Chapter Six
"Detective Swan and the Chief of Police"
"I'm going to visit Vera after school," Bella said virtuously on Friday morning. It was a dreary day. The clouds were a heavy, steely gray, and she could easily imagine the quiet splash of raindrops filling up her truck bed. There was something wrong with the tailgate, and rainwater didn't drain anymore unless she put it all the way down.
Charlie, sitting across from her at the table and eating a bowl of raisin bran, did not respond.
"I haven't seen her in a couple weeks," she continued. "She's very old, and very lonely, and I'd like to cheer her up. I think I'll stay for dinner." I think I'll go to La Push, she was thinking. I think I'll stay there till after dinner time.
Charlie was entirely uninterested in whatever she felt like doing. He washed his bowl, drained his coffee cup, washed that, too, put on his jacket, and stood waiting for her on the porch. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and followed with her keys jingling in her hand, and as she stepped outside he held out his own hand with a look that said, I'll take those, thank you very much.
Shit.
Bella dropped her keys into his palm and rode to school in the front seat of the cruiser. At least he didn't turn on the siren this time.
Sitting in her classes that day, Bella avoided the glances of classmates who wondered aloud, "What is that smell?" She had done her best to get rid of the skunk stink with an extra long shower and more baking soda and hydrogen peroxide, but she still smelled faintly sour. Therefore she had put her crappiest clothes: a ripped, black, long-sleeved T-shirt and the enormous denim tent of a skirt she had worn when she'd had that stinging road rash. The top half of her outfit screamed, Rebel, rebel, you tore your dress, and the bottom half screamed, Get in the minivan, kids, or we'll be late for gymnastics. "What is that?" her classmates kept whispering. "Do you smell that?" Bella kept her expression neutral and her mouth shut. She had more important matters to consider.
How was she going to find Jacob? While her teachers lectured, she struggled through various schemes. Should she call Emily? She seemed friendly, so maybe she'd be willing to talk. Should she stake out the La Push School? Jacob had to return there eventually. Should she stake out his house? This seemed like the best plan, but Billy was a liability. Billy might tell her to go away. No visitors he had told her when he said Jake had mono. And what about that mono? Could it be real? And how was she going to get her truck keys back?
"Dime sobre el tiempo actual," Mrs. Goff was saying. "Isabella."
"Huh?"
"¿Hace frío? ¿Hace calor? ¿Esta lloviendo?"
"¿Repita, por favor?"
"El tiempo," Mrs. Goff said, gesturing toward the window of the Spanish classroom. A dozen students turned to look at her. The classroom's window was curtained in festive orange and red colors; there was a piñata burro hanging from the ceiling and a small banner of flags from Spanish-speaking nations draped along the top of the white board. From the bored expressions on the students' faces, she guessed that this was a softball of a question.
"Uhhhh... ¿Son las once y media?"
Yes, said Mrs. Goff, it was eleven thirty. But what about the weather?
"Son llorando."
"Gracias, Isabella."
Someone snickered, and Bella dropped her gaze to her textbook. Why was this so hard? Oh, yeah. She had zombied her way through nearly half a year of instruction and it was hard to come back from that kind of deficit.
Macho gracias, Eduardo.
At lunchtime, she wanted to talk with Angela about the Jake problem, but things were blurry now. Was he simply sick? Or was he in Sam's gang now, in Sam's thrall?
I think I'm next, Quil had said. And he was scared.
What was Sam up to? Gathering a cult to worship his magical Quileute wolf-monster?
Yes, it was the wolf-monster than made everything blurry. Of course she couldn't talk to anyone about that; they'd think she was crazy. And Sam had attempted to swear her to silence, saying that otherwise she would hurt Jacob. She imagined Jacob in a cage in the forest, a cage made out of tree limbs and vines, like something out of a King Kong movie. Maybe Sam was going to fatten him up and feed him to the monster. Or maybe he was forcing Jake and Embry to hunt squirrels night and day to feed it. Or maybe they were trying to fight magic with magic. What the heck kind of magic would that be? A magic spell? Could they be wrapped up in some kind of ritual to appease it? Or make it go away?
All of these ideas seemed stupid.
"You okay?" said Angela. She was sitting across from her, eating a red apple. Mike and Jessica shared their table. They, too, were looking at her.
"Sorry," she said. "Just daydreaming."
In gym class, she and Angela were paired with other students who were sliding toward the bottom of the badminton tournament pyramid, having lost their re-match against Mike and Cody a few days ago. Now Angela watched Cody out of the corner of her eye. He and Mike high-fived one another with their racquets after each point, stalking over the varnished pine floor, shoulders loose, their grins easy and smug. He shook his sweaty, curly, red hair and said, "Woo!" and Angela made a pained expression, like she was having a stomach cramp, and forced herself to look away. The white birdie zinged back and forth across the net as Bella leaned left and right, trying to reach it, and Angela ran back and forth behind her, picking up the pieces. At one point, Bella actually returned a serve, having held her racquet up to protect her face as the birdie flew toward her. It bounced off perfectly. Angela laughed, her voice rich and sweet and loud, and Cody stopped and stared at her. A birdie bounced off the side of his head, causing Mike to say, "What the fuck, man?" and Coach Clapp to say, "No foul... language," a joke which only he found funny.
Later in the locker room, Bella said, "He was totally looking at you."
"I am going to catch me a man," Angela whispered, glancing nervously at the other girls.
"You can't catch a man," said Bella.
"Shh!"
More quietly, she hissed, "You can't catch men. First off, he's a boy, a kind of doofy one, and second, you are not a cowgirl."
They were sitting on the wooden benches, changing out of their white tennis shoes, white T-shirts, and green shorts. Bella redressed in her crummiest clothes while Angela pulled on black leggings and shrugged into a rose-colored tunic sweater.
