SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  WITHIN AN HOUR, everyone had gone as Becca sat and thought and tried and failed to contact Laurel. Out of range, out of range was the message each time, feeding into Becca’s deepest fears. At the end, she had only a single hope. She would have to talk to Carol Quinn’s husband.

  Becca stepped out of the vegetation. She approached the house, and as she did so, Mr. Quinn came outside and stood on the deck. She hesitated, half-hidden behind a rhododendron. She could see him, but he could only see her if he knew where to look, and he wasn’t looking. Instead, he stared out at the water across the street from his house in a way that told Becca he wasn’t actually looking at anything.

  He lit a cigarette and smoked for a few moments in silence, and in equal silence Becca watched him. Then what now . . . she never thought . . . no plan came to her, a scattering of thoughts, like bread cast on the water for ducks. But the feelings that came with them made them heavy like boulders and they rolled toward Becca till she stepped into the light.

  “Mr. Quinn?”

  “Yeah,” he said heavily. “Who’re you? You lost?”

  “I’m Becca King,” she said. And then she waited, for the recognition, for the realization, for the remembrance, for anything. She hoped he would say, “Oh yes. The girl Carol was going to take in till her mom comes back,” but he said nothing. So Becca knew from this that Carol Quinn had taken Laurel’s request for absolute secrecy right to her death. Her lips felt stiff and sore as she murmured, “I just wanted to say . . . I’m sorry for your loss.”

  But he was already deep within his own thoughts, and none of them related to a girl from San Diego on the run from a man who’d murdered his business partner in a phony break-in into the man’s million-dollar condo.

  BECCA WENT BACK to her bike. She pulled the cell phone out and she tried again. She heard her mother’s words. It’s programmed, sweetheart. Press one on yours and it’ll connect you to mine. But only in an emergency.

  Everything related to Carol Quinn had turned into an emergency, Becca thought. She pressed one and tried for Laurel again. She waited in agony for the connection to go through. But the message was the same as before. Out of range, out of range, out of range.

  Wait, she told herself. Just wait for a while. Cell phones got out of range all the time, and she expected that they got out of range frequently in this part of the world. There were mountains and bodies of water and islands, and surely all of these things indicated it would be very simple for someone to be out of range for a time.

  So wait, wait, wait, she told herself. Just wait, wait, wait. Because the last thing she could face at the moment was the possibility that the very same mother who’d planned their escape from Jeff Corrie so perfectly had ended up leaving her to fend for herself on an island she knew nothing about.

  * * *

  FOUR

  In that moment, Becca was afraid of a lot of things. Like other girls her age, she’d never been on her own. She’d had her mother and, before her breast cancer death, she’d had her grandmother. Now what she had was a cell phone connecting her to exactly no one unless she wanted to call San Diego and exchange happy greetings with Jeff Corrie. The fact was that Laurel had laid very careful plans, and the big one had just blown up in Becca’s face.

  She crossed the street in front of the house where Carol Quinn had lived. The man had gone back inside, and she could see him through the brightly lit windows. She couldn’t hear his whispers from this distance and because of the glass between them but she could easily imagine them: Carol . . . Carol . . . what do I do . . . He was moving aimlessly around the living room.

  Becca was on a stretch of open grassy land, high above the water. A log lay here, bare like a piece of driftwood that had been brought up from the beach below to serve as a bench. She sat and tried not to think about anything else but an answer to the question, What next? To keep herself from going to a place of total panic, she dug in her jacket where the sugar cookies were, and she ate the second one slowly, in order to kill time. A soft rain began to fall, and she put up the hood of her jacket. Then she looked out at the lights across the passage and wondered how far Laurel had gone.

