“What is it?”
The thing they were looking at was Grant’s size, but not his shape. There was a long, floppy ear, and there was a paw, but the body was practically unrecognizable, it was so riddled with holes. Those holes weren’t even well placed along the body. It was just one great big spray of them, letting out blood and intestines and jellied eyes.
This gory, perforated rag was all that was left of Patience.
“Jesus,” I said, sick and relieved at the same time.
“You really didn’t need to see this. You’ve already got enough to deal with,” one of them said. I was almost positive it was Dean, because he was usually the first to respond when they were in a group—a trait that had landed him in the Island County sheriff’s office the night before.
“Jesus. I don’t know how we’re going to tell Pix,” another said. Sammy. You could see part of a scar along his hairline. He had a bad motocross accident a couple of years ago that nearly killed him.
I looked at the rag with holes that used to be Pixie’s pet. I should’ve been more shocked, I suppose, but after the night I’d had, and given the state she was in, it was like looking at roadkill.
“Who would do this?” I said, more to myself than the Grays.
“Someone who didn’t want to be found,” said a voice from the trail above us.
I looked up to the dike. I was so caught up in the Grays’ drama, it hadn’t occurred to me I was being followed. But there was agent Armstrong, standing in a black raincoat, looking ready to unleash a whole lot of fury on whatever sick whack job had reduced Patience to a pile of holes.
He’d remembered a piece I’d forgotten. Patience was the best scent hound in the state. If you didn’t want her on your trail, this was one way to get rid of her.
As the rest of us stood there, wallowing, I noticed that agent Armstrong didn’t bother to climb down and get into the muck with us. He didn’t need to. He had perfect command of the situation from above.
eleven
PIXIE
Mom stayed with me the first two hours of my incarceration—I mean, my recovery—at Whidbey General Hospital in Coupeville, but she left when the swelling went down and my face returned to its natural size. The tests had all been run, my chest hooked up to wires and monitors, and now we were just waiting for the results. Although she wanted to help find Grant as much as I did, she was reluctant to leave.
“I don’t think you understand what you put me through, Marilyn. You had to be resuscitated. That’s a first. I almost prayed when I found out what had happened to you.”
“It was an accident.”
“Don’t give me that shit. You’re my only girl. And as such, I hold you to higher standards than the rest. That includes not getting poisoned. Your face is looking a little better.”
I reassured her that I felt fine, and finally she left to make coffee and sandwiches for the people searching for Grant.
“All right. I’ll go. But only because you’ve got more sense than some of your brothers, and there’s work to be done. You’ll call me when the doctors come back with your prognosis?”
I told her I would. I told her I felt fine. I did not tell her that I felt normal.
The truth was, I was scared of what the brain scans would turn up. I was sure that at least part of my brain had turned to jelly, and I wanted to put off Mom’s reaction to it as long as possible.
After all, nobody with a normal brain would’ve seen what I saw the night before: the man sitting on the log . . . the woman coming from the sea . . . Lyudmila becoming an incandescent light. And then the woman standing over me, whispering something in my ear, something important that, try as I might, I couldn’t remember.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember but couldn’t tune out the beeping from the machines I was hooked up to. What had she said?
After a while, I gave up trying and focused on the wall-mounted TV. I watched the manhunt for Grant Shepherd, the one that Patience and I should’ve wrapped up by now.
The news listed Yuri Andreevich Bulgakov as a “person of interest.” Everybody liked him for Lyudmila’s murder and Grant’s disappearance. His motive was supposed to be money.
Nobody had seen him since Sunday afternoon. The newscasters hinted he might have a link to the Russian mafia, which pissed me off. I mean, just because he was Russian didn’t mean he was carrying out hits on people. True, he owned that Kalashnikov, but I figured that was more out of habit than anything else.
Yuri was just too sad. When he was off duty and dipping into the cornichons and the vodka, he would stare a little too long at the big house and start singing verses of Russian folk songs. He would get a faraway look, massage Patience’s wrinkles, then turn to Henry and me and say, “Ah, to be young and in love.”
He loved Lyudmila with a doomed, Russian kind of love.
I always assumed that was enough for him.