“We got it!” Becca called out.
“Don’t touch it!” This from Squat. “You’re never supposed to touch evidence.”
They gathered around, looking down at the chain. After a few minutes of discussion, they settled on calling Derric’s dad and hoping he wasn’t all the way up in Coupeville. If he was in his office there, they would have one hell of a wait for him in the cold and the darkness.
Derric had his cell phone out and was calling his father when Squat came up with the next plan. Since they were going to have to wait for Dave Mathieson to show up, it made sense for Seth and Derric to go back to Dave Mackie Park—some distance back down Maxwelton Road—and bring their cars up while the rest of them “guarded the evidence,” as he put it. At least that way they wouldn’t have to hike back down there once whatever was going to go down with Isis Martin went down with Isis Martin.
“Like her getting carted off to jail,” Jenn said.
This sounded sensible once they learned that, while Dave Mathieson wasn’t still up in Coupeville, he was at the café at Greenbank Farm, a repurposed group of agricultural buildings sitting on an expanse of acreage that had been saved from developers some time in the past. Now it was a place of community gatherings, with a café that offered the best pies on the island. Dave had been purchasing one of those pies on Rhonda’s orders, but he’d “get down to Maxwelton and see what you kids’ve found ASAP,” he told Derric.
That meant the wait that they’d anticipated, so Seth and Derric started the hike back to the Dave Mackie Park for their cars. Squat, Jenn, and Becca found places to sit just off the road. It was going to be at least a thirty-minute wait, so they huddled together to stay warm. At least when Derric and Seth brought the cars up from the beach, they could wait inside them. For now, there was no shelter but their hoodies and each other. And, of course, it began to rain.
This time, it was no misty island precipitation but instead a real downpour. Jenn swore, Becca groaned, and Squat manfully put his arms around both of them. The wind came up. It creaked through the fir trees that climbed the hillside on the west side of the road. From the alders and maples, it blew leaves which quickly became sodden, forming a slick mat on the surface of the road where pools of rainwater were going to make each curve trickier to negotiate.
“This is just great,” Jenn groused.
“Hey, it’s romantic,” Squat told her. “The dark, the wind, the rain, two damsels in distress.”
“Puh-leez.” She sighed.
“I guess that means you don’t want me to nuzzle your neck?”
“Like I want a potato peeler up my butt.”
“That’s totally gross,” he told her.
“I believe you’ve caught my point, little man.”
Becca had been using the AUD box during the search, the better to concentrate on what she was doing without picking up whispers from her friends. But now she took the ear bud from her ear and disengaged it from the box itself. She removed the whole little unit from the waistband of her jeans and tucked it into the pocket of her jacket.
“See?” Squat said. “You’ve grossed out Becca, too. She doesn’t want to hear another foul image emanating from your mouth.”
But the truth was that Becca had decided on a period of practice while they waited. With Jenn and Squat, who was thinking what would be clear. Potentially, their whispers would be complete.
Jenn and Squat continued their verbal sparring while Becca listened in on their whispers. Squat’s were about sex. A guy, sixteen years old, what else would you expect, Becca concluded. Jenn’s were about soccer: the captain of their team, a senior girl called Cynthia Richardson, the locker room, showers, Cynthia’s body, and . . . Becca glanced at her friend in the darkness, seeing only her profile in the dim light that came from a driveway nearby. It came to her that Jenn was thinking about sex as well, although she shifted from that to her ultra-religious mother and what was going to befall her—Jenn—when she finally told the truth.
Life was complicated, Becca thought. She wanted to tell Jenn that everything would all work out because it usually did. Only . . . she wasn’t sure that was really the case.
Car lights came from the direction of the beach. The three of them rose in the pouring rain. Jenn stepped into the road and so did the others. Jokingly, they spread out to form a blockade that Seth and Derric would have to obey.
