Useless Bay(28)

The blankets were just the kind we threw over the rowboat and the kayaks, but they’d been arranged in a way to seem comfy. Under different circumstances, I wouldn’t have minded curling up in those and taking a nap. I loved the places where we hung up the boats. To me, they smelled of early-morning mists rising off the water and staph infections from dirty oars. Nirvana.

Tonka sniffed around for a while, then the beast walked nose-down back out of the garage and to the gate, where he stopped and looked stupidly up and down the street that led along the shore.

There was no aroo sound.

There was no more sniffing.

The trail was cold.

Sammy had emerged from the lagoon at this point. He came up to where Dad and Mere and I were standing mutely, watching Tonka do nothing.

He broke the silence. “What’s going on? They brought in Tonka?” he said, as if he couldn’t believe that anyone were so desperate.

I said what we were all thinking. “That dog is a moron.”

“He’s not a moron, actually,” Sammy said. “He’s just a male, so he pees on everything he sniffs.”

Mere rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Total moron.”

She smiled slyly and exchanged a look with Sammy that lasted a little too long.

I glanced at Meredith, and she quickly looked away. Was I imagining things, or was something going on between those two?

“Look, whether or not the dog is a moron, it’s obvious the trail ends here, on the shore road,” Dad said.

“So if we believe the dog, Grant got into a car, right?” I said. “We can call in the people walking the grid and trolling the bay and issue an Amber Alert.”

“Wait just a second. Have we thought that maybe he went willingly with someone and that maybe he’s safe?” Mere suggested. “He went willingly with Pixie in the rowboat.”

It was common knowledge by now. Pixie hadn’t been in good enough shape to tell everyone last night, so I told them that she was the one who had taken Grant out. Then, when she got home from the hospital, she told the sheriff everything she remembered.

“He’s a minor, and whoever took him didn’t have my consent,” Dad said. “So it’s a kidnapping. Even if that someone was a Gray. And I will prosecute whoever took him to the full extent of the law.” He glared at Sammy.

“Whoa,” Sammy said, backing up. He had come here to help us out and instead was getting a fight from a man whose wife had just died, so that put him in a position where he couldn’t defend himself.

“Dad,” I said, “you can’t think after all this shit that they’re still playing . . .”

It was right then, when we were standing in the drive arguing, paying no attention to what was going on around us, that the second-best scent hound in Washington State began to bay.





fifteen


PIXIE


When we finally filled Patience’s grave, Dean marked the spot with a stick. Not a cross, because Mom would have yanked it out of the ground and winged it into the lagoon.

So a stick.

He asked me if I wanted to say a few words.

I said what was expected of me. “Patience. You ate Shih Tzus. And goose poop. But you found things.” I stopped. I remembered that first day, bicycling back from my brothers, the last child, the one whose only superpower was that she was the Girl. But how, after I started working with Patience, I had gotten a reputation for being a finder of lost things—a reputation my brothers didn’t quite share, even though they were keen to help out.

I thought of her trembling that first day, the way she crept out of her crate, and how I had to keep her from howling, and how it gave me a purpose that I hadn’t had before. “You found me,” I finally said. “So thank you.”

Dean tamped down the dirt with his shovel a little better, and I looked around. With Patience, I knew what to do. Without her, now what?

“That’s that, then,” Dean said, wiping the rain across his face. Drips of water hung from his nose. Mine as well, I was sure.

And then it happened. One of those weird moments that told me, no matter what the doctor said, I wasn’t normal. Not after what had happened in the bay and when I came out of it.

There. Under the eaves of our house.

I saw Patience. Alive. Not when I was looking at her directly, but out of the corner of my eye. She was sitting calmly beside the house under my bedroom window, in a patch of ivy. When I looked at her straight on, she wasn’t there. But when I looked at something else, anything else, there she was again, lounging, completely dry in the downpour.

“You go on down to the Shepherds’, Dean,” I said. “I need a moment alone.”

Dean nodded. “I understand. Don’t take too long. Even without Patience, we’re all still looking to you. You’re still the finder.”

I tried to tell him this wasn’t true, that I’d lost everything when I’d lost Patience, but he was Dean, and Dean didn’t lie.

Still, I needed time to investigate something I couldn’t explain to him. So as soon as he was out of sight, I tried looking at the ghost of my dead dog again. I trained my eyes in the distance away from the house, and there she was, under my bedroom window, calmly sitting, but when I looked at her full on, she disappeared, like an optical illusion.

What was going on?