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.
PART III
Maxwelton Beach
TWENTY-ONE
Seth found out about the party at Maxwelton Beach through Parker Natalia. He’d been invited by “the two hotties giving it,” as Parker put it, and when he revealed that one of the two hotties was Hayley, Seth decided to go. Parker’s feminista date on Wednesday night had turned out to be with Isis Martin, and Seth figured that if Parker was interested in Isis, that left Hayley open and available.
Yeah, yeah, he knew he was being dumb. He and Hayley were still at let’s-just-be-friends. But just because Hayley wanted things that way, it didn’t mean he was meant to stop hoping they could return to being mor
e than friends.
The party at Maxwelton was after dark, out of doors, and in back of one of the big beach houses. Seth figured this was where Isis Martin and her brother lived with their grandmother, but that wasn’t how it was. It also wasn’t a small party with people sitting around, having a few beers, smoking a little weed, and playing music. The word had gone out around the high school that something big was going on, and by the time Seth arrived, at least forty-five kids were already there and more kids were coming.
The house in question was at the far end of Maxwelton Road, where it dead-ended at a point about one quarter mile beyond a sign saying PRIVATE. This indicated a neighborhood that didn’t encourage non-residents to wander in, and up above the PRIVATE sign, someone had posted a hand-lettered SHHHHH! on thick poster board, a message that appeared to be for everyone heading to the party. A FOR SALE sign hung outside the party site: a big, green-shingled and many-gabled getaway house that no doubt belonged to a dotcom millionaire with a permanent home on Lake Washington. When Seth saw the FOR SALE sign and also saw the pitch darkness inside the place, he had his first qualm about the party. But he was already there and there were others behind him coming along the road stealthily. There seemed to be safety in numbers.
He went around to the water side of the house. The yard in which he found himself gave directly onto the driftwood piles distinctive to beaches in the Pacific Northwest. From these piles kids had gathered smaller pieces of wood which were set to burning in the huge stone fire pit that was a feature of the house’s well-landscaped exterior. Next to this fire pit a lot of scrap wood lay, waiting to go up in smoke as well.
There were kids everywhere, but they were doing a good job of keeping the noise down. The nearest houses were a long-abandoned fishing shack to the south—a building that the private road didn’t even reach—and, some fifty yards to the north and past an empty lot, a summer cottage that was vacant. Across the street on the land side of things, there was only a steep slope of alders that rose to a thick forest of evergreens and then to a road. As long as they stayed relatively quiet, they could party without bothering a soul.
Seth looked around for friends. He heard his name called, and saw that Becca and Derric were there, sitting on a low stone wall that marked the property boundary from the empty lot next door. Jenn McDaniels was with them, and so was Jenn’s longtime pal Squat Cooper. Seth didn’t see Hayley, but he did see Isis Martin, who was arms-around-the-waist with Parker Natalia as someone took a picture of them with a smart phone. Parker gave a wave to Seth and Seth jerked his head in hello and continued looking for Hayley as he made his way over to Becca and the others.
“Happenin’?” he said to them.
They all had beers. This surprised him a little because he couldn’t remember ever seeing Becca drink. She wasn’t generally a partier, and neither was Derric. But now seven beer cans lay empty at their feet. He raised his eyebrows when he saw this and he figured they’d been at it for a while.
“I’ve never been drunk before,” Becca said. “I decided to try it.” She wasn’t slurring her words but she didn’t look altogether there. “I dunno . . . I hope I don’t throw up.”
“Who’s driving you guys home?”
Derric raised a lazy hand. “When I c’n see straight. ’F I can’t, we’ll sleep on the beach. You okay with that, babe? Me ’n’ you under the stars or whatever?”
Becca giggled, leaned against him, and yawned.
“Hell,” Seth said, “you guys need to be careful.”
“We need to get blitzed,” Jenn told him. “The Squat man here came that way and the rest ’f us are trying to catch up.” She nuzzled Squat’s neck playfully and then said to Seth, “He had, like, a half gallon or something of Jack Daniel’s that he stole from his mom. Where’d you put it, Studboy?” This last she directed to Squat.
Squat didn’t answer. He was totally ruddy in the face, even in the darkness, and his eyes looked like embers. He finally managed, “Dunno. It was here and it’s gone,” and he waved aimlessly in the direction of some kids who were in the deep shadows at the edge of the water. Seth looked that way and could see a bottle being passed among them. He wondered if anyone in this crowd was going to stay sober enough to drive.
“Anyone know whose house this is?” he asked. He heard a shout and turned around to see flames and sparks flying high up from the fire pit as someone threw an armload of very summer-dry kindling on it. It looked like old blow-down that had been gathered from the woods, and the kids who’d done the gathering were dumping more of it next to the fire pit and stoking the blaze. Hayley was with them. So was Aidan Martin. For a second Seth thought they might be a couple because Hayley leaped back when the flames shot up, and she gripped onto Aidan’s arm.
