Useless Bay(27)

I hadn’t realized how heavy Patience was until Dean and I both heaved her into the deep hole we’d dug. We had to swing her to get her to the bottom. Dean had done his best to wrap her in an old blanket, but the red blood kept seeping through. Her tongue lolled out and got dirty, but she didn’t care.

That was when I knew that Patience was finally, completely gone. All that was left were memories and compost.





fourteen


HENRY


Agent Armstrong wanted us to stay indoors and wait for news, but I wasn’t so good at that. I had to know what had happened to Grant—even if it was the worst thing I could think of. I’d been mentally preparing myself for it ever since Pixie and I turned over the rowboat the night before. At the very least, I wanted to “walk the grid” the way the Grays were doing.

Pix was back from the hospital. Sammy said she was okay and all her tests had come back normal. I could see her at the edge of her yard on top of the bluff, working at something. I texted her to come down and show me what to look for when walking a grid, and she texted back that she couldn’t at the moment, that she was burying her dog. But she’d ask one of her brothers to break off from where they were searching the lagoon. That one of them would help me. Break off? I texted her. Should they do that?

She called me—not a text, an actual call—and told me not to worry. There was plenty of manpower, and she was sure I must be going stir-crazy without a job to focus on. Sammy was on his way.

I watched her from a distance as she talked. Her speech was punctuated by grunts, I realized, because she was shoveling dirt.

I looked at the lagoon separating her house from mine. All that muck. Dad had wanted to fence it. When we’d first bought this house, before we knew the Grays, he wanted to build a barrier so they couldn’t get through. Not to the lagoon, not to the bay, both of which were legally ours.

And now I thought of what a mistake that would’ve been. Both to keep the Grays out of their natural habitat and to put a fence between us. Now we were so intertwined I wasn’t sure where the Shepherds ended and the Grays began.

We were lucky that Grant had stumbled onto the Grays six years ago and that they were the kind of kids who liked looking after him, who played hide-and-seek with him, who enjoyed showing him gross and interesting things, such as how the guts of spiny dogfish were so disgusting not even scavenger birds would eat them.

They must’ve been like characters out of one of Grant’s fairy-tale books. Of course he’d want to be by them.

Once upon a time there was a curious little boy who strayed away from his mother and father and ran into five friendly giants walking down a bluff.

We will show you treasures, they said.

I have enough treasure, the little boy replied.

Not like this.

Without the Grays, Dad might have toyed with our weekend house as he did his other assets, fenced it, got tired of it, and moved on after a year or two to some other playground.

Now, no matter what had happened, it was still our refuge.

? ? ?

I made my way outside to meet Sammy when he came and stumbled onto the arrival of the second-best scent hound in the state.

Sheriff Lundquist was at the gate to the shore road and waved through a truck with a huge bed that had the logo of a ram in front and a large crate in the back.

Meredith came outside, too. Apparently, she was no better at staying put than I was.

The sheriff was greeting the driver. “Thanks for coming, Dan. I know it’s a long way from Bremerton.”

“No problem, Sheriff. Tonka and I are happy to help. It’s been a long time since we’ve gotten called to the island.”

“No need till now,” Sheriff Lundquist said with a half chortle. And I knew why. He was proud. Patience belonged to the whole island, the way the quints did. Everyone shared in their glory and hard work, and con-doled with them when their work turned up remains and not live bodies.

And now they had to resort to calling in someone off-island for assistance. It was like asking someone from a different school to the prom.

“I was real sorry to hear about Patience,” Dan said. “I never thought that dog would come to anything. But she and that big gal sure proved me wrong.”

Big gal? Big gal? He was talking about Pixie. Give me an oar. I’m gonna hurt him.

Meredith seemed to sense what I was thinking and dug her fingernails into my arm, reminding me that I’d already broken one clavicle this week, thank you very much.

After a certain amount of pain, I realized that Dan-whoever-he-was-in-the-down-vest had a beast that could help us find Grant, so I kept my trap shut.

Mere may have made me behave, but I could tell by the way she bit her lip that she was as skeptical as I was about the abilities of the animal named Tonka.

The beast hopped out of the crate, and we saw he was twice the size of Patience, with his balls still intact and swinging, of course. The first thing he did was pee on a tire of the giant truck, showing off his giant penis and copious amounts of urine. The message was clear: Dan in the Down Vest was compensating for something. We had a hard time taking him and his dog seriously, which may have colored what happened later.

Dad came out of the house with one of Grant’s shirts. After many handshakes and politenesses of “I’m real sorry for your troubles,” Dan thrust the shirt under the beast’s snout. Tonka put his nose to the ground and went straight to the garage, then he pawed at the door until we opened it. He galumphed to a spot by a pile of cable that had some blankets piled into what looked like a nest.