Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (33 page)

J
enn couldn’t figure out what Squat Cooper wanted to talk about, but she went along with it. They walked to the end of Second Street, but on their way he didn’t say a thing. It wasn’t until they crossed over Cascade and they came to the bench from which they could gaze at the distant, perfect peak of Mount Pilchuk that he got around to saying anything at all.

By that time she was a little impatient. He’d worn a totally serious expression when he’d come upon her with Becca, Ivar, and Sharla. He looked like someone about to announce either the death of a parent or a sudden plan to move to another state. It turned out to be neither of those things. He wanted to talk about what he called “us.”

He began with, “I don’t get what’s going on with you.”

She began with the answer, “Huh?”

He said, “Come on, Jenn. You know what I’m talking about. I mean . . .” And then his face grew red. “I mean, that
was
you upstairs in my house, right? Minus the shirt and the bra and all the rest?”

She felt herself growing hot under his gaze. Okay, they’d been naked and they’d moved to his bedroom, but that was it. Things hadn’t gone anywhere close to
anywhere
close. Below them, the banging sound of his scabby brother’s entrance into the house had put an end to that. At the time, she’d been disappointed . . . or something. Afterward, the truth was she’d been relieved. They’d scrambled back into their clothes accompanied by the sound of Dylan rummaging for food in the kitchen cupboards. His “Oh
man
,” along with companion swear words, had told the tale of his frustration.

Squat’s frustration was of a different kind. He drew his Jockeys up over an impressive hard-on. Even with his jeans redonned, she could still see the bulge. They’d scooted out of his bedroom and back to the boys’ study area. They were on the couch watching MTV on the flat-screen TV when the odious Dylan showed his acne-infested face.

“Whoa!” he said. “Didn’t know you two were here. How’s it going, little bro? You turn this lesbo yet?”

“Shut up,” Squat said.

“Good idea,” Jenn agreed. For good measure, she put her hand on Squat’s thigh. Dylan saw the move and laughed.

“Like that would convince me?” he said to Jenn. “You ever get laid by the sexed-out redhead babe?”

Squat looked at her. She said, “He means Annie Taylor,” she told him. “And no, Dylan, in spite of what you apparently want to keep thinking, I don’t do women.”

“Oh right,” he said. And then to Squat, “I’m telling you, Squatster, you are wasting your time. How far’d you get anyways? Bet she hasn’t put out anything. Okay, maybe tongue, but
that’s
going to be your limit, bro.”

“Will you get out of here and leave us alone?” Squat said. “’Cause I’m telling you, Dylan, if you don’t make tracks—”

“Yeah. Whatever,” Dylan said. “But don’t come whining to me when zippo happens, okay? Because that’s what’s in store for you, bro: zippo, nada, and zilch.”

Squat stirred, as if to get up and go after his brother, but Dylan beat tracks to his room. His door slammed and music ensued. Top volume. There was hardly a point to watching MTV after that.

No other opportunities for alone time with Squat had presented themselves. Lots had happened—Cilla, Nera, the whole selkie business, her failure to make the All Island Soccer team—and the truth was she hadn’t thought about Squat at all. At least not in the way he seemed to be thinking about her. Jenn felt bad about this, but that was just how it was.

She said, “Oh. Upstairs at your house. But . . . We’re friends, aren’t we? I thought we were friends.”

“We’re more than that,” he said. “Or at least we were. You know what I mean. If Dylan hadn’t shown up that day . . . We were
heading
somewhere.” His face grew redder. He looked so appealing blushing that way that Jenn wanted to throw her arms around him, just because he was so nice, such a decent person, so good of heart, so completely Squat. But she also understood that throwing her arms around him was
all
she wanted. Everything else . . . That had been joking around. It had been trying to convince herself. It had been exploring, wanting to see, needing to understand if Annie Taylor and even the revolting Dylan had been right about her. She
didn’t
know yet. But she was close to knowing. When she was ready, she would accept the truth.

She said, “I guess . . . I don’t think I really wanted to go there, where we were heading. I mean, I
thought
I did. And maybe I would’ve although it would also have been a totally dumb move.”

“Thanks,” he said sourly.

“Come on, think about it,” she told him. “We’re fifteen years old.”

“So? Other kids—”

“Got it. They have sex at twelve. Dylan probably had sex at nine if he could get it up then. But you and me? We’re not like them, Squat. And even if we were . . . it’s just that . . . I’m not sure.”

