SEVEN

The specter of Sam Edleson filled the room with the stench of sulfur. Heath caught herself grinding her teeth and made herself stop.

“I’m going to make a few calls,” Anna said, and slipped from the room as soft-footed as the apocryphal Indian.

Elizabeth excused herself to go to the bathroom.

Heath and Gwen waited in terror, neither saying anything, both afraid Elizabeth had gone to harm herself, both afraid they would never again feel safe when the girl was out of their sight.

“Should I go check on her?” Heath asked.

“No,” Gwen said. Then, after a minute, “Do you think I should?”

“No.”

Gwen began feverishly tidying the room. Heath pored over her daughter’s cell phone, rereading the sordid texts, wanting to delete them but knowing she shouldn’t. They were evidence. Elizabeth was adamant; she didn’t want the police involved. Elizabeth was also sixteen. Heath wasn’t sure police could do anything about the cyberattacks anyway. To ease the pressure, she finally allowed herself to delete one message. It was from herself to Elizabeth reminding her to put the wash in the dryer.

After what seemed a cruelly long time, Elizabeth returned. Relief flooded Heath when she saw she’d washed her face and combed her hair, signs of hope.

Then the three of them waited, Heath spinning her mental wheels. Gwen, having straightened every cushion, and aligned every book and magazine, sat on the sofa watching her great-niece with such intensity Elizabeth finally pelted her with a pillow.

Irritation, another sign the girl was beginning to engage in the world outside her misery.

Anna returned. “Edleson left his job in Idaho for making improper advances to a seventeen-year-old high school intern. In Idaho it’s only a felony if the girl is sixteen or under. Nobody wanted to press charges, for all the usual reasons. The company didn’t want to fire Edleson because of the adverse publicity and/or unemployment compensation. He was told to quit, and did. Shortly thereafter the family moved to Boulder.” Having delivered the message in as few words as possible, Anna waited, her weight on the balls of her feet. Heath guessed she was hoping to be shot toward Sam Edleson as an arrow is shot from a bow.

“You called the cops!” Elizabeth cried.

“I did,” Anna said. “The Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, police. They have no jurisdiction over you.”

Reassured, Elizabeth’s attention jumped to the next awful conclusion. “He’s done it before?” she demanded, sounding shocked.

“Probably more than once,” Anna said. “That’s how these guys are.”

“Then why were they yelling at me?” The indignation in her voice went far to soothe Heath. Because she was female, it was inevitable Elizabeth would be thinking she had done something wrong, brought this upon herself.

“Elizabeth, would you get my boots, please?” Heath asked.

“Which boots?” Elizabeth asked warily. “Your old climbing boots?” This last was asked with a small note of hope.

“Nope,” replied Heath, dashing it. “The turquoise and silver.” Elizabeth groaned. Almost said something, thought better of it, and levered herself up off the sofa cushions to vanish down the hall.

“What’s with that?” Anna asked.

“Now we’re going to pay that nice neighborly call,” Heath said. Her voice came out flat and dark. Even if his wife and daughter lied to themselves and the world about Sam, Heath wanted him to know in no uncertain terms that she knew what he had done.

“No time like the present,” Anna said.

“Good cop, bad cop?” Heath asked. She felt silly saying it, but it worked on television, and was the only plan that came to mind.

“Only if I can be the bad cop,” Anna said without a trace of humor. “Are you going to wear your carapace?”

Heath thought she detected a note of excitement in Anna’s voice. The electronic exoskeleton fascinated the ranger. Leah, whom Anna had gotten to know on their ill-fated trip down the Fox River, had strapped Anna into the prototype. Though she’d fought the machine as if it were trying to take over her body, she’d come to respect and admire it. Whenever Heath used it, Anna would whistle through her teeth or shake her head and mutter, “I’ll be damned.”

“Not tonight,” Heath said. “I’ve used up my quota of energy on that scale. Robo-butt will have to do the heavy lifting.”

“Let me get my—” Gwen began.

Heath cut her off. It was best not to let the juggernaut pick up any speed. Gwen lacked self-control around people who harmed children. Though Heath wanted to rend the Edlesons limb from limb, burn their house down, and sow the land with salt so nothing would grow there for a thousand years, she suspected she would gather a lot more workable leverage and information by using subtle threats and blackmail.

