Boar Island (3 page)

Mrs. Duffy watched them go, a tired look on her face, and something more energetic in the curl of her upper lip, disgust possibly.

The blonde shifted on the stool. Again their eyes met, this time in the long mirror backing the bar. Realization hit Denise with the force of near-sobriety. Not disgust. Hatred was what burned in the blonde’s eyes. She knew. Denise had seen it. It greeted her in the bathroom mirror every morning. For a long time they sat, eyes locked, watching a slurry of emotions, memories and shocks flickering across the faces in the glass at dizzying speed. Never breaking eye contact, the blonde stood, picked up her drink, and carried it over to Denise’s booth. She slid into the shadows on the opposite side.

“I was beginning to think I’d made you up out of whole cloth,” she said, and laughed.

The laugh made the hairs on the back of Denise’s neck prickle.

THREE

Elizabeth wouldn’t tell Heath why she’d been contemplating slitting her wrists. When pressed, she cried and looked so desperate it scared Heath into silence.

Dem Bones hung like a Space Age suit of armor on its stand in the corner; Heath, collapsed in the familiar embrace of Robo-butt, was putting water on for tea. While the water heated, she rolled onto the back porch to call Gwen in her persona of doctor and great-aunt. She also called Anna Pigeon in her persona of law enforcement ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park and Elizabeth’s godmother. Surely, between medicine, the law, and Heath’s blind determination, they could find out what had driven Elizabeth to despair and put the child back together again.

Curled up on the oversized leather sofa, and in her pajamas though it was not yet sundown, Elizabeth accepted the tea without comment. Elizabeth couldn’t care less about tea, but it was all Heath could think to offer, and she was grateful her daughter took it.

Heath had not seen E this hopelessly totaled since, at nine years old, she had wandered out of the night woods weeping and nearly naked.

A year earlier, during a nightmare canoe trip on Minnesota’s Fox River, Elizabeth had been as strong and canny as any battle veteran. Heath had almost forgotten she wasn’t Rambo; she was a sixteen-year-old girl. Evidently, whatever this evil was, it was of a variety that struck at the heart of where that wonderful, vulnerable girl lived.

Anna arrived first. Soundless in moccasins without socks, she appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room. She must have dropped everything and left work as soon as Heath called. Heath probably sounded as panicked on the phone as she was. She refused to feel guilty. They were talking about Elizabeth’s life.

Anna had changed out of her uniform. She was wearing Levi’s so worn the knees were white and stringy with age, not artifice, and an oversized, man’s white shirt, probably her husband Paul’s, rolled up to the elbows.

A while back Anna had turned fifty. More gray twined through her braid now than when Heath had first met her. Decades in the sun had freckled and creased her skin in a way that suited her skull and her soul. Anna had grown to look like a person you would want to tell your darkest secrets, all the while harboring an uneasy sense she already knew what they were.

“Hey,” Heath greeted her. She didn’t expect a hug. Anna was not a touchy-feely kind of woman. Both in greeting and departing, Anna nodded. A modified bow of respect, Heath guessed. Or dismissal.

Perhaps because Elizabeth was so young and damaged when she’d met Anna, she had crept through those boundaries. Leaping off the sofa, the girl threw herself into the ranger’s arms. As tall as Anna, and a few pounds heavier, Heath expected Elizabeth’s onslaught to knock Anna back into the kitchen, but Ranger Pigeon stood staunch as an oak and wrapped her arms around the clinging girl.

Relief only slightly tainted with jealousy washed over Heath. Chest muscles loosened. She drew her first deep breath since she’d found Elizabeth in the bath. It saddened her that, physically, she could not be Elizabeth’s rock. Without bitterness, Heath knew she’d gotten the harder job, to anchor and support her emotionally.

Anna folded down onto the floor, her back against the sofa, legs crossed Indian fashion. Elizabeth curled up on the seat behind her and played with Anna’s pigtail the way she’d done when she was a little wreck of a girl, still in shock from the multiple ordeals that brought her into Heath’s life. Holding on to the braid, Elizabeth whisked the tail over her eyes and cheekbones as if sweeping away cobwebs.

“I wish you hadn’t changed out of uniform,” Heath said to Anna. “I was kind of looking forward to having a gun close to hand.”