Squat cast a look over his shoulder at her. He was hunched forward on the bench, his arms on his thighs. He looked, momentarily, disgusted. He said, “So he was right, huh?”

“Who?”

“You
know.
He was right all along and everything was . . . It was you trying to prove something to yourself, at my expense.”

“It was not!” she protested. She jumped to her feet and stood in front of him. “Hey, me and you have been friends since we were
five
. What d’you think? That means nothing?”

“You were using me.”

“Like you
weren’t
using me? If I was using you, it goes both ways and you know it. You wanted a first and it wasn’t me. I wanted to . . . I don’t know. I wanted to . . . to understand some things, and you were there. We
always
joked with each other and talked about sex and love and marriage and all sorts of junk but you
knew
it was a joke and you can’t say you didn’t. You just used it as a key of some kind. To unlock a door and the door was me. And when it was open, I figured here was the chance to . . . to see in some kind of mirror and the mirror was you.”

He looked up at that. He leaned back against the bench and observed her. He said, “I don’t think I ever heard you say so much.”

“Yeah? Well get used to it. I got lots to say.”

He blew a chuckle out of his nose, more or less. “Whatever,” he said.

“What’s that s’posed to mean? I hate it when people say ‘whatever.’”

“You say it yourself.”

“Not anymore.” She waited, one hand on her hip, one foot tapping against the gravel on which sat the bench. “Well, whatever
what
?” she demanded.

He rose and sighed. “Whatever you want,” he said. “It’s been since kindergarten we been friends. I guess it’s sort of dumb to dump you now.”

“Yeah but friends like
what
, ’cause we got to be straight with each other,” she said.

“Friends like . . . like friends,” he told her.

“And you’re okay with that?”

He thought about the question. He looked out at the water and then back at her. “Long as you keep your T-shirt on, I guess.”

T
hey had all agreed that the secret of Nera was one they needed to keep. As for what had happened to Cilla . . . She’d disappeared from Annie’s trailer one day. It would be easy enough to manage all parts of the story, they’d reasoned. Nothing existed to prove something sinister might have happened to Cilla, and no one had documented Nera’s transformation. Beyond that, not a soul would believe such a thing as a selkie was possible. Whidbey Island was a place of art and music and magic and mystery, to be sure. But some things asked for a leap of faith that most people couldn’t make.

Becca, though, knew differently. There was one person on Whidbey Island who would understand exactly what had occurred.

So a few days after the Welcome Back Nera festival, she sat with Diana Kinsale on her deck overlooking Sandy Point. There, she told Diana the story. She told her all the ins and outs of it, ending with what she’d seen that evening on Possession Point.

Diana didn’t seem at all surprised. But then, she was a woman who’d learned acceptance of the incomprehensible a long time ago. She merely lowered her hand to Oscar’s head and caressed it as she watched the rest of her dogs gamboling and sniffing on the slope beneath them. She said, “A selkie. I always did wonder why Ivar was so intent upon keeping everyone away from that seal.”

“He didn’t want anyone to know. If people got too close, she might’ve come out of the water and stepped out of her skin in front of them. And then . . . Who knows what would’ve happened to her?”

“One can imagine the uproar.” Diana laughed quietly. “Lord, the Langley city fathers would have gone . . . what’s the term I need?”

“Gone bananas,” Becca said. “CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox, you name it.” They were quiet for a moment considering this: what would have been made out of Nera had anyone known what she was capable of doing once her body hit the sand. More than a Welcome Back Nera festival, that was certain. The village would have been put on the map, but the reason for this would have led to disaster.

“He’s a good man, Ivar Thorndyke,” Diana said. “It takes a lot for a person to risk being mocked in order to protect something that he couldn’t have explained to people if he tried.”

“They would’ve thought he was crazy. I bet most of them think he’s crazy anyway.”

“We’re all a little of that,” Diana said. She’d been gazing at the water, but now she turned to Becca. “What else?” she asked.

Becca blushed. “Me and Derric.”

Diana smiled. “Ah. That’s resolved? Good. You and Derric have something special.”

“He was . . . It was about Seth, why he was upset.” Becca told that story as well. Diana listened, her expression thoughtful. At the end, Becca said, “It would be so nice to have a place to live, Mrs. Kinsale. I mean . . . a real place. Like . . . well, like here.”

“Are things not working out at Debbie’s?”