“I don’t think this is a good time to leave Elizabeth home alone,” Heath said.

“Of course not,” Gwen agreed immediately. “I’ll make a fresh pot of tea.” She smiled wearily. “It’s good to have something to hate that can easily be dumped down the drain.”

As if he understood every word that passed, Wily heaved himself to his paws with a sigh and made ready to follow them. “Protect the children and old people,” Heath said fondly as she rubbed his head. There was a time she would have taken him. He was courageous and as wily as his namesake, but the years were creeping up on him.

Elizabeth returned carrying a pair of worn but beautiful turquoise cowboy boots with silver threading. “What’s wrong with your sneakers?” Elizabeth asked forlornly. “Or even your hiking boots?”

“Tonight I intend to kick some ass,” Heath replied. Elizabeth flopped down, her body awkward, her resentment obviously at war with what Heath suspected was the joy of having a champion, regardless of whether she rides out on a white horse or in a gray wheelchair.

Gentle, as she always was when touching her adoptive mother, Elizabeth waved away Heath’s hands and put the boots on her feet for her.

“Aren’t those a bit dressy for an unannounced call?” Gwen remarked, coming in from the kitchen with the threatened pot of tea.

“Power suit,” Elizabeth said.

Anna said nothing, following as Heath rolled toward the front door.

The sun was behind the mountains, and though it wasn’t dark, shadows pooled and the sky had grown soft and infinite. The day’s warmth was drifting away from the skin of the mountains on a gentle down-canyon breeze carrying the scent of pine.

Lights were beginning to come on in the neighborhood, people home from work and cooking supper. Sam’s truck was in the drive, an outsized Dodge Ram that one should not keep if one doesn’t own a ranch where it can run and play. Expertly, Heath wheeled around it. Fortunately, the Edlesons’ house had a wide brick walk and a front door without a step, a rarity Heath hadn’t noticed before her disability. Given this was to be a confrontation, she was glad she didn’t have to be dragged up a front stoop, then wait while Robo was hauled clanking up behind like an albatross.

When they arrived at the door, Anna reached over Heath’s head and banged the frame of the screen door. There was a doorbell, but Heath was happier with the “Open up. Police!” sound of Anna’s knuckles and left it alone. Disquiet murmured from inside, muttering, then silence, as if a television set had been switched off.

More silence.

“Curtains twitched at two o’clock,” Anna murmured. Heath had caught the tiny movement from the corner of her eye—Sam or Terry or Tiffany peeking out the front-room windows to see who was at the door. The phrase “at two o’clock” threatened to make her giggle hysterically, and she wondered when her anger had turned to fear. Heath had no fear that Sam would do them physical damage. Bizarrely enough, given she would probably come out on the wrong end of a physical encounter with a well-muscled man, she would have welcomed that. A compulsion to feel his flesh under her fists—or between her teeth—coursed through her so fiercely that, for a second, she felt she could rise from her chair and kick the door down. Her fear was that something she or Anna might say or do would make it worse for Elizabeth.

Anna banged again, louder and longer this time. Heath didn’t allow herself to wince.

She was beginning to think the Edlesons weren’t going to answer the door when she heard the bolt thunk back. The door opened halfway. No lights were on in the front room. The one in the kitchen, a light Heath had noticed when they crossed the drive, had been turned off. Dim behind the screen door, Terry stared out at them, her eyes like black holes in a dead-gray face.

“Hi, Terry,” Heath said pleasantly. “This is Anna Pigeon, a friend of the family and, for the moment, chief chair wrangler.” She smiled crookedly. Poor little paraplegic couldn’t hurt a fly. It wasn’t one of Heath’s favorite strategies, but she wasn’t above using it now and then if she thought it would give her the upper hand. Maybe she heard a faint snort from Anna; she wasn’t sure. “Could we come in for a minute?”

Terry didn’t want to let them in. She was breathing hard through pinched nostrils. Heath could hear each sniff. Terry’s lips, usually full and soft-looking, were pressed into a tight little frown.

