Boar Island (35 page)

The sun was low over Mount Desert, knifing into the room in a wedge of rich coppery light. Gwen squinted into the shaft of dancing motes for a moment. “Chris died. Damn. She will never get to see her daughters—not even one of them. It just makes my heart ache.”

“What’s the legacy?” E asked. Anna had been wondering the same thing but had become too civilized to blurt it out at the graveside, so to speak.

“Boar Island, this house,” Gwen said. “There isn’t much left in investments, but I imagine one could get a pretty penny for a private island off the coast of Acadia National Park. The historic value of the lighthouse would be worth something, I would think.”

“Jeeze, yuh think?” Heath mocked gently. “I bet this rock would be worth millions of dollars to some rich New Yorker who wants a six-thousand-square-foot summer cottage to use for a couple of weeks each year. Not a bad legacy. Juicy enough to want to steal it from your sister.”

“That’s the good news part of the legacy,” Gwen said, then sighed again, more deeply this time. “The bad news is that their biological father—”

“The child molester the witch was so into protecting,” Heath butted in.

“Died of Huntington’s disease,” Gwen finished.

“Shit,” Heath breathed. Gwen shot her a reproachful glance.

Elizabeth stared at her mother, then turned to Anna. “What’s the big deal? He was a pervert. Who cares if he died? It’s not like they’d want to look up dear old Dad for the holidays. I sure wouldn’t.”

“Huntington’s is hereditary,” Anna said. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance the child will have the disease if one parent carries it.”

“It is a terrible disease,” Gwen said. “Pitiless. It’s a neurodegenerative genetic disorder, which means the nerve cells in the brain break down. There’s a whole host of symptoms ranging from loss of motor control to severe psychiatric disorders and dementia.”

“Gosh,” Elizabeth said. “You’d think they’d know they had it already.”

“Most people start showing symptoms in their late thirties and early forties. Sometimes it manifests earlier or later, but if you didn’t know your family history, you might not know what was happening to you,” Gwen told E. “That’s what Chris was worried about, that they wouldn’t get medical care if they had it, or that, without the money from the sale of Boar, they couldn’t afford it. A person with Huntington’s can live twenty or more years after the first onset of symptoms, getting progressively worse and worse.”

“Is there anything you can do about it?” Heath asked.

“Not much,” Gwen said.

“Then who’d want to know they had it till they had it?” E asked.

Anna suspected she wasn’t so much asking anybody in particular as demanding answers of the universe. Why would anyone want to get tested? A fifty percent chance of no longer worrying about it. Why would anyone who wasn’t worrying about it want to know?

Gwen answered E’s question. “There are some drugs that show promise. There’s also the issue of safety to self and others.”

“Driving,” E said.

“Gas stoves, matches, babysitting, getting lost, knocking over hot coffee, the whole gamut of dangers, and we haven’t even gotten to psychiatric issues,” Gwen said. “At some point it becomes unsafe not to seek medical care.”

“My biological father is dead and I don’t know his medical history,” E said. “Could I have it?”

“You could,” Gwen answered slowly. “But you’re more likely to get cancer or pneumonia or hydrophobia. Huntington’s is rare. If you’re going to dwell on it, I’ll get you tested.”

“You don’t have the gene,” Heath said. “Your father died in a motorcycle accident when he was fifty-five, remember?”

“Right,” E said, sounding relieved rather than sad. Anna was unsurprised. E’s father had been absent since she was eighteen months old. “Did you tell her—the daughter?”

“We didn’t. Chris wanted to do that,” Gwen said. “Now Chris is gone. I’m afraid the twins do have the gene. This poor woman seemed to have some cognitive dysfunction. We had to repeat ourselves. Sometimes she appeared confused, unnaturally docile.”

“Maybe she just isn’t very bright,” Heath offered.

“She also showed chorea. Involuntary movement in her hands.” Gwen flicked her wrist.

Suddenly, what had niggled in Anna’s brain snapped into place: bleached blonde, overlapping front teeth, cigarettes being flipped out on the ground.

“Paulette Duffy?” she asked.

THIRTY-NINE

Once again Anna was sitting at Peter Barnes’s kitchen table. As superintendent, he could keep a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday schedule if he wanted. Since the baby had been born, he did. Lily was watching television in the front room; Olivia, in a soft pink Onesie, was curled up on the couch beside her, making tiny grunting sounds like a piglet.

