SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  She looked down and saw her own ice cream had become a bit soupy and the biscotti remained uneaten. She wondered if Jenn was thinking what a waste of food and money Becca King was turning out to be, and she said to her, “I’m not too hungry. D’you want my biscotti?” as a way to explain why she hadn’t been able to finish either.

  Jenn whispered fiercely, “Are you crazy or something? Why would I want your leftovers? What’s wrong with you?”

  BECCA WAS DOING some homework for Eastern Civilization when Debbie knocked at her door and popped her head inside. She said, “I’ve got to go to a meeting.” She tilted her head in the direction of the little cottage on Second Street where she and Becca had first met. “Can you watch Chloe and Josh? Just for an hour or so? There’s a woman who needs me to be there . . . ?”

  She meant one of the ladies she helped in Alcoholics Anonymous. Becca understood this because time and again she’d come in on Debbie having a phone conversation with someone she was trying to help stop drinking. Becca said she was happy to help out. She was falling asleep over her homework anyway.

  In the apartment behind the motel office, Josh was working on his Social Studies, while Chloe was supposed to be listing all the adjectives she could think of that could be used to describe the picture on a postcard that her teacher had given her. Two adjectives were required for every noun, and Chloe was finding this a stupid assignment.

  Becca couldn’t disagree. “But if you get through it, we can do something fun,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “We’ll have a drawing contest.”

  “What’s the prize?” Josh asked shrewdly.

  “Sweet Mona’s for a treat. Winner’s choice.”

  That was all Josh needed to hear, and wherever Josh went, Chloe followed. The kids finished their homework in record time and were ready for the drawing contest before Becca had a chance to get into the English homework she’d brought with her. Act 1 of The Merchant of Venice. It was proving as tough to get through as the Eastern Civ.

  She set the play aside. She said, “Okay. Here’s the contest. You draw me, and the best drawing wins.”

  Chloe protested that she couldn’t draw Becca. Josh would win too easily. But Becca said that wasn’t the contest. The contest was to draw Becca in her favorite place in the world and they had to guess what it was. Whoever guessed closest would win. “It’s not about the best drawing,” she told Chloe. “It’s about the best guess.”

  This was acceptable to Chloe, and both of the kids settled into their drawing while Becca settled back into figuring out what was going on in The Merchant of Venice. But she was tired and it was warm, and soon enough she fell asleep.

  She woke with a start when the motel’s office door snapped shut. She was about to swing herself to her feet, when she recognized Debbie talking to someone. They came into the apartment’s living room.

  Debbie’s companion was Tatiana Primavera, the counselor from the high school. Debbie said, “Look who I found walking home from choir practice,” and to her grandkids she said, “You guys finished with your homework? What’re you doing?”

  “Contest,” Josh said.

  “Drawin’ Becca,” Chloe said.

  Debbie said, “That right? Well, Becca looks wiped out. You can finish tomorrow. She needs to go to bed and so do you.”

  “No! We can’t!”

  “Grammer!”

  “Hey, you guys, listen.” Debbie and Tatiana Primavera exchanged the kind of look that passes between adults when their plans have just undergone a change that they didn’t anticipate.

  Becca said, “I c’n stay. I think they’re almost done anyway. You guys almost done? What d’you say? Ten minutes?”

  “Ten minutes, Grammer!” Chloe cried.

  Debbie huffed, said, “No more than that,” and took Tatiana Primavera into the kitchen. The running water and banging around suggested she was making some coffee. With this came some whispering, the real kind and not the kind that floated to Becca on the air.

  She could hear it well enough. She might not have even listened had it not been said in whispers. But whispering suggested adult information, and adult information suggested something she might need to know. So she sat quietly and picked out from the hushed conversation what she could.

