Useless Bay(23)

“Who else was here?”

“From the family?” I said. “Meredith. Also our travel team: Joyce, Hannah, Edgar, Yuri. Come to think of it, if you’d had a meeting, Joyce should’ve been with you, shouldn’t she?” I asked Dad.

Dad rallied enough to act uncharacteristically cagey. “Normally, yes,” he said, “but she’s just been through a tough breakup. She said she wanted a few hours to walk along the beach. It’s the least I could do. Joyce is my admin,” Dad explained. “She never takes time off.”

“I see,” agent Armstrong said. “So everyone was here but you. And you came back when?”

I opened my mouth to tell him three, when I noticed something.

Twenty yards down the beach, one of the Gray brothers stopped inspecting the beach, stood up, and looked toward the lagoon.

Fifty yards away, another Gray did the same thing, as if some kind of sonar had pinged him.

The two Grays started running toward the lagoon.

“Something’s happening,” I said, and took off after them.

I sprinted down the patio and around the house.

There was a bunch of people crowded behind a police cordon at the edge of our property. As soon as they saw me, the questions started flying like bottle rockets. “Henry! Over here! Henry! Do you care to comment?” I heard the word lies. I heard the name Marilyn. I heard the word diet, or maybe just the word die.

I stopped at the trailhead that led to the path through the lagoon. Where were the Gray brothers? It wasn’t like they were easy to miss.

There. All four of them were down in the lagoon itself, waist-deep in the muck. I hadn’t seen them at first because their hair looked like beach grass. I ran down the trail and parted the branches of the Scotch broom, afraid of what I’d see.

I looked closer. The muck itself wasn’t all brown. Parts of it were tinted red. They were examining something that was floating. From the tilt of their heads, I could tell it wasn’t good. This wasn’t their “Interesting . . . a bird of prey dropped a spiny dogfish” head tilt. This was much, much worse.

Oh no. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. This was no horror movie. This was real. They had my brother down there, and he was so bad off that Frank wasn’t even trying to revive him.

“Dean?” I asked softly.

One of the four heads shot up.

“You don’t need to see this, Henry,” Dean said.

I was tired of hearing that.

There was no easy path down, just rocks covered with barnacles. Finally, I got down on my butt and slipped down, tearing my jeans and skin. Soon I was waist-deep in the muck with them.

“What is it?”

The thing they were looking at was Grant’s size, but not his shape. There was a long, floppy ear, and there was a paw, but the body was practically unrecognizable, it was so riddled with holes. Those holes weren’t even well placed along the body. It was just one great big spray of them, letting out blood and intestines and jellied eyes.

This gory, perforated rag was all that was left of Patience.

“Jesus,” I said, sick and relieved at the same time.

“You really didn’t need to see this. You’ve already got enough to deal with,” one of them said. I was almost positive it was Dean, because he was usually the first to respond when they were in a group—a trait that had landed him in the Island County sheriff’s office the night before.

“Jesus. I don’t know how we’re going to tell Pix,” another said. Sammy. You could see part of a scar along his hairline. He had a bad motocross accident a couple of years ago that nearly killed him.

I looked at the rag with holes that used to be Pixie’s pet. I should’ve been more shocked, I suppose, but after the night I’d had, and given the state she was in, it was like looking at roadkill.

“Who would do this?” I said, more to myself than the Grays.

“Someone who didn’t want to be found,” said a voice from the trail above us.

I looked up to the dike. I was so caught up in the Grays’ drama, it hadn’t occurred to me I was being followed. But there was agent Armstrong, standing in a black raincoat, looking ready to unleash a whole lot of fury on whatever sick whack job had reduced Patience to a pile of holes.

He’d remembered a piece I’d forgotten. Patience was the best scent hound in the state. If you didn’t want her on your trail, this was one way to get rid of her.

As the rest of us stood there, wallowing, I noticed that agent Armstrong didn’t bother to climb down and get into the muck with us. He didn’t need to. He had perfect command of the situation from above.





eleven


PIXIE


Mom stayed with me the first two hours of my incarceration—I mean, my recovery—at Whidbey General Hospital in Coupeville, but she left when the swelling went down and my face returned to its natural size. The tests had all been run, my chest hooked up to wires and monitors, and now we were just waiting for the results. Although she wanted to help find Grant as much as I did, she was reluctant to leave.

“I don’t think you understand what you put me through, Marilyn. You had to be resuscitated. That’s a first. I almost prayed when I found out what had happened to you.”

“It was an accident.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You’re my only girl. And as such, I hold you to higher standards than the rest. That includes not getting poisoned. Your face is looking a little better.”