The fact that she was condemned to working with Extra Underpants Schuman on a critical project in her Western Civ class made everything worse. She could at least have had an A to look forward to in her life. But with Extra Underpants hanging around her neck like a dead German shepherd, there was no possibility of anything other than a C. And that, only if she was lucky. And that, only if she could talk him into being something more than a certified idiot.
When he showed her his completed part of their report, her spirits tanked. She eased the AUD box earphone from her ear in the hope she might pick up from his whispers some reason why he was such a dope. She’d better because no one . . . only way . . . talk her into it because if I . . . only told her that he expected her to buy the garbage he was putting together. It was all from Wikipedia and Askme.com, she saw: a jumble of information that he’d scored about a tribe in the Amazon, First Nations in Canada, and the Maoris in New Zealand. He’d applied it every which way to their assignment. When she read it, she wanted to put her fist through his head.
She said, “We’re supposed to be creating our own primitive culture, Tod. I guess we can start with this and throw some ideas back and forth, but—”
Tod grabbed the papers. “Hey, I worked my butt off on that,” he declared. Don’t make me . . . if I . . . you’ll be way sorry, toadbutt . . .
As if, she thought. But what she said was, “It looks like cut and paste from the Net. You’re not even putting it into your own words.”
“So?”
“So Mr. Keith said—”
“Keith’s a buttwipe.” Find out why as soon as . . .
“—he’s going to be checking the Internet. So if we use this . . . Look, it’s not that hard. We c’n do it together if you want instead of dividing the work up. I mean, I c’n help with the primitive culture and you c’n help with the European one.”
“You took the easier part of the assignment anyway,” he sneered. “If I’d’a known you’d do that, I would’ve chose another partner.”
Chosen, she thought. He couldn’t even speak correct English. She said, “So we’ll trade, then.”
“No way! I already worked on this.” The other part . . . not fair . . . this is the only way . . . stupid . . . the rest of them already . . . He snatched up the papers. “All right, I’ll fix the stupid thing,” he hissed. “Geez. I knew I should have picked someone else.”
“It has to be original,” she reminded him.
“Just shut your fat mouth,” was his reply.
So things weren’t good. And when she next saw his paperwork, things weren’t better. It looked different but ninety minutes on the Internet at South Whidbey Commons were enough to prove that all he’d done was retype the original, mix it up a bit, and add adjectives and adverbs liberally.
She sighed, gave it up, and Googled Jeff Corrie. He’d lawyered up, she saw. Connor’s vacant condo had finally been searched, dusted for fingerprints, examined for signs of violence, the whole nine yards. So had Jeff’s house. So had his car. The police thought Jeff had information, but Jeff wasn’t talking. He also wasn’t leaving San Diego. She was still safe.
Under other circumstances that would have made her feel marginally better. But with Derric’s anger hanging over her head and Extra Underpants Schuman’s incompetence driving her nuts, it didn’t do a lot to lift her spirits to know her stepfather wasn’t coming after her, at least for now.
She left South Whidbey Commons and trudged in the direction of the bus stop. She hadn’t made it there when a pickup truck pulled over to the curb, a window lowered, and Diana Kinsale leaned over the passenger seat. She gave Becca one of her long, knowing looks. She said, “Get in, my dear,” and she spoke with such compassion that Becca did as she asked without question.
“Blue?” Diana said to her. For once, she was driving alone, without the dogs who were her regular companions.
“Bummed.” Becca found she didn’t want to go into it, though. Diana was a friend, but to unspool the story of Derric’s letters, of Courtney Baker, of Extra Underpants Schuman . . . The very thought of doing that made her just want to take a nap instead.
Diana said, “I bet what you need is a pick-me-up.”
“I sure as heck need something.”
She thought Diana meant a latte from one of the several coffeehouses in town. But instead of pulling into a parking space, Diana drove them out of the village and onto the highway.
