The Edge of the Shadows

  Becca used the AUD box to save herself from any distractions. She said to him, “Want me to do something there?” He was struggling to hold a board in place and nail it simultaneously. She went to aid him, and he pounded a nail in. It bent to one side, and Reverend Wagner swore. Then he excused himself with “Terrible example from a man of God,” and he pulled the nail out. He suggested that they take a break. “I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns,” was how he put it. He lowered the board to the ground and went to sit on a camp chair. There was another, and he patted its seat for Becca.

  She joined him and asked her question. “I’m sort of wondering, Reverend Wagner . . . Did you leave a message with Ralph Darrow about a place called Broad Valley Growers?”

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket, removed the baseball cap he was wearing, and wiped down his forehead, his neck, and his balding head. “I did,” he said. “After you and I talked, I realized that Children’s Hope has three branches in this area: here, in Friday Harbor, and in La Conner, and I got to thinking that someone in one of the other branches might be helpful, considering all the different possibilities for this young lady you’re looking for. So I phoned those branches, and there you have it.”

  “That girl I saw at Broad Valley Growers . . . So she was Rejoice.”

  “Ah. You went out to see her,” he noted with a nod. “Adopted when she was five,” he added. “The family . . . perhaps you saw them, too? All their kids are adopted from various regions in the world. A real melting pot of youngsters and two of the nicest mom and dads you’re ever likely to meet.” He glanced at Becca and repeated one point. “Five years old,” he said. “That’s when she was adopted. Rejoice Ayoka was the name, actually, not Nyombe as things turned out. But she was the only Rejoice, so I assumed . . .” His words were spoken in a meaningful way.

  Becca cringed inwardly because she knew he’d worked out that she’d lied to him. Not only had she chosen Nyombe as a surname for Rejoice, but she’d also claimed that Rejoice was her pen pal in Africa, which was hardly likely since she’d been sitting up in La Conner for years.

  Reverend Wagner said kindly, “Is there anything you’d like me to help you with, Becca? Or should I continue to assume that all of this is confidential?”

  Becca clasped her hands between her knees to keep herself from clasping them at the minister’s chest. “C’n you please . . . ? Oh gosh, this is awkward. But c’n you not say anything about Rejoice? C’n you not say anything about me asking about her?”

  He regarded her evenly. “This has to do with Derric Mathieson, doesn’t it?”

  She swallowed. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s just that . . . Well, it’s something Derric’s got on his mind and needs to work out and if you say something . . . Or if I say something . . . I think it might be better for him to decide what happens next on his own, if you know what I mean.”

  He thought about this for a moment before he slowly nodded. “I think I do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Welcome. Now . . . is there anything else I can help you with? Besides this situation with Rejoice?”

  There certainly was, Becca thought at once. There was plenty he could help her with. Or at least there was plenty that she needed someone to help her with. But Reverend Wagner was not the person who could find her mom.

  Reverend Wagner had his gaze fixed on her face. He seemed to watch a playing out of her emotions there, as careful as she was trying to be to keep them at bay. He said, “You know, Becca, it’s not a bad thing to rely on other people occasionally. I think you’ve just seen that with this circumstance involving Rejoice. Now, I know—having three of my own, all grown up now—that most kids like to rely only on themselves. But sometimes putting your faith elsewhere . . . ? That can work, too.”

  • • •

  REVEREND WAGNER’S WORDS hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. But there wasn’t much anyone could do for Becca when it came to Jeff Corrie. On the other hand, there was something that someone could do that might make a difference when it came to Becca’s mom. That person was Parker Natalia.

  The evening after she’d been to talk to Reverend Wagner, she spoke to the Canadian as she and he did the dishes. She kept the water running and her voice low. Ralph was in the living room and although he was banging around with the fire tools and logs as he built his nightly blaze, there was always a chance he’d overhear.

  She said to Parker, “I got to ask a favor. D’you remember my cousin Laurel in Nelson?”

