I’d never chameleoned from inside someone’s grasp before, but I did it now. And since one of the effects of chameleoning—my earliest, youngest method of self-defense—was to make everyone in a very dangerous room forget about me, that’s what happened.
It could have been funny, if it wasn’t so terrifying.
Kip relaxed his grip on me, somehow forgetting I was even there. Sheila trained her gun on him. I, however, was one frozen chameleon, and could not slither away from him even if I’d thought that would be a good idea.
Sheila was there, alive and breathing, a crazy not-actually-dead-after-all lady with a gun.
“You . . .” Kip stammered, sounding deeply confused.
Sheila still smirked, but she too looked uncertain. It’s not perfect, this supernatural disability of mine. Everyone affected by it knows they’re missing something . . . they just can’t quite put their fingers on what.
When I’d done this before with Sheila, it had pissed her off. It worked just the same this time. Sadly for Kip, he was the only one she knew to focus on.
“Yeah, me,” she snarled at him, waggling the gun a little. “Thought I was out of your hair, did you?”
“You can’t . . . be here,” he stammered.
She tried again for her smirk. “Seems like I can.” I could see her finger tighten on the trigger. Was she going to shoot him? A cop? Just how stupid was she?
Still pressed against Kip as I was, I could feel him reach for his gun. He thought I was dangerous, but he’d been holding me against his holstered gun. He couldn’t have thought I was that dangerous. He actually had to push against me to get enough leverage to reach it.
I struggled to regain my visibility, my voice. I had to return to presence in this room. This terrifying, tiny room. With two armed, unstable people in it. Well, one unstable person; and one who was confusing the hell out of me at the moment.
I had never had any control of my “gift” . . . until last week. Then, I was able to intentionally bring on the chameleoning, in order to save my life.
Could I do the same thing in reverse, now? For the same reason? Could I . . . bring myself back to visibility?
I could only try. I breathed deeply. I focused on my core and pulled calm back into my body. Into my limbs. Into my mind.
Meanwhile, Kip had his gun out, aimed at Sheila. His arm was steady against my side, but when he spoke, his voice shook. “You’re under arrest. Drop it, Sheila.”
She merely raised her own gun higher, now aiming directly between his eyes. “You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed. “Stupid country cop, have you ever shot anyone in your whole damn life? Stuck out here on this backwater island writing tickets for tourists and giving directions. You couldn’t shoot a squirrel, Deputy Doofus.”
She was goading him. Did she want to die?
I drew calm into myself. Again, again. I watched everything, and pulled calm from the universe, into me.
My left elbow, the one touching Kip, started to tingle.
Sheila kept going. Her voice sounded ragged. “Go on and do it. Stop being Howdy Doody in a uniform, and start being a cop. Do it.”
“Don’t tempt me, you traitorous, lying gargoyle.”
I’d never heard such anger and ugliness in Kip’s voice. Kip’s golden, mellifluous voice. Was the man I’d known, the man I’d grown to like and trust, just a fiction? Was this the real Kip?
My whole left side came alive, tingling and sparking as the nerves fired. I tried to clear my throat, coming up with a faint squeak.
Kip and Sheila both turned to me. Because I had popped right back into existence for them. They were both shocked and confused. Surprise was on my side. “This has to stop,” I said, as forcefully as I could. My voice still faltered, but they could hear it, and I could use it, I was visible, I’d done it! “Put your guns away. Now.”
Sheila just stared at me, open-mouthed. Even though she’d seen my chameleon trick before, she looked like she’d been pole-axed. Kip, however . . . his gun arm, still tightly pressed against my side, faltered a little. Was he beginning to lower it? Was this actually going to work?
The boat jolted as someone jumped on board, out on the deck behind us. “Hands up, all of you!”
Kip’s hand shot upward again and I felt him fire, I felt the strong report of the gun reverberate through his arm and my side. The impact of it broke whatever was left of my frozenness; I dropped to the floor, trying yet again to make myself as small as possible, only deliberately this time. Gunshots sang out all around me—I couldn’t tell if it was Sheila firing, Kip again, or the new player, whoever that was. Or all of them at once. I cringed further and made for the corner.