Anna set her teacup down and gazed past Peter at the charming picture on the couch. Mother and daughter, happy, safe, beautiful. Would that it would always be so.

“Elizabeth’s cyberstalker has sent an ultimatum,” she said more abruptly than she’d intended. “E’s supposed to show up alone, in person, at a time and place to be determined. Or else.”

“Preying on children! God, but it makes my stomach turn! Throw in sexual perversion and I’m ready to change my stance on the death penalty,” Peter said. He didn’t glance at his baby girl, but Anna noticed his head jerk as if he’d been going to and stopped himself. Attitudes changed when one had skin in the game. Taking a hit while fighting for the principle of a thing was fine, but when the good fight began to cause collateral damage to innocents, how to be a hero became more complex.

“Heath would be too conspicuous in her wheelchair, and logically, the stalker is someone who knows Elizabeth; ergo, he might know Heath or me or even Gwen. I was hoping to borrow an unknown face so it won’t be only me and Gwen. Though smart and fierce, Gwen is small and somewhere north of seventy-five.”

“There’s always the Bar Harbor police, the Maine State Troopers, the sheriff’s department,” Peter said drily. “All perfectly legitimate and, from what I’ve experienced, competent options. Not as reassuring as an elderly pediatrician, I’m sure, but they do their best.”

“I have great respect for small-town police and sheriff’s departments,” Anna said. “They see a little of everything and have to deal with it by themselves. They tend to be generalists, the way rangers were in the good old days, before we carried guns. It’s the time-frame and subject matter that make me want to keep it personal.”

“How so?” Peter asked.

“With cyberbullying, police don’t yet know what to do, where they stand, what the procedure is; nobody really does. The police back home more or less blew Elizabeth off. Not out of malice, more out of this-isn’t-my-jurisdiction.

“The or-else meeting is tomorrow. That’s not much time to coordinate with officers who may not deal well with a girl from Boulder, Colorado, hiding out in Maine, who says she’s meeting a stalker who posts dirty things about her on the Internet. I doubt we’d get things sorted out in less than the twenty-odd hours we’ve got.”

“Put the guy off. Tell him you’ll meet day after tomorrow, or next week,” Peter suggested. “That might give you time to get things set up with local law enforcement.”

“It might. It also might scare him back into the cyber woods. Then E will have to live not knowing when the bastard is going to pop out again.”

“I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, especially not a teenaged girl,” Peter said.

“Marriage and fatherhood have made you downright sensitive,” Anna joked.

“Estrogen seems to have a civilizing effect on me,” he admitted. “I can’t give you anybody. I shouldn’t have let you and Denise go on NPS time. Bad judgment on my part, and let’s hope it stays our little secret, at least until I’m retired. What I can do is give Artie the day off—you’re on sick leave—and if you and Artie choose to spend the day hanging out with septuagenarian aunts and underage girls, that’s your business.”

Anna’s eyes were blurring. Drug residue. She blinked rapidly to clear them.

“You look like shit,” Peter told her kindly. “You should have let me come out to Boar.”

“I had cabin fever,” Anna said. Talking hurt—her upper lip was bruised—but nothing like the pain in her left heel or her butt. Gwen had bandaged her various scrapes. Anna felt like she was wearing diapers under her jeans. “I needed to get off the island. I’ll be back in Schoodic tonight.”

“Hoping for another attack?” Peter asked. He took a sip of hot tea, raising his eyebrows over the rim of the cup at her.

“No. I’m dead, don’t forget,” she said.

“Right. How’s that supposed to work for us?” he asked.

Anna rubbed her face. “I must admit I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I wanted to stay dead. I had a sort of half-baked notion that I could appear like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and the guilty parties would fall down and confess, or at least look much amazed. Trouble is, this ghost doesn’t know to whom it would be profitable to appear. Now I think I’d like to stay dead until we get this business with the stalker over with. If I’m dead, nobody will be taking potshots at me.”

“Artie and I made a quiet visit to Schoodic today and had a look around,” Peter said. “We found a broken needle—the kind that fits in a plastic syringe—in front of the Rockefeller building. It’s been bagged and will be tested.”

