She called me—not a text, an actual call—and told me not to worry. There was plenty of manpower, and she was sure I must be going stir-crazy without a job to focus on. Sammy was on his way.
I watched her from a distance as she talked. Her speech was punctuated by grunts, I realized, because she was shoveling dirt.
I looked at the lagoon separating her house from mine. All that muck. Dad had wanted to fence it. When we’d first bought this house, before we knew the Grays, he wanted to build a barrier so they couldn’t get through. Not to the lagoon, not to the bay, both of which were legally ours.
And now I thought of what a mistake that would’ve been. Both to keep the Grays out of their natural habitat and to put a fence between us. Now we were so intertwined I wasn’t sure where the Shepherds ended and the Grays began.
We were lucky that Grant had stumbled onto the Grays six years ago and that they were the kind of kids who liked looking after him, who played hide-and-seek with him, who enjoyed showing him gross and interesting things, such as how the guts of spiny dogfish were so disgusting not even scavenger birds would eat them.
They must’ve been like characters out of one of Grant’s fairy-tale books. Of course he’d want to be by them.
Once upon a time there was a curious little boy who strayed away from his mother and father and ran into five friendly giants walking down a bluff.
We will show you treasures, they said.
I have enough treasure, the little boy replied.
Not like this.
Without the Grays, Dad might have toyed with our weekend house as he did his other assets, fenced it, got tired of it, and moved on after a year or two to some other playground.
Now, no matter what had happened, it was still our refuge.
• • •
I made my way outside to meet Sammy when he came and stumbled onto the arrival of the second-best scent hound in the state.
Sheriff Lundquist was at the gate to the shore road and waved through a truck with a huge bed that had the logo of a ram in front and a large crate in the back.
Meredith came outside, too. Apparently, she was no better at staying put than I was.
The sheriff was greeting the driver. “Thanks for coming, Dan. I know it’s a long way from Bremerton.”
“No problem, Sheriff. Tonka and I are happy to help. It’s been a long time since we’ve gotten called to the island.”
“No need till now,” Sheriff Lundquist said with a half chortle. And I knew why. He was proud. Patience belonged to the whole island, the way the quints did. Everyone shared in their glory and hard work, and con-doled with them when their work turned up remains and not live bodies.
And now they had to resort to calling in someone off-island for assistance. It was like asking someone from a different school to the prom.
“I was real sorry to hear about Patience,” Dan said. “I never thought that dog would come to anything. But she and that big gal sure proved me wrong.”
Big gal? Big gal? He was talking about Pixie. Give me an oar. I’m gonna hurt him.
Meredith seemed to sense what I was thinking and dug her fingernails into my arm, reminding me that I’d already broken one clavicle this week, thank you very much.
After a certain amount of pain, I realized that Dan-whoever-he-was-in-the-down-vest had a beast that could help us find Grant, so I kept my trap shut.
Mere may have made me behave, but I could tell by the way she bit her lip that she was as skeptical as I was about the abilities of the animal named Tonka.
The beast hopped out of the crate, and we saw he was twice the size of Patience, with his balls still intact and swinging, of course. The first thing he did was pee on a tire of the giant truck, showing off his giant penis and copious amounts of urine. The message was clear: Dan in the Down Vest was compensating for something. We had a hard time taking him and his dog seriously, which may have colored what happened later.
Dad came out of the house with one of Grant’s shirts. After many handshakes and politenesses of “I’m real sorry for your troubles,” Dan thrust the shirt under the beast’s snout. Tonka put his nose to the ground and went straight to the garage, then he pawed at the door until we opened it. He galumphed to a spot by a pile of cable that had some blankets piled into what looked like a nest.
The blankets were just the kind we threw over the rowboat and the kayaks, but they’d been arranged in a way to seem comfy. Under different circumstances, I wouldn’t have minded curling up in those and taking a nap. I loved the places where we hung up the boats. To me, they smelled of early-morning mists rising off the water and staph infections from dirty oars. Nirvana.
Tonka sniffed around for a while, then the beast walked nose-down back out of the garage and to the gate, where he stopped and looked stupidly up and down the street that led along the shore.
There was no aroo sound.
There was no more sniffing.
The trail was cold.
Sammy had emerged from the lagoon at this point. He came up to where Dad and Mere and I were standing mutely, watching Tonka do nothing.
He broke the silence. “What’s going on? They brought in Tonka?” he said, as if he couldn’t believe that anyone were so desperate.
I said what we were all thinking. “That dog is a moron.”
“He’s not a moron, actually,” Sammy said. “He’s just a male, so he pees on everything he sniffs.”
Mere rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Total moron.”
She smiled slyly and exchanged a look with Sammy that lasted a little too long.
I glanced at Meredith, and she quickly looked away. Was I imagining things, or was something going on between those two?
“Look, whether or not the dog is a moron, it’s obvious the trail ends here, on the shore road,” Dad said.
“So if we believe the dog, Grant got into a car, right?” I said. “We can call in the people walking the grid and trolling the bay and issue an Amber Alert.”
