Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (22 page)

The air seemed to crack. She’d only said his name, but everything in the room became instantly different. Each object was supercharged with emotion and the emotion came from Ivar although he tried to hide it.
Now it comes . . . so close to what I should have . . .
indicated there was history here. Ivar made this clear when he said to Becca, “Well, Eddie Beddoe’s a bad spot for me.”
Married to her and he won’t . . .
told Becca the source of the trouble.

“Sharla, huh?”

“He lost her and now she’s here in my house and in his mind one and one equals two. I don’t disabuse him of that notion and I probably should. Him and me? We squared off more ’n once about Sharla. Years ago, this was. He’d hurt her bad.” He seemed to read something on Becca’s face because he went on quickly with, “Heart hurt, Becks. He didn’t hit her or nothing. All’s I know is she took off for a while—off island somewheres—when they lived down in Possession Point. When she came back, she didn’t want nothing to do with him. He came around here once and I drove him off with a shovel. I won’t have no one bothering Sharla.”

The way he said her name . . . Becca knew there was also heart hurt right in Ivar Thorndyke’s bedroom. But the topic of Sharla brought to mind what Becca had found inside the trunk in Ivar’s chicken coop: those tiny OshKosh overalls. So she said carefully, “Sharla seems really sad, don’t you think?”

“Oh she’s sad all right,” Ivar agreed.

“’Bout Eddie maybe?”

“I do not know.”

“They have any kids, her and Eddie?” Becca asked because those overalls and what they meant certainly could point to a very big reason for someone’s sorrow.

But Ivar said, “Sharla and Eddie? Nope.”

So Becca asked, “Sharla and someone else?” And when Ivar looked at her sharply, she went on quickly with, “I was just thinking of reasons she might be sad. Like she had a kid and something happened to it. Like it . . . I don’t know . . . like it drowned or something?”

“No kids,” Ivar said. “And the only one who
almost
drowned was Eddie.”

“When he lost the boat, right?”

“That’d be about it. When Nera”—he made quotes in the air when he said the seal’s name with a scoff—“sank his boat and he swam to shore. Course it would’ve helped if he’d known how to handle that boat in the first place, but that’s Eddie for you. Always in a hurry to have more than he has and in an equal hurry to be someone he isn’t. And when he fails—which he always does—he starts the blaming. Surprises me that he went for Nera instead of Sharla. But Sharla wasn’t with him on the boat that night, so ’less she got out there and fiddled with it somehow, Eddie couldn’t exactly point the finger at her.”

Becca heard this detail and could see its importance in the overall Eddie-and-Sharla story. But the most peculiar part of it was still those little OshKosh overalls. Someone wasn’t telling the truth.

B
ecca made good time into Langley. She was proud of how expert she’d become upon her bike. The added benefit to having a mode of transportation was that she had no spare weight upon her any longer. She knew that when she picked up Jenn McDaniels’s whisper of
FatBroad
or when Jenn referred to her as
Fattie
, it simply was no longer the case. In fact, the only part of her that remained as it had been when she’d first arrived on the island was the amount of makeup she continued to wear and the phony thick-framed glasses that she put on daily. Other than that, she was totally different. The many pounds she’d lost, along with the glasses and the makeup and the hideous clothes, went some distance to assuring her that Jeff Corrie would probably not know who she was if he showed up on the island another time and looked right at her.

She passed through the village. Her destination was Diana Kinsale’s house. She arrived there to see Diana in the dog run. Her five dogs were bounding around the front lawn. Diana herself was shoveling poop into a bucket.

It was a fine day, the only truly nice day they’d had in all of March, which, Becca was discovering, was about three months long in the Pacific Northwest. It was endless rain, and when it wasn’t rain, it was gray skies or fog or bursts of wind. Everything was becoming green and lush. But there were times when green and lush did not make up for sunlight.

Diana’s dogs barked joyously when they saw Becca coast into the driveway. They bounded over and surrounded her. Oscar, the poodle, remained at a distance as usual, the sloppy enthusiasm of his pals far beneath his dignity. But he submitted himself to Becca’s caress of his thatch of soft head hair. He padded after her as she went to the kennel.

“Need help?” she asked Diana Kinsale.

Diana paused, leaning against her shovel. “Some things,” she said, “are far beyond friendship, and asking a friend to help shovel dog poop is one of them.”

Becca warmed to Diana’s use of
friend
. She looked at the wood shavings that covered the ground inside the waist-high chain-link fence. She said, “Five dogs make a lot of poop.”

“Next time, believe me, I plan to have only field mice as pets.” Diana went back to shoveling the poop. She said, “What brings you out this way?”

Becca began with the seal, with Annie Taylor, with diving. She segued from diving to Ivar and from Ivar to Sharla. Diana had lived on the island for thirty years. If Ivar had been lying about Sharla, Diana was probably going to know it.

“Children?” Diana said to her at the end of her story. “No. She’s never had children as far as I know. I suppose she
could
have had a child as a teenager. But she would have lived up in Oak Harbor then, and if she did have a baby, she must have given it up for adoption. If that’s what happened, though, she’s never told me. Why, Becca? What’s going on?”

“She seems sad, is all,” Becca said.

Diana raised an eyebrow at her. Becca understood what that raised eyebrow meant. Diana knew there was more to the story.

So Becca told her about the OshKosh overalls: three pairs along with some little T-shirts and shoes. Diana’s response was a sensible, “Are you sure the trunk was Sharla’s? If it was in the chicken coop, it seems more likely that it’d be Ivar’s. Or that he shares it with Sharla. And Ivar has a daughter. Steph. She lives in Virginia.”

“Nope,” Becca said. “It was all Sharla’s stuff inside the trunk. Pictures and clothes and things.”

