Anna sat with Wily, Gwen, and Heath on the stone apron overlooking the sea. The sky was scattered with a herd of ephemeral sheep, as small and puffy and regular as if a child had drawn them. The sea was impossibly blue, navy in the shallow troughs and teal where the water thinned at the crests of the waves. This far north, the afternoons slipped into evening with exquisite slowness, the sunlight, rich as wild honey, striking diamonds from both the ocean and the granite.
Anna found it hard to believe that people bothered to torment and injure one another when there were so many better ways of spending one’s time. Given the choice of a moment such as this or trolling the Internet, or shooting a hairy naked man, why would anyone choose the troll or the hairy man?
“Have you recovered from E’s going AWOL?” Anna asked.
Heath sipped her bourbon. “Like it never happened,” she said.
“She’s lying,” Gwen said mildly. Gwen was fortified with a glass of white wine, her feet resting on the rounded footrest of a classic Adirondack deck chair. “After much consultation, she has decided to pretend it is okay. I have not. In my day—and I very much think today is still my day, thank you very much—boys come to the door and meet the family.”
“The boy remains a state secret?” Anna asked. “Do we even know for sure it is a boy?”
“Of course it’s a boy,” Gwen said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Anna smiled. Of course it was a boy.
“I wanted to forbid E ever to see the little bastard again,” Heath said. “But I actually think she would have disobeyed. Yesterday E asked to ‘go out’ for a while. Like there was a mall nearby. Jesus. I managed to say yes without spitting.”
“You get points for that,” Anna said.
“Fortunately I was gone,” Gwen said. “I think I should have spit.”
“You were in Bangor with the owner of the island?” Anna asked to be polite.
“Yes. Christine has had several heart attacks. This last was accompanied by another stroke. She can’t speak, and her left side is completely paralyzed. It’s hard to see her so agitated. She fell trying to get out of bed. Dez said she had scribbled something about wanting to see her children.”
“Elizabeth came back from her second ‘date,’” Gwen said. “You were probably right to let her go.”
“Right. Because she came back when she said she would, I should get Mother of the Year,” Heath said. “If she hadn’t…”
Heath didn’t finish that thought. She didn’t need to.
Maternal fear, so palpable Anna could almost see it, curled like fog around the wheels of Heath’s wheelchair. “E didn’t let any interesting information slip?” Anna asked, hoping to distract her friend from the nightmare possibilities.
“Nope. If she wasn’t happier than I’ve seen her for a long time, I might consider thumbscrews,” Heath said. “E is sticking with the basic ‘nice friend’ description of Boat Boy.”
Anna would have liked to see Boat Boy behind bars, if for no other reason than that he took her goddaughter out in a boat that had but a single personal flotation device, muffled his oars, and refused to meet the parents for fear of being arrested.
“If I was trawling for a sixteen-year-old girl, a cute boy would be my bait of choice,” Anna said.
“Don’t think I haven’t obsessed on that. And mentioned it to E about six hundred times. She insists that’s not it. The child smirks and hums to herself,” Heath said sourly. “If he’s a pervert I will skin him with a dull Boy Scout knife, one square inch at a time, drench him with gasoline, and set him on fire.” Abruptly Heath went silent.
“You two are scaring me,” Gwen said mildly. “Talk about something joyful.”
“Murder, then. Murder is always entertaining,” Anna suggested.
“The murdered lobsterman—the second lobsterman killed recently, right? The first was shot with a rifle for stealing … poaching?” Heath asked.
“There’s nothing to indicate the two killings are related—” Anna began.
“Smells fishy to me,” Heath said.
“John says the two incidents have nothing to do with each other,” Gwen said. Both Heath and Anna looked at her.
“And John knows this why?” Anna asked.
“It turns out—and this just breaks my heart—that the first lobsterman, the one shot because he and his son were suspected of robbing traps, was Will Whitman, John’s son,” Gwen said.
“God,” Heath groaned. Her compassion ground deep. Anna knew she was thinking of losing Elizabeth. Anna could imagine, if only intellectually, what it must be like to lose a child, like losing a particularly magical cat or a dog one had bonded with. Maybe worse.
“John says his son is innocent, for what it’s worth,” Gwen added. “His grandson is still missing, trying to clear his father’s name and keep himself out of the line of fire, I guess.”
“John is probably right about Will Whitman’s and Kurt Duffy’s deaths being unrelated. Whoever killed this guy Duffy appeared to be a little more personally involved than a man gunning down a poacher. Duffy was shot three times—twice through the shower curtain—”
“And, one assumes, other parts of his anatomy,” Gwen said.
“With a small-caliber weapon,” Anna finished. “Then apparently smothered with the shower curtain. Since us ‘acting’ chiefs haven’t much to keep us occupied, I cruised by the widow’s house. It’s not exactly park jurisdiction, but I thought I’d interview her just for the hell of it. Nobody answered the door. I walked around to see if Ms. Duffy was hanging out clothes or sunbathing.