Before Anna could respond, Gwen blew in through the outside door. Gwen was in her late seventies, small-boned, fragile-looking, with wildly curly hair that she ignored with the exception of taking time every three weeks to keep it as resolutely red as it had always been. Dr. Gwen Littleton was the antithesis of a little old lady. Heath thought of her aunt as a whirlwind, a dust devil, a genie in a tiny bottle, a force that, though small in size, was most definitely to be reckoned with.

She gusted into the living room, dropping the black leather doctor’s bag she’d been given when she graduated from medical school—and still carried every day—on the floor. The air that came in with her was the kind that can only be found during dry high-mountain summers, a draft so light and crisp, so warm and full of optimism, you feel that if only you could spread your wings wide enough you could fly.

“I left the door open,” Gwen announced. “Fresh air. My unbottled, unpatented, priceless, free cure-all.” Dumping her purse, Heath’s mail, and a long turquoise-and-gold scarf she’d been carrying for some reason, she put her hands on her hips, surveyed the three of them, and said, “Okay, now, what’s this all about?”

Elizabeth started to cry again, mopping at the tears with the tail of Anna’s braid. Though it had to be absorbing a bit of snot on the side, Anna didn’t look like she had any intention of rescuing it.

Gwen swooped down onto the sofa and folded her great-niece in her thin arms. Anna took one of Elizabeth’s narrrow feet between her roughened hands and began to massage it gently. Heath rolled nearer, closing Elizabeth into a circle of love. An impenetrable circle? Probably not. Love did not conquer all, but sometimes it made it bearable.

“Baby, what is it? You have to tell us,” Gwen crooned.

“Or we’ll never go away,” Anna added.

“Not even to go to the bathroom,” Heath said. “How disgusting would that be?”

“I am so ashamed,” Elizabeth mumbled through her tears and the soggy end of Anna’s braid. “I swear I’m going to die of embarrassment. Just die! I want to die,” she said with bone-chilling sincerity. “I’m so ashamed.” Tears clogged her throat then, and she sobbed into Gwen’s boney bird-shoulder.

“I accidentally fell on a friend of mine and killed her,” Anna said. “That was pretty embarrassing.”

Heath almost blurted out, “What the fuck?” Leading technical climbs for much of her adult life, Heath was fluent in the modern vernacular, and “fuck” was such a jolly good bad word. But when Elizabeth came into her world, Heath had determined to clean up her language. Saying the F-word was one thing; hearing it on the lips of a fairylike little girl was obscene. Worse, it was tacky, low rent.

Anyway, it had been ruined. On the Fox River one of the thugs had, quite simply, used it up. He had used all possible, probable, and improbable applications of the word, finally rendering it absurd. Now, when E and Anna and Heath heard someone say “fuck,” they’d lift an eyebrow, exchange a smile.

Left without it, Heath fell back on the classics. Twelve apostles and forty thousand cowboys couldn’t be wrong. God damn it to hell, bastard, SOB. All were workable.

“The hell you say,” she amended. From the corner of her eye she noted Elizabeth was listening. The sobbing had quieted.

“No kidding,” Anna said somberly. “Squashed her throat. Now that’s something to be ashamed of.”

“I once told a woman her fetus was going to be stillborn,” Gwen admitted. “She mourned and wailed through seventeen hours of labor. The baby never moved, its heart never beat, I swear it! The moment she was born, that baby girl was wiggling and giggling. The wretched little thing had been lying doggo, or hiding behind Mom’s liver or some darn thing. I thought I was going to die of humiliation before the mother killed me for scaring her to death. Thank God that was back before mothers sued for every little birthmark. I was so ashamed I didn’t show my face at the hospital for nearly a week. When I did, doctors, and even some nurses, started calling me Dr. Lazarus.”

“I never killed anybody or scared anybody half to death,” Heath said. “But in college I got drunk and made a bet with this guy that I could free-climb the front of the administration building, no lines, no belays, no shoes, no gloves, no nothing. Bet him a hundred bucks. He upped it to a hundred and fifty if I did it totally naked. I was halfway up and doing great when the cops showed up with the spotlights. I was charged with drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, and—this hurt worst—defacing university property, apparently by plastering my bare-naked ass on it.”

“You did not!” Gwen exclaimed.

“Spent the night and half the next day in jail. I was too ashamed to call you. The only reason I wasn’t expelled was that the boy who made the bet with me was the president of the university’s son. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Elizabeth stared at her wide-eyed, completely engaged now. “Oh gosh, Mom, how did you stand it?” she cried.

