SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  Laurel reached over and yanked the earphone out of Becca’s ear. She said, “I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry I’m not who you want me to be. But here’s the thing: no one ever is.”

  At this, Becca got out of the car. She had money enough in her jeans to buy herself something to eat, and more money in the pockets of her jacket. She fully intended to use it. There was even more money in her backpack if she wanted to buy everything on the menu, but the backpack was with her bike in the back of the Explorer and if she tried to get at it, she knew her mother would stop her.

  Becca crossed the road. To her left, she could see the ferry coming, and she paused for a moment and watched its approach. When Laurel had first told her that she would get to Whidbey Island on a ferry, Becca had thought of the only ferry she’d ever been on, an open-air raft that held four cars and sailed about two hundred yards across the harbor in Newport Beach, California. This thing approaching was nothing like that. It was huge, with a gaping mouth for cars to slide into. It was all lit up like a riverboat and seagulls were flying around it.

  The line at Ivar’s had diminished by the time Becca got there. She ordered clam chowder and made sure it was the New England kind, made with milk and potatoes and therefore possessing a dizzying number of calories. She asked for an extra bag of oyster crackers to float in the container, and when she had to pay, she did it in coins. She placed them carefully one at a time on the counter, and oh damn . . . what the . . . stupid chick told her that the cashier wasn’t pleased. Becca saw why when the cashier had to pick up the coins with fingers minus their nails. She’d bitten them down to the quick. They were ugly, and Becca saw the cashier hated them to be on display.

  Becca thought about saying sorry but instead she said thanks and took her chowder over to a newspaper stand. She balanced the soup container on top and dipped her spoon into it as she watched the ferry come nearer to the mainland.

  The chowder wasn’t what she expected. She’d been thinking it would be like the chowder her stepfather two stepfathers ago had made. He was called Pete and he used corn in his, and Becca was a corn girl. Popcorn, corn on the cob, frozen corn. It didn’t matter. Laurel claimed corn was what was fed to cows and pigs to make them fat, but since Laurel said that about nearly everything Becca wanted to eat, Becca didn’t give much thought to the matter.

  Still, this particular chowder wasn’t worth fighting over with Laurel. So Becca ate only half of it. Then she jammed her container into a trash can and sprinted back toward the Explorer.

  Laurel was on her cell phone. Her face, now without its spray tan, looked gray and weathered. For the first time, Becca thought of her mother as old, but then Laurel smiled and nodded and started talking in that way where no one could squeeze in a word. Carol Quinn was probably getting an earful, Becca thought. Her mom had been calling her twice a day to make sure every detail of the plan was hammered into position irreversibly.

  Their eyes met, and when they did, what Becca heard was no one’s ever going to hurt, but that was cut off the way a radio gets cut off when someone changes stations and what came over the airways next was one if by land and two if by sea and I on the opposite shore will be. It was just like static from the AUD box and it worked as well. Laurel said something into the cell phone and ended the call.

  Becca got into the Explorer. Her mother said sharply, “Was that New England clam chowder you were eating?”

  Becca said, “I didn’t eat it all.”

  Ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm took the place of what Laurel wanted to say but it didn’t matter and Becca told her so. “Stop it,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking anyway.”

  Laurel said, “Let’s not fight.” She reached over and touched her daughter’s hair. “Carol will be waiting for you when the ferry docks,” she said quietly. “She has a truck for the bike, so there’s nothing to worry about. She knows what you look like and if she isn’t there when you arrive, just wait because she’ll be on her way. Okay, sweetheart? Hey. Are you hearing me?”

  Becca was. She was hearing the words. She was also feeling the emotion behind them. She said, “It’s not all your fault, Mom.”

  “There’s more than one kind of fault,” her mother replied. “If you don’t know that yet, believe me, you will.”

  Becca reached for her backpack in the back of the Ford. Laurel said, “Where are the glasses? You’ll need to put them on now.”

