SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  “It really wasn’t,” Becca said as, behind the counter, a man came out of an inner room. He asked what the problem was, and the girl Jenn spoke right up.

  “I’ll tell you what the problem is,” she said, as the younger of the two boys with her murmured, “Jenn . . .” in a voice that sounded like a warning. “I gave her a twenty,” Jenn declared. “This chick’s seeing things.”

  “Let’s take a look, shall we?” the man then asked. He swung a small screen around to face the line of customers. It displayed the cash drawer, and it filmed each time the drawer opened. He pushed a button and there it was. The ten-dollar bill went from Jenn’s hands to the cashier’s hands. “Move along,” the man said in a steely voice. “Next customer please.”

  Becca stepped to the register and paid for her cookies. But not before Jenn said into her ear, “You little bitch,” and then vanished with her two companions.

  AN ANNOUNCEMENT TOLD everyone when to head back to their vehicles. Becca followed the crowd. She was careful when she passed the sheriff’s car not to look at it or the boy within it, although she caught a glimpse of his shoulder because he was leaning against the window.

  Everything was as she’d left it at her bike. The saddlebags still bulged on either side of it, and her backpack leaned against its rear wheel. She worked her way into this again and gazed forward as the ferry dock loomed up ahead. She saw that here the mist was more like fog, a billowing gray veil that hung between her and whatever there was that defined this place. Mostly, what defined it appeared to be trees. There were more trees here than she’d ever seen in an area where people also actually lived.

  Becca was used to hillsides sketched with the bony definition of chaparral and a landscape that developers scraped clean to the desiccated dirt before they filled it with thousands of identical houses. Here, though, if there were houses at all, they were somewhere in the trees, because what Becca was looking at was a vast forest: Douglas firs, hemlocks, and cedars that would remain untouched by winter weather, along with alders, birches, maples, and cottonwoods that would lose their leaves and thus bring light to the forest floor. This landscape rose steeply from a beach along which a few houses were strung, brightly lit against the growing gloom.

  The ferry workers waited till a ramp was lowered from the dock. Then they took down the barrier chain and waved at the bicyclists and the foot passengers to disembark.

  The foot passengers headed to the left, and the bicycle riders headed to the right. Becca went along and found herself on a dock far vaster than she’d expected. Here, she realized, everything was larger than life. Ferries, trees, docks, everything.

  As soon as she had walked her bike to the end of the dock, she began to look for Carol Quinn. She didn’t know a thing about what her mom’s friend looked like, but she assumed that there would be someone waiting with a pickup truck into which she could dump her bike.

  But there was no one, just a local bus that pulled away and headed in the direction of a highway, just a few cars in a distant parking lot to which ferry passengers walked and then climbed inside. Becca looked around, but she felt no panic. Her mom had phoned Carol Quinn. Becca had seen her do it. Carol Quinn was on her way.

  Becca waited ten minutes. Slowly, she ate one of her cookies as those ten minutes stretched to twenty. Another ferry came and went with no Carol Quinn turning up to get her. After the departure of yet another ferry, Becca rustled through her backpack and found the cell phone that was programmed with Laurel’s number.

  The call to her mom didn’t go through. Out of range was the reply she received. She would wait awhile and phone again, Becca decided, but in the meantime she would start on her way to Carol Quinn’s house because, obviously, something had come up to detain her and she would no doubt meet her on the way.

  Becca pulled out the map of Whidbey Island, along with Carol Quinn’s home address. She plotted the most direct route she could find to Blue Lady Lane. Right off the highway, she saw, a street called Bob Galbreath Road would take her there. She wasn’t in the best shape in the world for a bike ride, she knew, but this appeared to be only six miles. A piece of cake, she decided. She had a ten-speed. And anyone with a ten-speed could ride six miles.

  Wrong, she discovered. When she pedaled to the highway that led away from the ferry, Becca’s first thought was, Oh my God, and her second was, I’ll never make it. For where the road began, it climbed at once. It curved up and away from the dock, and it disappeared into the fog. Along its right side a few businesses were lined up, hopeful buildings that seemed to cling to the ground with the expectation of otherwise sliding into the water.

