Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (17 page)

B
ecca thought about a lot of things after the meeting of the seal spotters that she’d witnessed in South Whidbey Commons. Mostly, though, what she thought about was Eddie Beddoe. Danger had seemed to roll off the man along with all the anger he displayed, and it didn’t take much for her to remember the day she’d run into him at Sandy Point. His whispers had spoken of
kill her that’s what.
She’d thought at the time he meant Diana Kinsale. But Diana had told her he meant the seal. The seal was responsible for his life’s hardships, he thought. The problem was, that didn’t make sense.

Making sense didn’t matter much, though. She’d felt the atmosphere that Eddie Beddoe created, and she figured his intentions toward Langley, its townspeople, and the seal they loved were very bad.

She hardly knew anything about the man, though. He’d lost a boat in a storm. He blamed a seal for that. At one time he’d been married to Sharla Mann. End of story. But after the seal spotters’ meeting, Becca wanted to know more. She just wasn’t sure how to discover it.

“Hey, Ivar, where’s that guy Eddie from?” didn’t get her far the next time she was at work in the chicken coop at Heart’s Desire.

“Lived in Possession Point for years,” was the extent to which Ivar illuminated her as he examined his pot plants and adjusted the grow lights over them. “Now he’s over in Glendale. Why d’you want to know?”

“Because he wants to kill Nera” didn’t seem like a smart way to go, all things considered. So she said, jiggling the truth a bit, “Sharla said one time she was married to him.”

Ivar nodded. “Oh yeah. They were married.”
Head examined
was his thought.

Becca didn’t know if Ivar’s whisper meant Eddie or Sharla. She waited for more, hoping to learn something, but all she got was
oil and water
, which made her think of the old saying that oil and water don’t ever mix.

But later, alone in her tree house with the wind kicking up a March storm outside, she thought of oil in a different way. She remembered the information about the oil spill that Jenn McDaniels had left on the computer in the library when Becca had sat down to see what was going on with Jeff Corrie. The spill, she recalled, had polluted Possession Point. Was that what Ivar had been talking about?

At her next scuba lesson, she decided to brave the lioness’s fangs and ask Jenn McDaniels about it. She hung around in the locker room after her shower, trying to make it seem less obvious that she was stalling for time by spending extra minutes on her hair. When the coast was clear and Jenn was alone by the lockers, Becca sauntered in, pretending to be gathering her things. She said casually to Jenn, “Hey, Jenn, d’you know anything about that oil spill in Possession Point?”

She might have said “D’you know there’re six aliens standing in the locker room doorway?” because Jenn’s reaction was about in line with having heard that instead of a simpler question. She turned slowly and examined Becca with so many swear words pounding from her head that Becca dug the AUD box from her backpack and slid it onto the waistband of her jeans, following this with making a very big procedure about screwing the earphone into place.

“What d’you
really
want around here?” was Jenn’s demand. “I mean, aside from Derric Mathieson who, by the way, is totally inside Courtney Baker’s pants in case you didn’t know.”

Becca took a few steadying breaths. She said to Jenn, “Thanks for the info, but he and I are way done, so he’s free to climb into anyone’s pants. He can wear them, even. So, what about the oil spill? D’you know anything? I know you live down there.”

Jenn’s eyes narrowed. “And you know this, how?”

Becca faltered under her gaze. “I don’t even remember. Derric must’ve said. I dunno. Why? Does that make a difference or something?”

Jenn slammed the door of her locker. She was wearing only a towel, which she dropped to the floor. Becca, embarrassed, looked away. Jenn hooted. Then she began to talk.

Yeah, there was an oil spill. Yeah, it was in Possession Point. It was bilge oil and it was bad and it wrecked a lot of sea life and a lot of the shore.

So far so good, Becca thought. She asked, then, about Eddie Beddoe. He lived there, right? At the time of the oil spill?

