The Edge of the Light (6 page)

Seth saw Becca ease the earbud out of her ear again as Brenda said in a hiss to Rich Darrow, “You always think you're so clever. You arranged to have this meeting without me because you knew I'd object. He needs full-time care and he's
not
going to get it here.”

“Not that you're volunteering to take care of him,” Seth put in.

She swung on him. “Don't you dare—”

“Seth, let me handle this,” Rich said. “Why don't you and Becca wait outside?”

Seth didn't want this. He was too scared that his aunt would strong-arm his dad. Because Brenda had money, Brenda had power. Rich was a glass blower lucky enough to make ends meet. But Seth said, “Come on, Beck,” and he went outside to the porch. On the lawn, Gus looked up from the bone he was working on, and his tail wagged happily. Seth went over to him and patted the Lab's head.

He said with some determination to Becca, “He's
not
going anywhere but home, Beck.”

“I know it's important,” she replied. “It's what he'd want.”

“We got to get him here fast. If we don't, my uncle's going to come over with his polished shoes and his sports jacket and his razor cut hair and believe me he's going to have a calculator in his pocket. You ask me, he'll be looking at the house to sell it and then we'll be done for, especially if Grand isn't sitting on the front porch when he shows up.”

T
he work on Ralph Darrow's house was going to take two weekends. Becca and Seth had first assumed one weekend would do it. But when they had all the supplies gathered and when they stood together outside Ralph's house, having a look at the scope of the work they'd taken on, they had to admit it couldn't be accomplished in the two and a third days they had blocked out for it. There was too much to be done, and a lot of it had to be accomplished out-of-doors, where daylight in January was in short supply.

“Sheesh,” had been Seth's reaction, and although his thoughts were fuller, they made the same point.
No way José
had been foremost in his mind, followed by . . .
I don't do this and he ends up getting booted because that's what she'll do to him depend on it.

Becca was pleased by the amount of whispering she picked up from Seth as they stood together. Time was that she'd only heard fragments. Working with Diana Kinsale to block out people's whispers when she didn't want to hear them was also improving her ability to hear them when she wished to do so.

“We can make a serious dent in it, can't we?” she asked Seth.

“S'pose,” he said.

“Then what's left, you and I can do next weekend. Prynne'll come back, I bet.”

Prynne was Seth's girlfriend: Hester Prynne Haring. She was one of Seth's fellow musicians, and she'd grown up west of Whidbey Island in the vicinity of the Hood Canal, which stretched its length between the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas. She and Seth had been together for several months now, and from what Becca had picked up from whispers, things were pretty serious. At least that was the case on Seth's part. On Prynne's part . . . Becca wasn't so sure.

Prynne came out of the house, followed by Jenn McDaniels and Squat Cooper. Squat was wearing a
BOB THE BUILDER
baseball cap over his thick, rust-colored hair, and somewhere he'd found a pair of workman's overalls to go with it. He'd scored tools from his mom's garage as well, leftovers from before his dad had deserted the family for his receptionist. Despite his appearance as a worker, Squat represented the brains of the group. The rest of them represented the brawn.

That included Derric, who was up above on the area where the driveway would go in. The trees there had been felled and hauled off by professionals. The profits from selling the downed wood to a lumber mill were being used to buy what they needed to fix Ralph's house. Two trees, however, had been left where they'd fallen. Seth's plan was that they would be turned into firewood for his grandfather. They needed to be sawed into manageable lengths, chopped into fireplace logs, and set in covered stacks to
dry. Derric had asked for this project. Becca could tell from the roaring of the chain saw that he was deep into it as the rest of them gathered on the front porch of the house.

It was a frigid day. Seth's words came out in puffs of vapor as he assigned them their tasks.

“Jenn and Squat,” he said, “you're with me on the ramp. Beck and Prynne, you're doing all the rails for the house. They're already cut but they need to be stained. The brackets are ready, too. We got stainless steel for the shower, and those're in the downstairs bathroom ready to mount. Everything else is in Grand's shop. Everyone okay with that?”

