The Edge of the Shadows

  “There’s things I won’t ever be able to do good and I’m lucky I even passed the GED and anyway that’s not what I want to talk about.”

  Their sandwiches were handed over to them, and Seth scored two drinks. These they took across the road to an old white schoolhouse from the 1800s, where they found a spot in the sun that would keep them warm despite the cool breeze that had begun to blow.

  Seth had already decided how to broach the subject of Parker Natalia. “Surprised to see you and Parker over in Port Townsend,” he told her.

  He saw her hesitate before she took a bite of her sandwich. When she answered, she talked about Prynne.

  “She was really good,” she said. “But d’you think she’s as good as Parker? Parker thinks she’s better than he is, but I don’t think so. She was good, but Parker . . . ? Doesn’t it seem to you that Parker has something special?”

  Seth could see how much she enjoyed just saying Parker’s name, and this worried him. He said, “She’s definitely as good as Parker. She’s probably better.”

  “So why’s she not in a group?”

  “Sometimes people like to go it alone. She’s coming over here to jam with Triple Threat, though. That’s why I went to hear her.”

  Hayley didn’t miss how he emphasized I. She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well . . . why’d you guys go?”

  “I went because Parker invited me.”

  “So why’d he want to go?”

  “Because he’s a musician.” Hayley set her sandwich on its wrapper and said, “Want to tell me what’s going on, Seth?”

  “Just that I sort of wonder about Parker.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Seth set down his sandwich as well. He looked across the street at the last of the stalls being taken down. People were still standing there chatting as if reluctant to have the market end. The end of the market meant winter was coming. There were a few more good weeks, but the bad stuff was out there.

  He said, “I got something I need to tell you, Hayley. You’re not going to like it and you’re probably going to be seriously ticked off at me. But I did it for you because the one thing you don’t need is someone taking a meat cleaver to your heart.”

  He’d said this without looking at her, but now he turned. A mixture of suspicion, fear, and anger appeared to be washing across her face. “What?” she said in a voice like scissors making a cut through paper.

  So he told her what he’d learned from the bass player in BC Django 21. Watch out for the guy. He’s trouble.

  “What kind of trouble?” Hayley asked.

  “Don’t know for sure. There was some kind of deal about him and the mandolin player’s sister but the real thing is—”

  “Wait a minute.” Hayley jumped to her feet. “Are you telling me that you . . . that you just . . . you believed this person you don’t even know at the other end of a telephone call? You talk to him once and you . . . you just believe whatever he says? ‘Watch out for the guy. He’s trouble’? For all you know, Seth Darrow, Parker borrowed that guy’s car and didn’t fill it with gas afterwards and the guy got mad and thought, All right I’ll fix you real good, buddy. I’ll spread the word so that no one trusts you again.”

  “Hayl, that’s not hardly—”

  “You don’t want me to be happy, do you?”

  He got to his feet as well. He said, “I’m just passing along something that I heard. You c’n do with it what you want. I don’t care. But for God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Because whatever else you think, people aren’t always what they seem to be.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “And that means what?”

  “It means Parker’s been on the island for every single one of the fires, Hayley.”

  “Oh my God. Well, if you think what you’re thinking, why don’t you just report him to the sheriff?” And then, as if seeing an alteration in Seth’s face, she went on. “You did! You reported him! I can’t believe it.”

  “Hayley, come on . . .”

  “No! No! Watch out for the guy, he could be trouble and that means he sets fires. Well, we both know why you’re thinking what you’re thinking. So, if it comes down to it, report yourself to Sheriff Mathieson, Seth. You’ve been on the island for every one of the fires, too.”

  She turned on her heel and stalked off, then. So she didn’t hear Seth say, “No. Truth is, I haven’t been on the island for all of the fires.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  At the far end of the farmers’ market stood Bayview Hall, a long, flaking white barn-like building that served the purposes of everything from dance hall to Christmastime marketplace. Behind this structure in a vacant field of beaten-down grasses, an outdoor food court was set up each market Saturday from spring to fall. It was here that Becca was meeting with Jenn McDaniels and Squat Cooper.