  Tatiana was talking. “. . . and now Dave wants to come to the office to look for her. I keep telling him that it’s nothing. Just some kid on a cell phone who got unnerved by the accident and didn’t want to hang around. But he doesn’t believe that. He’s sure it has to do with why Derric was in the woods. I can’t convince him otherwise. Then when he had the phone traced and told me the name—”

  Debbie said, “You sure that’s the name you heard? I mean, it was a while ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure. Right after she died. But I remembered it because I thought I knew all of Carol’s friends, and this one . . . someone called Laurel. I’d never heard of her.”

  Becca froze. Every muscle that she could feel in her body went tense.

  “Maybe it was Laura, not Laurel,” Debbie said.

  “It was Laurel. I know that’s the name I heard,” Tatiana was saying. “I’m sure of it. Evidently she called that evening when Carol collapsed, and with everything going on, Pete didn’t pick up the phone. Her message was still on the machine. He played it for me because it was so odd. ‘Carol, this is Laurel. Just wanted to make sure you two made contact. Remember, it’s not Hannah, okay?’ Pretty strange, huh? But that was it. And that was the name. And Laurel’s not that common so Dave’s convinced it’s got to be this Laurel Armstrong person he’s looking for. So now he wants—”

  “I’m done!” Josh shouted. He jumped to his feet and waved his drawing in the air in front of Becca’s face.

  “Me too, me too, me too!” shouted Chloe. “You got to decide!”

  Deciding anything was the last thing Becca wanted to do. She wanted to know what else Tatiana Primavera was going to say. She looked at the pictures: herself in the forest reading a book and herself on the sofa reading a book. She said, “Amazing! Both of you win. Yea!”

  “No fair!” Josh shouted.

  “You got to choose,” Chloe cried.

  “But you’ve both got it,” Becca said. “My favorite place is anywhere I can read a book, and you’ve both got that. So you’re both the winner. We’ll go to Sweet Mona’s on Saturday, okay? You each pick what you want. Let’s put the crayons all back in the carton now.”

  That got them relatively quiet for a minute or so, long enough for Becca to ease closer to the kitchen door where she was close enough to hear Tatiana say, “I told him that the voice on Carol’s machine didn’t sound like a kid to me. But because of the connection to that stupid cell phone . . . You know how Dave is. He’s fixated on finding her. If Carol were still alive, she’d be able to tell him, but as it is. . .”

  As it is, Becca thought. She looked down at the two pictures she was holding: herself in the forest and herself on the sofa. But she had in her mind another picture altogether and that was of Becca King at Carol Quinn’s house on Blue Lady Lane the very first night she had been on Whidbey Island. Exactly when had Laurel phoned Carol Quinn, Becca wondered. And why hadn’t she come back to Whidbey to look for her daughter when Carol Quinn failed to return her call?

  * * *

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It hadn’t taken long for Hayley Cartwright to discover Seth had been to the farm. Brooke told her. She said he’d come by to say hello and he’d claimed, Brooke said, that he was there to say hi to her. But she knew he’d really come because he wanted to know what Hayley had been doing.

  “He was looking all around,” Brooke added carefully. “He could tell everything’s not good here, Hayley.”

  Hayley said in response, “Everything’s fine,” but Brooke just looked at her with that sad, wise look she had. She said, “Whatever,” and wandered off.

  Now at school, Hayley was worried. If Seth had come to the farm, then Brooke was right
in what she was saying. It had to do with Hayley. And if it had to do with Hayley, it also had to do with Saratoga Woods. She and Seth weren’t finished talking about that.

  She was working her hour at the reception desk when Derric’s father showed up at the school again. The undersheriff looked really bad. His eyes were bloodshot and his face looked jowly with weight loss. Dave Mathieson had always been the kind of man that people referred to as “robust,” which Hayley translated to mean full of health. But he didn’t look like that now.

  She said, “Hi, Sheriff Mathieson. How’s Derric doing?”

  The undersheriff shook his head. “No change. The signs are good, but he’s not waking up. The doctors’re making noises about more tests. They want to take him into Seattle to Children’s Hospital and bring in a specialist team from Ohio.” The undersheriff scrubbed his hands over his face.

