by North, Will
“Doesn’t surprise me. Drunk as a skunk, you were. Probably still are.”
“Sick,” Pete said.
“No kidding. Drink this ginger ale. It’ll help your blood sugar.”
“Don’t like it.”
“Do it anyway, dammit!”
“Why are you being so mean?”
“Because you annoy the shit out of me, Martha Petersen, that’s why—and because despite that, I want you to get better. For one thing, that’s my bed.”
Pete sipped some of the ginger ale and promptly threw it up. When the nausea passed, she sank into the pillows, exhausted. Edwinna’s cat, Desmond, leaped onto the bed and wobbled over to his keeper. Edwinna adored his nervous ticks; he walked like a drunk, often misjudged distances, and was given to unpredictable fits of manic activity. It was as if he was possessed by demons. Given her own paranormal moments, she thought this made him a perfect companion. The cat peered at Pete as if trying to place her, gave up, made a lightning fast tour of the tops of several pieces of furniture, and then vanished down the hallway, yowling as if tortured.
“How did I get here? The last thing I remember…”
“Yeah, the last thing was you were choosing a good place to die on the Vashon Highway. Couldn’t you have found someplace less public? Appalling judgment.”
Pete took this in and tried to make sense of it. “No,” she said finally. “No. I was home. At the beach house. On the terrace. With Tyler.”
“Right. And I abducted you.”
For a moment, Edwinna thought Pete was going to vomit again. Her abdomen contracted several times and the older woman was about to pull her yet again to the edge of the bed when she realized Pete wasn’t being sick. She was sobbing, tearlessly, and staring at her bruised wrists.
Edwinna stroked the younger woman’s hair. “Hey girl, I tell you what,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you how you got here if you tell me how you got those welts.”
But Pete turned away, her body shuddering silently like an old, badly tuned car dieseling away long after the engine has been turned off.
***
EDWINNA WAS A Rutherford—not that she’d ever had much to do with them. They were, in island terms at least, relative newcomers to the beach. She’d married into the family and rued the day almost ever since.
Edwinna Fry arrived in Seattle at the age of sixteen just as World War II was drawing to a close. Her father, Benjamin, a scientist and a Jew, had taught at the Technical University of Berlin and been an early architect of rocket propulsion systems in Germany. Werner von Braun was his star pupil. Despite his professional credentials and strategic importance, though, Fry became increasingly certain his family would not survive in Hitler’s Reich. When the Nuremberg Race Laws eliminated the rights of Jews, Fry took advantage of a scientific conference in London and fled there with his daughter Edwinna and wife Rachel. Once settled, he continued to teach but also served quietly as an advisor to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
But though he and his family found refuge in England, Fry’s intuition about their future proved accurate: he and his wife were vaporized by a V-1 rocket that hit their Chiswick home in 1944. Edwinna had been at school that day. Just before the lunch break, she had bolted from class and burst into the headmaster’s office screaming that her house was going to be bombed. The headmaster took it to be war stress and tried to calm her, but her fear turned to fury. She fled the school, raced toward home, heard the distant explosion, and a few minutes later found only brick rubble and a smoking crater where the center of her life had been only hours before.
Shipped off to an aunt in Seattle in 1946, Edwinna left home a year later and found a job as a stenographer in the King County Superior Court. She lied about her age and her British accent made her seem mature and sophisticated. During trials, she knew instinctively who was guilty or innocent. She could see their stories even before she heard the testimony, but she kept this to herself. In time, she met Jack Rutherford, a rising young court reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Within a year, and against his family’s wishes, they’d married, rented a tiny house on the west side of Queen Anne Hill overlooking Elliott Bay, and were looking forward to starting a family.
Instead, only a month after the United States entered the Korean conflict, Jack was drafted. Six months later, a week after he was deployed, he was dead. When she received the news, all she said was, “I didn’t see this coming.”
No one understood what she meant.
