Authors: Nevada Barr
Why was Paulette being obstinate? “She might not have come back; more likely she did and you didn’t see. The pigeon has all the pieces to you and me and Kurt dead and you at the Acadian. She’s not stupid. She’s an obstacle, and the obstacle has to be removed,” Denise insisted.
Paulette spun around, her hands to her cheeks like a cartoon of “noooooo.” “Do you mean kill her?” Paulette exclaimed. “Miss Pigeon is a ranger, law enforcement, like you. I’ve seen it in every movie. If a cop is killed—probably even a tree cop—the CIA and FBI and everybody start a huge manhunt!”
Denise stifled a sigh. “It’s not like that. I know you’re scared. I’d be, too. But we’re not going to do anything drastic,” she said, forcing a smile and a soothing timbre to her voice. “What I’ve got planned is more like a prank. It’ll be seen like a prank. Ha ha, no big deal. You’ll see. Rangers play pranks on each other all the time. Nobody gets their panties in a wad. We’ll snatch the pigeon—like frat boys snatch each other for a joke. We’ll keep her in here for a couple of days, then, when we’ve finished, we’ll call somebody to let her out. Nobody gets hurt. We get what we deserve.”
“You’re sure?” Paulette asked. Denise’s twin appeared to be growing younger and younger as Denise watched. Years dropping from her voice and face. Denise was growing older. At present she felt they weren’t identical twins at all, that she was the much older sister and had to take care of Paulette.
“I’m sure,” she said warmly. “We need more time, just a few days more to get everything we need. If we can … pull our prank on Anna Pigeon, it will buy us that time. We’ll finish everything on our list, then we’ll buy a nice big car and we’ll go south until it’s spring all year around, and we’ll buy a nice house.”
Paulette smiled wistfully. “It would be wonderful to have a nice new house,” she said. “One that was clean and pretty, where nothing was broken or patched.”
“That’s what we’re going to have,” Denise promised. “Tonight we’ll remove the obstacle. Over the next few days we’ll tidy up, then off we’ll go. An adventure.”
Paulette’s smile firmed up, her age steadied at about fourteen, or so it seemed to Denise. Fourteen would have to do.
“I got water for her,” Denise said, pulling three liter bottles from her canvas sack. Without a word, Paulette gathered them up and carried them to a shelf next to the crib, where she arranged them in a neat row. “I brought these.” Denise dug in her bag. “MREs from the fire cache. The park will never miss them. And these.” She pulled two pairs of handcuffs from her belt. “Anna Pigeon will be fine. Just for a couple of days. I hoped you had an old bucket around somewhere.”
“A bucket? What for?” Paulette asked as she piled the MREs in a tidy stack beside the water bottles.
“No bathroom,” Denise explained.
“Yuck!” Paulette made a face. “Wait.” Dropping to her hands and knees, she felt around under the crib. “If it’s only for a couple days…” She dragged out a pink potty-training toilet. “It’s nicer than a bucket.” For a moment she studied it, then turned to Denise. “It’s awfully small.”
Paulette was so naïve, so sweet, like a little kid untouched by the whole real, nasty, shitty world. At times Denise thought maybe Paulette wasn’t all there, wasn’t quite right in the head. That would mean Denise wasn’t right in the head either. They were identical twins. Being crazy wasn’t a new thought. Things had gotten blurry and odd in the last while, maybe a year, maybe more.
Nerves.
“Anna Pigeon has a skinny butt,” Denise said. “The potty is perfect. We do it tonight.”
“I didn’t get the triazolam,” Paulette confessed. “I can look again tomorrow. We could do it tomorrow, couldn’t we?”
Denise knew Paulette wouldn’t have gotten the drug. Of course she knew. There wasn’t anything she didn’t know about her identical twin. To Paulette this was just talk, just a game. Paulette didn’t think this was going to happen; she didn’t think they deserved a life together. Kurt had beat that out of her.
Denise knew better. This had to happen.
“Not a problem,” Denise assured her. “I got it all worked out. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”
“I did get this,” Paulette said, brightening. “It’s about the legacy. It came to General Delivery this morning.” She held an envelope out to Denise. It had been opened. That irked Denise. The legacy was something they shared—or should share. Paulette should have waited until they could open it together.
Having unfolded the single slip of paper from the envelope, Denise turned it to the lamp so she could read the letters.
