“Outspied?”
“Yes. That was his word.”
As they wheeled Yuri’s body out on a stretcher, Mrs. Gray handed out peach cobbler to anyone who wanted it.
“Can you think of any reason why Mr. Bulgakov would come to you for help?” he said.
“Yes,” Pix said, shivering beneath her blanket. “He helped me train my dog.”
“The bloodhound? The one that was killed with his weapon?”
“That’s the one. We spent a lot of time together training Patience. She needed a lot of work. The guy who was originally supposed to train her half-assed the job. Yuri helped me fix her.”
There seemed to be something going on with Pixie’s eyes, because she wouldn’t look at agent Armstrong straight on. She kept looking at the floor. Maybe she was just tired.
“So you think maybe Mr. Bulgakov came to explain why he killed your dog?”
“I think he came to explain that he didn’t kill Patience, and he wanted to tell me who did. I don’t think he killed Mrs. Shepherd, either. I think he wanted to set me straight on that. But he didn’t have the chance.”
Agent Armstrong glared at Sheriff Lundquist, whose expression didn’t change.
So we all knew who had been quick on the trigger. And now, thanks to the good sheriff, we were no closer to the truth or to finding my little brother. The information had stopped.
I wanted to blame him, but if I had found someone threatening Pixie, I might’ve done the same thing.
Agent Armstrong was still talking. “And Mr. Bulgakov gave no indication who this person might be. The one who outspied him.”
Pixie shook her head. “None whatsoever.”
Agent Armstrong asked Pixie more questions about what had happened the day before, and she answered them. But something was stuck in my mind after Pixie had said the word outspied.
The CCTV had been stuck on a loop showing the Breakers, but why in the garage, too? What had been going on there? Had Grant gone to the nest of blankets before he went to the gate? What had happened in the garage that he’d known about that someone would want covered up?
We were down to a short list of people who had the capability to find Lyudmila in the Breakers when Dad was away: There were the Grays, and our family. And then there was our travel team: Hannah, our cook; Edgar, who stayed above the garage; Joyce, who thought she was so important she was always just a step behind Dad; and Yuri, who was dead. One of us was a killer.
No wonder Grant didn’t want to come home when Pixie rowed him into the Sound. He was a witness. He’d seen something happen to his own mother, and he’d told no one. Not even me.
I swear, as soon as I found the little urchin, I was going to kick his ass for not coming to me first.
If I found him.
Outside, the weather was picking up. The wind whistled through the cracks in the windows, and the rain splashed against the glass.
I wove my way across the room and found myself sitting next to Pixie on the sofa. Agent Armstrong had finished his questioning and left with the others. Without thinking, I took her hand. I interlocked my fingers in hers. She took it and squeezed.
I should’ve known better than to reach for her.
Pixie was an observant girl.
She felt my scars. I’d been picking at them again. I couldn’t leave them alone, especially when I was stressed. She opened my palm and counted them. Five. A whole constellation of old cigarette burns.
“They’re bad again, aren’t they?” she said.
“It’s been a long couple of days,” I said.
She’d seen the scars before. Most of the time, they were easy to overlook.
But now they were leaking, oozing red.
Pix got up, went to the bathroom, and came back with a first aid kit. As she dabbed at my hand with neomycin ointment, branches blew back and forth against the windowpanes. Something swooped overhead, and I didn’t ask what.
“These aren’t ever going to fade, are they, Henry?” Pix asked, investigating my skin.
And maybe it was the trauma of the past couple of days, or the idea that I might never see my little brother again, or the knowledge that I’d had two mothers come and go from my life, but right then was when I broke.
I resolved to tell Pixie about the scars on my hand, and the secret of my life, and how I became a little soldier.
I am four years old. Meredith is two. We spend our lives propped between a pair of golden women. Two blondes. One, our mommy, sits us on her lap and reads to us every night before we go to bed. She takes us to the kitchen, where Hannah feeds us gooey chocolate desserts and lets us put all the sprinkles we want on them and writes our names in raspberry syrup.
Our nanny has golden hair just like Mommy’s. She’s pretty like Mommy, too. She takes us where we need to go and sets us up with experiments in foam shapes and glue and hardly ever gets upset when Meredith gets sloppy and gets glitter on the carpet.
I want to be a good boy for both of these golden women. But I can’t always be. I am told to sit still. But I just can’t. I break things. I break a Slinky. I break Candy Land. Once, I break the fountain in the front yard. I don’t mean to. I just want to play in it, and I break a tile trying to get to the part where the water comes out.
That’s when I get the first one, the first burn.
That was an expensive tile imported from Italy, the pretty blonde says. Your father will be mad when he finds out.
I didn’t mean to. It was hot. I just wanted to play in the water.
Still, your father will be furious. Come upstairs with me.
She takes me to the bathroom in the playroom on the top floor. She locks the door and opens a window.
She lights a cigarette. I’m surprised, because she doesn’t smoke.
Hold out your hand. You’ve done a bad thing, and now you’ll have to be punished, but it’ll be over quickly and you’ll be forgiven.
Just like that?
Just like that.