Absurdly pleased that her tale had trumped accidental death by falling on, and nearly terrifying to death by misdiagnosis, Heath said, “This was before everybody had iPhones. I was only totally humiliated in front of twenty or thirty people, not millions on the Web.”

Elizabeth’s face went deathly pale. Heath had read the phrase “deathly pale” many times, but this was the first time she’d ever witnessed the phenomenon. It was as if she watched the blood drain from beneath her daughter’s skin, leaving a gray pallor in its wake. For a moment she thought E was going to faint or scream or vomit. What she did was far more frightening. She began striking herself in the face with her balled fists.

Heath ached to hold her. She knew that the best she could manage was to lurch upon the pile like Frankenstein’s monster. Cursing the ice that had bested her, she turned her wheelchair sharply and sped from the room, left the hardwood and hit the carpet without slowing down. Robo-butt had never moved so fast. In an instant she was down the hall and in Elizabeth’s room. The pink iPhone, a gift from Gwen, was on the bedside table. Elizabeth’s laptop was on her desk, holding pride of place in the midst of a landfill’s worth of cosmetics, tissues, magazines, earrings, and whatever else had been dropped there over the past two years.

Heath took both electronic gadgets and dropped them into the saddlebags on her chair. Another twenty seconds and she was back in the living room parked beside the couch. “Elizabeth,” she said in a tone that cut through the soft fuzzy outpourings of Gwen and the somber attentions of Anna. Elizabeth looked up, eyes and cheeks wet, lips red and swollen.

Heath held up the pink cell phone.

“Noooooo,” Elizabeth begged. She covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut as if waiting for the fuse to burn down to the dynamite.

“Yes,” Heath said. “Rotten ice.” Rotten ice was their code for
This will try to kill you. Face it or run away fast.

Gwen glared at Heath. Anna nodded slightly. In the minute or less Heath had been gone, Anna must have figured it out. Heath pushed the message button. Seventeen new messages in the in-box. “I’ve never had seventeen messages in my entire life,” Heath said. A small whimper from Elizabeth. Not funny. Heath opened the first message and read it. Then she read it aloud in a flat voice. “‘Have you been on the page? Dweeb said you did the basketball team. TNT?’”

“Kimmy?” Heath asked as she noted who it was from.

“She’s in my geometry class,” E said miserably.

“TNT? Explosive?” Anna asked.

“Totally Not True,” Elizabeth said. “How could she have to ask?” Tears started. She knocked them from her eyes with the backs of her hands.

E was going to be brave. Heath hoped she was. She opened the second. “‘Check The Page.’ Tiffany sent this one,” Heath noted. “The Page?” She raised an interrogative eyebrow.

“It’s a blog the kids all read.” E hid her eyes with the tail of Anna’s braid. “Somebody posted that I did things I didn’t do.”

“Like the basketball team?” Anna said dryly.

“Like that,” E said.

Heath opened the third message: “‘Who hasn’t screwed you yet?’ My God, this stuff is insane. Somebody is going to get their skull bashed in if I have any say in the matter.”

The fifth had a picture attached, an image of a woman being mounted by a Great Dane. Heath didn’t read it aloud. She passed the phone to Gwen.

“‘I guess you like being done to by dogs.’”

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” Gwen whispered.

Anna had taken the laptop from the saddlebag and had it open on her thighs. “What’s the address of the blog?”

E told her. Anna typed it in.

Heath rolled her chair over to read it. “‘EJ pulled a train—you hear that? After the game.’”

“‘True. I was the caboose.’ That one’s signed Spike,” Anna said.

“It’s this creep everybody calls Dweeb. He signs himself Spike,” Elizabeth said. “God, the
Dweeb
!” E cried. “Nobody could think I’d have anything to do with the Dweeb!”

“‘No sloppy seconds for me.’ This one is signed IceBlow.”

“A slime bag Dweeb hangs with. You should have let me kill myself,” E whispered.

“‘Sloppy twenty-seconds more like,’” Anna read on relentlessly. Heath considered stopping her, saving Elizabeth the pain, but she believed Anna was right in what she was doing. Elizabeth already knew what they said. Aloud, in Anna’s flat, almost bored tone, they lost some of their snickers-in-the-dark malice and sounded as stupid as they were. Almost.

“‘Not in all orifices.’” Anna looked around. “Orifices?” she asked no one in particular. “Big word for this moron.” She returned her attention to the computer and read the last two quickly, as if the whole thing were too foolish for words.