  “No one’s looking at me.”

  “You need to put them on. You need to get in the habit. Where’s the extra hair dye? How many batteries do you have for the AUD box? What’s your name? Where’s your mother?”

  Becca looked at her then. Listen my children listen my children, but there was no need for Laurel to recite that poem over and over, even if she couldn’t recall the rest of the words at that moment. For Becca read her expression as anyone could have done. Her mother was terrified. She was going on instinct alone just as she always had, but because her last instinct had been the one telling her to marry Jeff Corrie, she no longer trusted what her gut was telling her.

  Becca said, “Mom. I’ll be okay,” and she was surprised when Laurel’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother hadn’t cried once since they’d left San Diego. She hadn’t cried at all since she’d spent herself crying when she’d learned who Jeff Corrie really was and what Jeff Corrie had done. We can’t go to the police, her mother had told her through her tears. God in heaven, sweetheart, who will believe you? No one’s reported a body yet and if we do . . . we have no evidence Jeff was involved. So she’d laid her plans and they’d made a run for it and here they were on the brink of something from which there was no return.

  Becca reached out and took her mother’s hand. “Listen to what I know,” she said.

  “What do you know?”

  “Rebecca Dolores King, Mom. San Luis Obispo. My aunt Carol on Whidbey Island. Carol Quinn. Olduvai Gorge.”

  Laurel looked beyond Becca, over her shoulder. The sound of traffic said that the ferry had arrived and was offloading its vehicles. “Oh God,” Laurel whispered.

  “Mom,” Becca said, “it’s okay. Really.” She shoved open the door and walked to the back of the Explorer. Her mother got out and joined her there. Together they lifted her bike from the back and arranged its saddlebags on either side. Becca struggled into the heavy backpack, but before she did so, she dug inside for the glasses with their clear and decidedly useless lenses. She put them on.

  “Map of the island?” her mother asked her.

  “I’ve got it in the backpack.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What about Carol’s address? Just in case.”

  “Got that too.”

  “Where’s the cell phone? Remember, it’s limited minutes. Yours is programmed with the number of mine. So emergencies only. Nothing else. It’s important. You’ve got to remember.”

  “I’ll remember. And I’ve got it in the backpack, Mom. And yes to the rest. The AUD box. Extra batteries. More hair color. Everything.”

  “Where’s your ticket?”

  “Here. Mom, it’s all here. It is.”

  Oh God oh God oh God.

  “I better get going,” Becca said, gazing at the stream of cars heading into the town beyond the ferry line.

  “Look at me, sweetheart,” Laurel said.

  Becca didn’t want to. She was afraid, and she didn’t need to hear more fear. But she knew the importance of giving her mother this reassurance, so she met her gaze as Laurel said to her, “Look right into my eyes. Tell me what you see. Tell me what you know.”

  And there was no midnight ride of Paul Revere now. There was only a single message to read.

  “You’ll come back,” Becca said.

  “I will,” Laurel promised. “As soon as I can.”

  * * *

  TWO

  The walk-ons and the bikes went first. There was a crowd of them, and Becca fol
lowed their lead. Those with bikes moved toward the front of the ferry, wheeling them along a three-lane tunnel toward an opening at the far end. The walk-ons went for a stairway. Among them were people fishing in their pockets and their purses, and Becca concluded that there was something to buy up above. She guessed it was food or hot drinks. Either would be welcome to her, because a cool breeze was coming off the water, she was shivering, and she was still hungry.

  At the front of the ferry, people parked their bikes. Becca did likewise. She had intended to go back to the stairs to find the food, but the sudden roar of motorcycles stopped her. The noise was intensified because the motorcycles were coming through the ferry’s tunnel. There were only four of them, but it sounded like twenty, and what followed them was a line of eighteen wheelers. The cars followed, arranging themselves in four lanes, two to each side of the main tunnel.