And she jabs the cigarette out in my palm and it hurts so much and I cry and try to pull away, but she holds my hand tight.
There now, she says. Stay. Good boy. All done. She lets my hand go and smiles at me and shrugs as if it were no big deal. She puts the cigarette butt in the toilet, then flushes it away. Of course I understand. And then she’s running my hand under cool water, putting salve on it, and bandaging it up. I’m forgiven. All done.
There’ll be a mark, but it’ll be our secret, she says. You were so good. You’re my little soldier. She kisses me on the head and smiles so prettily at me, and we drink hot chocolate. Though my hand hurts, the rest of the day seems like a party.
At dinnertime, Dad doesn’t seem furious at all. She has made it better.
Four more times this happens. The second because I make a bad choice in kindergarten and take a little girl’s crayons and make her cry. The third because I won’t sit still and practice writing my letters. The fourth because, at a friend’s birthday party, I say trains are dumb, even though he loves trains and has a train birthday cake and we’ve gotten him a train puzzle as a present.
The fifth one is the deepest and does the most damage. This one is because I break my sister’s tiara with the pink gem and my sister cries and cries, and no amount of glue can put it back together.
Then the pretty blonde turns on me with that look on her face, and I know I will have to be her little soldier once again. This time I am afraid because even though she has trained me, I know she is mad. I don’t want to be a soldier. I don’t want to be forgiven. I want her to leave me alone.
But the training holds. She burns me, leaving the cigarette in the valley between my thumb and forefinger extra-long. I don’t jerk away. I don’t cry. But for the first time, I can tell that she wants me to. And finally comes the All done, which sounds more and more hollow, and then the salve, and then the ice, which lasts longer and longer. I begin to think she is made of ice herself.
I stop there. There’s too much shame
in what happened next. I don’t like revealing it to myself, let alone Pixie.
“So you told your parents, and they canned her ass, right?” Pixie said, examining the worst scar, the one in the valley of flesh between my thumb and forefinger. It’s bleeding now because I’ve been picking at it so much.
“We got a different nanny,” I said.
We were in the sunroom, surrounded by windows. Windows on three sides and on the ceiling. Thin coverage against the wind and rain, which were now so strong they seemed to have a mood. They were pissed at something. Might as well be me. The betrayal all those years ago was mine. The least I deserved was a squall.
Because here was what I didn’t tell Pixie. Here was what I didn’t even like to tell myself:
When my dad discovered the burns and asked me who’d done them, I said, “Mom,” because that was what I’d been trained to say.
We’d practiced it so much, I didn’t even flinch.
The abuse stopped; the nanny got a promotion that took her away from my sister and me; Mom got a divorce and a restraining order.
Sitting in the sunroom, I felt like everything blew through me, but not this knowledge. Nothing could keep it from sitting like a boulder at the bottom of my gut. Even after twelve years, the whole thing sickened me. Why had I sat at the dinner table and sold Mom out?
That had kicked up a storm that made the one raging around us look like a mild summer breeze. I hadn’t realized how bad it would be until a different rainy day, the drizzly kind, when I watched her from the safety of the attic playroom, the new nanny arranging coloring books and juice on short worktables behind us. Below, in the circular drive, while cherubs frolicked in the fountain, my mom packed thin cardboard boxes of clothes in the trunk of her car, and drove off.
I remember how she took one last look up at the attic. I remember her lobbing the words I love you up at us, and I remember feeling as though I’d caught them.
That’s when I understood what I’d done.
That’s when I understood she wasn’t coming back.
Now I felt sick. It was as though all that had been happening in the past couple of days was nothing compared with what I’d been through twelve years ago. I had to get my head on straight; otherwise, I’d be no use to anyone.
I took my hand from Pixie’s. She was a smart girl. She could never know. It’d been a mistake to reveal this much.
“I need to get home,” I said, shaking myself out of her grasp.
“Right,” she said, looking almost hurt, which surprised me, because sometimes I forget girls her size have feelings. Tall girls were almost bestowed honorary dude-hood. “It’s been a long day. We should all get some rest. Maybe tomorrow we’ll remember something about Grant that we’ve forgotten.”
She stood up to her full height, and once again I was glad I hadn’t told her the whole tale. I didn’t need this much girl judging me.
At the front door, I reached up and kissed her on the cheek. What was I thinking? Of course she had feelings. Over and over, she’d gone out on nights like this with nothing but a flashlight and a hound and brought home scared little kids.
And those were the lucky ones.
Maybe thinking of all those families, families like us, who were missing a loved one and never said thank you when they were recovered, made me do something I’d never done before. I ran my hand through her long blond hair. I buried my face in it. It smelled like lavender shampoo and something the shampoo couldn’t cover, like saltwater spray and Scotch broom pollen and sand and things dying and clams spitting and people laughing and drinking things from a cooler.
She smelled like the island.
What would she know of my betrayal?
I told her good night, and as I turned away, the wind practically forced me off my feet. I had to lean forward forty-five degrees on the walk through the lagoon just to get home. If my abs hadn’t been so strong, I don’t think I would’ve made it.