“We live to serve,” was how Squat put it. He extended his arm to Jenn, adding, “Shall we, dearest?”

“Don't make me hurl,” she replied with a roll of her eyes.

Becca and Prynne headed for Ralph Darrow's shop, which stood at the foot of the hill down which the new driveway would descend. Overhung with a winter bare wisteria, the shop wasn't a large building, but it had served Ralph well. It was the first structure he'd put onto his property, and from it he'd built the entire house in which he and wife had lived.

Inside, Becca and Prynne found the rails that the house needed. They were stacked along one wall in varying sizes, and on them was taped the location of their installation. Brackets to hold them sat on the workbench. These were wrought iron: simple, without ornament, and made by one of the island blacksmiths.

Prynne looked at the scope of their work and said to Becca, “We got the better deal. Sometimes it's useful to have only one
eye. Otherwise, I'd be outside pounding a hammer, I bet.”

Becca was switching on the two portable heaters. It seemed even colder in the building than it was outside. She turned to see Prynne popping out her false eye and pulling from the pocket of her long wool skirt a small box and the piratical patch she wore when she didn't have the glass eye in her empty socket. She stored the glass eye inside the box, positioned the eye patch where it belonged, and fastened the band that held it in place.

“Don't want to get sawdust in the old socket,” she said in answer to Becca's unasked question.

“You're nice to help us,” Becca told her.

“Well, Seth's my guy,” Prynne said.

Becca nodded, but the truth was, she wasn't so sure. Earlier, when Seth and Prynne had entered Ralph's house in advance of Derric, Jenn, and Squat, she'd hugged hello to both of them. When her hands touched Prynne, she'd had a flash of an image. It had lasted two seconds, perhaps a little longer. But it was enough for her to see a bearded and bony guy looking up from a cluttered table, his eyebrows raised and a smile on his face. Sly, the smile seemed. Knowing as well. Becca felt uneasy when she saw him. She had glanced between Seth and Prynne, and she'd tried to read the level of comfort and trust they had in each other. But that was an impossibility. She might be able to hear their whispers, and she might be able to see through their eyes a previous moment they'd lived through. But that was it.

Now, she and Prynne set out to do their assigned task. There were two cans of stain to make the railing match the woodwork in the house. Becca opened one of them as Prynne brought two
of the rails to the workbench. They worked in silence for a couple of minutes, a silence broken by the periodic roar of the chain saw and Seth's voice outside Ralph's shop, telling Squat and Jenn what they needed to do to help him build the ramp. Since he'd already put the posts in, they heard him say, they had to frame out the structure. Grand would have to be able to walk up and down it and he'd also have to be able to be pushed in a wheelchair on occasion, so the degree of the slope . . .

“He sure loves that guy,” Prynne murmured. “Working all week on construction and then coming here to do more? He's tough.”

“He wants Grand home,” Becca said.

Prynne dipped her rag into the stain and began applying it. “I didn't get to meet him before . . . you know . . . before the stroke.”

“He's great.”

“Got to be. Nice that you get to stay here, too. I mean, nice that he lets you. Lots of old people . . . that'd sort of be the last thing they'd want, taking in some teenager they don't really know. How'd it happen?”

Becca had replaced her earbud when Prynne and the other two kids had come out of the house. That many people in her immediate vicinity still proved too much for her to block out. But now she eased the earbud from her ear, the better to pick up what Prynne might be thinking about Becca King and her advent on the island.

Becca went with a slight variation of her original story: She'd come north from San Luis Obispo in California to live with her
“aunt Debbie” at the Cliff Motel in Langley because her relationship with her mom wasn't so hot. But things hadn't worked out with her aunt, and she'd ended up here at Ralph's because she knew Seth from his job at the Star Store grocery in town. “Where he used to work before construction,” she told Prynne. “He pretty much rescued me.”