  Becca actually made it about one hundred and fifty yards before her breath was shrieking through her chest and her heart was slamming so hard that no AUD box was going to be necessary to drown out every other sound around her. Then she turned into a small parking lot. A sign reading CLINTON NAIL AND SPA identified the business, and a red neon sign indicated it was open. There was also a light above its door that cast a pyramid glow down to a welcome mat, and it was this light that Becca approached.

  She took out the map again. She tried to find another way to get to Carol Quinn’s house. There wasn’t one. So she watched the highway for a good ten minutes, hoping to see a pickup truck slowly going by, with someone inside it searching for her.

  That didn’t happen. She had no choice. She set off again.

  The pedaling was so difficult that she was practically standing still. She managed to inch past a low-slung Wells Fargo bank and an ancient restaurant with Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! advertised and that same sheriff’s car parked in its lot and, no doubt, the sheriff and that boy inside, scarfing down a king-size pepperoni and cheese. When she crawled past a used-car lot, she thought about how she and her mom could have driven onto it and traded the Ford Explorer for whatever came next. Thinking this made her eyes sting, though, so she looked away from the car lot and what it promised and instead looked ahead with the hope of seeing the road she was looking for somewhere in the shrouded distance.

  Instead she saw a Dairy Queen. Her heart sang. She’d make for this, she decided. She’d buy herself a hamburger there. French fries and a strawberry shake. Eating her way through her fear was the only answer. She certainly could make it as far as the Dairy Queen, she told herself, especially since there was a meal waiting for her at the end.

  As it happened, however, what was also waiting was Bob Galbreath Road. It lay a short distance before the Dairy Queen, giving Becca another option. Since the shadows were lengthening and darkness was approaching, she went for virtue instead of calories. She set off along Bob Galbreath Road.

  * * *

  THREE

  Becca discovered quickly enough that Bob Galbreath Road was worse than the highway she’d ridden to get to it. It began with a descent that allowed her to coast, but within fifty yards it started to climb

  Soon enough there were trees everywhere. On the right, the edge of the lane ended abruptly. It gave way to a hillside that fell steeply, with thin-trunk alders bursting out of it. This same kind of tree grew in profusion on the other side of the road as well, and in the fog the leaves on the branches above Becca made a tunnel from which drops of water plopped onto the glasses she wore.

  Becca shook her head to get the water from the lenses, but she knew better than to remove the glasses altogether. For they were now part of who she was, along with the dismal brown that Laurel had chosen in order to change her hair from strawberry blonde to completely ugly.

  The important thing was neither her glasses nor her hair, though. Getting to Carol Quinn was paramount. Yet Blue Lady Lane seemed as far away as the moon, and with every revolution of the pedals it became more difficult for Becca to breathe.

  The fifth time she came out of the forest to climb yet another hill, a sob leaped out of her chest. She couldn’t tell if she was sobbing for breath or simply sobbing, but what she did know was that she had to rest. She made it to a point where the road wasn’t
so narrow, and she got off her bike.

  She leaned over the handlebars to catch her breath. That was when she heard the siren approaching, followed in short order by flashing lights.

  She thought the worst at once. As the vehicle came closer, she could tell it was a police car. She steeled herself and waited for something to happen, but the car screamed by her as if she were invisible to its occupants.

  Becca saw them, though. In the brief instant it took for the car to shoot by, she saw the boy from the ferry again. Their eyes met. She felt the hollowness within him. And then it was gone. What had he done, she wondered, that his insides were so empty? Where was he being taken?

  The silence was profound once the police car’s siren faded away. Becca had no idea how much farther she had to go, but she assumed she had little enough hope of reaching Blue Lady Lane before the gloom of the evening became utter darkness. She set off again.