  None of this would have been a problem, since Becca had the AUD box with her. She plugged in the earphone and turned up the volume and concentrated on the static the AUD box produced. But as she did this, she saw that the first car coming into the side tunnel and parking just behind the spot where she was standing next to her ten-speed was a police car.

  If it can be said that blood can run cold, Becca’s did at that moment. All she could think of was the logical first move Jeff Corrie would have made when he found his wife and his stepdaughter gone: phone the cops and report them both as missing persons, sending out the general alarm to find them as quickly as possible, so that Becca and what Becca had gleaned from his whispers could be wiped from the face of the earth. Jeff’s favorite motto had been about the best defense being an offense, and what better offense could there be? Becca could even picture the flyer he’d come up with and circulated far and wide. It would be fastened to a clipboard within the police car, she imagined, her face and her mother’s face upon it.

  She turned away from the police car slowly, determined to look straight ahead. Anything else like a sudden turn would have given her away, and the thought of giving herself away not ten minutes after she’d left her mother was so frightening that she felt as if neon arrows were pointing down from the ceiling of the ferry right at her skull so that the cop inside that police car would get out and question her.

  But the suspense of not knowing if she’d been noticed was too much for Becca to bear. She knew it meant exposing herself to even more of an assault pounding like hammers inside her head, but she did it anyway because she had to do it: she turned down the AUD box to try to catch some useful information.

  It was nearly impossible to distinguish anything. There was Nancy damn it and dinner won’t be and nail polish all over and talked to my boss and William for a haircut . . . then suddenly with all of this came a warmth that should have been impossible to feel in this cool, damp place. With the warmth came scent, equally out of place. Where she should have been smelling diesel fumes from the big rigs or exhaust from the cars and the motorcycles, instead what she smelled was the sweetness of fruit being cooked. It was so intense that before she realized what she was doing, Becca actually swung around, exposing her face to the police car behind her. But she didn’t think of what might happen. Nothing seemed as important as finding the source of the warmth and the scent.

  That was how she first saw him, the boy who would ultimately change everything for her. He was a teenager like her, and he was sitting in the police car. He was in the front seat, not the back, and he and the policeman were talking. They both looked serious, and the contrast between them could not have been greater.

  The boy was black, deeply black, and the pure midnight of his skin made the policeman with him look white beyond white. He was also completely bald, not the bald of illness but the bald of choice. This suited him and, in contrast again, the policeman had lots of hair that mixed gray and brown.

  Becca realized as she looked at the boy that he was the first person of any color other than white that she’d seen in the vicinity of the ferry. She didn’t intend to stare and she wasn’t actually staring when the boy looked at her. As their eyes met, the warmth Becca was feeling increased along with the scent of cooking fruit, but something else floated on that warmth and it was the unexpected hollowness of the boy’s despair. Along with the ache of it floated the whisper of a single word repeated three time: rejoice, rejoice, rejoice.

  Becca half-smiled at the boy the way one does. But in return the hollowness grew, and when it began to feel as if it might take her over, she dropped her gaze. As she did so, the policeman got out of the car. He shut the door neatly and walked toward the stairs, punching in numbers on a cell phone.

  While this was the moment that Becca could have approached the boy, she knew far better than to do so. She decided that now she could go for the food she’d been thinking about when the police car had stopped behind her.

  She shrugged out of her backpack. She left it next to her bike and walked in the direction of the stairs. She couldn’t risk another look at the boy but she saw as she passed the police car that on the side it said ISLAND COUNTY SHERIFF.

  As luck would have it, she found herself climbing upward just behind the policeman, who she assumed was a deputy of some kind, or perhaps the sheriff himself. He seemed to be well-known, because people passing on the stairs called him Dave and asked how Rhonda was and inquired about his daughter’s new baby. Becca huddled into herself to stay unnoticed to him, but it didn’t matter as things turned out, because his call went through and he started talking about a cliff to someone.

