I wanted to know more.
Pixie and Frank dropped at exactly the same time.
I wanted to know if Dean, Sammy, and Lawford had dropped, too.
That question would have to wait.
“Son,” Dad said. I’d forgotten he was there. “You can let Pixie go now.”
I couldn’t stop staring at Frank joking with the medics about blacking out and how, if Sammy ever found out about it, he’d never hear the end of jabs about fainting couches and smelling salts.
Who were these giants? Why did they play by different rules than the rest of us?
“Henry,” Dad tried again. “Come away now. Pixie’s got good people looking after her. Her long night is over. Ours is just beginning.”
I turned around reluctantly. Farther up the beach at our house, a different kind of crew was walking to and from a prone form in the sand, slowly and methodically. Meredith had retreated to the patio and out of the rain.
Now that the emergency with the Grays was over, Lyudmila’s death seemed to have hit my sister hard. Someone had thrown a scratchy blanket over her shoulder, and she alternately clutched it and blew her nose into it.
Behind her, the rest of our team had come out to witness the final progress of my stepmother.
Yuri wasn’t there, but Joyce was talking into a headset and tapping on an electronic tablet. Our cook Hannah was wiping her hands over and over on a clean apron, and Edgar, who was still for once, had taken the baseball cap off his head and held it over his heart as a sign of respect.
I’d always liked Edgar.
Dad was trying to give me a strong smile, but it wasn’t working. He hadn’t bothered to put the hood up on his raincoat, and his bald head was getting pelted. As the rain dripped off his nose and down his chin, it seemed as if it was taking pieces of his face with it. He was dissolving in front of my eyes.
He was going to need my help.
This wasn’t the first time we’d done this, the two men of the family protecting what was left.
I took his hand in mine. It was time to go.
nine
PIXIE
I am sitting on a log on a beach that is mine and not mine at the same time. It has all the features of Useless Bay but also possibilities that make it foreign.
A man sits next to me.
He has a long face, weather-beaten, and white hair pulled into a ponytail. He seems out of place. He wears a uniform I’m not familiar with, with a navy coat and white pants, worn but in decent repair.
Behind me, I can hear people barking orders I don’t understand. Timbers groan. Something massive is back there, but I can’t see it for the fog.
The keel hit bottom before the anchor did, the man sitting next to me says. He has a British accent. Upper-class.
Captain Vancouver thinks this place is useless, but I don’t.
I recognize this man’s profile from somewhere, a book, a display. He’s someone important. I don’t know how he comes to be sitting here next to me. There must be something about the fog . . .
I love gentle shores, the man says. A wonderful place for children. Much better than Deception Pass to the north. I almost didn’t think we’d make it through those waters.
I know who he is.
Mr. Whidbey? I say.
He doesn’t acknowledge his name, but I know it is him.
Behind us the noise continues of people trying to right the HMS Discovery. I know, without seeing it, that it has sailed into Useless Bay at low tide and that the keel has hit the sand before the anchor and now the ship is tipped to the side.
In front of us, the night is lit up red. Everyone is arrayed in front of me, as if on a stage. No one is moving. There’s Lyudmila’s body on the sand. There’s Henry, sitting, his father wrapped around him. Meredith and Joyce hang back. There’s Frank, prone, and there’s another body next to his. One with long blond hair that can only be mine.
Curious.
I wish I could know you and your brothers better, Marilyn. Alas, there’s little time.
You know me? You know us?
He smiles sadly but does not look at me straight on. He looks at the sea. I think he must’ve spent a life looking at the sea, gauging its moods.
I don’t know how he knows my name or about my brothers, but I have suspicions. All I know is that I trust him. He has a trustworthy profile.
I screwed up, I say. I let Grant get away.
Hush, child, he says. It’s too late for that now. She’s coming.
Who’s coming?
The Sea.
I know he isn’t talking about the rising tide but something else.