“Talk about depressing. The yard is packed dirt with a broken swing set. The chain on one of the swings was banging against the metal pole in the wind. It was like a scene from Edgar Allan Poe, if Poe had been born in a trailer park in 1967.”
“For whom the bell tolls,” Heath said amiably. “Isn’t the spouse the first suspect? An abused spouse in this case, wasn’t she?”
“When all else fails, it’s the wife,” Anna said. “But I doubt that was the case this time. From the state the bedroom and the deceased were in, there was an all-out battle. Ms. Duffy doesn’t seem to be the kind who could fight a sick puppy and win. What possesses a woman to marry a Kurt Duffy?” she wondered aloud. “Move into his hovel, cook his dinners, launder his sweaty fish-smelling undershorts?”
“As my father used to say, ‘Perhaps Mr. Duffy has talents we are not privy to,’” Aunt Gwen said.
Anna grunted.
Heath struck a match to light her cigarette.
Elizabeth emerged from the house, “He’s back,” she announced.
From the sound of her voice, Anna knew it wasn’t the boy with the boat.
“Read it out loud,” Heath said to her daughter.
Elizabeth held the phone in front of her at eye level. “‘You didn’t show up you lousy pig-faced C asterisk asterisk T,’” she articulated carefully.
“You’re kidding!” Heath exclaimed. “A filthy cyberstalker who balks at the C-word?”
“He also misspelled ‘lousy.’ L-O-W-Z-Y. Loh-zeee,” she said in the tones of a demented Hollywood Chinaman. “Sheesh! Even in text-speak we have our pride.”
Then she laughed.
Anna sighed. No matter how old a woman grew, there wasn’t much a cute boy couldn’t cure.
At least for a while.
Anna hoped Boat Boy wouldn’t break E’s heart. At sixteen heartbreak was a miserable thing. Age did nothing but make it worse. Hearts that didn’t grow harder as the years passed acquired an ability to love that young people could only imagine.
The text didn’t prove the boy with the muffled oars, and the fear of law enforcement, wasn’t a monster. It did suggest that he was not the cybercreep. Unfortunately there was more than one kind of monster in the world.
Heath lit the cigarette before the match burned her fingers, breathed in a lungful of smoke, blew it out. “Our Fox River thug ruined the F-word forever. Now this toad is going to ruin all the other bad words.”
“Pig-faced asterisk asterisk is my favorite so far,” Elizabeth said.
Heath shot her a sideways look, squinting through the smoke from her cigarette. “I think you’re beginning to enjoy this,” she said.
Anna heard the joy beneath the pretense. No one could miss how much happier Elizabeth was since her ersatz abduction, and E’s happiness was Heath’s happiness. “Anything else in the text?” Anna asked.
E’s eyes tracked back to the cell phone. “‘Same place, same time, day after tomorrow or else.’ ‘Or else’ is in all caps.”
“Are you being stalked by a ten-year-old?” Heath growled. “What does ‘else’ mean?”
“I don’t think I want to find out,” Elizabeth said, her good humor gone, anxiety dragging down her cheeks.
Anna thought for a moment, her fingers absently ruffling the feathers of Wily’s tail; he’d flopped down between Robo-butt and Anna’s chair. Threats were tricky things. Most went unfulfilled. Most. However, if the stalker wanted to meet with E, it was not to do her a kindness. “Or else” could be nothing. It could also be an ugly bit of business.
It was tempting to think the stalker would be mollified by contacting his victim in the flesh. He would say what he needed to say, be heard if he needed to be heard. Anna suspected that more than one person who climbed into a clock tower with a repeating rifle did so because they felt they could not be seen, could not be heard, could not break through the indifference of the world—or the bureaucracy—any other way.
One might be tempted to believe that a meeting would cancel out the “or else.” Not Anna. To stalk and bully with the intensity this creep had shown was to prove oneself beyond the pale of society. Now that he was demanding to move from the ether into the corporeal world, he went from a psychological threat to a physical threat.
Resources were limited. Jurisdictions, considering the crime was instigated in Colorado and conducted from the cloud, were a mess. Stalking was illegal, but cyberstalking? That had yet to be dealt with in any definitive way.
Information was limited. None of them had a clue as to who this was. It could be someone connected to E’s past in the compound, someone connected with the kidnapper who had taken her and the other girls, an enemy of Heath’s—or even Anna’s—or a random psychopath. He might recognize them or not. They might recognize him or not.
“We need to set a trap,” Anna said.
“Anything to end the suspense,” Heath said.
“What can I do?” E asked.
“Nothing,” Anna told her. “You’re the bait.”