"I'm going to catch one. Quil. Or him."
"Well, who do you like better?"
"I don't know."
"Is this about Ben?"
"You smell kind of funny. It's faint, but... it's kind of...skunky?"
Lauren walked past. "You mean 'skanky.'"
Bella just raised an eyebrow at her. Ever since Jess and Mike had reunited, the wind had gone out of Lauren's sails. Or the venom had gone out of her little snakebites. A nice, solid, "Whatever," from Bella or Angela was enough to make her move on.
"Skunky," repeated Angela.
Bella rolled eyes and explained what had happened yesterday. Angela asked a lot of questions, so many that they arrived at Mrs. Kranz's door before Bella realized that Angela had not answered her question.
When school was over, Bella walked out to the pick up and drop off lane. There was Charlie, motor running, his face expressionless. She got in the cruiser and he pulled out of the lot, turning right on Main Street instead of left toward their house.
"Where are we going?"
"You said you wanted to visit your old lady friend."
Double shit.
He left her on the doorstep of Olympic Acres. It was still raining, so she had no choice but to enter the building. The receptionist smiled when she saw her. "Long time, no see!" she said brightly. "How are you?" "Fine," grumbled Bella. She stalked down the hall to Vera and Albertine's room, then stood leaning on the wall outside their door, trying to sort through her emotions.
Did she want to see Vera? Was Vera her rival? Was one of them "the other woman" in Edward's life? If so, Bella feared it was her. It made her feel angrier than ever. I am not a side chick, she thought, clenching her fists. At the same time, she felt an aching compassion for another life destroyed by abandonment. Letting her head loll back against the wall, she stared at the white, speckled ceiling tiles and the long tubes of florescent lights and contemplated walking home two miles in the rain.
Suddenly, a woman shouted, "Look, it's Bella! Bella's back!"
Albertine was hurrying toward her, coming from the direction of the community room with a basket of yarn cradled against her stomach. A couple doors opened and old ladies she had never met stuck their heads out and said, "Ooh, it's Bella! Where have you been, honey?" One of them came out and banged on Mr. Horowitz's door, saying, "Reggie! Hey, it's Bella!" and when the door opened, Mr. Horowitz rolled out in his wheelchair and slapped her hip, saying, "Ha! Ha, ha, ha! How you holding up, girlie?" They surrounded her in a cloud of pink flowery housecoats, fluffy slippers, wrinkly faces, sparkling eyes, and gnarled hands, patting her everywhere, gently herding her into Vera's room.
There was Vera, asleep, half smothered under Albertine's many mauve afghans. Bella was surprised by the change in her appearance.
The skin on her face was paler, thinner, and more papery than ever. The bridge of her nose and her cheekbones were more prominent, almost shining through her skin in white relief. Her eyelids were dark, and her tiny, sparse eyelashes were marked with yellow. Her white, tufty hair seemed thinner, and her hands, where they lay across her chest, were wrinkled, spotted, pale, and knobby, stiff perhaps with arthritis, and folded in the same manner as hands on a corpse lying still and white in a coffin. The little deer from her crystal animal collection was clasped to her heart where a lily would belong. Mr. Horowitz, Albertine, and the neighbor ladies barely breathed as they watched her.
"She misses you," whispered Albertine. Holding a finger to her lips and saying to the little crowd, "Don't startle her," she crept closer and gently tugged on Vera's wrist, trying to rearrange her hands. Vera woke up then. Without opening her eyes, she croaked, "I'm practicing."
Ohhhhh!" scolded the ladies, clucking their tongues.
"Go away," croaked Vera.
The ladies shuffled out, grumbling things like, "Ought to ashamed of herself," and "Not funny." One said, "Poor thing," and looked appealingly at Bella for reasons Bella could not guess. Mr. Horowitz rolled out, too, but first he slapped Bella's hip again and said, "Go get 'em, tiger."
Albertine fluttered her hand at the chair beside Vera's bed and perched cautiously on her own while Bella sat down. In the silence that settled again, Bella looked at Vera, who returned her hands to their crossed position and exhaled so deeply that her chest visibly sunk.
"Oh, she misses you so much!" chirped Albertine. "You can see how excited she is to see you."
"Shut up," said Vera.
Albertine lifted a mauve, half-finished creation from her knitting basket and began to work on it, her silver needles clicking. "It's a hat. I'm trying to get Vera to wear a hat."
"Fuck hats."
"Vera feels strongly about hats."
Yes, thought Bella, she could tell. She took off her coat—Leah's raincoat, really, since her red one was probably still soaked and muddy in a plastic bag in Sam's backyard where she'd forgotten it—and glanced at the thermostat. It was much warmer in here than usual. The monitor said it was set at seventy-eight degrees.
"Wouldn't you like to sit up and visit with Bella?" Albertine pressed a button on Vera's bed frame, and slowly the top half of the mattress began to rise. When it got to a forty-five degree angle, Vera, eyes still shut, pressed a different button to lower herself.
It had been two weeks since Bella had visited Olympic Acres. She glanced around the room. On the table by the window, Albertine had left her red glassware on display, and Vera's glass dome still covered her crystal animals. There were maybe a few more bodice-busting romance novels on the wicker bookcase and a few more afghans on Vera's bed. Bella could hardly see the outline of her feet through all the layers. The photos of Albertine's eleven grandkids still smiled from the walls, and the many bottles of Vera's pills still sat on their tray on her bedside table. It seemed a sad contrast suddenly: the things Albertine had there, and the things Vera had.
She looked at the old lady lying flat and mute. "Hi," she began. It was like talking to a plant. "How have you been?"
Vera was so still that Bella watched the blankets over her chest until she saw them rise slightly with her breath.
"Me, I'm okay. I guess."
