I mean, really worry.
Grant’s disappearance was a different kind of deception.
five
PIXIE
All Henry had to say was “Yuri” and Patience forgot to stay. She shot off down the trail as though she’d been fired from a cannon. Oh boy oh boy oh boy we’re going to find things!
Yuri had done his best to continue Patience’s training where that troll Hal Liston had left off. And Yuri didn’t charge us, which scored him major points in the Gray family playbook. Never mind that he had a glower that made him look like he wanted to poison you with sarin gas.
And we couldn’t argue with the results. In a part of the world filled with some of the worst smells on earth, Patience could tell the difference between a dead seagull and a dead cormorant. She did not eat either of them, thanks to Yuri, which was nothing short of a miracle.
There was another, worse part of Yuri’s dog training that I didn’t want to think about now.
I was twelve years old the night we got the first call that wasn’t the neighbors saying “Get your beast to stop yowling,” but instead Sheriff Lundquist saying “How good a scent hound is Patience? We’re missing a toddler in the woods around Deception Pass. The parents are hysterical. Can you come?”
I remember being skeptical. There were miles of trails at Deception Pass. And, thanks to our Red Cross courses, we knew the kind of dedication it took to be a search-and-rescue team. It required months of training that Patience and I didn’t have. True, Yuri had tried to plug the gaps, but it wasn’t systematic.
But Mom took the phone away from me and told Sheriff Lundquist we’d be right there. Then, after rousting my brothers, she turned to me and said, “That’s somebody’s baby who’s missing. Those parents are so desperate they’re probably praying. And since no Jesus is coming, you’d better get off your ass and get going.”
Mom was firmly antireligious because of all the people of faith who had gathered around her with casseroles when she was a new mother of quintuplets and promised to help . . . if only she’d repent and admit she’d been a whore to get herself knocked up to begin with.
“Hypocrites, all of them,” she said. “So you be good to people while you’re alive, and when you’re dead, you’ll be compost. Now let’s go help that family find their baby.”
This was before we had a system and had our kits with everything we might need in an emergency; so the five of us just had flashlights, and Frank had his roadside-assistance kit.
It was raining hard when we got to the ranger station at Deception Pass. Sheriff Lundquist briefed us on what had happened. The parents, Mr. and Mrs. Goodman, and their son, Martin, had been day-tripping, and they had let Martin down from his backpack for a minute—just one minute, honestly—and when they turned around, he was gone.
Now the parents were inside the ranger station, hugging each other close. Mrs. Goodman was red and poofy from crying. They were drinking hot chocolate, which Mom thought should’ve been spiked with Jack Daniel’s.
Outside, Sheriff Lundquist handed me a flare gun and a freezer bag with a cloth diaper that had been pooped in. Full of good smells.
“Now comes the test,” Sheriff Lundquist said. “Let’s see if this dog really is useless. When and if you find the kid, send up the flare. We’ll find you.”
I alternated between not optimistic (I had the world’s stupidest beast) and freaked (the kid had been missing more than eight hours—what would I find?). But I knew either way I would never be the same after that night. Either the people in uniforms gathered around me watching my dog sniff poop would remember what a failure I had been and not call me again, or I would find my first body and I’d be on the hook for the next missing hiker.
I opened the freezer bag. I thrust it under Patience’s nose. “Go,” I said.
And she was off.
I wasn’t stupid enough to let her off the leash. Who knew what kind of sniff she’d find if I did? There were just too many distractions. So I held onto her as she plowed through the undergrowth and ran up and down muddy trails, my brothers hurrying after me. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, Dean had the presence of mind to mark the trail by breaking off branches.
Finally, Patience stopped at the top of a slope that had been eroded and went straight down into the churning water. Halfway down, a toddler, too weary to flail, was caught on a branch.
“Aroo, aroo, aroo!” Patience bayed, and pawed at the muddy ground. I pulled her back.
“Harosho,” I said. Which is Russian for good, a term Yuri had taught me. But I had no treats for her. A major oversight. Those would have to come later.
“Martin! Martin Goodman!” Dean called down. He didn’t get a coherent response, but there was a thin mewling coming from the kid. “Pix, send up the flare. He’s too precarious. We’re going to have to move him. Form a chain, and let’s pull him up.”
“Damn it,” Sammy said. I’m sure he wanted to slide all the way down on his butt. “Can I at least be on the end?”
I could see Dean’s thoughts churning like the water below. “Yes,” he said. We definitely didn’t want Sammy on anchor. Too jumpy.
So after stepping into a clearing and sending up a flare, I wrapped myself around a Douglas fir. Frank grabbed my waist, then Lawford, then Dean, then finally Sammy, who was able to unhook little Martin from the salal and hand him up to Dean, then Lawford, then Frank, then me. As soon as we were all up top, Frank laid him flat on the ground and checked him over for broken bones and hypothermia, both of which he had.
But he was alive.
Alive enough to spread the word in the papers the next day that he’d been saved by a race of giants and one very wet princess.
Princess?
Princess?
Should we have talked poop? Should we have talked about smelly dogs? I wasn’t exactly sitting at home spinning straw into gold while my brothers got out and rescued him. How long was it going to take me to live that “princess” comment down?