  She was heading for British Columbia and a mountain town called Nelson. She had said her reasoning had to do with Roxanne, that old film with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah. Laurel liked it so much that she had her own DVD of it, and she played it whenever life got to her. It wasn’t the romance of the film that seemed to interest Laurel, though. It was the little town of Nelson where it had been filmed. She studied that town every time she watched Roxanne. She stopped the film and looked at the scenery. She did it so often that Becca had wondered if Laurel was actually looking for someone, like an extra hired from the town. But she never was able to figure this out. For when Laurel watched, she kept her mind going on listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and when Becca asked her why she was doing that, her mother said, “Discipline, sweetheart,” as if she was afraid she’d forget the poem because the film would sweep it from her mind. She’d add sharply, “And why aren’t you using the AUD box?”

  “The AUD box is for your protection, hon,” her grandmother would say. “It’s to give other people their privacy, sure. But it’s also because you can’t go through your life being bombarded with noise.”

  “You have,” Becca would answer, for she’d inherited hearing whispers from her grandmother instead of the woman’s flaming red hair.

  “Sure. But your talent’s stronger than mine. It’ll take you a while to learn to control it.”

  “So, I have to wear this dumb thing for the rest of my life?”

  “Just till you learn where the knobs are on the volume in your head,” her grandmother said. “Your mom’s only trying to protect you, hon. It’s for the best.”

  But Becca couldn’t see how her mom was protecting her now. So when she’d finished the cookie, which she’d eaten as slowly as she could manage by letting each bite melt on her tongue, she took out the cell phone and called Laurel again.

  Out of range was the message another time. Becca gave a little cry, and she shoved the phone back into her pocket. She wanted to be angry with her mother, but she knew there was no point to that. She also wanted to return to Diana Kinsale’s door and ask for help. But despite not having the AUD box plugged into her ear, the fact that she’d gotten no reading off Diana Kinsale worried her. She wasn’t sure what it meant. Still, she couldn’t stay here on the driftwood log, so she roused herself and trudged back to her bike. Under a streetlight nearby Becca fished out her map of Whidbey Island and traced the route into Langley, which was the nearest town. It wasn’t terribly far at this point: back to Clyde, a few miles to the end of a road called Sandy Point, and then a right turn would put her in the vicinity of downtown, whatever went for downtown in this place. But she didn’t know what she would find there, and she was so tired that she didn’t know what she’d do when she got there. So she refolded the map and returned to her bike. She had to do something, and riding was better than nothing.

  When she reached Diana Kinsale’s driveway, Becca paused. In the darkness just beyond the house, she could make out the silver outline of the dog run where the shapes of Diana’s dogs were moving about, settling down for the night. Becca found there was comfort in thinking about those dogs. They’d been friendly to her, sniffing around her feet and her pockets but not jumping on her or anything.

  She glanced around. As she did so, the porch light on Diana’s house went off and somehow that seemed like an invitation.

  She saw that next to Diana’s driveway, an enormous heap of shrubbery grew. In the darkness she couldn’t tell what it was, just that it was thick and ungoverned and that it had copious thorns, which she discovered when she removed her saddlebags from her bike and slid them and the bike beneath its branches.

  The dogs began barking as she approached the dog run. The back door of the house opened and Becca shrank back into the shadows. Diana’s voice called ou
t, “Enough, dogs. No bark,” and they fell silent although they increased their restless pacing. The door closed once more.

  Becca waited. She wanted the dogs to settle down and she wanted to make sure that Diana Kinsale wasn’t going to open the door again. She shivered and stuck her hands into the pockets of her jacket, and her right hand found the last of the sugar cookies. This told her there was an easy way to handle what had to come next.

  At the run she extended her fingers, sugary now from the cookie and its icing. The dogs jostled one another for a smell and a lick, and they were delighted when she climbed over the fence, joined them, and broke the sugar cookie into pieces, saving one for herself and giving them the rest.

  There was a doghouse at the far end of the run. It was the size of a chicken coop because of the number of dogs that slept there. It was also big enough for just one more creature to fit inside, and that was what Becca did. She crawled through the opening, out of the rain.