Albertine quietly rocked in her chair.
"I got grounded."
Bella thought she detected a flicker of interest on Vera's face.
Talking to her was not like talking to a plant, Bella decided half an hour later. It was like talking to a diary. She created a story. It was essentially a severely edited account of her life these past two weeks. She talked about her father's dislike for her former boyfriend and the trouble she was in for sneaking around with him. It felt really, really uncomfortable to talk to Vera about Edward, wondering about Edward's feelings for the old woman and how his feelings for her compared. If only you knew... she thought, staring at Vera's purple, sunken eyelids. Would we comfort one another? Would you hate me? Or would the news shock and pain you? Vera's pulse flickered in her skinny neck. Would it shock and pain you fatally? Bella was strongly leaning toward not ever talking about that!
Instead, she talked also about her best friend, and how she had been thinking of him as her new boyfriend. But he hadn't spoken to her in two weeks. Something was wrong, she said. He needed her help because someone was keeping him from her.
"Sweetie," said Albertine, "are you sure he wants to see you again? Maybe you should spend your love on another boy."
No, said Bella. She didn't want another boy; she wanted him. And she knew that something was wrong, wrong, wrong. She needed to help him. She had been to his house, she said, and it was an unnatural mess. His friends hadn't seen him in days and days. His father had unplugged their phone.
"His father has sold him to the Gypsies," said Albertine.
Vera may or may not have smirked.
This is not funny, said Bella. She had spent a couple hours yesterday trying to find him, stomping through the wet woods, asking at his friends' houses, getting rained on, sliding down a muddy hill with her boyfriend's giant pal who kept tripping on her, hiding from her father while she wished to pry information out of an antagonist's girlfriend—
"Sneaking around on your daddy again?" said Albertine. "You are a bad girl."
—"I am not"—and getting sprayed by nine skunks.
At this Albertine laughed out loud. Vera frowned harder than ever, probably to suppress a smile.
"How many, did you say?" said Albertine? "Ten?"
"Nine."
"Hey, Reggie!" Albertine hollered into the hall. "She got sprayed by ten skunks."
"A dozen skunks?" hollered Mr. Horowitz.
Aurelia Tisdale, Tyler Crowley's mom, came down the hall with a pile of fresh white towels in her arms. The nurse poked her head into Vera and Albertine's room and said, "There better not be anybody bringing skunk smell in here."
"It was yesterday," said Bella.
"You go wash yourself," said Ms. Tisdale. "I can still smell you."
"I already did! I washed with ketchup and everything!"
"My nose doesn't lie. I can smell you from here."
"I am not stinky! Not very stinky." She looked at Albertine. "Not stinky?"
With an apologetic cringe, Albertine pinched a centimeter of air with her index finger and thumb.
Out in the hall, she could hear the old ladies opening their doors. "What's going on?" said one. Another said, "Bella got sprayed by twenty skunks!"
"You can't even get twenty skunks in one place!" shouted Bella. She walked to the door, leaned into the hall, and shouted, "That's impossible!"
"Twenty skunks in one place!" said an old lady in a blue striped bathrobe. "Do they live in colonies? Or nests? Like snakes?"
"Snakes don't live in nests," said another lady.
"Oh, yes, they do," said a third lady. "Some do. They hibernate in big squirming messes underground, like noodles."
"Did you wake up a nest of skunks?" said Ms. Tisdale. "Why would you do that?"
"I'm going home," said Bella. "Excuse me." She picked up the phone on Vera's bedside table and dialed the station. Charlie answered. "Please come and get me," she said.
"I'm working."
"I'm being attacked. There are like, six people attacking me here."
"I'm sure you're perfectly safe. See you after dinner."
"Dinner?"
"'I think I'll stay for dinner.' That's what you said."
Triple shit.
She said goodbye before she hung up on him because she didn't feel like getting in any more trouble.
"Is your daddy coming?" said Albertine.
"No."
"Oh, good. You can stay for dinner. We're having tomato soup!"
All the old ladies laughed.
Vera pressed the button to raise herself to a sitting position. "Arabian Nights," she croaked. "Ali Bella and the Forty Skunks."
"Nine," she sighed. "Only nine."
"Forty-nine skunks."
There was no way for Bella to win. Reggie and the old ladies crowded into the room to tease her, and they ended up staying for an hour, trading long-ago stories of kids and dogs sprayed by skunks. Some were envious of Ellen Uley, whom Bella said she blamed for this whole problem. "I wish I had a pet," said one lady. Her name was June. She was the one who knew that snakes can hibernate in colonies. She had been an elementary school teacher before she retired, right around the time Bella was born.
How amazing, thought Bella, that she could fit her entire life into the time that this one person, June, had spent being retired. Measuring her young life against the Cullens' vampire-lives didn't feel the same, perhaps because the Cullens were just stopped at one point, in the physical growth and changes that a body would endure... or enjoy? These women had aged through life stages. Falling in love. Parenthood. Grieving losses. Seeing a child go to college. Seeing a grandchild born. Even burying a spouse. As Bella sat quietly by the wall, she began to think that the life of an old, old woman was not rich like the Cullens', with their beauty and fancy houses, cars and clothes, but nevertheless rich in a human way.
Do I want that?
Dinner was tomato soup, salad, pasta with vegetables, and small squares of pale pink, overcooked salmon. She sat at a big round table with a white linen cloth, surrounded by Albertine, Vera, Reggie, June, and half a dozen other ladies. She tried to catch their names, most of them sounding woefully unstylish by today's standards: Florence. Dorothy. Harriet. Phyllis. Gladys. Alma. They talked a lot. They waited for a staff member to come around with a tray of chocolate sheet cake. Feeling like a prop or a favorite doll, Bella sat between Vera and Albertine with little to say. They talked over and through her. But Vera was talking, she noticed, even if she had a negative and sometimes profane opinion about most things—"Full of shit," she croaked at one point, and "Fuck salmon," at another—and she ate a few bites of each thing on her plate.