Becca quirked her mouth. All these months of lies. Yet if she didn’t tell Diana the truth at last, they couldn’t move forward. She had to risk it. She said, “I haven’t exactly been there. At the Cliff Motel, I mean.”

Diana’s face went very still. She said, “Where have you been, then?”

And Becca allowed the tale to come tumbling out: the tree house, the woods, Ralph Darrow’s property, her flight from Langley the previous November.

“In a
tree house
?” Diana said. “All through the winter? Debbie didn’t know this, did she?”

Becca grimaced but she still went forward. “She thought I was here, with you.”

Diana did not look pleased. She said, “Badly done, Becca. Very badly done. Lying to me. Lying to Debbie. Living in a tree house. Was this Seth’s doing?”

“Don’t blame Seth. It’s just that . . . I needed to get out of Langley. Last November, something happened and . . .” She was at the point she always reached with people, the Jeff Corrie point, the what-to-tell-in-place-of-telling-everything point. Still she couldn’t reveal it all. The anguish of not being able to say everything felt like something clawing at her insides.

Diana put her hand on Becca’s shoulder. And there it was: that warmth and lifting. Becca said to her, “If I could only live here with you . . .”

Diana looked at Becca for such a long time that Becca turned her own gaze away. Diana said her name and nothing more until Becca returned her gaze once again. “The time isn’t right,” Diana told her. “At some point it will be. You’ll be here eventually. But not yet.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it’s the truth. If you were here with me, you’d miss the lessons you’re meant to learn. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

“What am I going to do then? Hide out in a tree house forever? Where am I supposed to go?”

“You’ll know where to go because it will be revealed. I suspect you’ve always known anyway. It’s only your impatience that gets in your way.”

“You say I’ll always be safe on the island, but I don’t feel safe,” Becca said bitterly. “You say the time of danger has passed, but it doesn’t
feel
passed.”

Diana reached for her hand. Becca had clenched it on the arm of her chair, and Diana folded her own hand over the fist she’d made. She held it there as she spoke, saying, “Your place is here on the island as it has been from the first. Nothing and no one will be able to take you from it.”

“How do you know that?” Becca demanded.

“It’s what I see.”

“How do you see that?”

“Because I’m patient.”

• • •

BUT BECCA WAS
not. How could she be with so much about her life at stake? She sought a form of reassurance that went beyond the kind words of a woman whose touch lifted her fears and soothed her spirit. She went from Diana’s to the library in Langley. Inside the library, she sought the computers and typed Jeff Corrie’s name into a search engine.

As before the Internet gave her a number of choices when it came to Jeff. The first dealt with his “investment” firm, an old interview with Jeff and his partner Connor and what they were supposedly doing to enhance the financial lives of San Diego retirees. Then there were the articles about the good works Jeff and Connor had done in the San Diego area in order to drum up business, raise their profile, and encourage people’s trust in them. Then there were the first rumblings of suspicions. Then there were the disappearances.

There were three disappearances that Jeff was now being questioned about, according to the San Diego newspaper. Jeff Corrie’s wife and stepdaughter were missing as well as his business partner Connor. As was logical in this kind of situation, the last man standing was the first man under suspicion. Jeff was the common denominator in the lives of the people who’d disappeared. The police found this intriguing. So, it seemed, had the FBI and the IRS.

Jeff had done the wise thing. He’d talked to no one but his lawyer. Still, things were looking bad. His investment firm’s doors were closed and its books were under scrutiny. As for Jeff himself? He hadn’t been arrested for anything yet. But the fact that he wouldn’t talk about a thing was making him look suspicious.

Arrest him, arrest him was what Becca thought. But for what? Unless she went back to San Diego and spoke to the police, there was not yet a thing for them to arrest him for. And even if she went back, what was she supposed to tell them? “I hear people’s thoughts,” she would say. “And I heard his and he killed Connor and that’s why we left.”

“So where’s your mom?” they would ask her, looking at each other the way people do when they’re ready to call the guys with the straitjackets to take someone away.

“She left me on Whidbey Island and she hasn’t got back yet.”

“When did she leave you there?”

“Last September.”

“What? To fend for yourself? A kid? What was she so desperate about and what the hell was she doing abandoning you? D’you know just
how
against the law that is? Where is this woman? We’ll need to find her.”

“It’s not like it looks. See, we knew what Jeff had done. We knew.”