“I SAID HANDS UP,” bellowed Deputy Sherman, slamming the tiny cabin door open. “DROP YOUR WEAPONS, BOTH OF YOU!”
The boat rocked again. More people were boarding.
“No!” screamed Sheila, turning the gun on herself.
I was on my feet and hurling myself at her before I could even think. I cannonballed into her, knocking the gun away from her face. She managed to squeeze the trigger before it clattered away from her, but she didn’t hit herself. Or me.
I fervently hoped the bullet hadn’t caught anyone. There’d been quite enough stray-bullet wounds around here lately, thank you very much.
Sheila hauled back and slugged me in the chin; entangled as we were on the floor, she wasn’t able to get much force behind the blow, but I saw stars all the same. “You dumb hairdresser bitch!” she hissed in my ear. She groaned in anger or pain. Maybe she had caught herself with the bullet. “I’m the dummy. Here I was, trying to protect you.”
“Sheila,” I groaned. “Please, please stop trying to protect me. Really.”
“You two! Move apart and raise your hands!” Deputy Sherman hollered. I looked up to see that she’d somehow disarmed and subdued Kip . . . and she hadn’t done it alone.
Behind Sherman stood a tall, thin woman in head-to-toe black except for the bold white “FBI” emblazoned across her chest, made even taller by a sizable natural do shaved high and tight above her ears. She looked like Grace Jones in an FBI jacket. She towered over a smaller man in the unmistakable scarlet uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
“Deputy Rankin, you are relieved of your duties in this investigation until further notice,” the FBI agent intoned. “Inspector McMichaels and I are in charge from now on.”
Kip groaned, leaning against the cabin wall. “I was only trying to get to the bottom of things . . .” He shook a finger at me. “She’s . . . she’s in this somehow.”
The FBI agent turned to Sherman. “Bring them in. Cuff him if you need to.” She pointed at Sheila. “Definitely cuff her. And bring the civilians too.”
Sherman complied, perhaps even a little eagerly. Kip didn’t fight her. As the agent and the Mountie hauled him to his feet, he gave me a long last look, a look that conveyed regret, panic, desperation. He laid a finger against his lips in a clear signal, then let them handcuff him without a trace of struggle. He didn’t want me to tell them anything.
I’d never been so confused in my life.
They frog-marched him out of the tiny cabin as Sherman closed in on Sheila, who looked cornered, panicked, like she was ready to make a break for it. Sherman kept her gun trained and steady. “Don’t even think about it. Even if you run, we won’t shoot you. Not to kill, anyway. You’re going to talk to us this time.” Sheila’s face hardened. Kip was right. She did look like a gargoyle. But it was shocking that he’d ever say something so cruel.
“You, whoever you really are. Come on,” Sherman said to me with a scoff. “Party at the Orcas Island Substation.” And then she gave me a smirk that rivaled any Sheila had ever come up with.
Who was this Deputy Sherman, anyway?
And wait—she had said civilians? Who were the civilians, besides me?
“Testy, testy,” came JoJo’s voice from the boat’s deck. “No need to haul on me like that. I called you, didn’t I?”
“Come along, Mr. Brixton,” I heard the Mountie say. “We’ll sort this all out downtown.”
“Downtown” my foot, I thought. In a county without a single stoplight.
<<>>
It was hours later and the sky was getting light when I rode home in the backseat of Deputy Sherman’s car. JoJo sat to my right, trying to keep up his usual light and flirtatious banter. “So what drew you to law enforcement, Deputy Sherman? The handcuffs?”
Deputy Sherman was having none of it.
I wondered where Kip and Sheila were. With the FBI agent and/or the Mountie? After what I’d been through, my concern for the two of them confused me. I’d been manhandled by the courtliest man I’d ever met, and “protected” almost to death by a woman who had murdered a man right before my eyes and trained a gun on me more than once. Still, I couldn’t stop wondering where they were. Were they being held longer than us, or booked, or transported to—somewhere else?