Except it turned out that there was only one car, not two. And the car was neither Seth’s VW nor Derric’s Forester. It was a Nissan sedan, and given no choice in the matter, it had to slow and then stop. The driver lowered the window, and Isis Martin’s voice called out brightly, “Hey! What’re you guys doing here?” She sounded friendly enough but her whispers cursed god damn little bitches, which unnerved Becca for a moment. Then she caught . . . happening . . . Mom and Dad? . . . no I won’t not again . . . that place and it came to her that Isis wasn’t alone in the car. Aidan had to be with her although he wasn’t in sight.
Becca took a chance and called out, “Why’s Aidan hiding? Where’re you guys going?”
“Excuse me?” Isis looked around innocently. “Aidan’s not—”
“He’s in the back seat or he’s in the trunk or he’s just ducked down, Isis,” Becca told her.
“And it doesn’t matter ’cause the game’s over, hot mama,” Jenn put in. “We called the sheriff and you’re about to be toast.” Then she called out, “Hey, Aidan, if you’re in there? It’s olly-olly-ox-in-free for you. Big sister here set the fire at the shack and probably all the others, too. We know it, she knows it, and the sheriff’s about to know it too ’cause we got the evidence and he’s on his way to get it.”
Becca winced at the flurry of whispers that came at her then because Isis was swearing at Jenn but so was Squat. She would have sworn at Jenn, too, if she hadn’t been trying to maintain enough cool among them to keep Isis from taking off in the rain. As it was now, Isis gunned her car’s motor as next to her Aidan rose in the passenger’s seat and said, “What the hell?” to no one in particular.
Just then, the lights of two other cars approached from the direction of the beach. That, at last, would be Seth and Derric. Isis appeared to see them in her rear view mirror because she gunned the engine another time and said, “Get out of the road, you guys.”
“Like, where d’you think you’re actually going?” Jenn demanded. “This is an island, dummy. And the sheriff’s coming.”
“Get out of the freaking way,” Isis cried.
Aidan said to her, “You God damn told me . . .” but instead of finishing, he leaped out of the car. “What the hell, Isis? You . . . Because all this time . . . And with Mom and Dad . . . and you were just waiting . . .” He pounded his fist against the rooftop of the car.
“Get back in,” Isis ordered.
“Don’t do it, man,” Squat said.
“Shut your mouth!” Isis screamed.
And the rain fell harder.
Seth and Derric pulled their cars up behind her. Derric got out. He said, “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is Isis trying to get her brother arrested and sent to jail or back to his school or whatever so that she can go back to her frigging stupid Palo Alto and run for homecoming queen,” Jenn said. “Only what she doesn’t know because she’s so stupid is—”
Isis floored the accelerator. Squat grabbed Jenn and pulled her to him. Becca jumped out of the way. Isis shot through them like a projectile from a cannon. Without a word, Derric ran back to his car.
• • •
BECCA TORE AFTER him. Seth, stepping out of his VW, shouted, “What the hell’s going—” as Jenn and Squat stormed him, yelling, “Go, go, go!” They climbed inside as Squat cried out, “We got to be able to tell the sheriff—” He slammed the door closed and cut off the rest of his words.
Aidan, looking stunned, remained on the side of the
road, just out of the cones of illumination cast by the headlights of the two cars. He cried out, “You can’t—” but the rest of his words were also cut off once Becca crashed her car door closed. Derric hit the gas and they shot after Isis with Seth’s VW coming up behind them.
Isis, they saw, was screaming along Maxwelton Road. Ahead of them she careered through the intersection where the old wooden church stood among the trees. She made a sharp and sudden left onto a road called Sills. Her car slid but she righted it. She hit the gas and sent up a spray of water.
“Damn,” Derric said. “She’s completely nuts. Where’s she going?”
Like most roads on Whidbey, Sills was unlit. It dug deeply into the forest like a landscape scar. In the pouring rain, the cedars were dropping massive amounts of foliage onto the pavement. Alders bent forward, shedding leaves. Douglas firs got whipped by sudden gusts of wind.