Someone shouted, “Holy shit! What’re you guys doing?”
Aidan shouted back, “Thought you wanted a fire!” He grabbed up a burning piece of blow-down and used it like a sword, flashing fire in the sky.
Music came from somewhere, and Seth saw that one of the kids had found an outdoor electrical outlet. Into this, he’d plugged a set of speakers for an iPod. They were small but they did the job. Loud rap began.
A boy that Seth recognized from the high school football team came around the side of the house at that point, with a small metal beer keg on his shoulder. He was followed by three other guys, a slew of good-looking girls, and two guys somewhere in their twenties. They were both carrying grocery bags and the bags turned out to be filled with bottles. They started to unpack these on a circular table on the terrace outside the house’s back door. A cheer went up from the kids who saw vodka, gin, rum . . . There were mixers, too, and a couple of bags of ice and plastic glasses.
“Come ’n’ get it,” one of these guys yelled.
Kids stormed the table from all directions. There was laughter. There was shoving. There was good-natured joking. And someone hurled another enormous armful of dry wood into the fire so that the flames leapt upward, looking like a beacon against the night sky. Sparks shot everywhere. Embers flew. A bottle fell from the table and broke and a girl got down on her hands and knees and began lapping up the booze that pooled on the terrace. A boy sat on her back and tried to ride her.
Now, Seth liked parties as much as the next guy, but this looked like one that was getting seriously out of control. There might have been no one inside the house and no one on either side of the house, but the noise was growing. There was no way someone from the neighborhood wasn’t going to come investigate what was going on.
He made his way through the crowd over to Hayley. She was standing back from the fire, holding on to Aidan Martin’s arm again. This time, though, she seemed to be trying to keep him from flinging his burning piece of blow-down onto the roof of the house. He was laughing and yelling, “Lemme do it, bitch.” Hayley saw Seth coming toward her and mouthed “Help!” at him.
Or she might have been shouting it, for all he knew. The noise level was way too high at that point.
Seth said, “Hey, man,” to Aidan, and he managed to get the burning wood away from him. He tossed it onto the fire. “Better watch it with that or this whole place’ll go up in smoke.”
Aidan said, “Hey, Seth, gotcher guitar? This music sucks.”
“I totally agree.”
“Well, I’m gonna do something ’bout that,” Aidan said, and stumbled in the direction of the iPod, which was, unfortunately, also in the direction of the booze. Seth watched him grab a bottle of whatever the heck it was and lurch off with it. Then he turned to Hayley and said, “We better get out of here. This is, like, way out of control.”
“I don’t know how people found out,” Hayley told him. “It was just going to be Isis and me and a couple of others and all of a sudden . . .” She looked around. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“You had anything to drink?”
“Part of a beer. I set it down and
. . . I don’t know. I think someone took it.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose. They were smudged and her right cheek had a smear of ashes on it.
“You ask me, we need to get away. And someone’s gotta get Derric and Becca out of here because, I swear, the sheriff’s going to show up. If he sees Derric, that’ll—”
“Hey, you two.” It was Isis. Parker Natalia was with her. She was hanging back as if she wanted to take him somewhere else and he was trying to come forward as if he wanted to talk to Seth. He was smiling, and his gold earrings flashed in the light.
“Take our picture!” Isis cried. She tossed her iPhone at Seth, put her arms around Parker, locked a leg around one of his, and dropped her hands to his butt. They began kissing long, hard, and obviously with a lot of tongue. Seth took the picture. She wanted another, with Parker standing behind her with his arms around her waist. “Kiss my neck,” she commanded. He cooperated, laughing. Then he unlocked himself from her and came over to Seth and Hayley.
“This scene reminds me of high school in Nelson,” Parker said to Seth.
“What, having some blitzed chick go for you?”
“I am not blitzed.” Isis was linking her arm to Parker’s and saying, “And I don’t need to be blitzed to go for this guy’s tongue.”
“Some party,” Parker said, this time to Hayley. “I didn’t see you when I got here.”
“That’s ’cause she was in the woods,” Isis said. She winked at Hayley. “How’d it go? Hook up with anyone?”
Hayley looked flustered. “We just got some wood. But, you know, it’s so dry that I’m thinking—”
“Your brother was playing around with it,” Seth said. “If he throws it up on the roof of this place—”
“Where is he?” Isis looked around for Aidan.
“Who the hell knows? Where’d all these people come from and who’re those guys with the booze?”
“No clue,” Isis said. “But it’s totally rad that they showed up. Come on,” this last to Parker, “we need a refill.”