  Squat, with the money to do so, had purchased a cheeseburger, a Coke, and a bag of chips. Becca and Jenn, without the money to purchase anything, were sharing a chicken salad sandwich provided by Becca and two bottles of tap water provided by Jenn. Squat had already pointed out to them that reusing plastic bottles was going to kill them both because of the breakdown of toxic chemicals that went into the bottles’ manufacture. To this, Jenn had countered with, “I don’t see you parting with any cash to get us something to save our lives, Studboy.”

  With a roll of his eyes, Squat went to purchase two bottles of flavored water. Becca remarked that Jenn had manipulated Squat into doing this. To that, Jenn smirked, unrepentant.

  Squat came back with the waters and handed them over, saying, “Don’t say I didn’t ever get you anything.”

  Jenn eyed them and said, “I dunno, Squatman. I don’t see any kettlecorn here. Oh well. Guess these’ll have to do,” and she scored a handful of his chips. She munched for a moment and then brought up to Becca the reason for their meeting. “Background on Wolf Canyon Academy,” she told her. “Me and the Squatman got the goods.”

  Becca was all ears. She’d been consumed by the possible whereabouts of Derric’s sister, Rejoice, waiting anxiously to hear anything at all from Reverend Wagner. To have something else to consider even for a moment was welcome. She said, “What?”

  “It’s a place for dopers and alkies when their parents are at the end of their rope,” Jenn said.

  “It’s a last stop place, not a first stop place,” Squat added. “Heavy addictions and big trouble kids.”

  “I say it’s pills,” Jenn went on. “Vicodin, Oxy, Valium, whatever. Aidan’s one of your medicine cabinet druggies. This place costs major bucks so the family’s got piles of it and that means they got piles of prescriptions for whatever ails them because you know how rich people are.” Jenn grabbed her lower back and said, “‘Oh doctor, doctor, I got a backache . . . C’n you give me something?’ So he hands over some Oxy and it ends up getting put in the medicine cabinet and the kids dip into it. If you look at Aidan, it’s pretty clear he’s not into anything like meth. It’s gotta be pills.”

  Becca nodded. She could see, though, that Squat looked thoughtful. She’d put in her ear bud and, not being able to pick up his whispers, she said, “What d’you think?”

  He was chewing some burger, too well brought up to talk with his mouth full. When he was ready, he said, “Seems to me there’s all kinds of addictions. Like maybe he’s a klepto or something. Maybe he’s a peeping Tom. Hell, maybe he’s a perv who went after little kids in his old neighborhood. Maybe he gets a thrill from killing animals.”

  “Maybe he’s into setting fires,” Becca said.

  They all looked at each other. Jenn was the one to voice what all of them were thinking. “I’m telling the cops.”

  “’Cept,” Squat said, “we don’t know for sure he’s a pyro. I mean, he could be addicted to other things, too. Like eating. Like gambling. Like . . . whateve
r.”

  Becca shook her head. “It’s got to be fire,” she said. “It’s the only thing that really explains—” She stopped herself. She couldn’t say more because what she had to say was knowledge that had come from the whispers she’d heard about an apartment fire. She thought for a moment and then finished with, “Maybe that’s why he’s always lurking around when I get on the Internet.”

  “He knows something’s there, and he’s worried you’ll find it,” Jenn said.

  • • •

  BECCA COULDN’T RISK doing research on the topic of fires and Aidan Martin anywhere that the boy might find her doing so. So she settled on the offices of the South Whidbey Record. She used the excuse of a journalism class she was taking at the high school and an assignment given to the students involving journalists, methods of research, and resulting stories. She told this tale to one of the island paper’s three reporters who was in the office at work on a story about an ongoing murder trial at the Coupeville courthouse. He was on a deadline and consequently harried, but he was willing to give her five minutes during which he sketched out how she might go about looking into a suspected arson in Palo Alto, California. Start her search with finding out the name of the Palo Alto newspaper if there was one, he told her.