“Yet you didn’t report him. Why?”

And then they’d be back to hearing thoughts.

What Becca concluded from her Internet search was that, despite Diana’s words, Jeff Corrie was still out there. He was looking and he was waiting. Until things changed for him, he would be intent on finding her any way that he could.

• • •

AT LEAST, BECCA
thought with resignation, the weather had improved . . . a bit. Middle of May and she’d thought the Pacific Northwest rain
might
have let up by now. It hadn’t done that, but at least the temperatures were rising. So, she told herself, if she had to stay in the tree house for a few more months, she could let go of worrying about how to keep the woodstove going day and night.

Finding a place to shower would be rough once school was out, however. But if she kept working for Ivar there was always a chance that she could shower at Heart’s Desire in exchange for taking on the bathroom cleaning duties. Or perhaps at Derric’s? No. That would always be a problem because of his dad. While she’d finally told Derric where she was staying, he’d sworn not to tell either one of his parents, and they were sure to ask him what was going on with Becca King if she started using their shower on a regular basis.

She would need to get creative, she thought. It was turning out that being creative was what being on her own was all about.

She was thinking of all this on her way through the woods. She’d gone from Diana’s to Heart’s Desire for her afternoon work, and now at day’s end, she was ready to rest. She’d stowed her bike in its hiding spot beneath the trees, and as she hiked along the trail from Newman Road to the tree house, she could see the new spring growth around her everywhere. She could see, especially, how it was beginning to encroach on the path from Newman Road. She would have to borrow some clippers from Ivar in order to cut back the salal, the blackberry, and the huckleberry bushes that were stretching out to obscure the trail. Ralph Darrow would soon be doing the same thing on his other forest trails, she decided. She was going to have to be extremely careful with her comings and goings now.

As always, she paused when she got to the clearing with its twined hemlocks and the tree house in their embrace. She listened but heard no sound other than the usual birds and the angry chattering of squirrels warning each other of her approach. She made for the stairs, then, and climbed quickly to the trapdoor in the deck. It felt oddly good to be home, and how additionally odd it was to think of this little shelter as home at all.

She opened the door. She was surprised to see that Seth was inside. He was sitting on the camping stool next to the stove, not doing a thing, which was completely unlike him. Usually he’d be playing his guitar or he’d be struggling with his battered copy of
Siddartha
or he’d be messing with the woodstove. Something more than just sitting, though.

She said, “Hey! I didn’t see your car on the road. Did you come from your grandpa’s?”

Seth didn’t have a chance to reply. A gravelly voice said, “He did indeed. Come in and join us.”

Becca gulped. She stepped inside and shut the door. Doing this, she saw Ralph Darrow sitting on her camping cot. He wore a suede jacket and a wide-brimmed hat that made him look a little like Wild Bill Hickock, since his sandy gray hair was long and flowing and his mustache was impressive. Becca looked from him to Seth to him again. She didn’t know what to say.

This turned out to be no problem, since Ralph was the one to do the talking. He said, “You must be my grandson’s ‘tutor,’ she of the jealous boyfriend and the applied math.”

Becca said nothing. She was straining for whispers and it didn’t take long to hear them.
When will he ever . . . in it deep so she might as well . . . age of this child . . . has no idea how much trouble it can . . .
didn’t give her much to go on as to how she was supposed to answer. She went for part of the truth and hoped for the best.

“We’ve figured it out, me and Derric,” she said eagerly. “That’s my boyfriend. See, he didn’t get why there were things I wouldn’t tell him. Not about Seth but other things. And he was upset about me tutoring Seth and
I
got upset and it went from there.” She cast a glance at Seth. His face gave her nothing.

“I expect that’s true as far as it goes,” Ralph Darrow said, “but the way I see things”—he looked around the tree house’s single room—“explaining the finer points of applied math doesn’t require a sleeping bag, a Coleman stove, a lantern, flashlights, and a pile of groceries. All of which, aside from the groceries, happen to belong to me.”

She said, dumbly as she was to think later, “It gets dark early in the winter here. So we needed the lantern—”

“Beck,” this from Seth. “He knows. He came out here ’cause that’s what he does when the weather gets better. Just to check and make sure everything’s okay.”

“Care of one’s property,” Ralph Darrow told her. “It’s part of the responsibility of ownership. Now this little place I consider my property. What do you consider it?”

She swallowed. “I know it’s yours.”