The Edge of the Light (10 page)

Becca's blood went to ice when she saw this last part. The only thing she could think of doing was to look into the identity of the reporter who'd uncovered this information.

There was, luckily, a byline with the story. It had been written by one Olivia Bolding. Becca searched her out as she'd searched out the stories on Jeff Corrie. What came up was a slew of articles written by her along with links to her blog, to her website, to her Facebook page, and to Wikipedia.

Becca chose the last option. In short order she learned that Olivia Bolding was twenty-nine years old and that she had already been nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. These nominations had been, Becca read, for a story about a twelve-year-old Detroit boy's descent into heroin addiction and for another story about Mexican girls being smuggled into the United States and sold into sex slavery. Becca wanted desperately to believe that, compared to these stories, she was far beneath the notice of a reporter. But she had a feeling that if Olivia Bolding became intrigued by something, she didn't let go of it.

It seemed to Becca once again that her only hope was going to come from finding her mom. So she logged on to an e-mail account that only a single individual on the planet even knew existed.

T
here were families out and about when Becca left the library. People were beginning to crowd Cascade Street, not only the main route into the village but also usually the best place from which one could observe the Cascade Mountains—topped with snow—in the far distance. Today, though, beyond the gray veil of fog, there was little visible in the waters of Possession Sound. This fog would make biking to her next destination risky. But she felt she had little choice in the matter. She needed to recapture some kind of tranquility, and there seemed to be only one way to do this.

She headed out of Langley on her bike. Although she passed churchgoers, she could hear nothing of their whispers. This was just as well. The freedom inside her head allowed her to consider what she'd learned from her e-mail.

Her correspondent was Parker Natalia, a talented fiddle player whom she'd come to know the previous autumn. A native of British Columbia, he'd been in town for Langley's yearly gypsy jazz festival, and for a time he'd played with Seth and his group. She'd learned first that Parker was Canadian. In short order, she'd also learned that he'd come to Langley from the very
same town that Laurel had fled to: Nelson. When he'd made his return to British Columbia, then, Becca had maintained a secret contact with him. He'd been doing his best to locate for her a woman she'd explained was her cousin. Laurel Armstrong had immigrated to Nelson a few years ago, had been Becca's claim, and the family had lost contact with her. A town of ten thousand people, Nelson wasn't a huge haystack from which a single needle had to be drawn. But so far nothing Parker had done was sufficient to unearth Becca's “cousin.”

He'd accepted Becca's claim that the situation was urgent. Thus, he'd put ads in the local paper and had posted have-you-seen-this-woman flyers throughout Nelson's small downtown and inside a mall that stood a short distance from an arm of Lake Kootenay. He'd also posted flyers out on the docks in the lake on which Nelson sat, where people came and went from their boats, even in winter. He'd crossed over the lake to the other part of town and fixed posters to light poles there. But if Laurel Armstrong was indeed in Nelson, she wasn't responding to his efforts to find her.

Parker had pointed out in his last e-mail to Becca that she might want to expand her search to Castlegar and to Trail. And in this most current e-mail that he'd sent to her reply of “Parker, I know she's in Nelson,” he offered a different possibility. Maybe, he wrote, her “cousin” Laurel had never actually immigrated to Canada. He pointed out that the nearest border crossing to Nelson was north of Spokane. Becca's “cousin” could have decided that Spokane was a better situation for her, Parker wrote. “It's a bigger city, there's more action, and she wouldn't have had
to go through the hassle of trying to get Canadian residency.”

On the other hand, he went on to tell her, one of the regular customers at his family's restaurant in Nelson was a cop. He'd see if that cop would contact Canadian immigration because, if Laurel
had
actually entered Canada at any one of the border crossings in the state of Washington, there was going to be a record of that.

Throughout all of this, Parker Natalia hadn't questioned why Becca was so determined to find an individual whom, she claimed, she hadn't seen in years. From a large and closely knit Italian family, when it came to wanting to contact your relatives, Parker understood.

