The Edge of the Water

  Ivar surged to his feet. Sharla shrank back. For a second it seemed as if he would charge across the room at her, but instead he walked to the window and looked outside at Useless Bay. His fist hit the pane gently but he didn’t speak. Becca looked at him, her mouth forming an O that seemed surprised.

  “I thought we’d hear something,” Sharla said to Ivar’s back. “I thought we’d read something. About a boat that had been wrecked somewhere, about someone drowned, about anything that we could connect to that baby, but there was never a thing. I said to Eddie, ‘Can’t we keep her till there’s a story in the paper about a missing baby?’ And he didn’t say no and we waited and waited. For a month. Six weeks. I don’t remember. But there was nothing. So I said to Eddie, ‘Who would abandon a baby on the beach in the middle of the night? Whoever did a thing like that doesn’t want the baby and will only abuse her if they get her back.’ See, I wanted her and I knew I could take care of her and I told Eddie that.”

  “Lord my God,” was a murmur from Ivar. He pressed his forehead to the window.

  “Eddie went along at first because I was . . . See, I was so crazy for that child. No one was ever going to give us a baby to live with us in that trailer, see. But here God had given us one. Only Eddie decided it wasn’t good for her, wasn’t a good place to have a small child, so he took her away. I waited then for the sheriff to come and ask me why I hadn’t reported her earlier, but he never came. And then I waited for a story in the paper about that baby being handed over to the authorities or found somewhere else that Eddie might’ve put her, but there wasn’t a story. And then . . . then . . . I didn’t ask him where he’d taken her. I was too afraid to know what he had done.”

  Jenn felt every drop of blood drain from her face as she put the pieces together. The baby and that box on Eddie Beddoe’s boat. That box that weighed so very little that whatever it contained, it wasn’t a fanciful treasure of gold and jewels. It was something terrible and something frightening, and Eddie Beddoe had been desperate to get to it and was equally desperate to get rid of it now.

  “Oh, Sharla girl,” Jenn heard Ivar say.

  Sharla began to weep. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  FORTY-TWO

  In the truck again, Becca had rummaged through her belongings. She’d found the AUD box. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to avoid the possibility of hearing any more whispers, though. It was rather that she’d been bombarded with whispers since the moment Eddie Beddoe had confronted them at Langley’s marina. Then, at Heart’s Desire, so much had been coming at her from both Ivar and Sharla—not to mention from Jenn—that she had reached the point where her head was aching. What was worse was that the barrage of whispers was making it difficult for her to think. The past and present of the whispers were overlapping each other, too. She had to do something to wall them out.

  She had the earphone in her ear when Jenn whispered tersely, “What the crap? I can’t believe you’re listening to music!”

  This required, at long last, a quick explanation about the AUD box’s function in relieving Becca’s “auditory processing problem.” Jenn accepted this with the words, “I always wondered why you never got busted for wearing that damn thing,” and the matter was settled. At that point, Ivar said, “I’m taking you girls home. There’s things needing to be done right now and neither of you needs to be a part of them.”

  Jenn said, “Uh . . . Isn’t calling the sheriff what needs to be done? We got a pretty good idea why Eddie wanted that box, don’t we? You ask me, the sheriff’s gonna want to know what’s in it and Eddie’s gonna want to make sure he never finds it.”

  Ivar glanced at her and then at Becca. He said, “Maybe so, but I want to give that man a chance to do the right thing, just once in his miserable excuse of a life.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Turning that box over to the sheriff on his own and telling the damn truth.”

  “Isn’t that gonna land him in jail?” Jenn asked. “I mean, he took a baby, according to Sharla. Then he got rid of the baby. How’s he gonna want to talk about that?”

  “He’s not. Which is why I need to take you girls home, so’s I can convince him.”

  Becca said, “No way. You go to see him alone and there’s no one there to keep him from doing something crazy, Ivar. All three of us go, and what’s he going to do? Shoot everyone at once? Shoot anyone at all and have two witnesses to it? Anyway, he didn’t have bullets in the rifle.”

