Boar Island (31 page)

“Are we done?” Paulette sniffed.

“Almost,” Denise said. “I just need to find a garbage bag.”

THIRTY-THREE

There was sensation of a sort. Anna didn’t know if it was life, death, dreams, or something altogether different. As in a dream, occurrences that would have been staggeringly bizarre to the waking mind, felt ordinary.

Zen.

That thought wafted through the utter darkness inside Anna’s skull. In dreams one was truly in the moment: no worries for the future, no regrets from the past, no expectations, therefore no surprises. The entire universe created in the mind, and the mind created in that universe.

A sliding sensation followed by a hard whack to the small of her back startled Anna free of philosophy. Pain was real and actual. Pain made a person care, and damn quick, what was going to happen next, and what had happened a second ago. Pain meant she wasn’t dead and she wasn’t dreaming. Life was happening.

Further than that, she couldn’t fathom. “Breathe,” she told herself.

ABCs: airway, blood, circulation. Breathing was first. Of course she was breathing. Alive, one did that sort of thing. But it wasn’t easy. Almost, she had to tell her diaphragm to drop, her lungs to expand. Not an out-of-body experience; more a trapped-in-a-worthless-body experience.

As consciousness and breath fluttered in and out, pictures came back fleetingly: the jab, the wasp, the chase. Like old Polaroids, colors were muted and images fading like ghosts at sunrise.

Shadows had come to her room and pricked her arm. She had chased the shadows. Now she was blind and couldn’t move. By the slick fabric clinging to her face, and the faint rubbery smell, she guessed she was in a big plastic sack. So, perhaps not blind, merely temporarily unable to see.

Drugged. Paralyzed. In a sack.

But not scared or unhappy. To the contrary, Anna felt fairly chipper. The drug, though powerful and paralyzing, had potential as a recreational drug. Nice of her kidnappers to think of her feelings. For a moment, Anna felt warm and fuzzy toward her shadows.

Then one of them stomped on her ankle. Roaring filled her ears. The two happenings were unrelated. The roar was an engine. Her sack and she were in a boat, or had been dumped in the backseat of a car. Boat. No car had that high whiny sound. A go-cart maybe.

Who kidnapped anybody with a go-cart?

For a while Anna faded. She knew she existed, she knew she was cold, but she had little opinion regarding these things. On some level she knew she was in deep trouble. People were not drugged and bagged and carted out to sea in a go-cart unless they were going to be disposed of.

Oddly, she didn’t care overmuch.

Then the whining growl of the engine was gone. Anna’s mind rose from the depths as if the harsh noise had been holding it under. Silence was a balm. Opening her mouth, she tried to breathe it in. Plastic stuck to her lips and tongue. Hands grabbed at her, latex screeching on plastic as fingers plucked and slipped on her shroud, then pinched and clutched, trying for better purchase. Heavy breathing and grunts filtered through the bag, but no voices. Not that it mattered. There would be no harm in her identifying the voices. The dead tell no tales and all that.

Dead. That sounded so melodramatic.

Anna would have liked to fight, just to say she had, that she’d gone down swinging and taken a few of the bastards with her, but she was unable to lift a hand or make her lips form a word.

As she was manhandled up to where her belly pressed hard against the gunwale, the boat rocked dangerously. Just as she was thinking how grand it would be if it capsized, and her shadows had to escort her to Davy Jones’s locker, her head plunged into the cold. Plastic form-fitted itself around her mouth and nose, and she couldn’t breathe.

Another heave and the rest of her followed out of the boat. Every inch of Anna was pressed with cold plastic. The ocean was too cold. Anna didn’t want to die in the cold. Maybe she’d suffocate or die of hypothermia before she drowned.

“It’s not sinking,” came a shrill voice.

Well, that was good news.

In the fetal position inside the garbage bag, Anna felt the sea roll her onto her back; then she spun weightless into the sucking cold.

“There she goes,” a calmer voice said.

Not much of an epitaph, Anna thought.

