Authors: Nevada Barr
“My friend wanted to take me back, but I insisted. When we heard you calling and I realized how long we’d been gone, I was afraid you’d arrest…”
Silence followed that.
“Why would I arrest a nice friend?” Anna asked.
A person. A friend. Heath could guess why this mysterious individual was genderless. The friend was a boy. Heath had been asking herself what would make a wonderful, considerate child like Elizabeth so forgetful that she would terrify her mother. A boy. A nice boy. A boy/friend. God was good. She was going to shackle E to the iron stair railing in the tower and feed her nothing but bread and water until she was forty years old.
For another moment, Anna just looked at E and said nothing. Elizabeth was hugging her arms, shivering. Anna opened the tiny door under the hull, pulled out a blanket that looked as if it was made of tinfoil, then tossed it to E. “We’ll sort this out later. Wrap up. Both you and Wily.” She shot Wily a hard look. “You should have known better,” she said to the dog.
With that, Anna pushed the throttle to full and turned the boat back toward Boar Island.
* * *
Both Wily and E had
bathed and toweled off. Anna built a small fire in the great hearth in the outer room skirting the tower. The evening was mild, but girl and dog had gotten thoroughly chilled. Anna also made tea. Elizabeth wrinkled her nose, then sighed. “Hot drinks, I know, the wilderness cure-all. Does Wily have to drink tea, too?”
Neither Heath nor Anna answered. Heath was seated in Robo-butt, her knees almost touching the overstuffed chair where her daughter was curled up. Elizabeth’s feet peeked out from beneath a hand-knitted throw of purple and green. In T-shirt and sweatpants, her hair damp from the bath, and no makeup, she looked like a little girl. A delightful fact Heath knew better than to share aloud.
Sprawled in front of the hearth, Wily looked old and tired, his fur ragged and spiked with damp, his pointed ears at half-mast. Elizabeth might have deserved a ducking in icy water for being so thoughtless, but Wily didn’t. The cold was hard on his old bones.
“Enough,” she said to her daughter. “Tell us every single thing from the beginning of time.”
“Billions and billions of years ago this was a vast inland sea,” Elizabeth droned in a mockery of PBS specials.
“Don’t,” Heath warned. She wanted to be angry. It was spoiled by the fact that she had not heard such sauciness from Elizabeth since before the razor-in-the-tub incident. That, and the fact her daughter was alive and in one piece.
“Just tell it,” Anna said quietly.
“Aunt Gwen was going to boil some lobsters alive,” E said. Heath saw the wince in Anna’s gaze at the same moment it clutched her own chest.
“I freaked,” E apologized.
Heath had come to the conclusion it was she and Aunt Gwen who needed to apologize.
“I mean boiling alive, how rotten is that? So Wily and I took the lobsters in the bucket and went over to the far side of the island to turn them loose. We’d got ourselves down to the water and were dumping the lobsters into the ocean when, whoosh! This little rowboat rushes in between the rocks and almost smacks my feet.” She laughed, and then shared the memory that brought the laughter. “I dumped the lobsters right in the boat and they started sliding all around.”
She sobered. “It wasn’t funny then, really, only now. What with the cyber stuff and everything, I got scared. Anyway. We became friends and I went for a boat ride, me and Wily.”
“That’s it?” Heath asked carefully. “You went for a ride with a friend?”
“I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody,” Elizabeth said.
Anna snorted.
Heath waited. E could occasionally keep secrets from her and Gwen, but never Anna.
“Wouldn’t tell anybody what?” Anna asked innocently.
“You know, about him, and stuff.” E had a pleading note in her voice. Anna ignored it.
“If there is something about him so dangerous that he made you promise not to divulge it to your mother, I think you’d better divulge it to your mother. And me,” Anna said flatly.
“Not dangerous to me,” E said. “Just him. He—oh God, I’ve told you he’s a boy!” she almost wailed.
“Twice,” Anna said. “Believe it or not, given we had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right, we got that part right. We’re betting a cute boy.”
Elizabeth smiled and looked down.
“Now we know we got that part right,” Anna said.
Heath said nothing. Anna was much better at this sort of thing than she was.
“So,” Anna said. “You’re on the back of Boar, down by the water, emancipating crustaceans, and a cute boy in a rowboat floods in. Merriment ensues, and you and Wily go for a ride.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth admitted.
