The Edge of the Shadows (10 page)

NINETEEN

A
t first Becca thought that the book Diana Kinsale had given her,
Seeing Beyond Sight
,
was going to be about having visions, and it was in a way. But the visions weren't premonitions about the future or seeing dead people and receiving messages from them. Instead, the visions had to do with people in everyday life and what their memory pictures were. They had to do with entering people's minds and
seeing
the pictures that defined their memories and thoughts, and this brought Diana Kinsale perilously close to declaring to Becca that she knew perfectly well that Becca could hear what was going in people's heads. This also brought Diana perilously close to saying, “Here's your next step, my dear.”

What made it scary for Becca was that she'd already
had
these visions that were talked about in
Seeing Beyond Sight
. She'd had them three times. Twice she'd seen someone's picture memories through establishing a connection to that person with Diana Kinsale as the conduit, like a chain of three links formed with Diana in the middle. Once she'd had the vision by making a connection with someone on her own. Diana knew something about these visions, but what she didn't know was how clear they'd been.

Yet she seemed to be telling Becca that what she could become was someone able to see, hear, and somehow know many things that were unavailable to other people. The very idea terrified her. So she set the book aside on a shelf in her bedroom at Ralph Darrow's house and she gazed at it nightly next to her childhood copy of
Anne of Green Gables
. But she didn't pick it up again to read.

There were other things to concern her. Foremost was Derric. He'd been brooding about something for several days, and he'd not wanted to talk about it. When she finally allowed herself to invade his whispers,
album
was the only word she heard.

She resolved to say nothing to Derric till he said something to her. This he finally did after school on his third day of brooding.

She was at his house. In his bedroom together, they were working on homework when Derric shoved his notebook to one side and said, “I need to show you something.” He pulled open a dresser drawer. Here was the album that had been in his thoughts, Becca saw, a picture album. He nodded at the bed and she sat down. He sat next to her and handed it over with
now
she's gonna see
in his mind.

Inside the album, was a pictorial history of Derric's adoption into the Mathieson family. It began with the orphanage in Kampala, and it ended with the Mathieson clan here in this house welcoming him to his new home. It wasn't a large album, but it was a detailed one, complete with written explanations of how everything had begun with Rhonda's first trip to the Ugandan orphanage along with their church group. On this trip and on subsequent trips as the Mathiesons waited for Derric's adoption to go through, she'd taken dozens of pictures.

“This is great,” Becca murmured as she turned the pages, which were beautifully decorated with cutouts and maps and journal entries.

Derric said nothing in return, so she looked at him. His face was stormy.
It's what they want to know
said that he believed there was a hidden message in the pages of the album. She frowned and said, “Don't you like it? What's wrong?”

“She had us all sit together and look at it.” There was an edge of anxiety to his voice.

“That makes sense, doesn't it?”

God's sake, Becca!
came from him. Becca frowned. She put the ear bud back into her ear, the better to hear his words rather than thoughts that indicated his mood. “They wanted me to
name
the kids,” he said. “In the pictures where there's a bunch of us doing something. ‘Do you remember this boy?' they were asking. ‘What about this little girl? She's a real cutie.'”

Becca saw where this was heading. She said, “Rejoice is in the pictures, isn't she?” and she looked down to seek his sister's face. She'd only seen one photo of the little girl, in a picture taken of the orphanage's small brass band. Derric had been a member of that band, a grinning boy with an overlarge saxophone in his hands, and Rejoice had been one of the listening children when the picture was taken, a laughing little elf of a girl in the midst of clapping her hands. Becca looked through the pictures to find that same face, and there she was, here and there among the other children but never photographed only with Derric.

Becca looked up. “What did you do?”

“What
could
I do? I named the kids, at least the ones I said I remembered. I told them I didn't remember all of them 'cause it had been a while, and I hadn't known them all that good, especially the littlest ones. I said whatever frigging thing came into my head. But that didn't stop her. Like anything would?”

“Rejoice.” Becca said the name on a breath.

“My dad must've told her about those letters, and you
know
my mom. 'F she thinks anything is wrong in what's supposed to be my perfect life—saved from an African orphanage and all that—then she's not gonna give up till she finds out what it is and fixes it for me.”

“So did she ask directly about Rejoice?”