• • •
THEY ENDED UP on the other side of the island, northwest of Langley, on a patch of farmland that overlooked a huge scythe-shaped body of water called Useless Bay. There, Diana drove under an old wooden arch spanning a gravel driveway. HEART’S DESIRE had been carved into this arch so long ago that lichen filled in most of the letters.
The lane they were on curved around a long, enormous unpainted chicken coop and ended between a huge red barn and a yellow farmhouse with a porch wrapping all the way around it. The house stood on a rise of land in the middle of a lawn. It overlooked the bay and, in the distance, a sprinkling of cottages along the shore.
The pick-me-up was inside the house, and she was called Sharla Mann. She operated a single-chair beauty salon in her mudroom, a stick-thin woman with two round spots of bright pink blusher on her cheeks and worn-down Uggs, fleece pants, and two hooded sweatshirts on her body. She looked like someone without an ounce of joy inside her, Becca thought, and the only whispers she could catch from Sharla were know what he wants but I, which didn’t tell her a thing about the woman.
Sharla had been in the process of sweeping the floor of hair clippings. She took one look at Becca and said, “Girl, who the hell did that to your hair? People’ve gone to prison for less. Sit down and lemme take a look at you.”
Becca knew instantly, then, what Diana’s pick-me-up was destined to be. But the problem was her hair was supposed to stay ugly. The rest of her was supposed to stay ugly as well, from her phony glasses with their out-of-fashion frames to her overly made-up face to her ill-fitting clothes to her dirty tennis shoes with their broken laces. For her altered appearance was crucial to her mom’s plan for their escape from Jeff Corrie, and it had saved her once. It was intended to save her again.
Diana put a hand on her shoulder. She gazed directly into Becca’s eyes. “It will be a good thing, you’ll see,” she said. “All things pass.”
There was that lifting she always felt at Diana’s touch. It compelled Becca to say, “Okay.”
“Can you take Becca back to her original color?” Diana asked Sharla. “It’s grown out a bit. Can you match it?”
“I c’n come close,” Sharla told her. “But only if she swears not to mess with it again. You ready to swear, Miss Becca?”
“I guess,” Becca said. But what she wondered was how she was ever going to pay for what Sharla Mann was about to do.
• • •
IN THE WORLD of fantasy, Becca would have emerged from Sharla’s ministrations like the ugly duckling grown up into the swan. That didn’t happen. But Sharla did work enough magic on her that her former hair color of blonde-streaked light brown was back in place and the cut of her hair made it cup her head and allowed it to fall airily around her face.
“Now that’s a haircut,” Sharla said as she stepped back from it. “A trim every six weeks will keep it nice.”
Becca had no idea how to pay for this haircut, not to mention the dye job. The thought of coming up with the money to keep the style in shape every six weeks . . . No way. Before she could bring this up, though, Sharla turned to Diana and said, “You next, lady. You want the regular?”
“Shorter I think,” Diana said. She ran her hands through her hair, which was short and choppy and salt-and-pepper colored, and it came to Becca that this look was intentional whereas she’d always thought Diana chopped it off herself.
“You sure?” Sharla was saying to her as Diana
climbed in the chair. “But not too short, huh?”
Sharla and Diana exchanged a look in the mirror and it seemed to Becca that they were saying something to each other that she didn’t understand. Diana’s reply was, “We’ll go supershort later.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Sharla said.
Diana glanced at Becca and said she ought to have a look around Heart’s Desire because the views were wonderful. Becca said okay, but felt reluctant. Something was going on beneath the placid surface of Diana’s exterior. She wanted to know what it was, but she had a feeling that now wasn’t the time she was going to learn it.
She went outside.
• • •
DUSK HAD FALLEN. She saw that while she’d been inside the house, someone else had arrived at Heart’s Desire, for a large, white open-bed truck was parked next to the enormous chicken coop and lights from within the building cast a glow on the ground from a partially opened door.