Around seven o'clock, Ms. Tisdale tapped Bella on the shoulder, saying that her father was waiting in the lobby. "Goodbye, Bella," chorused the ladies. "Come again, sweetie." Heat rose to her cheeks at the unexpected attention. She waved goodbye awkwardly and started down the hall. Before she reached the lobby, however, a voice behind her said, "Girlie. Wait." Mr. Horowitz had followed her.
He stopped his wheelchair beside her and searched her face with his hard, blue eyes. "It's good you came back," he said quietly. "Vera doesn't do well when people go away without saying goodbye."
His words sent a tiny arrow of recognition and guilt through her heart, making her tear up.
"I see you understand. Thank you."
Charlie was extremely pissed off when he picked her up.
"What's wrong?" she said.
"Wait till we get home."
So she stood beside him nervously as he stopped at the Golden Gate restaurant for Chinese takeout. "Would you like to see a menu?" said the woman at the counter.
"I'd like whatever is available for immediate takeout."
They went home with three white paper cartons: rice, lemon chicken, and Mongolian beef with pea pods. In the kitchen, Charlie dumped some of each onto his plate and dug in with a fork. Bella tried to stay out of the way as he opened a drawer, got out his magic markers, pulled his hand-drawn Olympic Peninsula map from the top of the refrigerator, and spread it one the table.
"Loo' this," he mumbled through his food, choking it down rapidly. With a red X, he marked a spot just north of Hoquiam.
"Another hiker?" she cried. "Killed? Oh, no!"
"An old, unsolved murder case. With large paw prints." He made a red marking for the prints, too, and drew a dotted line from the mark of Waylon's death near Forks to the animal sighting in the Queets River valley to these new marks near Hoquiam, completing the bottom third of the bow shape he'd been forming. "And get this," he added, passing her a newspaper article. It looked to be scanned and printed from a microfiche file, the blur and wrinkle of the newsprint slightly visible.
Local Educator Found Dead, read the title.
The body of Hoquiam High School Vice Principal Gerald Hinkley was found yesterday morning in a wooded area north of Hoquiam. Police suspect either an animal attack or foul play due to the condition of the body, which was severely mutilated.
"I wasn't sure what I was looking at at first," said Frank Holmes of Aberdeen, who spotted the body while hunting elk, and who called the scene "chilling" and "sickening." He expressed a wish for detectives to quickly identify and apprehend the perpetrator or perpetrators responsible. The perpetrator, however, may be an animal. Large paw prints, likely belonging to a bear, were found at the scene. Detectives aren't ruling out any possibilities at this time.
Local hunters have organized a sweep of the forest with intent to eradicate any bears in the area.
Meanwhile, those close to the deceased are being interviewed as police seek knowledge of anyone who may have expressed animosity toward the educator. Students at Hoquiam High are "stunned," according to senior class president Donald Kowalski. While the vice principal may not have been a favorite of students, Kowalski avers that "no one would have dreamed of [harming] the guy."
The family of the deceased expressed "shock," "disbelief," and "grief," according to his brother, Garrison Hinkley.
Memorial services will be held Sunday at First Episcopalian Church of Hoquiam.
Bella looked up at her father, horrified. The article was dated June 16, 1936, published in the Hoquiam Herald. He slipped her another article, dated July 1, 1936.
Political Hesitancy to Blame for Lack of Inditement.
This was an opinion column.
In view of the murder of Hoquiam High's Vice Principle, Gerald Hinkley, now is the time to re-establish the natural order of society in this state; namely, to keep the Indians confined to the lands preserved for them by treaty and by the generosity of the federal government. These are lawful measures taken to separate the races for the safety and comfort of all and to ensure the wholesome character of our communities.
In the weeks following Gerald Hinkley's despicable and callous killing, Hoquiam has failed to recognize the menace of the savage race in our midst. Clearly, the individual apprehended at the scene of the crime is to blame, but authorities sited lack of evidence as grounds—even an imperative—for releasing the only and obvious perpetrator of this crime. Let our law enforcement officials remember the facts: the only person tied in any way to this murder is the so-called chief of a distant and backward Indian tribe from the north coast, apprehended at the scene, kneeling over the deceased with a guilty expression. Obviously drawn to our city looking for economic gain, this Indian—and others like him—have inserted themselves into a society where they do not belong and have nothing to contribute. Indeed, they are a drain on our charity and tolerance, and we have seen the evil with which they reward us.
Be vigilant, citizens. Offer no harbor to our enemy. You will know him by his dark skin, tall frame, black hair, hooked, beakish nose, and haughty bearing. Be alert for one Ephraim Black, whose name I do not hesitate to publicize in the knowledge that some stouthearted men in our midst—men who will not be intimidated—will have the courage to do what law enforcement officials are legally—or cowardly—unable to do.
—Reverend Thomas P. Goodwin, Hoquiam, WA
Bella was appalled. Who would publish this racist shit? Were things really that bad in the thirties? Was this a man of GOD who said these things? And what about this Ephraim guy? Had he been lynched?
"This is horrible!" she blurted.
Charlie laughed. It was a strange, barking, mad-scientist kind of laugh which made Bella shrink from him. "This is horrible?" he laughed. "This is Billy."
"What?"
"Billy Black. It's his grandfather."
"What?"
"Your boy Jacob's great grandfather."
"How is this connected?"
"Oh, Bella. You have some explaining to do."
