Hayley said, “You know that’s not how it happened. You know Aidan took that ring. He left it at the shack when he set the fire to make it look like you—”
“That’s not true! He’s my brother! And now everything’s ruined because the sheriff knows. He called Grandam last night and then she called my parents and she asked questions and they had to tell her and now she knows too and she went berserk because of what it could all have meant with her not knowing and having all this . . . this stuff lying around all the time, stuff he could’ve set fire to.” Pathetically, Isis began to cry. She paced hopelessly back and forth.
Hayley stared at her dumbly. “Isis, I don’t get . . . Your grandma didn’t know what?”
“The fires. Aidan. She never knew.”
“Oh my God. Are you saying that she never knew that Aidan started fires? How could she not know? He’s her grandson!”
“Because it all happened so far away. My mom didn’t tell her. And she doesn’t follow what’s going on in Palo Alto. She hates California. She doesn’t want to know what’s happening there.”
“But didn’t she wonder why he went to that special school in Utah?”
“They told her it was all about Robbie. And it was. Aidan was grieving so bad and he never stopped grieving and . . . Maybe they told her he was into drugs in Palo Alto or he was drinking or something but they never said fires. It’s all so stupid.”
“What is?”
“That they don’t want people to know. So I’m up here with him and I’m s’posed to cover for him and I can’t do it anymore and I want to go home.” She wept bitterly at that point, and it wasn’t the controlled weeping from before but rather something that looked more like she was going to head right into extended hysterics. She cried, “He’s the only brother I have left. I have to find him, Hayley.”
“But you also have to see that Aidan’s the only one who—”
“No!” Isis advanced on her. “You listen to me. I must have had that ring on that night. I thought I stopped wearing it earlier but I must not have done that. I must have kept it on and worn it the night of the party and when Parker and I were making out . . . We were on the beach over by some driftwood and okay so things got carried away but I must’ve lost it then. That’s what happened.” Her face was alight. “And Parker took it then! He took the ring and he left it at the fire and—”
“You’re trying to talk yourself into something you know isn’t true,” Hayley told her, and for the first time she felt close to tears herself. “Look at the facts. I know you want Aidan to be okay but he isn’t okay and he’s probably on his way to do God only knows what right now. No one is safe unless he gets found.”
Isis looked wild-eyed. “Then we have to find him.” She jumped to her feet and ran out of the room.
FIFTY-THREE
Becca found Derric having his regular once-a-week Big Brother afternoon with Josh Grieder at the Cliff Motel. They were in the living room behind the motel office, in the midst of constructing a serious Tyrannosaurus rex from Legos.
Josh, always generous with his Derric time when it came to Becca’s intruding on it, said that sure, Becca could borrow Derric. But only for five minutes ’cause they had serious work to do.
Derric rubbed Josh’s head and went with Becca back through the office and outside to stand beneath the porch’s overhang. It had begun to rain. The weather was bringing winter now. The days were shorter, colder, and wetter.
“We need to go to Coupeville,” Becca told him.
“Say what?”
“We need to go to your dad’s office. We’ve got to get into the evidence files on the fire at Maxwelton Beach.”
Derric took her arm and led her along the line of rooms, and all the way to the end of the porch, which looked out onto Camano Street and the community arts center on the other side. “Spill,” he said.
Becca told him that it was looking like a ring was involved in the Maxwelton fire. “I keep hearing about it,” was how she put it. “Hayley and Isis? They’re, like, all over the subject, Derric.”
“You think one of them set the fires? Not exactly Hayley’s style, Becca. That leaves Isis. But why?”
“Don’t know. Hayley keeps saying she’s got some hot boyfriend in Palo Alto. Maybe she wants Aidan sent back to Utah so she can go home to him.”
“Or maybe Aidan’s doing it to get her carted off to jail.”
“Or maybe Parker’s doing it ’cause him and Isis hooked up and he doesn’t know how else to get rid of her. Point is, though, that we need to see if there’s a ring in evidence in the first place, so we need to go to Coupeville.”
“I could just ask my dad if—”
“Your dad’s not going to tell you anything till the case is solved. And maybe not even then ’cause there’ll be a trial, right? So we need to go to his office, and then we need to get to the files. I don’t have a clue how we c’n do this but we have to try. The question is: C’n we do it soon?”
“Oh, it’s way easier than that,” Derric told her.
Josh came outside. He put his hands on his hips the way his grandmother did when she was miffed. He said, “Hey, you guys! Five minutes is five minutes!”
“Coming, bro,” Derric said. “Let me kiss my girl.”
“Yuck! I don’t want to see that.” Josh ducked back inside.
Derric smiled and turned back to Becca. He said, “I’ll call Mom. You’re coming to dinner. Dad always logs on to his work after dinner. He says it helps to recap the day. We’ll do something that’ll get him out of his study—”
“Like what? Set a fire?” Becca asked sardonically.
“Like I’ll figure it out. But when we do it, you be ready. You’ll go into his study and read the file and then you’ll know. It’ll work, trust me. There are certain distractions that he can’t resist. I just have to choose the best one.”
