The Edge of the Light

by Elizabeth George

  Becca frowned. Diana’s words didn’t bother her, but her handwriting looked bad: skippy and scratchy, as if the pen had been faulty.

  Becca read the note a second time, more thoughtfully. But she could conclude nothing, so she shoved it into her pocket and went around the house to the dog run. The extra key hung inside the dogs’ shelter, a good place for it, since only a very foolish burglar would have gone inside a run housing large dogs to scout around for a house key.

  She found Oscar with them, which gave her pause. He hung back from Becca with his expression suggesting offense at having been locked up with these lesser canines.

  Becca eased into the run. She picked her way among the dogs and squished through the mulch to the shelter, noting once again how badly it needed to be replaced. She found the key where it was hanging on a nail. She eased back out of the run, taking Oscar with her. He seemed only too happy to leave his companions behind, since he willingly followed Becca to the back door of the house, and when she had it unlocked, he preceded her inside without a glance cast back at his run mates. They barked in protest. Becca couldn’t blame them. Had she been at all confident that they would return to her when called to do so, she would have let them out into the field next to Diana’s house.

  In the mudroom, Oscar went to his water bowl. He lapped for a bit, turned his attention to his food dish, and began crunching on the kibble. Becca went into the kitchen. There she saw that Diana’s laptop was on the table. It was plugged in and it was open. Becca decided to use the time to see if there was news from Parker Natalia.

  There was not. She was beginning to think there never would be news. Her mom had been determined that Jeff Corrie would never find her, but the problem was that she’d hidden herself too well.

  Becca went for Jeff Corrie next. Googling his name took her to the very latest. This consisted of Olivia Bolding and an article she’d written sometime after speaking to Connor West. It seemed that the discovery of Connor West in Mexico had prompted the police, the DA, the FBI, and the SEC to consider something Jeff Corrie had been claiming from the first about his missing wife and her daughter: that they’d headed north. For a call to the sheriff on Whidbey Island had confirmed that someone had indeed spoken to Jeff Corrie from the sheriff’s office and the subject of the call had been a cell phone found on Whidbey and traced back to Laurel Armstrong sometime after her disappearance.

  This detail had apparently whetted Olivia Bolding’s appetite for a good story. There was, after all, a Pulitzer out there, and the story had all the elements of a win for the reporter: embezzled money, disappearances, an alleged death that turned out to be a flight into a foreign country, missing persons, accusations, possible homicides. She’d be nuts not to follow the trail, now that the sheriff had told her about the cell phone.

  Becca’s palms began to sweat. She felt anxiety running up and down her arms. She switched off the computer and filled a glass with water. She was drinking it down when she heard the dogs begin to yip outside.

  When she went to the front door, she saw that an old hatchback had pulled into the driveway behind Diana’s truck, and Diana was inside. A woman Becca recognized was just getting out of the driver’s seat and coming around to the passenger door. She was Sharla Mann, and she ran a one-person hair salon out of her mudroom on the west side of Whidbey. For a while the previous year, Becca had worked for Sharla’s life partner, Ivar Thorndyke. During this time, she’d come to know both of them well, but as far as she knew, Sharla and Diana were connected only because Sharla saw to Diana’s hair. Yet her hair on this day was completely unchanged from the last time Becca had seen her.

  Oscar eased past Becca. The dogs in the run continued to yip. Sharla helped Diana out of the car and caught sight of the poodle. She looked from him to the door, saw Becca coming toward the VW, and said, “Long time, no see. You need a haircut. What d’you think, Diana?”

  “She could do with a trim,” Diana said, and to Becca, “I’m so sorry I’m late.”

  “My fault,” Sharla put in. “I talked her into a movie over town. Movie and lunch and we got caught in the ferry line.”

  No need to know came from one of them. Becca tried to catch more, but the dogs’ racket made it impossible. So she said, “What’d you guys see?”