On the truck’s door, Becca saw that THORNDYKE LAWN, MAINTENANCE, AND HONEY-DO were painted to form a medallion. When she looked past purpose-built storage cabinets to the bed of the vehicle, she saw a jumble of all sorts of equipment.
A man’s voice said, “Who might you be?”
She turned to see that a tall older guy was watching her as he polished very thick and very unfashionable glasses on the tail of his flannel shirt. Becca recognized him. She’d seen him conducting the seal meeting inside South Whidbey Commons on the night she’d scored a ride home from Seth. Like then, he wore a baseball cap over lots of hair that sprouted from beneath it like straw from a scarecrow.
“What’s ‘honey-do’ mean?” she asked him.
He looked from her to the door of his truck. “‘Honey do this, honey do that.’ I’m the honey that gets called to do it. It’s my business. Ivar Thorndyke: lawn man, garden man, handyman.” He put his glasses back on. “That’s my answer. What’s yours?”
“To what?”
“To who the hell you are and what the hell you’re doing peering into my truck.”
“Sharla cut my hair. She colored it, too.” Which, of course, brought to her mind the subject of money. She said impulsively to Ivar, “D’you need an assistant? I’m good at all kinds of stuff and I need a job.”
Ivar put his baseball cap back on and examined her. She caught pretty little thing . . . could be . . . wrong to be here now coming from him, none of which Becca could interpret very well. He said, “Assistant, huh? What kinda work you do?”
“Anything,” she said. “And I’m excellent at learning stuff.”
“You’re a little young to be working, aren’t you?”
“I’m fifteen.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“And at what point am I gonna learn your name?”
She strode to him and held out her hand. “Becca King,” she said. “I could take care of your tools and clean them and oil them and put them away. I could work with you when you’re doing the handyman stuff. Like you tell me what you need and I hand it to you. I could work for you weekends. After school, too. I don’t live far from here and I could ride my bike over.”
Just like . . . reminds me . . . when Steph wanted that damn horse . . .
Ivar said, “Not a bad idea if I needed someone, which I don’t. Winter’s sparse around here when it comes to work. Too bad you didn’t come by last summer because I was overrun then. Autumn, too. But now? Thin pickings.” He grabbed up an armload of tools and headed into the chicken coop.
Becca wasn’t about to be defeated so easily. She grabbed up some tools and followed him. There were no chickens living in the coop, but she figured there must have been hundreds at one time because the place was like a vault. It had been altered at some point to a combination of shop, storage unit, and collection center for a billion rusty farm implements, with an off-season hothouse at the far end where grow lights shone down on a few dozen spindly plants.
Ivar dumped his tools on a workbench and strode to this hothouse area. There he squatted and examined his plants. Becca joined them. She saw at once they were pot plants, and she did the math quickly. He had forty. Whoa, she thought. Forty was more than he could smoke, and that meant only one thing.
Ivar glanced at her and seemed to read her expression because he said, “Think you’ve dropped into a drug den, I bet.”
“Not really.”
“Work on the poker face, girl. What’d you say your name is?”
“Becca King.”
“Well, Becca King, you got to work on looking like you’re thinking something other than you’re thinking. I’m not a drug dealer. Least not in the normal sense. This is . . . let’s call it a sideline. It’s medical marijuana. I use it and so do some other folks. They buy it from me for a real good price, which saves them a trip over town to find it.”
“Oh,” she said. There didn’t seem to be a reason to doubt him. His whispers were saying nothing different from his words.
He went on with a smile. “Course, I could be lying my head off, couldn’t I? There could be a meth lab over there in the barn. Matter of fact, expanding the ol’ business might not be a bad idea. You know anything about meth? Now I could definitely use an assistant if I get into that.”
“You’re making fun,” she said.
“You sure of that?”
“Yeah. Pretty much. I sort of think you joke a lot.”
“Do you now, Becca King.”