“I’m afraid I don’t handle the chill of evening as well as I did before…” Smiling again, Heath waved a hand over her lap to indicate just how very sad and debilitated she was. Terry still didn’t want to let them in, but, like a lot of people, she was intimidated by the wheelchair. How could she say no? Heath was a cripple, for Christ’s sake. The door opened a bit more, and Heath got a wheel in, then, with a push from Anna, she was over the sill and into the house. All Terry could do was get out of the way so Heath wouldn’t run over her feet.

Before the fall from Keystone, Heath had been brash and ballsy. After, she had been angry and self-destructive. When she finally realized that, though she couldn’t walk, she was still a whole person, she found she’d changed. From the bastion of Robo-butt, the world was different, more layered and complex. Heath learned patience. She learned to watch people, to really listen, to genuinely see them. Something she’d not done much of when she was superwoman climbing tall mountains. Another skill she’d picked up was canniness, an ability to manipulate situations to her advantage, to manipulate people when she had to. Cunning wasn’t a strength much lauded in literature or the media, but it was a strength all the same, and Heath respected it.

Once they had breached the walls, as it were, Terry’s mood didn’t warm. She did, however, assume the role of hostess, offering them coffee. Anna didn’t accept. Heath did. Hard to toss somebody out before they’ve finished their drink. She parked herself advantageously, blocking the big, leather, man-of-the-house chair so the only remaining seating was on a couch that was too soft or a straight-backed chair that was too hard. She didn’t want Goldilocks getting too comfortable.

Anna leaned against a dark wood highboy, her ankles crossed, her arms crossed, looking deceptively relaxed.

In the minute it took for this arrangement, Terry was back with two cups of coffee on a tray along with a bowl of powdered creamer and half a dozen packets of Sweet’N Low. “Sure you won’t have anything?” she asked Anna politely. Being the hostess, probably along with the fact that neither Heath nor Anna had lit into her, seemed to have dialed her hostility down a notch. Coffee served, Terry perched on the edge of the couch, her mug hands as plump and white as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. Where there should have been knuckles there were babyish dimples. The rest of her was as amorphous; her bland oval face just missed being pretty due to a lack of definition in her features.

“The girls haven’t been seeing much of one another lately,” Heath opened conversationally.

“That’s so,” Terry said, then took a careful sip of her coffee. “I think it will be good for them to have a little time just with family.” She was recovering her equilibrium. Heath wanted none of that.

“So do I,” she said flatly.

Terry looked up, annoyed or startled. Sam appeared behind her, backlit in the kitchen doorway, shoulder against one side of the frame. His hair was tousled, that nice gold-shot Robert Redford hair, and he wore a plaid shirt half unbuttoned. Heath suspected he’d been in the bathroom primping until this entrance.

“I know you sexually assaulted Elizabeth,” Heath said to Sam. “Elizabeth’s sixteen. In Colorado that makes your behavior child molestation. A felony.”

Sam stopped leaning. He, at least, was scared. Not so Mrs. Edleson. Clacking her mug down on the tray, she tried to nail Heath to the wall with a malevolent glare. “Now see here, Heath, Sam didn’t do anything! Do you hear me? You daughter, your adopted daughter, is no better than she should be, and you don’t know the half of it.”

Heath looked over Terry’s head. “Sam, I know you arranged to be alone with Elizabeth, then assaulted her. I’m thinking the only reason it wasn’t rape was that your wife and daughter got wind of it and came home before they were supposed to.”

Terry was on her feet. “Your daughter made advances to my husband!” she shrieked, looking like she might fly at Heath and claw her eyes out.

Anna’s voice cut cold from where she still leaned against the sideboard, ankles crossed. “Elizabeth’s sixteen. Sam’s forty—”

“Thirty-eight,” he interrupted, his first words since entering the fray.

“She’s a minor. He touched her. Either way it’s a felony. Either way Sam goes to jail,” Anna finished.

Terry quivered, fumed, sat, took up her coffee cup, breathed, sipped. “There’s no need for that kind of talk,” she said softly. “There’s no need to embarrass yourself—or your daughter—by calling the police. I don’t blame Elizabeth. Girls like Sam. He’s a very handsome man.”