Now more than ever, Becca needed to find her mom. With the reporter Olivia Bolding on the case, Becca ran the risk of being tracked down. She might need to leave Whidbey in a rush, and she didn't want to do that, because Laurel would have no way of knowing where she'd gone.

Becca headed out of town. The fog made her cautious. It increased the time it took her to reach the end of Sandy Point Road and its zigzag of streets that took her to Diana's house. When she finally got there, she was wet from the damp and cold to her bones.

She rang the bell. A chorus of barking followed. As before, all of Diana's dogs came storming from the direction of the sunroom save for Oscar. He merely paced, and over the bouncing and bobbing heads of his comrades, he looked gravely at Becca through one of two windows that sided Diana's front door. Diana
herself was nowhere to be seen. Becca frowned when the woman made no appearance as she waited.

It was odd. Diana wouldn't go off and leave the dogs inside her house. And she wouldn't go off and leave Oscar behind. He was her constant companion, and even if Diana had for some reason gone somewhere without him, he and the other dogs would be in the run.

Becca tried the door and found it locked, also highly unusual for Diana if she was home. She went around to the side of the house to try the door to the mudroom, and she found the same. From there, she hurried to look through the sunroom windows. But nowhere was Diana in evidence.

Becca felt the first twinge of panic when she saw Diana's slippers and her robe next to the chaise where she sometimes rested in the sunroom. She had the distinct sensation of something being wrong, and she decided to go to the nearest neighbor. Diana lived alone. Diana could be ill. Diana could even be dead. No one would find her for days, and in that time the dogs would be in the house and they wouldn't have food and they wouldn't have water. . . . Becca forced herself to become calmer. She forced herself to walk, not run, back the way she'd come. She was on the driveway about to head to the nearest neighbor when the front door opened and Diana called her name.

“My goodness,” she said, and in reference to her dogs. “I wondered what got into them. Hello, Becca. I was in the shower. Isn't it a ghastly day?”

Until tomorrow . . . time isn't right . . .
came to Becca,
rendering her momentarily mute. She felt a chill beyond the chills she was already feeling from the weather. Those few words represented the first time that she had heard Diana Kinsale's whispers without Diana intending her to hear them. The whispers were choppy, just as Ralph Darrow's had been in the days before he'd had his stroke.

She said, “What's wrong, Mrs. Kinsale?” and she felt the same fear she'd felt when she'd phoned her mother from outside Carol Quinn's house after learning of that woman's death.

At Becca's question, Diana inhaled so deeply that Becca knew she was attempting to align her thoughts with whatever she said next. This was, “Nothing's wrong except exhaustion from doing too much work in the garden this morning. I plant and plant every spring, and I forget that a glorious garden in summer means a pile of work to winterize everything once January rolls around. I overdid things. Sometimes I forget I'm seventy-four. Do come in, Becca.”

Once inside, Becca greeted the milling dogs. They sniffed at her pockets. Diana said, “Do ignore them,” then she paused on her way to the kitchen and said, “On the other hand, would you put them in their run? Not Oscar, though.”

Becca called the dogs through the kitchen and the mudroom where the doorway marked the closest route to their run. They came, hopeful of treats to follow. As she hadn't intended to come to Diana's, she had nothing in her pockets, but she couldn't bear to disappoint them. She grabbed a package of freeze-dried chicken on her way out.

They crowded around her: out the door, across the lawn, and
over to the dog run. She swung open its gate, and in they went after her, giving her the loopy dog smiles that were characteristic of them when they knew something special was coming. Once they were inside, she rewarded each. But she also recognized that the large run had not been cleaned in ages. The stench was overpowering.

At this, she felt a resurgence of concern, because Mrs. Kinsale was religious about keeping the dogs' run shipshape. Becca looked from the run to the house, and this allowed her to see that the lawn, too, was speckled with piles of poop. This told her that Mrs. Kinsale hadn't been walking the dogs as she usually did, nor had she been throwing the ball for them down on the beach at Sandy Point, nor had she carted them to one of the island's dog parks.

