The Edge of Nowhere (5 page)

Diana laughed. She took off her baseball cap and Becca could see that her hair was gray. Becca found this quite strange. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever actually seen gray hair on a woman before this because where she was from women dyed their hair the moment the first strand of gray came in. But Diana Kinsale was the definition of
au naturel
. She wore no makeup, and her hair wasn’t even styled.

“They’re all mine,” Diana Kinsale said in reference to the dogs. “I didn’t
intend
to end up with five of them, but one thing always leads to another and here I am. What about you?”

“I don’t have a dog,” Becca said. “I like them a lot, but my mom’s allergic.”

“Ah.”
Who is she
?

Becca felt a pressure inside her head.
Who is she?
was, of course, the logical question. Who is your mom, this woman who is allergic to dogs, and does she know you’re on your bike all alone in the growing dark with the fog coming in heavier each minute? But these questions weren’t asked. They weren’t even thought.

Becca stole a look at Diana Kinsale. Diana Kinsale glanced at her and said nothing. She punched a button on the radio, and the Dixie Chicks began singing at a volume that precluded conversation.

It didn’t take long to get to Clyde Street. One and a half Dixie Chicks later, and Diana was pulling into the driveway of a gray clapboard house that overlooked water that Becca would come to know as Saratoga Passage. Below the house, a group of cottages sat directly on a spit of beach, and across from this another island rose up in a mass of trees, darkness, and a fistful of flung lights coming from the houses that stood at its south end.

Diana got out of the truck and Oscar followed her. The other dogs began to pace. When Becca joined the woman at the pickup’s tailgate, Diana had lowered it and the four dogs leaped out and began bounding around the front yard.

“No pooping,” Diana shouted at them as she heaved the bike out and set it on the ground. She rearranged the saddlebags upon it, and extended her hand to Becca. “I hope to see you around, Becca King,” she said.

Becca reached out for the shake. When their hands met, a tingling shot up Becca’s arm, something between an electric shock and her arm coming awake from sleep. Her eyes met Diana’s and in that moment, Becca knew what her grandmother had said was true. Sometimes the absence of something indicates the presence of something else. The only difficulty lay in discerning what that something else was.

Diana said quietly, “Things aren’t always your fault.”

Becca said, “Huh?” because she needed whispers now in order to understand this woman, and in the absence of whispers she was only too aware of how lost she could become on Whidbey Island.

Diana said, “The chain on your bike? It probably needs some work but it’s natural not to notice that kind of thing till it’s too late. It’s not your fault that the ride was a tough one if your bike’s not in good condition.”

The dogs returned. They began sniffing the ground around Becca’s feet and they’d soon made it up her leg to the vicinity of her jacket pocket where the last two sugar cookies remained.

Diana said, “The dogs like you. That’s good,” and then she said to the animals, “Chow time, dogs!” and the dogs set up a chorus of barking. “Stop by anytime,” Diana said with a wave, and she disappeared toward the back of the house. The dogs followed.

BECCA REMEMBERED TO
push her bike. She figured that Diana Kinsale might have known she was lying about the chain slipping, but still she wanted to keep up the pretence. So she pushed it till she came to a streetlight some distance away from Diana’s house and there she unfolded her map to see where Blue Lady Lane was from Clyde Street.

A single glance told her why Diana had said this was her lucky day. Blue Lady Lane broke off from a street at the end of Clyde, and the end of Clyde was clearly visible by the stop sign on its corner.

So, it turned out, was the sheriff’s car that had passed Becca on Bob Galbreath Road. When she made the right turn that would take her to Blue Lady Lane, she saw the car sitting in front of a house midway along the street, where Blue Lady Lane began.

Becca knew, then. She couldn’t have put everything into words, but something had happened and it wasn’t good. At first she thought the police were looking for her. But the presence of at least eight people on the upstairs deck outside of the house and the bright lights within the building seemed to suggest something else.

She rolled her bike to a mound of vegetation, and from within its shelter she gazed at the house. A low sign in front of it said Horse Haven and lights shone on house numbers on this. She dug out Carol Quinn’s address, but she was sure of what she would find. The numbers matched.

She crept forward. She crossed the street in the shadows from the trees, and she’d reached the side of the sheriff’s car before she realized the boy was still in it, although the sheriff was not.

She began to back off, but the boy got out. He rubbed the back of his neck and gazed at the house on its little rise of land. She froze where she was. Then he turned to her.

Their eyes locked on each other’s.
People leave . . . someone . . . if death was easy . . . rejoice rejoice . . .
caressed the air between them. Then voices broke into the darkness around them as two men approached, coming down the walk from the house.

“I’m so damn sorry, Mr. Quinn. If there’s anything . . .”

The boy glanced their way, then back at Becca.
Go
, he mouthed.
Now. Go.
He got back into the car.

But Becca couldn’t go until she heard and knew, and the knowledge came quickly with the other man’s words. She could tell he was crying. “Just a little under the weather,” he said. “She felt bad but she thought it was the flu and so did I. And now this.”

“She’s not the first,” the undersheriff said. “With women, a heart attack . . . it doesn’t feel like they think it would feel. She didn’t know that.”

“She was so strong, Dave.” He started sobbing.

Becca backed away. She returned to the vegetation and sat. She put her head in her hands and listened to the sound of the Island County sheriff’s car as it drove off. She had no idea what she would do.

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

I
n 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?”