Useless Bay

by M. J. Beaufrand

  “Listen,” Lawford said as he got dressed, “no matter what you say, you’re closer to this than the rest of us. You should be armed. You can have my second-best Taser.” He rummaged through his underwear drawer and pulled out a more cumbersome, pistol-shaped version of what he kept on his belt. “Do you remember this? It’s older. You don’t need to get quite so close. It sends out the two electrodes. It’s all in the spread. If you need to drop somebody, this’ll drop ’em. Do you hear me?”

  I took it from him and shoved it into the pocket of my rain jacket. The pockets there were big enough.

  Something was going to happen this night, I could taste it in the salty air that whistled through the trees and crept through the cracks in the windows and doors.

  I sent Lawford and Frank ahead of me because I didn’t want them to see me idling around looking for my dead dog out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t know how to explain my visions of Patience.

  I chased after Patience, moving from spot to spot. I looked away from where I’d last seen her, and I saw her outline again, farther along the trail, standing calmly while the wind whipped us all into a froth. She was getting closer to the Shepherds’ house, then closer and closer. Soon I was at the guard shack again.

  There was a new guy with a badge there standing watch. I didn’t know what flavor of law enforcement he was, but he had an extreme glower. My guess was expensive rent-a-cop. Not the tragic Russian kind with a bottle of vodka stashed away somewhere, waxing philosophical about the status of young people and love. I hoped the Taser in my jacket pocket wasn’t bulging, because I was pretty sure he’d confiscate it.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m here to see Henry. I’m . . .”

  “I know who you are,” the new guy said. He spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Pixie Gray’s here. Can she come up? . . . Thought so. You just missed your boyfriend.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yup. He wanted to know if there was a way to retrieve the tape of what happened in the garage while it was set on a loop. We’ve sent it off to a clean room to see if there’s anything at all we can pick up. Even at a rush, it’ll be a few days before we can get any kind of data back.”

  A few days seemed like a long time. Even a few hours did. I tried not to think that whatever evidence they found by that time would be postmortem.

  “A few days?” I said. “You think they’ll find something?”

  “No guarantees, but it’s probable.”

  This couldn’t be good for Grant. Maybe if whoever had killed Lyudmila knew that and had Grant stashed somewhere alive, they might start to act desperate.

  I felt for the Taser in my pocket.

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll be going now.” I’d caught sight of Patience. She was around the corner of the main house, by the outdoor cooktop, which, like everything else, was getting pummeled by waves.

  All this time, we’d been mouthing off to the Shepherds about what a mistake it was to build on a spit. The sea was now blasting them from three sides.

  Was this the night? Would the seawall hold? Or would the Shepherd house be washed into drift-wood?

  None of this seemed to bother my ghost dog, who was unperturbed by the storm. In fact, there was a minor glow by her. It was the glow of a cigarette.

  I trotted after her and found Hannah, the Shepherds’ cook, standing on the stoop and desperately smoking, wrapped in a rain jacket, huddled with her back to the weather. She must’ve really needed that smoke to be outside at all.

  At her feet was something I hadn’t noticed before—the stone statue of a seated woman with a tattered cloak and wavy hair holding a lotus flower. The figure came up to my calves and looked to have been there a long time. Sand and bits of seaweed had pooled on the lotus in her hand.

  And it may have been the glow of the cigarette or it may have been something completely different, something I couldn’t explain, but for a moment I thought I saw the lotus blossom glow and take flight.

  Then the moment passed. The statue was once again stone, draped with seaweed and sand and cigarette ash.

  But I knew what I’d seen.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked. “Who is she?”

  Hannah looked up, startled. She probably hadn’t heard me approach over the wind. “Pixie?” She followed where I was pointing. “Are you talking about Kwan Yin?” Hannah said, flicking ash onto the statue’s head.

  I ran forward. “Oh, shit!” I said, brushing the ash off. I needn’t have bothered. The saltwater spray washed it off and drenched us both.

