SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  THE BAD PART was that Jenn had chosen to leave by the very same door used by the boys who’d been giving her a bad time. Becca saw this and knew what it probably meant. There was unfinished business in the air.

  She had a moment of indecision. Jenn was a real piece of work, and Becca owed her nothing. But she’d been trying, at least, to do something to help Derric. That was a mark in her favor, wasn’t it?

  Outside in the corridor, Becca saw that the boys who’d been confronted by the undersheriff had gone no farther than the doors that led to the band rooms. These were close to the girls’ lavatory, and she could see that Jenn was headed there. But the boys saw this, too. They approached her and surrounded her.

  “What’s with you anyway?” Dylan demanded.

  “What’s with the clipboard?” another added. “You some kind of school official now?”

  Jenn said to them all, “Why don’t you guys shut up and do something useful?” and she tried to push through them.

  “With you?” Dylan laughed. “Good idea!”

  Two of the other boys grabbed her arms and her clipboard fell to the floor. Dylan started to chant, “She wants it, she wants it. Do it to me, do it to me, Derr-rick!” as the other boys moved their hips suggestively.

  Becca threw her backpack to one side. She shouted, “Hey! You guys leave her alone!” because she could see from Jenn’s face that she was perilously close to crying.

  “Ohhh! It’s the dyke’s wife!” one boy yelled, and another boy cried, “Bacon Grease Hair with legs!”

  They laughed stupidly. But the diversion of Becca’s interference was enough. Jenn twisted away from them and dashed to the restroom.

  The boys went for Becca but the band instructor came out of his classroom at that moment and his sharp “What’s going on out here?” was enough to send them scurrying like rats off a sinking ship.

  Becca watched them go, only dimly hearing the band instructor say to her, “You all right?”

  She nodded, but the truth was something else. For as the boys made themselves as scarce as possible, Becca had a glimpse of something that made her breath catch in her throat. The boy Dylan was wearing a pair of sandals. The sandals were exactly the same as Seth’s.

  THERE WAS NO real time to process this, not with the band teacher standing there waiting for Becca to respond to him. So she said thanks and grabbed up Jenn’s clipboard and her own backpack. She ducked into the lavatory to find the other girl.

  Jenn was bent over one of the washbowls. She swung around in a flash. She was crying and Becca knew instinctively that this wasn’t good. A tough girl like Jenn McDaniels crying? Everything, Becca knew, was about to get worse.

  She wasn’t sure what approach to take, but it didn’t matter. Jenn spoke first.

  “What d’you want?” she snarled. “Why are you following me? God, you’re such a pathetic piece of trash with your ugly glasses and your stupid dyed hair. You don’t belong here. You don’t fit anywhere. Why’d you come here, anyway?”

  The force of Jenn’s words stopped Becca from saying what she wanted to say: about Dylan, about his sandals, about the forest and the footprint she’d seen and Saratoga Woods itself. So she merely extended the clipboard to Jenn. Jenn didn’t take it.

  “What?” Jenn cried. “What? You think I need you to fight my battles? Leave me alone. You butt in everywhere and no one wants you around. Don’t you get that, fattie?”

  Becca set the clipboard on the floor. She knew the best course was to get away. But Jenn wasn’t about to have this. As Becca turned to go, Jenn raced around and planted herself squarely in Becca’s path.

  “Why’d you follow me? What do you want? I know what you’re trying to do, you know. It’s only obvious to everyone.”

  Becca drew her eyebrows together. Finally she was able to speak. She said, “I don’t get—”

  “Oh, yeah right. You don’t get it. You just go up there and read your stupid book to him and act like you’re not trying to do anything at all except practically get into the bed with him and we both know what that’s all about, don’t we?”

  “That’s not . . .” Becca began to back off.

  This, apparently, was just what Jenn wanted. She shoved her. She grabbed Becca’s backpack and began to go through it. She said, “Where is it? Where’s that stupid book?” She dumped the backpack’s contents onto the floor.

