by S. D. Perry
Rick grinned, his flushed, sweaty face too close to her own. His breath was sour. “Great. Everyone’s raving about the salmon. And half the people I’ve talked to said last year’s barbecue was better. Guess they like our sausages better than Mick and Jason’s.”
She tensed, waiting for the inevitable joke. He dropped his voice slightly, leaned in even closer. “Course, some people are more particular about where they get their sausage, you know what I mean?”
Sadie managed a slight smile. The co-owners of Elson’s, Mick and Jason, were gay, and Rick couldn’t say two words about them without adding some vaguely homophobic innuendo. It was so…so pedestrian, in this day and age. So very like Rick, to be threatened by whatever he didn’t personally benefit by.
“And you were right about the melon, honey,” he added. “Everything was spectacular…beautiful. Look, I’m going to go make a couple of calls; we’re going to need to order more of the smoked salmon, and I’ve got a couple other requests for the shop, some organic stuff…can you and Josh hold things down for a few?”
As if she’d fall apart without his guiding hand, as if she didn’t know how to smile and charm with the best of them. She was the one who’d grown up with money; that kind of thing was second nature for her. It was Rick who had to thrash and struggle to make contacts and kiss ass to keep them. Sadie didn’t know the business specifics as well as he did, true, but she definitely knew more than he thought—and she was learning more all the time.
One of these days. It would be a nasty divorce, she was sure of that. Rick was a bully and miserly to his core, two essential facts that he’d kept well hidden until after he’d convinced her to marry him, so, so long ago. But almost everything was in her name; he’d be left with nothing. She was in no hurry to get to it—Rick worked hard and did his best by her—but the end was inevitable; their lives had been separate for so long, she doubted she’d even notice his absence, assuming she could find a good manager to take his place. And just the right Josh, of course, to attend to her other needs.
“I’m on top of it,” she said, and if her smile was a bit more sardonic than it needed to be, he didn’t notice. He never did.
Rick bussed her cheek and headed for the service lot, already pulling out his cell. Sadie watching him walk away, his square, heavy ass accentuated by off-the-rack khakis, and wished that he was already gone.
Perhaps it was time to whisper a few well-chosen words into Josh’s tender ear. Sadie smoothed her fabulously expensive dress down her slender hips and walked his way, smiling for real.
They’d been at the picnic for almost an hour and still hadn’t come up with a plan. Devon thought they should approach the cops—well, Chief Vincent—and tell him that they’d overheard Brian talking about raping someone…which wasn’t too bad, except that talking didn’t exactly qualify as a crime, and Amanda was worried that the chief would blow them off. Devon’s reasoning was that Vincent would go hassle Brian a little, scare him off the idea, but she wanted something better, something more concrete. They had yet to see Brian Glover at all, and except for a rather sullen-looking Ethan Adcox, there with his family, none of the Dicks were in attendance. Ethan was only a semi-Dick, anyway. Amanda was fairly certain that her dream—her vision—had been of Brian, Todd Clay, and Ryan Thompson. Devon agreed. If anyone was gonna go pro, he said, it would be those three.
They stood in the shade, smoking, still pondering their options, talking it over. What had seemed so clear in the dead of night, her decision to save the unknown woman by any means necessary, now seemed kind of far-fetched. She wasn’t Buffy, she wasn’t a crime fighter or superhero, she didn’t have the resources—or, she had to admit, the credibility—to make things happen. Or not happen, in this case.
“What if I tell Vincent that Brian assaulted me?” Amanda asked. “He’d at least pick him up, right?”
Devon considered it. Amanda noticed a man staring at her, some guy walking to the food lines, and discreetly flipped him off. Fucking tourists. The guy looked away, an expression of mild amusement on his face, and she realized that he looked familiar. Not a tourist, then.
Who cares? Someone is going to get hurt if you don’t come up with something.
“Seems risky,” Devon said finally. “I mean, if he’s got an alibi, you’ll look like a liar.”
