SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  She swallowed. “I guess I’m here, then.” Then she looked around for the rest of her belongings, the things she had left at the Cliff Motel, but none of them was among what Seth had brought.

  She said, “But my stuff . . . the motel?”

  Seth shook his head. He was blowing up an air mattress that he’d taken from the pillowcase. He said, “Couldn’t get it. I’ll try tomorrow. The undersheriff was in the parking lot talking to that Primavera chick from the high school. No way did I want them to see me going into your room or any room.”

  “Ms. Primavera?” Becca said. It was worse and worse. For Tatiana Primavera had heard the phone message from Laurel and she would now tell the undersheriff and then the final connection would be made. It would have to be made. People weren’t stupid. “What was she doing there?” Becca wailed.

  “Heck d’I know.” Seth finished with the air mattress and then unrolled the sleeping bag on it. He said, “I’ll try to get the rest of your stuff tomorrow. Meantime, don’t sweat it. You’ll be okay here. There’s even a bathroom. I’ll bring you soap and a towel. I’ll bring some shampoo. Just hang tough. You can do that, can’t you?”

  Becca didn’t see that she had a choice. It was hang tough or nothing. For better or worse, the Dog House was going to be her new home.

  PART FOUR

  The Meadow Loop Trail

  * * *

  TWENTY-NINE

  Hayley Cartwright was driving the farm truck out of the school parking lot when she saw Becca King pushing a bike with a flat tire in the direction of the school. It was the end of a school day, though. Becca was going in the wrong direction.

  Hayley recognized the bike. It belonged to Seth. Because of its crazily painted psychedelic handlebars, there couldn’t have been another bike like it on the island. Hayley wondered why the dowdy-looking girl with the thick-framed glasses had it. Obviously, Seth had handed it over to her, but Hayley didn’t know what this meant. She did know it shouldn’t be important to her. But it was, somehow. Just as it was also important to Hayley that this girl Becca had put a note into Derric’s hand at the hospital. “Give this back to me when you wake up,” it had read. That message suggested more than one thing to Hayley, and one thing it suggested was confidence. Confidence in Derric, confidence in his condition, and confidence about other things as well. Hayley told herself she could use some of that confidence. So she rolled down the window and called Becca’s name.

  “You need a ride? You’re going in the wrong direction, you know.” She smiled. “School’s over. You aren’t just getting here, are you?”

  Becca blinked owlishly behind those weird glasses. She had so much black around her eyes that she looked like a panda. She said, “Oh. Hi,” and she added with a glance down at the bike, “Got a flat. I needed to get some stuff from my locker.”

  “Well, if you want, I c’n give you a ride after you get the stuff. There’s a tire place up on the highway. I c’n take you there.”

  “’Kay,” Becca said. “That’d be good. I thought I’d fixed this stupid thing yesterday, but I guess I didn’t do such a good job.” She waited till Hayley had pulled to the side of the road and she handed the bike over to her. She said she’d be right back and she hurried in the direction of the school building. She looked around a little furtively as she walked.

  When she returned, her backpack was crammed. Hayley said, “Wow. Impressive. You’ve got the homework, huh?” and Becca said, “I had to miss school a couple days. Makeup work. You know.”

  Hayley knew that much, at least the part about Becca missing school. For she had been on the reception desk when Debbie Grieder had phoned in a panic. Where was Becca King? she’d demanded. Could Hayley tell her if she was in school? She was missing from the Cliff Motel, but her belongings were still in her room. Debbie Grieder didn’t want to think what this might mean. Please, please tell me she’s in school, she’d cried. Hayley had put her through to the attendance clerk. Beyond that, she didn’t know how to help.

  She opened the tailgate of the farm truck and loaded up the bike. They set off in the direction of the highway.

  Hayley said to Becca, “Debbie Grieder called the school. She said you were gone but your stuff was still at the motel. She’s really—”

  “I got my stuff,” Becca broke in quickly. “Well, Seth got it for me. I was staying with Debbie but things didn’t work out.”

