Again Heath looked at her watch. Less than two minutes had passed since last time. Finally she held it up to her ear. Ticking. Time and its petty pace were making her crazy. At minute twenty-four, Anna slid back down the same rock she’d climbed out over.
“Bucket track,” she said succinctly as she dropped the lobster pail to the ground. “I found where Elizabeth dumped the lobsters. There were skid marks in the loose gravel on the rock. A handful of plants were ripped from a crack as if she’d grabbed them to keep from being pulled into the water.”
Heath felt her heart stop. When it started again each beat struck a blow to her rib cage from the inside. “Slipped and fell?” she croaked. “Drowned?” This had to be what dying felt like. Everything was going black but for Anna’s face. Maybe Heath was falling. She couldn’t tell.
“I don’t think so,” Anna said as she trotted toward the lift. “Wily is gone as well, and there were scrape marks on either side of the rock crack where she set the lobsters loose. A small boat is my guess.”
“She took a boat?” Heath said stupidly. Her ears were hearing words. She could see Anna’s lips moving, but her brain was having a hard time making sense of things. “With Wily?”
“A boat took her, and I hope they took Wily and didn’t just kill him and dump the body,” Anna said as she opened the lift gate. “Coming?”
Leah said saltwater could damage Dem Bones’s electronics. Leah said, “You break it, you buy it.” She meant it. Leah was not a fanciful genius. To her a cliché was as good as a contract.
To hell with Leah. Heath couldn’t take the time to get out of the thing and into Robo-butt.
“Of course I’m coming.”
Anna turned and walked toward the lift.
Heath followed, the crutches giving her balance.
Anna was piloting the small NPS runabout, a single-engine boat with a canvas shelter over the steering wheel. Heath relinquished pride in favor of speed and let herself lean heavily on Anna’s shoulder as the metal and electronics lifted her feet and legs from the dock and over the gunwale one at an excruciating time. With a push and a whirr, she was seated on the plastic bench that ran along the port side of the runabout. Anna held up an orange life jacket. Heath wanted to tell her to drop the thing, get a move on. Knowing it would take longer to argue, and she wouldn’t win, she clenched her teeth and held her arms out so Anna could thread the PFD onto her shoulders.
“I’ll get the straps,” she insisted as Anna started to do up the front of the life preserver. Anna looked at her for a second.
“I will,” Heath promised.
Evidently Anna believed her. She slipped into her own PFD, leapt out of the boat, untied the lines, leapt back in, and finally, finally, thankyoubabyjesus started the boat.
Breathe, Heath told herself. Breathe. Air came in through her nostrils. She seemed unable to force it down past the concrete closing off her throat.
“Where are we looking?” Heath asked. Her voice was nearly a whine. There was nowhere to look. Just ocean and drowned land.
“We’ll start where the boat met up with Elizabeth and Wily. From there we will fan out in arcs. I will be looking for boats. You will be looking for anything, no matter how small, on the water. Every thirty seconds you will blow that whistle around your neck and shout Elizabeth’s name and Wily’s. When we lose the light, we assume they’ve made land somewhere—the boat was small, rowboat sized—and we stop. I call Peter, and the rangers start searching the park.”
Heath nodded. Words were backed up behind her teeth, but not one of them meant a thing.
Evening, and the encroaching fog, rapidly cooled the air. As Anna pushed the throttle open, the rush of chill wind against Heath’s overheated face felt like an acid wash until her skin became acclimated to the new element.
Darkness oozed in from all directions, the ocean, the edge of the sky, out from the islands, their skirts of rock turning black and ominous. Heath felt the world closing down, ending. “It’s been hours, she’s surely dead,” she moaned. “I am such an idiot. I killed her.”
Anna pulled the throttle to idle. Turning she stared down at Heath. “Do you want me to slap you?” she asked. “You know, the traditional cure for female hysterics?”
Heath blinked. Anna looked no softer than the granite, no warmer than the fog. Heath swallowed.
“Not necessary,” she whispered.
“Good. Talk about something else. Tell me what Gwen’s been up to. Anything. Watch and call and blow the whistle.” Anna turned back to the control panel and pushed the throttle forward, not far enough to bring the boat up on plane, just above idle so voices could be heard over the engine noise and the wake wouldn’t swamp anything that might be floating in the darkening waters.
Heath pulled the brass whistle Elizabeth had given her from under her shirt and life jacket. Sucking in as much air as her shriveled lungs would allow, she blew a long blast, then called weakly, “E! Elizabeth!”
“Good,” Anna called over her shoulder. “Now talk to me for thirty seconds and do it again. Keep your eyes on the water.”
Talk. About something else. Not the girl dying somewhere because Heath was a fool, a shit-for-brains fool. There was nothing else. Aunt Gwen, she thought, gone with John to Bangor. “Aunt Gwen delivered Ms. Zuckerberg’s children.” Heath said the words one by one like a not-so-bright schoolchild reciting a poem she didn’t understand. When she’d done, she felt herself sinking, her eyes unfocused on the endless deadly expanse of water turning the color of ink. Under all that icy black was a child of light.
“And,” Anna prodded. “Talk to me.”
Slowly, Heath rose out of the depths and forced herself to think of anything else. “Ms. Zuckerberg isn’t doing well. Heart weak. Transient ischemic attacks. She’s lost the ability to talk, Gwen said.”
“Good,” Anna replied, as deaf to the words as Heath was. “Blow, call.”
Heath blew the whistle and called Elizabeth’s name. Her voice was stronger. The talking was keeping her mind off the horror that wanted to suffocate her as surely as the water had suffocated—
“Ms. Zuckerberg can’t talk,” Anna said sharply. “When she gets out of the hospital, is she going to her kids?”
“No,” Heath said. She knew what Anna was doing. She knew she needed it, but, at the moment, she resented Anna for it. Despair pulled at her with an almost pleasurable force, the way a steep canyon would if she stood—rolled—too close to the edge. Part of her wanted to fall into the nothing that was offered. Coward, she cursed herself. Sucking in a lungful of breath, she forced herself to speak. “No. Her kids don’t even—”
“Hush!” Anna said and cut the throttles to idle. “Listen.”
Through the muffling of the coastal fog, now reaching halfway to Boar, Heath heard what sounded like a dog’s yip. Then nothing. She blew a blast on the whistle. “E!” she screamed. “Elizabeth! Answer me!”
A thin, reedy bark pierced the fog.
“There,” Anna pointed to where the mother-of-pearl of the sea met the pearl of the mists. A dark shape, trapezoidal, about the size of an old shipping trunk, touched the water. Then an orange smudge showed above it. The smudge moved suddenly. As they heard the splash of a body hitting the water, a girl screamed.
Anna shoved full throttle.