She sighed, pulled another cigarette out of her crumpled pack—had to love soft packs, there was always another one hiding in there—and lit it off the butt of the one still burning. She’d been chain-smoking since she’d left the apartment; her mouth tasted like crap, but she was too wired to do anything else.
“Well, technically, I will be lying,” she said, stomping the old butt into the dirt. “But I’m thinking that by the time they figure it out, it’ll be too late. I could talk to Vincent right before dark.”
“Maybe. But what if…”
“What if what?”
Devon shook his head. “Nothing, it’s stupid.”
“Now it’s going to drive me nuts. What?”
“I was just thinking…I mean, what if we tell Vincent, or whoever, and he hassles Brian…and Brian wasn’t going to do anything, but he gets so pissed off about being accused…”
Amanda felt a knot form in her gut. “You mean, what if I actually make it happen by trying to stop it? That—that sucks, Dev. That totally fucking sucks.”
Devon dropped his own smoke to the ground, tapping it out with the pointed toe of his wingtip. “Forget it. I told you it was stupid.”
“I mean, I can’t just do nothing—”
“I know, I know.”
“—because if I keep my mouth shut and it happens—”
Devon sighed. “I know, all right?”
They were both silent for a moment. Amanda felt entirely overwhelmed. The situation was so unreal, like she was in a movie or something, but everything was taking too long and she still felt like her normal self. Not bored shitless for a change, but otherwise just plain ol’ Amanda Young. Certainly not like some fictional young psychic detective with brilliant plans and a network of talented friends and a handgun.
“Maybe we should talk to Pam, and Ally Fergus,” Devon said. “Couple of the others.” He’d already brought this up like three times. “If we can get them to back you up, then go talk to the sheriff—”
Amanda shook her head. “No way he’d believe us.”
“He’d have to, though, if we could prove that you saw—that you saw what happened before.”
“We talked about this,” Amanda said. “A bunch of teenagers, most of them totally trashed on the night in question—and Pam Roth won’t own up to having a party, you know that. Her parents would shit.”
“Stopping a, a rape totally trumps Pam getting in trouble with her parents—”
“You remember when she took her dad’s car last year, drove it to Port Angeles?” Amanda asked. “She had a fuckin’ black eye the next day, and she was grounded for like four months.”
“Still,” Devon said, but he didn’t sound as sure.
“We’re children, Devon. They’ll think we’re full of shit; you know it. Not just the cops, either. You think Sid would believe us? Or my mom?”
Devon’s uncle Sid was a good man, but he also had no imagination whatsoever. And her mother…Grace’s solution to anything she couldn’t handle was to get shit-faced and cry about it.
“OK, but there are other people,” Devon said. “If we could get someone with some real credibility to listen to us, maybe they could talk to the cops…like what about Willie?”
Willa Tenungren, Willie T, was the art teacher at the high school. She was maybe the only teacher there who made any real effort to connect with her students, and Devon was a particular favorite of hers.
Amanda gave it a second’s thought, then shook her head. “Not exactly credible.” Willie liked to hang out at the artist colony in the off-season and wrote poetry books in her free time, published by Kinko’s. Amanda had seen her read a couple of times; s
he wrote poignant odes to wilting flowers and latesummer days and dreams about flying. Someone like Chief Vincent probably thought she was a flaming hippie.
“She’d believe us, though,” he said.
“Dude, her underwear’s made out of hemp,” she said, and in spite of the seriousness of what they were discussing—or, more likely, because of it—they both started to laugh.
The laughter had started to die down when Devon added, “When she farts, midgets get high.”
Amanda choke-laughed out a lungful of smoke, grateful to Devon in spite of the near attack of dry heaves that followed. For making her laugh. For believing her. She’d called his cell as soon as she’d gotten up, told him what had happened in about a dozen words—well, except for the part about her mother and the rat, which was too weird and upsetting and somehow too personal—and he’d immediately changed his plans in order to hang out with her.