If I could’ve prayed without Mom’s noticing, I would’ve prayed for a different superpower. It was bad enough being the Girl. Now I was the princess, too. I didn’t see how it could get any worse.
No, that’s not right. Martin Goodman could’ve been dead. That’s how it could’ve been worse.
• • •
After that first rescue, my brothers and I got more calls, and we got better at finding what was lost.
Sometimes it was okay. I found hikers or paddle-boarders who were cold and wet and didn’t know where they were, or some adrenaline junkie who’d broken a bone, required a splint, and couldn’t get cell reception to ask for it. Stupid I could handle. Injured I could handle. Scared I could handle.
It was carrying the weight of things broken beyond repair that I hated. Adult or child, it didn’t matter. They were always so heavy. And even though my brothers were quick to help, I somehow felt I carried that weight alone.
No matter what configuration my brothers and I took, I was the one with the scent hound—now the best in the state, according to some—so I was the one who took the lead. I was the one who handed these broken things to inconsolable families who, if they noticed me at all, would forever associate me with the senseless death of someone they loved.
If I was a princess, I was a princess of muddy, overex-posed death.
All this went through my mind as Henry and I followed Patience on the path through the lagoon to Yuri’s guard shack.
Beyond the guard shack was what I thought of as the “Shepherd compound.” It wasn’t just a McMansion—it was the main house, a guest house they called “The Breakers,” a garage where they kept their car and rowboat, and a sports court.
It was a lot of space for Grant to find a place to hide, but I didn’t think he was anywhere inside. Especially not after what had happened between us earlier. And I did not want to carry Grant home.
Especially not to Henry, who was a good guy, one with a cleft in his chin and sprightly eyes an
d curly hair I always wanted to run my fingers through—even though he may have been acting like a butthead earlier. But hey, if my face was bruised and swollen like that, I might act like a butthead, too.
At least now he seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation.
Me? I understood it hours ago, when Grant had pleaded with me to ferry him across the great waters.
As we approached the Shepherd property, I heard something on the wind. Stay . . . Good girl . . . and the gnashing of teeth. Even though so far he’d visited me only in my nightmares and I was now wide awake, it sounded like the troll was abroad, creeping his way up from the depths.
I really hoped Grant hadn’t tried to cross the sound in the rowboat on his own. Not only because some cruise ship might smash him to smithereens in the shipping lanes but also because something might chew him up before he even got that far.
While I was listening to voices on the wind, Henry noticed that something on the Shepherd property was wrong.
“The gate wasn’t up when we left a few minutes ago,” he said.
It was getting dark out. Henry waved the flashlight at the gate, and sure enough, he was right.
The Shepherds had a red-and-white gate arm that separated their manicured land from the lagoon behind them. The gate arm was useless since, if you wanted to trespass, all you needed to do was climb over or under or go around. The family relied mostly on CCTV for security and, when they weren’t here, some rent-a-cop to patrol the main house and outbuildings, including the garage and the Breakers, and make sure no one was squatting in one of them.
We checked on things, too, but we had other things to do, like homework and basketball practice. People as wealthy as the Shepherds needed more protection than the five of us could provide.
And we didn’t really understand the gate. It may have been useless, but it was almost always down.
Not now.
Patience was sitting in front of the shack, which meant Yuri hadn’t given her three tasks yet.
That was his M.O. Three jobs, then a treat.
As Henry and I got closer and opened the door, Patience let up with the “I’m such a good girl” routine, nudged the already-open door, and started sniffing inside Yuri’s shack. I heard a crash, then a whuffle.
We glanced around. Yuri was nowhere to be seen. But there was an upturned bucket of Liver Snax on the floor, the contents of which Patience was eating so fast I was pretty sure we’d see it in her barf later.
Henry yanked Patience out of the shack and examined the interior.
There was a bank of twelve monitors that displayed different rooms in Henry’s family compound—the main house, the garage, and the Breakers.
The monitors were all still. There was no movement in any of them.
“Where’s Yuri?” I said.
“He’s probably looking for my brother, too.”
“Would he just leave like that? I mean, shouldn’t someone at least be here to take over for him?”
There was almost always someone sitting here—even if they were just eating Doritos and watching a Seahawks game on TV.
“Weird,” Henry admitted, but he wasn’t really paying attention to me. He was looking at the bank of monitors. What he’d seen must have impressed him, because he got into one of his hyperattentive states, where the rest of the world fell away.
Which was good for me, because while the monitors occupied Henry, I found Yuri’s dirty little secret.
And I swiped it.
Yuri usually carried a standard-issue .44, plus a Taser and a club. But stashed in his narrow uniform closet was a Kalashnikov. He had even showed it to us once or twice. The thing always freaked me out, reminding me that the Shepherds were more than rich—that they were so rich they needed protecting. The bay windows in their estate? Bulletproof glass. And Kevlar under the carpets.
