The Edge of the Shadows (14 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

“
R
estriction.” Derric said this to the lunch table in general as they compared notes on the fallout from the Maxwelton party. “A month and ‘you're lucky it's not longer but your mom thinks a month' . . . blah blah blah.” He unwrapped a ham sandwich and tossed the plastic into the center of the table.

Jenn McDaniels said, “That's harsh. But it's definitely better than having your mom read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to you. Twice, by the way. Like any day now I'm gonna turn into a pillar of salt. Ha. She should be so lucky.” She took a bite of her PBJ sandwich and said to Squat, “What about you?”

“I'm becoming my brother,” Squat informed them. He grabbed a carrot stick out of Jenn's meager supply and used it to pretend he was smoking a joint. “Bunch of crying. Bunch more of ‘I'm a failure as a mother.'”

“Harsher,” Jenn said.

“An appointment with Ms. Tatiana and my mom,” Hayley said.

“Harshest of all!” Jenn said, and then to Becca, “Bet
you
faced tea and cookies at Mrs. Kinsale's, didn't you?”

Becca said, “As if,” and everyone began to give her a bad time until she went on with, “Okay, okay. But it was waffles,” as a way to keep them at a distance from the conversation she'd had with Diana Kinsale in the aftermath of the Maxwelton party.

She needn't have worried. Isis Martin took up the reins of the conversation. They were at their regular lunch table, and from what Becca could hear around them in the New Commons, the Maxwelton party along with the fire was
the
topic of conversation. This wasn't surprising since so many of the kids sitting nearby had showed up at the party. And that, it turned out, was what Isis Martin wanted to talk about.

“I didn't tell
anyone
about that party,” she declared. “And you'd think I committed some major crime against humanity. Grandam was spitting bullets the whole next day. She called my mom and went on and on. You'd think we'd murdered someone.”

There was a moment of silence. Hayley was the one to say, “Someone did die, Isis.”

Isis covered her mouth with her hand. Then she said, “I didn't mean . . . But the fire started
after
we were rounded up. It was just a coincidence that someone was camping in that shack. Even Grandam said that and she was ready to accuse us of everything she could think of.”

“Do they know who he was?” Becca turned to Derric, who'd be the most likely person to know, considering his dad's job.

“Turned out to be a longtime druggie from Oak Harbor,” he told them. “He assaulted both his parents 'bout three months ago, then took off, and the cops've been looking for him ever since.”

“Loser,” Jenn said.

“He didn't deserve to die,” Hayley said quietly.

“I'm not saying he deserved it,” Jenn said. “I'm just saying he was a loser. He lit an illegal fire inside that place.”

“But so did we,” Becca pointed out.

“Our fire wasn't illegal. It was in a fire pit.”

“You know what I mean.”

They were all quiet again until Isis spoke up, saying, “Guys . . . you haven't told anyone it was my idea, have you? We're all in this together, aren't we? No way did I intend the booze to be there. It was all just something to
do
, you know? Something to do on a Saturday night? It's not like there's any place else to go or anything else to do and I meant that in the best possible way and I wasn't even drunk. Were you?”

They all looked at each other incredulously. Jenn said, “Whatever,” and stuffed half of her PBJ into her lunch bag. She said, “I'm outa here,” and in very short order, the rest of the kids decided they were, too.

• • •

DERRIC'S FOOTSTEPS WERE
slow as he and Becca walked to her next class. His arm around her shoulders was heavy. At her classroom door, he drew her to one side and told her what was wrong. “It's worse than restriction. I didn't want to say.”

Becca felt a rush of fear. “What?”

“She made me an appointment with a shrink,” he told her. “She says it's time they all ‘get to the bottom' of what's going on with me. She was all ‘you haven't been yourself in months and this is the limit.' She meant the party.”

Becca put her hand on his smooth cheek. “I'm sorry,” she told him. “But it could . . . It could be a good thing.”

