The Edge of Nowhere and The Edge of the Water

ON WHIDBEY ISLAND, NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS.

Becca’s ability to hear “whispers”—the thoughts of others—has put her at risk from her criminal stepfather. So Becca escapes to Whidbey Island, where she hopes to find safety. But when a terrible accident affects everyone on the island, Becca finds herself wrapped up in a complicated mystery, and she isn’t the only one with a secret. . . .

••“Blending mystery, family drama, teen angst and a dose of

paranormal, this novel rises above many in the young adult genre.”—USATODAY.com

“George has hit the nail on the proverbial head with this action-packed, mysterious, and somewhat ‘creepy’ novel . . . the writing is superb.”

—Suspense Magazine

An Edgar Award Nominee

An Agatha Award Nominee

www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com

Becca’s mystery continues in The Edge of the Water.

Cover Design: Greg StadnykCover Photo © Aleshyn Andrei / Shutterstock

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TITLE: Edge of Nowhere 5.5 × 8.25 SPINE: 1.16DATE: 8/28/13

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Be not afeared: the isle is full of noises,Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

EdgeofNowhere_INT_3P.indd 1 5/10/12 10:52 AM

How Things Began

On the last day of Hannah Armstrong’s existence, things were normal for a while. She made a 94 percent on a math test, and she accepted a movie date for later in the week.

She walked home, as usual. She didn’t use her hearing device since she didn’t really need it outside of school. This gadget had the appearance of an iPod, but it didn’t play music. Instead it played a form of static that removed from Hannah’s hearing the disjointed thoughts of other people. Since babyhood, she’d heard these broken thoughts of others, which she’d learned to call whispers. But they came into her head like a badly tuned radio; she could never tell exactly who the whisperer was if more than one person was present; and they made school a nightmare for her. So a mechanism that her mom called an AUD box had been manufactured for Hannah. She’d worn it since she was seven years old.

When she arrived home, she went to the stairs. She headed up to her room, only to see her stepfather come stealthily out of it.

They locked eyes. Damn . . . what’s she doing . . . why didn’t . . . came into Hannah’s head from Jeff Corrie as whispers always did, disconnected and seemingly random. She frowned as she heard them, and she wondered what her stepfather had been doing in


4 Elizabeth George

her room besides trying once again to gather reassurance that she wasn’t going to tell her mother how she’d been helping him with his latest scheme.

It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to help him, either. But Jeff Corrie had Hannah’s mom in some sort of thrall that had more to do with his looks than his character, and caught up in their dizzy-ing relationship, she’d told him what went on inside Hannah’s head when she wasn’t wearing the AUD box. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out a way to use Hannah’s talent. He decided to “employ” her as the cake and coffee girl at his investment house, just the person to bring in the refreshments and listen to the whispers of his clients in order to read their weaknesses. He and his pal Connor separated old folks from their money in this way. It was a grand scheme and it was making them millions.

Hannah had never wanted to help him. She knew it was wrong. But she feared this man and she feared the fact that his whispers, his words, and the expressions on his face never matched up. She didn’t know what this meant. But she knew it wasn’t good. So she said nothing to anyone. She just did what she was told and waited for whatever was going to happen next. She had no idea it would happen that very afternoon.

Jeff Corrie said, “What’re you doing home?” His gaze went to her right ear where the earphone to the AUD box usually was.

Hannah dug the box out of her pocket and clipped it on the waistband of her jeans, screwing the earphone into her ear as well. His eyes narrowed till he saw her turn up the volume. Then he seemed to relax.

“It’s three thirty,” she told him.


5The Edge of Nowhere

“Start your homework,” he said.He went past her and down the stairs. She heard him yelling,

“Laurel? Where the hell are you? Hannah’s home,” as if his wife was supposed to do something about that.

Hannah put her backpack in her room. Everything seemed to be the way she’d left it that morning. Still, she went to the bed-side table to check the drawer.

The tiny piece of clear tape was ripped off. Someone had opened the drawer. Someone had read her journal.

It wasn’t enough, she thought, that she helped him and his friend. He had to possess her thoughts on the matter, too. Well, good luck to figuring out how I feel, Daddy Jeff, Hannah scoffed. Like I’d write something honest and actually leave it in my bed-room for you?

She left her room and descended the stairs. She heard her mom and Jeff Corrie talking in the kitchen. She joined them there and turned away from the sight of Jeff Corrie nuzzling her mother’s neck. He was murmuring, “What about n-o-w?” and Laurel was laughing and playing at pushing him away. But Hannah knew her mom liked what was going on between her and her husband. She loved the guy, and her love was as deaf and as dumb as it was blind.

Hannah said, “Hi, Mom,” and opened the refrigerator, reach-ing for a carton of milk.

Laurel said, “Hey. No hi to Jeff?”“Already saw him upstairs,” Hannah told her. She added,

“Gosh. He didn’t tell you, Mom?” just to see how she would react. Don’t trust him, don’t trust him, she wanted to say. But she could only plant seeds. She couldn’t paint pictures.


6 Elizabeth George

There was a silence between Laurel and Jeff. With the refrig-erator door still open, hiding her from them, Hannah turned off the volume of the AUD box.

He’s not . . . he can’t be . . . had to be from her mother, she thought.

She tried to hear Jeff, but there was nothing.Then everything changed, and life as Hannah had known it

ended.Little bitch always thinks . . . a break-in . . . surprise . . .

Connor . . . if she hears that a gun . . . because dead isn’t always dead these days . . .

The carton of milk slipped from Hannah’s fingers and sloshed onto the floor. She swung around from the refrigerator and her eyes met Jeff’s.

“Clumsy,” he said, but inside his head was something different.His gaze went from Hannah’s face to her ear to the AUD box

on her waist.She heard was the last thing Hannah heard before she ran

from the room.


PART ONE

••The Cliff


ONE

Becca King’s mother, Laurel, had traded the Lexus SUV at the first opportunity after they’d descended interstate five

on the serpentine stretch of highway known as the Grapevine in California. She’d lost money on the car, but money wasn’t the issue. Getting away from San Diego along with getting rid of the Lexus was. She’d traded it for a 1998 Jeep Wrangler, and the moment they’d crossed the California state line into Oregon, she began looking for a place to unload the Jeep as well. A 1992 Toyota RAV4 came next. But that only took them up through Oregon to the border with Washington. As quickly as possible and making sure it was all legal, Laurel then dumped the Toyota for a 1988 Ford Explorer, which was what mother and daughter had driven ever since.

Becca hadn’t questioned any of this. She’d known the desper-ate reason it had to be done, just as she knew the reason there could be no more Hannah Armstrong. For she and her mother were traveling as fast as they could, leaving house, school, and names behind them. Now they sat in the Explorer in Mukilteo, Washington. The car was backed into a parking space in front of an old wooden-floored store called Woody’s Market, across the water from Whidbey Island.


12 Elizabeth George

It was early evening, and a heavy mist that was not quite fog hung between the mainland and the island. From where they were parked, Whidbey was nothing more than an enormous hulk surmounted by tall conifers and having a band of lights at the bottom where a few houses were strung along the shore. To Becca, with an entire life lived in San Diego, the place looked forbidding and foreign. She couldn’t imagine herself there, trying to establish a new life far away from her stepfather’s reach. To Laurel, the island looked like a safety net where she could leave her daughter in the care of a childhood friend for the time it would take her to establish a place of refuge in British Columbia. There, she figured that she and Becca would be safe from discov-ery by Jeff Corrie.

Laurel had felt overwhelming relief when her longtime Bohemian lifestyle had been enough to quash any questions from her friend. Carol Quinn had not even acted surprised that Laurel would ask her to care for her daughter for a length of time she couldn’t begin to name. Instead of questioning this, Carol said no problem, bring her on up, she can help me out. Haven’t been feeling so great lately, Carol had said, so I could use an assistant in the house.

But will you keep this a secret? Laurel had asked her over and over again.

To my grave, Carol Quinn had promised. No worries, Laurel. Bring her on up.

Now Laurel lowered her window two inches, to keep the windshield from fogging up. The middle of September, and she hadn’t had a clue the weather would have changed so much. In southern California, September was the hottest month of the



year, a time of forest fires driven by winds off the desert. Here, it already felt like winter. Laurel shivered and grabbed a sweatshirt from the back of the car, where it lay against the wheel of Becca’s old ten-speed.

She said, “Cold?” Becca shook her head. She was breathing deeply, and while she usually did this to calm herself, she was doing it now because on the air was the scent of waffle cones meant for ice cream, and it was coming from Woody’s Market behind them.

They’d already been inside. Becca had already asked for a cone. Laurel had already made the automatic reply of “In through the lips and onto the hips.” She was a woman who, on the run from a criminal, could still count her daughter’s intake of calo-ries. But Becca was hungry. They hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch. A snack certainly wasn’t going to blow up her thighs like balloons.

She said, “Mom . . .”Laurel turned to her. “Tell me your name.”They’d been through this exercise five times daily since leav-

ing their home, so Becca wasn’t happy to go through it another time. She understood the importance of it, but she wasn’t an idiot. She’d memorized it all. She sighed and looked in the other direction. “Becca King,” she said.

“And what are you to remember as Job Number One?”“Help Carol Quinn around the house.”“Aunt Carol,” Laurel said. “You’re to call her Aunt Carol.”“Aunt Carol, Aunt Carol, Aunt Carol,” Becca said.“She knows you have a little money until I can start sending

you more,” Laurel said. “But the more you can help her . . . It’s like earning your keep.”


14 Elizabeth George

“Yes,” Becca said. “I will become someone’s slave because you married a maniac, Mom.”

Oh God what did he do to you when you’re my only—“Sorry,” Becca said, hearing her mom’s pain. “Sorry. Sorry.”“Get out of my head,” Laurel told her. “And tell me your name.

Full name this time.”There was a parking lot to Becca’s right, across the main road

that ended with the ferry dock. People had been sauntering from cars in that lot to a food stand just to one side of the dock. A sign declaring the place to be Ivar’s was shining through the mist, and a line of people making purchases had formed. Becca’s stomach growled.

“Tell me your name,” Laurel repeated. “This is important.” Her voice was calm enough, but beneath the gentle tone was come on come on there’s so little time please do this for me it’s the last thing I’ll ask, and Becca could feel those words coming at her, invad-ing her brain, perfectly clear because that was how her mother’s thoughts always were, unlike the whispers that came from oth-ers. She wanted to tell her mom not to worry. She wanted to tell her that Jeff Corrie might forget about them. But she knew the first statement was useless, and she knew the second was an outright lie.

Becca turned back to her mother and their eyes met and lis-ten my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere came from Laurel.

“Very funny,” Becca said to her. “It would’ve been nice if you’d memorized something else in sixth grade besides that, you know.”

“Tell me your name,” Laurel said again.



“All right. All right. Rebecca Dolores King.” Becca grimaced. “God. Does it have to be Dolores? I mean, who has a name like Dolores these days?”

Laurel ignored the question. “Where are you from?”Becca said patiently because there was no point to anything

other than patience at the moment, “San Luis Obispo. Sun Valley, Idaho, before that. I was born in Sun Valley, but I left when I was seven and that’s when my family moved to San Luis Obispo.”