  Ivar shot her a look and so did Jenn. Jenn was the one to say, “And you know this how?”

  “I just know,” she said, for what else could she tell them that would not betray how she’d heard Eddie’s thoughts?

  “Oh, that makes me feel a hell of a lot better,” Jenn remarked.

  “Really,” Becca said, and to Ivar, “we’ll be okay. Where d’you think he is? He’s gonna want to get rid of that box. Where’s the best place?”

  Ivar thought about this. He finally said, “Glendale. There’s woods above it. Eddie’s got a place there. Take that box into the woods behind his cabin and it’s gone till he decides it’s not.”

  He proceeded to drive them to Glendale at a good clip, choosing the route that offered the most speed, which was coursing down the highway and then along the fields and woods on either side of Cultus Bay Road. Then they were in woods that were thicker than ever, winding above a deep cut in the land through which the Glendale Creek flowed out to Possession Sound.

  They came out into a tiny community comprising an ancient long-abandoned hotel, the skeletal remains of a pier jutting into the water, and a scattering of wind- and rain-blown houses. This was no idyllic vacation spot but a hard-bitten kind of place that was off the beaten path and mostly forgotten.

  Ivar took a dirt road of the sort that anyone could easily overlook. It carved a narrow, dark passage back into the forest, marked only by a blue reflector and three tumbledown mailboxes leaning precariously on two-by-fours planted into the ground.

  They passed a single-wide trailer overgrown with every possible kind of forest creeper. They passed a cabin fronted by an ancient VW van on blocks. Finally they came to Eddie Beddoe’s property, identified only by a chain that passed across its ingress along with a pockmarked NO TRESPASSING sign hanging from the chain.

  The chain had no lock. Jenn hopped from the truck and dealt with its removal from the route. Ivar drove forward, and she jumped back aboard. He drove some three hundred yards into the distance, to the point at which a red metal roof just became visible through a break in the trees.

  Ivar parked at the point where the rooftop was visible. He told the girls to stay well behind him. Becca decided this was the moment to remove the AUD box’s earphone from her ear in order to take the best reading she could off the area. But there was nothing but Ivar’s broken whispers about the baby Sharla had spoken of, along with his thought of caution and of his concern for them. Mixed in with these whispers were Jenn’s, which signaled her determination to be cool.

  Eddie wasn’t far. His truck was parked next to a small cabin that they came to. One glance inside and Ivar brought out the man’s rifle, which had been on the floor. He checked it for bullets and then glanced sharply at Becca. How’d the girl know was written on his face, as easily recognizable as the whisper that accompanied it. She nodded at him. Eddie had either spent all his ammunition firing uselessly into the water with the hope that he might somehow hit Nera, or he’d shown up at the marina with the intention of frightening them but that was all. In either case, they were safe unless he had another weapon on him.

  “Listen,” Jenn said in a low voice.

  For a moment, though, it was only the call of Steller’s jays that they heard, as well as the high-pitched cry of an eagle. Then, though, the sound of metal hitting metal echoed. It was coming from behind the paint-flecked cabin.

  Ivar turned to the girls. He said, “Don’t
you make me sorry I brought you. You stay behind me. This man’s not dangerous by nature, but his mind’s gone bad and you’ve seen that already. Got it?”

  They nodded. Becca said, “We don’t want you to get hurt either.”

  “I don’t intend to get hurt,” Ivar replied.

  Together, then, they headed around the side of the cabin, toward the back. They found Eddie Beddoe using the nonbusiness end of an ax against the lock that held the metal box tightly closed. He was in a clearing but all around him was forest, thick with both trees and an undergrowth of ferns, salal, huckleberry, a snarling mass of vines and creepers. Becca saw this and knew Ivar had been right. If Eddie’s intention was to hide the contents of that box in the woods, there would be no way of finding it.