  He was wiping a plate and he looked like someone whose mind was a million miles away. Becca picked up like that’s all I think about from him, along with maybe it’s true but how unreasonable . . . Jesus how much more screwed . . . great going asshole . . . another bright idea only now there’s no way without . . . but none of it made sense to her. She forged ahead. She repeated, “D’you remember my cousin Laurel in Nelson?”

  Parker roused himself. “Don’t know her, though.”

  “Yeah. But here’s what I’m wondering. You guys have a newspaper up there, right?”

  “Sure.” He dried a plate and put it on the stack he’d already done.

  “I want to put an ad inside it.”

  “For your cousin?”

  “Just her name really big and Seth’s phone number.” She couldn’t risk Ralph’s, not only because her mom might call and Ralph might forget all about it but also because Becca had already lied to him about Laurel Armstrong. But Seth could be relied upon to pass along a message from Becca to Laurel and from Laurel to Becca. It would be brief enough anyway. “Come back to Whidbey,” to which Laurel could then say, “Be there next week.” Or “in two days” or better yet “tomorrow.” But in any case, she’d get the message and she’d return and Becca could then tell her about Connor West and about having been wrong about Jeff Corrie.

  “See, I can’t do the ad because they’re gonna want money, right?” Becca said to Parker. “And I’ve got money to pay for it, but not . . . like . . . a credit card or anything. But I bet you’ve got a credit card. So if you arrange for the ad and give them the credit card number or whatever and then I c’n pay you . . .”

  He nodded but she could tell he wasn’t really listening. She could also tell his spirits were low. She could almost feel the weight of his heart.

  She said to him, “What’s going on, Parker?”

  “With me? I blew it.”

  “What?”

  “Everything.”

  She looked at him, and she breathed in deeply. There were a jumble of words comprising his whispers and then a flash of memory from him that she caught onto just before it faded from sight: Isis pulling a sweater over her head and reaching around to unfasten her bra and a hand—Parker’s?—reaching for a bright gold chain that hung between her full breasts. The hand closed around that chain and then . . . nothing. Becca found herself staring at Parker, and he was staring at her. She could feel her cheeks burning with what she’d seen.

  She said, “Is this . . . well . . . Isis, maybe?”

  Instead of answering directly, he said, “You and Hayley are friends, right?”

  “We talk and stuff and usually we have lunch at the same table, but she’s more Seth’s friend. And Seth’s more my friend. If you know what I mean.”

  He didn’t seem to care one way or the other. All that appeared to matter was the “talking to her” part. He said, “Could you talk to her for me? If I wrote her a note, could you give it to her? She’s not talking to me now and I don’t blame her because I did something righteously stupid because I didn’t think about that freaking iPhone not to mention Facebook and it just seemed easier to deny . . .” He looked so pathetic that Becca had to feel some sympathy for him. From what she could work out from his memory pictures and his words, he’d done the deed with Isis but then lied to Hayley.

  She said, “You’re seriously dumb, Parker.”
br />   “She came on to me. It’s not like I wanted—”

  “So you fought her off. Not.”

  “Jesus. Why are women so . . . Look, I know I blew it. I just didn’t expect to get accused. I went to see Hayley just to give her a CD and before I knew it, we were talking about Isis and I could tell she was pissed and I didn’t know how to handle it. I know I was wrong. I want to apologize and make things right. All’s I’m asking is for you to give her that message. You don’t need to talk her into—”

  A sharp knock on the front door interrupted Parker’s words. It was followed at once by someone ringing the door bell. From the living room, Ralph said, “Tarnation. All right,” and grumbled his way over to see who it was.

  Dave Mathieson entered. He nodded at Ralph and then his gaze shifted to the kitchen doorway. He saw Becca. He saw Parker standing behind her. He said, “Parker Natalia, right? Let’s you and me go somewhere to talk.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Parker left with the undersheriff, and he didn’t return to the house that night. Becca hadn’t the first clue where he and Dave Mathieson had gone, but the fact that the undersheriff had shown up in the first place did not make anything look good for Parker. She figured she should worry about this, but her larger worry was getting a message to Laurel, and Parker had been her last best bet to do that.

