The Edge of Nowhere (40 page)

Actual words accompanied the whispers. But the whispers themselves overpowered everything. Becca flung her hands up. She put her palms over her ears and cried, “Stop it!” before she realized what she was doing and how all this would seem to Seth.

His surprise at her reaction abruptly stopped both the whispers and the words. After a moment she was able to hear him say, “Stop
what
? I’m not accusing you of anything.
I’m
the one getting accused. So if you’ve got some reason for asking Hayley about my sandals, I want to know what it is.”

She said, “
What
sandals?” She wasn’t playing dumb with him. For the moment she was only trying to regain her footing in the wake of his words and whispers.

Seth didn’t understand that. How could he? He pushed his chair back with a scrape against the old wooden floor and he snapped, “Oh that’s just
great
! So
you
think so, too. I
can’t
believe it! Well, let me tell you: I
didn’t
touch that dude! I wouldn’t have touched him! Who the hell do people think I am?”

He jerked away from the table, then. He strode over to the large plate-glass window and he banged his fist against it once, so hard the glass quivered the length of the room. His shoulders heaved. He gulped loudly.

Becca stared at him. She felt momentary wonder. Oh my God, she thought. Seth was trying not to cry. And then she heard
what’s the point . . . total joke.
And then, quite simply, Becca knew.

Sometimes whispers weren’t random thoughts. Sometimes whispers were also signs. And these whispers of Seth’s were telling her something about what was real and what was not. He hadn’t done a thing to hurt Derric Mathieson. He hadn’t lifted a finger against him.

Becca got out of her seat. She was hesitant, but she still approached him. She put her hand on his shoulder and she felt him flinch. He swung around, and she flinched, too.

Before he could speak, she said, “I saw your footprint in Saratoga Woods, Seth. It was right above where Derric fell. I asked Hayley about your sandals because I thought maybe a lot of people around here wear them, maybe it wasn’t your footprint at all.”

Seth was staring at her. She was staring at Seth.
What to do . . . what to do . . .
was heavy in the air, and she knew why. It was because they both were thinking it, not just Seth. And to her
what to do
she was adding What to do to help Seth, who hadn’t hurt anyone. But someone had, and she thought she knew who.

She said, “That kid Dylan has a pair of sandals like yours, Seth. Maybe other people do, too. I haven’t seen any but—”

“He was in the woods that day,” Seth said.

“Dylan? I wondered. Hayley said kids meet up at the big rock . . . Could the stoners have been on Meadow Loop Trail, too? Where Derric fell? Could Derric have been meeting one of them there?”

“Dylan, you mean?” Seth rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe. I don’t know. I mean Derric’s not a stoner, far as I know. Some of the athletes do drugs, but even they don’t
hang
with stoners.”

“Do they buy from them, though?” Becca hated to think it. It didn’t seem possible. But Derric had been doing something that day in the woods and this had to be ranked among the possibilities.

“Did he buy from Dylan, you mean? Did he owe him money, even?” Seth thought about this and blew out a breath. “Could be. But if that’s the case, he’s sure put on one hell of a performance as Mr. Straight. I dunno, Becca. It’s hard to believe and I don’t even like the guy.”

“Were you on that trail, Seth? Can you remember?”

“Meadow Loop Trail? Who knows? I was all
over
the woods that day. So were you. You were looking for Gus, too. Did you keep track of where you went? I didn’t. Why would I? Why would anyone? I mean, everybody and his brother and his sister and his dogs and his cats were in the woods that day. At least I had a
reason
to be there, but no one—”

Becca held up her hand to stop him. She realized suddenly that his words and his whispers for the very first time were so identical that they melded together. It came to her that she’d made a step in understanding the power of whispers. When everything matched—words and whispers—she was on the path to people’s truths.

But there was something Becca had learned from sitting in Jeff Corrie’s office once she’d passed around refreshments, and that was that sometimes what people understood to be the truth was only what they wanted to believe was the truth.

The reality was that there was more truth out there, and she was going to find it. Finding it was the only way to help Seth and to free him from the burden of everyone’s suspicions about him.

THIRTY-SIX

W
hen the undersheriff showed up, Hayley was in her favorite class. This was AP U.S. History, and she was listening to her fellow students debating the moral and ethical issues connected with advancing upon the land of indigenous people.

Ms. Stephany, the teacher, left for a moment. When she returned, her face was grave. She said, “Hayley, you’re wanted . . . I think you might need your things . . . ?”

The tone of her voice made Hayley’s mind start whirling with possibilities, all of them having to do with her dad. She grabbed her backpack. Outside the classroom, she found Undersheriff Mathieson waiting.

He looked as grave as Ms. Stephany had. He said as Hayley closed the classroom door, “You and I need to talk.”

Hayley said, “Is something wrong?” although she didn’t really want an answer to her question.

“It’s time for you to be completely frank with me about Saratoga Woods, Hayley. You haven’t told me the whole story and I want it now.”

Hayley sagged against the wall. The relief she felt over
not
hearing something about her dad was so intense that she thought she was going to melt right there in front of the undersheriff. She understood then how scared she’d been, how long she’d been scared, and how scared they
all
were that her dad might hurt himself because of how his body wasn’t working.

Undersheriff Mathieson grabbed Hayley’s arm and walked her down the corridor away from the classroom. He said to Hayley, “
Very
good. So you see there’s no point to lying to me, don’t you?”