“Why are you here?”“I’m staying with my aunt.”“Where are your parents?”“My mom’s on a dig in . . .” Becca frowned. For the first time

since they’d fled California, she couldn’t remember. She assumed it was the fact that she was so hungry because she was never at her best when there were physical needs that had to be taken care of. She said, “Damn. I can’t remember.”

Laurel’s head clunked back against the headrest of her seat. “You have to remember. This is crucial. It’s life and death. Where are your parents?”

Becca looked at her mother, hoping for a clue but all she picked up was on the eighteenth of April in seventy-five hardly a man is now alive, which wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She looked back at Ivar’s. A woman bent over with osteoporosis was turning from the counter with a carton in her hand and she looked so old . . . and then it came to Becca. Old.

“Olduvai Gorge,” she said. “My mom’s on a dig in Olduvai Gorge.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, but shortly before they’d made their run from Jeff Corrie, Becca had read an old book about the discovery of Lucy, aka Australopithecus


16 Elizabeth George

afarensis, in Olduvai Gorge by an ambitious postgraduate fresh out of the University of Chicago. She’d been the one to suggest that her mother be a paleontologist. It sounded romantic to her.

Laurel nodded, satisfied. “What about your father? Where’s your father? Don’t you have a father?”

Becca rolled her eyes. It was clear that this was going to go on till the ferry arrived because her mother wanted no time to think of anything else. Least of all did she want to think of how she’d endangered her daughter. So Becca said deliberately, “Which father would that be, Mom?” and then she reached in her pocket and pulled out the single earphone of the AUD box. She shoved it into her ear. She turned up the volume and her head filled with static, soothing to her as always, the way satin is soothing against someone’s skin.

Laurel reached over and yanked the earphone out of Becca’s ear. She said, “I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry I’m not who you want me to be. But here’s the thing: no one ever is.”

At this, Becca got out of the car. She had money enough in her jeans to buy herself something to eat, and more money in the pockets of her jacket. She fully intended to use it. There was even more money in her backpack if she wanted to buy everything on the menu, but the backpack was with her bike in the back of the Explorer and if she tried to get at it, she knew her mother would stop her.

Becca crossed the road. To her left, she could see the ferry coming, and she paused for a moment and watched its approach. When Laurel had first told her that she would get to Whidbey Island on a ferry, Becca had thought of the only ferry she’d ever been on, an open-air raft that held four cars and sailed about two



hundred yards across the harbor in Newport Beach, California. This thing approaching was nothing like that. It was huge, with a gaping mouth for cars to slide into. It was all lit up like a riverboat and seagulls were flying around it.

The line at Ivar’s had diminished by the time Becca got there. She ordered clam chowder and made sure it was the New England kind, made with milk and potatoes and therefore pos-sessing a dizzying number of calories. She asked for an extra bag of oyster crackers to float in the container, and when she had to pay, she did it in coins. She placed them carefully one at a time on the counter, and oh damn . . . what the . . . stupid chick told her that the cashier wasn’t pleased. Becca saw why when the cashier had to pick up the coins with fingers minus their nails. She’d bit-ten them down to the quick. They were ugly, and Becca saw the cashier hated them to be on display.

Becca thought about saying sorry but instead she said thanks and took her chowder over to a newspaper stand. She balanced the soup container on top and dipped her spoon into it as she watched the ferry come nearer to the mainland.

The chowder wasn’t what she expected. She’d been thinking it would be like the chowder her stepfather two stepfathers ago had made. He was called Pete and he used corn in his, and Becca was a corn girl. Popcorn, corn on the cob, frozen corn. It didn’t matter. Laurel claimed corn was what was fed to cows and pigs to make them fat, but since Laurel said that about nearly every-thing Becca wanted to eat, Becca didn’t give much thought to the matter.

Still, this particular chowder wasn’t worth fighting over with Laurel. So Becca ate only half of it. Then she jammed her con-


18 Elizabeth George

tainer into a trash can and sprinted back toward the Explorer.Laurel was on her cell phone. Her face, now without its spray

tan, looked gray and weathered. For the first time, Becca thought of her mother as old, but then Laurel smiled and nodded and started talking in that way where no one could squeeze in a word. Carol Quinn was probably getting an earful, Becca thought. Her mom had been calling her twice a day to make sure every detail of the plan was hammered into position irreversibly.

Their eyes met, and when they did, what Becca heard was no one’s ever going to hurt, but that was cut off the way a radio gets cut off when someone changes stations and what came over the airways next was one if by land and two if by sea and I on the opposite shore will be. It was just like static from the AUD box and it worked as well. Laurel said something into the cell phone and ended the call.

Becca got into the Explorer. Her mother said sharply, “Was that New England clam chowder you were eating?”

Becca said, “I didn’t eat it all.”Ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex

village and farm took the place of what Laurel wanted to say but it didn’t matter and Becca told her so. “Stop it,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking anyway.”

Laurel said, “Let’s not fight.” She reached over and touched her daughter’s hair. “Carol will be waiting for you when the ferry docks,” she said quietly. “She has a truck for the bike, so there’s nothing to worry about. She knows what you look like and if she isn’t there when you arrive, just wait because she’ll be on her way. Okay, sweetheart? Hey. Are you hearing me?”

Becca was. She was hearing the words. She was also feel-



ing the emotion behind them. She said, “It’s not all your fault, Mom.”

“There’s more than one kind of fault,” her mother replied. “If you don’t know that yet, believe me, you will.”

Becca reached for her backpack in the back of the Ford. Laurel said, “Where are the glasses? You’ll need to put them on now.”

“No one’s looking at me.”“You need to put them on. You need to get in the habit.

Where’s the extra hair dye? How many batteries do you have for the AUD box? What’s your name? Where’s your mother?”

Becca looked at her then. Listen my children listen my chil-dren, but there was no need for Laurel to recite that poem over and over, even if she couldn’t recall the rest of the words at that moment. For Becca read her expression as anyone could have done. Her mother was terrified. She was going on instinct alone just as she always had, but because her last instinct had been the one telling her to marry Jeff Corrie, she no longer trusted what her gut was telling her.

Becca said, “Mom. I’ll be okay,” and she was surprised when Laurel’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother hadn’t cried once since they’d left San Diego. She hadn’t cried at all since she’d spent herself crying when she’d learned who Jeff Corrie really was and what Jeff Corrie had done. We can’t go to the police, her mother had told her through her tears. God in heaven, sweetheart, who will believe you? No one’s reported a body yet and if we do . . . we have no evidence Jeff was involved. So she’d laid her plans and they’d made a run for it and here they were on the brink of something from which there was no return.


20 Elizabeth George

Becca reached out and took her mother’s hand. “Listen to what I know,” she said.

“What do you know?”“Rebecca Dolores King, Mom. San Luis Obispo. My aunt

Carol on Whidbey Island. Carol Quinn. Olduvai Gorge.”Laurel looked beyond Becca, over her shoulder. The sound

of traffic said that the ferry had arrived and was offloading its vehicles. “Oh God,” Laurel whispered.

“Mom,” Becca said, “it’s okay. Really.” She shoved open the door and walked to the back of the Explorer. Her mother got out and joined her there. Together they lifted her bike from the back and arranged its saddlebags on either side. Becca struggled into the heavy backpack, but before she did so, she dug inside for the glasses with their clear and decidedly useless lenses. She put them on.

“Map of the island?” her mother asked her.“I’ve got it in the backpack.”“You’re sure?”“I’m sure.”“What about Carol’s address? Just in case.”“Got that too.”“Where’s the cell phone? Remember, it’s limited minutes.

Yours is programmed with the number of mine. So emergencies only. Nothing else. It’s important. You’ve got to remember.”

“I’ll remember. And I’ve got it in the backpack, Mom. And yes to the rest. The AUD box. Extra batteries. More hair color. Everything.”

“Where’s your ticket?”“Here. Mom, it’s all here. It is.”



Oh God oh God oh God.“I better get going,” Becca said, gazing at the stream of cars

heading into the town beyond the ferry line.“Look at me, sweetheart,” Laurel said.Becca didn’t want to. She was afraid, and she didn’t need

to hear more fear. But she knew the importance of giving her mother this reassurance, so she met her gaze as Laurel said to her, “Look right into my eyes. Tell me what you see. Tell me what you know.”

And there was no midnight ride of Paul Revere now. There was only a single message to read.

“You’ll come back,” Becca said.“I will,” Laurel promised. “As soon as I can.”


TWO

The walk-ons and the bikes went first. There was a crowd of them, and Becca followed their lead. Those with bikes moved

toward the front of the ferry, wheeling them along a three-lane tunnel toward an opening at the far end. The walk-ons went for a stairway. Among them were people fishing in their pockets and their purses, and Becca concluded that there was something to buy up above. She guessed it was food or hot drinks. Either would be welcome to her, because a cool breeze was coming off the water, she was shivering, and she was still hungry.

At the front of the ferry, people parked their bikes. Becca did likewise. She had intended to go back to the stairs to find the food, but the sudden roar of motorcycles stopped her. The noise was intensified because the motorcycles were coming through the ferry’s tunnel. There were only four of them, but it sounded like twenty, and what followed them was a line of eighteen wheel-ers. The cars followed, arranging themselves in four lanes, two to each side of the main tunnel.

None of this would have been a problem, since Becca had the AUD box with her. She plugged in the earphone and turned up the volume and concentrated on the static the AUD box pro-



duced. But as she did this, she saw that the first car coming into the side tunnel and parking just behind the spot where she was standing next to her ten-speed was a police car.

If it can be said that blood can run cold, Becca’s did at that moment. All she could think of was the logical first move Jeff Corrie would have made when he found his wife and his step-daughter gone: phone the cops and report them both as missing persons, sending out the general alarm to find them as quickly as possible, so that Becca and what Becca had gleaned from his whispers could be wiped from the face of the earth. Jeff’s favor-ite motto had been about the best defense being an offense, and what better offense could there be? Becca could even picture the flyer he’d come up with and circulated far and wide. It would be fastened to a clipboard within the police car, she imagined, her face and her mother’s face upon it.

She turned away from the police car slowly, determined to look straight ahead. Anything else like a sudden turn would have given her away, and the thought of giving herself away not ten minutes after she’d left her mother was so frightening that she felt as if neon arrows were pointing down from the ceiling of the ferry right at her skull so that the cop inside that police car would get out and question her.

But the suspense of not knowing if she’d been noticed was too much for Becca to bear. She knew it meant exposing herself to even more of an assault pounding like hammers inside her head, but she did it anyway because she had to do it: she turned down the AUD box to try to catch some useful information.

It was nearly impossible to distinguish anything. There was Nancy damn it and dinner won’t be and nail polish all over and


24 Elizabeth George

talked to my boss and William for a haircut . . . then suddenly with all of this came a warmth that should have been impossible to feel in this cool, damp place. With the warmth came scent, equally out of place. Where she should have been smelling diesel fumes from the big rigs or exhaust from the cars and the motor-cycles, instead what she smelled was the sweetness of fruit being cooked. It was so intense that before she realized what she was doing, Becca actually swung around, exposing her face to the police car behind her. But she didn’t think of what might hap-pen. Nothing seemed as important as finding the source of the warmth and the scent.