  She had to wait for another chance with him. In the meantime, she decided that she would fulfill his request that she speak to Hayley.

  The problem was finding a time to talk to Hayley when Isis wasn’t hanging around her. The only stretch of time that Hayley was without the other girl consisted of the moments that she spent on the reception desk in the administration wing of the high school.

  Becca buttonholed her there. To do this, she had to cut a class, but there didn’t seem to be any help for that. She removed her ear bud in order to be guided by Hayley’s whispers.

  Hayley looked very pale. She was fair-skinned anyway, but now she seemed drained. Becca approached her, and Hayley raised her head from some homework. She smiled wanly. Becca said, “You busy?”

  “Statistics,” Hayley told her and gestured at some sort of graph she was in the midst of creating. “This and the phones,” she added. “It’s pretty quiet right now. Makes me want to take a nap.” Got to stop this . . . he’s always there . . . if Mom won’t do something about . . . such a pig . . . impossible constituted what was in her head.

  Becca frowned. It seemed to her that all the progress she’d made with whispers was gone now, defeated by the knowledge of how she’d misinterpreted Jeff Corrie’s. She wasn’t sure how to get anything back or even if she should make the attempt at all. She said, “Parker asked me—”

  No no no no.

  That was clear enough, Becca thought. “—to talk to you,” she concluded.

  “Well, you’ve just talked to me, so consider your obligation fulfilled,” Hayley told her tartly.

  Becca squirmed. She didn’t like to play the go-between, and she sure didn’t like the reason that Parker had made this request of her. But she was in it now, so she decided to plunge onward. She couldn’t exactly make things worse between them. She said, “It’s just that he feels really bad about what happened and he wanted me to—”

  “D’you know what happened?” Hayley tossed to one side of the desk the colored pencil she’d been using on the graph. “Did he tell you? Because if he did, the whole idea that he’d ask you to tell me anything is outrageous, okay?”

  “He knows he blew it. He just wants a chance to talk to you.”

  “To lie about something else is what you mean. Well, I don’t want to listen. You didn’t answer anyway. Do you know what he did?”

  Becca felt hot around the neckline of her sweater. She said, “Isis.”

  “Right. Parker and Isis and then he lied. I’m not putting up with liars, Becca. You c’n tell him that.”

  “He’s just hoping that you’ll give him a chance. Just to talk is all. I think he wants to say sorry.”

  “Great. He’s sorry. Tell him you told me, I listened, and the end is the end however he wants to color it. Look, you have Derric. You c’n be sure of him. That’s what I want, too. To be sure of someone. Parker’s not that person. He’s a liar, it’s too bad, and there’s an end to it.”

  Becca gave fleeting thought to the whole idea of being sure. Nothing, she knew, was ever for sure. She said, “It’s just that sometimes people . . . Things happen and they don’t really intend them to or they’re sorry they did or they weren’t thinking straight. And when that happens—”

  “When what happens?” another voice said.

  Becca swung around although she knew who was talking. Isis Martin was there, carrying with her an enormous placard reading BATHROOM PASS. She carelessly tossed this onto one of the chairs in reception and came over to the desk, which she hung upon and said, “What’s going on?”

  “Parker wants to talk to me,” Hayley told her. “He sent Becca to ask.”

  Isis glanced Becca’s way, her cool blue eyes appraising. Becca thought she was about to warn Hayley off, but Isis surprised her by saying, “You should talk to him. You know it was nothing, him and me.” And to Becca, “Where is he? Outside?”

  “I think he’s with the sheriff,” Becca said.

  “What?” This from Isis.

  “The sheriff came for him last night and said they needed to talk and they went somewhere together. He usually comes to the house for breakfast—to Mr. Darrow’s house?—but he didn’t today.”