He pulled a manila file folder thick with printouts from his briefcase, saying that while his deputy Steve Dorsic was too spooked to go in the woods lately, he was certainly not afraid of books. Dorsic had spent weeks combing through a hundred years worth of newspapers in the basements of public libraries all over the Olympic Peninsula, looking for incidents of animal attacks. Eventually he found these gems in the Hoquiam Herald. And Charlie, always thorough, asked him to print out everything for two years before and after these events.
Bella felt the blood drain from her face.
"Oh, I don't know whether to laugh or cry," he said. "Probably cry. I'll cry about this tomorrow; thank God I have the day off."
He spread an assortment of articles over the map in front of her. In a jumbled chronology, she saw the closure of Hoquiam Hardware and Mercantile; the Moss family's bankruptcy; obituaries for John, Judith, Bertram, and the infant Milton Moss; an engagement announcement—awkwardly brief, but socially obligatory—for Vera Moss and Edgar Culpepper; the logging accident that killed Bertram Moss and injured Reginald Horowitz and a dozen other men; Bertram's piano donated to his church after his memorial service; The Quinault Lumber Company's employment records showing Ephraim Black, Edgar Culpepper, Bertram Moss, and Reginald Horowitz assigned to the same crew; a contract for Dr. Charles Culpepper, hired as a surgeon at the neighboring Aberdeen General Hospital; articles about the urgent search for a physician to replace Dr. Culpepper after his sudden departure on June 14, 1936—"My deepest apologies," began his resignation letter—; and Esther Culpepper's blue ribbon lilacs at the Grays Harbor County Fair in May of 1935. There was a picture of Esme and the flowers.
"Ha!" said Charlie. "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I'm going out of my mind!"
"Shh," said Bella. "Take a deep breath."
Instead Charlie got up and put away the leftover Chinese food, his map, and his magic markers. His hands were shaking.
"Crazy, blood-sucking sociopaths! I'm going to need to interview more witnesses! And you know who's still alive? Who Dorsic tracked down?"
"Uh..."
"Reginald Horowitz and Vera Moss."
Quadruple shit.
"Your god-damned history project partner. Haven't you spent six weeks writing that woman's biography?"
Bella stared at the articles on the table. Part of being a Cullen is being meticulously responsible, Alice had said. Apparently they learned that after their disastrous stay in Hoquiam.
"And you didn't think to mention this?" said Charlie. "Whose side are you on?"
"Well, what am I going to say?" she cried, standing, shoving her chair back. "Huh? My whole life revolves around a vampire? He leaves town and I still have to hear about him from a wrinkly old prune who almost married him?"
"Yes!" said Charlie. His eyes were glittering with adrenaline. "What the hell! Say exactly that!"
"I didn't even know! I found out two weeks ago!"
Charlie paused. "But you went to Hoquiam more than a month ago. You probably saw some of these same articles when you did your assignment."
Bella looked at him mutely.
"Edgar Culpepper. Edward Cullen. Sparkly-ass eternal flame who likes to live in cloudy places and jilt girls. You didn't connect the dots?"
"Well, I—" She tried to make this admission sound dignified by standing up straighter: "Mr. Horowitz explained it. Two weeks ago."
Charlie looked at her blankly for a moment, then paced to the sink and stared out the window, pinching the bridge of his nose hard. Although the church Bella's grandmother had attended with the Webers was Lutheran, it seemed that when Charlie was young, her grandmother had tried to raise him as a Catholic. "O my God," he muttered, and she could tell by his earnest pauses that he was trying to speak from deep memory, "I am heartfully sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishment..." It was a long prayer that made her feel vaguely uncomfortable. She looked over her shoulder.
When he came back he gently prodded her into her chair. "Bella," he began, pulling another chair out and sitting in front of her, taking her hands. He turned them palm up as if he could read something there that would help him. "Sweetie. Look. Let's just consider everything important enough to tell me. As soon as you figure it out."
"Okay..."
"People are in danger. People have died. Cullens don't eat people, you say, but somebody out there does. And we haven't caught that somebody yet."
"You can't catch them," she began. "They're too fast, too—"
"We have to try. We can't do nothing. And just today, we lost two more hikers."
"No!" Tears came to her eyes. She wanted to pull her hands away, but he wouldn't let go.
"This is very, very important. A young man and woman have gone missing. The man is a college student who grew up here, and his parents say he went backpacking with a young woman he met recently on the internet. He was last seen two days ago. The young woman is missing, too, but we don't know anything about her, where she's from, what's her name, what she looks like... We got nothing. His Facebook account is linked to hers, but hers has been deleted. Now we need to get some kind of lead, some kind of new information that can get us farther along in this investigation. Something new—anything—could help."
In a very small voice, she said, "Is it Riley?"
"Riley Biers. You know him?"
"My friend," she managed.
Charlie squeezed her hands.
She swallowed hard and said, "There's a giant wolf in the woods."
That night, she lay awake for a long time, listening to the rain on the roof.
She had fished Riley's cell phone number out of her backpack. He had given it to her at the library. The last time I saw him... She dialed the number and her call went to voicemail immediately: "Hi, leave a message," was all he had recorded. No wordy "...and I'll return your call as soon as possible," formality. Not even his name. Just his voice: friendly, casual, honey-colored. She didn't know why she thought of his voice as honey-colored, but it was. She called several times, hearing, "Hi, leave a message," until tears rolled down her face. "Be safe," she whispered after the beep. "Hold on." Then she called Angela, who also cried to hear the news. Angela said she would pray for him. She didn't have to say that she feared the worst.
Rain pattered on the roof all night. She knew this because she kept waking from shallow dreams of running through the woods, sometimes with Edward, and sometimes from Edward. Everything was green and silent, the sound of her footfalls absorbed by moss. Sometimes she ran from Sam. Sometimes from a massive, shapeless, furry animal with moon-white canines and a body of hot musk. In other dreams, she felt she was Riley, running from an unknown terror with pale, granite skin and red eyes.