  The dogs crowded in after her. The smell was terrible, since there’s very little that smells worse than wet dog except, perhaps, wet dog plus dog blankets in need of washing. But for Becca it was a beggars and choosers situation, and even if it hadn’t been, she thought she probably would have chosen the dogs anyway as her sleeping companions that first night on Whidbey Island. For as they settled around her and she settled in with them, one of the dogs sought out her face and licked her lips. She knew at heart that the dog was after one more crumb of sugar cookie, but she decided to call it a good-night kiss.

  SHE WOKE UP early. It was still dark, but through one of the boards that made up the side of the doghouse, she could see a slice of dawn. It was the color of an apricot near its pit, and threads of that color bled out into the sky.

  Becca was stiff in every way. Her neck hurt from how she’d positioned herself with the dogs. Her legs were sore, her back ached, and her arms felt as if she’d been carrying weights. Even her wrists hurt.

  She smelled just like one of the dogs, and she was very hungry. She lay there with her head on her arm and wished more than anything that she’d stopped at that Dairy Queen.

  She moved tentatively. The dogs roused around her, and the air filled with the dog breath of their morning yawns. None of them barked, however. She was part of the pack now, and there was no reason to sound the alarm at her coming or going.

  Becca petted each one of them in farewell. She didn’t know their names, only Oscar’s, and he was apparently inside the house. They nudged her with their noses, and one of them whimpered while another went to an enormous stainless steel bowl that glittered in the ambient light and lapped noisily. Becca was as thirsty as she was hungry, but member of the pack or not, she drew a line at sharing the dogs’ water.

  At the mass of shrubbery along the driveway, Becca rustled for her saddlebags and then for her bike. In the weak light, she could see that the shrubs were blackberry bushes, completely untrimmed and insanely wild, with the late summer’s fruit still upon them. But she had no time to pick some berries and make them her breakfast. Diana Kinsale would be up soon, and Becca knew she couldn’t run the risk of being caught there and facing her questions.

  She walked her bike to the road. From looking at the map on the previous night, she knew where the town of Langley was. She had to find this place, and once there she had to figure out what to do next. She’d phone Laurel again when she got there.

  She reached the end of Clyde, Diana’s street, and she made a little jog onto Sandy Point Road. This ran in the same direction as the waters of Saratoga Passage although within moments, Becca discovered that Sandy Point Road was as bad as Bob Galbreath Road had been. The only difference was the lack of curves. It was as straight as a ruler but otherwise it was hills and valleys all the way.

  It was terribly cold. Becca’s breath came from her like cumulus clouds, and she was soon grateful for the exertion necessary to get up the hills because, at least, this kept her warm.

  At last she came to the end of the road, where at a T-junction she saw in front of her the barnlike shapes of the county fairgrounds. She went to the right, in the direction that the map had told her she would find the town. As she did so, the chain on her bike slipped suddenly. The pedals turned with nowhere to go, and her leg hit the serrated pedal edge. Becca winced with the sudden pain.

  She got off the bike and took a look at it. She had to do something to keep it functioning. The problem was that she didn’t know what was wrong with the thing aside from the obvious. Did the gears need oiling? Did the chain need cleaning? Did something need to be replaced?

  She had to push the bike the rest of the way into the town. It wasn’t far. The road she was on was level at last, and she followed its curve. Finally, in the growing dawn, Langley spread out before her, tucked into trees, easing its way down a slope speckled with wood-framed cottages, then rising again into another hill. It was more a village than a town, and it sat on a bluff high above the pulsing water. She pushed her bike along this bluff toward what looked like a commercial area.

  She quickly discovered that the business part of Langley consisted of only two streets. She chose the first one, simply because it went downhill and she could get back on her bike and coast. She wasn’t sure where she was going at this point. She only knew she needed some food and she hoped to find it.

