Denise picked Anna up ten minutes after she called. Denise’s unsettling aura, the one that made Anna’s spine tingle, evaporated as Anna told her what she wanted. The abrupt loss of Denise’s erratic hypervigilance made Anna wonder what she’d been expecting. What she’d been fearing. Given Ranger Castle’s behavior, Anna didn’t think “fear” was too strong a word. Maybe whatever had inspired her sudden retirement was still haunting her.
“So,” Anna finished, “Elizabeth’s stalker is here in Maine. Wants a meet-and-greet. E’s off somewhere communing with the spirits, but we don’t want to let the opportunity slip past.”
Denise leaned forward until her chin was almost resting on the steering wheel. “Are all men such bastards?” she demanded. “Serial killing, child molesting, rape, bestiality—you name it, men do it.”
“Women, too,” Anna said because she was in the mood to poke a hornets’ nest.
Denise sucked an audible breath through her nose, then puffed the air out of lips loose with scorn. “Sure. One, two maybe. Not enough for a decent statistic. Get real. Women do shitty things, no doubt about it, but the twisted male victimization of women is front page every day. Got a cult leader? What’s the first thing he does? Makes all the women sleep with him. Got a God? First thing the guy says—and the gods are all guys nowadays—is ‘Obey your husband. Put yourself in a black bag so nobody can see you.’ Root of all evil, Eve and the goddamned apple my ass! More like Adam and his snake.”
Anna laughed. “I like that. I have to remember to tell my husband. He’s a priest.”
Denise looked at her, her eyebrows in a shocked V. “Like defrocked?”
Anna laughed again. “Episcopal.”
“Sorry I shot off my mouth,” Denise said. She sounded more sulky than sorry. Rather like a child who got caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to.
“Don’t be,” Anna said easily. “In this case, you’re preaching to the choir. This victim is a particular friend of mine.” She didn’t mention that E was her goddaughter. Being married to a priest was condemnation enough to a cynical ear.
Having cleared the change in routine with Peter, Anna and Denise would swap out cars so they weren’t in a marked NPS vehicle. Denise would accompany Anna to the coffee shop. It was unlikely, but whoever was behind the bullying might recognize Anna on sight. Denise had the advantage of being an unknown.
“Do you know anything about stalking via the Internet?” Anna asked as Denise pulled the patrol vehicle into the parking garage beneath her apartment building in Bar Harbor.
Denise’s head jerked back as if Anna had flopped a nasty fish in her face.
“What are you implying?” she asked, an edge to her voice.
Maybe Denise had done a bit of cyberspying after the split with Peter. Before the Internet, dumped girlfriends had to drive by “his” house to see whose car was parked there. Now, armed with personal information, they could read credit reports, check Facebook. All manner of interesting new methods of self-torture were available.
“I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to this stuff,” Anna replied mildly. “I hoped you might know more.”
“Oh,” Denise said. “No. I’m not into that. I don’t even have a cell phone.”
For a law enforcement officer not to have a cell phone was tantamount to dereliction of duty. More was the pity; a cell phone saw to it that no one was ever truly off duty, or home from work. Anna tossed this lack of modern technology onto the pile of Weird Denise Castle Things growing in the back of her mind.
With the nervous reluctance of a jeweler ushering in a cat burglar, Denise let Anna into her apartment. To Anna’s eyes there was nothing to be ashamed of. The place was neat to a fault—no books, no magazines, no cats or dogs or dirty underpants on the floor. White walls were decorated with framed photographs in black and white of the park both above and below the surface of the Atlantic. The carpet was white, no off-color spots where beasties vomited or booted feet left dirt. The couch was white, black-and-white zebra-print pillows standing sentinel at either end. A glass coffee table and a flat-screen TV finished the decor.
With the air of a wary damsel inviting a vampire over the threshold, Denise said, “This way,” and ushered Anna into the apartment’s single bedroom. It was as monochromatic as the living room. Both rooms had the impersonal feel of having been “dressed” by a Realtor looking to sell.
“These should fit well enough,” Denise said, pulling a pair of gray linen slacks and a white pleated-front blouse from the closet. A narrow black belt was hooked over the hanger by the buckle. The clothes in the closet were all arranged in outfits. She laid the clothes on the bed, then took a shoe box from a neat arrangement of shoe boxes on the closet floor. “Size seven and a half,” she said.
“That will work,” Anna replied.
Denise looked around the sparsely furnished room, then left reluctantly as if she thought Anna might pocket any valuables left lying around.
Having put on Denise’s outfit, Anna studied herself in the mirror on the sliding closet door. In any mall in America she would have gone unremarked. Salespeople would trust her. PTAs would welcome her as a member. Anna felt deep, deep undercover. Still, it was good to be free of the Kevlar vest. Anna missed the days when they were an option, not a requirement, for law enforcement rangers.