  She’d gotten only a quarter mile when she heard a vehicle coming up behind her. She moved as far to the edge as she could, but the engine noise didn’t get any louder. She realized that whoever was coming along in her wake had no intention of actually passing her, and she turned to see a pickup truck, a group of dogs moving restlessly in its bed.

  Hallelujah, Becca thought. Carol Quinn at last.

  The truck pulled to the side of the road. Someone got out. Becca could see a baseball cap, work boots, and a heavy jacket. A woman’s voice spoke pleasantly. “Looks like you’re struggling. Do you need a ride?” Obviously, Becca thought bleakly, this was not Carol Quinn at all.

  She listened for whispers. On the side of the road there was a woman. On the side of the road there was Becca. What there wasn’t was a single whisper.

  Becca wasn’t sure what this meant. The lack of whispers from this woman said she was completely different from anyone Becca had ever come into contact with. Although Laurel would have declared that this was the precise reason Becca should avoid her like poison oak, Becca’s grandmother would have taken her aside and said, “Special defines itself by absence as well as presence, hon.”

  So Becca said, “The chain keeps slipping,” in reference to her bike. This was a lie, but a small one since the chain had been feeling like a chain with the clear intention of slipping every time she had shifted the bicycle’s gears. “I’m going to Blue Lady Lane,” she added.

  The woman said, “This is your lucky day. I’m going to Clyde,” as if Becca would know exactly what that would mean. She strode over and said, “Let’s get this in the back,” and she picked up the bike, its weight and the loaded saddlebags nothing at all to her. She carried it to the side of the truck and hoisted it into the bed, saying to the animals, “All dogs move,” before she said to Becca, “Hop in the front. Oscar’ll move over. Just let me get this settled.”

  Oscar turned out to be a standard poodle, without what Becca thought of as a poodle’s froufrou haircut. He was black, and he was secured into the seat with its regular belt. Since Becca wasn’t sure if she was intended to unfasten the belt, she waited until the woman opened her door, climbed in, said “What’re you waiting for?” and then laughed when she realized the seat belt was the problem. She said, “Sorry. Let me get that. Come on over here, Oscar,” and when she had the seat belt off the dog, she pulled the poodle over, and then said to Becca, “Diana Kinsale. I don’t know you, and I thought I knew everyone on the south end.”

  “Becca King,” Becca said. She thought the rest: Rebecca Dolores King from San Luis Obispo, California, by way of Sun Valley, Idaho, where I was born. I do not ski. You’d think I would, considering, but I don’t.

  Diana Kinsale said, “Pretty name.” She put the truck into gear.

  Becca glanced back through the window at the pickup’s bed. There were two labs back there and two mixed breeds. She said to Diana, “Doggie daycare?”

  Diana laughed. She took off her baseball cap and Becca could see that her hair was gray. Becca found this quite strange. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever actually seen gray hair on a woman before this because where she was from women dyed their hair the moment the first strand of gray came in. But Diana Kinsale was the definition of au naturel. She wore no makeup, and her hair wasn’t even styled.

  “They’re all mine,” Diana Kinsale said in reference to the dogs. “I didn’t intend to end up with five of them, but one thing always leads to another and here I am. What about you?”

  “I don’t have a dog,” Becca said. “I like them a lot, but my mom’s allergic.”

  “Ah.” Who is she?

  Becca felt a pressure inside her head. Who is she? was, of course, the logical question. Who is your mom, this woman who is allergic to dogs, and does she know you’re on your bike all alone in the growing dark with the fog coming in heavier each minute? But these questions weren’t asked. They weren’t even thought.

  Becca stole a look at Diana Kinsale. Diana Kinsale glanced at her and said nothing. She punched a button on the radio, and the Dixie Chicks began singing at a volume that precluded conversation.

  It didn’t take long to get to Clyde Street. One and a half Dixie Chicks later, and Diana was pulling into the driveway of a gray clapboard house that overlooked water that Becca would come to know as Saratoga Passage. Below the house, a group of cottages sat directly on a spit of beach, and across from this another island rose up in a mass of trees, darkness, and a fistful of flung lights coming from the houses that stood at its south end.