“I do.”
He shot her a smile. Serious like her . . . Steph would’ve . . . but then she always did, didn’t she . . . made Becca wonder who Steph was and why Ivar thought about her instead of Sharla. But she didn’t say anything other than, “I could learn to take care of them,” with a nod at his plants.
“They don’t need taking care of,” he told her. “There’s a reason it’s called weed and I expect you c’n figure it out.”
“You mean weeds don’t need taken care of.”
“Smart,” he said, tapping his index finger to his baseball cap. “I like that in an attractive woman.”
Diana came into the chicken coop as Ivar was saying this last bit. She said, “I thought I’d find you in here. What’re you two up to?”
“Miss Becca King here is looking for work. She’s rejected pot growing out of hand.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I thought I could maybe be his assistant,” Becca said. “When he does his handyman stuff.”
Diana looked around the chicken coop and frowned. She said, “This place is chaos, Ivar. Maybe she can organize it for you. Someone needs to. How do you find anything?”
“Hunt, peck, throw, grunt, and curse,” he said.
“That doesn’t seem very time effective.”
“You got a point.”
“I could organize this place,” Becca told him earnestly. “I could do it easy as anything. I wouldn’t throw anything away, either. Not without asking you, I mean.”
Ivar Thorndyke cast a fond look in her direction. He shook his head, but in a way that told Becca he was giving in. He said, “Now that’s something I might be able to use you for, Becca King.”
“When?” she asked. “Soon? Now?”
Diana said to him, “She’s got a haircut she needs to keep up with.”
“And other things,” Becca added. She thought of what money could do for her situation. She might even have enough to get out of the tree house and rent a real room somewhere.
Ivar waved them off, a gesture of defeat that really meant acceptance of their plans. “So you won’t throw away a thing, right?” he said to her.
“Absolutely swear. Not without asking you. When d’you want me to start?”
PART THREE
Langley Marina
FOURTEEN
Jenn wanted to do an hour of wind sp
rints and forty-five minutes of dribbling practice. The tryouts for the All Island Girls Soccer team were coming up faster and faster, and she didn’t really need anything more to distract her. So when Squat Cooper asked her if she had time to go over their Western Civ report so that he could show her what he’d come up with, she wanted to say no way. But she knew how lucky she was to have Squat for a partner, so she said yes instead, which ended up involving a trip to his house at the edge of the sand on Useless Bay.
The place was a palace. Squat’s mom had scored it as part of a divorce settlement from his dad. When Mr. Cooper had done the evil deed with his executive assistant, the fool had decided to do it right in the marital bed. That had cost him the massive stone house, a pile of money each month, and a new Range Rover every five years.
She and Squat took their stuff upstairs. Somewhere a television was blasting, but where they sat the sound was muted. This was a study area at the far end of the house. It had two computer stations, bookshelves, two desks, a leather sofa, coffee table, and a flat-screen TV. It also had a bar with a glass-fronted minifridge. To Jenn, it was like a superdeluxe hotel. To Squat, it was business as usual.
He got out his iPad. He was handling the alternatives to conquest on the part of the European explorers who supposedly had stumbled upon the primitive culture that Jenn was inventing. His idea was to create visual aids to go along with their presentation. He wasn’t a 4.0 student for nothing.
“I pretty much got the alternatives to conquest figured out,” he told her.
“Give me the details, Studboy,” she replied.
He shot her a look. “You gotta control your craving for me if we’re gonna get this done. I know how desperate you are for my bod, but we got work to do.”
“My knuckles are white,” she said. “Continue.”
He brought the first of his work onto the screen, saying, “First thing I figure is we got to decide what makes the Europeans want an alternative to killing, capturing, pillaging, raping, enslaving, and whatever-ing, know what I mean? The rest of the class’s going to just list alternatives. But if we delve into the European culture and find something that makes them want to be different, we got Mr. Keith’s attention.”