Boar Island (7 page)

“I don’t think this is a good time to leave Elizabeth home alone,” Heath said.

“Of course not,” Gwen agreed immediately. “I’ll make a fresh pot of tea.” She smiled wearily. “It’s good to have something to hate that can easily be dumped down the drain.”

As if he understood every word that passed, Wily heaved himself to his paws with a sigh and made ready to follow them. “Protect the children and old people,” Heath said fondly as she rubbed his head. There was a time she would have taken him. He was courageous and as wily as his namesake, but the years were creeping up on him.

Elizabeth returned carrying a pair of worn but beautiful turquoise cowboy boots with silver threading. “What’s wrong with your sneakers?” Elizabeth asked forlornly. “Or even your hiking boots?”

“Tonight I intend to kick some ass,” Heath replied. Elizabeth flopped down, her body awkward, her resentment obviously at war with what Heath suspected was the joy of having a champion, regardless of whether she rides out on a white horse or in a gray wheelchair.

Gentle, as she always was when touching her adoptive mother, Elizabeth waved away Heath’s hands and put the boots on her feet for her.

“Aren’t those a bit dressy for an unannounced call?” Gwen remarked, coming in from the kitchen with the threatened pot of tea.

“Power suit,” Elizabeth said.

Anna said nothing, following as Heath rolled toward the front door.

The sun was behind the mountains, and though it wasn’t dark, shadows pooled and the sky had grown soft and infinite. The day’s warmth was drifting away from the skin of the mountains on a gentle down-canyon breeze carrying the scent of pine.

Lights were beginning to come on in the neighborhood, people home from work and cooking supper. Sam’s truck was in the drive, an outsized Dodge Ram that one should not keep if one doesn’t own a ranch where it can run and play. Expertly, Heath wheeled around it. Fortunately, the Edlesons’ house had a wide brick walk and a front door without a step, a rarity Heath hadn’t noticed before her disability. Given this was to be a confrontation, she was glad she didn’t have to be dragged up a front stoop, then wait while Robo was hauled clanking up behind like an albatross.

When they arrived at the door, Anna reached over Heath’s head and banged the frame of the screen door. There was a doorbell, but Heath was happier with the “Open up. Police!” sound of Anna’s knuckles and left it alone. Disquiet murmured from inside, muttering, then silence, as if a television set had been switched off.

More silence.

“Curtains twitched at two o’clock,” Anna murmured. Heath had caught the tiny movement from the corner of her eye—Sam or Terry or Tiffany peeking out the front-room windows to see who was at the door. The phrase “at two o’clock” threatened to make her giggle hysterically, and she wondered when her anger had turned to fear. Heath had no fear that Sam would do them physical damage. Bizarrely enough, given she would probably come out on the wrong end of a physical encounter with a well-muscled man, she would have welcomed that. A compulsion to feel his flesh under her fists—or between her teeth—coursed through her so fiercely that, for a second, she felt she could rise from her chair and kick the door down. Her fear was that something she or Anna might say or do would make it worse for Elizabeth.

Anna banged again, louder and longer this time. Heath didn’t allow herself to wince.

She was beginning to think the Edlesons weren’t going to answer the door when she heard the bolt thunk back. The door opened halfway. No lights were on in the front room. The one in the kitchen, a light Heath had noticed when they crossed the drive, had been turned off. Dim behind the screen door, Terry stared out at them, her eyes like black holes in a dead-gray face.

“Hi, Terry,” Heath said pleasantly. “This is Anna Pigeon, a friend of the family and, for the moment, chief chair wrangler.” She smiled crookedly. Poor little paraplegic couldn’t hurt a fly. It wasn’t one of Heath’s favorite strategies, but she wasn’t above using it now and then if she thought it would give her the upper hand. Maybe she heard a faint snort from Anna; she wasn’t sure. “Could we come in for a minute?”

Terry didn’t want to let them in. She was breathing hard through pinched nostrils. Heath could hear each sniff. Terry’s lips, usually full and soft-looking, were pressed into a tight little frown.

“I’m afraid I don’t handle the chill of evening as well as I did before…” Smiling again, Heath waved a hand over her lap to indicate just how very sad and debilitated she was. Terry still didn’t want to let them in, but, like a lot of people, she was intimidated by the wheelchair. How could she say no? Heath was a
cripple
, for Christ’s sake. The door opened a bit more, and Heath got a wheel in, then, with a push from Anna, she was over the sill and into the house. All Terry could do was get out of the way so Heath wouldn’t run over her feet.

