Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (2 page)

W
hen people said “Money isn’t everything,” Jenn McDaniels knew two things about them. First, they’d never been poor. Second, they didn’t have a clue what being poor was like. Jenn was poor, she’d been poor for all of her fifteen years, and she had a whole lot more than just a clue about the kinds of things you had to do when you didn’t have money. You bought your clothes at thrift stores, you put together meals from food banks, and when something came along that meant you had even the tiniest chance of escaping bedsheets for curtains and a life of secondhand everything, you did what it took.

That was what she was up to on the afternoon that Annie Taylor drove into her life. Had the condition of the very nice silver Honda Accord not told Jenn that Annie Taylor didn’t belong on Whidbey Island—for God’s sake the car was actually clean!—the Florida plates would have done the job. As would have Annie Taylor’s trendy clothes and her seriously fashionable spiky red hair. She got out of the Accord, put one hand on her hip, said to Jenn, “This is Possession Point, right?” and frowned at the obstacle course that Jenn had set up the length of the driveway.

This obstacle course was Jenn’s tiniest chance to escape the bedsheet curtains and the secondhand everything. It was also her chance to escape Whidbey Island altogether. The course consisted of trash can lids, broken toilet seats, bait buckets, floats, and ripped-up life jackets, all of which stood in for the traffic cones that any other kid—like a kid with money—might have used for a practice session. Her intention had been one hour minimum of dribbling up and down this obstacle course. Tryouts for the All Island Girls’ Soccer team were coming up in a few months, and Jenn was
going
to make the team. Center midfielder! A blazing babe with amazing speed! Her dexterity unquestioned! Her future assured! University scholarship, here I come. . . . Only at the moment, Annie Taylor’s car was in the way. Or Jenn was in Annie’s way, depending on how you looked at things.

Jenn said yeah, this was Possession Point, and she made no move to clear the way so that Annie could drive forward. Frankly, she saw no reason to. The redhead clearly didn’t belong here, and if she wanted to look at the view—such as it was, which wasn’t much—then she was going to have to take her butt down to the water on foot.

Jenn dribbled the soccer ball toward a broken toilet seat lid, dodging and feinting. She did a bit of clever whipping around to fool her opponents. She was ready to move the ball past a trash can lid when Annie Taylor called out, “Hey! Sorry? C’n you tell me . . . I’m looking for Bruce McDaniels.”

Jenn halted and looked over her shoulder. Annie added, “D’you know him? He’s supposed to live here. He’s got a key for me. I’m Annie Taylor, by the way.”

Jenn scooped up the ball with a sigh. She knew Bruce, all right. Bruce was her dad. The last time she’d seen him he’d been sampling five different kinds of home brew on the front porch, despite the early February cold, with the beers lined up on the railing so that he could “admire the head on each” before he chugged. He brewed his beer in a shed on the property that he always kept locked up like Fort Knox. When he wasn’t brewing, he was selling the stuff under the table. When he wasn’t doing that, he was selling bait to fishermen who were foolhardy enough to tie their boats up to his decrepit dock.

Annie Taylor’s mentioning a key made Jenn first think that her dad was handing over his Fort-Knox-of-Brewing shed to a stranger. But then Annie added, “There’s a trailer here, right? I’m moving into it. The man I’m renting from—Eddie Beddoe?—he said Bruce would be waiting for me with the key. So is he down there?” She gestured past the obstacle course. Jenn nodded yeah, but what she was thinking was that Annie had to be talking about a different trailer because no way could anyone live in the wreck that had stood abandoned not far from Jenn’s house for all of her life.

Annie said, “Great. So if you don’t mind . . . ? C’n I . . . ? Well, can I get this stuff out of the way?”

Jenn began to kick her obstacles to one side of the lane. Annie came to help, leaving her Honda running. She was tall—but since Jenn was only five two, pretty much everyone was tall—and she had lots of freckles. What she was wearing looked like something she’d purchased in Bellevue on her way to the island: skinny jeans, boots, a turtleneck sweater, a parka, a scarf. She looked like an ad for the outdoor life in Washington State, except what she had on was way too put together to be something a real outdoorsman would wear. Jenn couldn’t help wondering what the hell Annie Taylor was doing here aside from being on the run from the law.

Soccer ball under her arm, she trailed Annie’s car to the vicinity of the trailer. Her reaction to the sight of it, Jenn decided, was going to be more interesting than dribbling.

“Oh!” was the expression on Annie Taylor’s face when Jenn caught up to her. It wasn’t the oh of “Oh how cool,” though. It was more the oh of “Oh my God, what have I done?” She’d gotten out of her car and was standing transfixed, with all her attention on the only trailer in the vicinity. “This is . . . uh . . . it?” she said with a glance at Jenn.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Jenn replied sardonically. “If you’re into living with black mold and mildew, you’re in the right place.”