I’d repeated my side of the story so many times, I could hear it in my brain on a loop. I was worried about Lisa Cannon. So I walked over to check on her. Kip Rankin intercepted me, and insisted I go with him to the boat. I had no idea why. There, we encountered Sheila and after that, things were a confusing blur. No, I had no idea why Kip wanted me on that boat. Yes, I’d been on the boat before, looking for my cat, and I was so sorry I hadn’t told anyone about it. Yes, I’d pulled up the floorboards, because James was somehow trapped in there. No, I hadn’t seen or found anything under that floor, besides my cat.
I wasn’t telling anyone that part.
I was in trouble for disturbing a possible crime scene. I was a person of interest. I was not to leave the island. But I’d stayed calm, that was the important thing. No chameleoning at all, no strange erasures that would alarm everyone in the police station. I was sure a police station, even one on a tiny island at the edge of everything, had cameras everywhere. What would happen if my supernatural disability were captured on tape? Could it be captured on tape?
“You know, I left the island because it was boring,” JoJo murmured. “This has been the least boring family holiday in memory.” He sounded bemused.
I looked over at his profile, handsome and golden in the dawn. I wondered what it would be like to have so much of what he had—money, looks, that gorgeous build—and not know what to do with yourself. He didn’t seem to do much besides drink and flirt. It seemed like a colossal waste.
Exhaustion had made me judgey. At least he was helpful.
“Thank you.”
“She speaks.” He smiled at me. “But what are you thanking me for?”
“For calling for help. I have no idea how you knew something was wrong, but however you knew it, you got me out of a bad situation. So thank you.”
He gave a rueful smile and shook his head. “I can’t claim any psychic superpowers. It appears we were both worried about Lisa. I was headed over to check on her myself. I saw Rankin manhandling you in a way that was not professional. And no matter what you might say about Kip Rankin, he’s always the soul of professionalism. Something was definitely wrong. So I put in a call on a back channel.”
I didn’t even know what a back channel was, but I was glad such a thing existed.
I thought about my family holiday weekend and stared out the window, watching for the waters of Massacre Bay. I would see morning light dancing on the water through the trees, soon.
We pulled up to the Brixton gate, which was closed. “Pull up to the keypad,” JoJo said, as offhand as if he were addressing a cab driver. “Could you roll down this window? Never mind. I’ll get out.” He tried the handle. “Could you let me out? Now?” He panicked. Of all the happenings of the weekend, finding a dead body, burglary, finding another dead body, Kip’s going rogue, Sheila being alive, and the arrival of the RCMPs and the FBI, the thing that got him the most upset was being trapped in the back of a police vehicle.
I felt exactly the same way.
When Deputy Sherman released us from the car, neither of us wanted to get back in. He waved her off, and we walked silently toward the houses. I could see the waters of Massacre Bay, and they were as just beautiful as I’d imagined.
I found myself leaning against JoJo as we walked. “JoJo? I can’t understand why you’d ever want to leave. I love it here.”
He put his arm around my shoulder in a companionable way. “Then you can have it. I’ll be on the next ferry out.”
I smiled for the first time in at least a day. He let go of me and went toward the big house, and I walked on to mine. I could hear Diana Brixton’s voice as he opened the door, and had no desire whatsoever to know what she was saying.
Maybe I could understand JoJo’s desire to leave here, after all.
<<>>
The Intruder was still dominating the driveway, of course, as silent and huge and out of place as ever. My car and my parents’ Lexus were next to (oddly enough) Jen’s white van. Maybe she’d come over to keep my parents company while I was at the station. The kitchen light shone through the guesthouse window. I hoped they hadn’t been up all night. I’d asked Deputy Sherman to give them a call, but had no idea whether or not she actually had. She’d spent most of the night looking slightly smug, as if she’d always known something was strange about Kip Rankin, and now we all knew.
“Brrup?” A familiar little heart-shaped face popped up on the path before me. James, with a dead shrew dangling from his mouth.