That was how she first saw him, the boy who would ulti-mately change everything for her. He was a teenager like her, and he was sitting in the police car. He was in the front seat, not the back, and he and the policeman were talking. They both looked serious, and the contrast between them could not have been greater.

The boy was black, deeply black, and the pure midnight of his skin made the policeman with him look white beyond white. He was also completely bald, not the bald of illness but the bald of choice. This suited him and, in contrast again, the policeman had lots of hair that mixed gray and brown.

Becca realized as she looked at the boy that he was the first person of any color other than white that she’d seen in the vicin-ity of the ferry. She didn’t intend to stare and she wasn’t actu-ally staring when the boy looked at her. As their eyes met, the warmth Becca was feeling increased along with the scent of cooking fruit, but something else floated on that warmth and it was the unexpected hollowness of the boy’s despair. Along with



the ache of it floated the whisper of a single word repeated three time: rejoice, rejoice, rejoice.

Becca half-smiled at the boy the way one does. But in return the hollowness grew, and when it began to feel as if it might take her over, she dropped her gaze. As she did so, the policeman got out of the car. He shut the door neatly and walked toward the stairs, punching in numbers on a cell phone.

While this was the moment that Becca could have approached the boy, she knew far better than to do so. She decided that now she could go for the food she’d been thinking about when the police car had stopped behind her.

She shrugged out of her backpack. She left it next to her bike and walked in the direction of the stairs. She couldn’t risk another look at the boy but she saw as she passed the police car that on the side it said island county sheriff.

As luck would have it, she found herself climbing upward just behind the policeman, who she assumed was a deputy of some kind, or perhaps the sheriff himself. He seemed to be well-known, because people passing on the stairs called him Dave and asked how Rhonda was and inquired about his daughter’s new baby. Becca huddled into herself to stay unnoticed to him, but it didn’t matter as things turned out, because his call went through and he started talking about a cliff to someone.

Becca caught snatches of conversation but not any whispers. The conversation that came to her said that next week was going to be too difficult for Dave because of his schedule and maybe the week after might work if it works for you too. Also, was the cliff completely safe because it was pretty exposed, wasn’t it, and you-know-who was starting to hang around there with his little


26 Elizabeth George

brother. This made Becca wonder more about the island. She was used to southern California, which had suffered from every pos-sible kind of natural problem: earthquakes, fires, floods, drought, windstorms, and landslides. But now she saw that disasters were, perhaps, common here as well, and she wondered what sort of disasters they would be if they had to do with the safety of cliffs.

Upstairs, the policeman paused to continue his conversation near the windows, while Becca followed the crowd to a cafeteria where a line had formed to purchase food. Aware of money and how she was going to have to make it last till her mom started sending her more, Becca chose cookies. There was a package of three, sugar cookies that were frosted in orange, and she con-cluded this was something special when she heard a little girl’s voice behind her say, “Look, Gram! They’re not pink this time,” and Gram say in reply, “Maybe it’s for Halloween.”

Halloween. Becca felt a tug. It had always been her favorite holiday. Laurel usually said this was because of the free candy she could collect and it was important that they “take a look at your addiction to sugar, sweetheart, because Type Two diabetes is becoming an epidemic these days among kids your age.” On the other hand, Becca’s grandmother noted that it was all about the fun Becca had in knowing who each child was behind the mask since their whispers almost always gave them away. Becca’s grandmother always advised her to stay near the whispers of children anyway. “They don’t know how to lie to themselves,” she said.

Becca missed her badly. She missed hearing, “Laurel, just let her be, okay? She’s going to adjust,” and although Laurel’s answer was always the same, “I want her to be normal, Mother,” her



grandmother’s reply of “Pooh. Nothing’s more boring than nor-mal,” generally made Becca feel special, not odd.

It was in the cause of seeming normal, though, that Laurel had come up with the AUD box. She’d claimed it was entirely for Becca’s benefit, so that she could concentrate when she was in school. But the truth was that while the AUD box worked per-fectly to help Becca focus, it also served to keep other people’s thoughts away. Laurel’s in particular, of course.

••

BECCA DIDN’T TAKE any note of the girl in front of her in the cafeteria’s line till they reached the cash register. Then she saw her holding a foil-wrapped hamburger and talking to two boys who were waiting for her by the condiments, a short dis-tance away. One of the boys was long-haired and spotty-faced, wearing a rolled-up ski cap on his head like a beanie; the other was neatly dressed and neatly combed, looking worried and swallowing compulsively. As for the girl, she was very small and very trim, not an ounce of fat on her, virtually all muscle. She had a pixie haircut and a voice whose tone was one of snarky irritation. All three of them together made the suggestion that something was going on. It came to Becca as she watched them that, no matter what, high school kids were probably the same pretty much everywhere.

The long-hair boy muttered, “She doesn’t have the guts to try it,” as the girl reached the cash register.

“Probably shouldn’t, Jenn,” the worried boy said.


28 Elizabeth George

Becca thought idly, Shouldn’t what? as Jenn handed over a ten to pay for her food.

The cashier took the money, and Becca watched the exchange and admired the woman’s nicely buffed nails, so different from those on the cashier at Ivar’s. They were smooth with a pretty sheen to them and Becca wondered as she handed change back to Jenn—

“Hey,” Jenn said to the cashier, “I just gave you a twenty.”Becca spoke without thinking. “No, it was a ten. I saw it.”Jenn swung on her. “What the . . . Are you calling me a liar

or something?” And what came with this was who the hell . . . oh great, Dylan . . . more cool ideas?

“Oh, sorry! No,” Becca said. “I just noticed because I was look-ing at her nails.” She added, “They’re really nice,” to the cashier, who blushed prettily.

Jenn said, “What are you, some kind of perv?” and to the cashier, “It was a twenty, and I want my change.”

“It really wasn’t,” Becca said as, behind the counter, a man came out of an inner room. He asked what the problem was, and the girl Jenn spoke right up.

“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” she said, as the younger of the two boys with her murmured, “Jenn . . .” in a voice that sounded like a warning. “I gave her a twenty,” Jenn declared. “This chick’s seeing things.”

“Let’s take a look, shall we?” the man then asked. He swung a small screen around to face the line of customers. It displayed the cash drawer, and it filmed each time the drawer opened. He pushed a button and there it was. The ten-dollar bill went from Jenn’s hands to the cashier’s hands. “Move along,” the man said in a steely voice. “Next customer please.”



Becca stepped to the register and paid for her cookies. But not before Jenn said into her ear, “You little bitch,” and then vanished with her two companions.

••

AN ANNOUNCEMENT TOLD everyone when to head back to their vehicles. Becca followed the crowd. She was careful when she passed the sheriff’s car not to look at it or the boy within it, although she caught a glimpse of his shoulder because he was leaning against the window.

Everything was as she’d left it at her bike. The saddlebags still bulged on either side of it, and her backpack leaned against its rear wheel. She worked her way into this again and gazed for-ward as the ferry dock loomed up ahead. She saw that here the mist was more like fog, a billowing gray veil that hung between her and whatever there was that defined this place. Mostly, what defined it appeared to be trees. There were more trees here than she’d ever seen in an area where people also actually lived.

Becca was used to hillsides sketched with the bony definition of chaparral and a landscape that developers scraped clean to the desiccated dirt before they filled it with thousands of identi-cal houses. Here, though, if there were houses at all, they were somewhere in the trees, because what Becca was looking at was a vast forest: Douglas firs, hemlocks, and cedars that would remain untouched by winter weather, along with alders, birches, maples, and cottonwoods that would lose their leaves and thus bring light to the forest floor. This landscape rose steeply from a


30 Elizabeth George

beach along which a few houses were strung, brightly lit against the growing gloom.

The ferry workers waited till a ramp was lowered from the dock. Then they took down the barrier chain and waved at the bicyclists and the foot passengers to disembark.

The foot passengers headed to the left, and the bicycle riders headed to the right. Becca went along and found herself on a dock far vaster than she’d expected. Here, she realized, every-thing was larger than life. Ferries, trees, docks, everything.

As soon as she had walked her bike to the end of the dock, she began to look for Carol Quinn. She didn’t know a thing about what her mom’s friend looked like, but she assumed that there would be someone waiting with a pickup truck into which she could dump her bike.

But there was no one, just a local bus that pulled away and headed in the direction of a highway, just a few cars in a distant parking lot to which ferry passengers walked and then climbed inside. Becca looked around, but she felt no panic. Her mom had phoned Carol Quinn. Becca had seen her do it. Carol Quinn was on her way.

Becca waited ten minutes. Slowly, she ate one of her cookies as those ten minutes stretched to twenty. Another ferry came and went with no Carol Quinn turning up to get her. After the departure of yet another ferry, Becca rustled through her backpack and found the cell phone that was programmed with Laurel’s number.

The call to her mom didn’t go through. Out of range was the reply she received. She would wait awhile and phone again, Becca decided, but in the meantime she would start on her way



to Carol Quinn’s house because, obviously, something had come up to detain her and she would no doubt meet her on the way.

Becca pulled out the map of Whidbey Island, along with Carol Quinn’s home address. She plotted the most direct route she could find to Blue Lady Lane. Right off the highway, she saw, a street called Bob Galbreath Road would take her there. She wasn’t in the best shape in the world for a bike ride, she knew, but this appeared to be only six miles. A piece of cake, she decided. She had a ten-speed. And anyone with a ten-speed could ride six miles.

Wrong, she discovered. When she pedaled to the highway that led away from the ferry, Becca’s first thought was, Oh my God, and her second was, I’ll never make it. For where the road began, it climbed at once. It curved up and away from the dock, and it disappeared into the fog. Along its right side a few busi-nesses were lined up, hopeful buildings that seemed to cling to the ground with the expectation of otherwise sliding into the water.

Becca actually made it about one hundred and fifty yards before her breath was shrieking through her chest and her heart was slamming so hard that no AUD box was going to be nec-essary to drown out every other sound around her. Then she turned into a small parking lot. A sign reading clinton nail and spa identified the business, and a red neon sign indicated it was open. There was also a light above its door that cast a pyra-mid glow down to a welcome mat, and it was this light that Becca approached.

She took out the map again. She tried to find another way to get to Carol Quinn’s house. There wasn’t one. So she watched


32 Elizabeth George

the highway for a good ten minutes, hoping to see a pickup truck slowly going by, with someone inside it searching for her.

That didn’t happen. She had no choice. She set off again.The pedaling was so difficult that she was practically standing

still. She managed to inch past a low-slung Wells Fargo bank and an ancient restaurant with Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! advertised and that same sheriff’s car parked in its lot and, no doubt, the sher-iff and that boy inside, scarfing down a king-size pepperoni and cheese. When she crawled past a used-car lot, she thought about how she and her mom could have driven onto it and traded the Ford Explorer for whatever came next. Thinking this made her eyes sting, though, so she looked away from the car lot and what it promised and instead looked ahead with the hope of seeing the road she was looking for somewhere in the shrouded distance.

Instead she saw a Dairy Queen. Her heart sang. She’d make for this, she decided. She’d buy herself a hamburger there. French fries and a strawberry shake. Eating her way through her fear was the only answer. She certainly could make it as far as the Dairy Queen, she told herself, especially since there was a meal waiting for her at the end.