“Possession Point,” Annie said, pretty much to herself. And again then to Jenn, “This is . . . for real? I mean, this is it? You don’t live here, too, do you?” Annie looked around but, of course, there wasn’t much to see that would reassure anyone about this dismal place.

Jenn pointed out her house, a short distance away and closer to the water. The building was old but in marginally better condition than the trailer. It was gray clapboard, with a questionable roof, and just beyond it at the edge of the water, a bait shack tumbled in the direction of a dock. Both of these structures seemed to rise out of the heaps of driftwood, piles of old nets, and masses of everything from overturned aluminum boats to upended toilets.

As Annie Taylor took all this in, Jenn’s father, Bruce, came out of the house and down the rickety front steps of the porch. He was calling out, “You Annie Taylor?” to which Annie replied with little enthusiasm, “You must be Mr. McDaniels.”

“You are in the presence,” he said.

“That’s . . . uh . . . That’s great,” Annie replied although the hesitation in her words definitely indicated otherwise.

Jenn could hardly blame her. In her whole life, Annie Taylor had probably never seen anyone like Bruce McDaniels. He enjoyed being a character with a capital
C
, and he played up anything that made him eccentric. So he kept his gray hair Ben Franklin style down to his shoulders. He covered his soup-bowl-sized bald pate with a ski cap that read
SKI SQUAW VALLEY
although he’d never been on skis in his life. He was in terrible shape, skinny like a scarecrow everywhere except for his belly, which overhung his trousers and made him look pregnant most of the time.

He was digging in his pocket, saying, “Gotcher key right here,” when the front door opened again, and Jenn’s two little brothers came storming out.

“Who the hell’s
she
?” Petey demanded.

“Dad, he ate a damn hot dog and they were ’posed to be for damn dinner!” Andy cried. “Jenny, tell ’im! You heard Mom say.”

“Desist, rug rats,” was Bruce McDaniels’s happy reply. “This is Annie Taylor, our new neighbor. And these, Annie, are the fruit of my loins: Jennifer, Petey, and Andy. Jenn’s the one with the soccer ball, by the way.” He chuckled as if he’d made a great joke although Jenn’s pixie haircut and lack of curves had resulted in her being mistaken for a boy more than once.

Annie said politely that it was nice to meet them all, at which point Bruce ceremoniously handed over the key to the trailer. He told her he’d given the door’s lock a good oiling that very morning and she’d find the place in tiptop shape with everything inside in working order.

Annie looked doubtful, but she murmured, “Wonderful, then,” as she accepted the key from him. She settled her shoulders, unlocked the door, stuck her head inside, and said, “Oh gosh.” She popped out as quickly as she’d popped in. She shot the McDaniels spectators a smile and began the process of unloading her car. She had boxes neatly taped and marked. She had a computer and a printer. She had a spectacular set of matching luggage. She started heaving everything just inside the door of the trailer.

No one in the McDaniels group made a move to help her, but who could blame them? For not one of them even began to believe that she would last one night in the place.

• • •

JENN AVOIDED ANNIE
Taylor for the first twenty-four hours of her stay, mostly out of embarrassment. Three hours after Annie had emptied her car, Jenn’s mom had come rumbling home in the Subaru Forester that did service as South Whidbey Taxi Company. Bruce McDaniels had been continuing his extensive experiment in the quality control of his brews for those three hours, and when Jenn’s mom got out of the Subaru and began trudging tiredly toward the house, he’d greeted her by belting out “Kuh-kuh-kuh Katie! My bee-you-tee-full Katie!” He ran to greet her, falling on his knees and singing at full pitch, and Jenn’s mom had cried, “How could you! Again!” and promptly burst into tears. Jenn recovered from the excruciating humiliation of all this by hiding out in her bedroom and wishing her parents would both disappear, taking Andy and Petey with them.

From her window, she spied on Annie Taylor, who left the trailer periodically either to haul wood inside for the stove that heated the place or to walk on the driftwood-cluttered beach. When she did this latter thing, she carried a pair of binoculars with her. Perched upon the gnarled roots of a piece of driftwood, she used the binoculars to scan the surface of the water. Jenn figured at first she was looking for the resident orcas. Killer whales made use of Possession Sound at all times of the year, and seventy of them lived within fifty miles of Whidbey Island. To Jenn, they were the only sea creatures of interest.