Jack’s father Hank was a contractor. He’d prospered building and expanding the military facilities that ringed Seattle during World War II, then switched to subdivision development during the post-war housing boom. He also built a summer home on Madrona Beach, just west of the Petersen compound. It was large and, like his subdivisions, cheaply built, but the family loved it.
Edwinna never crossed its threshold. Her inheritance was enough for her to buy a parcel of land of her own on the Burton peninsula and to have a small house built—but by local builders, not her father-in-law. This, of course, did little to endear her to the Rutherfords, but she could not have cared less. Hank Rutherford had kept his other son, Jeff, out of Korea by engineering a “critical trades” exemption for him and making the ridiculously young and stunningly incompetent man a vice-president of the firm. Edwinna despised Jeff Rutherford—not because he avoided serving in Korea, but because he’d never earned a thing he’d been given.
When, after Jeff had been married for a decade and a half, and his society wife, Katie, caught wind of rumors that her husband had something more than friendly relationships with the real estate agents, male, who sold the houses in his father’s developments, she sued for divorce. Thanks to the doggedness of the first female lawyer Adam Strong had taken into his firm, Katie secured a settlement that included not only a sizable monthly alimony payment but also both their Bellevue and island homes. Edwinna congratulated her.
Katie and Jeff’s one child, Dylan, dropped out of high school in the mid-Sixties soon after his father was exposed and headed east, fetching up at Tolstoy Farm, an agrarian, anything goes, so-called “intentional community” west of Spokane named after the place Ghandi had studied non-violence in South Africa. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably given the culture of the commune, he fathered a daughter named “Twilight,” and then, when drafted to serve in Vietnam, slipped over the nearby Canadian border and was never heard from again.
Twilight’s mother, “Dawn,” had never really committed to the commune’s generally wholesome values and died of a heroin overdose in a Spokane alley when her daughter was ten. The girl was subsequently raised by the others in the commune, educated somewhat sketchily at their alternative school, and—at the first opportunity—had the great good sense to change her name legally from Twilight to “Margaret,” a name she chose from the directory hanging in the public phone booth in the Spokane County District Court building where she filed the application. She liked the way the twinned triplet syllables—Margaret Rutherford—rolled off her tongue.
Several months later, after she’d tracked down her only remaining relative, her grandmother Katie, she accepted an invitation to visit the family’s Madrona Beach compound for the first time. She and Katie hit it off instantly, and Katie and her second husband, Mike Foley, a retired neurosurgeon, took her in.
That’s when she met Edwinna, and changed her name yet again. That was Edwinna’s doing. She took Margaret aside, showed her a photo in an encyclopedia of the jowly, double-chinned British actress of the same name, Dame Margaret Rutherford, and suggested “Peggy” as a substitute. It suited, Edwinna thought; she was the kind of girl whose name should end in “y”: cute, lively, and none too bright.
Had Colin known of Edwinna’s initial assessment of Peggy’s potential when he met the girl during his first summer visit to the beach, he would have been stunned. The Peggy Rutherford he met—the product of Edwinna’s sharp prodding and Grandmother Katie’s gentle nurturing—was a questing an
d confident young woman, and a lovely one at that. Like Pete, her hair was streaked blonde by the sun; unlike petite Pete, she was taller than average and rather lushly upholstered: a Greek goddess to Pete’s Parisian gamine. And when Peggy Rutherford emerged from her countercultural past and began to blossom, Rob March was there, courting her with the kind of quiet persistence that, like running water, wears down even the hardest rock. Still, it came as a surprise to almost everyone, except Edwinna of course, when Peggy ultimately succumbed and she and Rob married.
Like a frog who’d charmed a fairy princess, Rob devoted himself to Peggy’s happiness, and his wife flourished. When children arrived, gentle, affable Rob was always on hand to care for them. And as he prospered, Peggy’s life gained both the luxury and respectability, like carefully applied layers of thin gold leaf, that she had never imagined possible. Even now, years later, you could sometimes catch Rob watching his wife and shaking his head, amazed at his luck.
***
EDWINNA ADORED PEGGY, but she loved Pete almost desperately as the daughter she’d never had. But the truth was, she was afraid of her affection for Pete Petersen, afraid that one day she would “see” tragedy in the young woman’s aura.