As it happened, however, what was also waiting was Bob Galbreath Road. It lay a short distance before the Dairy Queen, giving Becca another option. Since the shadows were lengthen-ing and darkness was approaching, she went for virtue instead of calories. She set off along Bob Galbreath Road.


PART ONE

••Deception Pass

9780670012978_EdgeoftheWaterTheintmech.indd 1 10/3/13 1:56 PM

Cilla’s World

I was two years old when I came to my parents, but the only memories I have before the memories of them are like dreams.

I’m carried. There’s water nearby. I’m cold. Someone runs with me in his arms. My head is pressed so hard to his shoulder that it hurts every time he takes a step. And I know it’s a he, by the way he’s holding me. For holding doesn’t come naturally to men.

It’s nighttime and I remember lights. I remember voices. I remember shivering with fear and with wet. Then something warm is around me and my shivering stops and then I sleep.

After that, with another flash of a dream, I see myself in another place. A woman tells me she’s Mommy now and she points to a man whose face looms over mine and he says that he’s Daddy now. But they are not my parents and they never will be, just as the words they say are not my words and they never will be. That has been the source of my trouble.

I don’t speak. I only walk and point and observe. I get along by doing what I am told. But I fear things that other children don’t fear.


4 Elizabeth George

I fear water most of all, and this is a problem from the very start. For I live with the mommy and the daddy in a house that sits high above miles of water and from the windows of this place, water is all that I see. This makes me want to hide in the house, but a child can’t do that when there is church to attend and school to enroll in as the child gets older.

I don’t do those things. I try to do them, the mommy and the daddy try to make me do them, and other people try as well. But all of us fail.

This is why I end up far away, in a place where there is no water. There are people who poke me. They prod me. They talk over my head. They watch me on videos. They present me with pictures. They ask me questions. What I hear is “You have to do something with her, that’s why we brought her” and the words mean nothing to me. But I recognize in the sound of the words a form of farewell.

So I remain in this no-water place, where I learn the rudi-ments that go for human life. I learn to clean and to feed myself. But that is the extent of what I learn. Give me a simple task and I can do it if I’m shown exactly what to do, and from this every-one begins to understand that there is nothing wrong with my memory. That, however, is all they understand. So they label me their mystery. It’s a blessing, they say, that at least I can walk and feed and clean myself. That, they say, is cause for celebration.

So I’m finally returned to the mommy and the daddy. Someone declares, “You’re eighteen years old now. Isn’t that grand?” and although these words mean nothing to me, from them I under-


5The Edge of the Water

stand things will be different. What’s left, then, is a drive in the car on a January morning of bitter cold, a celebration picnic because I’ve come home.

We go to a park. We drive for what seems like a very long time to get to the place. We cross a high bridge and the mommy calls out, “Close your eyes, Cilla! There’s water below!” I do what she says, and soon enough the bridge is behind us. We turn in among trees that soar into the sky and we follow a twisting road down and down and covered with the foliage of cedars shed in winter storms.

At the bottom of the road, there’s a place for cars. There are picnic tables and the mommy says, “What a day for a picnic! Have a look at the beach while I set up, Cilla. I know how you like to look at the beach.”

The daddy says, “Yep. Come on, Cill,” and when he trudges toward a thick growth of shiny-leafed bushes beneath the trees, I follow him to a path that cuts through it. Here is a trail, part sand and part dirt, where we pass beneath cedars and firs and we brush by ferns and boulders and at last we come to the beach.

I do not fear beaches, only the water that edges them. Beaches themselves I love with their salty scents and the thick, crawling serpents of seaweed that slither across them. Here there is drift-wood worn smooth by the water. Here there are great boulders to climb. Here an eagle flies high in the air and a seagull caws and a dead salmon lies in the cold harsh sun.

I stop at this fish. I bend to inspect it. I bend closer to smell it. It makes my eyes sting.


6 Elizabeth George

The seagull caws again and the eagle cries. It swoops and soars and I follow its flight with my gaze. North it flies, and it disappears high beyond the trees.

I watch for its return, but the bird is gone. So is, I see, the daddy who led me down through the trees and onto this beach. He’d stopped where the sand met the trail through the woods. He’d said, “Think I’ll have me a cancer stick. Don’t tell Herself, huh, Cill?” but I have walked on. He has perhaps returned to the car for the promised picnic, and now I am alone. I don’t like the alone or the nearness of the water. I hurry back to the spot where the car is parked.

But it, too, is gone, just like the daddy. So is the mommy. In the place where the picnic was supposed to be, only two things stand on the lichenous table beneath the trees. One is a sandwich wrapped in plastic. The other is a small suitcase with wheels.

I approach these objects. I look around. I see, I observe, I point as always. But there is no one in this place to respond to me.

I am here, wherever this is, alone.


ON E

When people said “Money isn’t everything,” Jenn McDaniels knew two things about them. First, they’d never been

poor. Second, they didn’t have a clue what being poor was like. Jenn was poor, she’d been poor for all of her fifteen years, and she had a whole lot more than just a clue about the kinds of things you had to do when you didn’t have money. You bought your clothes at thrift stores, you put together meals from food banks, and when something came along that meant you had even the tiniest chance of escaping bedsheets for curtains and a life of secondhand everything, you did what it took.

That was what she was up to on the afternoon that Annie Taylor drove into her life. Had the condition of the very nice sil-ver Honda Accord not told Jenn that Annie Taylor didn’t belong on Whidbey Island—for God’s sake the car was actually clean!—the Florida plates would have done the job. As would have Annie Taylor’s trendy clothes and her seriously fashionable spiky red hair. She got out of the Accord, put one hand on her hip, said to Jenn, “This is Possession Point, right?” and frowned at the obsta-cle course that Jenn had set up the length of the driveway.

This obstacle course was Jenn’s tiniest chance to escape the


8 Elizabeth George

bedsheet curtains and the secondhand everything. It was also her chance to escape Whidbey Island altogether. The course con-sisted of trash can lids, broken toilet seats, bait buckets, floats, and ripped-up life jackets, all of which stood in for the traffic cones that any other kid—like a kid with money—might have used for a practice session. Her intention had been one hour minimum of dribbling up and down this obstacle course. Tryouts for the All Island Girls’ Soccer team were coming up in a few months, and Jenn was going to make the team. Center midfielder! A blaz-ing babe with amazing speed! Her dexterity unquestioned! Her future assured! University scholarship, here I come. . . . Only at the moment, Annie Taylor’s car was in the way. Or Jenn was in Annie’s way, depending on how you looked at things.

Jenn said yeah, this was Possession Point, and she made no move to clear the way so that Annie could drive forward. Frankly, she saw no reason to. The redhead clearly didn’t belong here, and if she wanted to look at the view—such as it was, which wasn’t much—then she was going to have to take her butt down to the water on foot.

Jenn dribbled the soccer ball toward a broken toilet seat lid, dodging and feinting. She did a bit of clever whipping around to fool her opponents. She was ready to move the ball past a trash can lid when Annie Taylor called out, “Hey! Sorry? C’n you tell me . . . I’m looking for Bruce McDaniels.”

Jenn halted and looked over her shoulder. Annie added, “D’you know him? He’s supposed to live here. He’s got a key for me. I’m Annie Taylor, by the way.”



Jenn scooped up the ball with a sigh. She knew Bruce, all right. Bruce was her dad. The last time she’d seen him he’d been sampling five different kinds of home brew on the front porch, despite the early February cold, with the beers lined up on the railing so that he could “admire the head on each” before he chugged. He brewed his beer in a shed on the property that he always kept locked up like Fort Knox. When he wasn’t brewing, he was selling the stuff under the table. When he wasn’t doing that, he was selling bait to fishermen who were foolhardy enough to tie their boats up to his decrepit dock.

Annie Taylor’s mentioning a key made Jenn first think that her dad was handing over his Fort-Knox-of-Brewing shed to a stranger. But then Annie added, “There’s a trailer here, right? I’m moving into it. The man I’m renting from—Eddie Beddoe?—he said Bruce would be waiting for me with the key. So is he down there?” She gestured past the obstacle course. Jenn nodded yeah, but what she was thinking was that Annie had to be talking about a different trailer because no way could anyone live in the wreck that had stood abandoned not far from Jenn’s house for all of her life.

Annie said, “Great. So if you don’t mind . . . ? C’n I . . . ? Well, can I get this stuff out of the way?”

Jenn began to kick her obstacles to one side of the lane. Annie came to help, leaving her Honda running. She was tall—but since Jenn was only five two, pretty much everyone was tall—and she had lots of freckles. What she was wearing looked like something she’d purchased in Bellevue on her way to the island:


10 Elizabeth George

skinny jeans, boots, a turtleneck sweater, a parka, a scarf. She looked like an ad for the outdoor life in Washington State, except what she had on was way too put together to be something a real outdoorsman would wear. Jenn couldn’t help wondering what the hell Annie Taylor was doing here aside from being on the run from the law.

Soccer ball under her arm, she trailed Annie’s car to the vicin-ity of the trailer. Her reaction to the sight of it, Jenn decided, was going to be more interesting than dribbling.

“Oh!” was the expression on Annie Taylor’s face when Jenn caught up to her. It wasn’t the oh of “Oh how cool,” though. It was more the oh of “Oh my God, what have I done?” She’d gotten out of her car and was standing transfixed, with all her attention on the only trailer in the vicinity. “This is . . . uh . . . it?” she said with a glance at Jenn.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Jenn replied sardonically. “If you’re into living with black mold and mildew, you’re in the right place.”

“Possession Point,” Annie said, pretty much to herself. And again then to Jenn, “This is . . . for real? I mean, this is it? You don’t live here, too, do you?” Annie looked around but, of course, there wasn’t much to see that would reassure anyone about this dismal place.

Jenn pointed out her house, a short distance away and closer to the water. The building was old but in marginally better con-dition than the trailer. It was gray clapboard, with a questionable roof, and just beyond it at the edge of the water, a bait shack tumbled in the direction of a dock. Both of these structures



seemed to rise out of the heaps of driftwood, piles of old nets, and masses of everything from overturned aluminum boats to upended toilets.

As Annie Taylor took all this in, Jenn’s father, Bruce, came out of the house and down the rickety front steps of the porch. He was calling out, “You Annie Taylor?” to which Annie replied with little enthusiasm, “You must be Mr. McDaniels.”

“You are in the presence,” he said.“That’s . . . uh . . . That’s great,” Annie replied although the

hesitation in her words definitely indicated otherwise.Jenn could hardly blame her. In her whole life, Annie Taylor

had probably never seen anyone like Bruce McDaniels. He enjoyed being a character with a capital C, and he played up anything that made him eccentric. So he kept his gray hair Ben Franklin style down to his shoulders. He covered his soup-bowl-sized bald pate with a ski cap that read ski squaw valley although he’d never been on skis in his life. He was in terrible shape, skinny like a scarecrow everywhere except for his belly, which overhung his trousers and made him look pregnant most of the time.

He was digging in his pocket, saying, “Gotcher key right here,” when the front door opened again, and Jenn’s two little brothers came storming out.