Jenn shrugged. “He has a trailer down there. He might’ve lived in it then. Hell if I know. And why d’
you
care?”

Becca fiddled around with her backpack long enough to make sure Jenn had put on some clothes. Then she looked up and said, “It’s just that . . . I heard him going on at that meeting? The one in South Whidbey Commons? He was going on about the seal? I asked Ivar Thorndyke about it and he said Eddie came from Possession Point. So I just wondered. . . .”

“What were
you
doing there?” Jenn’s eyes were narrow and her face was a scowl.

“Huh? Where?”

“God
. Where else, Fattie? South Whidbey Commons. What were
you
doing there?”

“Like, I wasn’t supposed to be there or something?” Becca asked.

“Like, I like my life better when you’re nowhere near it and I was at the meeting. Why didn’t I see you?”

“I was talking to Seth.”

“Ohhhh. Seth. The new boyfriend Seth.”

Becca sighed and tried to summon up patience. Jenn McDaniels had to be the most impossible girl on the planet. She said, “Look. I’m just asking. You don’t have to tell me anything, okay?”

“Good because I’m not going to.”

“I guess that means you don’t know,” Becca said.

“Hey, I know lots. I know a hell of a lot more than you. There was an oil spill and he probably lived there then and if you want to know for sure, why the hell don’t you ask him? Or are you too scared? Yeah that’s it, I bet. He scares you, doesn’t he?”

“I get the feeling he scares everyone,” Becca told her. She gave up on Jenn and left the locker room.

• • •

BILGE OIL
WAS
bad, as Jenn had declared, and it didn’t take much effort for Becca to discover this. In the case of Whidbey Island, the bilge oil had been put into a ship in the wrong way, somehow. The result of this was pipes cracking in that vessel and oil leaking from it as it moved from the Port of Everett into the shipping lanes of Puget Sound. The leak happened at night, and no one knew about it until the morning when the tide had brought the sludge of it to shore and deposited it all over Possession Point.

She got some of her facts from the biology teacher at the high school. She put together others by ducking into a white cottage on Second Street in Langley, where the historical society had set up a museum about the village and where other information was stored, including information in the memories of the volunteers who ran the place. There, Becca learned that the stuff that had polluted Possession Point had been toxic to whatever it came into contact with. People wore hazmat suits just to go near it, and all sorts of individuals from the island had been hired to help clean up the mess.

Toxic meant deadly. Becca knew that. Wildlife died when it was covered by the oil. She wondered, though, what happened to people when they came into contact with the oil, too. Did it get onto their skin, into their systems, into their blood, into their brains? Did it eat at their minds? Was that at the bottom of what was going on with Eddie Beddoe? Why else, she wondered, would he see a seal as something he needed to kill? It’s not like he was a fisherman being robbed of his catch or something.

She wanted badly to talk to someone who could answer her questions, but the only person she could think of was Sharla. And Sharla barely talked about anything at all.

She said, “Oil spill?” and her whispers said
too close past remembering happened and gone
, which wasn’t helpful to Becca. She went on with, “I lived there, sure. My husband, he helped with the cleanup. Everyone did.”

“It was bad, huh?” Becca said. They were doing the dishes on one of the nights that Sharla had invited Becca to stay for dinner after her work in Ivar’s chicken coop. “I saw pictures at the historical society. People had on hazmat suits.”

“Oh, sure,” Sharla said. But
Not Eddie . . . oil like a second skin on the man
suggested something else, and Becca felt the hair on her arms stir.

“What about you?” Becca asked. “Did you have to wear at hazmat suit?”

Not Eddie not Eddie the sight and the smell eight days and then no no I won’t.

What
did she mean? Becca asked herself.
What
couldn’t she bear to think about?

Ivar either couldn’t or wouldn’t help her. The subject of Eddie Beddoe was a sore one for him. All he would say was “F’r all I know, Becks, Eddie Beddoe was crazier’n a rabid raccoon long before there was any oil on the beach. And a helluva long time after, too.”