  Diana got out of the truck and Oscar followed her. The other dogs began to pace. When Becca joined the woman at the pickup’s tailgate, Diana had lowered it and the four dogs leaped out and began bounding around the front yard.

  “No pooping,” Diana shouted at them as she heaved the bike out and set it on the ground. She rearranged the saddlebags upon it, and extended her hand to Becca. “I hope to see you around, Becca King,” she said.

  Becca reached out for the shake. When their hands met, a tingling shot up Becca’s arm, something between an electric shock and her arm coming awake from sleep. Her eyes met Diana’s and in that moment, Becca knew what her grandmother had said was true. Sometimes the absence of something indicates the presence of something else. The only difficulty lay in discerning what that something else was.

  Diana said quietly, “Things aren’t always your fault.”

  Becca said, “Huh?” because she needed whispers now in order to understand this woman, and in the absence of whispers she was only too aware of how lost she could become on Whidbey Island.

  Diana said, “The chain on your bike? It probably needs some work but it’s natural not to notice that kind of thing till it’s too late. It’s not your fault that the ride was a tough one if your bike’s not in good condition.”

  The dogs returned. They began sniffing the ground around Becca’s feet and they’d soon made it up her leg to the vicinity of her jacket pocket where the last two sugar cookies remained.

  Diana said, “The dogs like you. That’s good,” and then she said to the animals, “Chow time, dogs!” and the dogs set up a chorus of barking. “Stop by anytime,” Diana said with a wave, and she disappeared toward the back of the house. The dogs followed.

  BECCA REMEMBERED TO push her bike. She figured that Diana Kinsale might have known she was lying about the chain slipping, but still she wanted to keep up the pretence. So she pushed it till she came to a streetlight some distance away from Diana’s house and there she unfolded her map to see where Blue Lady Lane was from Clyde Street.

  A single glance told her why Diana had said this was her lucky day. Blue Lady Lane broke off from a street at the end of Clyde, and the end of Clyde was clearly visible by the stop sign on its corner.

  So, it turned out, was the sheriff’s car that had passed Becca on Bob Galbreath Road. When she made the right turn that would take her to Blue Lady Lane, she saw the car sitting in front of a house midway along the street, where Blue Lady Lane began.

  Becca knew, then. She couldn’t have put everythi
ng into words, but something had happened and it wasn’t good. At first she thought the police were looking for her. But the presence of at least eight people on the upstairs deck outside of the house and the bright lights within the building seemed to suggest something else.

  She rolled her bike to a mound of vegetation, and from within its shelter she gazed at the house. A low sign in front of it said Horse Haven and lights shone on house numbers on this. She dug out Carol Quinn’s address, but she was sure of what she would find. The numbers matched.

  She crept forward. She crossed the street in the shadows from the trees, and she’d reached the side of the sheriff’s car before she realized the boy was still in it, although the sheriff was not.

  She began to back off, but the boy got out. He rubbed the back of his neck and gazed at the house on its little rise of land. She froze where she was. Then he turned to her.

  Their eyes locked on each other’s. People leave . . . someone . . . if death was easy . . . rejoice rejoice . . . caressed the air between them. Then voices broke into the darkness around them as two men approached, coming down the walk from the house.

  “I’m so damn sorry, Mr. Quinn. If there’s anything . . .”

  The boy glanced their way, then back at Becca. Go, he mouthed. Now. Go. He got back into the car.

  But Becca couldn’t go until she heard and knew, and the knowledge came quickly with the other man’s words. She could tell he was crying. “Just a little under the weather,” he said. “She felt bad but she thought it was the flu and so did I. And now this.”

  “She’s not the first,” the undersheriff said. “With women, a heart attack . . . it doesn’t feel like they think it would feel. She didn’t know that.”

  “She was so strong, Dave.” He started sobbing.

  Becca backed away. She returned to the vegetation and sat. She put her head in her hands and listened to the sound of the Island County sheriff’s car as it drove off. She had no idea what she would do.