A snort from the sideboard, and a murmured “Chinless wonder.”

Heath suppressed a smile. Terry pretended not to hear. Sam’s hand flew to hide the lower half of his face.

“Elizabeth made a pass at Sam,” Terry said. The threat of jail hadn’t silenced her, but it had toned her down.

“Just like the girl in Idaho made a pass at Sam?” Anna asked. She pushed out from the table she’d been tucked against and stepped into the light from the kitchen. Menace radiated from her. Heath could never figure out how she did it. It was just there, palpable, a sense of imminent threat that could be felt against the skin of the mind.

“That girl … that girl was … she…” Terry, her righteous anger temporarily damped, was flailing for words to fan it back to life. Heath took this moment of vulnerability to unlock Elizabeth’s cell phone and open a text. Wheeling close enough that she bumped Terry’s knees, she thrust the cell phone into the other woman’s hands, where she couldn’t miss the photo of a woman and a dog fornicating.

“Is that why you sent this to my daughter?” Heath demanded. Terry dropped the pink cell phone as if it were a used tissue.

“This is sick,” Terry hissed at Heath. “Your daughter is disgusting and sick. This proves it.”

Sam pushed his wife aside, then reached down to retrieve the phone. Heath watched him narrowly as he turned the phone right side up on his palm and pushed the button to unlock it. “Shit!” he said in what sounded like genuine shock. Terry tried to slap it from her husband’s hand, but he dodged her blow. Anna moved from the shadows to stand behind Heath’s chair. Making plans for a quick retreat, no doubt.

Before the Edlesons could stop their squabble to launch a counterattack, Heath broke into their concentration.

“Sorry to introduce that into your world so suddenly,” she said acidly. “Someone has been using the Internet and cell phones—Twitter, texting, you name it—to cyberstalk Elizabeth. I need to find out who is behind it. Since the girls were at odds, I thought Tiff might be able to help me.”

“Tiff had nothing to do with that!” Terry snarled. “Nothing. I kept her away from your … daughter.” She made the word sound like an epithet. “Because Tiff is a good girl.” Terry’s doughy round face hardened and took on a sly look. “Since there is no problem, but you are troublemakers, what about I help you, and you promise not to try and get my Sam in trouble with the police?” she asked shrewdly.

“I promise,” Heath said solemnly.

“What about you?” Terry glared at Anna.

“Elizabeth doesn’t want the police involved,” Anna said.

“We don’t know anything about these … these filthy things,” Terry said. “We don’t know people who even know where to get filth like that. Nobody we know would ever get anything like on your daughter’s phone. There. Now we’re out of it. That’s all the help I can give you.”

The bitch was throwing it back on Elizabeth. Heath said nothing, and that nothing burned in her throat like fire on gasoline.

Sam, still staring at the phone, as if loath to take his eyes from the image of the woman and the dog for fear it would vanish, sat down on the sofa with a thump. “I’ve never seen anything like this stuff.” He was thumbing forward on the touch screen, no doubt hoping for more.

Terry snatched the phone from her husband’s hands. Heath was willing to bet she knew what Sam was, knew the lies she told herself so she could stay in the marriage.

“Is Tiff home?”

“You are not going to show this to Tiffany!” Terry exclaimed in horror. Marching over, she dropped the phone in Heath’s lap with an exaggerated moue of distaste.

“The girls are estranged,” Heath said. “Maybe Tiffany is doing this because she’s angry, because you told her Elizabeth tried to seduce her dad.”

“Tiff wouldn’t do this,” Sam said. “Tiff wouldn’t even know what this is.”

Heath could feel Anna hovering behind her like a brewing storm cloud. She shot her a warning glance; they needed to talk to Tiff. “I don’t need to show her the photograph,” Heath said with as much patience as she could muster. “But I would like to talk to her. The girls are close; Tiffany might know who wants to hurt Elizabeth.”

Terry’s eyes narrowed. “We’re done here,” she said. “Take your daughter’s filth and get out.”

“We need to talk to Tiffany,” Heath insisted. “If you want to be around when we do, go and get her.”