  “Oh.” Hayley cast around for something else to say to the girl. Seth seemed the logical subject at this point, but she didn’t want Becca to get the wrong idea. Another good subject would be “Where are you staying now?” but—

  “Debbie doesn’t like Seth,” Becca announced out of nowhere. “If you see her, don’t tell her he helped me, okay?”

  Hayley glanced at her curiously. Becca was looking down at her fingernails, which were dirty. So was the rest of her. She smelled pretty bad. Hayley wondered where on earth she was staying if she wasn’t at the Cliff Motel. She looked like someone who’d been sleeping in a car. Seth’s car, maybe, but that hardly made sense. Wouldn’t Seth just take her home to his parents or to his grandfather’s house if she needed a place to stay?

  “Course, he’s not my boyfriend or anything,” Becca went on suddenly. She was looking intently out of the side window. Her face was completely hidden from view.

  “Huh?”

  “Seth. He’s not my boyfriend. He’s just . . . I met him right when I came to the island. Him and Diana Kinsale. Well, I met Diana Kinsale first ’cause I was riding my bike—my other bike?—on Bob Galbreath Road and I didn’t know how bad it was there. I had to stop. She gave me a ride. I met Seth the next day at the Star Store.”

  How weird, Hayley thought. Something wasn’t right in all this. She could sense it. Seth, Becca, Diana Kinsale, the Star Store, Debbie Grieder, the Cliff Motel, Becca leaving it, Debbie Grieder not knowing, and now Becca talking about it all with no apparent reason. It almost seemed like—

  “It’s drugs, see,” Becca said in a rush. They’d come to the end of Maxwelton Road and were at the light, waiting to go onto the highway. “Debbie thinks Seth’s into drugs.”

  “Seth doesn’t do drugs.”

  “That’s not what Debbie thinks.”

  “Wow. Not fair.”

  “That’s what I thought. So . . .” Becca shrugged.

  She was making it sound as if she’d cut out on Debbie due to loyalty to Seth, Hayley thought. That was nice, but it didn’t seem exactly probable. How long had she known Seth, after all? No. There was more here than met the eye. She was about to ask Becca what was really going on, but Becca spoke first.

  “How’s Derric?” she asked. “I haven’t been able to get up to see him.”

  “The same,” Hayley told her. The light changed and they pulled onto the highway, heading south. “I saw that note you put in his hand. Seems like you’re sure he’ll recover. That’s nice.”

  Becca finally looked at her, then. Her forehead furrowed. She said, “I just . . . It was dumb, but I wanted him to have something. I didn’t have anything else with me, and I saw all the balloons and flowers and stuff. It just seemed like something . . . It didn’t mean anything. I don’t expect him . . . I mean, it’s not like I’m after him.”

  “What if you are? He’s a great guy.”

  “Gosh,” Becca breathed. “That’s sort of . . .”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you guys . . . You and Derric . . . ? You know.”

  “Seth told you that, didn’t he?” That figures, Hayley thought. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “Oh.”

  “He doesn’t. Plus, he acts first and he thinks later. If you hang around him much, you’ll see him in action. You’ll do something and he won’t give you a chance to explain and he’ll lose his temper and—” Hayley stopped herself. She heard herself. Acting without thinking and there Derric was in a coma from which he would not emerge to point a finger at whoever pushed him over that bluff. If he wa
s pushed, Hayley told herself. If he was pushed.

  Becca said nothing in reply to Hayley’s words. Hayley went no further with them. But it wasn’t a friendly silence that hung between the two girls at that point. It was a silence heavy with thoughts and suspicions.

  So much for learning about the source of her confidence, Hayley thought. So much for thinking she had confidence in Derric’s recovery at all. For if she was thick with Seth Darrow, chances were good that she knew more than she was saying about everything. For all Hayley knew, she’d been at the hospital with Seth for a sinister reason, not an act of kindness toward Derric at all but rather a threat.

  “Give this back to me when you wake up” had an entirely different meaning, then. It was the same as saying, “Call me when you come to because you and I have stuff to talk about.”