  Becca caught snatches of conversation but not any whispers. The conversation that came to her said that next week was going to be too difficult for Dave because of his schedule and maybe the week after might work if it works for you too. Also, was the cliff completely safe because it was pretty exposed, wasn’t it, and you-know-who was starting to hang around there with his little brother. This made Becca wonder more about the island. She was used to southern California, which had suffered from every possible kind of natural problem: earthquakes, fires, floods, drought, windstorms, and landslides. But now she saw that disasters were, perhaps, common here as well, and she wondered what sort of disasters they would be if they had to do with the safety of cliffs.

  Upstairs, the policeman paused to continue his conversation near the windows, while Becca followed the crowd to a cafeteria where a line had formed to purchase food. Aware of money and how she was going to have to make it last till her mom started sending her more, Becca chose cookies. There was a package of three, sugar cookies that were frosted in orange, and she concluded this was something special when she heard a little girl’s voice behind her say, “Look, Gram! They’re not pink this time,” and Gram say in reply, “Maybe it’s for Halloween.”

  Halloween. Becca felt a tug. It had always been her favorite holiday. Laurel usually said this was because of the free candy she could collect and it was important that they “take a look at your addiction to sugar, sweetheart, because Type Two diabetes is becoming an epidemic these days among kids your age.” On the other hand, Becca’s grandmother noted that it was all about the fun Becca had in knowing who each child was behind the mask since their whispers almost always gave them away. Becca’s grandmother always advised her to stay near the whispers of children anyway. “They don’t know how to lie to themselves,” she said.

  Becca missed her badly. She missed hearing, “Laurel, just let her be, okay? She’s going to adjust,” and although Laurel’s answer was always the same, “I want her to be normal, Mother,” her grandmother’s reply of “Pooh. Nothing’s more boring than normal,” generally made Becca feel special, not odd.

  It was in the cause of seeming normal, though, that Laurel had come up with the AUD box. She’d claimed it was entirely for Becca’s benefit, so that she could concentrate when she was in school. But the truth was that while the AUD box worked perfectly to help Becca focus, it also served to keep other people’s thoughts away. Laurel’s in particular, of course.

  BECCA DIDN�
��T TAKE any note of the girl in front of her in the cafeteria’s line till they reached the cash register. Then she saw her holding a foil-wrapped hamburger and talking to two boys who were waiting for her by the condiments, a short distance away. One of the boys was long-haired and spotty-faced, wearing a rolled-up ski cap on his head like a beanie; the other was neatly dressed and neatly combed, looking worried and swallowing compulsively. As for the girl, she was very small and very trim, not an ounce of fat on her, virtually all muscle. She had a pixie haircut and a voice whose tone was one of snarky irritation. All three of them together made the suggestion that something was going on. It came to Becca as she watched them that, no matter what, high school kids were probably the same pretty much everywhere.

  The long-hair boy muttered, “She doesn’t have the guts to try it,” as the girl reached the cash register.

  “Probably shouldn’t, Jenn,” the worried boy said.

  Becca thought idly, Shouldn’t what? as Jenn handed over a ten to pay for her food.

  The cashier took the money, and Becca watched the exchange and admired the woman’s nicely buffed nails, so different from those on the cashier at Ivar’s. They were smooth with a pretty sheen to them and Becca wondered as she handed change back to Jenn—

  “Hey,” Jenn said to the cashier, “I just gave you a twenty.”

  Becca spoke without thinking. “No, it was a ten. I saw it.”

  Jenn swung on her. “What the . . . Are you calling me a liar or something?” And what came with this was who the hell . . . oh great, Dylan . . . more cool ideas?

  “Oh, sorry! No,” Becca said. “I just noticed because I was looking at her nails.” She added, “They’re really nice,” to the cashier, who blushed prettily.

  Jenn said, “What are you, some kind of perv?” and to the cashier, “It was a twenty, and I want my change.”