Becca hurried back to the house. Mrs. Kinsale was in the kitchen, where the Seattle newspaper was spread on the table within the nook. She was in the process of folding it up, and she turned and offered Becca a smile.

She said, “Have I forgotten that we're practicing today?” And when Becca shook her head, “Good. I thought my memory was going along with the rest of me. Would you like some hot chocolate? Doesn't that sound perfect for a day like this? Hot chocolate with marshmallows on top?”

“Sounds good to me,” Becca said. “But only if you let me make it.”

“All right. There's a container of African chocolate in the pantry. I think you'll like it.”

As she set about it, Becca said, “I'll clean up the dog run for
you, Mrs. Kinsale, if you have some mulch delivered. And there's poop on the lawn, so I'll get that, too.”

Diana turned from excavating in a kitchen cupboard for a bag of marshmallows. “I can't let you do that,” she said. “Dog poop? That's pushing our friendship to the limit, Becca.”

“It'll be how I pay you for helping me manage the whispers.” Becca returned to the kitchen with the chocolate, and she rustled in the fridge for the milk. She saw it was nonfat and she held it up in a salute. “Well, at least we only have to feel partially guilty.”

She said nothing more about the purpose of her visit until they'd taken their hot chocolate to the sunroom, where Oscar was enjoying the heated floor. Diana chose the chaise longue after setting her robe and slippers to one side, while Becca sat nearby in a wicker chair. Usually, the beach cottages down on Sandy Point were visible from Diana's sunroom. But today only the environs of Diana's garden could be seen. The fog was getting thicker instead of dissipating, and Becca gave a worried thought to Derric driving to La Conner virtually blind.

Diana said, “Something tells me this isn't a social call.”

“I guess it usually isn't, huh?” Becca replied.

“I've no problem with that.” Diana reached for an afghan at the foot of the chaise and she spread it across her legs. “Tell me.”

Becca recounted everything she'd learned from her time on the Internet in Langley's library: from Connor West's implication of her and her mom in the embezzling scheme that he and Jeff Corrie had come up with to what Parker Natalia had informed her about his failures to unearth Laurel Armstrong. But what she stressed most was the dangers that she saw looming ahead
because of the reporter Olivia Bolding. A Pulitzer Prize nominee whose specialty was investigative reporting . . . ? There wasn't going to be a single place for Becca to hide on Whidbey Island if the reporter decided that this Hannah Armstrong part of the embezzling story was intriguing.

“I got to find my mom, Mrs. Kinsale. We got to find some place better than this for me and for her.”

Diana looked thoughtful. “I can see it's serious. But are you completely certain that Nelson is where your mother was going?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yet people do change their minds.”

“She wouldn't've.” Becca adjusted her position in the chair in order to emphasize what she said next. “See, she always watched this film that was made in Nelson. It was, like, three times a year that she watched it.”

“Perhaps she merely liked the film.”

“No. It was like she was looking for someone among the extras. I swear that's what it was like. There's someone up there and she meant to find him.”

“‘Him'?”

Becca circled her hands around the mug of hot chocolate and let its warmth give her the courage to voice what she had long suspected. “I think it's my dad,” she said. “I think she's gone to my dad and he's hiding her there. She's never told me who he is or where he lives or even how they got together. But this thing with her always watching that dumb film and then heading for Nelson once she left me here . . . Do you see?”

Diana set down her chocolate and extended her hand to
Becca. Becca took it, knowing what would happen. It would be warmth and a lifting of her anxiety, her worry, and her pain of not knowing. As always that was what occurred. But still Becca had to ask the question that had brought her to Diana Kinsale's house in the first place, although she felt a stinging of tears when she next spoke.

“What's going to
happen
, Mrs. Kinsale?”

“I don't have the power to tell you that.”

“But one time . . .” Becca felt a tear escape her right eye, and, impatient with herself for allowing her fears to get the better of her, she said, “You told me one time that Mom's safe from anyone being able to find her. You
must
know more.”

“I wish I did. But that's all I've ever felt about your mother. Safe is all that I can tell you.”