The third time Annie walked the beach, she took a camera and tripod with her. Jenn decided she was probably a wildlife photographer, then, and she asked her father this at breakfast on the day after Annie’s arrival. He was the only person up aside from Jenn. The day was freezing cold outside, and as usual it wasn’t much warmer in the house. Everyone else in the family had apparently decided the best course was to wait out the cold beneath the covers, but it wasn’t raining, and clear weather meant running practice, which was what Jenn intended to do. Still, there was the matter of Annie. . . .

“Hell if I know,” was Bruce’s answer to Jenn’s question about the young woman and photography. “All I do is collect the rent and all I care about her is: is she quiet at night and will she keep from scaring the herring in the bait pool. You’ll have to ask Eddie if you want to know more. Far’s I’m concerned, ignorance is
b-l-i-s-s
.” He’d been reading a week-old edition of the
South Whidbey Record
as he spoke. But he looked up then, took in Jenn’s attire, and said, “Just where the hell you going?” when she told him she’d see him later.

“Sprints,” she said. “Tryouts coming up. All Island Girls’ Soccer. You know.”

“For God’s sake be careful if you’re going on the road. There’s ice out there and if you break a leg—”

“I won’t break a leg,” she told him.

Outside, she began to stretch, using the porch steps and the railing. Her breath was like a fog machine in the freezing air.

A bang sounded from the trailer on the far side of the property, and Annie Taylor stalked outside. She had on so many layers of clothing that Jenn was surprised she could move. She headed for the woodpile and grabbed up an armful.

“Stupid, idiot, frigging, asinine, useless, oh yeah right,” came from Annie to Jenn across the yard. “Like this is supposed to . . . Oh
great
. Thank you very much.”

Jenn watched as Annie piled up wood and staggered with it back to the trailer. She gave a curious look to the woodpile. The Florida woman was sure going through it. Except . . . Jenn realized that there was no scent of woodsmoke in the morning air.

She went over to the trailer’s door. She stuck her head inside and said, “Sure are going through the wood, huh?”

Annie glanced over at her from a squat woodstove in front of which she was kneeling. “Oh, I sure as hell wish,” she said. “None of it’s burning. I’m just trying to find a damn log that will.”

“Weird,” Jenn said. “It should burn fine.”

“Well,
should burn
and
does burn
are two different things. If you see smoke coming out of this trailer, believe me, it’s going to be from my ears.”

“Want me to take a look?”

“Be my guest. If you can make this shit burn—pardon my French but I am so frustrated and I spent the whole damn night freezing my tits off—I owe you breakfast.”

Jenn laughed. “Frozen tits, huh?” she said. “Ouch. Lemme look at the stove.”

J
enn took one look around the inside of the trailer and said, “Gross. Why’d you rent this place?”

“I need the water around here.” Next to the woodstove, Annie grabbed a log from among the two dozen others already scattered on the floor.

“Uh . . . this is an island?” Jenn said. “Last time I looked there was water everywhere.”

“Sure. Right. But I need this water.”

“It’s the same all over.”

“Wrong,” Annie said. She pointed to the woodstove, its door hanging open like a toothless black mouth. “So, d’you know anything about these things?”

“I know you got to clean out the ashes,” Jenn told her after giving it a quick look. “Nothing’s going to burn inside the stove till you do that. What about the dampers? Are they even open? Bet no one checked the flue, and there’s probably bird nests on top of the chimney.”

Annie said, “Oh,” but she made no move to address these problems. Instead she sank onto a filthy chrome-legged kitchen chair and looked dismally around the place.

To Jenn, the interior of the trailer suggested a serious health hazard. Aside from the chromed-legged chair that Annie was using, the furnishings consisted of another similar chair, a ripped-up banquette, a sloping table, and a mildewed couch that stood beneath a window so leaky that something looking suspiciously like moss appeared to be line dancing along its sill. The place was a death trap in various forms. Jenn wondered how long Annie planned to stay.

She scratched her head and said, “D’you want me to get this woodstove working?”

“Oh
would
you?” Annie said, brightening at once. “I’d get on my knees and kiss your ring. Except . . . I saw you stretching. Were you about to go running or something? I mean, I don’t want you to—”

“No worries. This’ll just take a sec.”

Jenn went outside and grabbed one of the bait buckets she’d been using for her dribbling practice. She took this to the woodstove and began to shovel the ashes into it. She figured that Annie had decided the fireplace tools standing next to the stove were part of the overall décor. The amount of dust on them suggested that no one had touched them in years.

As she shoveled, she said, “No one’s lived here in, like, for my whole life. You sure you want to stay? I mean, you could probably get real sick.”

“It needs to be fixed up, that’s for sure,” Annie agreed. “I was sort of hoping that hot water, ammonia, baking soda, bleach, and white vinegar would take care of the problem.”