  What remained was the question of why he was opening the box at all instead of just dashing into the forest with a shovel to bury it. Becca looked around for the answer to this question, and she saw it in fairly short order. In an oblong pit of stone, Eddie had constructed what was going to be a roaring blaze the moment he set a match to it. The smell of lighter fluid was thick in the air, just in case there remained any doubt in this matter.

  Becca felt Jenn’s hand clutch her arm. “He’s gonna burn that baby!” she whispered fiercely. “He’s gone burn her bones!”

  “He’s sure as hell gonna burn something,” was Ivar’s take on the situation. He stepped forward with Eddie’s rifle dangling from his fingers and he said, “You’re gonna need a fire hotter’n hell, Eddie. What’d you do to that baby? How’d that baby die?”

  When Eddie swung around, what the hell . . . that bitch told . . . should’ve hidden it . . . got rid of . . . but it wasn’t enough swung around with him. Becca heard the whispers as if they were objects slapping the air. But his words were, “What the hell’re you talking about, Thorndyke?”

  “You drown that baby? You hit that baby on the head? You give that baby something to make it sleep and then you weigh down that thing there and toss it overboard?”

  Ivar’s words were harsh, but his whispers were not. They were should have known . . . should have seen . . . no point to an act of loving when it ends like this, which Becca did not entirely understand. Yet she felt desperate to know the entirety of what was happening between the two men, and she wondered if there was any possibility. . . . She’d needed Diana before, Diana had been the conduit of the visions, but perhaps . . . if she—Becca—touched this man as Diana had touched him . . . in this most desperate of situations . . .

  “This ain’t no baby,” Eddie snapped. “That what you think, Thorndyke? That what she told you?”

  “Maybe you dropped that baby on its head,” Ivar said. “An accident, like, and you never could say. So you stuffed that child into a box and then you threw that box overboard.”

  “I tol’ you this ain’t no baby, you fool. You think otherwise, you call the cops and have ’em bring their handcuffs along.”

  “I’m giving you the chance to do what’s right. You speak the truth about that child so I c’n give Sharla some peace of mind.”

  “Sharla, Sharla,” Eddie scoffed. He said her name like a nasty word. “You wanted her from the first, didn’t you? Well, now you got her and you’re welcome to her and I got this and if anyone’s making anything right, this is gonna do it. Right here and right now.”

  “You intend to answer me straight?” Ivar asked him. “You keep that baby hidden somewheres till you could kill it? That what happened when you took the child away? You cram its poor broke body into that box and—”

  Eddie laughed so wildly that for a moment Becca thought he was drunk. Except his whispers weren’t drunk and neither were Ivar’s. Along with Jenn’s whispers, the air was swarming.

  What he thinks . . . damn fool . . . should’ve gone home ’cause something bad’s gonna . . . somebody needs to call . . . let it happen and it doesn’t matter . . . Sharla, Sharla . . . wish I’d left it where I found it . . . the seal comes because . . . there she was naked and beautiful and . . . It all confused her. She could get no clarity on anything that was going on. She felt so strongly that she needed to touch Eddie Beddoe as Diana had touched him because that seemed the only route to clarity.

  She took a hesitant step forward. Ivar grabbed her arm. He said, “I told you to stay—”

  “You gotta let me. Please.”

  Losing no . . . can’t live with . . . nuts, that what were the reactions of both Ivar and Jenn to this idea. But she gently removed Ivar’s hand from her arm and took another step in Eddie’s direction.

  Eddie said, “You best call the sheriff now. Use the phone inside. He’s gonna be real happy to come all the way out here and see what I’m getting ready to burn. Go on. Go on. Use the damn phone ’cause I c’n see you ain’t gonna believe me over a woman who’s been a nutter since the day she’s born.”

  He lifted the ax again. He used its blade this time, against the box and against the lock. The lock fell off and Eddie opened the box. “Come ’ere,” he told them. “You all’s so hot to see what I got. You want your salvage or whatever you think. Here it is.”

  He upended the box. What tumbled out of it was the furry skin of a very small seal: a head-to-toe skin that looked almost like a costume, so perfect was it and so perfectly had it been preserved.