  Eventually Becca got to the story she needed. She worked back through time and found it thirty months earlier, an arson taking place on Middlefield Road. A fire had completely gutted an apartment building, rendering homeless the residents of the twenty-two units. Once she read the story, Becca moved forward through time to follow whatever was available on the investigation. There was little enough information since arsons were, apparently, not big enough news to make the front page or even the inside pages of a newspaper for very long once they occurred. After the first flurry of excitement, there were occasional references to the ongoing investigation and one big story about a huge donation from Google that provided housing for all of the people who’d lost everything in the fire. Becca read and sifted and searched and finally found what she was looking for in a very brief paragraph some six weeks after the fire had occurred. A fourteen-year-old boy had been arrested and charged with the crime of arson, she discovered. There would be a hearing in juvenile court regarding the matter.

  Becca did the math on that. The age was right for Aidan to have been charged with the crime and for some kind of deal to have been struck that sent him for two years into a lockdown with heavy emphasis on dealing with his problem. If, of course, he really did have a problem. And Becca thought that he did.

  • • •

  SHE FELT RELIEVED, mostly because her interpretation of the whisper she’d heard had been correct. There had been an apartment fire and it had occurred in Palo Alto, California. What remained for her to work out now was what to do with her information.

  Obviously, she needed to discover exactly when Aidan and Isis Martin had arrived on Whidbey. For all Becca knew, they could have arrived at the very beginning of the summer, and if that was the case, Aidan had been there from the time of the small conflagration in the trash can at Bailey’s Corner to the storm of flames and smoke that had killed the druggie inside the old fisherman’s shack.

  The best way to find out how long the Martins had been on the island was the direct approach. But the problem was that the direct approach would reveal her suspicions about him to Aidan should she just ask him. She could ask Isis, Becca figured, but the better course was probably to get the information from Hayley Cartwright. She and Isis were tight. Hayley would know when Isis and her brother had first shown up on Whidbey.

  Becca had to wait a few days to get Hayley alone. She asked her question directly, but Hayley ended up not knowing for sure. Indeed, Hayley ended up totally flustered by the question, which Becca didn’t understand until she eased the ear bud out of her ear and began to pick up Hayley’s whispers. They were flying fast and furiously from the other girl’s mind. I don’t believe that Parker and Isis . . . If he said he didn’t then he didn’t and what’s the point if I don’t decide to trust him . . . Seth always gets in the middle of things . . . This deal with Brooke and what in God’s name am I supposed to do about . . . all said that perhaps Hayley had bigger worries than thinking about the arrival of the Martin siblings. Then on top of Hayley’s whispers came some memory pictures so vivid that Becca started and Hayley said, “What’s wrong?” And that put an end to their conversation because no way was Becca going to tell her about seeing Parker Natalia’s hungry face hovering over someone who had to be Hayley and seeing his hands pulling off Hayley’s top and seeing Hayley’s hand clenched and then hiding something beneath her leg while that leg was on the cot in the tree house that Becca recognized better than anything. So Becca was left once again wondering how to go at something that ought to be relatively easy but wasn’t.

  She felt as if there was way too much swimming around in her head. She wondered what the point was of having whispers and memory pictures if she couldn’t work out what to do with them.

  That idea took her back to what Diana Kinsale had said to her. Things are quickening. She’d looked up that word—quickening—in a dictionary at school, and there she’d read its meaning: “to cause to move more rapidly, to hasten.” Well, she’d thought, that was for sure because information was piling up faster now. But what to do with it . . . ? She needed to work this out.

  In her room at Ralph’s, she took up the book Diana had given her, Seeing Beyond Sight. The writing within it was old fashioned and often so obscure that Becca had done very little reading of it. But now she wondered if there might be something useful in its words, so she opened the book to give it another try.