“Being as he was adorable, and you’re adorable, and everything is adorable, you become ‘friends’ and lose track of time,” Anna said.
“I guess,” E said.
“Then, when he realizes grown-ups are about to ruin this idyll, he chucks you and your poor old dog into the freezing ocean so he can save his sorry ass,” Anna said.
“It wasn’t like that,” E protested. “I was the one who wanted to do it. To help.”
“And he needed help because…” Anna said.
E’s face took on a mulish cast. She studied her fingers. Wily licked his paw. Anna stared at E. Heath tried to fit the information E had shared into a coherent picture.
“I didn’t hear a boat engine,” Anna said. “And I didn’t hear oars in oarlocks or paddles on the gunwale. So your new pal—who cannot be named—muffles his oars? Fishy.”
Studying fingers, licking paws, staring into flames, thinking.
“You know I’ll find out who fishy boy is,” Anna threatened.
E said nothing.
Gradually it became clear that the boy’s identity was one secret E was going to keep. At least for now. Heath quashed the urge to bargain or plead. E’s new “friend” had not killed or molested her, and when she asked, he’d let her go free. That, and the fact that Elizabeth was happy, allowed Heath to keep her peace. In a bizarre way she was pleased that Elizabeth refused to divulge the boy’s—and of course it had to be a boy—name. It showed backbone, honor, a sense of being in control of her own world that the Internet creep had stolen from her.
Quiet ticked by to the comforting sound of Wily working the salt from between the toes of his right paw with his tongue.
“Hey,” Anna said finally. “On a lighter note, your stalker is here in Maine and wants to meet you.”
Elizabeth toppled over on her side and pulled the afghan over her head.
Denise sat cross-legged on her bed. In front of her was a silver laptop. On the screen was a full-color fish-eye view of the nursery in Peter Barnes’s home. Baby Olivia slept upstairs across the hall from Peter’s room. Peter and
Lily’s
room, she reminded herself. Where they slept on the bed that Denise had bought secondhand and refinished with such care.
Lit by the light of a Blue Fairy lamp, Olivia slept in a pink bundle. They’d let the room get too warm, Denise noticed with irritation. The baby was kicking her tiny feet, trying to get free of the rose-colored burrito
Lily
had thought suitable for swaddling. Why didn’t the woman just stick Olivia in a papoose pack and lace it up tight?
It had been a week or more since Denise had allowed herself this particular torture. Paulette had taken her mind in other, more satisfactory directions. Directions that didn’t all lead to a dead end. She’d missed watching Olivia. In a way, she was more a mother to the baby than Lily was. A couple of days after the baby was born, Lily had one of her migraines and checked herself back into the hospital. When she got out, though, of course Lily didn’t have to work for a living; she went back to her “activities.”
Not Denise. Denise had always been there.
The day Olivia was brought home, Denise stuck a Nice Lady No Bad Feelings face on the front of her skull and trotted right over to her old home, where Peter kept his family. In a beautifully wrapped box was an expensive fragile figurine of a guardian angel.
A smile pasted so tightly to her face that her lips stuck to her teeth, Denise told Lily it was to watch over the baby.
Nice, good, little Lily had put it on a table overlooking the baby’s crib, right where the tiny camera hidden in the angel’s armload of brightly painted flowers would capture the entire room.
Denise had invested in several snazzy little wireless cameras. This was the only one she’d planted in Peter’s house, but it wasn’t the limit of her knowledge of the Barnes family.
Before Paulette, when Denise had been scarcely more than a festering sore, barely able to keep her mind from pouring out through her eyes like molten lava, she’d kept herself alive by spying on the happy couple, then, when baby made three, the happy family.
She knew Lily’s routine better than Peter did. Maybe better than Lily herself did. She knew when the baby napped and how often she was changed, when she was fed and what. She knew dear Lily was dry as an Arizona gully in August and never produced a drop of milk from her pert little tits to feed her child. Denise knew what kind of formula she used and where she kept it.
After he’d summarily thrown Denise out into the cold, thinking himself oh so clever, Peter had changed all the locks. He was too stupid to remember the dog door. Denise had been in that house dozens of times over the past three years. She knew Lily preferred Tampax tampons, the kind that looked like pink bullets; she knew when Lily’s period was and how many days it lasted. She knew Lily suffered from migraines and what she took for them. She’d discovered Peter took Cialis. That had been a good day when she’d found those in his medicine cabinet. He also suffered from periodic constipation and kept
Playboy
magazines in the back of his closet.