“Nope. It couldn't,” he replied. “There's not a single way it could be good.”

She didn't argue. Instead, she pulled him down to her and kissed him. She thought about loving someone the way she loved this boy and how loving someone sometimes meant letting them find the path they needed to take.

• • •

BECCA TOLD HERSELF
that just because
she
was going to find out what had happened to Rejoice, it didn't mean she would have to do anything with the information. A phone call to Derric's church in the guise of having to do a report for one of her classes was enough to get her the name of the orphanage that Derric had come from: Children's Hope of Kampala. From there, she had to get her hands on a computer, and this was something she didn't want to do at school.

South Whidbey Commons wasn't a safe place since she didn't want to be seen by one of the many kids who gathered there in the afternoons. So she went to the city library, a cottage-like structure next to the city hall. Some sort of women's reading group was meeting in a room that opened up off the stacks, but that was it as far as users went that afternoon. No one was sitting at the computers, so she logged on and started her search for news of Children's Hope of Kampala and how one might discover the whereabouts of one of its orphans.

What she did discover gave her pause. The orphanage where Derric and his sister had lived had closed its doors. And the closing seemed to be permanent. She was about to follow a link to learn more when she heard, “Art class again?” at her shoulder.

She looked around. There stood Aidan Martin yet again
,
and his expression was so smug that Becca felt infuriated. She snapped, “What
is
it with you? Every time I'm working on the Internet, you turn up and it's getting creepy. Are you a stalker or something?” She jerked her ear bud from her ear and heard
if she wasn't such a poser.

Aidan smiled, apparently unoffended by being called a stalker. Becca saw why in a second when he flipped open his chemistry books and pulled a folded piece of paper from it. This he unfolded and placed over the computer's keyboard. It was one of the Have You Seen This Woman flyers.

Becca said nothing although fear shot through her. Aidan put down his backpack and rustled through it till he came up with the front section of a newspaper. She saw that this was the Everett
Herald
, from the closest large town on the mainland. He handed it to her and said, “Page five,” and although she knew what she was probably going to find there, she cooperated. Her heart started break dancing.

She saw that the paper, like the
South Whidbey Record,
had the story about Laurel Armstrong and her daughter, Hannah. The paper was running it, just like the
Record,
with the same pictures that the
Record
had used. Not for the first time, Becca felt the walls closing in on her. But she swore she wouldn't give in to this kid and whatever it was that he wanted from her. So she looked at the story and then at him. “So what?” she said.

“Kind of a bizarre coincidence.”

“What is? Look, I'm working here, Aidan, so if you have something to say just spit it out instead of creeping around and acting like you're working for the CIA.”

“I just recognized the daughter is all.” His eyes locked on hers and there was no whisper accompanying what he said, which told her his thoughts and his words were one with each other: perfect truth.

She said, “So? Call the number on the flyer then. 'Cause I don't know why you're announcing to me that you recognize some little kid in the paper.”

“That's the coincidence.”

“
What
is?”

“It's the same girl you were looking at on the Internet. You remember that, right? The one you were looking at for your art class?” He made air quotes when he said the last two words. He watched her with that smirk on his face.

The smirk replaced her fear with fury. She said, “Coincidences happen, okay? Just like the
coincidence
of you flinging around a burning piece of wood
just
before a shack catches fire and kills someone inside. Got it?”

His expression altered and along with it came
he died and I was pissed but that doesn't mean I meant bad because
 . . . which was startling in its clarity. But what was more startling was what accompanied it: less than five seconds of vision of an infant in a facing-backward car seat and a hand giving that infant a bottle. Then the vision was gone and she and Aidan were staring at each other. They held the stare for another five seconds till he turned on his heel and left the library.

Becca remained, but she was frightened. Who was this kid? she wondered. What was he really capable of? And what did it mean that she didn't even have to touch him in order to have a vision?

