The Edge of the Light (9 page)

Lights from a car came jostling toward her from the house. That would be her mom, Jenn figured. She stepped to one side, but her mom didn't pass. Instead, she halted the car, rolled down her window, and gave Jenn a look that took in her bedraggled appearance.

“Where on earth . . . ?” she began.

“Soccer practice, the island bus, and talking to Mr. Holiday about a job.”

“Again? Jenn, honey, no means no.”

“Sometimes it means ask me later.”

“Not in this case, I'm afraid.” Kate tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and frowned into the storm. She said, “I just got a call, so you'll need to help your father finish making dinner. It's easy enough. Hot dogs cut up, put into baked beans. You know your dad, though. Mr. Secret Ingredient. There's bread and canned corn, too.”

“What about you? Coming back for dinner?”

Her mother shook her head. “Bible study tonight.”

“Aren't you having anything to eat, then?”

“The Lord has other plans for me. I trust in Him and in His ways. For He is—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jenn said. “See you later.”

She started to trudge off, but her mom went on with, “It
wouldn't hurt you to become familiar with the Bible, Jennie.”

Jenn ticked a salute at her. “It's on my to-do list.”

Before her mother could make any further comment, Jenn headed in the direction of Possession Sound. Out of the darkness, lights began to emerge. They came from across the water, in the windows of the more expensive houses in the town of Mukilteo. They also came from the nearby shabby old building that was the house where Jenn had grown up.

Its special features were a listing front porch, sheets hung at the windows and inexpertly made into curtains, and siding with great splintered patches where the weather had worn completely through the paint. Near the house, Jenn's dad had his brew shed. Its lights were on, so she figured he hadn't gotten around to beginning the dinner yet. Typical of Bruce McDaniels, she thought. Between beer and baked beans, he'd always choose beer. Besides, this was yet another source of income for the family. His brews were popular, so he had to keep up with demand.

But when she opened the door, her father wasn't inside the shed. She sighed, switched off the light, and fastened the padlock on the door.

She found her dad where he was supposed to be. He stood in the kitchen with a completely unnecessary apron wrapped around him. He was doing something with a loaf of bread while Jenn's little brothers wrestled on the living room floor. They were in a dispute over the television remote, she saw. Pretty dumb, as they didn't have cable and had to rely on a completely inadequate antenna to pick up the two channels that they actually were able to watch.

Her father turned from the counter on which he was fashioning his creation. He said, “Jenn o' my heart! Home at last!” and his slurred voice suggested he'd been sampling brew again. He waved around himself in an expansive gesture that took in the kitchen. “Are you here to assist or just to admire?”

She walked over to see what he was doing, which was using cookie cutters shaped like whales and maple leaves to make fanciful shapes out of the bread. A lot of it was, however, going to waste. He also had the habanero sauce out along with a bag of hardened brown sugar. She sighed and said, “Want me to take over? Might be faster and those guys—” She jerked her head at her brothers. “They're not going to settle down till they eat.”

“An answer to my prayers,” Bruce said. “I shall advise your brothers that table setting might be in order.”

Good luck with that, was what Jenn thought. She found the canned corn her mom had told her about. She stirred the baked beans with their chopped-up hot dogs. It was a meager enough meal, but sometimes they didn't even have this much. Then it would be pancakes for dinner. Syrup, no butter.

She hated her life.

W
hen Becca looked out the window the following Sunday morning, what she saw was a mass of gray so thick that her field of vision ended at the poles holding up Ralph Darrow's front porch. There had been fog before during her time on Whidbey Island, but she'd not yet seen fog like this. Becca didn't even notice Derric till he was on the porch itself. He wore a heavy winter parka and a blue and lime-green ski cap with
SEAHAWKS
printed on the front of it. He wore gloves and boots as well. From this Becca understood that it was not only foggy outside. It was also bitterly cold.

Usually she attended church with Derric and his family, something she'd been doing since Christmas. After the service, their habit was to head to a coffee roaster deep in the woods where they enjoyed bantering over breakfast. But today Derric had claimed that he and Becca wanted instead to go over town, taking the ferry that would allow them to catch a movie in nearby Lynnwood. This wasn't the actual case, but there was no way that Derric would consider telling Dave and Rhonda Mathieson the truth.

Becca didn't like lying to them. But anything less than lying, Derric had argued, was going to make his parents suspicious. For the reality was that he had been invited to La Conner for Sunday lunch, and if he told them that, he would have to tell them who Jeff and Darla Vickland were. That would lead to him having to tell them how he'd become acquainted with a family all the way up in La Conner, which would lead to him having to bring up Rejoice.