The falling rain reflected the Forester’s headlights right into the windshield. Ahead of them, they could see the taillights of Isis’s car, but not much else. Derric said, “Babe, I’m thinking this isn’t—” but that’s all he got out when it happened.
The road curved but Isis had not slowed. On the slick pavement, she slid. She overcorrected. She spun the car. It shot off the road at tremendous speed. It smashed head-on into a telephone pole. It burst into flames.
Derric stamped on the brakes. His car also went into a slide as well. Becca felt him instinctively reach out his right arm to keep her safe. He knew enough about skidding to release the brakes as behind him Seth honked frantically as if in warning.
They came to a stop. Seth, Jenn, and Squat were already out of the VW and hurtling toward the fiery mass of metal that was Isis’s car.
“Get her out!” Derric yelled.
Flames shot up the telephone pole, and the rain was not enough to douse them. The car itself was completely engulfed. Squat was the one who shouted, “No way can you get her! Keep back!”
“Oh my God!” This was from Jenn. She turned to Becca and covered her face.
“It’s bad,” from Seth.
“Nine-one-one,” from Squat.
And the air was filled with the whoosh of flames and the anguished whispers of terrified kids as they all fell back and away, and shakily Derric punched the numbers into his cell phone to bring them help.
FIFTY-FIVE
At Smugglers Cove Farm and Flowers, Seth sat in his VW for a couple of minutes. He’d never been at the scene of someone’s death before. The fire chief had told them that she’d probably been killed right when her car hit the telephone pole, so she hadn’t even known she was trapped. But that was very small consolation.
The fire trucks had arrived within ten minutes, but it had seemed like an hour. As people who lived in the forest along Sills Road rushed down their unpaved driveways to see what the commotion was, the volunteer firemen doused the flames. Derric’s dad had shown up, and an ambulance had come. Through it all Seth asked himself if he could have done anything different.
There were lots of if onlys in his head. If only they hadn’t been at Maxwelton looking for the chain. If only Jenn, Squat, and Becca hadn’t been blocking the road. If only they’d just let Isis pass by, no matter where she was going. If only he and Derric hadn’t decided to chase after her.
Now, he had to tell Hayley. Isis Martin had been her friend, and Seth knew he couldn’t put Hayley in the position of discovering what had occurred when she got to school the next day. So he heaved open the car door and trudged up the path to the farmhouse’s front door. It was long after dinner but the lights were still on and he found the family in the living room playing Clue. Hayley wasn’t with them—too much homework—but she came downstairs when her mom called up for her.
When Seth asked if he could talk to her, she looked concerned. She could tell from his tone, he figured. She said, “What’s wrong? Your grandpa’s okay, isn’t he?”
“Grand’s cool,” Seth told her. “This’s something different.”
He jerked his head toward the front of the house. Hayley followed him onto the porch. She shivered but he figured it wasn’t exactly from the cold. When they were at the far end of the porch overlooking the fields and the chicken barn below, he told her. He gave it all to her as he’d learned it from Becca, Derric, Squat, and Jenn, and then from a freaked-out and sobbing Aidan Martin. He didn’t know how much she already knew, how much Isis had told her, or what Isis had claimed. So he started with Aidan and Wolf Canyon Academy and when she told him she knew all about that and why Aidan had been sent there, he skipped to the ring. This, it turned out, she knew about, too. So he told her about Becca’s conclusions that they needed to search for a chain that might have held a ring and might have been broken during the Maxwelton party.
“We found it. Then Isis showed up,” he said. “Jenn more or less mouthed off at her and Aidan jumped out of the car.”
“Aidan was there?” Hayley said.
“Sure. Why?”
She told him about Isis’s claim that her brother had run away in advance of their parents coming up to get him. She ended with, “But d’you think he was there all the time? At home?”