At first, I think it’s just bulb kelp rising from the bay, but then a head of human hair emerges lightly and, underneath that, a woman’s face. She has features that arrange themselves into something familiar. Her clothes are tattered, and she walks with a driftwood staff, smooth and whorled, at the top of which rests a whole blue-gray Japanese fishing float.
She is beautiful.
I love her but am afraid of her at the same time. There can be no question that we are in the presence of immense power.
Who is she?
Hush, now, the man repeats.
She comes for Lyudmila first.
The Sea kneels over her empty body and caresses her white face. I can’t tell if the Sea is crying or not, but she is certainly grieving. She whispers one word in Lyudmila’s ear and stands to her full height. With her staff, she touches Lyudmila’s dead heart.
A white light comes from within Lyudmila’s chest. It illuminates the night. And then it floats away on the dark sky and is gone. And I know, somehow, that everything that Lyudmila was was contained in that light, and the body that’s left lying on the beach is nothing but an empty shell.
It is now my turn.
The Sea is halfway down the sand to where my body lies, and I’m not ready for her. I’m not ready to be launched into the night the way Lyudmila was.
I’m trembling. I want the man sitting next to me to keep me safe. I reach for his hand.
Help me, I say. I’m afraid.
I can’t spare you this, Marilyn. I wish I could.
The Sea is closer to my body now. Two paces away. She parts the people around me. They move aside easily. I think: Of course they do. The Sea always gets her way.
She kneels over me, where I lie thick and bloated, unable to get air, a useless thing.
Please, do something, I beg the man sitting next to me.
All we can do is pray for mercy, he says.
I don’t know how. Mom never taught us.
The man grasps my hand and starts mumbling words I don’t understand.
But then I see Henry’s distraught profile, and I know I shouldn’t pray for myself—I should pray for those I care about, and how my light winking out will affect them.
Mine shouldn’t be the second bad death in one night for Henry. The first was enough. He is going to need help finding his brother, too, and I already messed up on that score.
So I start praying.
Please, I beg the beautiful woman who is bending over my body, give me mercy. I know I should’ve helped Grant more. I need time to atone for my mistake. And Henry needs my help. That’s what I do. I find lost things.
The man sitting next to me squeezes my hand. Stay strong, Marilyn, he says. The Sea is known for her compassion. You might have a fighting chance.
The beautiful woman is crouched over my body the way she was with Lyudmila’s. She taps my heart with the fishing float, but no light emerges from me.
She leans in closer and whispers one word in my ear that I cannot hear and will spend what will seem like an eternity trying to catch. It will roll toward me like foam, and roll away from me the same way.
I know I have been granted a reprieve, but with it I am being ripped away from this place as if I’m on a current.
No! Not yet! I say. I try to clutch the man’s hand, but it is slipping away from me.
Take heart
, Marilyn. You have a difficult path to walk. But know that I walk with you.
I wake with a jolt to the heart.
I gasp for air.
Henry is rocking me, saying it’s going to be all right, but he doesn’t know what’s coming.
ten
HENRY
The sun was coming up behind us on Monday morning as Dad and I sat on the patio and answered questions. Meredith hovered, trying to get Dad to come inside. “Please, at least get warmed up and have a cup of coffee. Hannah’s made a fresh pot.”
“No thanks,” Dad said. “I need to see this through.”
“This” meant Lyudmila’s body being carted away on a backboard.
Joyce hovered, too, talking into her headset. “Good news, Rupe,” she told Dad. “There’s a vacant plot in the cemetery where Jimi Hendrix is buried. Do you want marble or granite for the headstone?”
I failed to see how this was good news.
Dad stared blankly beyond her to the lapping waves. “You decide,” he said.
“Marble, then,” Joyce said. “Granite’s more for kitchen counters. Do you want a particular poem or a line from a song engraved along with her name?”
Dad looked at her without really seeing her.
