Heath wasn’t sure whether she was making any headway or not. There was no end to sites, articles, and blogs about cyberstalking on the Internet. As often happened, there was not a lot of content in any of them. Most simply described the phenomenon: stalking via electronic media, the cell phone the most common method. As in the schoolyard, the incidents could be anything from a snide remark to a death threat. Sex and shame were favored tools, and, though she’d thought it unique to Elizabeth, children telling other children to kill themselves wasn’t all that rare. School and government sites had tabs marked “Prevent Cyberbullying,” but they were little more than advice columns on how to police your own children and teach them what to post and what not to.
Several sites were informative as to how to report the incidents and get them removed from personal media. She learned there were things called “bashboards,” sites where visitors could vote on who was the fattest or ugliest or meanest kid in class. There was one for Elizabeth. Someone else had already reported it. It still existed, but Heath couldn’t open it.
On the subject of how to track down a cyberbully—or stalker, as she thought of the individual tormenting E—was vague and spotty. There was no clear path through the ether if the sender was even halfway clever.
A scream snatched Heath out of cyberspace.
Shoving the laptop off her legs, she yelled, “Elizabeth, are you all right?” Then, “Aunt Gwen!” Moving as quickly as long practice allowed, she levered herself off her bed, where she’d been sitting working, and into Robo-butt parked next to it. “Gwen!” she yelled again as she rolled across the old painted concrete floor of the lighthouse and toward the archway leading to the newer part of the house.
In reality the archway was a tunnel cutting through walls thirteen feet thick. Ms. Zuckerberg had painted the sides and curved ceiling with Peach Dawn at floor level and Midnight Blue with stars overhead. Heath shot through it like a mechanized comet.
“Elizabeth!” she shouted.
Wily began barking frantically.
“I’m coming,” she heard her aunt call from the top of the lighthouse.
A wide living room formed an arc around the base of the lighthouse. Curved windows gave views east and west. Large overstuffed chairs and sofas, backed by heavy dark wood tables, lent the peaceful air of an old library or a high-end lodge from the turn of the century.
Heath rolled through the charming room, seeing nothing except that her daughter was not in it.
The barking escalated.
Another scream cut across Wily’s shrill cries.
“I’m coming!” Aunt Gwen again. Heath could hear her footsteps rattling down the circular stairs.
The nightmare sensation of moving in slow motion through an atmosphere as thick and unyielding as bread pudding caught Heath. She felt as if her hands could not spin the wheels of the chair, as if she couldn’t see properly, her vision dusky at the edges. Had she not been able to hear rubber squeaking loudly on the tile floor as she took the corner from the living room into the kitchen, she would have thought herself trapped like a fly in invisible amber.
Ms. Zuckerberg’s kitchen was spacious and modern, with antique touches tying it to the island’s past. The floors were of wide planks, aged and scarred, either salvaged from old ships or made to look old by an artisan. A kitchen island stood in the middle of the space. The sides were of dull beaten tin, the top of dark marble. Beyond was the sink, and more counter space beneath cupboards built of dark wood with perforated tin where glass might have been in another home.
Elizabeth was on her hands and knees atop the utility island. Wily was on the floor, hind end up in the air, forelegs on the planks, barking like crazy at something Heath could not see between the island and the sink. Heath jerked her wheels to a stop, and her chair slid another couple of feet. The floor was covered in water.
“What in the hell is going on?” she roared, panic making her voice big and angry.
Elizabeth snatched her eyes from whatever Wily had cornered and, to Heath’s relief and fury, began to laugh. She was laughing so hard she was holding her sides and gasping, feet dangling over the edge, rear end on the cutting board, when Gwen came running into the room. Before Heath could shout a warning, Gwen hit the water-slick and careened across the floor in a comic-book slide, arms windmilling, to fetch up against the island.
This sent E into another round of hysterical giggles.
“She could have fallen and broken a hip!” Heath shouted at her daughter. “We both could have been killed.”
For reasons that Heath had no interest in, this struck not only E as funny, but Gwen as well.
“Damn it, Wily, shut up!” Heath roared. To her surprise he did. He grinned at her foolishly, then trotted over to her chair. Grabbing his collar, though he was the only one who appeared to be paying any attention to her, she waited with grim patience until Elizabeth and Gwen saw fit to stop snickering.
“Are you done?” she asked acidly when they’d quieted. Careful not to look at one another lest they burst out all over again, they both nodded.
“What the hell is going on?” Heath demanded.
“Elizabeth was playing with her food,” Gwen said. That set them off again. Heath sat and fumed. She’d have lit a cigarette if she’d been anywhere but inside a house. There was nothing she could do when Gwen was encouraging E. Aunt Gwen was in her seventies, but when the two of them got going Heath could easily see what her aunt had been like when she was thirteen. Finally they wound down to intermittent giggles.
Wily whined.
A skritching of hard, sharp objects clawing at the floor emanated from behind the island, where now both E and her great-aunt sat swinging their legs, heels banging lightly against the tin sides. Gwen was in lime green capri pants and aqua tennis shoes, E in sweats, T-shirt, and purple flip-flops.
Brownish green and curved, a claw protruded from behind the island, then another, smaller, then the rest of the lobster.
“There are two,” Gwen managed, fighting to keep her face straight. “John dropped them by for dinner tonight.”
Gwen had come home at two in the morning. Heath had checked the time when the lift bell awakened her. Then she’d heard her aunt and John giggling in the kitchen. By the time Gwen had tiptoed through her bedroom and up to her tower room, Heath had been asleep. Now Gwen’s paramour had come by to drop off gifts. Things were certainly moving along in that quarter, Heath thought sourly—the sourness of the proverbial grapes, she suspected.
“I took the lid off that bucket.” E pointed to an overturned metal pail by the refrigerator. “And they just came out.”
Again she and Gwen went into gales of giggles. Regardless of the shock of thinking her only child was being slaughtered by barbarian hordes, Heath could see the humor and allowed herself a smile.
Gwen hopped off the island. Expertly, she grabbed the first lobster behind its claws. After a lifetime of dealing with squirming children, lobsters evidently were no challenge. While E squealed, “Eeew!” Gwen dropped it in the bucket and then caught the second one.
“I’ve got to go down the lift and get a bucket of seawater. Our friends here will die if they stay out much longer.”
“Aren’t they supposed to die?” E asked. “They’re food. Shouldn’t they be in the refrigerator or somewhere? Not running around the kitchen frightening the children?”
“You cook them live,” Gwen said.
Elizabeth’s face went stiff with shock, her mouth open. “You do not!” she exclaimed.
“You do. It doesn’t hurt them,” Gwen said matter-of-factly. In her soggy sneakers, her pail of lobsters at her side, Gwen marched out of the kitchen toward the lift.
“It doesn’t hurt them?” E asked incredulously. “How can being boiled alive not hurt them?”
Before Heath could think of an answer, Elizabeth had run out of the kitchen. Heath rolled to the doorway, but E was not standing at the lift waiting for her aunt to return. She was nowhere in sight,
Unexploded ordnance, Heath thought miserably. Gwen should have known. She didn’t know who to pity most, Elizabeth for her memories, or Gwen when she realized what she had done.