“That’s interesting, then, isn’t it?”

“And what I was wondering is . . . well, have you
felt
anything when you’ve been with her,” which was as close as Becca was going to venture to talking about Diana’s own talent for touch and what happened when she put her hand upon another person.

“I’ve felt a lot of sadness,” Diana said. “What you’ve seen in her yourself. But I’ve always had the idea that Sharla has much to be sad about.”

“’Cause she was married to Eddie Beddoe?”

“That started things, yes. But I suspect a lot of other things added to it.”

• • •

WHAT THOSE THINGS
were, though . . . ? It was a case of Diana saying all she would say on the subject. That she knew more was a fact beyond doubt to Becca. That her belief was that Becca King was intended to discover things on her own was also beyond doubt, however. Becca was considering this and what she was meant to do about it when she reached the Cliff Motel as she pedaled into Langley. There, however, further considerations were driven from her mind as she rounded the corner from Camano Street and caught a glimpse of the empty lot next to the motel’s parking area.

Derric and Josh were having some Big Brother/Little Brother time there. They were building some kind of hideaway in the farthest corner, using reclaimed materials along with a lot of hammering and the sound of rap blasting from somewhere.

Here was something else she’d been avoiding, Becca thought. She didn’t think she had the courage to face Derric at the moment, but she knew she owed him some information. He would hate her even more at the end of it, but since things were finished between them, she didn’t see how they could get any more finished.

So she left her bike at the edge of the lot and crossed the newly greened grass that was coming up. Josh saw her first and yelled, “Hey, Becca! Lookit this place! It’s gonna be cool.”

She waved at him gamely. Derric, who was pounding a nail into a board, gave her a glance but nothing else. She nearly turned on her heel and beat a retreat when she caught the coldness in his eyes. But she forced herself forward and after dutifully admiring the structure whose many beauties Josh pointed out to her, she said to the little boy, “D’you mind if I talk to Derric for a second?”

Josh looked from her to his Big Brother. He said, “But not for long, huh? ’Cause we have work to do.”

Becca said, “Not for long.”

Josh said, “’Kay, then,” and returned to his pounding.

Derric didn’t look exactly thrilled to have to talk to her, and Becca couldn’t blame him. She’d messed up badly by producing the hidden letters to his sister. Hers was the primary action that had concluded with the letters being lost, and she could understand why forgiveness for that move wasn’t going to be in the cards.

She eased the AUD box earphone from her ear and said to him, “I checked with Good Cheer.”

Oh yeah big frigging deal wish I’d never
flitted through his mind as his face settled into an expression that told her he knew pretty much what was coming.

She said, “Stuff in the trash goes up to Coupeville. But the same day it goes up there, trucks take it off island to another site.”

He said, “Like this is some big discovery, Becca? I already knew that. My mom found it out.”
Stupid lame all the trouble she causes . . .
if I’d never . . . she’d never been . . . go away go away or I swear what I’ll do is . . .

“Please just listen,” Becca broke into his thoughts. “Seth and I . . . We went up to Coupeville right after we talked to you. I mean, the next day because obviously we couldn’t go that night ’cause they wouldn’t’ve been open.”

“So?”

“So they told us where everything went, to a site in Burlington. We went there, too. But in Burlington they said trash and junk and stuff ends up there from all over the island, from Camano Island, from the towns nearby, too. And even that’s not the final place for it. See it goes to eastern Washington—”

Shut up shut up shut up shut up because you’ve made things too late do you get that Becca?

Full and complete, the whisper was so clear and so patently Derric and so comprehensible for the first time in her life that Becca gave a little gasp. Derric said, “What’s wrong?”
Now she’s being a frigging drama queen and let me tell you it ain’t going to work.

She clutched her stomach against a sudden pain. It was as if the words were like little beings that entered her body and took up residence there. But they were hungry beings and they ate at her and surely, she thought, this isn’t how the whispers were supposed to be.

She said, “We went to Burlington like I said and we told them we had to look for the chair. Seth made a big deal of it, so they let us even though they said it wouldn’t be there. But there was so much junk . . . I mean, how could they know for sure it wasn’t there?”

Because they’re not frigging dumb like you.

“Please,” she murmured. “Can’t you try to be fair?”

“Huh? Hey, when were you ever fair with me?”

“I’m sorry. I’m
sorry
. What I’m trying to say is we could’ve gone to eastern Washington and I wanted to go and Seth would’ve taken me but there’d be tons of garbage and trash and by the time we got there the bulldozers would have covered it all anyway.”

Derric glanced at her, then. He’d been looking away, over at the town’s performing arts center where the marquee was advertising an upcoming performance of the community’s rendition of
Cyrano de Bergerac
. That put Becca in mind of the film
Roxanne
, which put her in mind of the town of Nelson in British Columbia, where it had been filmed, which put her in mind of her mom, who’d been in that town since the previous September and why why why had she not yet returned to take Becca her daughter away from this place to a new life somewhere, where they would be safe? She blinked hard against tears and she said, “I’m sorry,” although at that point she didn’t know whom she was apologizing to: Derric, herself, her mother, all of the above? And what did it matter when she was sorry for everything but especially for the moment she’d heard her stepfather’s whispers and read danger in them for both herself and her mom. What if, she thought, she had screwed up that as badly as she’d screwed up Derric and his letters to his sister? Wouldn’t
that
be icing on the moldy cake?

Derric said, “Yeah.” It wasn’t agreement. It was finality. He turned back and started to head across the vacant lot to Josh once again. She watched him walk off, his head lowered and his fists in his pockets, and she wondered if she could possibly ever feel any worse than she felt at the moment. She didn’t think so.