The Edge of Nowhere (31 page)

Becca cleared the leaves from the site and began to pull at the weeds. When she’d completed this job, she rustled in her backpack and found a ruler and started to use this against the lichen. She was going at this industriously when a hand touched her shoulder. She shrieked. Diana Kinsale jumped backward, a hand at her heart. She said, “Lord! I’m
sorry
.”

Becca looked beyond her and saw Diana’s truck in the other, newer part of the cemetery, parked near her husband’s grave. Diana said, “They’re not with me this time,” in reference to her dogs. “I just stopped to say hello to Charlie.” She looked down at Reese Grieder’s grave. She said, “Are you cleaning it? That’s very kind of you.”

“It looked sort of sad.”

“It needs a plant or two, I think,” Diana said. “Even some greenery would help, if you put it into the flower holder. Shall I get some for you? From over there?” She took a few steps in the direction of the trees at the cemetery’s edge, where ferns grew in a rich profusion. But this put her on a direct line to the AUD box, and Becca cried, “Wait!”

Diana’s expression was startled. Becca dashed over to where she was standing and scooped the AUD box from the ground where it had been half-hidden in a clump of the overlong grass.

Diana said, “Yours?” and she reached for it, turning it over in her hand so that the damage Jenn had done to it showed. “What is it?”

Becca said what she’d learned to say about her hearing problems. She embellished a bit with Diana Kinsale, adding, “I had ear infections all the time when I was little. . . . My hearing’s not right because of that. It’s a sound spectrum problem.”

Diana looked at her quizzically. “You sure this isn’t a radio, Becca?”

“I wish. All it does it help me equalize sounds. It blocks background noise so I c’n focus.” It was the spiel she’d heard her mother give teachers and other adults so many times that she could say it from memory.

“It looks broken now.”

Becca lied without thinking about why she would bother to protect Jenn McDaniels. “I was riding up the hill, on the road by the fairgrounds? It fell out of my pocket and my back tire went over it. I’ve got to figure out a way to fix it because without it, I’m hopeless if there’s more than one person around me talking.”

What she didn’t add was that right now without the AUD box working, she should have been picking up whispers from Diana since Diana was the only person around and Diana clearly
had
to have something going on in her head. But as before, nothing came off the woman, not a single whisper, not even a word.

Diana said, “I know someone who can probably fix this if you’d like me to take it to him.”

“I was sort of figuring that maybe I could take it to the metal shop at school . . . ? I was hoping they could solder it or something?”

“Perhaps,” Diana said, “but it’s probably not quite like anything they’ve dealt with in the metal shop.” She waited a moment. A few drops of rain fell. She looked at the sky and then at Becca and said, “I
can
help you, you know, my dear.”

Becca hesitated. She didn’t know about accepting help because the only people who could really help her were gone. She said, “I was just thinking . . . I mean, I need it back pretty fast because of school.”

Diana said, “I’ll have it back to you before you begin to worry about where it is.”

She walked over to Charlie’s grave then. She sat on the little bench there and bent her head and for the very first time, Becca caught a whisper in the air that had to have come from her. It was
the one, Charlie? . . . how will I know . . .

Becca looked away quickly, back to Reese’s gravestone. She returned to cleaning the lichen from it.

ONCE BECCA DECIDED
to allow Diana Kinsale to see to the AUD box, she tried not to worry about whether she’d get it back. It was tough enough just to concentrate without the device.

She spent a lot of time in the town library as a result. She also did her work for Debbie. Plus, she went out to the cemetery to continue fixing up Reese’s grave, and she tried to keep away from Jenn McDaniels as much as possible. She also kept clear of any place where she might be seen by the undersheriff and get confronted with some of the questions he appeared to be asking everyone he encountered. This meant, unfortunately, keeping away from the hospital in Coupeville. That meant not seeing Derric.

He filled her thoughts, anyway. Particularly she thought about the picture on his bedside table, with him and his band and his saxophone. She thought of him with those little children hanging on him and his bandmates. She thought of the music that filled the air when she touched her hand to his. Becca sent him every good wish she could, but she knew she couldn’t risk going to see him.

Yet Becca knew she
had
to talk to someone. For always at the back of her mind was the sight of that footprint on the trail where Derric had fallen. Not saying a word about it meant not getting to the bottom of what really had happened that day in the woods. But saying a word meant getting the information to the undersheriff, and when she thought about
that
, she always reached the same conclusion: He was going to want to talk to whoever had seen that footprint. And she couldn’t have that.

Several days after she’d handed over the AUD box to Diana Kinsale, Becca was in the Langley library working on a paper for her English class. She was using one of the library computers, but the challenge was enormous because of the whispers she was picking up on. Whereas most of the time, the whispers were general buzzes of useless information that she couldn’t even apply to a particular person, there was something about the silence in the library that allowed her to pinpoint where the whispers were coming from, which made it more difficult for her to concentrate on her work. The worst at the moment was coping with the whispers coming from the man at the computer next to her. He was looking at Match.com and his whisper of
what kind of book she might think I like
was something Becca was itching to reply to. The man was about a million years old and he’d been looking at women who appeared to be about twenty-five. Becca wanted to tell him that it wasn’t
exactly
going to matter to them what kind of book he might like if he wasn’t rich, so he’d be better off thinking
how much money she might think I have
and go from that angle rather than trying to discuss
Huckleberry Finn
with them.

Becca wanted to giggle when this came to her mind. She knew she’d reached the point of having
nothing
more to write on her English paper. So she used the rest of her quarters to print up what she’d written so far about
The Merchant of Venice
and its relevance today and she left the library.