“Wait just a second. Have we thought that maybe he went willingly with someone and that maybe he’s safe?” Mere suggested. “He went willingly with Pixie in the rowboat.”
It was common knowledge by now. Pixie hadn’t been in good enough shape to tell everyone last night, so I told them that she was the one who had taken Grant out. Then, when she got home from the hospital, she told the sheriff everything she remembered.
“He’s a minor, and whoever took him didn’t have my consent,” Dad said. “So it’s a kidnapping. Even if that someone was a Gray. And I will prosecute whoever took him to the full extent of the law.” He glared at Sammy.
“Whoa,” Sammy said, backing up. He had come here to help us out and instead was getting a fight from a man whose wife had just died, so that put him in a position where he couldn’t defend himself.
“Dad,” I said, “you can’t think after all this shit that they’re still playing . . .”
It was right then, when we were standing in the drive arguing, paying no attention to what was going on around us, that the second-best scent hound in Washington State began to bay.
fifteen
PIXIE
When we finally filled Patience’s grave, Dean marked the spot with a stick. Not a cross, because Mom would have yanked it out of the ground and winged it into the lagoon.
So a stick.
He asked me if I wanted to say a few words.
I said what was expected of me. “Patience. You ate Shih Tzus. And goose poop. But you found things.” I stopped. I remembered that first day, bicycling back from my brothers, the last child, the one whose only superpower was that she was the Girl. But how, after I started working with Patience, I had gotten a reputation for being a finder of lost things—a reputation my brothers didn’t quite share, even though they were keen to help out.
I thought of her trembling that first day, the way she crept out of her crate, and how I had to keep her from howling, and how it gave me a purpose that I hadn’t had
before. “You found me,” I finally said. “So thank you.”
Dean tamped down the dirt with his shovel a little better, and I looked around. With Patience, I knew what to do. Without her, now what?
“That’s that, then,” Dean said, wiping the rain across his face. Drips of water hung from his nose. Mine as well, I was sure.
And then it happened. One of those weird moments that told me, no matter what the doctor said, I wasn’t normal. Not after what had happened in the bay and when I came out of it.
There. Under the eaves of our house.
I saw Patience. Alive. Not when I was looking at her directly, but out of the corner of my eye. She was sitting calmly beside the house under my bedroom window, in a patch of ivy. When I looked at her straight on, she wasn’t there. But when I looked at something else, anything else, there she was again, lounging, completely dry in the downpour.
“You go on down to the Shepherds’, Dean,” I said. “I need a moment alone.”
Dean nodded. “I understand. Don’t take too long. Even without Patience, we’re all still looking to you. You’re still the finder.”
I tried to tell him this wasn’t true, that I’d lost everything when I’d lost Patience, but he was Dean, and Dean didn’t lie.
Still, I needed time to investigate something I couldn’t explain to him. So as soon as he was out of sight, I tried looking at the ghost of my dead dog again. I trained my eyes in the distance away from the house, and there she was, under my bedroom window, calmly sitting, but when I looked at her full on, she disappeared, like an optical illusion.
What was going on?
I walked in the direction I’d seen Patience. There was nothing on the ground where I’d seen her. A small depression in the ivy, but nothing large enough to indicate 150 pounds of dog had just been there. My bedroom window was wide open. The screen had been peeled back, and inside it was too dark to see. One thing was for sure: My bedroom was getting flooded, and I couldn’t shut the window from outside. I didn’t know what kind of critter could’ve done such damage. Maybe Sammy was playing a prank on me? But Sammy was walking the lagoon.
So I went around the house and through the garage, dumped my muddy boots and my parka, then made my way to the bedroom.
The cold was the first thing I noticed, not the man with a semiautomatic rifle.
“I did not kill her.”
“Jesus Christ! Yuri?”
I flipped on the overhead light to get a better look.
He was drenched and muddy and sitting on my bed, tightly gripping his Kalashnikov with both hands. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week, and his eyes kept darting around me to the hallway.
“Off, please,” he said.
I switched off the light, but I could see his outline in the dark, and more later as my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness.
“You will also please keep your voice down and close the door behind you. I need to explain some things.”
“Fine. Fine. Just put the gun down. Did you shoot my dog?”
That was the least of the crimes he’d committed if he’d committed them, but it seemed important. After all, he helped me train her.
“Are you not listening? I did not shoot anybody. I did not shoot Patience. Patience was good dog.”
“Then where did you find your gun? I hid it in the Scotch broom last night.”
“You are a very silly girl. Do you not know you were being watched? We were all being watched. All the time.”
He pointed to his eye with one hand and kept a tight grip on his Kalashnikov with the other. “Me, I thought it was different. I thought that I was doing the watching. But I have been outspied. For many years.”
“What do you mean? Who outspied you?”
The door burst open. Dean was at my shoulder. I was trying to be quiet and do everything Yuri said, but I should’ve known that one of my brothers would be coming to check on me after I just buried my dog. Lawford, Sammy, and Frank were probably on their way, too.