Very good? Hayley furrowed her brow. But then she understood. He was taking her reaction of sagging against the wall not as the relief of knowing her dad was okay but as an admission of guilt. She wasn’t sure what he thought she was guilty of, but the set of his face made her see him differently from how she’d always seen him in the past. Before he’d been Derric’s dad, the great guy who’d done things like drive them to Seattle to see an exhibition of Congolese art. Now . . . Hayley didn’t know who he was.

“Am I going to have to bring your parents in on this, Hayley?” the undersheriff asked her, giving her arm a tug. “Or are you planning to answer me? I’ve spoken to the other kids who were on that list. I have their stories. Now I want yours. All of it this time.”

At this, Hayley realized she hadn’t yet replied to anything he’d said. Still, she felt a tightness inside of her at his tug on her arm and at the thought that he’d even
bother
her parents about her presence in Saratoga Woods when they were already dealing with more than they could possibly handle. She felt the tightness within her morph into anger, and she decided then and there that she was not about to help this man. She said firmly, although her heart was slamming inside her chest, “There were lots of kids in the woods that day. Not everyone got put down on that list of yours.”

He said, “I see,” but his lip curled in a nasty way and he added, “And was this Becca King I’ve been trying to find one of those kids?”

Hayley said, “I barely know who Becca King is,” which was hardly an answer to his question.

“She’s disappeared from the Cliff Motel,” he told her. “She’s also been out of school for weeks. What do you know about that?”

“Not a single thing,” Hayley replied. “Since I didn’t notice her when she was here, I don’t think I’d notice if she was gone.” She saw at once that this was the wrong thing to say. The undersheriff took a step closer. She thought he might drag her to the dean’s office, then, or to the jail in Coupeville, in order to force her to tell him everything.

He was so close she could see a patch of whiskers at the corner of his mouth that he missed when he’d shaved. She could smell his breath, and it wasn’t pleasant. He said, “You listen to me. You were in the woods and you’re the only person on the list who hasn’t explained what you were doing there. Now someone hurt my boy in that forest and I’m not leaving this school till I know who. So let’s get back to the question you haven’t answered and let’s hear the answer. Why were you there?”

Hayley’s heart-slams got worse.
My boy
reverberated in her mind. Not
my son
, but
my boy
. Like
my bike
,
my car
,
my refrigerator.
She recalled Derric telling her how the undersheriff never referred to him as his son. He’d say “This is our boy, Derric” or “This is our Derric,” and what did it mean that he never used
son
in reference to him?

She just snapped, then. “Why do you
call
him that?” she demanded. “Why do you say ‘my boy’? Why don’t you ever say he’s your son?”

The undersheriff’s whole body stiffened. His mouth formed a line like a scar on his face. “Who the
hell
do you think you are?”

“I’m Derric’s
friend
. And no, I wasn’t meeting him there, if you still think I was. I was meeting Mrs. Kinsale. And why I was meeting her is none of your business unless you think we pushed him off the bluff together.”

Hayley had never in her life talked to an adult like this, but she went on, believing that the upper hand was hers. She said, “You know, Sheriff Mathieson, there were stoners in the woods that day, too, and they
all
ran off before their names were taken. Why don’t you concentrate on them for a while, because you’re wasting your time hassling the kids who actually
liked
Derric.”

“He doesn’t do drugs.”

“Did I say he does? But
he
was there and
they
were there and people run into each other in the woods all the time. Have you even thought about that?”

The undersheriff reached in his pocket. He brought out a small leather notebook and a pen. He flipped the book open and gazed at Hayley meaningfully, and Hayley saw the trap that she’d just walked into.

“Names,” he said.

She didn’t really know. They’d all run off too fast, and she’d been caught up in talking to Seth. But she did have a piece of information that she could give Dave Mathieson to get him off her back. “Dylan Cooper,” she told Derric’s father. “I think he was there.”

“Student here?” the undersheriff asked as he took down the name.

“Yes. I guess so. I mean, yes.”

But Hayley felt the misery of naming
anyone
. She didn’t know anything, after all. The only detail connecting Dylan Cooper to what had happened was a pair of sandals, and
that
information had come from Becca King. Hayley didn’t even know what it meant, whether it was important, or whether Becca had just thrown it out to muddy the waters. She
thought
Becca King had been there that day in Saratoga Woods, and she figured the girl had run off before the ambulance arrived. But why she’d done this . . . Hayley didn’t know. She only knew that doing so had kept Becca’s name away from any involvement with Derric’s fall.

Undersheriff Mathieson was closing his leather notebook. He had a name now, but Hayley saw that he didn’t look triumphant about it. He looked miserable. He looked like someone living a bad dream. It was a dream of not knowing.

The last thing she’d expected to feel was sympathy for the man, considering the way he’d been talking to her. But Hayley did feel it, then, just for an instant. She understood the bad dream of not knowing. Better than anything, she understood it.

WHEN THE UNDERSHERIFF
left her, Hayley started breathing normally again, but she was shaken. Not only by having the conversation with him, but by naming Dylan Cooper to him. Across the corridor was the girls’ restroom, and she headed for it. The door hit someone as she entered. It was someone who’d been standing behind it, listening to her entire conversation with Derric’s father.

This turned out to be Jenn McDaniels. Who else? Hayley thought with resignation. Jenn had probably slithered into the restroom while the undersheriff had stood at the door to Ms. Stephany’s classroom waiting for Hayley to join him.

She brushed past Jenn and went to the washbowls. She took off her glasses and turned on the water although she could see her hands were shaking.

Jenn obviously saw this, too, because she said, “What’s the problem? You got
Parkinson’s
or something, Hayley?” She went behind Hayley and strolled over to one of the translucent windows. She cracked this open.