“Who the hell’s she?” Petey demanded.“Dad, he ate a damn hot dog and they were ’posed to be for

damn dinner!” Andy cried. “Jenny, tell ’im! You heard Mom say.”“Desist, rug rats,” was Bruce McDaniels’s happy reply. “This is


12 Elizabeth George

Annie Taylor, our new neighbor. And these, Annie, are the fruit of my loins: Jennifer, Petey, and Andy. Jenn’s the one with the soccer ball, by the way.” He chuckled as if he’d made a great joke although Jenn’s pixie haircut and lack of curves had resulted in her being mistaken for a boy more than once.

Annie said politely that it was nice to meet them all, at which point Bruce ceremoniously handed over the key to the trailer. He told her he’d given the door’s lock a good oiling that very morning and she’d find the place in tiptop shape with everything inside in working order.

Annie looked doubtful, but she murmured, “Wonderful, then,” as she accepted the key from him. She settled her shoul-ders, unlocked the door, stuck her head inside, and said, “Oh gosh.” She popped out as quickly as she’d popped in. She shot the McDaniels spectators a smile and began the process of unload-ing her car. She had boxes neatly taped and marked. She had a computer and a printer. She had a spectacular set of matching luggage. She started heaving everything just inside the door of the trailer.

No one in the McDaniels group made a move to help her, but who could blame them? For not one of them even began to believe that she would last one night in the place.

JENN AVOIDED ANNIE Taylor for the first twenty-four hours of her stay, mostly out of embarrassment. Three hours after Annie had emptied her car, Jenn’s mom had come rumbling home in the Subaru Forester that did service as South Whidbey



Taxi Company. Bruce McDaniels had been continuing his extensive experiment in the quality control of his brews for those three hours, and when Jenn’s mom got out of the Subaru and began trudging tiredly toward the house, he’d greeted her by belting out “Kuh-kuh-kuh Katie! My bee-you-tee-full Katie!” He ran to greet her, falling on his knees and singing at full pitch, and Jenn’s mom had cried, “How could you! Again!” and promptly burst into tears. Jenn recovered from the excruciating humiliation of all this by hiding out in her bedroom and wish-ing her parents would both disappear, taking Andy and Petey with them.

From her window, she spied on Annie Taylor, who left the trailer periodically either to haul wood inside for the stove that heated the place or to walk on the driftwood-cluttered beach. When she did this latter thing, she carried a pair of binoculars with her. Perched upon the gnarled roots of a piece of driftwood, she used the binoculars to scan the surface of the water. Jenn fig-ured at first she was looking for the resident orcas. Killer whales made use of Possession Sound at all times of the year, and sev-enty of them lived within fifty miles of Whidbey Island. To Jenn, they were the only sea creatures of interest.

The third time Annie walked the beach, she took a camera and tripod with her. Jenn decided she was probably a wildlife photog-rapher, then, and she asked her father this at breakfast on the day after Annie’s arrival. He was the only person up aside from Jenn. The day was freezing cold outside, and as usual it wasn’t much warmer in the house. Everyone else in the family had apparently decided the best course was to wait out the cold beneath the


14 Elizabeth George

covers, but it wasn’t raining, and clear weather meant running practice, which was what Jenn intended to do. Still, there was the matter of Annie. . . .

“Hell if I know,” was Bruce’s answer to Jenn’s question about the young woman and photography. “All I do is collect the rent and all I care about her is: is she quiet at night and will she keep from scaring the herring in the bait pool. You’ll have to ask Eddie if you want to know more. Far’s I’m concerned, ignorance is b-l-i-s-s.” He’d been reading a week-old edition of the South Whidbey Record as he spoke. But he looked up then, took in Jenn’s attire, and said, “Just where the hell you going?” when she told him she’d see him later.

“Sprints,” she said. “Tryouts coming up. All Island Girls’ Soccer. You know.”

“For God’s sake be careful if you’re going on the road. There’s ice out there and if you break a leg—”

“I won’t break a leg,” she told him.Outside, she began to stretch, using the porch steps and the

railing. Her breath was like a fog machine in the freezing air.A bang sounded from the trailer on the far side of the prop-

erty, and Annie Taylor stalked outside. She had on so many layers of clothing that Jenn was surprised she could move. She headed for the woodpile and grabbed up an armful.

“Stupid, idiot, frigging, asinine, useless, oh yeah right,” came from Annie to Jenn across the yard. “Like this is supposed to . . . Oh great. Thank you very much.”

Jenn watched as Annie piled up wood and staggered with it



back to the trailer. She gave a curious look to the woodpile. The Florida woman was sure going through it. Except . . . Jenn real-ized that there was no scent of woodsmoke in the morning air.

She went over to the trailer’s door. She stuck her head inside and said, “Sure are going through the wood, huh?”

Annie glanced over at her from a squat woodstove in front of which she was kneeling. “Oh, I sure as hell wish,” she said. “None of it’s burning. I’m just trying to find a damn log that will.”

“Weird,” Jenn said. “It should burn fine.”“Well, should burn and does burn are two different things. If

you see smoke coming out of this trailer, believe me, it’s going to be from my ears.”

“Want me to take a look?”“Be my guest. If you can make this shit burn—pardon my

French but I am so frustrated and I spent the whole damn night freezing my tits off—I owe you breakfast.”

Jenn laughed. “Frozen tits, huh?” she said. “Ouch. Lemme look at the stove.”


TWO

Jenn took one look around the inside of the trailer and said, “Gross. Why’d you rent this place?”“I need the water around here.” Next to the woodstove, Annie

grabbed a log from among the two dozen others already scat-tered on the floor.

“Uh . . . this is an island?” Jenn said. “Last time I looked there was water everywhere.”

“Sure. Right. But I need this water.”“It’s the same all over.”“Wrong,” Annie said. She pointed to the woodstove, its door

hanging open like a toothless black mouth. “So, d’you know any-thing about these things?”

“I know you got to clean out the ashes,” Jenn told her after giving it a quick look. “Nothing’s going to burn inside the stove till you do that. What about the dampers? Are they even open? Bet no one checked the flue, and there’s probably bird nests on top of the chimney.”

Annie said, “Oh,” but she made no move to address these problems. Instead she sank onto a filthy chrome-legged kitchen chair and looked dismally around the place.



To Jenn, the interior of the trailer suggested a serious health hazard. Aside from the chromed-legged chair that Annie was using, the furnishings consisted of another similar chair, a ripped-up banquette, a sloping table, and a mildewed couch that stood beneath a window so leaky that something looking suspi-ciously like moss appeared to be line dancing along its sill. The place was a death trap in various forms. Jenn wondered how long Annie planned to stay.

She scratched her head and said, “D’you want me to get this woodstove working?”

“Oh would you?” Annie said, brightening at once. “I’d get on my knees and kiss your ring. Except . . . I saw you stretching. Were you about to go running or something? I mean, I don’t want you to—”

“No worries. This’ll just take a sec.”Jenn went outside and grabbed one of the bait buckets she’d

been using for her dribbling practice. She took this to the wood-stove and began to shovel the ashes into it. She figured that Annie had decided the fireplace tools standing next to the stove were part of the overall décor. The amount of dust on them suggested that no one had touched them in years.

As she shoveled, she said, “No one’s lived here in, like, for my whole life. You sure you want to stay? I mean, you could probably get real sick.”

“It needs to be fixed up, that’s for sure,” Annie agreed. “I was sort of hoping that hot water, ammonia, baking soda, bleach, and white vinegar would take care of the problem.”

“Either that or blow it up,” Jenn said.


18 Elizabeth George

“Which,” Annie added, “might not be exactly a bad idea.”They laughed together. Annie had a nice laugh. She had neat

white teeth and a pretty smile. Jenn liked her and wondered how old she was. A lot older than herself, for sure, but Jenn wondered if they still might become friends. Friends were scarce on this part of the island.

She spied some newspapers sitting beneath a few of the logs, and she yanked these out and showed Annie how to build a proper fire: crumpled newspapers first, followed by a good amount of dry kindling, then logs on the top. She glanced at Annie to see if she was following, and Annie shot her a smile, although what Jenn had to admit was that a woman with Florida plates on her car probably hadn’t built fires very often.

She got to her feet and brushed off her hands. When Annie offered her the matches, she said, “Chimney first,” and she went outside, where she hoisted herself to the trailer’s roof and picked her way through the debris she and her brothers had been hurling up there for years. She found the chimney just as she thought she might find it: with a large bird’s nest perched on its top. She cleared this away and shouted down the chimney, “Let ’er rip, Annie.” In a few moments, a satisfying belch of smoke shot into the air.

Back inside the trailer, she found Annie kneeling in front of the woodstove, warming her hands like someone praying to the fire god. Jenn fed more kindling into the blaze and explained how to bank the stove at night. Annie nodded vaguely and leaned back on her heels. She cocked her head at Jenn and said, “I was thinking. . . . You need a job or anything?”



Jenn always needed a job. Along with potential friends, jobs were also scarce in this part of the island. “Doing what? Keeping your fire going?”

“Ha. That, too.” Annie waved vaguely around the trailer’s interior. “Let’s face it, Jenn. This place needs a ton of work. I can do some of it but I can’t do it all because I’ve got to get on with some other things. D’you want to help out? Obviously, I’ll pay.”

The pay part sounded good. The having to be near the trailer part didn’t. “I dunno,” Jenn said. “Maybe. I mean, this place is such a dump and spending a bunch of time in here fixing it up . . . ? No offense, but it sort of creeps me out. How much’re you shelling out to stay here, anyway?”

When Annie named the sum, Jenn gawped at her. “You’re so way being cheated,” she declared. “That’s totally unfair. You need to track down Eddie Beddoe and get a better deal.”

Annie’s expression became chagrined as she glanced around the derelict place. “It’s sort of my fault for being in such a rush, I guess.”

“Being in a rush doesn’t mean you deserve to be robbed.”“Sure. But I agreed on the price. If I tried to change it, he

might tell me to go somewhere else.”“That’s not a bad idea, if you ask me.”Annie shook her head. “It’s like I said before: I need Possession

Point and I need this water.”“Why?”“Just . . . well, just because.”“Is there some big secret? Like we got Bigfoot swimming


20 Elizabeth George

in Possession Sound and you’re here to take its picture or something?”

Annie said nothing at first, so for a moment Jenn thought she’d actually hit on the truth, as ludicrous as that truth sounded. She added, “Or maybe a prehistoric water thing? Like our own Loch Ness Monster?”

As things turned out, she wasn’t too far off the point, for Annie caved and said, “Hell. I guess you’ll find out eventually. Especially if you work for me.”

“Find out what?”“Will you work for me?”“Okay. All right. But you have to pay me.”“I said I would. Deal?”“Deal. Okay. Now, why’re you here?”Annie glanced back at the door, as if worried about listeners.

“I’m here because of the seal,” she said.

