabeth’s left hand must have rested. Sand had been swept away on one side of the rocks bordering where the boat came into the island’s embrace.
Elizabeth had not jumped or swum.
She’d been dragged off of Boar.
Again Heath looked at her watch. Less than two minutes had passed since last time. Finally she held it up to her ear. Ticking. Time and its petty pace were making her crazy. At minute twenty-four, Anna slid back down the same rock she’d climbed out over.
“Bucket track,” she said succinctly as she dropped the lobster pail to the ground. “I found where Elizabeth dumped the lobsters. There were skid marks in the loose gravel on the rock. A handful of plants were ripped from a crack as if she’d grabbed them to keep from being pulled into the water.”
Heath felt her heart stop. When it started again each beat struck a blow to her rib cage from the inside. “Slipped and fell?” she croaked. “Drowned?” This had to be what dying felt like. Everything was going black but for Anna’s face. Maybe Heath was falling. She couldn’t tell.
“I don’t think so,” Anna said as she trotted toward the lift. “Wily is gone as well, and there were scrape marks on either side of the rock crack where she set the lobsters loose. A small boat is my guess.”
“She took a boat?” Heath said stupidly. Her ears were hearing words. She could see Anna’s lips moving, but her brain was having a hard time making sense of things. “With Wily?”
“A boat took her, and I hope they took Wily and didn’t just kill him and dump the body,” Anna said as she opened the lift gate. “Coming?”
Leah said saltwater could damage Dem Bones’s electronics. Leah said, “You break it, you buy it.” She meant it. Leah was not a fanciful genius. To her a cliché was as good as a contract.
To hell with Leah. Heath couldn’t take the time to get out of the thing and into Robo-butt.
“Of course I’m coming.”
Anna turned and walked toward the lift.
Heath followed, the crutches giving her balance.
Anna was piloting the small NPS runabout, a single-engine boat with a canvas shelter over the steering wheel. Heath relinquished pride in favor of speed and let herself lean heavily on Anna’s shoulder as the metal and electronics lifted her feet and legs from the dock and over the gunwale one at an excruciating time. With a push and a whirr, she was seated on the plastic bench that ran along the port side of the runabout. Anna held up an orange life jacket. Heath wanted to tell her to drop the thing, get a move on. Knowing it would take longer to argue, and she wouldn’t win, she clenched her teeth and held her arms out so Anna could thread the PFD onto her shoulders.
“I’ll get the straps,” she insisted as Anna started to do up the front of the life preserver. Anna looked at her for a second.
“I will,” Heath promised.
Evidently Anna believed her. She slipped into her own PFD, leapt out of the boat, untied the lines, leapt back in, and finally, finally, thankyoubabyjesus started the boat.
Breathe, Heath told herself. Breathe. Air came in through her nostrils. She seemed unable to force it down past the concrete closing off her throat.
“Where are we looking?” Heath asked. Her voice was nearly a whine. There was nowhere to look. Just ocean and drowned land.
“We’ll start where the boat met up with Elizabeth and Wily. From there we will fan out in arcs. I will be looking for boats. You will be looking for anything, no matter how small, on the water. Every thirty seconds you will blow that whistle around your neck and shout Elizabeth’s name and Wily’s. When we lose the light, we assume they’ve made land somewhere—the boat was small, rowboat sized—and we stop. I call Peter, and the rangers start searching the park.”
Heath nodded. Words were backed up behind her teeth, but not one of them meant a thing.
Evening, and the encroaching fog, rapidly cooled the air. As Anna pushed the throttle open, the rush of chill wind against Heath’s overheated face felt like an acid wash until her skin became acclimated to the new element.
Darkness oozed in from all directions, the ocean, the edge of the sky, out from the islands, their skirts of rock turning black and ominous. Heath felt the world closing down, ending. “It’s been hours, she’s surely dead,” she moaned. “I am such an idiot. I killed her.”
Anna pulled the throttle to idle. Turning she stared down at Heath. “Do you want me to slap you?” she asked. “You know, the traditional cure for female hysterics?”
Heath blinked. Anna looked no softer than the granite, no warmer than the fog. Heath swallowed.
“Not necessary,” she whispered.
“Good. Talk about something else. Tell me what Gwen’s been up to. Anything. Watch and call and blow the whistle.” Anna turned back to the control panel and pushed the throttle forward, not far enough to bring the boat up on plane, just above idle so voices could be heard over the engine noise and the wake wouldn’t swamp anything that might be floating in the darkening waters.
Heath pulled the brass whistle Elizabeth had given her from under her shirt and life jacket. Sucking in as much air as her shriveled lungs would allow, she blew a long blast, then called weakly, “E! Elizabeth!”
“Good,” Anna called over her shoulder. “Now talk to me for thirty seconds and do it again. Keep your eyes on the water.”
Talk. About something else. Not the girl dying somewhere because Heath was a fool, a shit-for-brains fool. There was nothing else. Aunt Gwen, she thought, gone with John to Bangor. “Aunt Gwen delivered Ms. Zuckerberg’s children.” Heath said the words one by one like a not-so-bright schoolchild reciting a poem she didn’t understand. When she’d done, she felt herself sinking, her eyes unfocused on the endless deadly expanse of water turning the color of ink. Under all that icy black was a child of light.
“And,” Anna prodded. “Talk to me.”
Slowly, Heath rose out of the depths and forced herself to think of anything else. “Ms. Zuckerberg isn’t doing well. Heart weak. Transient ischemic attacks. She’s lost the ability to talk, Gwen said.”
“Good,” Anna replied, as deaf to the words as Heath was. “Blow, call.”
Heath blew the whistle and called Elizabeth’s name. Her voice was stronger. The talking was keeping her mind off the horror that wanted to suffocate her as surely as the water had suffocated—
“Ms. Zuckerberg can’t talk,” Anna said sharply. “When she gets out of the hospital, is she going to her kids?”
“No,” Heath said. She knew what Anna was doing. She knew she needed it, but, at the moment, she resented Anna for it. Despair pulled at her with an almost pleasurable force, the way a steep canyon would if she stood—rolled—too close to the edge. Part of her wanted to fall into the nothing that was offered.
Coward,
she cursed herself. Sucking in a lungful of breath, she forced herself to speak. “No. Her kids don’t even—”
“Hush!” Anna said and cut the throttles to idle. “Listen.”
Through the muffling of the coastal fog, now reaching halfway to Boar, Heath heard what sounded like a dog’s yip. Then nothing. She blew a blast on the whistle. “E!” she screamed. “Elizabeth! Answer me!”
A thin, reedy bark pierced the fog.
“There,” Anna pointed to where the mother-of-pearl of the sea met the pearl of the mists. A dark shape, trapezoidal, about the size of an old shipping trunk, touched the water. Then an orange smudge showed above it. The smudge moved suddenly. As they heard the splash of a body hitting the water, a girl screamed.
Anna shoved full throttle.
Denise sat at her small neat table in a space between the living room and kitchen called “the dining room” on the lease. In front of her, on the shining black wood, was a spiral notebook of college ruled paper. The cover was bright red.