The woman who put the ad in the paper regarding the twins is very ill at present. I would not want to see her hurt or disappointed. To that end, I would like to meet with you before I share your card with her. There is a legacy, two to be accurate. We can talk about that when we meet.
The number of a cell phone followed.
“Sounds like a con,” Denise said. “People run all kinds of con games. This sounds like one of them. Did you call her?” she demanded. Her tone was too rough. Paulette aged a little more, and her mouth turned harder. Ugly, Denise thought.
“I didn’t,” Paulette said. “But I want to. I think it’s real.”
Paulette wanted to get back with their biological mommy, Denise thought bitterly. No matter that Mommy was obviously a heartless tramp. Paulette would probably want to hang around and nurse Mommy back to health, and to hell with her sister, her identical twin sister.
Denise rode a wave of anger until it subsided, leaving her tired and determined. “We’ll do whatever you want,” she said. “First let’s get tonight out of the way, okay? Please?”
“Tonight?”
Denise said nothing, just kept a half smile pasted on her face. Paulette looked at her for long enough that Denise thought she was going to come up with another argument, distraction, or reason to postpone what they had to do.
“Just for a couple days, then we let her go,” Paulette said.
Denise felt a rush of relief as great as the anger had been. “I love having a sister,” she said.
“Me, too,” Paulette said.
Paulette was in the boat; she had the needle with the mixture. Denise had explained what needed to be done, and Paulette had understood and seemed confident she could do her part. The sea was flat, and there was a gentle onshore breeze. Everything was as it should be, Denise told herself for the hundredth time. Once, like the whine of a mosquito near her ear, the thought surfaced that this part of the plan, disabling Anna Pigeon, wasn’t crucial. A flash of the pigeon’s eyes over the picture frame, or the tilt of her head as she’d interrogated Paulette, pulled the thought back into the depths. This was not a time to take even the slightest risk. If they failed, there would be no time to recover.
Since Kurt had died and Ranger Pigeon started poking her nose in, Denise had had that awful feeling she got as a child when she tried to balance a broom on her nose. Never could she run fast enough to keep it from falling down.
This was the second-to-last major step; then they were home free, free to have a home. She concentrated on that to keep the noise of the boat engine from bouncing off her sensitized eardrums with the force of a cataclysm.
Denise had coddled and pampered the little runabout’s motor until it was as quiet as a fifteen-horsepower Evinrude could get. Unfortunately, on a still night, its high-pitched growl carried across the water like the wailing of an infant.
Before she could clearly see Schoodic’s rocky point in the ambient light of a moonless sea, Denise cut the engine. For a minute she breathed, letting the magnificent silence erase their trespass.
The water was flat—or as flat as the restless Atlantic ever was. This was good. High seas would have postponed this adventure. Time had become a creature of three dimensions, slippery and short and sliding fast through Denise’s fingers.
Having pried off the lens covers, she lifted the binoculars to her eyes.
Schoodic Point, as advertised, was pointed. It was a peninsula on the end of a peninsula that ended in a spade-shaped stone skirt digging into the ocean at the mainland’s southernmost shore. Schoodic was a bleak beauty of rock, stone, sea, and sky. Fashion shoots favored it for high-end clothes, the emaciated models teetering over the round rocks in high heels, believing that people were staring because they were pretty and not because they looked like idiots. Weddings were often booked at Schoodic Point.
A hard, uncompromising beginning to married life, Denise thought as she swept the shore with the binoculars. An ugly parking lot scraped a flat place above the beach and nearly ruined the aesthetics. This night Denise forgave its existence because it had the decency to be empty. It was after three in the morning, and RVs weren’t allowed to park overnight, but they often tried to get away with it.
No RVs. No sedans with thrashing bodies in the backseat.
“We’re clear,” she whispered to Paulette. “We paddle from here.”
Frizzled blond hair tucked under a black watch cap, small body hidden under a black long-sleeved T-shirt, black sweatpants, and black running shoes, Paulette was merely a shadow in the bow. Denise thought of herself as a strong, strapping woman. She saw Paulette as fine-boned and delicate. Odd that she and her sister were the same height and weight, same shoe, glove, and bra size. Paulette’s shoulders were hunched, and her chin was down, as if she tried to disappear into her own skeleton. Black ops were not her forte. Well, Denise thought, they weren’t hers either. She just did what she had to do. Paulette would see that. After the fact, when done was done, she would understand.
