Useless Bay(16)

I prayed that this time wasn’t worse, that he hadn’t been given the same treatment as Lyudmila. I’d always been able to fix him with a payoff before. I hoped I could now.

Yeah . . . denial is a powerful thing.

“Henry,” Lawford said. “I need to ask you some questions. Can you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“When we left the house, Pixie was with you. Where is she now?”

“Swimming in the bay.”

“Why would she do a stupid thing like that?”

“No clue. I think she wanted to rule out that Grant hadn’t . . . drowned, too.”

Frank shook his head. “Your stepmother didn’t drown, Henry. Someone just dumped her in the water to hide what they really did to her.”

Lawford kicked him.

“It’s all right. I have to face it sooner or later.”

And that was the first time that night that I thought I might lose it. I thought of Grant and his long eyelashes and the way he jumped around so much, lighting from one interesting thing to the next, especially up here, and how you had to focus to stay with him, but it was always fun to try.

My little brother always running ahead. Come on, Henry. Come, look.

Here I was, sitting in the rain, with no idea what to do next.

Luckily, I was with people who did.

“All right. We’ll call the sheriff. We’ll get our sister out of the bay, find her dog, and get a piece of Grant’s clothing. We’ll find him, Henry.”

“Where’s Yuri?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Lawford said. “And we’re a little concerned about the semiautomatic shots we heard in the lagoon earlier. Those weren’t random duck hunters. We’re not convinced Yuri’s not actually, you know, behind some of this. Maybe stay here, out of sight, till the sheriff gets here.”

“Wait . . . you think Yuri might’ve killed Lyudmila? That can’t be right.”

There was no way. He came with her from Moscow, and I sometimes saw sweet moments between the two of them. He’d stick wildflowers in her hair, and she called him brat with a smile on her face. Didn’t brat mean “brother” in Russian? I had no idea what they really were to each other. I sometimes wondered if Yuri were Lyudmila’s real love and Dad just their meal ticket.

Not the time to think of that now.

“All right,” Lawford said. “I’ll make the calls. I’ll get 911. I’ll find Sammy and see about releasing Dean. Frank, try to get Pix out of the bay. Henry, for God’s sake, stay here. There are already too many variables in play tonight.”

I didn’t think it would be too hard to get Dean out of custody, because when Dad had suggested to the sheriff that the Grays might be involved with a child’s disappearance, the sheriff had laughed.

I’d seen my father issue orders before, and he made it sound as though the world would end if he didn’t get what he wanted by tomorrow.

But he didn’t sound as though he had half as much authority as these two did. They told me to stay put, and that was what I was going to do.

Then Pixie surfaced in the bay holding something that looked like a purple gelatinous Frisbee.





seven


PIXIE


The first death of the night I hadn’t expected.

The second I was ready for.

I shouldn’t have stayed swimming in the bay. I should have gotten out, found a piece of Grant’s clothing, thrust it under Patience’s hound nose, and let her lead the way to whatever we’d find at the end of the trail—alive, dead, injured, stranded, pecked at by an osprey and deposited in our yard.

I definitely didn’t want Grant to be deposited.

But still I lingered in that cold salt water. I should’ve known better. The best chance I had for finding Grant alive was to start the search-and-rescue on land right away. I knew the statistics. I knew the first three hours were crucial. Who knew how much time had passed since Grant had gone missing? He had come to me at eleven that morning, asking me to carry him away. When Henry and Mr. Shepherd came to our door, it was five thirty.

But everyone other than me thought he was hiding, because that was what he did every Sunday evening. Someone was playing us—buying time to get away with something horrific we didn’t entirely understand yet.

The only reason I stayed in the water was that I thought there would be a second body, and if it had somehow come free from the rowboat, I wanted to be the one to find it. Not Henry. He’d already been through enough.

So I did an inefficient thing. I stayed in the water. I flutter-kicked in a circle around the Shepherds’ buoy, grasping at flotsam—and then farther out, the same thing. The water was so cold I felt it gnawing on me.

Since it was dark both above and below and I couldn’t see, I “looked” with my fingers.

It was easy. Grant wasn’t huge, but he was substantial enough. And there weren’t any impediments in the bay—no rocks, no coral—nothing to break up the sandy bottom other than moon snails and sand dollars. Lots and lots of sand dollars. Even in this, Mr. Shepherd was rich.

At first there was nothing. Bulb kelp. Iron fixtures from some far-off unmoored ship. Razor clams. Scallop shells. Discarded shells—the kind from rifles, which pissed me off, but I’d learned to live with it. Even though it was illegal, hunters shot ducks in the lagoon all the time, and they occasionally got a heron, which they deposited for my brothers and me to take care of.