  “Whoa,” Hannah said. “She’s not that kind of goddess. Kwan Yin can deal with a little cigarette ash. But, Pix, you don’t seem yourself. You’d better come in and dry off. The workers have made their way through most of my food, but I think I have some of that French orange cream tart left. You should come in and try it. Fortify yourself. You work too hard. You’re too skinny.”

  I looked around the patio and the beach, which was blowing things over the breakers of the logs and the seawall. I remembered the DANGER – TSUNAMI ZONE signs of a stick person being knocked off its feet. Inside wasn’t such a bad idea.

  With a second look at the statue—what had Hannah called her? Kwan Yin?—I followed her into the kitchen.

  A wave splashed at the shore, and the house shook. Not like ours did in a windstorm, when we were afraid a window might blow. Here, the foundation shuddered. I was afraid the house might crumble.

  None of this seemed to bother Hannah, who had her head in a giant, industrial-looking fridge.

  “Hang your jacket up on that peg. Leave your shoes at the door. You can wash your hands in the sink over there, then have a seat.” She motioned to a barstool by the kitchen island, which was lit from underneath by some lights I couldn’t see. They gave the entire block a kind of perma-glow.

  I reluctantly parted with my jacket because it had a weapon in it, but Hannah didn’t seem like a threat. She rarely seemed ruffled by anything—unless you didn’t wash your hands. Then she called you a cretin and ordered you out of her kitchen with a deep volcanic fury that made Mom’s diatribes seem kittenish in comparison.

  I washed my hands and sat down.

  She pulled out the tart, fluffy on top but dense underneath, sliced off two perfect wedges, put one on a plate in front of me, and saved another for herself. She seemed perfectly collected as the building shook around her.

  “That statue outside. What did you call her again?”

  “Who? Kwan Yin?

  “Right. Her. Why do you have a statue of her on your kitchen stoop? Or does she belong to the Shepherds?”

  “Nope. She’s all mine. A lot of people have statues of Kwan Yin. She’s the Buddhist goddess of forgiveness and compassion. The goddess of the sea. That’s why I said she wouldn’t mind a little ash on her head every now and then. Kwan Yin hears the cries and laments of the world, puts them in a lotus flower, and sets them free. Kinda cool, huh?”

  I remembered the woman from the night before in her tattered cloak and how she’d tapped Lyudmila’s cold, dead heart with her staff and how the light had come from Lyudmila’s chest. Perhaps it had been a lotus flower before it had taken fire and floated off.

  I took a deep breath. It’d been a strange day, but there was something about Hannah, something that made me think she wouldn’t judge me for what I was about to tell her. “Did Henry tell you what happened to me last night?”

  Hannah sighed. “Yes,” she said. I was grateful she didn’t say, You died.

  “There’s more. I haven’t told anyone, because I don’t know what to make of it myself. Ever since they brought me back to life last night . . . some weird things have been happening. . . .”

  When I was done, our plates were clean and sea spray was still attacking the windows.

  Hannah did not seem surprised by anything I told her.

  “Do you believe me?”

  She didn’t even pause before answering. “My wai po says certain places hold the possibility of po
ckets. Other spaces overlapping with this one. ‘Edgeworlds,’ she calls them. Places just like the ones we see, overlapping, but populated by an entirely different race of beings like the ones you describe. Our ancestors. Goddesses . . . Who am I to say what you saw or didn’t see?”

  “I’ve seen ghost dogs, too,” I said. “Only not in a different world. In this one.”

  “A spirit animal,” Hannah suggested. “Probably a guide. There’ve been tales of people like you. ‘Edgewalkers,’ my wai po calls them. Some people call them crazy, imagining things that aren’t there. But my wai po, she’s seen things. She has a berry farm up in Greenbank. She swears that on certain days, when the clouds hang low as fruit, she can see berries as big as your fists on her bushes, but when she reaches for them, she can never touch them. She could never find a way to bring one world into the other. But she’s convinced that there are thin places where some can. I think you might have a rare talent, Pixie.”