In the mirror’s reflection she noted the single personal item in this impersonal lair. A photograph stood on the black wooden nightstand. Drawn to it, Anna picked it up. A narrow rectangle, matted to fit the standard frame, showed a much younger Denise in her Park Service uniform. Three fingers wrapped around her right arm. It must have been taken when she was with Peter. He’d been cut out and the mat redone to cover the excision. Symbolic, this hiding of the past with a black mask. In the photo Denise was smiling, an expression Anna had seldom seen on her face. It had been taken before Denise had gotten her teeth capped. Her old incisors, the way they neatly overlapped, struck Anna as familiar.
“Are you done?” Denise demanded. She had entered without knocking and stood in the bedroom door radiating disapproval.
“Yes,” Anna said. “Is this you?” she asked, holding up the photograph.
“It was,” Denise said.
“You remind me of somebody,” Anna said, turning the picture to study the image.
Denise laughed, a cartoon laugh, “Heh, heh, heh.” In two steps, she’d crossed the small room and taken the picture from Anna’s hands. “I have that kind of face. I always remind somebody of somebody else.” Opening the drawer on the nightstand, she dropped it in facedown, then snapped the drawer closed again. “Let me get dressed.”
Summarily dismissed, Anna slunk back into the living room. She’d thought the woman had been warming to her. Evidently that phase of their relationship was abruptly at an end. Why? Was Denise hiding something? Shame at having cut Peter from a picture? Embarrassment at having her crooked teeth on display? Her sudden iciness seemed overkill for such minor humiliations.
Unless Anna had stumbled on a sore spot, pushed an old button. Perhaps Denise had been teased about the teeth. One never knew which closets harbored a stranger’s skeletons.
In moments Denise emerged from the bedroom in black slacks and a white sleeveless mock turtleneck. “Let’s get on with it,” she said as she walked to the door. Opening it, she held it, whisking Anna out with a sweep of her hand.
Door closed and locked, Denise relaxed marginally. By the time they’d traveled down the stairs to the garage, she seemed nearly her usual slightly weird self.
She opened the door of a forest green Mazda Miata. The top was down. “Cool,” Anna said as she slid in.
“Not very practical,” Denise said as if she quoted a stern and humorless mother.
Cecelia’s Coffee Shop was on the town square in the heart of Bar Harbor’s tourist district. Had the Miata not been so small, parking would have been a bitch; as it was, Denise slipped into a slot between two SUVs less than a block from the square.
She and Anna were intentionally early. They bought ice cream in small foam cups from a vendor in a pseudo-nineteenth-century cart complete with horse, then wandered to a bench in the square where they could watch the coffee shop.
“Your stalker can’t have too sinister an intent on his mind,” Denise said as she carved out a neat bite of ice cream with her tiny plastic spork.
“Not here,” Anna agreed. This wasn’t the haunted house at midnight. There would be no kidnapping, raping, or pillaging. Café tables sat beneath a striped awning, mothers and students and tourists perching on the ironwork chairs. People in shorts and T-shirts carrying plastic bags emblazoned with the names of local shops entered. A few minutes later they exited, iced coffee or mochaccino in hand. Nothing fishy, nothing shady.
On such a sunny afternoon, in the middle of a town set above the glittering blue of the Atlantic, and Disneyesque in its adorability, kidnapping, raping, and pillaging seemed an alien concept. Surely a species that invented ice cream, kites, and flip-flops would be incapable of harming a hair on a puppy’s head.
The mystery of humanity wasn’t that people were starkly evil or magnificently good but that they were both all the time. Sanity and insanity dwelt side by side in the human brain. Only when one grew so big it overshadowed and starved the other was it noticed.
People tended to either keep their crazy to themselves or gather with others sharing the same delusion. Churches, synagogues, temples, covens, mosques: If enough people believed a thing, it was declared sane. One person speaking to invisible beings was a nutcase. A thousand was a cult. Ten thousand, a religion.
Fortunately, most human madness was harmless, creative even; it made life rich and memorable and annoyingly real.
“Any clue as to what we’re looking for?” Denise asked, cutting into Anna’s thoughts.
“Nope.” Anna took a small bite of pistachio ice cream and let it melt on her tongue for a moment. “Early on I would have said teenage boys or girls, but they aren’t the sort who track victims across land for a couple thousand miles. That takes money and autonomy.”
“Any Dirty Uncle Ernies on the radar?” Denise asked.
“Not since she was nine.”
“Goddamn sons of bitches,” Denise said.
Two white high-school-aged girls and a woman who could have been their mother sat at one of the tables. Both girls were on iPhones. Mom, evidently old school, read a paperback novel. An older white male with a fat dachshund on a pink leash sat at another table and read a newspaper. Two boys came, opened their laptops on the third table, and ignored each other.