“Either that or blow it up,” Jenn said.

“Which,” Annie added, “might not be exactly a bad idea.”

They laughed together. Annie had a nice laugh. She had neat white teeth and a pretty smile. Jenn liked her and wondered how old she was. A lot older than herself, for sure, but Jenn wondered if they still might become friends. Friends were scarce on this part of the island.

She spied some newspapers sitting beneath a few of the logs, and she yanked these out and showed Annie how to build a proper fire: crumpled newspapers first, followed by a good amount of dry kindling, then logs on the top. She glanced at Annie to see if she was following, and Annie shot her a smile, although what Jenn had to admit was that a woman with Florida plates on her car probably hadn’t built fires very often.

She got to her feet and brushed off her hands. When Annie offered her the matches, she said, “Chimney first,” and she went outside, where she hoisted herself to the trailer’s roof and picked her way through the debris she and her brothers had been hurling up there for years. She found the chimney just as she thought she might find it: with a large bird’s nest perched on its top. She cleared this away and shouted down the chimney, “Let ’er rip, Annie.” In a few moments, a satisfying belch of smoke shot into the air.

Back inside the trailer, she found Annie kneeling in front of the woodstove, warming her hands like someone praying to the fire god. Jenn fed more kindling into the blaze and explained how to bank the stove at night. Annie nodded vaguely and leaned back on her heels. She cocked her head at Jenn and said, “I was thinking. . . . You need a job or anything?”

Jenn
always
needed a job. Along with potential friends, jobs were also scarce in this part of the island. “Doing what? Keeping your fire going?”

“Ha. That, too.” Annie waved vaguely around the trailer’s interior. “Let’s face it, Jenn. This place needs a ton of work. I can do some of it but I can’t do it all because I’ve got to get on with some other things. D’you want to help out? Obviously, I’ll pay.”

The pay part sounded good. The having to be near the trailer part didn’t. “I dunno,” Jenn said. “Maybe. I mean, this place is such a dump and spending a bunch of time in here fixing it up . . . ? No offense, but it sort of creeps me out. How much’re you shelling out to stay here, anyway?”

When Annie named the sum, Jenn gawped at her. “You’re
so
way being cheated,” she declared. “That’s
totally
unfair. You need to track down Eddie Beddoe and get a better deal.”

Annie’s expression became chagrined as she glanced around the derelict place. “It’s sort of my fault for being in such a rush, I guess.”

“Being in a rush doesn’t mean you deserve to be robbed.”

“Sure. But I agreed on the price. If I tried to change it, he might tell me to go somewhere else.”

“That’s not a bad idea, if you ask me.”

Annie shook her head. “It’s like I said before: I need Possession Point and I need this water.”

“Why?”

“Just . . . well, just because.”

“Is there some big secret? Like we got Bigfoot swimming in Possession Sound and you’re here to take its picture or something?”

Annie said nothing at first, so for a moment Jenn thought she’d actually hit on the truth, as ludicrous as that truth sounded. She added, “Or maybe a prehistoric water thing? Like our own Loch Ness Monster?”

As things turned out, she wasn’t too far off the point, for Annie caved and said, “Hell. I guess you’ll find out eventually. Especially if you work for me.”

“Find out what?”

“
Will
you work for me?”

“Okay. All right. But you have to pay me.”

“I said I would. Deal?”

“Deal. Okay. Now, why’re you here?”

Annie glanced back at the door, as if worried about listeners. “I’m here because of the seal,” she said.

• • •

A RATHER LONG
time later, Jenn would think that she should have called
whoa Nellie
when Annie Taylor brought up the seal. For there are seals and there are seals, but Jenn knew in an instant that there was only one seal that Annie was talking about. This seal was called Nera. She was coal black from her flippers to her eyeballs. And for some reason that no one would ever speak about no matter how they were questioned on the topic, she’d been showing up for ages in the Whidbey Island waters at the same time every year. She usually hung around a place called Sandy Point as well as the small village of Langley, cavorting in the water near the Langley marina and barking at tourists, townspeople, and fishermen, like a swimmer trying to get their attention. But—and this was the weirdest part of her behavior—she made the swim from Langley to Possession Point on the very same day, at the very same time, of the very same month each year. She remained in Possession Point’s waters for exactly twenty-four hours, swimming restlessly back and forth, moaning and barking like an abandoned dog. After that, she returned to Langley, spent another month or two hanging in the water below Seawall Park before leaving for wherever she went until the next year rolled around and she did the same things all over again. Her comings and goings were magical and completely mysterious to the people on the south end of Whidbey Island. And the way Jenn figured it, the people on the south end of Whidbey Island were
not
going to be happy if they found out someone was here to mess with their magic and mystery.