THIRTY-FOUR

They motored back to Somes Sound, Paulette as uncommunicative and dark as a lump of coal in the bow of the boat, Denise’s mind fixated on Ranger Pigeon’s demise. Not her drowning or suffocating or ODing or whatever finally took her out, but how weighty deadweight was. Manhandling the body was much harder than she would have believed. In the gym, Denise could bench press her own weight, one hundred twenty-five pounds—or could when she was in her early thirties. Yet moving a soon-to-be-dead body that weighed a bit less than that had been backbreaking, even though there were two of them doing the manhandling. Dead—or deadish—people were denser than living people, physically speaking, and just as uncooperative.

Denise was glad that the killing portion of her new life was at an end—maybe at an end. One thing did tend to lead to another. Obstacles would always pop up when one least expected it. Kurt had been a given, but the Pigeon thing, that was extemporaneous. Either way, Denise had reached the conclusion that killing people was more work than it was worth in a lot of ways. Hitler probably would have won World War II if he hadn’t wasted so much time and energy killing people who didn’t need killing.

Kurt had needed it. That hadn’t made it any easier. Anna Pigeon hadn’t needed it; things just got away from them, choices lopped off, until killing her was the only good one left. That didn’t make it any easier.

Paulette, too, wasn’t making things any easier. Denise watched her sitting in a heap as the boat cut neatly through the gentle swells. Paulette was more delicate than Denise had thought anyone who shared her DNA could be. It must be that nature made them both the same, but nurture had toughened Denise up. Nurture for Denise had been a brutal series of beatings and betrayals. Of course Paulette had been abused by her husband. Probably she was too old by then for the abuse to have any effect other than beating her down, Denise thought, whereas she—what? Had been beaten up?

However it worked, it was obvious that the removal of Anna Pigeon, though it had given them more time—a day, maybe a day and a half—had been harder on Paulette than it had been on her. Maybe it had broken some bit of her sister that could compromise the plan. Denise sensed that waiting while feds, rangers, and whoever else swarmed around looking for the missing Pigeon would be a bad idea. Paulette would fold under the pressure. Denise didn’t like to think it, but she herself might have issues. Her nerves, once as strong as steel cables, had begun to fray. Age might account for it. Or Peter Barnes. Everything. Not that she’d fold under pressure, but she might explode. Either would mean disaster.

Time, in this case, would not heal all. It was a bomb. Denise could feel it ticking. Paulette or Fate or dumb luck was going to trigger the explosion soon. That this was so was felt in her viscera, as palpable as an electric current. Even with Pigeon out of the picture, things would have to be moved up. Way up. The sale of the Duffy shack, the so-called legacy, and family.

Tomorrow night they would tick “family” off the list, then get the hell out of Dodge. Do the rest long distance. Denise had no doubt that once they were out of sight, they’d be out of mind. A has-been ranger retires and moves. A bleached-blond housewife, with an iron-clad alibi for her husband’s murder, sells the house where he was killed and leaves town. Nobody would connect those nonevents to a missing acting chief ranger from Rocky Mountain National Park. No connection between Denise and Anna, Anna and Paulette, Denise and Kurt, or Paulette and Denise.

All that could screw the pooch now was Paulette babbling or Denise going postal. So: tick, tick, tick.

For Denise that meant the night, though nearly spent, was not yet over.

By the time she got the runabout moored, and Paulette headed for her bed in the shack, only fifty-six minutes remained before dawn. Sunrise would be at 5:03
A.M.
At five Peter would get out of bed and go to the bathroom to pee. At 5:04 he would be pulling on his running clothes; 5:10 and he’d be out the front door swinging his hands side to side and jogging in place. He would run 4.5 miles. Depending on how he was feeling, he would be gone thirty to thirty-six minutes, getting back to the house around quarter to six.

Rather than sleeping in like a sane woman, little Lily flower got her lovely little ass out of bed at 5:15 every morning, checked on the baby—didn’t pee, she did that between midnight and three—and went down to make her darling hubby coffee.

Like Peter couldn’t poke the button on the coffee machine before he left.

She’d poke the button, then, while she waited for it to brew, prepare Olivia’s first bottle of the day, setting it in a pan of water to heat. Microwaving wasn’t good enough for Lily’s baby. No nuked fake milk for Olivia.

After the burner was on low, Lily would go upstairs and brush her teeth and comb her hair so she’d be all nice and minty fresh for that big sweaty kiss Peter would plant on her when he came huffing back for his coffee.