“Yuri, buddy. Put the gun down,” Dean said.
“Jesus Christ, Dean, get out of here. I’ve got it under control.”
There was baying in the distance. I knew it wasn’t from a ghost dog. My dog would not hunt this man no matter what shape she was in. No, whatever dog was coming our way was alive.
Time. We needed time. I wanted to hear what he had to say.
“You do not belong here, little boy,” Yuri said. “This is a private conversation between Marilyn and myself. I need to tell her something important before I die.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Nobody else has to die here today,” I said. “Believe me. I tried it last night. It isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
“Where’s Grant?” Dean said.
“I do not know where Grant is. Somebody has hidden him. I think it’s for the best. Marilyn, there are many things at stake now, yes?”
“Yes, Yuri. Many things. Put down the gun, and we’ll talk about them.”
“Do you not understand? I will try to explain . . .” He waved the gun toward my closet. There was a snip sound, and I was facedown on the carpet with a heavy weight on top of me.
Then a lot of voices. One deep one saying, “Who took the shot?” over and over again. “I wanna know who took that shot!”
The weight let up. I heard someone else say, “Stay down,” and another person say, “Clear.”
I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t understand that my eyes had been shut tight until I opened them and saw Yuri sprawled on my bed, a neat hole in the middle of his head, leaking blood and other matter I would discover later on my comforter and sheets and mattress.
“Frank! Someone call Frank!” I said.
Even as I said it, I knew there was nothing Frank could do.
Yuri was dead. It had all happened so quickly and so neatly. I hoped the tattered woman with the staff would find him and release his light into the world.
It was too late for anyone else to help.
sixteen
HENRY
We were so busy arguing, we hadn’t realized that agent Armstrong had already given Dan in the Down Vest another item for Tonka to sniff—this one not belonging to Grant. They were changing the focus of their search from Grant to Yuri.
We didn’t find this out until later. All we knew now was that Tonka was running, howling up the dark path to the Grays’ house, and Dad was muttering all the time, “I knew it. I knew you were hiding him.”
“Grant’s not there,” Sammy tried to tell us. “This is something else.”
The FBI and the sheriff were running as well, and they were outpacing us. A couple of them asked us to stay behind them.
When he got to the base of the bluff, Tonka broke off from the main trail and picked his way up a rarely used path through the blackberries. This path emerged in the Grays’ backyard. The FBI and Sheriff Lundquist followed close behind.
There was no space for Dad, Mere, Sammy, and me, so we took the regular trail that led to their front yard.
We were halfway up the drive when I heard the shot.
Oh no . . . Pixie!
I sprinted faster.
I was the first in the front door.
“What’s happened?” I said. “Is Pixie all right?”
Pix was sitting on the sofa, with Mrs. Gray draped around her. “We’ve had a shock, Henry.”
Dad came in, out of breath. “Where’s Grant?”
Mrs. Gray looked confused, as though there were only so much she could process, and right now it was all about her youngest, her only girl.
“I don’t think this is about Grant, Dad,” I said, although I still wasn’t quite sure myself.
Pixie’s giant brothers were standing shell-shocked around the living room.
Dean finally said, “It was your guard. He was in Pixie’s room. He had a gun. The police took him down. It was so fast . . . Jesus, it was fast.”
Mere was standing next to me, and her shoulders began to heav
e. She seemed to understand what had happened before the rest of us did. “Yuri’s been shot? But he didn’t deserve it! He wasn’t a threat. He was just a sad, old guy.”
Her cries became torrential. Sammy put an arm around her shoulder. He did it gingerly, as though he were breaking a taboo. “You don’t need to be here for this, Mere. Mr. Shepherd, why don’t I take her home?”
Dad nodded, looking vacant. “I thought they’d found my son.”
Mrs. Gray, with her arm still around Pixie’s shoulder, said, “I’m sorry, Rupe. I’ll make us some coffee. It’s going to be another long night.”
She ran a hand through her daughter’s hair, gave her a soft look that Pix didn’t catch, then got up and went to the kitchen.
I’d never seen Mrs. Gray look so grateful. It occurred to me that she might, just might, have a favorite child.
Or maybe she’d be this relieved if any of them had survived being held at gunpoint.
Dad didn’t stay long, but I did—mostly hanging back, hoping nobody would kick me out before I heard Pix explain what had happened with Yuri. I owed Yuri that much.
Agent Armstrong sat on the love seat in the living room and drank cup after cup of coffee as he asked Pixie questions.
His face was a thunderclap. Yuri had been shot too soon—before there was any chance for him to be interrogated. And now the investigation had been bungled. He was trying not to show his disappointment to Pixie, but I guessed that later someone was going to get his ass handed to him.
“He said he didn’t know where Grant was,” Pixie was saying. “He said that somebody had hidden him and that it was for the best.”
“Can you remember anything else he said? Anything at all?”
“Yes. I don’t think he took Grant or killed Lyudmila. He called me silly. He said he had been ‘outspied.’”
Useless Bay Page 9