  I heard it then, and I felt it. A tap between my eyes. The lightest of whispers and an anointing. Edgewalker.

  There was truth to it. Besides, it sounded so much better than crazy.

  “Wait a minute—what does wai po mean?”

  “She’s my grandmother.”

  “And she’s the one with the berry farm in Green-bank—the one with the big red barn?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “Where the island is so skinny you can practically lob pebbles from the eastern shore to the west?”

  “Many have tried. It’s just a little too wide.”

  I’d seen the woman manning the red barn. She was so ancient I didn’t think she could be so lively, but lively she was. When I first started search-and-rescue and discovered my first dead child, she showed up at our doorstep, didn’t even bother to introduce herself, and left a basket of loganberry syrup, blackberry preserves, and gooseberry jam with a note that read “For the Gray Family.” I caught a glimpse of her as she drove off in her truck. I always wanted to thank her for that small kindness when most people couldn’t even look at me.

  Of course, with four brothers, I didn’t even get to try the loganberry syrup. It was gone the next morning.

  “That’s your wai po?”

  Hannah didn’t say anything.

  “She’s awesome.”

  I stood up and bussed our empty plates to the industrial-sized sink and rinsed them off, feeling a little less strange.

  Edgewalker.

  Would I be pushing it if I asked her what I had to ask next? There was something else I needed. The end of Henry’s half-told story.

  As I loaded the plates into the dishwasher, I asked. “How long have you been with the Shepherd family?”

  “For a long time. Since before Henry was born. I was friends with Ellen—Henry and Meredith’s mom.”

  “Henry started talking tonight about the scars on his hands, and then he stopped. It was really abrupt. I don’t think he’s going to tell me any more. He said his mom went away?”

  “Went away? Went away? Honey, how much did he tell you?”

  “Just that he had had an abusive nanny who sounded as if she was training him for something big. That’s as far as he got. Then he shut down.”

  Hannah snorted. “No shit he shut down. I’d shut down right there, too. That nanny was training him to tell Rupert that Henry’s mom had been abusing him.”

  I didn’t say anything. My head hurt.

  Oh my God. Poor Mrs. Shepherd. No wonder Henry would never allow himself to heal.

  Hannah went on. “I was there that night at dinner when Ellen discovered Henry’s burns at the table. She was enraged. Threw down her napkin and demanded to know who gave him those marks. That kid didn’t even pause when he said, ‘You did.’

  “And that was when Ellen and I realized we’d both been outmaneuvered.

  “Rupert was furious. He threw plates. He demanded Ellen get her things and leave that very night. Got on the phone with the lawyers and started a divorce rolling right then and there. Wouldn’t even hear Ellen’s side of it, which, to be fair, would’ve been, ‘What the hell?’”

  “So she left without a fight?”

  She put a finger to her lips and looked out the kitchen door to the rest of the house. “That’s what we made it look like.”

  I asked the next obvious question. “So how is it really?”

  “I stuck close to the kids to keep them safe and wait for that sadistic bitch to mess up in a documentable way. But I never had any such luck. I was stuck in a kitchen, and she was a wiz with the paperwork. I was totally outgunned. But at least she never hurt the kids again. As far as I know. She got promoted out of the nursery and into Rupe’s office—which is what she wanted.”

  I tried not to let my jaw drop. “She stayed? The sadistic nanny stayed?”

  “Yeah. She was too ambitious to be a nanny. I don’t think she’s content even being an admin anymore. But you know her. Joyce. Joyce Liston.”

  I stared at her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I mean, Joyce Holbrook. I still think of her as Joyce Liston. I forget she went back to her maiden name when her husband died.”

  I tried to listen to the rest of what Hannah said, but I shut down after I heard the word Liston.

  “Wait. Her husband died?” I said. “Or was he murdered?”

  Outside, the wind shook the windowpanes and the water rose higher. Stay . . . I heard. Good girl.

  eighteen

  HENRY

  The storm was kicking up a freezing-cold spray from the Sound when I grabbed onto the guard shack. Agent Armstrong already had a team going through the CCTV footage. “When I checked yesterday afternoon, it was on a loop,” I told him. “I don’t know if it was that way everywhere we had cameras set up, but Pix and I noticed it.”