That was it until one day in the chicken coop, and at that point Becca had pretty much given up trying to sort out what was amiss with Eddie Beddoe. She was hard at work with more of the chicken coop’s contents, still doing her part to make sense of the place. Under a pile of what smelled like ancient blankets that had been used for horses, she came upon an old brass-bound trunk. It had no lock, so she pulled it into the center of the building where the light was better. It was covered with grime despite the blankets, and as it had no lock and she was curious, she opened it.

Right on the top was a pile of pictures, some in frames and some not. She took them out and slowly looked through them. Eddie Beddoe, she saw, and Sharla Mann. They were wedding pictures from a long time ago, but there was no mistaking Eddie Beddoe. He was as big as a member of the Bunyan clan and Sharla on his arm looked young and pretty. It was sad, Becca thought, how everything changed. She wondered if more than an oil spill had changed things.

So she looked. She knew it wasn’t entirely right to be going through Sharla Mann’s old belongings, but she did it anyway because Sharla’s whispers—such as they were—told her there was more to know. And having such knowledge
could
be important, she told herself. It could help her keep Eddie Beddoe from doing whatever he intended to do to harm people.

Halfway through old clothes, tablecloths, and towels, she found it. Three small pairs of OshKosh overalls, three small T-shirts, three pairs of socks, one pair of shoes. They were sized for a toddler. But Sharla, she recalled, had never had a child.

• • •

BECCA THOUGHT ABOUT
this as she rode her bike back to her hiding place in the woods. She stowed the bike deep within the trees and began the hike to the clearing where the tree house waited. As she walked, she reviewed what she knew: about the oil spill, about Eddie Beddoe, about Sharla Mann and those small child’s clothes. She thought about Ivar Thorndyke, too. She wondered if he was one of the people who wasn’t revealing everything he knew.

All of this was on her mind when the clearing came into view ahead of her in the evening shadows. A figure was moving slowly across it. She quickly ducked out of sight behind the huge trunk of an old-growth hemlock. Her heart slamming in her throat, she waited. Carefully, she peered around the tree to see what was going on.

She knew the old man who was gazing at the ground. It was Seth’s grandfather, Ralph Darrow. She’d never met him but she’d seen him with Seth: once through the window where she’d stood outside in the darkness and watched Grandpa and Grandson play chess in front of the huge stone fireplace in Ralph Darrow’s living room and once alone and working in his garden. But she’d never seen him out this far into the woods, and she knew his presence meant trouble.

He was studying the area beneath the tree house. She knew what was there. Her footprints were all over the place. So were Seth’s. As she watched, he went to the bottom of the tree house stairs and looked up at the trap door in the balcony floor which, Becca thanked God, she’d closed when she left. She also thanked God that there was nothing visible on the balcony to betray her. That wasn’t the same for the galvanized bucket and the shovel and the rake hidden behind a tree not thirty feet from where Ralph Darrow stood. There was also a low pile of logs that Seth had filched from Ralph for her use in the woodstove, but they were hidden as well, so if he didn’t look, he wouldn’t see.

He put his hand on the tree house stairs, and Becca held her breath. If he climbed, if he went inside, she was totally finished. And there’d be hell for Seth to pay.

She could only imagine how things would play out then. Ralph Darrow would discover her. He would say, “Who the heck are you?” first. Second he would ask, “Do your parents know where you are?” and then, if she answered that question with any degree of truth, his next one would be, “What’re you doing on the island, then?” And that would take them eventually to her mother, to San Diego, and to everything else.

In the clearing, Ralph Darrow put his foot on the bottom of the tree house stairs. He hesitated. Becca concentrated to catch his whispers. The only one she heard was
blasted boy . . . up to now.
Then he changed his mind about climbing up to see what the blasted boy had been up to. Instead, he turned away and headed in the direction of the main trail. It would take him away from Becca and back to his house.