• • •
THE BEST TURNED out to be Mexican Train dominoes. Derric sweetened the pot of his suggestion that they have a tournament of five rounds after dinner by declaring that if Dave’s was the lowest score at the end of those rounds, Derric would detail one of the family’s two cars. Dave’s reaction was to rub his hands together, say, “Boy oh boy. You set it up and give a yell when it’s ready,” after which he disappeared into his study, just as Derric had declared he would.
“Mom and I do the dishes,” Derric had told Becca, “and that’s when he reviews his cases. He’ll leave the computer on and he’ll still be logged in. The rest is gonna be up to you.”
Becca thought she could manage it. She’d never played Mexican Train dominoes, but it was easy enough to learn. She and Derric set the game up in a location as far as possible from Dave’s office. This was in the sun room at the back of the house.
Becca discovered that Derric knew his dad pretty well. Dave Mathieson was a take-no-prisoners player. So was Derric, and Rhonda wasn’t far behind. A lot of laughter, joking, yelling, and arguing about the rules accompanied each round. And each round was long enough that Becca could see it wasn’t going to take much effort to find an appropriate moment to fade out of the room and into Dave’s study at the far end of the house.
She declared herself hopeless at the game when they got to the third round. She said, “What’s my score, Derric?”
He looked at the sheet of paper on which he’d been tallying the numbers. He winced. “Babe, you’re in a class all your own. It’s two hundred twenty-four.”
“Yikes. I better watch a round to see what I’m doing wrong.”
“Just about everything,” Dave advised her. “You sit with me if you want to see the master at work.”
Sitting with Dave was what Becca did. They were well into the fourth round when she excused herself for a call of nature. The competition among them was intense enough that she felt fairly certain she would have all the time she needed to se
e what was on Dave’s computer.
As Derric had said it would be, the laptop that Dave carried with him in the sheriff’s car was on his desk. It was still switched on and bringing it out of sleep mode was all it took.
It opened to an entire list of files rather than merely the one that Becca wished to see. She scanned them as fast as she could and finally found the file when she saw the title Maxwelton Beach. But when she opened it, she discovered that it was far larger than she’d expected it to be. All of the interviews had been recorded. All of the photographs of the scene had been included. There was nothing that bore the telling title of Evidence or Clues that she could see. She clicked on the photographs.
There were two hundred and fifty-four. No way did she have time to look at them all. She murmured, “Damn, damn, damn,” and ran her gaze over the thumbnails of them as fast as she dared.
“Hey! Beckster!” Dave Mathieson called from the sun room. “You fall in or something? I’m having a very good game and if you want to learn—”
“He’s bullshitting you, Becca,” Derric cut in. “Take your time while I clean his clock.”
Becca rose from Dave’s study chair and listened hard at the door. The game seemed to be resuming. She went back to his desk. She went back to the pictures.
She heard Rhonda say, “You better check, sweetie. She might be sick.”
And from Dave, “Is this a setup, you two? I’m destroying you and—”
“Don’t be silly. Your turn, Derric. I’ll check.”
Damn damn double damn, Becca thought. She heard the scrape of a chair. She heard Rhonda call her name. She heard Derric call his mom back. But she knew she had only an instant or two left.
She scrolled desperately. She gazed. She felt on the edge of panic. All of them were talking loudly in the sun room now and she didn’t have time to wonder how Derric was going to keep his mom and dad where they were because she was so frantic to—
She found it. A wheelbarrow had been upended next to the woodpile across from the fisherman’s shack. The first photo of it showed its entirety. The second showed its handles against a moldy pile of wood. A third gave Becca information she could use. It showed only the single wheel of the wheelbarrow and in front of this wheel lay, unmistakably, a man’s large ring.
• • •
DERRIC DROVE HER home. She told him exactly where the ring had been. “It was pretty much out in the open,” she said. “In the open, Derric, like it was no mistake. It has to have been planted.”
“I dunno, babe. It was a man’s ring? You sure?”
“It looked like . . . I think it was maybe from a college ’cause it was so big.”
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone planted it there, does it?”
“Not someone. It can’t be just someone. It has to be Aidan or Parker.”
He continued with his thought. “You said it was near the woodpile, right? Next to a wheelbarrow, yes?” He glanced at her and she nodded. He said, “So if someone planted it, wouldn’t that person have put it closer to where the fire started? ’Cause with it at a distance from the fire, it could mean anything.”
“Which means . . . what?” She answered her own question. “That a ring by a wheelbarrow doesn’t prove a thing.” She slumped back against the Forester’s seat. She went on with, “We’re nowhere, I guess. Unless . . .” And there it was again, that image she’d seen of Parker Natalia reaching for something that hung from a chain around Isis’s neck. So quickly had it come and gone as a mental picture that Becca might have forgotten it altogether at some point had Hayley and Isis not been so caught up in whispers about a ring. “Derric,” she said, “what if there’s something else?”