  “That new film with Eddie Redmayne,” Diana told her. “I think I’m in love.”

  Sharla laughed. “It’s those accents of theirs. Those Brit guys make everything they say sound like genius. You okay there, old lady?” she asked Diana. “One glass of wine and since when are you done for?”

  “I’m fine.” Diana smiled. They exchanged a look and Sharla let loose the grip she had on Diana’s arm. She returned to the driver’s seat and shifted the car into reverse. It moved back about two feet only, though. Then she braked and watched as Becca came down the walk.

  Diana looked old, Becca thought. She looked tired. She said to her, “We c’n do the practice later, if you want,” but Diana’s reply was, “I just need a very strong cup of tea. If you’ll see to that, I’ll let the dogs have a run. I made a brown Betty for us, by the way. Can you reheat it?”

  Becca agreed, but she went inside reluctantly. When she was there, she watched Diana from the kitchen window as she let the dogs out and began to throw their balls for them. Her throw was weak. Her aim was bad. She leaned against the chain-link fence of the run the entire time the animals dashed about. Clearly, something was wrong, and Becca couldn’t understand why Diana kept pretending this wasn’t the case.

  She went about making the tea. She found the brown Betty and put it into the microwave. By the time she had milk, sugar, teapot, and all the rest on the table in the nook, Diana was coming into the house and allowing the dogs to come in as well.

  “This is lovely,” she said when she entered the kitchen. She still wore her outdoor jacket, which she didn’t remove despite the room’s warmth.

  “I used your laptop.” Becca had left it on the table but had moved it against the wall to make room for the tea and brown Betty. “I hope that was okay.”

  “That’s why I left it out,” Diana told her. “Will you pour, Becca? I think Sharla was right. One glass of wine and I’m completely done in.” She watched as Becca poured tea into their cups and cut each of them a piece of the brown Betty. “What did you learn?” she asked.

  Becca told her about her belief that Olivia Bolding was probably going to come to Whidbey Island. Following the cell phone was the logical next step. “If she comes here, she’s going to find me,” Becca said. “I feel like I got to leave, but I don’t know where to go.”

  Diana had forked up a tiny portion of the dessert, but she set it down. She reached across the table and settled her hand on Becca’s forearm. After a moment she said, “There’s more, isn’t there? I sense an agitation coming from you, and it seems to have to do with more than Olivia Bolding.”

  Becca told her then of her other concerns: Prynne being stoned at Ralph’s house, Prynne and Seth undergoing some kind of separation that Seth didn’t want to talk about, Brenda Sloan trying to get control of Ralph Darrow, Jenn and Squat squabbling. . . . The only thing she didn’t reveal was worry about Derric and Rejoice and where all of that was going to lead if Derric didn’t give his sister the news about her being his sister before it was too late.

  Diana nodded as she listened. Then she said, “Do you think you have power over any of these people?”

  “What kind of power?”

  “The power to make them behave the way you think they should behave.”

  “Course not. Not really, I guess.”

  Diana smiled as she lifted her teacup. She’d made it too full and a bit spilled into the saucer. She shook her head at this clumsiness and reached for a paper napkin to sop up the mess. “But you’re not entirely certain that you don’t have power in any of these matters, are you?”

  Becca looked away from the
probing gaze that Diana was giving her. She said, “I know I can’t make people do what I want them to do. But it’s just that I wish people could see—”

  Diana cut in quickly at this. “Do you remember what Seeing Beyond Sight has told you?”

  This was a small but deeply intense book that Diana had handed over to Becca some months earlier. Becca read it in bits and pieces only, because the information was so dense. She said, “It’s told me a bunch, but it’s hard to remember. And I don’t get how anything in it applies to this.”

  “Then you’re forgetting the quickening. This is the moment when you must begin to explore the visions instead of trying to interpret the whispers. This is why we’re trying to block the whispers when they need to be blocked. We do it first with the mantra and then through the power of your will.”