“Maybe something with a firebird in it,” I suggested. “That was her signature dance.”
“Excellent choice,” Joyce said, as if I’d picked out a vintage wine. She walked off to make the arrangements.
Me? I stayed outside with Dad, almost wishing I could be as numb as he was.
Lyudmila’s story may have been over, but we still had no idea what had happened to Grant, and that worried me.
There were five round scars on the palms of my hands. They were old and thick and didn’t fade. Sometimes when I was under stress, like now, I picked at them. I had to content myself with levering up the skin around the edges, but if I could, I would pull back full sheets of skin and leave my hands completely raw.
Where was Grant?
It was around seven, the tide was out, and there was still no sign of my little brother. Where Dad and I sat on the patio, we were protected from the rain but not the wind. We watched people comb the beach for something worse than sand dollars.
I felt lower than the waterline.
After Lyudmila’s body was taken away, we stayed there.
I tried to remind Dad that Grant had run away under worse circumstances and that we’d always gotten him back.
“Remember the boy soldiers in Sudan? Remember them? And what about that cartel in Venezuela? The fried guinea pig on a stick?”
If Dad needed cheering up, this wasn’t the way to go about it. Not with his dead wife being carted away to the coroner’s. He couldn’t take another tragedy.
But Grant wasn’t a tragedy yet, just a ticking clock. “The first few hours are critical,” people in uniform kept saying, but it was a sliding scale as to what “few” meant. The last time anyone had seen Grant was when Pixie had rowed him out to the bay the day before, around eleven A.M. When we mentioned this fact to law enforcement officials, they started acting squirrelly and telling us not to give up hope.
They asked us what shoes he was wearing, as if he were a toddler swiped at Disneyland. That didn’t sound right to me. Grant was ten years old and an active boy. If he were kidnapped, it wasn’t going to be by someone who wanted to raise him as their own. It would be by someone who wanted lots of cash.
I thought of Lyudmila.
Maybe he had seen something he shouldn’t have.
Maybe whoever it was didn’t want cash. Maybe they wanted his silence.
“So we’re definitely treating this as a kidnapping and not a second killing?” I asked Sheriff Lundquist. I didn’t really want the answer, but I needed information.
“Right now, we’re not ruling anything out,” he said, which didn’t seem particularly helpful. I wanted him to have at least some answers, but he didn’t.
I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the guy to solve a case of this magnitude. I’m sure he was a nice man, but he seemed completely overwhelmed.
And he wasn’t the only one.
Dad, a man who had goals and a mission, and made sure we had our own goals and that we revisited them each year, stared blank-eyed across the water to Point No Point.
But then a man came into our lives who seemed to know what he was doing.
He was large, but not in the carved-from-the-mountains way the Grays were large. This guy had extra padding around the middle, gelled hair, and a trim mustache. He came out to the patio, flashed a badge, and introduced himself as Special Agent Wade Armstrong, FBI.
The guy did not blink. It was unsettling. I felt as though he knew every single lie I’d ever told my entire life.
I picked at my scars, digging more deeply into flesh.
He pulled up a patio chair without being invited. “I know you folks have already been through a lot. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Dad nodded absently.
“But I’m going to ask you to retrace your steps one more time for me.”
Dad was silent, having retreated into whatever world he was in where his wife was still alive and his three children safely accounted for.
Agent Armstrong looked to me.
“Henry, is it? How about you? Could you walk me through the timeline of yesterday between eleven and five thirty?”
“Of course,” I said. “Dad was off-island at eleven. He’d forgotten a meeting. There was a kid from Rwanda in town who wanted to bring electricity to his village. It was a big photo op. ‘The Kid Trying to Save Africa with Electricity.’ So Dad took the helicopter to the mainland. Grant wanted to stay here, so Lyudmila and the rest of us stayed with him.”
“Who else was here?”