“
Course
she did. ‘Dad told me you had a special friend in Kampala. Is Rejoice in the pictures?' And believe me, I do
not
know why she needed to see her except she
always
wants inside my head and she
never
lets go of anything so she sure as hell isn't going to let go of the fact that I wrote letters to some babe called Rejoice and never mailed them and even felt I had to hide them away. At
least
she doesn't know I hid them in the woods because believe me if she knew that, I'd be signed up for counseling so fast I'd feel like the skids were greased to get me there.”

“What'd you tell her?”

“I sure as hell didn't tell the truth.”

“Derric, it was your
chance
. They gave you an opening.”

He surged up from the bed and paced over to the window, then to the desk, then to stand in front of her. “
Think
about it, okay? I tell them I spent eight years writing to a frigging five-year-old and what're they going to think?”

“She's not five now.”

He blew out an impatient breath. “So I started when she was five and I wrote them till she was thirteen or whatever and don't you think they'll figure that's a
little
weird? Like I'm a . . . a child molester or something? What eight-year-old kid writes letters to a five-year-old? I couldn't tell them who she really was so I pointed out the best-looking babe I could find and I told them
she
was Rejoice.”

He pointed to the album and Becca saw that his choice was a girl taller than he'd been and older as well, fully developed with breasts and curves. She was very pretty, and Becca had to admit that Derric's selection made a lot of sense. But it
only
made sense if he had decided to keep lying to his parents about the existence of his sister.

Becca closed the album and looked at Derric. She loved him, but she couldn't understand him, not when it came to this. She said, “You're gonna have to tell them sometime. Seems to me that this album's your chance to do it.”

“Oh great. After I told them someone
else
is Rejoice? Now I walk in and tell them I was lying?” He didn't wait for an answer. He walked to his desk and threw himself in his chair. He said, “I'm sick of it.”

“What?”

“Her.”

“
Rejoice
?”

“I don't frigging mean Rejoice. I mean my mom.” He dropped his head into his hands.

Becca got to her feet and went to his chair. She knelt in front of it and said quietly, “I get that no one's life is perfect. I get that it bugs you that your mom somehow thinks yours should be and that would make me crazy too. But here's the deal. Part of what's not perfect in your life has to do with Rejoice—”

“I'm
not
—”

“Just listen for a second. Maybe the real reason you're going crazy is because you don't know what happened to her. Maybe that's been eating you up for what . . . nine years and counting?”

“Don't tell me to—”

“Derric, I'm not. You're gonna do what you're gonna do. I get that. But you need at
least
to find out for yourself how she is and where she is because if you don't, you're going to . . . I don't know . . . get sick or something or flunk out of school or wreck your whole life or whatever.”

“And how am I s'posed to find out what happened to her?”

Becca considered this. It seemed to her that if Derric had been adopted, so might his little sister have been adopted. Derric had a Facebook page. So might Rejoice. It was better than nothing and worth a try, so she suggested that was where they should begin.

The problem, of course, was that all they knew was Rejoice's original name: Rejoice Nyombe, which hadn't been hers at the orphanage anyway since no one there had known that she was Derric's sister. It wasn't likely that anyone had assigned her that name, and they found out easily enough that no one had. Googling Rejoice didn't bring up anything either. Nor did any other approach they took. Their project to find out what had happened to her was, unfortunately, over before it had begun. They were back to the beginning: If Derric wanted to ease his mind, Derric needed to talk to his parents.

Becca stared at the laptop's screen. It had moved to screensaver and she watched colorful bubbles floating around. Truth was, she thought, not everyone put themselves onto Web sites. Not everyone was into advertising to the world who they were and what they did. She certainly wasn't. She couldn't afford to be. And what she'd had on Facebook prior to making a run from Jeff Corrie, she and her mom had taken down permanently.

The whole idea of taking something down permanently prompted an idea in her head. She said, “Could I . . . ?” and indicated the computer. Derric shrugged. She typed in Aidan Martin's name. She said to Derric, “Aidan Martin looked up my schedule for some reason. There's something going on with that kid. He keeps turning up like he's following me.”

“He's into you.”

“Nope.”

“Then what?”

“Don't know.” But she did, of course, know very well. Aidan Martin was suspicious. He'd seen her looking at the story on the Internet about the disappearance of Laurel Armstrong and her daughter, Hannah. He'd heard her excuse about looking for a face for her art class. He'd not bought into her tale and he'd done a little investigating on her. She didn't know why he felt compelled to do that, but two could play that game, and she was going to do a little investigating on him.