“Gwen went through the Mount Desert lab,” Anna told him. “Rohypnol and muscle relaxants were in my blood.”

“Good to have friends in high places,” Peter said. Being superintendent of a major national park couldn’t get evidence tested in a four-hour time frame: lack of funds and facilities, the need to stand in line behind other law enforcement organization at shared labs. “We found your other boot,” he went on. “Once it’s been through the system, you can have it back. It was about halfway between the Rockefeller building and Schoodic Point. Schoodic was probably where the boat was beached. Nothing interesting in your apartment or on the stairs.”

“No
CSI Acadia
?” Anna asked with a smile. “No tiny thread or droplet to lead us to the bad guys?”

“Sorry,” Peter said. “Have you remembered anything new?”

“I don’t know,” Anna said honestly. “The Rohypnol has an amnesiac built in. It’s not total, but everything is stretched and warped, like the memory of a dream. Walter said there were two people in the boat, and I sort of remember two people in my apartment—or the parking lot or somewhere. I haven’t any idea whether I really remember two or, because I was told there were two, I think I remember. Most of the day I’ve been poking at my poor raddled brain. I think I might think the two were small. I think I might think they were dressed like ninjas, all in black. I think I might think they wore white gloves like Mickey Mouse. I don’t trust my own memories. Before I can believe myself I need corroboration from people that weren’t stoned out of their minds.”

“We talked to the sculptors,” Peter said. “Nobody saw anything or heard anything. We talked to your boyfriend—Walter Whitman—”

“Don’t speak ill of my savior,” Anna said. She sipped her tea. Earl Grey. Right up there with tomato soup for curing what ails.

“Seems like a good kid. A little monomaniacal about clearing his dad’s name, but I can understand that.”

“Good thing he is, or I’d be sleeping with the fishes,” Anna said.

“He gave us a statement about the boat that dumped you, and precisely when and where that dumping occurred. We put out an APB to the Coast Guard and local marinas. Today I’d hoped to get a diver down where you went in. Something might have fallen from the bag you were in, or their boat. Problem is, Denise Castle, the ranger who drove you around, is our only certified diver, and she just retired.”

“She went through with it?” Anna was surprised at that. Denise didn’t strike her as a woman who had anyplace else to go. It wasn’t anything the woman had said or done, it was the starkness of her apartment: nothing personal, no pictures with people in them, family, friends, or even co-workers. Just that one bedside photo from which Peter Barnes had been amputated.

“She did. I think she was as shocked as everybody else.”

“Struck me that way, too. She’d not talked about it before?” Anna asked.

Peter looked into the other room, where his wife and child nestled in the flickering light from the television. “Why do you ask?”

“Not sure,” Anna said.

Peter sighed and rubbed his jaw like a bad actor trying to indicate he’s thinking. “Yes and no,” he said finally. “She seemed to be happy here, but—you know Denise and I lived together for eleven years?”

“I remember, vaguely,” Anna said.

“After the first shit was done hitting the fan, Denise seemed okay. Then Lily came and the baby. Denise seemed fine with that, seemed totally over the split. She brought Olivia a really beautiful coming-home gift—an angel figurine from Lenox, not cheap—and has been nice to Lily. I happen to know Denise has no family and no real friends, so on the one hand, I was surprised she just up and retired without any notice. On the other hand, there have been a few times I’ve caught her looking at Lily or me, or seen her face go kind of odd when somebody mentions our house, that makes me think she might not be as much over the split as she acts. So I wasn’t surprised she up and retired. Does that make sense?”

“Why now?” Anna asked. The timing of an incident could tell one a great deal. That was the moment when something changed. “After hanging on through the split, the marriage to Lily, the birth of Olivia, why did Denise choose now to retire?”

“Who knows,” Peter said wearily. “I haven’t a clue as to why Denise does anything. We got Walter Whitman squared away with the local police,” he said, changing the subject. “There wasn’t an arrest warrant out for him. Town police try and stay out of lobster wars. If there’s any danger to Walt, it’ll come from other lobstermen. John Whitman thinks blood has cooled enough the kid could come out of hiding, but that won’t get him his line back. Without fishing rights, he hasn’t got a future. At least not around here. I told him to talk with Gwen. If he’s going to be squatting on Boar to do his spying, it should be with the owner’s permission.”