Before the fall from Keystone, Heath had been brash and ballsy. After, she had been angry and self-destructive. When she finally realized that, though she couldn’t walk, she was still a whole person, she found she’d changed. From the bastion of Robo-butt, the world was different, more layered and complex. Heath learned patience. She learned to watch people, to really listen, to genuinely
see
them. Something she’d not done much of when she was superwoman climbing tall mountains. Another skill she’d picked up was canniness, an ability to manipulate situations to her advantage, to manipulate people when she had to. Cunning wasn’t a strength much lauded in literature or the media, but it was a strength all the same, and Heath respected it.

Once they had breached the walls, as it were, Terry’s mood didn’t warm. She did, however, assume the role of hostess, offering them coffee. Anna didn’t accept. Heath did. Hard to toss somebody out before they’ve finished their drink. She parked herself advantageously, blocking the big, leather, man-of-the-house chair so the only remaining seating was on a couch that was too soft or a straight-backed chair that was too hard. She didn’t want Goldilocks getting too comfortable.

Anna leaned against a dark wood highboy, her ankles crossed, her arms crossed, looking deceptively relaxed.

In the minute it took for this arrangement, Terry was back with two cups of coffee on a tray along with a bowl of powdered creamer and half a dozen packets of Sweet’N Low. “Sure you won’t have anything?” she asked Anna politely. Being the hostess, probably along with the fact that neither Heath nor Anna had lit into her, seemed to have dialed her hostility down a notch. Coffee served, Terry perched on the edge of the couch, her mug hands as plump and white as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. Where there should have been knuckles there were babyish dimples. The rest of her was as amorphous; her bland oval face just missed being pretty due to a lack of definition in her features.

“The girls haven’t been seeing much of one another lately,” Heath opened conversationally.

“That’s so,” Terry said, then took a careful sip of her coffee. “I think it will be good for them to have a little time just with family.” She was recovering her equilibrium. Heath wanted none of that.

“So do I,” she said flatly.

Terry looked up, annoyed or startled. Sam appeared behind her, backlit in the kitchen doorway, shoulder against one side of the frame. His hair was tousled, that nice gold-shot Robert Redford hair, and he wore a plaid shirt half unbuttoned. Heath suspected he’d been in the bathroom primping until this entrance.

“I know you sexually assaulted Elizabeth,” Heath said to Sam. “Elizabeth’s sixteen. In Colorado that makes your behavior child molestation. A felony.”

Sam stopped leaning. He, at least, was scared. Not so Mrs. Edleson. Clacking her mug down on the tray, she tried to nail Heath to the wall with a malevolent glare. “Now see here, Heath, Sam didn’t do anything! Do you hear me? You daughter, your
adopted
daughter, is no better than she should be, and you don’t know the half of it.”

Heath looked over Terry’s head. “Sam, I know you arranged to be alone with Elizabeth, then assaulted her. I’m thinking the only reason it wasn’t rape was that your wife and daughter got wind of it and came home before they were supposed to.”

Terry was on her feet. “Your daughter made advances to my husband!” she shrieked, looking like she might fly at Heath and claw her eyes out.

Anna’s voice cut cold from where she still leaned against the sideboard, ankles crossed. “Elizabeth’s sixteen. Sam’s forty—”

“Thirty-eight,” he interrupted, his first words since entering the fray.

“She’s a minor. He touched her. Either way it’s a felony. Either way Sam goes to jail,” Anna finished.

Terry quivered, fumed, sat, took up her coffee cup, breathed, sipped. “There’s no need for that kind of talk,” she said softly. “There’s no need to embarrass yourself—or your daughter—by calling the police. I don’t blame Elizabeth. Girls like Sam. He’s a very handsome man.”

A snort from the sideboard, and a murmured “Chinless wonder.”

Heath suppressed a smile. Terry pretended not to hear. Sam’s hand flew to hide the lower half of his face.

“Elizabeth made a pass at Sam,” Terry said. The threat of jail hadn’t silenced her, but it had toned her down.

“Just like the girl in Idaho made a pass at Sam?” Anna asked. She pushed out from the table she’d been tucked against and stepped into the light from the kitchen. Menace radiated from her. Heath could never figure out how she did it. It was just there, palpable, a sense of imminent threat that could be felt against the skin of the mind.