  “And then what?” What Becca really wanted to know was how long this was going to take, since she didn’t have all the time in the world to figure out what she was meant to do.

  “Then you take action,” Diana told her. “But that action, as the book tells you, must be designed ‘to propel events forward to a safe, desired, or happy conclusion.’ And that, Becca, has nothing to do with making people ‘see’ a thing.”

  “But if I don’t do something, things’re going to explode,” Becca told her.

  “They might,” Diana admitted. “But the unfortunate truth is this: You’re not ready to take any action, and you won’t be ready until you’re able to block the whispers fully and until you come to understand how the whispers relate to the visions, too.”

  21

  Cynthia’s remark about lesbians not biting was what made Jenn reconsider Lexie’s offer of a ride to Freeland in order to apply for the busboy’s job at G & G’s. And Lexie, she discovered, was pretty cool. She yacked away when they were heading up the highway, and she didn’t seem to have any subject that she wasn’t willing to discuss.

  She told her immediately that G & G’s was owned and operated by two women: Gertie and Giselle. She revealed that they were somewhere in their forties, they were life partners, they had three kids between them at the Waldorf school, and they’d both once been married to men but now were married to each other. “I hope this isn’t a problem for you,” she said to Jenn.

  Jenn found the information a little confusing. She’d always figured that if you were married to a man, you wouldn’t be interested in being married to a woman. When she voiced this in a form of a question to Lexie, the other girl laughed. She said, “Lots of people think that way, but they’re mostly men with big egos.”

  Getting the job turned out to be as easy as Lexie had predicted it would be. When they arrived at the restaurant, it was just a matter of Lexie saying to the owners, “Here she is. Ready, willing, and able,” and employment was virtually hers.

  It was simple work, learnable in five minutes. Gertie showed her where the supplies were: plastic bins for placing used dinnerware into, pristine white tablecloths, neatly folded and starched white napkins, black napkins for those whose clothing was dark. Giselle showed her how to remove dishes, silverware, glasses, and cups efficiently and quietly and how to replace a tablecloth without having to remove the flowers, the battery operated lamps, and the salt and pepper. She and Gertie then stood back and watched her do it. Gertie said, “You’re trained,” when Jenn demonstrated her skill. Giselle said, “You’re hired,” and they both went back to work: Gertie as executive chef, Giselle as dessert and sous chef.

  At first, Jenn assumed that the restaurant was going to be the local hangout for gay people, trans people, and others of general sexual eccentricity, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. G & G’s was, it seemed, a high-end restaurant that attracted diners from all over the island. It sat on a hill overlooking both the small town of Freeland and Holmes Harbor beyond it, and because of the food and the view, it was the most popular dining spot from Coupeville all the way down to Clinton.

  “You didn’t know that?” Lexie asked her when Jenn mentioned her surprise at the number of diners who showed up every night.

  Jenn didn’t want to tell the other girl that she’d have no reason to know it. It wasn’t like her family could afford to go out to dinner. If they scraped enough together to get slices at the pizzeria in Langley, they’d be having a terrific day.

  As soon as she had the job, she told her parents. She figured that they weren’t about to say she couldn’t work nights at a restaurant if the whole thing was signed, sealed, and delivered. Besides, she assumed they’d be super pleased. She wouldn’t be another mouth to feed at dinnertime, since she wouldn’t be there, and finally she’d actually have the cash to pay for the All Island Girls’ Soccer team if she made the cut. That meant there was a real possibility that she’d even be able to go to college, and Jenn knew her parents wanted that for her.

  With regular employment, the world opened up to Jenn. With this kind of employment, she also had access to occasional leftovers, which Giselle and Gertie were perfectly happy to let her take home to shore up the meager supplies inside the McDanielses’ refrigerator. It was, in short, a win-win-win. For a few weeks it actually remained that way.