She crossed the street so that she could walk along the bluff on her way back to the Cliff Motel. She looked out into the passage. It was late afternoon, so the sun was behind her, casting long shadows from the overgrown bluff out onto the golden water.

What she saw then in the passage brought a smile to her face. The surface of the water was broken by a fin. Then another broke the water, followed by a third. All of them were huge. They were also black. As she watched, she caught a glimpse of flukes as well.

“Orcas!” she cried. She took off at a run for the Cliff Motel. The kids would want to see this, she thought. So would Debbie.

She dashed into the office, crying, “Hey, you guys, there’s—” but Debbie was on the phone and she held up her hand to stop Becca and said to someone on the other end of the line, “Just don’t touch that bottle. You want me to come over?” and covering the mouthpiece of the receiver with her hand, she said to Becca, “I need you to clean room twelve-sixteen.”

Becca dropped her backpack and said, “Sure. Where are the kids? There’s at least three orcas—”

“Room twelve-sixteen, Becca. There’re people on their way from Tacoma.”

Josh, though, had come into the office from the family apartment. He said, “Orcas! Where?” as Chloe ran into the office as well.

Becca said to Debbie, “This’ll only take a sec. I promise,” and to the kids, “Quick, come with me.”

She took them around the side of the motel to the back. It was easy to see Saratoga Passage here and the direction in which the orcas had been swimming.

She helped the kids edge through tall ocean spray bushes at the top of the bluff, holding each child by the hand. Chloe was bouncing with excitement and Josh was listing everything he knew about orcas, which turned out to be quite a lot. They were killer whales, he told Becca, because they were carnivorous, and they hunted their prey, and they were really, really big. They didn’t kill
people
, but only sea creatures that they needed for food. They were apex predators and—

“There!” Becca pointed out the fins. There were seven of them now.

“Whales, whales, whales!” Chloe cried.

She bounced on her feet while Josh shouted with delight, and Becca thought about how free they all were in that moment: she and the kids and especially the orcas. No one hunted them any longer. They were safe in Puget Sound.

When the whales were finally out of sight, it had grown nearly dark. Becca said, “I’ve got to clean room twelve-sixteen or I’ll get my butt kicked by your grammer.”

“We’ll help,” Chloe said, as they crossed the grass at the back of the motel.

Becca didn’t think that having the kids help was what Debbie had in mind, and she knew they would probably just get in her way. So instead of accepting Chloe’s offer, she said, “Here’s what you can do to help. Chloe, we’ll get the sheets and towels and you take them to the laundry room. Josh, you get the cleaning cart and wheel it over to the twelve-sixteen. I’ll meet you there and—”

They’d come around the corner of the motel. Becca stopped in her tracks and pulled the kids quickly back out of sight. The undersheriff’s car was just pulling into the Cliff’s parking lot. Laurel, San Diego, and the cell phone, Becca thought. It had finally happened. Jeff Corrie was next, no doubt about it. Her day of reckoning was upon her.

TWENTY-EIGHT

“N
ew game,” Becca whispered to the kids. “Cops and robbers. Be real quiet.”

The kids squealed. Chloe covered her mouth and bounced from foot to foot.

“Here’s how it works,” Becca said. “You go to the office without anyone seeing you.”

“Even Grammer?”

“Even Grammer. You get my backpack. It’s just inside the door, okay? You bring it back to me without being seen.”

“What about room twelve-sixteen?”

“That’ll come later,” Becca told them.

“Is there a prize if no one sees us?” Josh whispered.

“There’s always a prize. But later, not now, okay?”

“’Kay!”

Becca watched as they slinked along the porch. Then she faded back out of sight and hoped for their success. Even if the undersheriff beat them into the office to talk to Debbie, there was still a chance that they could get in there and snag the backpack without being seen.

They managed it. Or at least Josh did because Chloe, he said, was “creating a version. She pretended to fall. We had to do it ’cause Grammer was still on the phone.”

“Great,” Becca said. “Now you head back and I’ll see you later. After the undersheriff’s gone, okay?”

“But the undersheriff’s not—”

“Just go back and don’t mention me to anyone. I’ll be back sooner than you think.”

This last was a lie, and Becca hoped she’d be forgiven for it eventually. She grabbed Josh and kissed the top of his head. Then she cut through some bushes and emerged on Cascade Street.

She crossed over and dashed behind a long, shingled building that was the Saratoga Inn. This put her out of sight of Cascade Street, where there was little doubt the undersheriff’s car would come cruising the moment he had finished talking to Debbie, which would
also
be the exact same moment after he was told about the fourteen-year-old girl who was staying at the Cliff, waiting for her mother to show up.

Becca hunkered down against a Dumpster at the edge of the inn’s property. She was out of sight of the inn’s windows, and that was how she wanted it because she needed to think.

She could handle seeing the undersheriff. She could even, perhaps, bluff her way through a real conversation with the man. But if Jeff had reported his wife and daughter as missing and if he’d said in his smooth Jeff Corrie way, “Say, let me e-mail you a picture of them so you know who you’re looking for,” there was still a chance that her looks weren’t changed enough and the undersheriff would recognize her, and she couldn’t risk that.

Becca hit her fists gently against her forehead, as if this would help her know what to do. She rested her cheek on her knees and she saw the lights of the library go out for the end of the day. Next to the library was the tiny brick city hall, also the location of the police department. So she could hardly stay in her present position because surely the undersheriff would check in with the local police and share her picture and tell them whom to be on the lookout for.