During those awful times, all Denise thought about was revenge, years fantasizing about how she would get justice. As an employee of the American justice system, she’d thought justice was catching and punishing the bad guys. She had been wrong. What American law enforcement did was not justice, it was revenge, and revenge was for people who were helpless to obtain justice.
Paulette had taught her that.
Paulette coming into her life was the first justice Denise had ever experienced. Justice wasn’t about the bad guy. It was about the victim. Justice made what was wrong right again. Justice made the victim whole. Justice put the jewelry back in the jewelry box, the car back in the rightful owner’s garage. Justice was restoration. When Paulette came, Denise’s lost soul was restored to her. That was justice.
Understanding this changed Denise’s worldview. Revenge was not necessary—not even desirable—if justice could be had.
However, her years spying on Peter Barnes’s family weren’t wasted. It was serendipity—or fate, kismet—that she’d done this groundwork. At the time, she’d spied and pried because she couldn’t help herself. Or so she’d thought. Some part of her brain must have realized that this information would become important to the planning of the whole life she had ahead of her now.
Not revenge; justice.
“Good night, baby girl,” Denise said, and closed the laptop’s cover.
She checked her watch. It was nearly three
A.M.
Time to leave to meet with her sister. Given how fast things were moving, and how small Acadia National Park was, meeting in the flesh, even in the dark of night in the woods, was risky, but after Denise had gotten off work she found a note Paulette had left in her mailbox; their cell phones neither texted nor took voice messages.
The note read
I have to see you. Please come tonight. We have to …
The last words were scribbled out.
Clutching the note, Denise feared she would have a heart attack in the foyer. Paulette had waltzed right up to the boxes in Denise’s apartment building, in broad daylight, and popped a motherloving note, with her handwriting on it and, undoubtedly, slathered with fingerprints matching those at the crime scene, into Denise Castle, Law Enforcement Ranger and Identical Twin’s mailbox.
Had Denise been a dog, she would have been mad enough to froth at the mouth. Thank God Paulette hadn’t signed the thing. Might as well just add
P.S. We killed the prick. Love, the Bobbsey Twins
.
If anyone saw Paulette slip the note into her mailbox, Denise hoped they thought nothing of it. It had been with two bills and a flyer for used tires. Had Paulette come after the mailman, or had the mailman opened the box to put in the letters, seen the note, and read it?
“Doesn’t matter,” Denise said aloud. By the time the shit hit the fan, Paulette would be gone. One battered widow, no family, no friends, vanishes. A nonevent.
Denise changed out of her old pajamas. The new ones she’d ordered for her and her sister had arrived, but she didn’t want to wear them until she and Paulette could wear them together.
Clad in dark clothes, she slipped quietly down the stairs and into her Miata. As on the night she’d disposed of Kurt, she would take the runabout to Otter Cove, then hike the short way overland. Covering the same ground more than once made her uneasy, but not as uneasy as taking the road. The inky shadow of the boathouse by the government dock on Somes was the only place she felt safe parking the Miata. Night diving was known to be her habit. If by chance the car was seen, no one would remark it there.
The NPS was understaffed and, at present, underfunded. Two weeks ago this would have pissed Denise off. Now park poverty was her friend. Acadia couldn’t afford twenty-four-hour ranger coverage. On Friday and Saturday nights the last shift ended at midnight, on weeknights at ten
P.M.
Even Eager Artie would be abed by three
A.M.
The Miata snugged into darkness by the boathouse, Denise rowed the runabout out a hundred yards. Probably an unnecessary precaution, but just because she was paranoid didn’t mean somebody wasn’t watching her. This was the downside of breaking the law—even when the law needed to be broken. Denise did not have a guilty conscience. In doing away with Duffy, she’d done the world a good turn, but it was like after she’d finished reading a mystery story. Once she knew exactly who, where, how, and when the crime was committed, it seemed it would be obvious to a two-year-old. To soothe her nerves she had to keep reminding herself that most people weren’t all that bright. Better yet, most people didn’t give a flying fuck unless it was a cop killed, or somebody they could use to make political hay.