  It was too horrible to contemplate where all of this was leading. Hayley wanted Becca King out of her truck. Mercifully, the tire store was in view. Hayley sped up to get to it. When they arrived, she braked the truck, hard. She waited for Becca to climb out, get her bike, and get away from her. But instead Becca said the strangest thing of all:

  “You know Seth’s sandals?”

  “Huh? What about them?” Hayley wanted to push her out of the truck, but it didn’t seem she was in any hurry.

  “I saw that kid Dylan had a pair like them. I never saw sandals like that before.”

  Hayley stared at her. “So?” What a weird chick was what she was thinking.

  Becca turned red. “I was just wondering . . . Do you think they came from around here? They’re sort of cool. I’d like to get—”

  “There’s no shoe store around, if that’s what you mean. They’re probably from some place over town. Seattle, maybe. And anyway, why d’you want a pair of sandals this time of year? It’s going to get too cold to wear them.”

  “I guess,” Becca said. “I never saw . . . I mean, no one else has them.”

  Hayley wanted to yell, “And this is important because . . . ?” but she kept quiet, thinking furiously. She could make no connections among Becca’s shifts in topic except the obvious one. And the obvious one had everything to do with Seth, Derric, and what Becca knew about Saratoga Woods.

  Hayley said shrewdly, “Are you protecting Seth?”

  “From what?” Becca asked her. At last she had her hand on the door handle. At last she was going to get out of the truck. But not before Hayley found out what she knew because she did know something. It was written all over her.

  “Come on,” Hayley said. “You know what I mean. Are you protecting him, Becca?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you?” Hayley asked her.

  Becca looked at her squarely then. Her gaze was steady and it chilled Hayley from her head to her feet. “Not any more than you are,” she said.

  HAYLEY’S BRAIN WAS whirling once Becca left her. Seth, Derric, Diana Kinsale, Saratoga Woods, Dylan, a pair of sandals. Becca King was a girl who talked in riddles, and Hayley couldn’t work out the answer to any of them. By the time she got home, she was in a state of strung nerves. That state got immediately worse when she saw the SUV was gone.

  Her stomach clenched hard. If the SUV was gone and her mom was gone, there was always the chance that something had happened with her dad.

  She got out of the truck. But then she heard the sound of the rototiller’s motor. The fact that the sound of it was coming from the direction of the vegetable beds meant her dad was actually working there.

  It was such a pleasure to think of her father finally back out on the land again that Hayley hurried in the direction of the massive beds. But there she saw it wasn’t her father at work at all. Rather it was Seth. Hayley looked around for Sammy, but the VW was nowhere in sight.

  Seth made the turn at the end of one of the beds. He looked up and saw her. He jerked his head in hello and she waved him over. He turned off the motor of the rototiller and strode across the beds, meeting her by the deer fence.

  She said, “What’re you doing here? Where’s my dad? Where’s your car?”

  Seth looked startled by the onslaught of questions. He hiked up his loose jeans in that way he had and said, “Hi to you, too, Hayley.”

  “Answer me.”

  “Whatever, Hayl. Your mom needed to take Brooke and Cassidy to the dentist. Your dad was working on the SUV so I loaned them Sammy.”

  “So where’s the SUV now?”

  “What’s with the third degree?”

  “Where’s the SUV, Seth?”

  “Th’ heck should I know? Your dad said he needed to get something from the gas station over in Greenbank. I don’t know what. Spark plugs maybe. Oil. He didn’t say.”

  “And you just let him go?” Hayley backed off from the deer fence. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with you? It’s his SUV. He can do what he wants.”

  “You don’t—” Hayley made herself stop. It was all right, she told herself. She was just scared. She wasn’t thinking straight. She was worried about Derric, she was worried about her dad, she was worried about how her mom and her sisters were going to keep the farm running, and now she was worried about a pair of sandals. Because Seth wasn’t wearing his at the moment and what did that mean?

  She said brusquely to Seth, “Funny. You don’t even ask how he is.”

  “Your dad? Hey, I was thinking there’s something wrong with him. D’you—”

  “I’m not talking about my dad! I’m talking about Derric. Why don’t you even mention him? Why don’t you ask? ‘Is he alive? Is he dead? Is he still in a coma?’ Why aren’t you asking? Don’t you even want to know?”