A RATHER LONG time later, Jenn would think that she should have called whoa Nellie when Annie Taylor brought up the seal. For there are seals and there are seals, but Jenn knew in an instant that there was only one seal that Annie was talk-ing about. This seal was called Nera. She was coal black from her flippers to her eyeballs. And for some reason that no one would ever speak about no matter how they were questioned on the topic, she’d been showing up for ages in the Whidbey Island waters at the same time every year. She usually hung around a



place called Sandy Point as well as the small village of Langley, cavorting in the water near the Langley marina and barking at tourists, townspeople, and fishermen, like a swimmer trying to get their attention. But—and this was the weirdest part of her behavior—she made the swim from Langley to Possession Point on the very same day, at the very same time, of the very same month each year. She remained in Possession Point’s waters for exactly twenty-four hours, swimming restlessly back and forth, moaning and barking like an abandoned dog. After that, she returned to Langley, spent another month or two hanging in the water below Seawall Park before leaving for wherever she went until the next year rolled around and she did the same things all over again. Her comings and goings were magical and com-pletely mysterious to the people on the south end of Whidbey Island. And the way Jenn figured it, the people on the south end of Whidbey Island were not going to be happy if they found out someone was here to mess with their magic and mystery.

So Jenn said, “A seal? What seal? What d’you want with a seal?” as if she didn’t know exactly what seal Annie was talking about.

Annie said, “Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know about her. Langley’s got . . . Here, wait a sec. . . .” She went to one of her boxes and pulled out a manila folder from which torn-out magazine pages frothed. She opened this and fingered through them. She brought out an article with brightly colored pictures: a festival, children eating ice cream, yokels wearing bizarre seal costumes, balloons, booths, and a banner across the entry to a


22 Elizabeth George

park screaming welcome back nera!!! in huge red letters.Jenn couldn’t pretend not to know what this was: one of the

village of Langley’s festivals. The dumbnut city fathers had a festival for everything, all to lure tourists to the town’s strug-gling bed-and-breakfasts, cafés, galleries, boutiques, and T-shirt shops. Nera was practically custom built for a town that wel-comed whales, celebrated a “soup box” derby, used alpacas as camels in a pageant at Christmastime, and killed a citizen every year for Murder Mystery Weekend.

So Jenn had to say, “Oh. You must mean Nera.”“Uh, yeah. I must mean Nera. Is there another seal?”“Well . . . no. I mean, not exactly.”“What d’you mean ‘not exactly’?” Annie looked thoughtful

before her eyes lit up. She cried, “Jesus, Jenn. Is there more than one? God, wouldn’t that be a coup!”

Jenn frowned. Annie obviously had something cooking, not only to do with Nera but also with Possession Point. If it was Nera alone, she’d be parking her body in Langley: Nera’s central hangout. But for her to come to Possession Point, to insist that she had to be here where the waters were somehow “necessary” to her . . . ? It didn’t sound right to Jenn, so she said directly, “What d’you want her for?”

“Nera?”“Yeah, Nera.”“Nothing, really.” And when Jenn looked skeptical, Annie

went on. “Okay, two things. One is the possibility of a genetic mutation. The other is the even better possibility of new species of seal.”



“And you care about this, why?” Jenn asked.“I’m a marine biologist,” she said. “Or at least that’s what I’ll

be officially if I ever finish my damn dissertation, and I need that seal to do it.”

“To write it for you? I don’t think she’s up to the job.”“Very funny. I need her to prove my argument. Or to reveal

something new to the world. Either way, I’m made.”Annie explained the rest in what Jenn would come to know

as Annie Taylor fashion. She dipped into one subject, slid over another, painted gloss on a third. Jenn wasn’t sure what this said about Annie, except that when she wanted something, she was a really fast talker in order to get it. So what she revealed in a rush was that Nera either had the rarest of rare conditions called melanism—“All-black, just the opposite of an all-white albino,” Annie explained—or she had a genetic mutation or she was a new species of seal. “She looks vaguely like a Ross seal,” Annie said, “but if that’s the case she’s seriously out of territory. So I figure she’s either a new species or a mutant.”

“Or the opposite of an albino,” Jenn said.“Yeah. But my money’s on mutant. Which, for my purpose, is

almost as good as being a new species.”“Why?”“Because the frigging oil companies all over the world keep

claiming that their spills aren’t hurting the animal life. Nera’s my chance to prove them wrong. I mean, look at the facts: Oil spilled here around twenty years ago and now we’ve got a freak seal at our fingertips, saying ‘Look at me please and run a few tests.’”

Tests? That rang all the alarms. “No one’s letting you get close


24 Elizabeth George

to Nera,” Jenn said. “Just so you know. And when was there ever an oil spill around here, anyway?”

“I already said. Twenty years ago. Something like that. It satu-rated Possession Point. You don’t know about it? Well, maybe you wouldn’t. How long have you lived here? How old are you any-way? You look . . . Are you twelve?”

“Hey! I’m fifteen, okay? And if there was an oil spill, I’d know about it.”

“Why? It would’ve been cleaned up. This place’s remote, sure as hell, but no one’s going to let bilge oil sit on the beach for twenty years. And that’s what it was. Bilge oil. The worst there is. It’d’ve been cleaned up within weeks, maybe two or three months. But in a couple of years there wouldn’t even have been a sign of it. Except in the sea life.”

“Like Nera.”“Like Nera. Who just happened to show up a year after the

spill? Two years after it? What does that tell you? I know what it tells me. So I need to get a close look at her. I need some samples. One way or the other, she’s proof of something. I just need to know what the ‘something’ is.”

“Samples? No way. No one’s letting you near that seal, Annie.”“Oh?” Annie gave an airy, dismissive wave. “Believe me, we’ll

see about that.”


In memory of Iver Olson,

island man through and through

EdgeofShadowsint 4p.indd 5 1/9/15 11:36 AM

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest


PART I

Island County Fairgrounds


O N E

The third fire happened at Island County Fairgrounds in August, and it was the first one to get serious attention. The

other two weren’t big enough. One was set in a trash container outside the convenience store at a forested place called Bailey’s Corner, which was more or less in the middle of nowhere, so no one thought much about it. Some dumb practical joke with a sparkler after the Fourth of July, right? Then, when the second flamed up along the main highway, right at the edge of a struggling little farmers’ market, pretty much everyone decided that that one took off because an idiot had thrown a lit cigarette from his car window right in the middle of the driest season of the year.

But the third fire was different. Not only because it happened at the fairgrounds, which were just yards away from the middle school and less than a quarter mile from the village of Langley, but also because the flames began during the county fair when hundreds of people were milling around a midway.

A girl called Becca King was among them, along with her boyfriend and her best girl friend: Derric Mathieson and Jenn McDaniels. The three were a study in contrasts, with Becca


4 Elizabeth George

light-haired, trim from months of bicycle riding, and wearing heavy-rimmed glasses and enough makeup to suggest she was auditioning for membership in the reincarnation of the rock band Kiss; Derric tall, well-built, shaven-headed, African, and gorgeous; and Jenn all sinew and attitude, hair cut like a boy’s and tan from a summer of intense soccer practice. These three were sitting in the bleachers set back from an outdoor stage upon which a group called the Time Benders was about to begin performing.

It was Saturday night, the night that drew the most people to the fairgrounds because it was also the night when the entertain-ment was, as Jenn put it, “marginally less suicide-inducing than the other days.” Those other days the entertainment consisted of tap dancers, yodelers, magicians, fiddlers, and a one-man band. On Saturday night an Elvis impersonator and the Time Benders comprised what went for the highlight of the fair.

For Becca King, with a lifetime spent in San Diego and just short of one year in the Puget Sound area, the fair was like every-thing else she’d discovered on Whidbey Island: something in miniature. The barn-red buildings were standard stuff, but their size was minuscule compared to the vast buildings she was used to at the Del Mar racetrack where the San Diego County Fair took place. This held true for the stables for horses, sheep, cattle, alpacas, and goats. It was doubly true for the performance ring where the dogs were shown and the horses were ridden. The food, however, was the same as it was at county fairs everywhere, and as the Time Benders readied themselves to take the stage after Elvis’s


5The Edge of the Shadows

final bow during which he nearly lost his wig, Becca and Derric and Jenn were chowing down on funnel cake and kettle corn.

The crowd, who turned up to watch the Time Benders every single year, was gearing up its excitement level for the perfor-mance. It didn’t matter that the act would be the same as last August and the August before that and the one before that. The Time Benders were a real crowd pleaser in a place where the nearest mall was a ferry ride away and first-run movies were vir-tually unheard of. So a singing group who performed rock ’n’ roll through the ages by altering their wigs and their costumes and re-enacting the greatest hits of the 1950s onwards was akin to a mystical appearance by Kurt Cobain, especially if you had any imagination.

Jenn was grousing. Watching the Time Benders was bad enough, she was saying. Watching the Time Benders at the same time as being a third wheel on “the Derric-and-Becca looove bike” was even worse.

Becca smiled and ignored her. Jenn loved to grouse. She said, “So who are these guys, anyway?” in reference to the Time Benders as she dipped into the kettle corn and leaned comfort-ably against Derric’s arm.

“God. Who d’you think?” was Jenn’s unhelpful reply. “Y’know how other county fairs have shows where has-been performers give their last gasp before they finally hang it up and retire? Well, what we got is unknown performers re-enacting the performances of has-been performers. Welcome to Whidbey. And would you stop feeling her up, Derric?” she said to their companion.


6 Elizabeth George

“Holding her hand isn’t feeling her up,” was the boy’s easy reply. “Now if you want to see some serious feeling up . . . ?” He leered at Becca. She laughed and gave him a playful shove.

“I hate this, you know,” Jenn told her friend. She was returning to the previous third-wheel-on-the-looove-bike topic. “I shoulda stayed home.”

“Lots of things come in threes,” Becca said.“Like what?”“Well . . . Tricycle wheels.”“Triplets,” Derric said.“Those three-wheel baby buggies for joggers who need to take

their kids with them,” Becca added.“Birds have three toes,” Derric pointed out. Then, “Don’t

they?” he said to Becca.“Great.” Jenn reached for more funnel cake and jammed it

into her mouth. “I’m a bird toe. Lemme send that out on Twitter.”Which would, of course, be the last thing Jenn McDaniels

could have done, since among them Derric was the only one who possessed anything remotely close to technological. Jenn had neither computer nor iPhone nor iPad nor laptop, because her family was too poor for anything more than a third-hand color television the size of a Jeep, practically given away by the thrift store in town. As for Becca . . . Well, there were a lot of reasons why Becca remained at a distance from technology and all of them had to do with keeping a profile so low that it was invisible.

The Time Benders came forth at this point, climbing onto the stage past amplifiers that looked like bank vaults. Their wigs, pegged pants, white socks, and poodle skirts indicated that—



just like last year—they’d be starting with the fifties. The Time Benders never worked in reverse.

The crowd cheered as the show began, lit by the rest of the midway with its games of chance and its creaking thrill rides. The best of the fifties blasted forth at maximum volume. Over the noise, Jenn shouted at Becca, “Hey, you probably won’t need that thing.”

That thing was a hearing device that looked like an iPod in possession of a single ear bud. It was called an AUD box and, despite what Jenn thought, Becca didn’t use it to help with her hearing. At least not in the way Jenn thought she used it. Jenn and everyone else believed that the AUD box helped Becca understand what was being said to her by blocking out nearby noises that her brain wouldn’t automatically block: like the noise from other tables that you might hear in a restaurant but nor-mally be able to ignore when someone was talking to you. That was what Becca let people believe about the AUD box because it did, actually, block out some noise. Only, the noise it blocked was the noise inside the heads of the people who surrounded her. Without the AUD box she was bombarded by everyone’s thoughts, and while hearing people’s thoughts could have its benefits, most of the time Becca couldn’t tell who was thinking what. So since childhood, the AUD box was what she wore to deal with her “auditory processing problem,” as her mom had taught her to call it. Thankfully, no one questioned why the AUD box’s loud static helped her in understanding who was speaking. More important, no one knew that without it, she was one step away from reading their minds.