“From the family?” I said. “Meredith. Also our travel team: Joyce, Hannah, Edgar, Yuri. Come to think of it, if you’d had a meeting, Joyce should’ve been with you, shouldn’t she?” I asked Dad.
Dad rallied enough to act uncharacteristically cagey. “Normally, yes,” he said, “but she’s just been through a tough breakup. She said she wanted a few hours to walk along the beach. It’s the least I could do. Joyce is my admin,” Dad explained. “She never takes time off.”
“I see,” agent Armstrong said. “So everyone was here but you. And you came back when?”
I opened my mouth to tell him three, when I noticed something.
Twenty yards down the beach, one of the Gray brothers stopped inspecting the beach, stood up, and looked toward the lagoon.
Fifty yards away, another Gray did the same thing, as if some kind of sonar had pinged him.
The two Grays started running toward the lagoon.
“Something’s happening,” I said, and took off after them.
I sprinted down the patio and around the house.
There was a bunch of people crowded behind a police cordon at the edge of our property. As soon as they saw me, the questions started flying like bottle rockets. “Henry! Over here! Henry! Do you care to comment?” I heard the word lies. I heard the name Marilyn. I heard the word diet, or maybe just the word die.
I stopped at the trailhead that led to the path through the lagoon. Where were the Gray brothers? It wasn’t like they were easy to miss.
There. All four of them were down in the lagoon itself, waist-deep in the muck. I hadn’t seen them at first because their hair looked like beach grass. I ran down the trail and parted the branches of the Scotch broom, afraid of what I’d see.
I looked closer. The muck itself wasn’t all brown. Parts of it were tinted red. They were examining something that was floating. From the tilt of their heads, I could tell it wasn’t good. This wasn’t their “Interesting . . . a bird of prey dropped a spiny dogfish” head tilt. This was much, much worse.
Oh no. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. This was no horror movie. This was real. They had my brother down there, and he was so bad off that Frank wasn’t even trying to revive him.
&nbs
p; “Dean?” I asked softly.
One of the four heads shot up.
“You don’t need to see this, Henry,” Dean said.
I was tired of hearing that.
There was no easy path down, just rocks covered with barnacles. Finally, I got down on my butt and slipped down, tearing my jeans and skin. Soon I was waist-deep in the muck with them.
“What is it?”
The thing they were looking at was Grant’s size, but not his shape. There was a long, floppy ear, and there was a paw, but the body was practically unrecognizable, it was so riddled with holes. Those holes weren’t even well placed along the body. It was just one great big spray of them, letting out blood and intestines and jellied eyes.
This gory, perforated rag was all that was left of Patience.
“Jesus,” I said, sick and relieved at the same time.
“You really didn’t need to see this. You’ve already got enough to deal with,” one of them said. I was almost positive it was Dean, because he was usually the first to respond when they were in a group—a trait that had landed him in the Island County sheriff’s office the night before.
“Jesus. I don’t know how we’re going to tell Pix,” another said. Sammy. You could see part of a scar along his hairline. He had a bad motocross accident a couple of years ago that nearly killed him.
I looked at the rag with holes that used to be Pixie’s pet. I should’ve been more shocked, I suppose, but after the night I’d had, and given the state she was in, it was like looking at roadkill.
“Who would do this?” I said, more to myself than the Grays.
“Someone who didn’t want to be found,” said a voice from the trail above us.
I looked up to the dike. I was so caught up in the Grays’ drama, it hadn’t occurred to me I was being followed. But there was agent Armstrong, standing in a black raincoat, looking ready to unleash a whole lot of fury on whatever sick whack job had reduced Patience to a pile of holes.
He’d remembered a piece I’d forgotten. Patience was the best scent hound in the state. If you didn’t want her on your trail, this was one way to get rid of her.
As the rest of us stood there, wallowing, I noticed that agent Armstrong didn’t bother to climb down and get into the muck with us. He didn’t need to. He had perfect command of the situation from above.
Useless Bay Page 7