He
could
have done this, naturally. But the problem was he'd already pointed out a different and older girl in a photograph of his days in an African orphanage, and he'd told his parents
she
was Rejoice, the object of a childhood crush. For Dave had come across a slew of unsent letters Derric had written to someone called Rejoice. His curiosity had been piqued by these letters, and he'd started to ask questions to which Derric had manufactured answers.

To Becca, the moment when Derric's parents started to ask him about Rejoice represented the moment he could have explained that he had a sister, that as a little boy of five years old, he'd not known to tell Children's Hope of Kampala that one of the mass of abandoned and orphaned children they'd picked up from an alley in the city was his sister. But whenever Becca brought this up, he countered with the fact that he
should
have told Children's Hope that the two-year-old girl was his sister. And since he hadn't, he didn't want to wreck the way his parents looked at him: both as their son and as a person.

“I was a selfish rat” was how he put it.

Her reply of “You were
five
years old
when you first met Rhonda. There's no such thing as a five-year-old rat” never made any difference.

So today she just said that she didn't like lying to Dave and Rhonda. Derric's reply as they climbed into his Forester was, “I've been lying to them for the past nine years and even before that. Another lie isn't going to kill them
or
me. Don't you ever lie when it's the only thing to do?”

Becca didn't reply as she fastened her seat belt. The only response she could have made was the one she also couldn't make: Her entire life on Whidbey Island was a lie.

They rumbled from Newman onto Double Bluff Road where the fog was so dense that they couldn't see the one hundred yards to the island highway. They crawled along, and Becca worried about what it was going to be like for Derric, driving all the way to La Conner, where the fog was probably going to be worse. He was planning to take the freeway to get there instead of driving up the island and crossing Deception Pass Bridge. He figured there would be less fog this way, and Becca could only hope he was right. He was also dropping Becca in Langley. She had work to do in the library there, using the library's Internet for a project in her graphic design class. At least, that was what she'd told Derric. It was, she explained, way too complicated to go any further into it than that.

Derric had said, “Why doesn't Mr. Darrow have Internet at his house? He could even do it through his phone, for God's sake.”

To this she'd replied, “Because that would mean moving
into the twenty-first century, and he's barely made it into the twentieth. I'm lucky he even
has
a phone, Der. He doesn't have a television.”

“How're you feeling about Seth's plan?” he asked. “I got to say I don't like it much.”

“We'll still be able to see each other,” she pointed out. “Seth and Prynne'll come over when we have a date. And we can have study dates at Ralph's place, too. I think it'll work out okay.”

Despite her words, Becca was uneasy. When Seth had phoned her to explain the scheme and to inform her that Prynne had agreed to come over to Whidbey in order to stay with Grand from seven till three every weekday, Becca had heard the pleasure in his voice. He wanted Prynne close to him, and now he had that. But this understanding had prompted Becca's recall of that quick vision she'd had from Prynne, the one that clearly showed another man who was part of her life. That smile of his . . . Becca remembered it all too well. It was knowing and pleased and something else, although she couldn't put a name to what that was.

At the library in Langley, the fog was so thick that Camano Island—just two miles across Saratoga Passage—was completely invisible, but you could make out the curve of First Street as well as the street that descended to a small marina at the bottom of the bluff upon which Langley sat. Derric pulled Becca's bike from the back of the car and set it on the pavement. He looked around, saying, “Maybe you should come with me. I don't like that you have to ride around in the fog.”

“It'll be fine,” she assured him. “Anyway, I wasn't invited.”

“What're they going to do if I show up with you and say ‘Oh hey, wasn't Becca invited, too?'”

“No worries, Der. If it gets worse, I can go over to the motel and wait it out. I'll play pirates with Josh and Barbies with Chloe.”

“Doesn't
that
sound great?” he teased. He kissed her good-bye and Becca watched him drive off before she rolled her bike to a spot near the little city hall where she could safely lock it.

What she'd said to Derric about her need for the library's Internet had been completely true. But the reason for her need of the Internet? From start to finish, once again she had lied to him.

• • •

BECCA KNEW SHE
ought to feel guilty about her lies, since she kept preaching to Derric about lying to his parents. But she couldn't take the chance of telling him the truth. So for the past sixteen months she'd lived in a no man's land between the two poles of truth and falsehood, and she'd constantly reassured herself that revealing nothing to Derric about her life as Hannah Armstrong in San Diego protected him at the same time as it protected her.

There was no graphic design project. What there was, instead, was Becca's need to use one of the library's computers in order to log on to the Internet for a private reason.

Sunday morning was the perfect time, because Whidbey Island was thick with churches, and much of the population
on the south end of the island attended them. There were three churches in the village alone, and within five miles of Langley, there had to be at least four more. Because of this, Sunday mornings rendered the village a ghost town. Only the village coffee roaster was open, along with the sole café that offered breakfast. Sidewalks were empty, and there was no one in the library except a middle-aged female librarian with pink-tipped pigtails working behind the desk.