But just like Rejoice, absolutely nothing came up for Aidan Martin, no matter how many different sites she tried. So she typed in Isis Martin instead, and what popped onto the screen was a virtual pictorial history of Isis's life in Palo Alto, most particularly her life with her boyfriend, Brady. There were pictures of them everywhere, from skiing in the mountains to surfing at the beach. There were also pictures of Isis and her scores of friends. Additionally, there were family pictures. Aidan was there and so were their parents.

Derric joined her in looking over the page. He murmured, “Does anyone even care about all this?” But he continued to look along with Becca, and he was the one to say, “Kinda strange that it's only Aidan.”

Becca looked up at him.

“She said she had two brothers,” he told her. “That day at lunch.”

“She did?”

“You told her Jenn has two brothers and she said she did too. Only she said
had
, so she's only got one brother now and if the other one died or something . . .” He let his voice drift off.

“Maybe she doesn't like to remember.”

“Or maybe she's not telling the truth in the first place.”

“That's definitely what Jenn would say.” Becca logged off the computer and swung around to Derric. She thought about truth versus lie as it applied to him and then as it applied to her. She knew one thing for sure when it came to people who bent the truth to fit what they needed other people to believe about them: If someone was lying, there was usually a reason.

TWENTY

B
ecca would have pursued the Isis and Aidan Martin conundrum had her world not undergone a shift two days later. The person who brought about this shift was Derric's father. The undersheriff of Island County, Dave Mathieson had a project that needed doing, and he figured that Derric and Becca might be just the two people who could do it.

Derric told her about this over the phone. His dad had some flyers that needed to be posted all over the island. They needed to go into tourist shops, fashion boutiques, antiques stores, grocery stores . . . everywhere. His dad had already got kids from the high schools up in Oak Harbor and in Coupeville to post the flyers in those two towns. He needed someone to do the same in all the small communities on the south end of the island. He was offering to pay, and he needed to rely on the kids to do the job fast and to do it right. Derric said that he hadn't seen the flyers, but he figured the sheriff's department was looking for someone on the run.

Since Becca hated to spend any of the money her mom had given her and since the job she'd had in the spring had come to an end, she signed on without hesitation. Her responsibilities at Ralph's didn't eat up all of her time, and she could spare a few hours after school and additional time on weekends. So Derric and she set off from South Whidbey High School in the afternoon.

They drove to Clinton to begin. On the south end of the island, this small enclave was where the ferry from the mainland docked. Derric drove them to the first of the businesses that defined the place. These were strung along the highway rising steeply from the rough waters of Possession Sound, and he parked just outside a nail salon advertising in stuttering neon that walk-ins were welcome.

The flyers were in the back of the Forester. Derric opened it, suggesting that he make a dash across the highway for the businesses there, while Becca saw to the shops on this side as well as Cozy's bar, the bank, and the used car dealership. Becca was fine with this and said so. She was still fine with it as Derric took out a thick sheaf of the flyers and handed them over. Then in a rush, she ceased being fine.

Have You Seen This Woman
formed huge black letters in two lines at the top of the flyer. Beneath them was a very clear photograph of Becca's mother.
Laurel Armstrong
was printed beneath it, along with her age, and the information that she'd been last seen in San Diego the previous year in September. Beneath this was the phone number of the sheriff's department. Beneath that was the word
Reward
.

Becca felt as if the ground was tilting. Her chest got so tight that she thought she might be having a heart attack. She'd dodged the Laurel bullet once before on Whidbey Island, when she'd left in the information shelter at Saratoga Woods a cell phone purchased by her mom. When the undersheriff had got his hands on it, he'd looked for Laurel but he hadn't found her. That
should
have been the end of it. But obviously, something new had occurred.

Derric said, “Be right back,” and headed to the highway before she could stop him. He dashed across.

Becca stood for a moment, staring down at the picture of her mother. She felt a stab of missing Laurel so much that for a few seconds she couldn't move. What she thought was, Where are you? Why haven't you come back? Please don't say you've forgotten about me.