Both women had blackened their faces with makeup. Denise didn’t know what the Delta Force guys or the Navy SEALs used, or what football players put under their eyes, but she and her sister had made do with a mix of Paulette’s black, gray, and dark blue eye shadows. The effect was all she could have wished for. But for her hands, Paulette looked to be little more than a texture on the night seascape.
As did Denise. Invisible twins. Could invisible people still be identical? Sort of the visual equivalent of the tree falling in the forest: Could one no-thing be exactly the same as another no-thing? Denise wondered as she watched Paulette’s white hands float up like the ghosts of long-dead starfish and close around the handle of a paddle.
In an inexpert attempt to get the paddle in position she struck the blade against the gunwale. The clunk was loud enough to wake sleepers in Nova Scotia.
Maybe Denise suffered from nervous twitches, but she was beginning to think her sister was just clumsy. She swallowed an oath.
“I’ll paddle,” she whispered, making her voice extra kind to stifle the traitorous thoughts about her twin.
The runabout was a bitch to paddle. Denise had done it enough that she could make it work. Work was the key word. Outboards weren’t meant to run on manpower. Or, in her case, womanpower. By the time she managed to catch the crest of a good wave, and ride the surf into the rocky beach on the point below the parking lot, sweat was pouring down from her temples and between her breasts.
As the swell that beached them retreated, it dragged small stones along with it, clattering back toward the ocean floor. If she timed it right, the racket of the stony surf would cover the racket of beaching the boat.
Denise was over the side in a second. Even in midsummer the water off the coast of Maine was cold. She was used to wearing a wet suit complete with booties. Cold feet were the least of the dangers, she reminded herself as she shoved hard on the stern to move the boat out of the reach of the surf before the Atlantic could turn it into flotsam. Paulette sat like a statue in the bow, making the going that much tougher. Again Denise felt irritation rise up her spine to scratch like a metal rasp on the back of her brain.
Lot of stress, she reminded herself. Lot on our plates. “Us against the world” was not as romantic as fiction writers would have it. “Us” could get real bitchy. Things would be better—like they used to be those first few times they were together—once they got straightened away, got the legacy, the pension, the money from the sale of the house …
Denise slammed her mind shut against the list. It grew longer every minute she dwelt on it, longer and heavier, each chore another lead weight on her metaphorical dive belt threatening to drag her down, drown her.
Paulette jumped from the boat, grabbed the bow with both hands, and began to help drag it up on shore.
See, Denise told herself. Not irritating. Good and right.
The previous day Denise had driven to the peninsula on reconnaissance to find a secluded spot to cache the boat. It didn’t need to be totally hidden, just out of casual sight should a ranger be on patrol—not likely; there weren’t enough green-and-gray bodies for round-the-clock coverage on Schoodic either. More likely would be a nosy insomniac out for a ride.
She’d found a shallow dry creek to the side of the point not too long a walk from the employee housing area and the old US Navy base—now a rotting hulk of dorm rooms and hallways—but far enough so that the sounds of their arrival wouldn’t wake any of the summer seasonals, or the sculptors on Schoodic for an artists’ retreat.
Psychically speaking, killing Kurt had been no big deal. He was a lout and a bastard, and even his best friend was over it in a beer or two. Even without killing, this would be different. Paulette was right. There would be cops all over a federal law enforcement officer going missing. Since Pigeon was “acting” chief, Denise hoped there’d be a time lag before the NPS declared her disappearance officially suspicious. Then Denise wasn’t sure who-all would descend, but she was sure it was going to be a big deal. Hence: black clothes, black face, surgical gloves for the event, and a getaway boat hidden in the scrub.
Leave No Trace.
That was a Park Service motto. Good old NPS, Denise thought with a smile. Good old Superintendent Peter, moldy green and moth-eaten gray down to his grubby little soul. This was going to look bad on Happy Daddy’s résumé. A perk she’d not considered before.
Paulette was making a lot of racket puffing and grunting as they dragged the boat into the wash. After they’d settled the runabout, Denise could still hear her breathing. Paulette hadn’t kept herself in shape. Denise stared over the dark shape of the hull between them. Despite the black makeup and the brim of the ball cap, she could see that Paulette’s face was crumpled like a little kid’s before it starts to shriek.