So Jenn said, “A seal? What seal? What d’you want with a seal?” as if she didn’t know exactly what seal Annie was talking about.

Annie said, “Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know about her. Langley’s got . . . Here, wait a sec. . . .” She went to one of her boxes and pulled out a manila folder from which torn-out magazine pages frothed. She opened this and fingered through them. She brought out an article with brightly colored pictures: a festival, children eating ice cream, yokels wearing bizarre seal costumes, balloons, booths, and a banner across the entry to a park screaming
WELCOME BACK NERA!!!
in huge red letters.

Jenn couldn’t pretend not to know what this was: one of the village of Langley’s festivals. The dumbnut city fathers had a festival for everything, all to lure tourists to the town’s struggling bed-and-breakfasts, cafés, galleries, boutiques, and T-shirt shops. Nera was practically custom built for a town that welcomed whales, celebrated a “soup box” derby, used alpacas as camels in a pageant at Christmastime, and killed a citizen every year for Murder Mystery Weekend.

So Jenn had to say, “Oh. You must mean Nera.”

“Uh, yeah. I must mean Nera. Is there another seal?”

“Well . . . no. I mean, not exactly.”

“What d’you mean ‘not exactly’?” Annie looked thoughtful before her eyes lit up. She cried, “Jesus, Jenn. Is there more than one? God, wouldn’t
that
be a coup!”

Jenn frowned. Annie obviously had something cooking, not only to do with Nera but also with Possession Point. If it was Nera alone, she’d be parking her body in Langley: Nera’s central hangout. But for her to come to Possession Point, to insist that she had to be here where the waters were somehow “necessary” to her . . . ? It didn’t sound right to Jenn, so she said directly, “What d’you want her for?”

“Nera?”

“Yeah, Nera.”

“Nothing, really.” And when Jenn looked skeptical, Annie went on. “Okay, two things. One is the possibility of a genetic mutation. The other is the even better possibility of new species of seal.”

“And you care about this, why?” Jenn asked.

“I’m a marine biologist,” she said. “Or at least that’s what I’ll be officially if I ever finish my damn dissertation, and I
need
that seal to do it.”

“To write it for you? I don’t think she’s up to the job.”

“Very funny. I need her to prove my argument. Or to reveal something new to the world. Either way, I’m made.”

Annie explained the rest in what Jenn would come to know as Annie Taylor fashion. She dipped into one subject, slid over another, painted gloss on a third. Jenn wasn’t sure what this said about Annie, except that when she wanted something, she was a really fast talker in order to get it. So what she revealed in a rush was that Nera either had the rarest of rare conditions called melanism—“All-black, just the opposite of an all-white albino,” Annie explained—or she had a genetic mutation or she was a new species of seal. “She looks vaguely like a Ross seal,” Annie said, “but if that’s the case she’s seriously out of territory. So I figure she’s either a new species or a mutant.”

“Or the opposite of an albino,” Jenn said.

“Yeah. But my money’s on mutant. Which, for my purpose, is almost as good as being a new species.”

“Why?”

“Because the frigging oil companies all over the world keep claiming that their spills aren’t hurting the animal life. Nera’s my chance to prove them wrong. I mean, look at the facts: Oil spilled here around twenty years ago and now we’ve got a freak seal at our fingertips, saying ‘Look at me please and run a few tests.’”

Tests? That rang
all
the alarms. “No one’s letting you get close to Nera,” Jenn said. “Just so you know. And when was there ever an oil spill around here, anyway?”

“I already said. Twenty years ago. Something like that. It saturated Possession Point. You don’t know about it? Well, maybe you wouldn’t. How long have you lived here? How old are you anyway? You look . . . Are you twelve?”

“Hey! I’m fifteen, okay? And if there was an oil spill, I’d
know
about it.”

“Why? It would’ve been cleaned up. This place’s remote, sure as hell, but no one’s going to let bilge oil sit on the beach for twenty years. And that’s what it was. Bilge oil. The worst there is. It’d’ve been cleaned up within weeks, maybe two or three months. But in a couple of years there wouldn’t even have been a sign of it. Except in the sea life.”

“Like Nera.”

“Like Nera. Who just happened to show up a year after the spill? Two years after it? What does that tell you? I know what it tells me. So I need to get a close look at her. I need some samples. One way or the other, she’s proof of something. I just need to know what the ‘something’ is.”

“Samples? No way. No one’s letting you near that seal, Annie.”

“Oh?” Annie gave an airy, dismissive wave. “Believe me, we’ll see about that.”