She
hadn't
, of course. Laurel was merely waiting till enough time had passed to be sure there was no possible connection between one Becca King and a woman who had dropped off a teenaged girl at the Mukilteo ferry before herself driving off on the route to British Columbia and a town in the mountains where she would establish a hideaway for them both. But the thought of that town in the mountains led Becca inexorably to Nelson itself and the additional thought of Parker Natalia, who might now see this poster, recognize Laurel by face as someone who'd come into his family's restaurant, and then logically speak to the sheriff about it.

Her only option was to get rid of the posters. But if she did that, the sheriff would wonder why they weren't in every shop and restaurant and boutique and
wherever.
He would ask and what would she say? And what was she actually supposed to do anyway: run all over Whidbey Island and take the posters down wherever they'd been placed?

Becca tried to get calm. She tried to think of anything positive that could come out of this. While there was nothing at all that she could see, what did finally come to her was an aphorism her grandmother used to say: Thank God for small favors. It was her way of looking for the good in the bad, and in this case the good was that at least there was no picture of Becca herself on the flyer, announcing her identity to one and all as Hannah Armstrong, daughter of the missing Laurel.

The bad, however, seemed to outweigh the good. For it seemed to her that if Dave Mathieson was looking for Laurel and if there was a reward involved, Jeff Corrie had to be involved as well. Which meant something had changed in San Diego.

• • •

DAVE MATHIESON TOLD
her what it was when she and Derric reported back to him on how far they'd gotten with the flyers: all of Clinton and a hugely unattractive strip mall on the route into Langley. “Truth is I don't know how much good it's going to do—this whole thing with the posters—but the San Diego PD
and
the county sheriff down there put in the request and they're paying for it, so we'll give it a go.”

The words
San Diego PD and the county sheriff
made Becca's palms begin to sweat. She said, “Is the lady a criminal?”

“She's just missing, far as I know,” Dave told her. Becca and Derric had run into him outside of the city hall, which housed Langley's small police department. He'd been there about Laurel, as things turned out, putting the local cops into the picture about the flyers that Becca and Derric were posting. Now the three of them were at the village pizzeria on First Street. They were sitting in the outside eating area sipping Cokes and waiting for their olive-and-mushroom extra large to be delivered to them. The eating area was a garden that overlooked Saratoga Passage, and while the sun was still shining in the Pacific Northwest in advance of the coming winter, plenty of people were taking advantage of it. There were a number of families hanging out at the wrought-iron tables, with little kids running around and dogs begging for food.

Dave went on. “Odd thing is, this Laurel Armstrong's
also
a woman I was looking for last year.”

Becca said nothing. Her stomach felt frozen. Derric said only, “When last year?”

“You wouldn't remember,” his dad told him. “You were out of it then.” He knocked Derric fondly on the skull as a reminder of the time he'd spent coma-bound in a hospital bed. “Someone called nine one one the day you fell in the woods. The call was made from a cell phone, and we traced the phone to this Laurel Armstrong. It was a credit card purchase in San Diego. At the time, I figured she was a kid because the voice on the nine-one-one tape didn't sound like an adult. So we made a search for her but came up cold. No one knew her. I guess now we know why.”

The logical question came from Derric since all Becca wanted to do was to avoid the subject forever if she could.

“Why?” he asked.

“You ask me, the husband got rid of her down there and then came up here to lay a false trail with that phone. He could've handed it off to any kid who then made that call and then just left the phone where someone would find it. Which is exactly what happened: It got turned in, I had it traced to the point of purchase, we got the number that went with the credit card that bought it, we called the number, and there the husband was: saying he knew nothing about a cell phone at all. No one up here thought to check him out with regard to this Laurel Armstrong because up here all we were concerned with was what had happened to you. Down there, though, the cops're thinking she was planning to leave him and it turned into the same old story: If I can't have you, no one can.”

“I don't get the point of the flyers if that's what the cops think,” Derric said. They had a slew of the flyers still with them, and he fingered these, picking up one and studying it. Becca looked away, out at the water. What she did
not
need was Derric starting to think that, hey, his girlfriend sort of resembled this woman, didn't she? “Why don't the San Diego cops just arrest him?”

“No evidence. He
looks
suspicious, sure. This guy didn't report the wife missing for months last year, and what's that mean, huh? He was already under investigation for some sort of squirrelly business he was running, so the cops along with the FBI were talking to him about that. And his business partner's missing too, the cops tell me, so he's got himself a shitload of trouble. Pardon my French.”