“Where?” They were heading up East Harbor Road, driving along the huge boot-shaped body of water that was Holmes Harbor. This would take them into the town of Freeland. They’d double back on the highway from there to get to Ralph Darrow’s place. Traffic was light, but the rain was insistent.
“At the fire scene,” Becca told him. “What if there’s a broken chain as well?”
“In the evidence, you mean?”
“Just think about it. If you’re wearing a chain with something on it and the chain breaks—”
“The ring falls off,” he finished, seeing where she was heading.
“Sure. And you don’t know the chain even broke ’cause you’re in a hurry—”
“To start a fire and clear out of there.”
“But that chain might get caught up in your clothes. And if what’s on the chain is heavy enough—”
“It falls to the ground but the chain goes nowhere.”
“Not at first. It would take a while. Maybe way after the ring got lost. And even then, you wouldn’t notice what’s going on with a dumb chain ’cause there are cops everywhere and people are yelling and other people are trying to run . . .”
“Which means that if there is a chain, it’s either in a different picture from the ring—”
“Or it’s still out there somewhere. See what I mean?”
“Not only good looking and sexy as hell, but you’re a frigging genius,” he told her.
“We need to see if there’s a chain,” was what she told him.
FIFTY-FOUR
It was Seth’s idea to use the metal detector. While he tracked one down, Becca brought Jenn and Squat into the plan to search for the chain Isis Martin had been wearing on the night of the party. Typical of Squat Cooper, he had a grid system for conducting a search developed within minutes.
The military town of Oak Harbor at the north end of the island proved to be the location of the nearest metal detector. When he’d targeted it, Seth went up to rent it, and the plan was put into place. They didn’t have a pile of hours prior to darkness falling, so everyone needed to bring a flashlight, Squat told them.
At Maxwelton Beach, they left their cars at the baseball diamond that defined Dave Mackie Park, and they picked their way to the party house via the beach. The scene of the fire having been thoroughly investigated by the sheriff’s department, that property was no longer sealed off with police tape, so they climbed through the shrubbery and began their search.
Seth used the metal detector. The rest walked their assigned grids, taking the landscape inch by inch. The metal detector went crazy with all the trash that was on the property: everything from tin cans to rusty nails to discarded tools and keys. But other than that, it was mostly garbage.
They moved from there to the party property, being careful all the while to watch for anyone who might be observing them, with one hand on the phone ready to dial the cops. But as on the fateful night, there were no signs of life in the house where they’d partied and none in the nearest property to it, so they managed to search without being accosted by an understandably suspicious neighbor. When they were finished, they met out in front. No one had come up with a thing aside from beer bottle tops, a rusty political button from an ancient election, half a pair of scissors, two empty tuna cans, three bottle openers, and another button—less rusty—celebrating the Maxwelton Fourth of July parade that was a special feature of this part of the island.
They gathered in a circle. The weather had turned. It was very cold, and rain was threatening. They huddled into their fleeces and hoodies to figure out what it meant that there was no chain to be found.
“We don’t know for sure she was even wearing a chain in the first place, do we?” Seth offered this. He leaned against the metal detector and pulled his fedora more firmly down on his head against the chill.
Becca said, “Not exactly. Only . . .” They all looked at her expectantly, but how could she tell them what she’d seen of Parker and Isis in her mind? She couldn’t, so she said instead, “It’s the only thing that’ll help us out. If she had a chain on that night and if it was mostly under her clothes—”
“She wears a chain
at school,” Squat put in. “I’ve seen it.”
“You? When?” Jenn asked.
“She shows a lot of . . . you know . . . like . . . chest,” Squat said. “And this chain, it sort of goes down between her boobs and . . . You know.” He ignored their hoots of laughter and said, “Come on. You’ve seen it. I bet if we looked at Facebook right now—”
“Yeah, there’s been a chain,” Derric admitted. And then to Becca, “Hey, I’m a guy.”
“Whatever,” she responded.
Jenn said, “So if this alleged chain broke and fell off her at some point, wouldn’t she have noticed when she got home? And wouldn’t she have sneaked back to look for it?”
“Not if she didn’t know where she lost it,” Becca told her. But she had to add silently, And not if Parker removed it from her at some point back in the tree house and hung on to it as well.
Derric snapped his fingers at this and said, “We’re forgetting the march.”
Becca picked up on his thought. “Oh my God. Yes. To the church. What is it, a mile?”
“Which means Isis could’ve lost the chain along the way,” Seth said.
• • •
WITH THE METAL detector, Seth was the one who finally found the chain. They had all spread out across the road, which, thankfully, was narrow enough that the five of them comprised a sufficient number to handle its width. The difficult part was the road’s shoulders, which were thick with weeds and the last of the summer grasses, now dying in preparation for winter. As the kids inched along, the metal detector signaled substances of interest time and again. It was only when they were about one hundred yards from the intersection where the church stood that the detector signaled the real thing.
By that time, it was dark and they’d been conducting their search by flashlight. The metal detector beeped and Becca went to Seth as usual and shone her flashlight onto the area of interest. This time something glittered in a rut made by the tires of a car, and that something was Isis Martin’s chain.