So Edwinna kept herself at a distance, and what she saw of Pete from that remove had evolved over the years from joy to disappointment. She’d watched the eager-to-please, motherless daughter of an emotionally unavailable father—a cleric, no less—bob along like driftwood wherever the tide of her life took her. As a girl, Pete had been bright, inquisitive, courageous, athletic—a tomboy all the other girls on the beach strove to emulate, the girl everyone wanted as her best friend. What dismayed Edwinna was how, as Pete matured, this promising creature became the image of her own long-dead mother: passive, accommodating, apparently satisfied with meeting the demands of whomever needed her—Pete’s ambitious but absent father, then handsome but feckless Tyler, and finally her children. It was as if she’d become a blank screen against which other people’s dramas were projected. Edwinna had expected more. And what was worse, she knew there was more in there: an intelligent, capable woman who was, for all intents and purposes, coasting. She wondered what it would take for Pete to finally take charge of her own life.
More recently, really since Two had died, she also worried about Pete’s health. She’d watched the girl go from slender and graceful to wiry and rail thin. Pete had always been a runner, but now she ran for what seemed to Edwinna like hours. She ran as if she were trying to run something out of herself, as if the pounding physical effort could cleanse her of…what? Grief, perhaps. Or guilt.
Lately Pete had taken to stopping in at Edwinna’s on her runs, ostensibly to refill her water bottle, but the visits often extended into discussions. The visits puzzled Edwinna until one afternoon, as the two of them sat quietly on the back porch, Pete said, almost in a whisper, “It’s so peaceful here, Edwinna. Thank you.”
“Well, of course it’s peaceful,” Edwinna cracked. “Not a damned thing going on, except me falling to pieces!”
“Not true. There’s love here. I’ve always felt it, and been thankful for it, and wondered why you’d always stayed away. You would have made a great mom.”
And for once, Miss Edwinna Rutherford was speechless.
***
As Pete dozed, Edwinna leaned back and thought about how frightened she’d been when she “saw” Pete lying in a road but could not make out where or why. Her visions were a mixed blessing. Long ago, when they began to get in her way, she’d researched the phenomenon. She learned there were certain people who literally heard the voices and conversations of distant individuals. That was called “clairaudience.” There were people who felt things emotionally about others they did not know. That was “clairsentience.” And there were people, like her, who saw things before they happened or as they were happening at a distance. That was “clairvoyance.”
The seeing and the knowing had always come to her simultaneously. But lately, she felt her gift, or curse, or whatever it was, failing. Her visions had once had a cinematic brilliance: sharply focused and glowing with an otherworldly light. More recently, it was as if someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens of her second sight. It had taken her twenty minutes to find Pete. She could see her where she lay, but not the larger picture. She couldn’t see how the girl had got there or how long she’d been there. She couldn’t even nail the “there,” except that she knew it was a road near water. It was almost an accident she’d found her at all, and by then Colin had taken over, thank God.
That Colin. What the hell was wrong with him? Good-looking chap. Successful, in an Island sort of way. Smart. Sensitive. Anyone could see he and Pete had a visceral connection. They weren’t lovers, though; Edwinna would have seen that. No, what she saw was his longing and Pete’s blindness. Colin was like some Arthurian knight, serving and worshipping his Guinevere from afar. Hopeless. Ridiculous.
Edwinna wondered whether she wasn’t being too hard on the woman who now lay in her own bed. What you do when a child disappoints you? Do you extend trust and understanding like lengths of rope? Is love like that: like an infinitely extended safety line? Surely, you needed eventually to reel that line in. But she didn’t know. She had no experience from which to draw. This mother of three, this adult in her bed, was not her child. No one was. She looked at the figure asleep before her, fragile as an autumn leaf, and didn’t know whether to hold her tight or slap her silly.