Sam stood, trying to pull his manhood up around him despite the missing chin. “You heard my wife,” he said, and took a threatening step toward Heath.

Anna moved from the shadows behind Robo-butt. Her right arm shot out, stiff and sudden, the heel of her hand catching him in the solar plexus. With an oof he sat again, his moment of macho a thing of the past.

“The girls are not close,” Terry hissed. She stomped past Anna and jerked open the front door. “Elizabeth brought this on herself. She probably gets stuff like that all the time. She probably likes it.”

Anna had turned the wheelchair so Heath was facing the harridan at the door. Throughout this adventure in futility Heath had remained relatively calm. Terry’s smugness and accusations blasted her self-control. The old Heath rose from the ashes of the one born of the ice fall. Heath never moved, but she saw, actually saw, an image of herself rise from her chair like a zombie from the grave, arms outstretched, fingers curled into claws the better to tear out and devour the flesh of Terry Edleson’s throat. Maybe Terry saw the projection. Heath didn’t know. All she knew was that a look of abject, pants-wetting terror deformed the other woman’s face.

Heath bared her teeth and braced her hands on the arms of her chair. Murder could be done in a state such as this. Had her legs been viable, she would have probably left the Edlesons in a squad car, never to see the outside of a prison cell again. As it was, blind rage could not be sustained more than a moment. Anna swept up behind her. Heath leaned back into the loving embrace of Robo-butt to be rolled unceremoniously over the sill and onto the brick walk. “You assaulted Sam,” Terry shouted. “I helped you! So you can’t call the police. They won’t believe you. You promised!” She glared at Heath.

“I did,” Heath said.

“You are a witness,” she yelled at Anna.

“I am,” Anna said.

The door slammed. The dead bolt thudded into place.

For a moment Heath and Anna stared at the door.

“Now we call the police?” Anna asked.

“Now we call the police,” Heath agreed.

Empty and exhausted, she slumped back in the seat and said nothing more, letting Anna push her down the walk. The long summer dusk had settled into true night. A streetlight made shadows stark and colorless on the concrete sidewalk beside the asphalt. Black and white, Heath thought, and missed a time when she saw right and wrong that clearly delineated.

“Ms. Jarrod?” came a whisper.

Anna stopped pushing. Heath came out of her slump into full alert.

“Ms. Jarrod, it’s me, Tiffany.” The girl, her blond hair gray in the cold light, separated herself from the side of her dad’s truck and crouched down by Robo-butt. At first, Heath thought it a sign of unusual sensitivity in a teenager, but realized it wasn’t. Tiffany didn’t want her parents to see her consorting with the enemy.

“I gotta get back,” Tiff said. “Tell Elizabeth it’s not me; my folks won’t let me call. They took my phone and my laptop and I’m like in a black hole. I can’t call anybody or get on Facebook or anything! I hope she’s okay. Tell her I’ll write her and put the note under the hedge where we used to crawl through when we were little kids. Nobody’d ever think of that.”

“Elizabeth’s being cyberstalked,” Anna said curtly. “Do you know who’s behind it?”

“I know about the stalking—everybody at school does. I don’t know—”

“Tiffany!”

“Gotta go. I know what Dad … I … gotta go.” She stood and ran, probably hoping to get back inside the house before Mom and Dad figured out she’d defected.

Anna pushed. Robo-butt rolled. Heath rode. Only the crunch of the chair’s rubber tires on bits of escaped gravel accompanied them back to the kitchen door. Gwen, Elizabeth, and Wily were waiting for them on the couch, tense and wide-eyed.

Anna parked the chair, then sank down in her former place. Heath set the brakes.

“Well, open the envelope, for heaven’s sake!” Gwen exclaimed.

“No winner,” Heath said wearily. “It probably isn’t Tiff, which is good news. She couldn’t, her folks confiscated her cell phone and her laptop.”

“Gosh,” Elizabeth breathed, evidently shocked at the draconian nature of the punishment. “What did she do?”

“She saw,” Anna said.

“Tiff said she would write you about it and leave the note under the hedge where you kids used to crawl back and forth to each other’s yards,” Heath said.

“On paper?” Elizabeth asked.

“No. She’s going to scratch it on a piece of slate with a stylus,” Heath retorted.