  Hayley said, “I know he’s going to wake up. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Dave Mathieson said, although she didn’t know why, “Sometimes you do the wrong thing,” and then he took a deep breath and altered his course with, “I’m meeting with Ms. Ward and the A-to-L counselor. That’s Ms. Primavera, right?”

  She said, “Sure,” but before she could pick up the phone and call them to say he was here, he said to her, “Laurel Armstrong, Hayley. Is she someone from the school?”

  Hayley shook her head slowly, as she thought about the name. “I don’t know. It could be a younger kid, I guess,” she said. “One of the ninth-graders? Why?”

  “She’s who bought the cell phone that made the call to nine-one-one, that day from the woods.”

  Hayley’s eyes widened. “How’d you find that out?”

  “Like I told you, these phones have serial numbers,” he said. “That took us to a 7-Eleven in southern California.”

  “And that took you to Laurel Armstrong?” Police work was amazing, Hayley thought, just like on television.

  “It took us to her credit card. Not likely that the card belonged to the kid who made the call, but we’ve got to check everything. The cops down there are helping out, going to the address associated with the card to see if it was stolen or if the phone was stolen. It’s a loose end that needs to be tied up.” He looked around, and his eyes seemed dim, like eyes not taking in what they were seeing. He finally said, “Anyway . . .” which reminded Hayley that she was to phone Ms. Ward and Ms. Primavera. She picked up the phone and did so.

  But she could see that there was another reason the undersheriff had come to the high school. She just hoped it had nothing to do with her.

  WHEN HAYLEY WAS walking out to the farm truck after school that afternoon, she saw that the undersheriff’s car was still in a guest spot in the parking lot. As she watched, he came trudging out of the administration building. The expression on his face suggested that he’d had no luck in finding someone called Laurel Armstrong.

  He wasn’t alone. Ms. Primavera was with him. She was talking to him, but her expression indicated she was feeling impatient with Derric’s dad. Hayley figured she was probably telling him he was wasting his time looking at South Whidbey High School for someone who wanted to hurt Derric because no one there wanted to hurt him, and no one ever would.

  Or maybe, Hayley thought, all of this was just wishful thinking on her part.

  She continued toward the farm truck. But she heard the undersheriff call her name, so she turned back. She did this in time to see him say something to Ms. Primavera, to see Ms. Primavera frown and roll her eyes, and to see them part ways. The undersheriff came toward Hayley.

  When he reached her, he said, “Looks like you were right. No Laurel Armstrong. There’s a Cindy Armstrong in ninth grade, but she’s no relation.” He smiled in a tired way. “Back to square one. Have to wait and see what else the cops in California come up with.”

  “Gosh.” Hayley waited for more. She figured that the undersheriff had something else on his mind or he wouldn’t have called her name.

  He began with, “You and Derric have been pretty tight this year, huh? You know him pretty well.”

  “We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend or anything.”

  “Sure. I know that. But what I don’t know it this: What the hell was he doing in Saratoga Woods, Hayley? You say he wasn’t with you. Okay. I accept that. But he had zero reason to be there. It wasn’t like him to go out for a hike alone, and even if he did on that day, why ride his bike all the way to Saratoga Woods when Putney Woods is closer?”

  Hayley shook her head, drawing her eyebrows together. “I don’t know, Sheriff Mathieson.”

  “Things go on in the woods,” Dave Mathieson said. “I know that, Hayley. Up there by the erratic, things go on. That’s always been the case.”

  “Derric’s not a stoner, if that’s what you mean,” Hayley declared. “He never even talks about drugs. Besides, he doesn’t hang with stoners at school and he probably would, wouldn’t he, if he was using. I mean, it’s not like he’s nasty to them or anything. It’s just he’s not interested. ’Cause if he was . . .” Hayley’s voice drifted off as she saw the undersheriff was looking at her oddly. She’d been talking aimlessly, she realized. That was stupid.

  Dave Mathieson said, “What were you really doing in the woods that day? You, Hayley. Not Derric.”

  “Sheriff Mathieson, I’m not a stoner either.”