What she did know was that she needed to get to the bottom of those bruised wrists.
fifteen
CHRIS CHRISTIANSEN LEANED BACK in one of the two worn vinyl office chairs behind the desk in the island’s tiny squad room. The spring on the chair was so weak that he was forever at risk of flipping backward. The bare-bones police headquarters was tucked away in back of the part-time county government branch office, just off the Vashon Highway a mile or so south of town. Like thieves on an inside job, officers skulked in through a code-protected door lock. There was a window, but the dusty Venetian blinds were perpetually down.
Behind Christiansen, the police radio hissed in the same way that the complete silence of wilderness hisses when your ears are searching for any sonic signal. From Christiansen’s point of view, it had been a blessedly uneventful holiday morning. The graveyard shift had had a domestic violence complaint on the north end of the island that, like most domestic violence complaints, was roundly denied by both the man of the house and the wife, or partner, or whatever she was, who’d first called it in. Once the officers got into the couple’s mossy single-wide trailer off Cove Road, they found no wounds, no obvious bruises, just a few sticks of furniture upended, the cloying smell of poverty and despair, and the wailing of a small child. Since then? Silence.
Then there was this Tyler Strong call. Something about it troubled him, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. He chewed on it as if on his favorite snack: smoked salmon jerky.
First of all, he said to himself, the summer people never called the police. It was as if they lived in a different, more elevated sphere of existence from the regular folks who called the island home, a world apparently unsullied by conventional civil or domestic distress and immune to crime, their off-island wealth serving like thick batts of fiberglass insulating them from more common human frailties and tragedies. He wasn’t so naive as to think they did not suffer like everyone else, not at all. Certainly Pete had suffered when that boy of hers was killed some years back. Horrible loss, that was; sudden, utterly random. For a few weeks everyone on the small island seemed to feel it and talk about it, he remembered, even though few of them knew the family well. The story was in the island newspaper—there being so little real news to report apart from the occasional break-in or traffic accident. Yes, Christiansen said, nodding to himself; the summer people suffered, too. But they kept it to themselves.
And that was the second problem: it was awfully early in the morning for Strong to become alarmed and file a missing persons report. Yes, i
t was a day for packing and leave-taking, for going back “over town,” as people said of Seattle; the end of the season, a melancholy time. Maybe, if you were one of them, you’d linger, saying goodbye to your friends over a cup of coffee or herbal tea, putting the moment off as long as possible. Maybe, if you were a private, contemplative sort, you’d go for a quiet and solitary barefoot walk on the beach.
Christiansen thought about that for a moment, then rose, the springs of his chair screeching at its release, and checked the tidal chart on the office wall. The morning high tide had just peaked and was beginning to ebb. Madrona Beach, he knew, had a broad, shallow shelf that stretched out several hundred yards into the outer harbor before dropping off. A careless sailor thinking distance from shore equaled a safe depth could easily run aground there. When the incoming tide arrived, the swell slipping in to the harbor moved so quickly you could watch the water advance across the shelf almost moment by moment. And when the tide finally turned, it retreated just as quickly—there one minute, gone the next; gone so far, in fact, that a stranger could be forgiven for wondering if it would ever return.
So, even an hour before high tide, Christiansen reckoned, there would have been plenty of beach for walking. Then again, long as it was, you couldn’t walk shoeless very far along Madrona Beach, even at low tide; the east and west extensions of the beach were studded with hillocks of rock encrusted with barnacles and mussels that would cut up your feet. And the beach itself was mostly stony with chunks of broken brick from the day, long ago, when a factory operated there fashioning bricks from island clay for the building booms in Tacoma and Seattle. Every day, the tide unearthed what seemed like an unending supply of brick from beneath the sand and gravel strand.
He poured another cup of tepid black coffee from the office’s stained and elderly “Mr. Coffee” machine, still staring at the tide chart as if it were a window giving onto the beach. He nodded to himself: a long barefoot beach walk was out. So Pete must be out visiting. Probably at old Judge Strong’s place, or saying her goodbyes to the March family in the old Rutherford place. Tyler had said he’d checked, but Christiansen was skeptical; the man seemed barely compos mentis.