“That Tiffany wasn’t doing it, that’s good, isn’t it?” Gwen asked.

“Not really,” Heath said.

“We haven’t a clue as to who is behind it,” Anna said. “So we have no way to make it stop. Nobody to come down on. We don’t have a motive. We don’t, do we, Elizabeth?” The adults again stared at the teenager in her pj’s like hawks at a baby duckling.

“No,” Elizabeth said sadly. “At school everybody likes me, or I don’t even know them. You know how it is. There’s a bunch of boys who make a game of getting girls to have sex with them, and they keep score. They’re creeps, and they’ve done some creepy things—you know, posting about the girls who put out, and even meaner posts about the ones that didn’t. Both Tiff and I got asked sort of out by one of their bottom feeders—not like a date or anything, just stupid stuff by a guy who wants to be in on the game but is a total loser. Maybe the creep boys could be doing it. I don’t think so, though. I mean, at school, I’m not all that important. Why take the trouble to stalk me? I’d probably be worth, like, half a point.”

“Half a point?” Anna asked.

“You know, a cheerleader’s worth five points, a girl on the student council two points. Like that.”

“Time to cull the gene pool,” Anna murmured.

“God, I’m glad you’re here, Anna,” Heath burst out as a boil of anxiety burst inside her. “For all we know this could turn to physical stalking.”

Anna said after a moment: “Starting next week, I’ve got a twenty-one-day detail in Acadia National Park. Acting chief ranger. Their chief is fighting that big fire in Southern California.”

This last was said without affect, but Heath knew it rankled with her friend. Like many rangers, Anna neighed and fretted like an old war horse when fire season came around. Heath couldn’t understand this love of fighting wildfire. For some it was about overtime and hazard pay.

For others it was an addiction. Anna belonged to the latter group. She’d taken a bullet during the Fox River adventure, and her left arm never fully recovered. Though Anna’d never admit it, she probably hadn’t the strength to swing a Pulaski for long.

To be acting chief in a park as important as Acadia would be welcomed by most rangers, a nice step up the ladder to being permanent chief somewhere else. Anna had dithered about the promotion to district ranger. Money meant little to her. Being out of doors and away from human beings meant a lot.

“You’re leaving?” Elizabeth wailed.

Heath flinched, not because her daughter cried out like an abandoned five-year-old but because, for an instant, she thought she’d done it herself and was mortified.

“They don’t need you!” Heath said, then stooped to threats. “They’re liable to give you a promotion.”

“I’ll be sure and offend the higher-ups,” Anna said with a dry smile.

“Send someone else,” Heath said, hating the whine in her words.

“Wildfires in California. Everybody is short-handed,” Anna said.

Heath said no more. She’d already said too much.

Gwen, whose usual upbeat enthusiasm seemed to have been squelched by the points game and creeps and stalkers, perked up. “Acadia National Park? In Maine? Of course in Maine! For heaven’s sake, I’m getting dotty. My first job out of med school was near there. I have to make some calls. Heath, Elizabeth, pack. We are going to Maine with Anna!”

Gwen kissed the air around everybody’s cheeks, snatched up her black medical bag, and blew out on the wind the way she had blown in.

“Mary Poppins,” Heath laughed.

“Who does Aunt Gwen know in Maine?” Elizabeth asked.

“Dez Hammond and Chris Zuckerberg. A couple of old hippies from the day,” Heath said. Heath had met them on two occasions when they’d visited Boulder. She remembered liking them. “Chris comes from money. She inherited an island off Acadia. They spend most of their time rehabbing an old mansion and hosting artists.”

“Where’s Arcadia?” E asked.

“Acadia,” Anna corrected. “Northern Maine, lobsters and nor’easters.”

“I’m going to be marooned on an island with four old ladies,” Elizabeth cried.

“In a crumbling old mansion,” Heath said.

“You’ll be there, won’t you?” Elizabeth begged Anna.

Heath was annoyed that, though she had more years under her belt than Heath, Anna was not among the designated Old Ladies.

“Not me,” Anna said. “A desert isle in the vast Atlantic? Too boring for this child.”

Elizabeth groaned.