  “What book?”

  “Oh right. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You play dumb but it’s all an act. When you have a chance—”

  “You’re crazy,” Becca said. She bent to gather her things.

  Jenn shoved her again. Unbalanced, Becca fell to her side. The earpiece to the AUD box was dislodged from her ear onto the floor. Jenn grabbed this. She jerked it hard and along with the earphone came the AUD box itself. Jenn hurled it viciously at the opposite wall.

  “You’re a loser,” she shrieked. “You and your books and your music and your . . . your . . .” Tears sprang to her eyes. She ran from the room.

  * * *

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Becca was able to make it through the rest of the school day, but it wasn’t easy. When she rescued the AUD box, she found it badly damaged. It wasn’t broken altogether, but it didn’t work right. It offered only intermittent static.

  As soon as school was over, she shoved the damaged AUD box into her backpack and got off the campus as quickly as she could. Without the box, she knew she was going to have trouble on her hands because during both Integrated Algebra and Yearbook there had been so much whispering flailing around in the air that she could barely concentrate on the teacher and she understood why her grandmother had said, “Cemetery time,” when she’d start howling and covering her ears and banging her head as a little kid.

  So Becca knew where she had to go in order to be able to think about what she was going to do without the AUD box working right. She rolled the bike away from the rack and set off down Maxwelton Road toward town.

  When she reached the cemetery, Becca left her bike at the edge of its main lane. She crisscrossed among the old monuments and markers, and she made her way over to Reese Grieder’s grave. It was covered by leaves from the maple and sycamore trees nearby, and Becca sat on a pile of them so that she could lean against the side of the stone.

  She took the AUD box out of her backpack and examined it more closely. The back of it was smashed in. Three of the interior wires were loose and were going to need to be soldered back into place. The earpiece wasn’t wrecked, but the amount of work that it was going to take to make the device usable again felt, for a moment, insurmountable. Becca sighed and tossed the entire AUD box to one side, into the deep grass. She lowered her head to her upraised knees.

  Truth was, she didn’t understand why Jenn McDaniels hated her so much. It wasn’t like Becca had done anything to her. She was just trying to wait for Laurel’s return, and in the meantime she was just trying to stay in school and be Becca King, someone completely different from the girl who’d left San Diego and all her friends to be on the run from Jeff Corrie. But now with Derric’s father in possession of Laurel’s name, Becca didn’t know what might happen.

  More than anything, Becca wished she had someone to talk to about all of this but particularly about Jenn McDaniels. She tried to find something positive in what was going on, but the only thing she could come up with was that if Undersheriff Mathieson was on the trail of Laurel, he might actually find her and bring her back to Whidbey Island and protect her and Becca from Jeff Corrie once they told him the truth. If, of course, he even believed them. On the other hand, though, now that he had Laurel’s name, he might just go down to San Diego. He might find Jeff Corrie that way or he might just phone and ask him about Laurel, in which case Jeff Corrie was going to want to know why an undersheriff in the state of Washington was calling him about his runaway wife. If that happened, Jeff Corrie would turn up on Whidbey Island eventually. And if that happened, he was going to find her. Maybe he wouldn’t fi
nd her at first, but he would in the long run because he wasn’t going to rest, Becca knew, till he had found her and had dealt with her.

  Everything felt black to Becca. Everything felt hopeless. She shifted her position and looked at Reese Grieder’s gravestone as if there might be an answer or two there.

  Poor Reese, she thought. Her grave was sad. The stone had lichen growing on it. Her picture had mildew at its corners because the cover on it had sprung a leak. The grave itself was full of weeds. It was all so dismal. It seemed unfair that Reese would be left alone and forgotten like this.

