Chapter Fifty-Seven

SHAUNA STOPPED THE car on a quiet curve of road north of the marina, stepped out into the long grass, and watched the cold lights, the stillness. Shauna saw no police cruisers. No construction vehicles. The place was lit up like a shopping mall: boat lights, road lights, markers on the pier, and lamps overhanging the closed office, all blazing yellow and icy-white into the evening.

Something told Shauna that the situation was wrong, but she had no choice now. Bill needed her. He was the one strand connecting her to the earth, a string stopping her from being swept away into dark winds. Because she had known, she supposed, that there would be other Norman Drivers in her future. That Pooney and Marris were the beginning, and the boy in the forest was a continuation, and Driver was going to be her next in an infinite line of nexts. Only Bill Robinson, and the photograph of him lying beaten and bound, had managed to ground her. She took the rifle from the car, locked the vehicle, and began to walk.

She took a shortcut off the access road and crouched in the bushes, her knees popping, watching for movement. Waves of exhaustion swept over her, the last couple of days like a cross-country journey awakening muscles she hadn’t used in years, angering worn-down joints and disturbing her equilibrium. She told herself to push on. There was plenty of motion up there. Boats bobbling. Flags and sails being caressed by the breeze. By the time Shauna crept down the embankment and halfway along the little beach beside the marina in the blackness, her eyes were watering from the brightness of the lights. It only occurred to her that this had been the plan all along when she heard the hammer of a revolver click back right beside her ear. She turned, the rifle frozen in her hands, but saw only explosions of green and red light as her vision tried to recover from the lights of the marina.

“Put it down,” a voice said.

Shauna lowered her rifle to the cold, damp sand. The cloudy color in her eyes dissolved, revealing a huge, hulking man in a sheriff’s uniform. She might have felt some wave of dread or shame as the big guy drew her tiny wrists behind her back and cuffed her for the first time in her life, but there was no time. She was struck instead with a gut-punch of betrayal as Bill Robinson and the girlfriend, Susan, emerged from the shadows too.

“Wow,” Shauna said and shook her head. She had to smile at the cleverness of it all. She looked at the split in Bill’s lip. “So who bopped you, then?”

“Clay did.” Bill gestured to the sheriff. “Very reluctantly.”

“Well, I wish he’d left a piece for me.” Shauna spat on the ground. “You’re a betrayer, Bill. A Judas.”

“I’m sorry, Shauna,” Bill said.

“You know this is not the way it’s supposed to end,” Shauna said. Her throat was tightening with rage and regret. “All you had to do was look the other way for one more night. But I guess taking the law into your own hands is a privilege that’s reserved just for you, huh?”

“Let’s just cool it everybody, OK?” Clay’s deep voice, full of authority, quieted them all. “You guys want to be nasty to each other, you can do it on your own time. I just punched a friend and now I’m arresting a lady, and neither of those things are my idea of a good time. I don’t need to hear you sniping at each other as well.”

Shauna gazed at Bill, shivering with fury.

“So where’s the box?” the sheriff asked. “Mrs. Bulger, you gonna make my life easy and just tell me? Or are we going to do a dance back at the station for a while, first?”

“It’s in the car,” Shauna said. “Bill’s car. I parked just around the bend there.”

“Right,” the sheriff said, nodding toward Bill and Susan. “Well, bad news, Bill. I’m going to have to confiscate the whole car. It’s been used by Mrs. Bulger for a couple of days now in the commission of several crimes. I can’t—”

“I get it.” Bill held a hand up. “Don’t worry. I get it.”

“Come on, Mrs. Bulger.” The sheriff moved her, pushing her sideways, his big hand gentle yet inescapable, an iron clamp locked around her biceps. Shauna went with him, and they walked into the darkness away from the marina. She spied the cruiser ahead, backed into a gap between dense bushes off the side of the road. Her footprints in the sand below her led nowhere, disappearing as he guided her up a set of concrete steps and onto the road.

Now the humiliation was coming on, heavier and heavier, like a series of blankets heaped onto her body. Her legs felt wobbly. She imagined the next few hours sitting in a cell, and then the inevitable meeting with a lawyer. The decision on whether to plead temporary insanity or some form of cognitive decline brought on by aging. She’d be in diapers in a locked ward within a month. Even faster than Henry had planned.

The sheriff guided her toward the cruiser. Shauna looked up at the barely visible stars, then at him. The big man was walking beside her now, her arm in one hand, the rifle in the other.

He had a kindly face. She’d seen regret flash there as Bill mentioned the punch to the mouth, the real and genuine squeamishness of a man who didn’t like violence of any sort. An old-fashioned, warmhearted man who tended to think and expect the best of people. A man who put on the uniform every day because he was full of goodness, and it was bubbling up and over the rim of the saucepan, and he just didn’t know what to do with it all.

This was a man who could be deceived, Shauna thought.