“That girl … that girl was … she…” Terry, her righteous anger temporarily damped, was flailing for words to fan it back to life. Heath took this moment of vulnerability to unlock Elizabeth’s cell phone and open a text. Wheeling close enough that she bumped Terry’s knees, she thrust the cell phone into the other woman’s hands, where she couldn’t miss the photo of a woman and a dog fornicating.

“Is that why you sent this to my daughter?” Heath demanded. Terry dropped the pink cell phone as if it were a used tissue.

“This is sick,” Terry hissed at Heath. “Your daughter is disgusting and sick. This proves it.”

Sam pushed his wife aside, then reached down to retrieve the phone. Heath watched him narrowly as he turned the phone right side up on his palm and pushed the button to unlock it. “Shit!” he said in what sounded like genuine shock. Terry tried to slap it from her husband’s hand, but he dodged her blow. Anna moved from the shadows to stand behind Heath’s chair. Making plans for a quick retreat, no doubt.

Before the Edlesons could stop their squabble to launch a counterattack, Heath broke into their concentration.

“Sorry to introduce that into your world so suddenly,” she said acidly. “Someone has been using the Internet and cell phones—Twitter, texting, you name it—to cyberstalk Elizabeth. I need to find out who is behind it. Since the girls were at odds, I thought Tiff might be able to help me.”

“Tiff had nothing to do with that!” Terry snarled. “Nothing. I kept her away from your …
daughter.
” She made the word sound like an epithet. “Because Tiff is a good girl.” Terry’s doughy round face hardened and took on a sly look. “Since there is no problem, but you are troublemakers, what about I help you, and you promise not to try and get my Sam in trouble with the police?” she asked shrewdly.

“I promise,” Heath said solemnly.

“What about you?” Terry glared at Anna.

“Elizabeth doesn’t want the police involved,” Anna said.

“We don’t know anything about these … these filthy things,” Terry said. “We don’t know people who even know where to get filth like that. Nobody we know would ever
get
anything like on your daughter’s phone. There. Now we’re out of it. That’s all the help I can give you.”

The bitch was throwing it back on Elizabeth. Heath said nothing, and that nothing burned in her throat like fire on gasoline.

Sam, still staring at the phone, as if loath to take his eyes from the image of the woman and the dog for fear it would vanish, sat down on the sofa with a thump. “I’ve never seen anything like this stuff.” He was thumbing forward on the touch screen, no doubt hoping for more.

Terry snatched the phone from her husband’s hands. Heath was willing to bet she knew what Sam was, knew the lies she told herself so she could stay in the marriage.

“Is Tiff home?”

“You are not going to show this to Tiffany!” Terry exclaimed in horror. Marching over, she dropped the phone in Heath’s lap with an exaggerated moue of distaste.

“The girls are estranged,” Heath said. “Maybe Tiffany is doing this because she’s angry, because you told her Elizabeth tried to seduce her dad.”

“Tiff wouldn’t do this,” Sam said. “Tiff wouldn’t even know what this is.”

Heath could feel Anna hovering behind her like a brewing storm cloud. She shot her a warning glance; they needed to talk to Tiff. “I don’t need to show her the photograph,” Heath said with as much patience as she could muster. “But I would like to talk to her. The girls are close; Tiffany might know who wants to hurt Elizabeth.”

Terry’s eyes narrowed. “We’re done here,” she said. “Take your daughter’s filth and get out.”

“We need to talk to Tiffany,” Heath insisted. “If you want to be around when we do, go and get her.”

Sam stood, trying to pull his manhood up around him despite the missing chin. “You heard my wife,” he said, and took a threatening step toward Heath.

Anna moved from the shadows behind Robo-butt. Her right arm shot out, stiff and sudden, the heel of her hand catching him in the solar plexus. With an
oof
he sat again, his moment of macho a thing of the past.

“The girls are not close,” Terry hissed. She stomped past Anna and jerked open the front door. “Elizabeth brought this on herself. She probably gets stuff like that all the time. She probably likes it.”

Anna had turned the wheelchair so Heath was facing the harridan at the door. Throughout this adventure in futility Heath had remained relatively calm. Terry’s smugness and accusations blasted her self-control. The old Heath rose from the ashes of the one born of the ice fall. Heath never moved, but she saw, actually saw, an image of herself rise from her chair like a zombie from the grave, arms outstretched, fingers curled into claws the better to tear out and devour the flesh of Terry Edleson’s throat. Maybe Terry saw the projection. Heath didn’t know. All she knew was that a look of abject, pants-wetting terror deformed the other woman’s face.