The older man finished his coffee. He and his hound ambled off. A barista cleared away his paper cup. Two middle-aged black women, both in capri pants and high-heeled sandals, took his place, sipping iced coffee. Obeying some psychic—or cyber—signal, the boys simultaneously folded up their laptops and left, still not speaking.
Time for the rendezvous came and went.
As afternoon on the square melted into evening on the square, Anna told Denise the details of the bullying. “At first we figured it must be a kid—or kids—in her school. As it turns out, if the victim doesn’t know the bullies or the bullies don’t ID themselves, or friends rat them out, there is virtually—and in this sense I mean virtually literally—no way to track them.”
“There’s got to be,” Denise said, settling on a bench near an old cannon on a concrete slab. “They can hack into your computer and record every keystroke you make, redirect your browser to ad sites, turn on the volume when they want to sing you a slogan, pinpoint your position anywhere on the face of the earth, find out what color panties you’re wearing, then try and sell you Viagra. How can they not track some pricks bullying a girl?”
“I guess we’re talking different theys,” Anna said as she spooned up a bit of the green dessert and laid it neatly on the end of her tongue, where it would melt over as many taste buds as possible on its journey to her esophagus.
“The capitalist theys are more motivated and tech-savvy than the don’t-bully-children theys,” Anna finished.
“And you can bet not one of them gives a flying fig about lost girls. Not one,” Denise said as she savagely attacked the chocolate chunk with her spork. “What makes you think it isn’t scumbag kids?” she asked around a mouthful of ice cream. “It stinks of scumbag kid fun to me.”
“Asking for a face-to-face,” Anna replied as she watched the people coming and going at the coffee shop. “To make a trip cross-country suggests an adult with the independence and money to travel.”
“What does the girl … Elizabeth?”
Anna nodded.
“What does Elizabeth think of the new development?” Denise asked.
“She doesn’t know yet. Her mother said she needed some time by herself. The combined concern of her mother, her great-aunt Gwen, and probably me can’t be all that easy to deal with. Poor kid.”
“Yeah, poor kid,” Denise echoed dully.
Anna was thinking of her husband, Paul. Never had anyone loved her like he did. More than she deserved. More than she could accept sometimes. There were moments it was as if she dared not feel pain because he would feel it as well, when she could not choose to spend herself as she would like because of what it would cost him.
“Unconditional love, in large doses, can be a burden,” she mused.
“I wouldn’t know,” Denise said.
Her tone snapped Anna out of her reverie. “There’s an odd one,” she said to deflect the feeling of guilt Denise’s sudden exposure had awakened. Using her spork, she gestured toward a woman nearing the coffee shop. She was plump, tall in platform sandals. Screaming red hair was styled in a short curly cap and set off by oversized glasses framed in turquoise. An enormous straw bag flapped at her legs as she walked, gripped by a hand as round and dimpled as that of a child, though the woman was probably in her mid-to-late thirties.
“What’s that in her bag?” Denise asked.
“Damn,” Anna said, then laughed. “It looks like a welding glove.”
“I think we’ve lost our window of opportunity,” Denise said finally.
“Maybe a no-show,” Anna said.
“Maybe,” Denise replied.
“Got cold feet?” Anna wondered.
“Made us?” Denise suggested.
“More likely, we didn’t make him.” Two college boys online, one old guy with a dog, one fat guy with badly behaved offspring. Woman with a Bozo hairdo. Nothing screamed stalker.
“We’re nowhere,” Anna admitted. Her cell phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” she said as she looked at the screen. “It’s our victim’s mother, probably wanting to know how we’re doing.” Anna poked the green phone icon and put the cell phone to her ear. “Heath,” she said.
“Elizabeth has gone missing.”
“You said she needed time alone,” Anna said, surprised at the terror in Heath’s voice.
“Hours ago, damn it! Hours ago. This island is the size of a postage stamp. She hasn’t come back,” Heath said.
Her fear awoke Anna’s. This wasn’t like E, to worry people she loved.
“Is Wily with her?” Anna demanded.
“I guess,” Heath said distractedly.
Anna smothered the urge to say, “That’s okay then.” Absurd as it was, the fact that the old dog was with E reassured her. Anna and Wily had forged an odd connection in the North Woods of Minnesota. It wasn’t something Anna chose to talk about. She doubted Wily did either.
“Anna, I’m pretty sure she’s not on the island,” Heath almost wailed. “I’ve looked everywhere I can, and called until I’m hoarse.”
While Anna had been neatly occupied eating ice cream in Bar Harbor, E had disappeared. Were the two connected? Had Anna been made a patsy? “Is Gwen with you?”
“No, Gwen and John went to Bangor for the evening. Dinner and a visit with Chris Zuckerberg.”
“I’m on my way. Give me half an hour,” Anna said. It would take her that long to talk somebody out of a boat and get to the island. Elizabeth’s body—Anna shuddered as she thought the word—would be found only by boat if she had fallen.
Or jumped.