  “Were you there because of this Laurel Armstrong?”

  “I don’t know her. Really.”

  “But something was going on. I know it and so do you. It had to do with what happened to Derric, and it’s why he rode his bike all the way from home instead of going to a closer woods to hike. My guess is that it’s also why you parked your truck over by Metcalf Woods. None of you kids wanted to be seen. Right?”

  “No, really. That’s not how it was.”

  The undersheriff shook his head. He said, “Hayley, I’m going to get to the bottom of this eventually. You might want to pass that message along to everyone else who was there.”

  * * *

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Seth was walking back out to Sammy after paying for gas at a highway strip mall called Casey’s Corner when he saw Mrs. Cartwright come out of the Goose, a grocery store on the other side of the parking lot. She was carrying what looked like seven or eight reusable shopping bags, heading to the family SUV. As she walked, the bags started to get tangled up. He drove over quickly and rolled down his window, saying, “Hang on and I’ll help you.”

  She was trying to untangle the bags and find her car keys in her purse at the same time. She said, “Thanks, Seth,” and she shot him a smile. When he’d parked and jogged back over to her, she said, “This stuff’ll have to go in the backseat. Hold on a sec,” and she put the bags on the ground along with her purse, which she opened and fished her car keys out of. Seth saw that she’d been running errands. She’d filled the back of the vehicle with boxes of canning jars, two huge sacks of barley and oats, and three big bags of chicken feed.

  She opened the passenger’s door and leaned across the driver’s seat to unlock the driver’s door and the other doors, too. Seth went to the driver’s side with some of the bags and she joined him there with the rest, saying, “Got to get that door fixed. It doesn’t open any longer with the key. You can lock the darn thing, but you can’t unlock it. Even when it’s unlocked, you can’t open the door with the outside handle. I swear. Everything’s falling apart.”

  “My granddad could probably fix this door lock for you,” Seth told her. “I can ask him to if you want.”

  Mrs. Cartwright said, “Let me think about that,” and then she said, “Brooke told me you stopped by to say hello.”

  He said, “Yeah. I did,” but thinking about his trip to the farm and the condition of things there made him feel the need to say something altogether different. He went with, “Hey, thanks for watching Gus that night. You know, the night that my granddad came for him?”

  Mrs. Cartwright looked confused for a moment. Then she
said, “Oh! That night. Not a problem. Hayley kept Gus in her room.”

  Hayley. There. Her name was out between them, so it was a good time to say something about her and ask how she was and what she was doing and whether Mrs. Cartwright knew how serious Hayley was about . . . But Mrs. Cartwright was getting into the car. She said, “Thanks for the help, Seth,” and she patted his hand.

  She started the car, which took on her second try. Black exhaust belched out of the tailpipe. Seth said, “Someone wants an oil change,” when he saw this. “Better tell Mr. Cartwright. You don’t want to let something like that go for long.”

  She looked flustered. Then she said, “Yes, yes. I’ll tell him,” and she put the car into gear. It jerked.

  Seth thought the transmission or the clutch could use a look, but he didn’t like to say that after already mentioning the exhaust. So instead he said, “How is Hayley?”

  Mrs. Cartwright looked at him in much the same way someone looks at a lost puppy. Seth didn’t like this, but his words were out, so he had to listen to her response. She said, “She’s been busy. I don’t see much of her. She’s at the hospital a lot because of Derric Mathieson. You know Derric, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I know him,” Seth said. “Everyone knows him.”

  Mrs. Cartwright nodded and cocked her head. She smiled at him tenderly and said, “We all like you, Seth. Every single one of us likes you.”

  He said, “Whatever,” and she backed out of the parking space. He watched her, heavyhearted, as she drove off.

  He felt completely alone in that moment. He kicked his toe against the tarmac, and that was when he noticed that he’d left Mrs. Cartwright’s purse behind the SUV when he’d picked up the grocery bags and carried them around to the door of the vehicle. She’d backed up and had been lucky not to run over it, but there it stood, with all her stuff inside.