  She discovered soon enough that she should have been looking into Seeing Beyond Sight all along. For an entire chapter was devoted to the subject of quickening, and seeing this, Becca began to devour it. Thus she found that there was more than merely the dictionary’s definition when it came to quickening, for the word also applied to the flashes of vision she’d been having. What she read wasn’t exactly a breeze to understand, however: “A verbal exploration and subsequent interpretation of the visions will lead the visionary to propel events forward to a safe, desired, or happy conclusion that might not otherwise occur should the visions not be explored completely and understood with a sharp degree of accuracy. This is what we call a quickening.”

  Becca set the book down. Verbal exploration? Subsequent interpretation? Propelling events forward? How was she to accomplish any of that?

  She was considering this when a knock on her bedroom door was followed by Ralph Darrow’s quiet, “You available in there, Miss Becca?” She jumped off the bed and returned the book to its shelf. She opened the door and said, “Just doing homework and thinking about a popcorn break. Without butter, by the way.”

  Ralph was holding a piece of paper, half torn from a pad that Becca recognized as being next to the phone in the kitchen. He said to her, “I got this . . . but truth is I’m damned if I c’n remember how. I think it’s for you but it could be for Seth. Even for Parker. You make anything of it?”

  If I tell Seth . . . dad will . . . chris . . . en . . . prob . . . Sarah going . . . grad . . .

  Becca blinked at the nature of Ralph’s whispers, broken up like a badly tuned radio station. She wondered if the memory pictures she was beginning to pick up were getting in the way of her ability to hear whispers from people.

  She looked at the paper Ralph had handed her. Broad Valley Grow Skag was written on it, and there was something very wrong about the handwriting. Becca had seen Ralph’s writing before, and it was strong and handsome, the writing of a man who’d taken seriously his grade school penmanship training. This, however, was little more than a scrawl. And she hadn’t the slightest idea what it meant.

  She said, “Mr. Darrow . . .”

  He said quickly, “I thought it best to give it to you, Miss Becca. If I give it to Seth and tell him I can’t quite r
emember how I got it or why, he’s liable to tell his dad and his dad is going to tell his sister—that’s my girl Brenda—and then you and I . . . ? We do not want to be tangling with Brenda. So . . . d’you want to see what this is all about, then? I guess what I’m saying is could you do that for me?”

  He seemed perfectly normal as he spoke. So she said she’d help out and do what she could to interpret the note. But, still, she said, “I’m sorta worried about you, Mr. Darrow. If you can’t remember how you got this . . .”

  He waved her off. “I’m telling you, Miss Becca, somebody said old age is not for sissies, and every day I’m more convinced of the fact. Now. Did you say something about popcorn?”

  “No butter,” she told him. “I said that, too.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  What the Broad Valley Grow Skag message meant didn’t concern Becca as much as the fact that Ralph’s handwriting was so changed and the other fact that he’d forgotten how he’d even gotten the message in the first place. She did find out that Broad Valley Growers was near a town called La Conner, which was itself situated in Skagit Valley, but when she got their phone number and tried to find out how they related to herself, to Parker Natalia, to Seth Darrow, or to Ralph, she came up empty. The place was a tulip farm and they had “no reason in hell that I c’n see, miss” to be calling Ralph Darrow’s home on Whidbey Island.

  Becca concluded that someone had been calling about Broad Valley Growers, and Jenn McDaniels was the most likely person. Jenn was, after all, hot on the trail of all things related to Aidan Martin and to Wolf Canyon Academy.

  When Becca cornered her at her locker at the high school, though, Jenn said no. “Don’t know nada about tulip farms anywhere” was how she put it. “But I got more on Aidan anyways, courtesy of the Squatman.”

  Becca smiled. “How’d you twist his arm this time?”

  Jenn shook her head. She opened her backpack to shove in some books and a pack of cigarettes fell out. She glanced up, saw Becca’s look of disapproval, shoved the cigarettes back in place, and said, “I’m quitting, I’m quitting. I was only testing to see if you noticed.”