When they’d finally calmed down, Amanda felt better. Still freaked, absolutely, but not as tense, not as flat-out terrified. She looked around at the people, the warm day—it’d be hot in their shithole apartment tonight, but it was kind of nice, here, now, in the shade—and she couldn’t help that the live wire she’d had in her stomach, there since Pam’s party, was as exciting as it was terrifying. Something was happening, she didn’t know what, and she wished wholeheartedly that this unnamed something hadn’t happened to her, but her life was changing, had already changed. For the first time ever, she felt…she felt special, kind of, and she didn’t like thinking that, was sure that made her a terrible person, but that was how she felt.
There was a guy over toward the food booths, looking their direction. He was young, their age, rail thin but tall, dressed in baggy jeans and a plain black tee. His hair was a thick, dark brown mop that hung in his eyes and stuck out over his ears. He had a wallet on a chain, the shining silver links hanging over one hip, his thumbs tucked in his front pockets. Picture of cool, a summer boy, and when their gazes met, he gave her a chin nod, that slight raise that told her she was being acknowledged. She nodded back. On any other day, she would have flirted, a smile, a shy look-away-and-back—he was a hottie, hands down, and he was checking her out, and considering her entire lack of a love life since Brooks (who wasn’t at the picnic this year, thank Christ for small favors) a new boy in her reality was nothing to dismiss lightly.
Not today, though. She looked away. When she glanced back in that direction a moment later, he was gone.
“What about Bob Sayers?” Devon asked suddenly.
“Who? The Isley Press guy?”
Devon nodded. “Sandy’s always going on about how cool he is, how he’s respectful of their ideas, doesn’t shoot anything down no matter how out there it is. Remember, he published that whole thing on UFOs they did last year?”
Sandra Mulvey was the editor of the school paper and a good friend of Devon’s. Amanda thought she was kind of pretentious but all right otherwise. The journalism class sometimes wrote little articles for the Press. “Yeah, that was pretty stupid.”
Devon rolled his eyes. “Not the point, dumbass. He published it, didn’t he?”
“Doesn’t mean he believes it,” she said, but felt a faint spark of hope, anyway. She wasn’t entirely conscious of the desire, but part of her wanted very badly to turn the whole matter over to a certified adult, to someone who would know what to do, who would act.
“But he is a reporter, and there’s a story here, right?” Devon asked, obviously warming to the idea. “He could talk to Ally. Scott was there, too, when you—when it happened. So was Joey K, a bunch of people. I mean, worst thing, he doesn’t believe us, we come up with something else.”
Amanda shook her head. “Worst thing, he tells the chief that we’re running around making shit up. Which would blow our shot at getting Brian arrested.”
Devon met her gaze squarely, and his light, airy tone dropped a notch. He rarely used his “real” voice, only when something was important, and it carried weight.
“We have to do something,” he said. “And if we can convince him, maybe he can help. If we—”
He stopped abruptly, looking past her. Amanda turned—and saw Brian Glover walking through the milling crowd, heading toward the restrooms, his upper lip stuck in its perpetual sneer. Amanda suddenly had to catch her breath; her heart was pounding her whole body. She’d never felt anything but disgust at the sight of him, since the day she’d first become aware of his existence, her first week of school after moving to Port Isley—the day he’d been leaning against her locker, talking to some of his dickhead buddies and she’d said, “Excuse me,” because she had to get her math book, and she didn’t want to be late to class, she was still new. He’d turned his mean, piggy gaze to her, the pink of his scalp shining through his eternally crappy crew cut, and grinned a sharp and shining grin. “Why, d’ya fart?” he’d shot, and his friends had laughed, and so had a bunch of other people. Since then, she’d come to know him as a moronic force of high school evil. His mom was a shivering mouse of a woman, and his dad was a mean drunk who hung out with those survivalist psychos out past the lighthouse, probably plotting to overthrow the government or something. Mostly, Brian disgusted her. What she felt now was so far beyond disgust she didn’t know how to express it, how she could even contain it.