  Then Kate showed up. It turned out she’d had a fare from the ferry up to Freeland, and since it was nearly ten, the hour that restaurants generally closed on an island where the sidewalks rolled up at five, she had driven to G & G’s to pick Jenn up. It would be far quicker than riding the island bus.

  Jenn hadn’t said a word to her mom about the owners of G & G’s. She also hadn’t said a word about the occasional bent twig—as Squat had so poetically put it—who dined there. A job was a job, and a job in a fine restaurant where she got a share of the tips was a dream job. It wasn’t as if someone was putting hands on her butt or anywhere else when she was busing tables, Jenn thought.

  When she saw her mom in the waiting area of the restaurant with its nice plush benches along the wall and its romantically dim lighting, she wasn’t overly concerned. There was a large birthday party going on at the windows overlooking Holmes Harbor, and the fact that every one of the guests was female indicated very little. There were twelve of them, which meant her share of a big tip, and the tip was what Jenn was thinking about, not the nature of the women or the fact that the guest of honor and her wife were sharing a wineglass and kissing each other over it when Jenn’s mom walked in.

  That might have gone unremarked upon and even unnoticed by Kate had not a couple been celebrating their first anniversary at a table closer to where Kate waited for Jenn. Giselle had just brought out a special dessert for them, and when she placed it on the table, she said, “Show us some love, now, ladies,” and the two women did just that.

  Jenn thought later that, at least, her mom hadn’t dashed across the restaurant and dragged her out of the place by her hair. But on the other hand, Kate’s reaction in the taxi as she drove Jenn home afterward suggested that in her opinion, Jenn had scored a job in a house of prostitution.

  Kate kept her eyes glued to the road, as if they couldn’t move in their sockets if she even wanted to move them. For the first five minutes in the car, she said nothing at all. Then it was simply, “No, sweetheart.”

  Jenn didn’t reply. She knew that saying “No what?” was an invitation to attend a concert whose music she didn’t want to hear. Better to pretend she was enjoying the sight of night caressing the bowl of Maxwelton Valley. A faint glow on the land marked Miller Lake.

  “Did you hear me, Jenn?” Kate asked.

  Still Jenn said nothing. She adjusted her seat belt and wished she’d had the sense to pretend to be asleep. She couldn’t do that now, especially when her mom glanced in her direction and said her name sharply.

  “I don’t get what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t work in that place.”

  “At G & G’s?” Jenn asked. It was a stall tactic. It didn’t work.

 
“Yes, at G & G’s. That is where you’re working, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a good job, Mom,” Jenn told her. “Minimum wage and a share of the tips. C’n you think of anyplace else on the island where I’d get paid like that?”

  Kate slowed to stop at a red light on the corner of Maxwelton Road and the highway. She took the opportunity to turn slightly so that she had a better look at Jenn. Jenn felt as if her mom was searching for evidence of something. Her skin prickled with irritation. No way, she thought, was she giving up this job.

  “That’s not the point,” Kate said. “I understand you need the money for soccer, Jennie, but this can’t be the way you earn it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of who you have to associate with. Because of the people who frequent the establishment.”

  Kate’s use of establishment raised Jenn’s hackles. She said, “Two nice ladies own it, and people go there to eat, Mom. So I don’t get what the problem is.”

  “The problem is sexual deviancy.”

  “Huh?”

  “The problem is being exposed to sexual deviancy. I can’t let that happen. When you’re a mother, you’ll understand.”

  Jenn squirmed to face her mom. The traffic light turned green. Kate had to watch the road then, so Jenn could study the side of her face. She looked perfectly at ease, as if she’d spoken her piece and that was it. The law had been laid down and Jenn was meant to follow that law. She said to her mom, “Let me get this right. You’re saying I can’t work in a restaurant because two lesbians own it and—”

  “Please don’t use that word, Jennie.”

  “—and because other lesbians eat there . . . along with all sorts of other people who, I guess, don’t count. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m sorry if the money is good, but I can’t allow this.”