I shuddered. “Don’t I feed you enough?” At least it wasn’t a bird. He darted towards the door as I tried to open it. “No, James, you’re not bringing that inside. James!” He turned and sped away, unwilling to surrender his prize catch.
When I stepped into the kitchen, my parents were seated at the table with coffee, both their faces pale and concerned. My mother burst immediately into tears.
“Oh Mom, I’m fine.” But they were on me, enfolding me in their arms. “Dad, please. I’m fine.” But it felt so good that I was crying, too.
My dad’s arms were shaking, and so was his voice. “I don’t buy that for a minute. Cliff had to leave on the ferry to make his flight, but he agrees with us. We’re taking you home with us.”
“Dad . . .”
“No arguing! Your mom and I have gotten you a ferry reservation. You’re coming back to Wenatchee with us. It’s settled.”
I let myself live there for about thirty seconds. Because it felt so easy, the idea of getting into my car, driving to the ferry, leaving these weeks of Orcas intrigue behind. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? I wouldn’t have to put up with Diana Brixton and her salt suspicions and her instruction manual. I wouldn’t have to worry about finishing the play, and live through the prospect of watching it bomb onstage because the actors were so out of control or it just plain sucked. I wouldn’t have to untangle whatever mystery was behind Lisa and that binder, and her ex-husband, and her homicidal ex-employee. I wouldn’t have to deal with my confusing feelings for Kip, especially in light of the last night. And whatever the deeper mysteries of Orcas were, these boats and bodies, these mysteries could carry on without me. It was just too much.
Except . . .
I pulled myself out of my tangle of parental love and tears and hugs. “I can’t leave. And I don’t want to.”
“But Cam . . .” My mom shook her head. “You’re not safe here.”
“I’ve spent too much of my life trying to be safe, Mom. I’ve only learned how to hide. I mean, no one is as good at hiding as I am. You know that, right?”
My mother blinked. My father squeezed my shoulder, then handed me a cup of coffee.
“I have to learn another way. I have to figure out how to stop hiding all the time. And I think this is the right place to do it. Here, on Orcas Island.” I searched my parents’ eyes, expecting to find disappointment. Instead I saw a flicker of understanding, a small nod, the slightest hint of a smile.
In spite of themselves, my parents were proud.
Dad started to zip up his bulky sweater. “Well, if you’re staying, then I’d better unpack your car, Cam.”
“You packed my car?”
My mother patted me. “Your father couldn’t sleep. It gave him something to do.”
I looked out the window. Jen’s truck was still there by mine. “Do you guys know where Jen is? Why is her van here?”
The room went very quiet, and my parents exchanged looks. “Er. I’m . . . going to go get your bags.”
What the heck?
I watched my father head out to my car, which was unlocked, apparently. He was swinging out my bag when the door to the Intruder opened. I watched as Jen looked out, testing the morning air. Jen, with hair tousled, cheeks flushed, smiling barefoot and wearing a very familiar T-shirt, one that belonged to . . .
Kevin.
Kevin, who stood close behind her, Kevin who wrapped an arm around her waist while handing her a cup of coffee, no doubt brewed in his magical Magnavox coffee system, Kevin who was wearing only his boxer briefs, Kevin who smiled sweetly into Jen’s face as she came in for a kiss, the only kind of kiss Kevin gave in the morning before he’d brushed his teeth. A sweet little closed-lips morning kiss with those sweet, full, perfect lips of his.
“Oh.” The word slipped out of me, along with a tiny weight I hadn’t even known I was still carrying. “Oh.” I felt nearly giddy with sudden clarity, and vertigo. I raised my coffee cup to my best friend in a silent toast, but I couldn’t smile.
Jen turned to look at the house, her expression suddenly worried, and caught my eye through the window. She gave me a tremulous smile, a question of a smile.
I made myself smile at her, as my heart spun in—confusion, pain . . . relief? All of it.
Her eyes widened. Then she raised her own cup back to me.
<<<>>>