  “What the heck . . . ?” Jenn was the one who spoke.

  Ivar said nothing but his face was a ghost’s.

  “This is what was on the beach that night, you fools,” Eddie said. “This is the baby Sharla’s been going on about. You got that, all of you? This is the damn baby, which she stuffed like the maniac she is and which she carried round like an idiot till I took it off her.”

  “What’re you saying?” Jenn demanded. “Are you saying Sharla skinned some seal like . . . like a seal clubbed in Newfoundland or something?”

  “Course not because there was no damn seal. There was no damn nothing. There was only this and it was covered in oil and damn fool I was, I thought I could clean it and maybe sell it for something but what does Sharla do? She carries it around like it was some pet, like it was some kid, for God’s sake, like a baby in a blanket till I finally get it away from her and toss it from the boat.”

  But there was so much more, and Becca heard it all. Sharla she said . . . weirder and weirder . . . someone’s out there and we’re gonna find . . . shot her when I could have . . . Dad told me and I remember . . . my woman and not yours never yours . . . I did this to her . . . to them both and now . . . All of it battled in the air around her, telling Becca the truth was close, but they hadn’t reached it and no one believed what anyone else was saying at that point. But all of them had moved close to Eddie. She could risk touching him if he became calmer.

  She said, “C’n I see it? Why d’you want to burn it?”

  “’Cause it’s been the curse of my whole damn life.” Danger emanated from the man, but Becca took a step closer and put herself next to him as Ivar and Jenn looked at the sealskin on the ground.

  She put her hand on Eddie’s arm. She felt his muscles, as tense as telephone wires. She felt from him the desperate madness that guilt causes a person to feel, and this seeped from him even as she saw in a blink only the sight of a small child on the beach and in that child’s hands, this very sealskin which the child rubbed and rubbed as if it were the only comfort available.

  She said, “No. That baby was there. Sharla didn’t lie.”

  Eddie pulled away from her furiously. “You’re as whacked out as she is.”

  “That night on the beach. The oil slick night. There was a baby on the beach.”

  “Oh you don’t know—”

  Jenn made a sound, half the mewling of a kitten, half a gasp of fright. “The timeline,” she said as they looked at her. “The timeline is wrong.”

  “What timeline?” Ivar asked her.

  “My dad said . . . It??
?s the boat, Becca. It’s the boat on the bottom.”

  “Like you’re making sense, girl,” Eddie sneered.

  “Where’d you get that boat?” Jenn demanded. “How’d you get that boat? My dad said you just . . . just had it one day for a fishing business. But he never said how you got it ’cause he didn’t know. But boats cost thousands and you never had a boat before that oil slick. You never had the money for a boat or else why would you have lived in that trailer and where’d that boat come from? Where’d you get that boat?”

  “Nera,” Becca said. For it all fit together, of a piece, and nicely. “Nera knows, doesn’t she? And that’s why Nera has to die.”

  “That damn seal,” was Eddie’s answer. He threw the ax aside. He kicked the metal box away. The sealskin was something he did not touch.

  FORTY-THREE

  “That’s what she’s wanted all this time. She’s wanted that skin. That’s why she was at the boat. And that’s why she comes back to Whidbey Island every year.”

  Jenn heard this and cocked her head at Becca. They were in Ivar’s truck, heading away from Glendale, with Eddie Beddoe following them. Ivar had given him no choice in the matter. It was come with them or talk to the sheriff about how he ended up with a boat without the means to pay for it.

  To this idea, Eddie had scoffed, “You think the sheriff cares how I got a boat that’s been underwater for near twenty years?”

  Ivar had replied, “I think he’ll be in’erested once he talks to Sharla. And the only way you’re going to avoid that happening is by seeing things to the finish.”

  “What finish you got in mind?”

  “The one you’ve been scared of for years.” Ivar had looked long and hard at Eddie Beddoe when he said this, as if he was communicating in a secret language. Jenn had glanced at Becca to see if she had the same idea. Becca’s gaze kept jumping from one man to the other.