  Becca cleared the leaves from the site and began to pull at the weeds. When she’d completed this job, she rustled in her backpack and found a ruler and started to use this against the lichen. She was going at this industriously when a hand touched her shoulder. She shrieked. Diana Kinsale jumped backward, a hand at her heart. She said, “Lord! I’m sorry.”

  Becca looked beyond her and saw Diana’s truck in the other, newer part of the cemetery, parked near her husband’s grave. Diana said, “They’re not with me this time,” in reference to her dogs. “I just stopped to say hello to Charlie.” She looked down at Reese Grieder’s grave. She said, “Are you cleaning it? That’s very kind of you.”

  “It looked sort of sad.”

  “It needs a plant or two, I think,” Diana said. “Even some greenery would help, if you put it into the flower holder. Shall I get some for you? From over there?” She took a few steps in the direction of the trees at the cemetery’s edge, where ferns grew in a rich profusion. But this put her on a direct line to the AUD box, and Becca cried, “Wait!”

  Diana’s expression was startled. Becca dashed over to where she was standing and scooped the AUD box from the ground where it had been half-hidden in a clump of the overlong grass.

  Diana said, “Yours?” and she reached for it, turning it over in her hand so that the damage Jenn had done to it showed. “What is it?”

  Becca said what she’d learned to say about her hearing problems. She embellished a bit with Diana Kinsale, adding, “I had ear infections all the time when I was little. . . . My hearing’s not right because of that. It’s a sound spectrum problem.”

  Diana looked at her quizzically. “You sure this isn’t a radio, Becca?”

  “I wish. All it does it help me equalize sounds. It blocks background noise so I c’n focus.” It was the spiel she’d heard her mother give teachers and other adults so many times that she could say it from memory.

  “It looks broken now.”

  Becca lied without thinking about why she would bother to protect Jenn McDaniels. “I was riding up the hill, on the road by the fairgrounds? It fell out of my pocket and my back tire went over it. I’ve got to figure out a way to fix it because without it, I’m hopeless if there’s more than one person around me talking.”

  What she didn’t add was that right now without the AUD box working, she should have been picking up whispers from Diana since Diana was the only person around and Diana clearly had to have something going on in her head. But as before, nothing came off the woman, not a single whisper, not even a word.

  Diana said, “I know someone who can probably fix this if you’d like me to take it to him.”

  “I was sort of figuring that maybe I could take it to the metal shop at school . . . ? I was hoping they could solder it or something?”

  “Perhaps,” Diana said, “but it’s probably not quite like anything they’ve dealt with in the metal shop.” She waited a moment. A few drops of rain fell. She looked at the sky and then at Becca and said, “I can help you, you know, my dear.”

  Becca hesitated. She didn’t know about accepting help because the only people who could really help her were gone. She said, “I was just thinking . . . I mean, I need it back pretty fast because of school.”

  Diana said, “I’ll have it back to you before you begin to worry about where it is.”

  She walked over to Charlie’s grave then. She sat on the little bench there and bent her head and for the very first time, Becca caught a whisper in the air that had to have come from her. It was the one, Charlie? . . . how will I know . . .

  Becca looked away quickly, back to Reese’s gravestone. She returned to cleaning the lichen from it.

  ONCE BECCA DECIDED to allow Diana Kinsale to see to the AUD box, she tried not to worry about whether she’d get it back. It was tough enough just to concentrate without the device.

  She spent a lot of time in the town library as a result. She also did her work for Debbie. Plus, she went out to the cemetery to continue fixing up Reese’s grave, and she tried to keep away from Jenn McDaniels as much as possible. She also kept clear of any place where she might be seen by the undersheriff and get confronted with some of the questions he appeared to be asking everyone he encountered. This meant, unfortunately, keeping away from the hospital in Coupeville. That meant not seeing Derric.

  He filled her thoughts, anyway. Particularly she thought about the picture on his bedside table, with him and his band and his saxophone. She thought of him with those little children hanging on him and his bandmates. She thought of the music that filled the air when she touched her hand to his. Becca sent him every good wish she could, but she knew she couldn’t risk going to see him.