8 Elizabeth George

Becca said, “Yeah, I’ll turn it down,” and she pretended to do so. Up on the stage, the Time Benders were rocking and rolling through “Rock Around the Clock” while on either side of the stage, some of the older audience members had begun to dance in keeping with the music’s era.

That was when the first gust of smoke belched across the heads of the crowd. At first, it seemed logical that the smoke would be coming from the line of food booths, all doing brisk sales of everything from buffalo burgers to curly fries. Because of this, the Time Benders audience didn’t take much note. But when there was a pause in the music and the Time Benders were getting ready for the sixties with a change of costumes and wigs, the sirens hooting from the road just beyond the fairgrounds’ perimeter indicated something serious was going on.

The smell of smoke got heavier. People started to move. A murmur became a cry and then a shout. Just at the moment that panic was about to set in, the regular MC for the show took the stage and announced that “a small fire” had broken out on the far side of the fairgrounds, but there was nothing to worry about as the fire department was there and “as far as we know, all animals are safe.”

The last part was a serious mistake. “All animals” meant everything from ducks to the 4-H steer lovingly brought up by hand and worth a significant amount of money to the child who would sell it at the end of the fair. In between ducks and steers were fancy chickens, fiber-producing alpacas, award-winning cats, sheep worth their weight in wool, and an entire stable filled



with horses. Among the audience for the Time Benders were the owners of these animals, and they began pushing their way in the direction of the buildings in which all the animals were housed.

In short order, a melee ensued. Derric grabbed Becca and Becca grabbed Jenn, and they clung to each other as the crowd surged out of the midway and past the barn where the crafts were displayed. They burst out behind it into an open area that looked onto the show ring and to the buildings beyond.

At the far side of the show ring, the stables were safe. The fire, everyone saw at once, was opposite them on the side of the show ring that was nearer the road into town. But this was where the dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, and rabbits had been snoozing in three ramshackle sheds that flaked old white paint onto very dry hay. The farthest of these sheds was up in flames. Fire licked up the walls and engulfed the roof.

The fact that the fire department was directly across the street from the fairgrounds had the effect of getting manpower to the flames in fairly short order. But the building was old, the weather had been bone dry for nine weeks—almost unheard of in the Pacific Northwest—and there were hay bales along the north side of the structure. So the best efforts of the fire department were directed toward keeping the fire away from the other build-ings while letting the one that was burning burn to the ground.

This wasn’t a popular move. There were chickens and rabbits inside. There were dozens of 4-Hers who wanted to save those ani-mals, and the news that someone had apparently released them at some time during the fire only made the onlookers crazed to


10 Elizabeth George

get to them before they all got trampled. Soon enough there were too many fire chiefs and too few onlookers and enough chaos to make Derric, Jenn, and Becca head for the safety of the stables some distance away.

“Someone’s going to get hurt,” Becca said.“It ain’t going to be one of us,” Derric told her. “Come on, over

here.” He took her hand and Jenn’s, and together they made their way beyond the stables to where a woods grew up the side of a hill to a neighborhood tucked back into the trees. From this spot they could watch the action and listen to the chaos, and while they did this, Becca removed the ear bud from her ear and wiped her hot face.

As always, she heard the thoughts of her companions, Jenn’s profane as usual, Derric’s mild. But among Jenn’s colorful cursing and Derric’s wondering about the safety of the little kids whose parents were trying to keep them away from the fire, Becca heard quite clearly, Come on, come on . . . get it why don’t you? as if it was spoken right next to her.

She swung around, but it was dark on all sides, with the great fir trees looming above them and the cedars leaning heavy branches down toward the ground. At her movement, Derric looked at her and said, “What?” and then shifted his gaze into the trees as well.

“Is someone there?” Jenn asked them both.“Becca?” Derric said.Out of here before those kids . . . was enough to give Becca the

answer to those questions.


T W O

Hayley Cartwright looked around for her sister Brooke, who’d claimed that she was leaving the family’s booth at

Bayview Farmers’ Market just long enough to do her business in the rest room. Total lie. She’d been gone thirty minutes, leaving Hayley and her mom to run the booth all by themselves when it was, minimally, a three-person job. Brooke did the bagging and the weighing of veggies, Hayley wrapped the flowers and boxed the jewelry, and their mom took the money and made change. But with Brooke gone, Hayley was left dancing from one side of the booth to the other and trying to keep her eye on everything but especially upon the jewelry, which was fashioned from sea glass, difficult to make, and her main source of personal income.

Not that people actually shoplifted from the Cartwrights, at least not people who knew them. Taking even a dime from the Cartwrights was close to the same as emptying the family’s piti-ful bank account, and everyone on the south end of Whidbey Island who knew the family also knew that. So most of the time people lined up patiently to pay for the flowers and veggies that the Cartwrights grew at Smugglers Cove Farm and Flowers. They


12 Elizabeth George

chatted to each other in the warm early September sun, petted the myriad dogs who accompanied the market-goers among the colorful stalls, and listened to the music weekly supplied by one or another of the local marimba bands.

This day, though, a girl unknown to Hayley had been pawing through her necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and hair pieces for at least ten minutes. She’d also been trying them on. She was very pretty, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and shapely arms and legs that were on full display beneath her tank top and shorts. She wore her hair in an odd Cleopatra style—if Cleopatra had been extremely blonde—and her bangs dipped almost into her eyes, which were so cornflower blue that only colored contact lenses could have achieved the hue.

She saw Hayley watching her as she was putting a third neck-lace around her ivory-skinned throat. She’d already donned four of the bracelets, and she was reaching for one of the more com-plicated pairs of earrings quite as if there was nothing strange about decking herself out like a jewelry tree.

Seeing Hayley observing her, she said, “I c’n never decide a single thing when I’m by myself. It’s absolute murder if I’m trying on clothes. My grandam is here somewhere”—here she looked around the crowded market distractedly—“and I guess I could ask her, but she’s got the most wretched taste, which you’d more or less have to expect from someone who carves up trees for a liv-ing. Not that there’s anything wrong with carving up trees, mind you. I’m Isis Martin, by the way. Egyptian. I mean the name is, not me. Isis was the goddess of something. I can never remember what but I truly hope she was the goddess of hot desire because



I’ve got a seriously delicious boyfriend back home. Anyway, what’re these made of and which do you think looks best on me?” During all this, she’d put on a fourth necklace, odd because she was already wearing her own, a gold chain with elongated links that disappeared into her tank top and must have cost a fortune. She was peering into the stand-up mirror that Hayley provided, and she paused in her inspection of Hayley’s necklaces to put on lipstick that she excavated from a basket-weave purse.

Hayley liked the purse but was afraid to say this, for fear of setting the girl off again. So she said, “It’s sea glass. I make them. I mean, I make all the jewelry.”

“Sea glass?” Isis said. “You mean ‘sea’ like from the ocean? So do you get it from . . . like . . . I mean, are you a diver? I tried to learn to dive. My boyfriend before my current boyfriend? He and his family were into diving in a major way and they took me to the tip of Baja for spring vacation one time? They tried to help me learn to dive, which was a total joke because I am so, like, totally claustrophobic.”

“I find it on the beach,” Hayley told her when Isis took a breath. She looked over the other girl’s head to see if Brooke was anywhere in view. No such luck, which meant she had to get back to bagging and weighing. She glanced over her shoulder. The line of patient shoppers was extending and her mom was beginning to bag and weigh. She looked harried. She cast Hayley a suppli-cating glance.

“On the beach? Way cool,” Isis said. She reached for a fifth necklace. “I love the beach. Maybe I could go with you some-time? I’ve got a car. Well, my parents had to give me something


14 Elizabeth George

to come up here, after all. I wouldn’t be any good at looking for sea glass, though. I’m blind as a whatever without my contacts and I generally don’t wear them at the beach because of the sand and how it can blow into your eyes if you know what I mean.”

“It’s over past Port Townsend,” Hayley told her. “The time to find it is winter, after a storm, more or less.”

“What’s past Port Townsend?” Isis peered at her reflection, then laughed. “Oh, I bet you mean the beach where you get the glass. God, I’m a flake. I c’n never remember what I’m talking about. Where’s Port Townsend? Should I go there? D’they have any decent shops?” She handed Hayley a sixth necklace, one that she hadn’t tried on. She picked one of the bracelets already on her arm along with a pair of earrings she’d not inspected and a barrette that matched nothing at all. “I think this’ll do it. Did you tell me your name? I can’t remember. I am such a ditz.”

She began disentangling the rest of the necklaces she’d donned as Hayley said that her name was Hayley Cartwright and, yes, Port Townsend had some really cool shops, if you could afford them. Hayley herself couldn’t, but she didn’t add that. She just wrote up the sale of the necklace, bracelet, earrings, and bar-rette, and she helped the other girl remove from herself every-thing else she’d donned. She told Isis the price, and the girl dug a thick wallet out of her woven purse. It was crammed with all sorts of things: newspaper clippings, folded notes with scribbles all over them, coffee reward cards, pictures, and cash. A great deal of cash. Isis pulled out a wad of it and distractedly handed it over.



She said, “Could you . . . ? Just take what you need.” Then she laughed. “I mean take what I owe you!” And she fixed the new necklace around her neck and scooped up some of her hair behind the barrette. She did this latter action with a lot of skill. She might be bird-brained, Hayley thought, but when it came to her appearance, she knew what she was doing.

Hayley counted out the appropriate amount of money and handed the rest back. Isis was admiring the barrette in her hair. The sea glass around her neck, as it turned out, was an inspired choice. It exactly matched the color of her eyes.

Isis took the rest of the money and crammed it into her wal-let. She had a section of pictures inside this that was three fingers thick. She said, “Oh, you’ve got to look at him,” and flipped open to the first. “Is he totally hot or what?” She showed Hayley a pic-ture of a boy whose hair stood out from his head in a way that made him look like a cartoon character recently electrocuted.

“Uh . . . he’s . . . ?” Absolutely nothing came into Hayley’s mind.Isis laughed in delight. “He doesn’t really look like this. He

just did that to piss his parents off.” She shoved the wallet back into her purse. “Hey, d’you want to get a lump-whatever? I can’t remember what it’s called but there’s a lady over there selling them and they look totally like something I shouldn’t be eating in a million years. Which, of course, is why I fully intend to buy two or three. What are they called?”

Hayley laughed in spite of herself. There was something beguiling about Isis Martin. She said, “Lumpia?”

“That’s it. I can tell I need you to help me navigate these


16 Elizabeth George

mysterious island waters. I’ve been here since June. Did I tell you that? Me and my brother . . .” She rolled her eyes expressively, and at first Hayley thought this was in reference to her brother until Isis made the correction with, “My brother and I. Grandam goes berserk when I say ‘me’ as the subject of a sentence, so sometimes I do it on purpose. She thinks I don’t know it should be I. Well, I’m a congenital idiot, but I do know me is an objective case pro-noun, for heaven’s sake. So d’you want a lumpia or two or six?”