Waking, she saw him still, remembering the golden curls beneath the green ball cap he wore, the way he re-laced his hiking boots, the way he'd managed to buy her a milkshake despite her stiff insistence that he not. He was a stinker. She saw him with his arm around the back of Angela's chair, teaching her to flip nondairy creamer cups at the diner, watching Quil covertly, making Angela feel pretty. Feel important and wanted. She saw him wet with rain, having run back to Newton's to get his car, and standing in the rain again to open her door when he'd driven her home. She saw him smirking at her in the library parking lot because she had rushed out of the house in her pajamas. She was late, and he had waited for her for an hour. She saw him talking about wanting to be a teacher, remembered that he'd listed "summers off" twice as a career benefit. And she saw him with his hands in his pockets in the windy, chilly library parking lot, after he'd given her his phone number and confessed that he wasn't helping her merely to be nice. He knew she had a boyfriend. But he was still thinking about her.
Oh, Bella had said. What else could she say? She had given him her hand, intending that a formal shake would conclude their business relationship. But he had pressed her fingers warmly and said, Bye, Bella.
In the deep morning dark, around four a.m., Bella woke from yet another dream of Riley running in the forest. She rolled onto her stomach and sobbed as quietly as she could, pressing a corner of her pillow against her mouth.
Toward dawn she gave up on sleeping and smeared her hands over her face, wiping at her tears, her sweat, and her anxiety. Oh, God, Riley and his friend could be dead by now. But she still had one other worry: Charlie hadn't been as surprised about the wolf as she thought he would be.
Saturday morning. She cried in the shower, tears mingling with the water on her face, and she cried at the table, trying to eat a bowl of cereal. Charlie asked her to tell him everything she could about Riley, and she gave him the phone number and said that the woman he'd gone hiking with, the one he'd met on Facebook, had red hair and could speak French. Also, she said that she'd met him when he bought a pair of hiking boots from Newton's.
"What kind of boots?"
"Asolos. The Stynger ones. Red and black. He was a ten and a half."
Charlie said that was very helpful. Very, very helpful.
"Really?"
He patted her shoulder, grabbed his briefcase, drove her to Newton's for her morning shift, and came inside with her to buy a pair of the hiking boots in Riley's size. He said he was going to make a plaster cast of the boot treads at the station and then drive the boots themselves to Port Angeles for Joe Carrington. The Port Angeles Chief of Police was going to head this investigation since Riley had told his parents he'd be hiking on the Bogachiel Peak trail, just east of Lake Crescent.
His parents, thought Bella. His poor parents.
Charlie said Joe Carrington had called in the FBI and told Charlie to get some sleep. I command you to get some sleep, is what he'd said. Charlie repeated this to Bella with a laugh.
"Well, maybe you should," she replied.
Charlie grimaced. Standing with Bella in the shoe section, he stared at the boots for a long moment. Then he rubbed his hand over her hair to say goodbye. At the front counter, he bought the boots from Mrs. Newton and told her about Riley's being missing. Mrs. Newton put her hands over her mouth and nose and said, "No. Oh, no, no, no." Charlie pulled a flyer with Riley's picture on it from his briefcase and asked Mrs. Newton to hang it in the window. "Yes, of course," she said. Her face was pale. Charlie called to Bella that he'd be back at one o'clock.
Bella cleaned Newton's customer restroom, took the sweaty sleeping bag she had messed up a couple weeks ago out to her truck, and sat in the shoe section after she'd finished her other chores. In her hands, she held an Asolo Stynger men's boot, size ten and a half. She turned it over and over, studying the pattern of the treads: a shape like a double horseshoe, curved lines on the heel, and a high arch with a steel shank. Never before, in any class, for any test, had she wanted to memorize something so bad.
After work, Bella made lunch for herself while Charlie took a nap. She did some homework. After an hour or so, Charlie came downstairs. Like his daughter, he was good at compartmentalizing when necessary. His colleague commanded him to rest? Well, he'd try. Maybe that's why his eyes weren't red as he read the comics in the paper, trying to put a smile on his face. Bella closed her physics book, armed herself with a pad of paper and a pencil, and decided to continue her own investigation.
First she called Jacob's home. It rang and rang until she gave up.
Jacob, she wrote. No answer. Phone probably still unplugged.
Next she called Quil. His mother answered the phone.
"Bella! Hi. How are you?"
"Fine. Is Quil there?"
"He's sleeping. Not feeling well, actually. He's got a fever."
"Oh, no. I'm sorry. Tell him I called?"
"Sure, sure. Put your dad on the phone, please."
Quintuple Shit.
Charlie talked to Joy long enough for Bella to leave the room, disgusted. She pulled a load of laundry out of the dryer on the back porch, folded it, and put it all away upstairs. When she returned, Charlie was whistling as he washed the dishes.
Frowning at his back, she wrote, Quil, on her pad. Fever.
That was funny. Jacob had had a fever, or at least his skin had felt unusually warm, after their night at the movies. She, Angela, and Mike had all come down with the flu within a day or two. Could the germs have taken two weeks to affect to Quil?
A phone call to Leah's house yielded no more information than the girls had gained on Thursday, which was pretty much nothing. However, Leah did say that she'd rescued Bella's coat from Sam's backyard and washed it for her.
"Thank you."
"You should stake out his house," said Leah.
"I'm grounded. More grounded than before. He even took my keys."
Charlie, still washing dishes, switched the tune he was whistling to one that sounded suspiciously like, "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah."
"You want me to come bust you out?" said Leah.
"Constant surveillance," she replied. At the same time she heard Sue in the background calling Leah's name.
"What?!" Leah hollered. Bella wished she would put her hand over the receiver. "What?! Now?!" There was a pause, and then Leah said, "Okay." She told Bella that her mom had just informed her that they were all going up to Neah Bay to visit her aunt; otherwise she would have gone to stake out Jacob's house herself.
