Useless Bay(9)

The tide had come in by the time Pixie took my little brother out in the rowboat. I watched them from the observatory. The rain had just begun to pick up.

Seeing them together was just one more thing that pissed me off. Grant was my brother. If he wanted someone to take him out in the rowboat, why not come to me? True, my association with oars hadn’t been so great lately, and I had called Pixie a bitch for hooking up with Todd Wishlow, to which she’d said, “Todd who?” So my overall karma was pretty much in the toilet, and I was walking around with a pounding headache, thanks to my black eye and a lot of suppressed rage.

It was also true that we didn’t need to call the law on the Grays, who were a nice family, and that I didn’t need to lie about Dean going out in the rowboat, not Pix. Here was my upstanding, mature reasoning for the subterfuge: my face hurt like hell, I was mad at everything and everyone. And hey, they were big kids. They could take it. Plus this gave me more alone time with Pixie to punish her both for something she did do (take Grant out in the rowboat at high tide) and didn’t do (Todd Wishlow).

When Pix and I were on our own that Sunday evening and she was supposed to hand over Grant for real, she still wouldn’t tell me where she was hiding him. In fact, she denied hiding him at all.

It was true, I didn’t believe the family was in on it—otherwise, they would’ve produced him when we showed up with the law.

But Pixie was playing it tight.

“All right,” I said, when we were out of earshot of the others. “Give him up.”

“Grant? Believe me, I would if I had him. This is a bad night to be hiding.” She kicked at the Scotch broom that lined the walk. Yellow pollen was released into the air, then blown thirty nautical miles north of us within seconds.

Above us, on the bluff, a huge branch snapped and launched itself against the Grays’ picture window.

I had to yell to be heard. “Come on, Pix. I watched you row him out into the bay.”

“Yeah . . . about that,” Pixie said, and summoned a stillness around her. Her dog sat at her feet, awaiting her next command. “That’s what scares me. He seemed upset about something. Really upset.”

I waited for her to finish her thought while the wind blew her hair into her mouth.

“Upset about what?”

“No idea. Just upset.”

I waited for more. Specifics. At least a GPS location.

She didn’t say anything else, but she wouldn’t look at me, either. She was hiding something.

“All right,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose, forgetting that my whole face was a wall of pain from where Todd Wishlow had banged it with an oar. “I’m really not in the mood for this. He has to be with one of you. He always comes to your house. Always at five thirty. You always find a bolt hole for him. So I’m telling you again, give him up now and we won’t press charges.”

Every second made my face pound more. The more I rubbed my nose, the more it hurt. The deeper the hurt, the grumpier I got. But I kept rubbing. I could feel the jelly of my eye. It was making my life hell. I had the perverse idea that if I could pop it out, I’d feel a whole lot better.

“I’m trying to tell you. We don’t have Grant this time, Henry.”

“Seriously? Not one of you has him.”

“Nope.”

“Did you ask?”

“No need.”

It seemed like the Grays could communicate without talking. I called it the “psychic quintuplet network,” although never to their faces. I figured I’d just get a blank stare. The quints were what they were.

But they were impressive in action.

On the school basketball court, for instance. They were legendary around the state. South Whidbey High won championship after championship. People from all over packed the bleachers just to see the magic that happened when all five of them were on the floor at the same time.

It didn’t happen every play, but sometimes when they were coming down the court, the ball moved so fast you couldn’t see it. Whiz bang tomahawk jam . . . and none of them called any plays. They weren’t the tallest kids on the court, but they knew where the openings were and which one of them could do what from where. Teamwork—effortless and uncanny.

“Look, Henry, I don’t think you understand how bad this is. When I rowed him back, I thought he’d go straight to you. I think I disappointed him somehow. He said he’d come to the wrong person.”

At least we agreed on something. But that didn’t get us any closer to finding Grant. He hadn’t come to me, and I hadn’t worried about it at the time because whenever he went missing he was always with them.

Ahead of us, Pixie’s smelly dog sat perfectly still, waiting for instruction. Was this new? I don’t remember Patience being so attentive before. Usually she just peed on everything and harassed squirrels until Pix whistled for her.

The dog was waiting for something. Something big. So was I.

“We already looked all over for him,” Pix said.

“When?”

“When he didn’t show up at five thirty, trying to avoid the six o’clock ferry.”

Yeah. None of us liked going back to the mainland after two days of freedom. Grant hated it most of all. To him, Useless Bay wasn’t just a retreat and the Grays’ house wasn’t just some broken-down rambler. It was an extension of the beach—a world filled with treasures and things of wonder, as though the Grays and all the creatures of the bay were conjured from one of Lyudmila’s books of Russian folktales, where poor men talked with fish and bridegrooms danced with bears.