That I could handle. But I hated to think of the kind of situation where Yuri might need to fire an automatic weapon. Especially here, on the bay, where the water was so shallow and people flew kites and rode horses. Not that we didn’t have our share of the darker side of things, but by the time they reached our shore, the damage was already done. The ships had come un-moored and drifted, the harbor seal was half eaten, the boots belonged to suicides who had died months before, washed down from that bridge in Vancouver.
Lawford had once loaded and unloaded the magazine in Yuri’s Kalashnikov and later pronounced it “a piece of crap.” He said it was so inaccurate you could be standing two feet away from your target and not hit it.
Sammy, on the other hand, said it was “wicked sick”—so easy to fire that even a child could use it, and many around the world did.
I swiped the wicked sick weapon from Yuri’s hiding place, just because I couldn’t stand thinking of it there, hiding in a place that he’d shown at least five other people.
When Henry wasn’t looking, I winged it into some Scotch broom.
Something was coming. I could taste it in the air, hear it on the wind. All I could think to do was hide things for later, when I needed them.
So I camouflaged the Kalashnikov in such a way that you’d know it was there only if you looked for it. It must’ve been a bitch to shoulder, although I had no intention of doing that unless someone threatened Grant.
I didn’t know where he’d gone, but he was the son of a wealthy man. Easy prey. I imagined him chained to a radiator, force-fed Froot Loops every other day, wallowing in his own pee, forced to poop in a bucket.
Even worse, I could practically feel his weight in my arms as I carried him home and knew that, skinny as he was, he would break me.
Firing a Kalashnikov would be nothing compared with that.
When I went back to the guard shack, Henry was still staring at Yuri’s monitors. I doubted he even knew I’d been gone. He was like his dad that way—put a puzzle in front of him and the rest of the world melted away.
He was studying the monitor that pointed at the garage.
I didn’t see what was so exciting that it held his attention, but Henry was Henry.
“Where is everyone?” I said. “Is Lyudmila around?”
As far as I knew, Mr. Shepherd was still searching my house for Grant, which was the logical thing to do, even though Grant wasn’t there. But that left several people unaccounted for. Not just the Shepherd family, but its entourage as well: Yuri; Joyce, the super-admin; Hannah, the cook (because apparently the family couldn’t even boil hot dogs on their own); and Edgar, who ran errands with a “Yes, sir” and made a hell of a spirulina smoothie.
“Wait,” Henry said. He pointed to the monitor displaying the garage. “Do you see that?”
I looked to the monitor where he was pointing. There was the Lexus taking up most of the space, the rowboat in the opposite corner, the walls hung with kayaks and life preservers. I didn’t understand what he was seeing.
“What’s happening?”
Henry didn’t look away from the bank of monitors. “The CCTV has been set on a loop.”
He toggled two keys on a master keyboard.
Suddenly I understood.
In one picture the wooden rowboat—the one I’d used earlier—was in its correct place on the side of the garage.
In the second, it wasn’t.
Before.
After.
Before.
After.
I didn’t need to look at the time stamp to know which picture the after was.
The boat was gone.
Oh no. Grant wouldn’t. Not by himself.
Earlier, when I’d talked to him in that rowboat, with a light mist just beginning to fall around us, crabs hadn’t been on his mind.
Escape had.
He’d been so scared by something, he hadn’t wanted to go back—not even to Henry. That, along with the fact that the security tapes had been tampered with, made me think that Mr. Shepherd had been right to involve the law. There was something at stake here that went beyond feuds about property bou
ndaries or one little boy who deliberately sabotaged his busy father’s schedule every Sunday night.
I hadn’t understood earlier when we were out in the rowboat. I just thought he wanted to do the impossible, like my brothers and I did every day.
Please don’t take me back, Pix, Grant had said when we’d rowed as far as the Shepherds’ orange buoy. How hard would it be to row across the Sound?
It looks easier than it actually is. At some point, the depth drops off. The closest land off-island is Point No Point. To get there, you’d have to go through the shipping lanes. And you’d have to get past the wreck.
What wreck?
Never mind. Why do you want to go anyway? You’ve got nothing to prove.
I want to disappear.
I should’ve been more sensitive to him and asked more questions about why he wanted to get away. But he seemed to want to disappear every Sunday. So, instead, I said:
Disappear? Like that? Not on my watch, dude.
I was already sprinting out of the shack and running the perimeter of the Shepherd house, over the flagstone patio that surrounded the main building, eight motion-detector lights flicking on as I went.
I vaguely heard Henry calling, “Pix? What’s going on?”
There was one thing I needed to check before I pulled in Patience to start sniffing.
The buoy. The orange one that marked where the Shepherds dropped their crab traps. I couldn’t see the rowboat attached to it. But what was that? A knot of rope? Something was there. It was even darker now. I had to make sure.
I dropped my kit at the end of the Shepherds’ boardwalk and was already stripping off my rain gear and sweats before I got to the water’s edge. I dove and cleaved the bay like a knife.
Three feet of water. That was all it was. But the water was so cold it sent a drag with each stroke. It felt as if my arms and legs were twisted up in bulb kelp.
When I reached the buoy, I stood up. The water reached my waist.
I felt underneath. There. Thick cable covered with barnacles. Something was attached. Something that wasn’t floating.
Useless Bay Page 4