  Agent Armstrong nodded indulgently. Smile at the rich brat. Then get him out of the way so we can do our job. “That’s one of the first things we noticed last night, son,” he said. “The footage from both the garage and the Breakers has been wiped. We’ve already sent what we have to a clean room to see if there’s anything that can be recovered. All we can do now is hope. Even the backups have been wiped. Someone was very thorough.”

  “Wiped? Both the Breakers and the garage?”

  Agent Armstrong nodded but didn’t bother to look at me. This is about my brother and my stepmother, I wanted to say. I have a stake in this. I don’t care what a hotshot you are.

  “But I thought Lyudmila was killed in the Breakers.”

  He nodded again.

  “So why would a killer bother to wipe the footage in the garage?”

  At last, agent Armstrong deigned to look at me.

  “Listen, Henry, will you do me a favor?”

  I hate it when people say this, because they’re acting like you have a choice in the matter, which you don’t. They’re really issuing a command.

  “Will you please get inside? We’re doing our best to find out who killed your stepmom and to find out what happened to your brother. You’re just in the way. The storm is already messing with our forensics outside. The sooner you let us do our job, the sooner we can get to the bottom of this.”

  I hated the man. I hated his reasonable requests. This was my family we were talking about. He could’ve given me some busywork to do, but instead he made me feel useless.

  I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and let the sea kick spray in my face as I made my way for the main house. I didn’t even try to keep my hood around my head. The wind would’ve just blasted it off no matter how tightly I tied it.

  I forced myself to take steps toward the house, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to go anywhere I wasn’t allowed. The garage, mostly. Or the Breakers. I was tired of being the good son.

  I let myself in the side door and shrugged off my rain jacket. I was immediately accosted by Pixie, who ran up to me and whispered loudly, “You didn’t tell me that Joyce used to be married to Hal Liston.”

  I took in the long drip of her, from t
he wet, messy blond braid and the salt water cascading off her nose to the stocking feet at the bottom of the strong trunks of her legs. I didn’t care who Joyce had been married to. I didn’t see why it was so important.

  But she’d latched on to something no one else had, and I was ready to hear her out.

  nineteen

  PIXIE

  Henry took me to his room, and we spoke behind closed doors. Outside, the weather continued its assault.

  “I don’t understand what a murdered dog trainer has to do with all this. How long has he been gone?”

  “About seven years.”

  “And you’re telling me his ghost isn’t quiet. That doesn’t make any sense. We’ve already lost who we’re going to lose.”

  Henry’s logical explanation didn’t quite describe the gnashing sound that was getting louder with each wave. The growling of Stay and Good girl that I heard in my ears was like a cacophonous symphony. The troll was coming. Tonight.

  “You think I don’t know that? All I know is that Liston’s body was never found. And that I hear the troll only when something bad is going to happen. I heard it the night before your stepmother was killed. I want to know why. What do you remember about Joyce this weekend?”

  “Joyce didn’t kill Lyudmila, if that’s what you’re asking. She’s been helping Dad with all the details.”

  “I know she gave you those scars.”

  Henry, startled, covered his hands.

  “Who told you?”

  “Hannah.”

  “How much did she tell you?”

  “Everything . . . Look, Henry, we don’t have time for guilt. Indulge me. The tide is rising. If I’m right, something bad is going down tonight. Will you please pull up your laptop and search ‘Hal Liston murder’? I think Joyce’s role may have been more insidious than we think.”

  Henry didn’t seem happy about it. He picked at the scar in the valley between his thumb and forefinger.

  But the troll was a powerful incentive, and it sounded as though he were right outside, rattling the foundation. I was right on the water. I was spooked. So Henry played along. He pulled up his laptop and started to search. He made his way through story after salacious story of Hal Liston’s murder, each told from a different angle.