• • •

BECCA NEEDED TO
talk with someone about Aidan's continual intrusion into her life. Seth seemed like a godsend. When Becca arrived back at Ralph Darrow's place, she saw that Seth's VW was in the parking area. When she saw him crossing the lawn in front of his grandfather's house, she called out his name.

He was coming from the direction of the forest, Gus bounding along at his side. Gus heard her call and gave a happy yelp. He began to charge toward her in greeting, and he didn't stop when Seth shouted his name. Becca found a stick quickly because she knew the Lab was likely to knock her off her feet with his ecstatic hello. When he got close, she cried, “Gus! Go get it!” and threw the thing high into the hillside that she was descending. Gus followed his nature, which was to follow the stick. Becca continued down to Seth.

“Don't tell Grand,” Seth said as Becca joined him. “I swear, Beck. I think he's retarded.”

Becca knew he didn't mean his grandfather. “He just gets excited. Watch. He'll bring the stick back.”

They waited and Gus proved her correct although, she saw, it was an entirely different stick. When he returned to them with this prize proudly dangling from his jaws, she giggled and added, “More or less.” And then to Seth, “Whatcha up to?”

He jerked his head in the direction of the woods. “Just saying hey to Parker,” he told her. “He wasn't there, though.”

Something in his voice told Becca more was going on than a simple hello. His whisper of
telling Hayley but that would be so lame because she'd think I'm hoping
 . . . filled in the blanks. Still, she said, “Oh yeah?” in a way that told Seth he needed to 'fess up.

Seth wrested the stick from Gus and threw it back toward the hillside. He said, “Oh yeah,” and matched her tone. He added as if to clue her in on the obvious, “Me and the guys're thinking of asking him to join Triple Threat.”

“Can he do that?”

“What d'you mean?”

“Doesn't he have to go back to Canada?” She admitted to herself that she'd been thinking of Parker's return to Canada ever since she'd learned he came from Nelson. For if he went home, maybe he could search for Laurel and somehow put Becca in touch with her mom.

Seth waited for the dog's return. Gus was snuffling around the bushes on the hillside. Seth called his name impatiently. He finally said to Becca, “Yeah. I guess so.” He shot her a glance. “Okay. I was checking up on him,” he admitted.

“In the tree house?”

“That and other stuff.”
Because if that guy meant fires when he said watch out no way do I want Hayley near him.

Beyond her pleasure at the absolute distinctness of the whisper, Becca knew that Seth might well have discovered something important. She asked him about this.

He told her about a phone call he'd made to the bass player in BC Django 21 and what he'd learned from him. He said, “And don't tell me it was dumb to call because no way am I letting Hayley get involved with some pyro who's gonna mess with her mind. She could end up following him to Canada and wrecking her life.”

Becca knew he was lying to himself, at least in part. Seth wasn't over Hayley no matter what he said. But she also knew there was nothing she could do about this since she'd take the same steps to protect Derric if she had to.

She said, “I get it. Just . . . Why were you checking up on him in the woods?”

“Perfect place for him to torch if that's what he's into. Or to hide his gear. Or . . . I don't know. I just needed to see. 'Cause if he's hiding who he really is, it could mean anything.”

The whole idea of hiding gave Becca the opening to talk to Seth about Aidan Martin. She told him her concerns. She kept the information to feeling stalked, to becoming scared, and to worrying about his interest in Hannah Armstrong. She said, “He's really strange, Seth. He's always there and he's always watching and he keeps turning up . . .”

“Maybe he's hot for you.”

“That's not it.”

“Bet he never turns up when Derric's there. Does he?”

“No, but—”

“Rest my case, then. Look, some dudes don't have a clue how to approach a girl. They're thinking how hot she is and they want to know her and they're total klutzes.”

“That's
not
what's going on. He's more like one of those kids who shoots up a high school.”

Seth took this in, gazing down at his sandals. “You think that, you got to tell someone.”