Hayley said, “Sorry. I can’t leave . . .” She waved around her. “The booth, you know. My sister’s supposed to be here, but she’s disappeared.”

“Siblings. What a trial. Well, maybe another time?”“You go on, Hayley.” It was Hayley’s mom speaking. She’d

been on the edge of the conversation all along. “I can handle things here. Brooke’ll be back.”

“It’s okay. I don’t—”“You go, sweetheart,” her mom said firmly.Hayley knew what that meant. Here was an opportunity to be

“just a kid,” and her mom wanted her to have that opportunity.

BROOKE FINALLY SHOWED up when they were disas-sembling their booth and getting ready to drop the unsold veg-gies at the nearby food bank, a feature of the island that most visitors to Whidbey didn’t know about. Tourists to the island came to soak up the atmosphere: the razor-edged bluffs rising up from beaches studded with sea shells and jumbled with drift-wood, the pristine waters where a crab pot brought up fifteen



Dungeness within two hours, the deep forests with shadowy hik-ing trails, the picturesque villages with their clapboard, seaside charm. As to the homeless population and the needy families . . . To visitors, they remained unseen. But people who lived on the island didn’t have to look far to find people in need, because many of them were neighbors, and when Brooke groused about how “totally dumb it is to be giving our food away when we should be selling it somewhere and making some money,” their mom cast a look into the rearview mirror and said to her, “There are actually people worse off than we are, sweetheart.”

Brooke’s response of “Yeah? Name ’em,” was out of character. But a lot of her remarks had been out of character lately. Their mom called this a stage that Brooke was going through. “The middle school years. You remember,” she said to Hayley as if Hayley had also been a Mouth with Attitude when she’d been thirteen. Hayley, on the other hand, pretty much believed that Brooke’s attitude had nothing to do with middle school at all. It had, instead, everything to do with the Big Topic that no one in their family would ever discuss.

Their dad, Bill Cartwright, was falling apart. It was a slow process that had begun in his ankles and had now worked its way up his legs so that they didn’t do what his brain asked them to do any longer. Time was when their dad would have been with them at the farmers’ market, working the booth. Time was when he would have shared the labor at Smugglers Cove Farm and Flowers, too. Hayley’s mom would have been raising the horses that she no longer raised and growing the flowers while he raised goats and worked in the huge vegetable beds as the girls took care


18 Elizabeth George

of the chickens. But that time had passed, and now what went on at the farm was whatever the women could manage, minus the littlest Cartwright woman, Cassidy, who was only competent at collecting eggs. What couldn’t be managed by the women simply no longer occurred on the farm, but no one mentioned anything about this or anything about doing something that might help them out. It was, Hayley thought, an extremely dishonest way to live.

They were heading north on the highway on the route home, when Julie Cartwright asked Hayley about “the chatty girl who bought the jewelry.” Who was she? A day-tripper from over town? A vacationer? Someone from school? A new girl friend, perhaps? She didn’t look familiar.

Hayley heard the hopefulness in her mom’s voice. It had two prongs. The first was to change the topic of conversation in order to alter Brooke’s mood. The second was to direct Hayley toward getting a normal life. She told her mom that the girl was Isis Martin—

“What kind of weirdo name is that?” Brooke demanded.—and she’d been on the island since June. She lived with her

grandmother and her brother and . . . Hayley realized that despite all of Isis’s chatting, those were actually the only two facts she knew aside from her having a boyfriend. Isis had bought four lumpias and, cleverly, had decided that she could only eat two of the pastry-like stuffed delicacies. She’d handed the other two over to Hayley, saying, “Do me a fave and snarf these, okay.” It had been breezily done. Hayley had found herself liking the girl for doing it.



After eating and when Hayley had said she needed to get back to the market stall, Isis had scribbled down her smart phone number and handed it over. She’d said, “Hey, maybe me and you c’n be friends. Call me. Or text me. Or I’ll call you. We can hang. I mean, if you c’n put up with me.” She’d excavated in her straw purse for an enormous pair of sunglasses with rhinestones along the ear pieces, saying, “Aren’t these the trippiest ever? I got them in Portland. Hey, give me your number, too. I mean, if I haven’t totally put you off with my babbling. It’s ADD. If I take my meds, I’m more or less focused, but when I forget . . . ? I’m a verbal shotgun.”

Hayley had given the other girl her phone number, although her cell phone was as basic as they got, so there would be no texting. She also told her the family phone number to which Isis had said, “Wow, a land line!” as if having this was akin to having kerosene lamps.

“Anyway,” Hayley said to her mother, “she was sort of ditzy, but in a good way.”

“How lovely,” Julie Cartwright said.


T H R E E

When they arrived at Smugglers Cove Farm and Flowers and trundled up the long driveway toward the collection

of barn-red buildings, they found Hayley’s dad on the front porch along with Cassidy. They were on the swing looking out at the farmyard. Cassidy had a death grip on one of the barn kittens. Bill Cartwright had a similar grip on the chain from which the swing did its swinging.

He struggled to his feet, and everyone did their usual thing of pretending not to notice. This was becoming progressively more difficult since he had begun using a walker. He worked his way to the edge of the porch as his women clambered out of the car. He called out, “Hayley, would you get that young man out of the veg-etables? He wouldn’t take no for an answer,” which made Hayley look in the direction of the vegetable beds stretching out glori-ously with the beginning of the autumn harvest.

She saw Seth Darrow’s 1965 VW before she saw him. The restored bug was parked to one side of the barn. Seth himself was crouched at the near end of the sweet potatoes. He had to be dealing with the watering system, she decided. They’d been hav-



ing trouble with it all summer and he must have stopped by the farm, had a conversation with her dad during which the watering system had come up. It would be just like Seth to set off to deal with it.

“I tried to tell him I’d be getting to it tomorrow,” Hayley’s dad said.

“Oh, you know Seth,” her mom said airily. “Brooke, go ask him if he’d like a tuna sandwich please.”

“No way. I want a tuna sandwich.” Brooke tramped up the front walk, blasted across the porch, said, “You know, you’re going to kill that stupid cat,” to Cassidy, and entered the house with a bang of the screened door.

Julie Cartwright said with a sigh, “I thought if she saw the dog, it might distract her.” Away from food was what she didn’t add. Brooke was putting on weight—far more than was natural—but it was another subject they didn’t talk about.

The dog in question was Seth’s golden Lab, Gus. He was snuf-fling around the squash.

“I’ll go,” Hayley said.“Tell Seth I’ll have a sandwich ready for him,” her mom told

her, which was code for “let him finish what he’s doing.” This surprised Hayley. They generally didn’t accept help from out-siders and, despite Seth being her former boyfriend, he wasn’t a member of the family.

Deep into his repair of the watering system, Seth hadn’t heard the rest of the Cartwright family arrive. He didn’t even look up till Gus came loping along the pathway between the beds once


22 Elizabeth George

Hayley entered through the tall gate in the fence that protected the area from the island’s marauding deer and rabbits.

He was dressed for work, Hayley saw. Instead of his usual garb of baggy jeans, sandals, socks, T-shirt, and black fedora, he wore his carpenter’s overalls, heavy work boots, and a baseball cap from which his long hair pony-tailed out of the one-size-fits-all opening at the back. Had he not been garbed like this, Hayley would have known he’d just come from work anyway, for his ear gauges were flecked with sawdust and his hands were newly nicked from construction.

He said, “Hey,” and paused to raise the baseball cap slightly. “Came by to give you some news and your dad said . . .” He nod-ded to the work he was doing.

She said, “Thanks, Seth. Mom’s making you a sandwich for afterwards.” She bent to pet Gus, who was bumping around her legs to get her attention.

“Coolness,” he replied. Then, “Gus, cut that out.”“It’s okay,” Hayley said. “And . . . thanks, Seth. He can’t really

get out here. I mean, he can but not to do anything hard.”“Yeah. I could tell.” He squinted up at her, seemed to evaluate

what might happen if he said what he wanted to say next, then said it anyway. “I wish you guys could catch a break, Hayl.”

“You and me both.” She watched him for a minute. He was working with wrenches, pliers, and wires, and she had no clue what he was doing. She said, “So why’d you stop by? You said you had news?”

“I passed the GED.”She felt her face brighten. “That’s great, Seth.”



“My tutor’s totally relieved, let me tell you. The whole math thing was touch-and-go. And she still thinks I can’t read worth beans, which is more or less true. But my mom’ll be doing a naked celebration dance in the moonlight. I’m gonna sell tickets. That’s not the best part, though.”

“No?” It seemed to Hayley that there couldn’t be better news. Seth had dropped out of school in his junior year, had avoided studying for the GED throughout what would have been his senior year. Only in the last six months had he pulled himself together. The fact that he’d surmounted both his fear of failure and his catalogue of learning disabilities to take the equivalency test and pass would be a very big deal to his entire family.

Seth said, “Triple Threat is playing at Djangofest this year.” He was trying to sound casual about it, but Triple Threat was his gypsy jazz trio, Djangofest was a five-day international fes-tival celebrating the intricate music of French guitarist Django Reinhardt, and to be invited to play at one of the many venues around the village of Langley during the festival had long been one of Seth Darrow’s dreams.

Hayley said, “Oh my God! Seth, that’s amazing! Have you told your parents? Your grandpa? Where’re you going to be playing?”

“My mom and dad know but that’s all. Aside from the guys in the trio, ’course. We didn’t score a good time—Wednesday after-noon at five at the high school and who’s gonna show up then but—”

“I’m showing up. And so’s your family. And so’s Becca and Jenn and—”

“Well, yeah. S’pose.” He sounded indifferent, but Hayley could


24 Elizabeth George

tell he was pleased. He said, “Anyways . . . This is looking pretty good now.” He was referring to the repair he’d made. He heaved himself to his feet and brushed off his hands. This put him eye-to-eye with Hayley, as well as closer than she was comfortable with. They were friends now, not what they’d once been. It had to be this way, and while she knew that he knew it, she sometimes felt from him a longing for more.

She took a step back. She covered this by looking toward the house where her dad was at the edge of the porch watching them. She frowned at his posture, at how he had to cling to the walker to stay upright now, at how he heaved one leg and then another just to move a few feet.

Seth seemed to read what she was thinking. He said, “Not good, huh?”

“How can I?”“What?”She gestured to the farm around them: the huge fields, the

paddocks empty of horses and goats, the long low chicken barn down by the road. “You know,” she told him.

He followed her arm’s semicircle, gazing at the sights and con-sidering what they actually meant. He said, “You decide where you’re applying yet, Hayley?”

Hayley knew where he was heading. But she had no intention of applying for universities. No one in her family knew about this. Neither did Seth. She wanted to keep things that way until it was too late to do anything about it.

She said, “I’m pretty close,” which was a total lie.



“Where’s it gonna be?”“Don’t know. Like I said, I’m close but not there yet.”But Seth was no fool. He heard something in her voice and he

said, “Don’t play that game, Hayl. You got the smarts. So use ’em.”She looked at him. “It’s not as easy as that and you know it,

Seth Darrow.”


The Edge of Nowhere and The Edge of the Water

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Transcript of The Edge of Nowhere and The Edge of the Water