Down on the shore, people were leaving. News crews were packing it in; retirees and people who could afford waterfront property like us had the belongings they needed in the backs of their SUVs and everything in their houses shuttered and bolted and locked against the storm. The water was only an inch deep on the shore drive, but everyone was in a hurry to get past the DANGER – TSUNAMI ZONE sign.
Everyone but two guys with flashlights wading their way through the lagoon.
Grays. Unfolded by the weather, out looking for my brother. There was a tribe on my side, which should have comforted me. But on this night it wasn’t enough. Not after what I’d almost revealed to Pixie.
It took a long time to get home on the dike trail. Each footstep squelching in the mud, each time I raised my ankle, it made a noise like the question: Why?
Why, Mom?
Why did you stay gone?
seventeen
PIXIE
Outside, the wind was howling. Down on the beach, the water was whipping up actual waves. Unusual for our inland waters. I couldn’t help thinking: The Sea is pissed about something.
I couldn’t understand Henry. It seemed like there was so much he’d left unsaid. When I asked if they’d fired the nanny, and he’d said, “We got a different nanny,” it made me wonder, “What happened to the first one?”
He was hiding something from me. Something important. It felt as though I were out on a search for his little brother and there were a giant flag blowing in the breeze.
This way.
I mean, if he didn’t want me to know about the abuse, then why tell me?
I was puzzling through the whole thing as Mom made up a bed for me on the sofa, which was where I’d be sleeping for the foreseeable future because I didn’t want to lie on raw brain matter, or the possibility of raw brain matter, no matter how much we all had scrubbed at it. “This’ll have to do until we can get you a new mattress,” she said as she fluffed the pillows on the sofa.
“It’s fine, Mom. Thanks.”
I pretended to settle in, and she turned off the lights.
I waited until the noises in her bathroom subsided, then let my thoughts churn another half hour so she would be through reading before I crept out of bed and stole into her home office. I flipped on her computer.
Here was my big question: Where was Henry’s mother in all this? I knew she’d been gone for so long it was ancient history. But why had she left? Something about Henry’s story, and her absence in it, made me think that she’d been outplayed somehow.
I brought up a search on the computer. I didn’t know Henry’s mom’s first name, but it wasn’t hard to find. I searched on “Rupert Shepherd First Wife,” and there it was: Ellen Dawes; and her place of birth, Cupertino, California; and her age, forty-five. I found out that she was currently working for a catering company out of Seattle. Nothing about whether she owned or trained any pets. That’s what I was interested in. Because that’s what it had sounded like to me—like someone in his life, either his mother or his nameless nanny, had trained him as if he were a bad, bad puppy.
I was about to head back to my sofa and try to sleep for real when I looked out the back window.
There, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Patience.
She was standing by the trailhead, completely dry in the rainstorm. Of course she wasn’t there when I looked at her straight on—it was only when I looked at the Douglas firs, swaying in the wind, that her outline became clear in my peripheral vision.
I thought about chasing after her, but the last time I did, someone got shot, so I thought I should be a little more prepared.
I eased myself into my brothers’ bunk room and tried to feel around for Lawford’s Taser without turning on the light.
Big mistake.
“Pix, what are you doing in my underwear drawer?”
The lights came on. Two pairs of eyes looked at me. Lawford and Frank were here, and they were awake. “Where are Dean and Sammy?” I asked.
“Still working the grid,” Lawford said. “Most of th
e other volunteers have bagged out because of the weather. Frank and I thought we’d try to grab some sleep before we go out again. It’s been a long day. So I repeat: What are you doing?”
“Looking for your Taser. I need to see Henry about something.”
They stared at me, unblinking as barn owls.
“Have you asked Mom if you can go?” Lawford said.
“No.”
They stared more, waves of disapproval rolling off them.
“Pix, you’ve had a rough day. You kinda died last night,” Frank said. “Can’t you just sit this one out?”
“And just where do you suggest I sit? In my bedroom? Oh wait. I almost got shot there, and I don’t want to sleep in what’s left of someone’s brains.”
Frank and Lawford studiously looked at the floor.
Neither of them called me a wuss, which surprised me. It had been a long day for all of us.
“You’re closer to this than the rest of us, Pix. You can’t blame us for being worried,” Lawford said.
“I know,” I said. “There’s just something nagging at me that I can’t let go of.”
Frank pulled back the curtains. “The storm is rising,” he said.
“The last time we had weather like this, the next morning all those boots washed ashore with the feet still in ’em,” I said. “Do you remember that, Frank?”
I was playing them, and they knew it. But you can’t have gone through all that training, all those endless rounds of junior lifesaving, senior lifesaving, open-water lifesaving, gory-car-wreck lifesaving, not to mention those endless nights of volunteer search-and-rescue, not to know that sitting on our asses while there was still a possibility that Grant was out there, alive and lost, or alive and trapped, was evil. As long as we were warm and dry, we were wicked, wicked people.
“We can’t let Grant wash up like the boots,” I said.
Frank sighed. “Is Mom asleep?”
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“Let’s go.”
Frank hopped down noiselessly from his bunk and started pulling on his pants.
Useless Bay Page 10