That gave Denise a four-minute window when nobody would be in the kitchen.

Years of covert surveillance were paying off big-time, Denise thought with satisfaction. Those long nights with binoculars, the skulking in the woods, following in rental cars, hadn’t been insanity, it had been foresight. A lot of what she’d seen as problems were turning out to be plusses.

She’d been going to tell Paulette about this step in the plan. Then she learned her twin wasn’t a real nurse, just a nursemaid. If she’d been a real RN it would have been good because Denise would have been more confident about the dosage. Since she wasn’t, Denise hadn’t said anything out of spite. Now she was glad. Given how shaken the Pigeon thing had left Paulette, the less she knew of the sordid details, the better.

Originally, Denise had planned to do this when she could take her time and make sure she got everything just right, not have to rush things to get it all done in a four-minute time slot. Most days, at two fifteen, Lily put the baby’s food on to warm, then went upstairs to make the bed. Picturing it, Denise shook her head in the dark as she climbed into her Miata. What kind of a nitwit makes the bed at two in the afternoon?

Still, that left a seven-minute window. Tons of time. Denise should wait until two fifteen, but she wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

Tick, tick, tick.

Four minutes would have to do.

Five
A.M.
sharp, Denise pulled the Miata into its customary space, the place she parked for her breaking-and-entering activities. A dirt road, a quarter of a mile down from Peter and Lily’s house, led to a construction boneyard no more than a hundred yards behind their property. One day a home would be built there. For the past several years it had been from whence Denise’s forays into the Barnes family homestead had been staged. Car tracks could link her to the place if anybody got that far into the investigation, but she wasn’t too worried. Big machinery was in and out during working hours: trucks, bulldozers, front-loaders. By noon the tracks of the Miata would be well and thoroughly squashed.

She popped the trunk, walked around to the back of the car, and unerringly laid her hands on the crumpled McDonald’s bag half wedged beneath the first aid kit. Inside, wadded in a used napkin, were three white pills, crushed to a powder. Having retrieved one of the unused Mount Desert syringes, Denise filled it half full from her water bottle, poured the powder in, shook it a few times for good measure, then stowed it carefully in her jacket pocket.

“What the hell,” she whispered, and threw the bag onto the ground. Maybe she’d get lucky and the litter would blow into Peter’s backyard.

THIRTY-FIVE

Heath’s eyes opened to unremitting black. Where in hell was she? Clearly not in her bed in Boulder. Momentary panic from watching
Premature Burial
too many times as a kid engulfed her. The adrenaline rush brought her to full alert.

This wasn’t the first time she’d woken up and not known where she was. After the accident, when she was on medications and changed hospital rooms or therapy venues, it often happened. The amnesia seldom lasted more than a second or two. A calming thought.

Ah, lucidity!

She lay in her little bed on Boar Island, and the black was not unremitting. At ground level, the tower had little in the way of natural light, but halfway up the winding stairs was a bar of living dark, dark like the midnight sky or the surface of a lake on a moonless night. There was a difference between living dark and the dark, she presumed, of a coffin six feet under.

What had wakened her?

In a second, it came to her. The lift bell had rung. Or a bell on a buoy in the ocean. Heath had seen those but never knew what they were for. To let fish know the wind was blowing? As far as she knew, both Elizabeth and Gwen were asleep in the rooms above. It was possible they could have descended the iron stairs and slipped through her room undetected. Possible but unlikely; the old stairs complained bitterly when they were used.

Heath switched on the bedside lamp, found her phone, and pinched it on. Dawn had not yet creaked. Surely John Whitman had more sense than to come calling on his lady love at this hour. She smiled, imagining the crusty old seaman serenading Gwen as she leaned over the rail around the top of the lighthouse.

Wily opened his eyes from his chosen spot at the foot of the stairs, where his charges would trip over him should they try to elude his vigilance.

“I’ve got ringing in my ears,” Heath said to the dog.

Wily thumped his tail.

The ring must have been from a buoy, or a ship’s bell. Ships did have bells, Heath remembered from old books. They told time by them. Probably they now set all the sailors’ cell phones to ring at the appropriate hours. Heath turned off the light and settled down to go back to sleep.