“Sounds like he's been up to something,” Derric commented.

“Sounds like. When a wife goes missing, the husband is generally behind it.”

The pizza arrived and they took some moments scoring a piece each before Dave Mathieson went on. “He'd been cooperating, more or less, with this deal about his business partner, but the day the cops came to talk to him about the wife . . . ? He lawyered up. Some neighbor had called and said she hadn't seen the wife and daughter in a while and at that point—”

Stepdaughter, Becca wanted to say. Jeff Corrie is not my dad. I never knew my dad. Is Mom with my dad? Is he in Nelson? Where are you where are you where are you, Mom, because—

Dave's words terminated her anguished thoughts. He was saying, “—the cops started looking into things down there. But everything stalled out.”

“Lucky for them you traced that cell phone,” Derric said.

Becca
had
to say something. It looked too strange that she was practically making a biological study of the top of her pizza. She chose, “I don't get it. Why would a guy from San Diego lay a trail to Whidbey Island?”

“Couldn't tell you but you can bet the cops're are checking into that. One thing we've discovered is he was up here late autumn last year, a few months
after
we put our hands on that cell phone. Now, he admits that freely. Fact is, he's the person who told the cops down there that there has to be a Whidbey connection. You can argue that makes him look innocent, but you can also argue it just makes him look wily. He knew we'd found the phone, he wanted to look concerned, he comes up and pokes around and asks after his wife and daughter—”

Stepdaughter, stepdaughter, stepdaughter, Becca thought.

“—and he figures everyone'll think he's squeaky clean when it comes to their disappearance.”

“How come she's not on the poster, then?” Derric asked. “The daughter?”

Dave shook his head. “Don't know,” he told them. “Could be another picture's coming. Could also be they're thinking that where Laurel Armstrong is, there'll be her daughter.”

It was again, Becca thought, a moment to thank God for small blessings. But she had a feeling it wouldn't last for long.

• • •

IT DIDN'T.

The
South Whidbey Record
was a twice-a-week affair, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Wednesday paper was the one with the story, something Becca discovered in fairly short order since Seth brought it to her as he'd done earlier.

Seth was the only person on Whidbey Island who knew the danger she was in. She'd told him early on because she'd had to tell him. She'd needed help. She'd needed someone's friendship. From the first, Seth Darrow had been the person on hand to supply her with both. So when he saw the story in the
Record
with Laurel Armstrong's name and picture right on the front page, he grabbed the copy from his mom's kitchen table and that was what he had when he showed up Wednesday night after dinner at Ralph Darrow's house.

Parker Natalia was with him. Becca thought at first that Seth had brought Parker over from his tree house for some reason, but it turned out that the two guys had met up on Ralph's front porch. Parker was there for a quick shower prior to “going out with one hot feminista,” he said, and Seth was there supposedly to check up on Ralph, his diet—and particularly his blood pressure—at the request of his dad. Or so he said, because Becca could see that something was off with Seth, so she took her ear bud from her ear and picked up on
get him out of the way long enough to tell her
, which seemed to indicate more was going on than his family's growing concern about Ralph's high cholesterol.

“Dad wants you to start using this,” he told his grandfather and brought out a blood pressure reader.

An argument ensued. Ralph Darrow wasn't about to let his children dictate to him the terms of his well-being, especially his own son Ralph Junior, “who need I remind you, favorite male grandson, is at this precise moment not only twenty-five pounds overweight but also probably having his fifth beer of the evening while watching the Seahawks game.”

“There's no Seahawks game on a Wednesday, Grand,” didn't get Seth very far. Ralph wasn't going to have his blood pressure taken, and to make sure Seth understood this, he stomped up the stairs.

With Parker in the shower and Seth's grandfather fuming up above them, Becca said to her friend, “What's going on?” and he handed over the newspaper.

“Oh no,” was really all she could say when she saw the picture of Laurel, her name, and the same information that was on the flyer that she and Derric were still posting everywhere. An article accompanied the picture. She was about to read it, when Seth said, “It's worse 'n you think.”

She saw why when she made the jump to page eight where the story continued because there was a picture of her as well. It was an old one, but that was hardly the point. For it was the very same picture that she'd been looking at on the Internet when Aidan Martin had come upon her.