  Yet Becca knew she had to talk to someone. For always at the back of her mind was the sight of that footprint on the trail where Derric had fallen. Not saying a word about it meant not getting to the bottom of what really had happened that day in the woods. But saying a word meant getting the information to the undersheriff, and when she thought about that, she always reached the same conclusion: He was going to want to talk to whoever had seen that footprint. And she couldn’t have that.

  Several days after she’d handed over the AUD box to Diana Kinsale, Becca was in the Langley library working on a paper for her English class. She was using one of the library computers, but the challenge was enormous because of the whispers she was picking up on. Whereas most of the time, the whispers were general buzzes of useless information that she couldn’t even apply to a particular person, there was something about the silence in the library that allowed her to pinpoint where the whispers were coming from, which made it more difficult for her to concentrate on her work. The worst at the moment was coping with the whispers coming from the man at the computer next to her. He was looking at Match.com and his whisper of what kind of book she might think I like was something Becca was itching to reply to. The man was about a million years old and he’d been looking at women who appeared to be about twenty-five. Becca wanted to tell him that it wasn’t exactly going to matter to them what kind of book he might like if he wasn’t rich, so he’d be better off thinking how much money she might think I have and go from that angle rather than trying to discuss Huckleberry Finn with them.

  Becca wanted to giggle when this came to her mind. She knew she’d reached the point of having nothing more to write on her English paper. So she used the rest of her quarters to print up what she’d written so far about The Merchant of Venice and its relevance today and she left the library.

  She crossed the street so that she could walk along the bluff on her way back to the Cliff Motel. She looked out into the passage. It was late afternoon, so the sun was behind her, casting long shadows from the overgrown bluff out onto the golden water.

  What she saw then in the passage brought a smile to her face. The surface of the water was broken by a fin. Then another broke the water, followed by a third. All of them were huge. They were also black. As she watched, she caught a glimpse of flukes as well.

  “Orcas!” she cried. She took off at a run for the Cliff Motel. The kids would want to see this, she thought. So would Debbie.

  She dashed into the office, crying, “Hey, you guys, there’s—” but Debbie was on the phone and she held up her hand to stop Becca and said to someone on the other end of the line, “Just don’t touch that bottle. You want me to come over?” and covering the mouthpiece of the
receiver with her hand, she said to Becca, “I need you to clean room twelve-sixteen.”

  Becca dropped her backpack and said, “Sure. Where are the kids? There’s at least three orcas—”

  “Room twelve-sixteen, Becca. There’re people on their way from Tacoma.”

  Josh, though, had come into the office from the family apartment. He said, “Orcas! Where?” as Chloe ran into the office as well.

  Becca said to Debbie, “This’ll only take a sec. I promise,” and to the kids, “Quick, come with me.”

  She took them around the side of the motel to the back. It was easy to see Saratoga Passage here and the direction in which the orcas had been swimming.

  She helped the kids edge through tall ocean spray bushes at the top of the bluff, holding each child by the hand. Chloe was bouncing with excitement and Josh was listing everything he knew about orcas, which turned out to be quite a lot. They were killer whales, he told Becca, because they were carnivorous, and they hunted their prey, and they were really, really big. They didn’t kill people, but only sea creatures that they needed for food. They were apex predators and—

  “There!” Becca pointed out the fins. There were seven of them now.

  “Whales, whales, whales!” Chloe cried.

  She bounced on her feet while Josh shouted with delight, and Becca thought about how free they all were in that moment: she and the kids and especially the orcas. No one hunted them any longer. They were safe in Puget Sound.

  When the whales were finally out of sight, it had grown nearly dark. Becca said, “I’ve got to clean room twelve-sixteen or I’ll get my butt kicked by your grammer.”

  “We’ll help,” Chloe said, as they crossed the grass at the back of the motel.