Thanks anyway, said Bella. She hung up the phone and wrote, Leah. Out of commission.
A scrap of paper on the counter caught her eye. It was in her father's handwriting. Uley, it said. 555-9837. Charlie finished up at the sink and went upstairs (hopefully not to put on cologne, she thought), so before she could talk herself out of it, she dialed the number. When the phone was answered, all she heard was a fit of coughing. Then a silence.
"Hello?" she began.
More silence.
"Um, is Emily there?"
"She's outside washing the house," was the creaky reply.
"Washing the— Wait, what?"
"Washing the house. The back wall. Who wants to know?"
"It's Bella?"
"Is that your name?"
"Yes?"
"You don't sound too sure. I ask you a question and you say your own name like there's a question mark at the end of your sentence."
Bella was beginning to regret this call. "Can I just talk to Emily?"
"I don't know. Can you?"
"Is this Ellen?"
"You can call me Mrs. Great Great Grandmother Uley. And you are a stupid girl. You play with fire. My boy saved your hide. And you broke my great-great-granddaughter's tiny little heart, you—"
A man's voice could be heard in the background: "Grammy, it was me. I had to do it."
"—stupid girl."
Bella frowned. Was she talking about Claire? Where was the math involved in that? The girl was Emily's niece, no relation. But she supposed Sam's great-grandma had claimed her. They'd probably bonded over stripeys and toast. Well, wasn't that just fantastic?
"Ellen, could I—"
"Mrs. Great Great Grandmother Uley."
"Sorry. Mrs. Great Great Grandmother Uley, could I—"
"No."
The line went dead. Bella stared indignantly at the receiver before adding to her list. Ellen Uley. Mean old lady. Hates me, why?
In Old Quil's garden on Thursday, Sam had said, There are worse things than vampires in the world. So clearly Sam knows about vampires. He almost certainly knew what Edward was when he found her in the forest that night, when she'd been so terribly lost. How on earth had Sam found her? What did he mean about worse things than vampires? Oh, God, was he referring to his wolf monster? In her dream last night, a dim memory had returned to her, a memory of a chuffing, sniffing sound and the warm breath of an animal flowing over her as she lay crumpled on the ground. Then Sam was there. Maybe he had directed his monster to sniff her out and then mercifully restrained it from eating her.
Of course! He did control it! He had spoken to it on Thursday to make it leave!
WM definitely Sam's pet/weapon, she wrote.
Why is this happening to me, she thought. More and more secrets to keep. And more importantly, where did the monster come from and how did Sam come to be its master? She tried to cull through her memories, things Edward had said, things Billy or Jake or even Sam had let slip, and she recalled that on the evening of her junior prom, Billy had blackmailed his son—with the promise of car parts—to deliver to Edward a cryptic message which Jacob had chalked up to his father's superstitions and recited with a roll of his eyes: "We'll be watching."
"We," as in plural?
Maybe the wolf monster didn't belong to Sam alone. Surely Billy had a hand in it. Billy spent plenty of time at Jake's birthday party telling Sam what to do, mostly regarding Paul and some kind of "job" that he thought Sam wasn't doing well enough. A "job?" That sounded vaguely like the mafia. Maybe the wolf monster was like the Quileute community hit man. Or at least an illegal pet. Or a science-magic experiment gone dangerously crazy.
So why would they make a wolf monster in the first place? She tried to doodle a few ideas but saw that she'd need a lot more paper. Up in her room, she found her journal. The more she wrote, the more her thoughts fell into place.
Fact #1: Embry knows the "bear" in the woods is not a bear. Conjecture: Embry might not have meant that it's a vampire. Embry might have meant the WM.
Fact #2: The WM found me when I was lost. Conjecture: WM can sniff things like a dog. Like a bloodhound?
Fact #3: Sam bosses around Embry, Paul (poorly), and probably Jared. Sam bosses the WM. Conjecture: Sam is an abnormally bad-ass and/or controlling dude.
Fact #4: Billy controls Sam. Conjecture: Billy is a MORE bad-ass and/or controlling dude. And if Billy controls Sam, then he also indirectly controls Embry, Paul, Jared, and the WM.
Well! This wasn't the first time she'd thought that Billy had his finger in everyone's pie. And if he was controlling Embry, or at least allowing his older son to be controlled by Sam, then Billy might allow Jacob to get messed up in that as well.
Billy was starting to creep her out. He'd meddled in her relationship with Edward (for good reason, she acknowledged), and scared her with the flash of his temper when he'd grabbed her arm and yelled at her. He'd exploded with anger at Jacob, too, that night they'd gone into the woods for stargazing. Maybe because he was the chief, he thought it was okay to boss everyone around. Now, with the WM, his power was amplified. Magically amplified with magisterial, messed-up, monstrous magic.
Mind-boggling.
She wished there were some kind of counter-magic to make this go away, like throwing a bucket of salt over a grease fire.
Having no other avenue toward finding Jacob, she went downstairs and dialed Sam's number again, hoping that someone other than Ellen would answer and preparing to hang up if necessary.
"Hello?" said a little voice.
Claire! What luck!
"Hi, sweetie," said Bella. "How are you?"
"Three."
"No, not how old are you. Just how are you doing?"
"I'm three."
"Okay. That's nice. Can I please talk to Emily?"
"She washing house. Stinky house."
"Ohhh..." Bella tried to sound like she knew all about that. "Well, do you think she would like a break? Maybe you could tell her that she has a phone call."
"She has phone."
"Good enough."
She heard a soft bump, which she imagined was Claire's setting the receiver on a counter or table. There was a long pause, and then faintly she could hear an exchange of voices.
"On phone."