Once seated at the computer farthest from this woman, Becca logged on to Google. She typed into this search engine the name of the person most responsible for her flight from San Diego: Jeff Corrie. He was her mom's fifth husband, the man to whom Laurel Armstrong had so dumbly revealed her daughter Hannah's ability to hear the broken-up thoughts of others. Why Laurel had done this when she'd never told any of her other four husbands was a question she had never answered. But her weakness throughout life had always been men—what else could five stepfathers possibly indicate?—and somehow her greatest weakness had been the last one she'd married, Jeff Corrie.

Hearing the thoughts of others equated reading minds. That was how Jeff Corrie had seen it, and this dubious skill of Hannah Armstrong's had been too much for him to resist. He had an investment firm that specialized in financial opportunities for senior citizens, and once he learned what his stepdaughter could do, he figured there was no better method to get those senior citizens to hand over their pensions than to know from the first what was on their minds. In this way, he could reassure them
with facts, figures, and opportunities that looked to be surefire winners.

That was where his stepdaughter Hannah Armstrong had come in. Coffee maker, tea maker, mineral water provider, cookie deliverer, sandwich girl . . . She came in and out of the conference room where either Jeff or his partner, Connor, or both of them had met with their potential clients, and afterward she faithfully reported on what she'd heard in those clients' broken-up thoughts. She did this for three years as Jeff Corrie and his partner moved money here, there, and everywhere and made it next to impossible for the elderly to understand what was actually happening to their funds. Hannah Armstrong had not known about this part of the enterprise. She only knew she was helping old people to be less anxious about investing.

Then things fell apart one afternoon when Hannah heard among Jeff Corrie's whispers what she believed was his responsibility for the death of his partner. At that point, she'd told her mother the truth. At that point, she and Laurel had fled with a plan to drop Hannah off with a new identity on Whidbey Island where she would be in the care of Laurel's old friend Carol Quinn. With Hannah—now Becca King—safely tucked away, Laurel would lay a false trail to Nelson, BC, until it was safe and Jeff Corrie was himself also tucked away: in prison where he belonged.

It had all sounded so good, so easy, and so absolutely perfect. Indeed, the trip from San Diego to Washington State had all gone like a dream. But once on Whidbey Island, the newly born Becca
King discovered that her mom's friend Carol had dropped dead of a heart attack minutes before she was supposed to leave her house to meet the ferry on which Becca was sailing. Laurel herself was, at that point, out of range of the throwaway cell phone she'd purchased for Becca, and she had remained out of range to this day. Thus Becca had been imprisoned on Whidbey Island for sixteen months, which included the day that she had discovered to her horror she'd misunderstood Jeff Corrie's whispers, for his partner Connor West was not dead at all.

A long list of newspaper articles posted to the Internet existed on the topic of Jeff Corrie and Connor West. These articles began with the disappearance of Connor West, gone without a trace in a situation that was highly suspicious: with a BLT half made on the countertop in his condo's kitchen, with the water running in the sink and a coffee carafe broken upon the floor. That had been the start of Jeff Corrie's troubles, which had only increased when a neighbor of his mentioned to the San Diego police that she hadn't seen Corrie's stepdaughter or his wife in a number of weeks.

Once Connor West had been found very much alive on a boat in Mexico, the focus of the stories altered. First they'd concentrated on the finger pointing that Jeff and Connor were doing at each other about their embezzling, which was fine with Becca, since it kept the papers' interest off her and her mom. But now as she scrolled through the stories she'd already read to collect new information on where matters stood, she saw that things had undergone a significant change in San Diego. Connor West had
given an interview to a reporter, and what he'd said was paraphrased in the midst of the newspaper article:

According to Mr. West, the stepdaughter of his partner Jeff Corrie was also involved in what went on at Corrie-West investments. His claim is that without the girl's participation, nothing would have come of Corrie's scheme to embezzle money that was placed into their hands. West also suggests that the girl's mother, Laurel Armstrong, had from the first known what was going on and it is this that prompted her to flee with her then fourteen-year-old daughter when the scheme began to fall apart.

The reporter had then, it seemed, spoken to Jeff Corrie about the assertions his former partner had made, for Jeff was quoted as saying, “That's so ridiculous a claim that I'm not even going to comment.” But then he'd gone on anyway, and what he'd told the reporter was paraphrased in the same manner as Connor West's words had been:

When it was pointed out to Corrie that his wife and stepdaughter's disappearance suggests they were indeed involved, Corrie's claim was that he'd come home one day from work and they were gone. He revealed that the only clue he'd ever had as to their whereabouts was a single telephone call from the sheriff's department on Whidbey Island in Washington State.