“I know a
lot
about things not working out with relatives, that's for sure,” Prynne said frankly when she'd heard the story. She confided that she'd moved out of her parents' home for just that reason. Port Gamble, she said, had to be the
worst
place on the planet to grow up. “You ever been there?” she asked Becca. When Becca shook her head, Prynne said, “It's Nowheresville. There's
nothing
nearby. I do not lie. I hate it there.”
If I'd never lived there I wouldn't be no way I'm not thinking about that today.

Becca gave her a curious look. Thinking about what? was what she wondered. What she said was “Bummer,” and she tried to hear more. She even tried her luck touching Prynne's arm when she told Prynne she was going to the house to make the sandwiches for lunch after nearly three hours of staining. But nothing else came from Prynne except a brief moment of her fiddle music.

Becca was assembling sandwiches for everyone when the roar of the chain saw up on the new driveway stopped. She figured Derric was breaking for lunch, and Squat's and Jenn's entry to the house followed by Seth and Prynne seemed to support this. Seth went to the fridge and brought out the pasta salad while Jenn and Squat did what they usually did, which was spar
verbally. In this case, the sparring had to do with Jenn's calf muscles. Squat pointed out to her the dangers of becoming too studly. Jenn pointed out to him how little she cared. She strode to the window as the others began loading the table with chips, cookies, fruit, and drinks.

She said, “There's some woman coming down the trail, Seth. Wow, that's seriously dumb footwear. She's going to . . . Whoops. Ooooh. That's hard on the ass.”

Dumb footwear equated to one person, and it wasn't long before they heard the staccato sound of Brenda Sloan's boot heels on the front steps over which the ramp was in the process of being built. She marched across the porch and flung open the door. She took in all of them, and Becca thought the course of wisdom was to remove her earbud. She did so as Brenda Sloan said, “What the hell is going on? And who is that black kid up in the forest?”

The atmosphere was suddenly rife with whispers.
Man what a bitch
 . . .
who's she think
 . . .
when Mike sees this he's going to understand why
 . . .
better call Dad
 . . . were just some of them. Diana Kinsale would have called this the perfect opportunity to practice
Empty of all there is
, but Becca didn't think that would be the most useful route to take.

Seth was saying, “That ‘black kid in the forest' is the under sheriff's son.”

“Don't try to impress me,” Brenda said. “
Or
intimidate me. Now who
are
you people and what are you doing in my father's house?”

“It's pretty obvious,” Seth replied. “We're getting it ready for Grand.”

“How dare you even think you can go ahead when nothing's been decided. A twenty-year-old doesn't get to determine what happens to
my
father.”

“Grand is Dad's father, too, and Dad says Grand stays here.”
Or he will
came after that, which told Becca volumes. She learned less from the rest flying around the room:
Bitch on wheels
 . . .
trespassing
 . . .
all I need after not making money anyway
 . . .
lying to me
and
maybe back to Port Townsend now
.

“We'll see about
that
,” Brenda said.

The door's flying open stopped Seth from replying. A well-dressed man walked in, and he had Derric by the arm in a way that suggested he'd dragged him down from the driveway. He said, “D'you want to tell me who the
hell
this thug is and what he's doing ripping off Ralph's trees?”

It was a jaw-dropping moment. Everyone went silent. Becca shoved her earbud back into her ear. She didn't want anything more to come at her. Derric's face was enough. His expression. His eyes.

Seth said acidly, “He's our friend, Uncle Mike. And Sheriff Mathieson's son.”

Mike dropped Derric's arm like a branch on fire. “Why the hell didn't you tell me when I asked you?” he demanded of Derric.

Becca didn't need to be without the AUD box to understand what Derric was thinking.
Because I'm black
was on his face.
Because of what you thought because I'm black.

Mike Sloan looked around. He seemed to take in the markings on the wall that indicated where the handrails were going to be placed. Obviously, he'd already seen the early stages of the ramp to the porch. He said, “You're completely reducing the value of this place. Trees going down, turning this into a house for the handicapped. D'you have
any
idea what that does to its sale price?”

“Doesn't matter,” Seth said. “Grand's not selling.”