  “He probably took off for Canada,” Hayley said. “He probably got deported.”

  “I don’t think it had to do with making him go back to Canada,” Becca said. “The sheriff didn’t tell him to get his stuff.”

  Isis turned to Hayley. “The sheriff’s got to be asking him about the fires. What else is there?”

  The ring . . . but what would that have to do with . . . know about him anyway? . . . he would have talked to the Canadian police and if he found out something . . . did he plan . . . he would have known that cigarette was . . . so if he had the ring . . . lies lies lies on top of lies . . .

  The whispers came from them both in great cloudy swirls that turned Becca around and inside out. The only thing she could understand from it all was that Parker had something to do with a ring, which had something to do with Isis or Hayley. How this related to everything else was something that she still didn’t know.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Isis found Hayley at the local food bank later on that afternoon. Using it represented how far her family had fallen into financial trouble, and for Isis to know this was almost too much to bear. But as if out of nowhere, the girl materialized at the side of Hayley’s cart, giving no clue as to how she’d managed to track her down. And Hayley didn’t have time to ask.

  “Aidan’s missing,” Isis told her. “I was gonna tell you when you were at the reception desk, but that girl . . . Becca . . .” She chewed her lip.

  “Missing? How? When?”

  “He was there at Grandam’s two nights ago, at dinner. He went off the next morning. He hasn’t been back. I told Grandam he was staying with a friend, but she’s not stupid and I have to find him. God, Hayley, things’re bad.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She looked around, as if for listeners. “Mom and Dad are coming up here.”

  “Why?”

  “The sheriff . . . It was only a matter of time till he got all of the information. He’s been checking every single kid who was at that party, and he looked into me and Aidan and he found out about Wolf Canyon Academy. He called Mom and Dad because the people at Wolf Canyon wouldn’t’ve told him why Aidan was there. Mom and Dad wanted to know why he was calling, course, and he told them some fire setting. They freaked. They called up here and they talked to me and I didn’t know what to tell them except that there we
re some fires only I swore Aidan wasn’t involved. But I told him they called and they were coming up here as soon as they could work it out. Hayley, I told him and told him he should’ve talked to the sheriff himself and let him know about everything because of how it would look if he let the sheriff find out on his own. But he wouldn’t and now he’s gone.”

  “God, Isis. Then he must have—”

  “No way. He’s cured. But what he thinks is that they’ll take him back. Mom and Dad.”

  “To Wolf Canyon?”

  “So he ran.” Isis’s eyes got bright with tears. “I have to find him. Will you help me? He’s hiding somewhere. But if I don’t find him fast, I’m scared he might actually . . . you know . . . do something. . . .”

  “Is he on foot?”

  “He’s got a bike. One of those two at Grandam’s.”

  “Then he can’t be far.”

  • • •

  ISIS BELIEVED IT would be some place close to her grandmother’s house. When Hayley suggested that they check his bedroom first for any kind of clue where he might be, Isis panicked. They couldn’t go to her grandam’s house. Grandam was always there. And if she saw them in Aidan’s room, she would ask questions and she couldn’t ask questions because she had to think—

  Hayley said, “But with Aidan missing . . . and since he sets fires—”

  “He’s cured!” Isis insisted. “But we got to find him.”

  It seemed to them both that the only logical place for Aidan to have gone was back down to Maxwelton Beach, to one of the vacant houses. Thus, they began their search not far from the turnoff to Nancy Howard’s house, and they crept along, looking for something unkempt, something deserted, or something not too different from that old fishing shack next to where they’d held their party. But they found nothing. Wherever he’d gone, Aidan was not at Maxwelton Beach.

  Swede Hill Road suggested itself next, since it broke to the east and climbed to the south toward Scatchet Head, immense with forest, beach, and bluff. But by the time they’d made their decision that that was the next direction to try, darkness had fallen and Hayley had to get home. The next part of the search would have to wait, she told Isis.