“She might’ve just wanted you to think he’d run away. To get you on her side even more. ’Cause that would make him look guilty, wouldn’t it? Only thing we can’t figure out for sure is why.”
“Why what?” Hayley moved to the porch railing and was staring out into the darkness, the light from the house touching only her hair.
“Why Isis did all this in the first place. Geez, does she . . . Did she hate him or something?”
“Aidan?” Hayley turned back to him. Seth saw that her face was drawn and weary.
“Why else would she want him to go down for a bunch of fires anyway?”
“Because she wanted to go back to Palo Alto,” Hayley said. “He’d messed up her entire senior year. He’d caused her boyfriend to break up with her. Her parents made her come up here to make sure he was cured but she wanted to go home. What better way . . . ?” Hayley covered her mouth with her fingertips.
Seth wasn’t sure what to do. He got the impression from Hayley’s reactions and from what she said that Isis had pretty much hooked Hayley like a fish and reeled her in. He felt bad about this, but it wasn’t Hayley’s fault. She was just a nice person who tried to be friends with some girl who didn’t know what friendship was.
• • •
IT WAS THE idea of doing something about lies that prompted him to seek out Brooke Cartwright. The next day he finished work early, so he took off for Langley. He intercepted the girl outside of the middle school.
He was standing next to his car and he had Gus with him. Brooke smiled when she saw the golden Lab. Seth said to her, “We got an appointment. Get in,” and he was relieved when Brooke assumed it had to do with the dog.
She wasn’t happy when he pulled into the Langley clinic’s parking lot, on Second Street in the village. She was even less happy when he came around to her side of the car, opened her door, and said, “Gus, you stay.” She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. She accused him of kidnapping her, to which he said, “Right, kid. It’s my new career. Come with me and don’t make me carry you ’cause believe me I’ll be happy to if that’s gonna be what it takes.”
“I don’t want—”
“This is on me and no one’s gonna know. Unless someone has to know. Got it?”
“But—”
“Nope.” He put his arm around her shoulders and he gave her a squeeze. “I know you’re scared. I know you don’t want to cause trouble at home. But you got to trust me. We’re gonna work everything out.”
“Nothing works out.”
“This will.”
Seth had phoned the clinic, so Rhonda Mathieson was expecting them. She saw Brooke and said, “Here you are! Come with me, young lady,” and she took the girl with her. r />
That was when Seth called Hayley. She started to protest. He said, “I’m paying, Hayley. There’s something wrong besides her just being thirteen years old. Brooke knows it, but she doesn’t want to say because of your dad and all the troubles and no insurance and no money and, geez, Hayl. You know all this. So I’m getting Mrs. Mathieson to look her over. If something’s wrong with her we c’n at least all sit down and figure out what to do. Which we can’t as long as you guys keep mum about everything going on in your lives.”
He thought she’d hung up on him when there was only silence that greeted his remarks. But then he heard a little gasp which he knew was a stifled sob which he also knew would humiliate Hayley. He said, “It’ll be cool, Hayl. And I’ll bring her home,” but only the second part could he be sure of.
FIFTY-SIX
Hayley had heard the expression “her heart in her mouth,” but she’d never really thought about what it meant until she watched her mother on the phone with Rhonda Mathieson. When Seth had called her with the announcement about Brooke, she’d been furious with him at first. But she’d also assumed that Seth would have already returned Brooke to the farm when she herself arrived home. When Brooke hadn’t shown up by the time her mom got back from her house cleaning day, Hayley was actually sick to her stomach with dread.
She didn’t have the first clue what to tell her mom, but that didn’t matter as things turned out because not ten minutes after Julie Cartwright arrived and before she wondered anything at all about Brooke, Rhonda Mathieson called. Hayley was the one to answer the phone. When she handed it over to her mom, she felt anxiety grip her like a cold fist.
When Julie replaced the receiver in its cradle, she stood there looking at it. Her shoulders were drooping.
Hayley said to her, “What is it?”