"Phone call for me? Who is it?"
"Don't know."
"Well, ask, please."
Claire returned to the phone. "Who is it?"
"It's Bella."
"Bella?" The little girl's voice became higher pitched, almost squeaky. "You! My baby pet!"
"What?"
"You kick her into the garden. Make her fly! So small! I find her, and her neck all floppy, her head rolling around. Her feet running nowhere!"
"Oh. Oh, no. I'm sorry."
"And Sam step on her head! He said it would be better that way. It was not better! Not better!"
"Oh, I'm so sorry. Can I talk to Emily?"
She heard only sniffling and hiccuping.
"I'm really sorry. It was an accident. And you have six others. That's good, right? Six other baby skunks? It's all right."
It was definitely not all right. Claire stood there crying, her breaths sounding like tiny gusts of wind on Bella's end of the line. Bella managed to understand, in the girl's fragmented sentences between sobs, that the baby skunk had been called Jasmine, named after a kitten she'd had in Neah Bay which had been hit by a car. Claire wanted Bella to tell her that Heaven was real. "I'm not sure," said Bella, reflexively, and then she immediately regretted it. She strained to understand Claire's words through her tears. The girl was saying something about burying Jasmine and her shocking, ghastly, squished head in a shoebox under a bush that Sam had promised would make pink flowers in a few weeks, but there were no flowers there now, which was horrible, and that all the boys had come to the funeral—
"The boys?" Bella asked.
"Tared and Paul and Embry and Take."
"Jake?"
"Take. And Paul say, 'Who done this?' and I say, 'Bella,' and he say you dirty cunt, and Take hit him, and all boys leave!"
"Oh, no."
"What's cunt?"
"It's a— A word little kids shouldn't say. Claire, I'm really, really sorry. So sorry. Can I please talk to Emily? I'm really sorry."
It stood to reason, she supposed, that sooner or later someone else in the household would notice a three year old sobbing on the phone. "Who are you talking to?" someone asked. "Bella," said Claire. "Gimme that phone," said the other person.
Sam's mother got on the line. "Look, we don't know you, but you have hurt this little girl. What are you going to do about it, huh?"
"I— I don't know. I didn't know it died. I'm so, so sorry; it was an accident."
"Well, you have accidentally broken enough hearts around here. You don't know what she has gone through, but it's more than a skunk, more than a kitten, let me tell you. When you figure out a way to fix this, you can call again, and not before. So for now you can just go—" Here her voice changed, becoming softer, sweeter: "What's that, honey? Okay."
Claire got back on the phone. "Hate you," she said very quietly, and then she hung up.
Bella replaced the receiver in its cradle. When would she stopped messing things up? It's like I'm King Midas, but instead of gold, everything I touch turns to shit. She sat down at the table, put her hands over her face, and let herself cry.
Charlie came downstairs with a load of laundry in a green, plastic basket. He was also freshly showered, she noticed, and wearing a nice sweater and... something scented?
"Aw, Dad."
"What's wrong?"
What on earth could she say? "Everything."
"Everything, how?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Oh, really?" The laundry basket made a heavy smack when he dropped it on the linoleum, instantly angry. "Vampire boyfriend, old people witnesses, giant wolf-thing in the woods, and you think maybe this is not a time when you ought to tell me what's going on?"
Well, when he put it that way... She got up and held open the door to the back porch with an "after you" expression, and as he loaded the machine and dumped in a cupful of white, powdered soap, she told him about Claire and the baby skunk.
"Ha, ha, ha," said Charlie. "Like, flying? You mean it went flying through the air?"
It wasn't at all funny, she insisted. She was in deep shit with a preschooler, Sam's mom, and a ninety-something-year-old withered tree stump of a witch. But at least she'd gained a little information about Jacob. He was still in La Push and had been well enough to attend a baby skunk's funeral.
"Go back to the skunk part," said Charlie. The thing that interested him was that she had been hiding beneath Sam's dining room window while he interviewed Emily. "And I didn't know you were there," he said slowly. "At least, not at the time." He was also interested in the other places she'd searched that day, the ground she'd covered, the people she'd interviewed, and how close she'd gotten to the wolf monster.
"That's not a good thing," she said.
He just patted her shoulder. "Do you know what a mole is?"
"A little animal. Lives underground. Can't see well. Eats worms."
"Excellent. Let's go to La Push."
Thank you for reading. I hope you'll review. Please sign in so I can reply to thank you and offer a preview!
A new chapter is coming within a week. Till then, I hope you'll share your thoughts about some of this. I have been getting some VERY good ideas from readers lately, including the idea that Bella is improving her own mental health by focusing on solving the mystery. Thank you, Jibrah! Please keep your ideas coming. What do you think about...
1. Angela's plan to catch a man, and Bella's question about Ben. Possible? Good idea? Incidentally, have any of you ever tried to catch one? I did. It worked. But I hadn't been specific enough with myself about what I hoped to catch until after I'd caught it. Anywho...
2. Charlie's "mole" comments...
3. Vera's reaction to Bella's return...
4. The conversation with Claire, Ellen Uley, and Allison Uley...
5. The clues Bella has gathered or attempted to gather about Jake's disappearance...
6. The clues Charlie has gathered about 1936...
6. Riley's disappearance... Is it too late to save him, plotwise, do you think?
I hope some of those ideas spark your interest. I, for one, am VERY interested in your feedback. Flames, not so much. (AmandaForks ducks as tomatoes are thrown.) I know I promised that Jacob would reappear in this chapter, and he's not here after all. But that is only because the chapter I wrote was soooooo loooooooong that I had to split it in half to publish it. FF website was cramping. So I made TWO chapters recently. Here's one! Please say hello, readers! And I'll have the next chapter—with Jacob—up within a week!
Yours ever. AF