  She had a bit of luck quickly. On her right a short distance along the street she came to a parking lot. Not a large parking lot, as nothing in the village seemed large, but a parking lot all the same. At one side of it squatted a white building with STAR STORE in red neon letters above a double door of glass. The lights inside this store were on, and from what Becca could see, it looked like a market.

  She rolled her bike up to its door. She thought about removing her saddlebags while she was inside the place, for security’s sake, but no one was around to steal them and anyway, she had a feeling they’d be fine where they were. So would her backpack, she figured.

  Although the lights were blazing inside the Star Store, when she pulled on the door, Becca found it locked. She muttered and jiggled the door in irritation. Nothing—it seemed—was going right. It was time to call Laurel again.

  Becca turned to dig her cell phone from her backpack, but at that point a little miracle happened. The store doors opened behind her and a boy’s voice said, “Hey. Not opened yet. Sorry.”

  Becca swung in the direction of that voice. An older teenager was standing half in and half out of the store, a trash bag in one hand and the other hand holding the door open a few feet. He sported baggy jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt with DJANGO REINHARDT ROCKS featured on it. He wore an unbuttoned flannel shirt over this. His hair was long and held back in a ponytail, and a black fedora sat on his head. He looked about eighteen years old.

  He said to her, “Two hours till we open. Sorry.” He leaned a mop against the wall inside and came out into the cold. He had odd, thick-soled sandals on his feet and even odder red-and-orange socks. He sauntered over to a Dumpster, heaved the trash bag up and over, and wiped his hands on the sides of his jeans.

  Becca’s eyes fixed on the Dumpster. Her thoughts went quickly from Star Store to groceries to trash bag to what might be in the trash bag, but the boy seemed to know what she was thinking because he fingered one of the ear gauges he sported and said, “No way. There’s nada in there worth even a look. If there was anything, I’d take it down to the seawall and give it to the gulls. Believe me, you do not want to mess with what’s inside this thing.” He slapped his hand against the Dumpster the way another boy might have slapped his hand against his car.

  He came her way. Becca could tell that he was nice because what came off him felt like a pleasant bath. He paused at her bike and looked it over. He gave her a glance, then squatted down for a closer look. He shook his head as he deftly put the chain back where it belonged. “Ride this thing far?” he asked. “It looks like it’s been sitting in the fog for a decade.”

  This wasn’t exactly an incor
rect surmise because leaving something outside in the eternally salt-laden air of San Diego wasn’t far removed from having left the bike in the fog. Becca said, “Yeah. It’s pretty bad. I’ve got to get it fixed. Or something.”

  He said, “Definitely ‘or something.’” He rose again. He was closer to her now, and he made that clear when he went on with, “Whew, you smell like a dog. You been sleeping with them?”

  “More or less,” Becca said. “I was hoping there was a place I could buy something to eat.”

  “Yeah? Bummer. This hour? Nada.” He looked at his watch. He said, “Mike’s’ll be open earliest. It’s up on the corner.” He pointed vaguely. “First Street and Anthes? You could get breakfast there. But not till later,” he added.

  She said, “Oh. Double bummer,” and made a move to go, which was when he said spontaneously, “On the other hand, I think I can help you. You got to keep it under your hat, though. Can do?”

  She nodded, and he led the way back into the Star Store, scooping up his mop as he entered. He rested this against one of two checkout counters and continued to the far side of the store.

  The place was bigger than it looked from the outside, Becca found. It was a full-service market, only in miniature, with short aisles stocked with groceries and an area with fresh vegetables and fruit. The place also had a deli, and it was to the deli that the boy led her.

  He pointed to some trays that sat on the counter behind a display of meats and cheeses. “It’s still good enough to eat but too old to sell. I give it to CMA”—with a glance at her—“Christian Missionary Alliance. They do soup a couple days a week for anyone who needs it. When there’s stuff here to be thrown away, I make sandwiches for them. If you want to make yourself one, have at it.”