  Seth came the rest of the distance to the deer fence and put his hands on it. He said in a quiet voice, “Hey. What’s going on?”

  “Where’re your sandals, Seth? Why aren’t you wearing them?”

  He looked at his feet and then at her. He said, “Hayley, you’re all over the map. What’s the big deal if I’m not wearing those sandals?”

  “You always wear them. You never wear anything else.”

  “Wrong.”

  “No. Right.”

  Seth had his fedora on, as usual. He pulled on its rim in a way someone would to hide their face. He said, “What’s it to you what I have on my feet? What’s it to you if I want to walk around in my socks? What’s anything I do got to do with you, Hayley? Way I remember stuff, I’m nothing to you anyway. So quit with the questions.” He turned away from her, as if to go back to the work he’d been doing.

  She cried, “What’re you doing here, Seth? Why’re you working on the vegetable beds? Why’d you stack all that wood? Mom told me you did it. What d’you want from me?”

  “I’m just trying to help out, okay? I fixed the rototiller motor, too, and it seemed—”

  “Oh, what could be cooler than that? You fixed the rototiller. How totally great. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you at least wear a size of jeans that fit? Why don’t you get a decent job? Why don’t you study for the GED? Because you’re not doing that, are you? You haven’t even begun. D’you think you can just show up here and stack some wood and work in the garden and I’m not going to figure out what you did?”

  “Did? What the heck?”

  “You pushed him, didn’t you? You were in the woods. You argued with him about me. We were kissing and so what, Seth, and I tried to tell you that but no way did you want to listen to me. But then you saw him and you saw your chance and—”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” Seth shouted. “This is all about Derric?” He turned to the fence and banged his fist on it. Then he shoved his way off it. He started to walk away. He swung around and walked back. He walked away again. He kicked at the dirt. He came back to her and punched his fist on the fence post. “Great,” he said. “Wonderful. Why don’t you just call the sheriff and turn me in?”

  “Do everyone a favor,” she said. “Turn yourself in.”

  That said, she left him and
headed for the house. Her mother rumbled into the driveway in Sammy.

  * * *

  THIRTY

  Seth wanted to smash his fist into the deer fence another time, just to do something. More than that, he wanted to follow Hayley and shake her by the shoulders until her head bounced around. But everyone was getting out of the VW, and Cassidy was crying and shouting, “It’s not fair! She said!” and Brooke was yelling, “I was sitting in the front seat! I couldn’t share! Mom, tell her!” and Mrs. Cartwright looked completely done. Cassidy went on about the dentist telling Brooke she was supposed to “share that stupid comic book with me” and Brooke continued to argue that she couldn’t share it from the front seat, so “here it is, dummy, why don’t you just eat it,” as she threw it at her sister and then slammed her way into the house, with Cassidy following.

  Hayley had already gone into the house, too, and Mrs. Cartwright started looking around, her face confused. Seth figured that here was another person about to ask him where that stupid SUV was, so he decided to go over and let her know that Mr. Cartwright had taken it to Greenbank for spark plugs or oil or something.

  When he told her this, she cried out, “What? When did he leave? Greenbank?” She said the last word as if Greenbank was Portland and not the nearest place to find a gas station and a general store. She cried, “We have to find him. Now,” which was something of a mystery since Seth couldn’t figure out why they had to find a man who’d gone about five miles down the road.

  But he had no time to remark on this. Mrs. Cartwright threw him the keys to Sammy and said, “You drive. I’ll look,” as if Mr. Cartwright had probably crashed the SUV into a ditch.

  Seth took the keys and climbed in the VW, but what he was thinking was that there was something seriously wrong around here.

  In less than two miles, they saw the SUV. It was parked neatly enough along the roadside, in a pull-out beneath a patch of big-leaf maples. Mrs. Cartwright was out of the VW before it came to a full stop. She ran to the driver’s door and tried to open it. She pounded on the window, too. Seth realized she’d forgotten that the door didn’t open from the outside any longer, and he dashed over to the passenger’s door and got inside.