“We’ll talk to Sayers,” she said, and Devon nodded, reaching out to put a hand on her trembling shoulder.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After a few minutes silently pondering the lingering remnants of the murder site—crushed vegetation, a mound of dying bouquets left by the miscellaneous bereaved, a profusion of shoe and boot prints—police chief Stan Vincent slowly continued along Kehoe Park’s main trail. Sun filtered down through the high treetops, which hissed and roared with the wind off the bay; down on the thickly wooded trail, it was barely breezy, the air warm, the sound of the thrashing trees high above strangely muffled. It was a nice day, good for the picnic, which was as big and well behaved, as usual. Annie and Trent were watching things, though most of the rest of his deputies were there as picnickers; if there was a problem, it’d be contained. He’d put in an appearance already, gladhanded some of the summer people, and done his best to avoid the worst of the gossipmongers, but Dan Turner and the rest of the council would have a giant shit if he didn’t show up again before dinner.
They need to feel safe, Dan had told him, trying to be encouraging and coming off like the fat, whiny, sanctimonious little prick that he was. They need to be reassured that Port Isley is a haven, and that the man responsible for their safety is on the job.
On the job. Vincent snorted, stepping lightly over a dip in the trail. Like those soft, manicured metrosexuals and their latte-slurping wives would give a fuck for whatever Deputy Dipshit had to say. They treated him like the hired help—unless there was trouble, of course, a parking violation or a noise complaint or, God forbid, a break-in. Then it was yessir, nosir, thank you Officer…
Vincent didn’t really mind the hypocrisy, most of the time. He was the chief of police in a tourist town; part of his job was to make the summer people feel comfortable so they’d come back, spend more money. But after what Ed Billings had done to the Meyer girl, and then his wife…all anyone wanted to know since Monday morning was how the sheriff had handled it. And how far away were the staters, and could deputies come quickly in an emergency, and just what was the jurisdiction breakdown, anyway?
Why the fuck do I bother, they think I’m so incompetent? Vincent continued to walk slowly, determined to keep a lid on his temper. He’d listened to their stupid, insulting questions for almost three hours this morning before he’d managed to get away. He could understand it, of course—the tourists didn’t know his background, didn’t know that he wasn’t some hick elected official with a badge who’d run on a smile and a solid handshake. With his experience—military background, degree in criminology, even most of a year of advanced special tactics training—he could be working anywhere. When he’d bee
n looking for work after the thing in Denver, he’d chosen Port Isley because he’d been invited in at the top, because he’d been allowed to pick his own people, organize things the way he wanted them. Yeah, Ashley had pushed for it, too. She’d fallen in love with the little town on their first vacation there, a good three years before Lily had come along, her birth forcing the need, in Ashley’s mind, to move someplace “good” for kids—but the final decision had been his. For the most part, he wasn’t sorry for the change, either; he was damned good at his job. And the first big case to come through since Walter Allen beat a fellow bar drunk to death three years back, and what did everyone want to know? Where were the county guys. What did the county guys say. Or the winner, from that hatchet-faced lesbian couple renting out the white Victorian for the season, “You’ve turned all the evidence over to the authorities, of course.”
Vincent took in a deep breath, blew it out. If he didn’t hate Wes Dean so goddamn much, Sheriff Western Dean of the big-boy county office, it might not be so bad—
A noise, a rattle of bushes, and Vincent saw something move ahead, a branch to the main trail some twenty yards away—a young man was stepping through the light screen of bushes there, tall, thin, dark hair, tan corduroy jacket. He was wearing expensive new hiking boots, the kind that weren’t really made for hiking—and considering how pale he was, he only could have been hiking at night, anyway. He didn’t notice the cop, was about to step across the main trail to the small branch he’d been walking. He wasn’t a local. Vincent knew about every face in town.
“Good afternoon,” he called out, and the young man stopped, not looking at him, his gaze still focused on the path. For the briefest of instants, Vincent had an impression that the guy meant to run—and then it passed, and the man turned toward him, unsmiling.
Something about the way he was standing, maybe, tightness in the jaw…Vincent wasn’t sure, but he dismissed the impression as he walked closer. The guy—mid to late twenties, probably—had a straight-arrow look, the face of a well-to-do grad student. Not the running type.