Chapter 16
When, two days later, Sam parked at home after an early shift, she found Danny Larsen working on the front of the house. Pieces of damaged siding lay on the dirt behind him. She got out of the car and slammed the door. He turned around with a grin.
“Heard you could use some repairs,” he called. At her expression, he sobered, clarified: “Elena asked me to come by.”
“No, she didn’t,” Sam said. “She would’ve told me.” His tools were scattered at his feet. She couldn’t believe the liberties he took.
“Ah, well. Sometimes people forget to tell people stuff.”
He turned to the wall before Sam could judge what he meant by that. A jab about her contacting Madeline? If Elena really had asked him to come here, did she tell him to say that? No, Sam was being paranoid, imagining this man as a messenger.
She came up the walkway and stood over his shoulder. The urine smell was faint at this point. How long had he been out here, peeling and nailing? She said, “Did you check with my mom before you started?”
“I rang the doorbell but she didn’t answer. I didn’t want to disturb her.”
First a bear, then the sheriff, then the scientist, then this. Sam said, “I’ll go find out.”
Inside, her mother was resting. Sam went into her own bedroom and texted Elena, who was working and didn’t answer, obviously, so Sam just messed around on her phone. She completed two more surveys before she got back up. It was uncomfortable to sit listening to someone scrape against the front of the house. It was eerily like what Elena must’ve heard the day she saw the bear from the living room.
Danny looked up from his work when Sam came out. “Everything okay with your mom?”
“She’s fine. Also, I texted Elena,” she said.
“Cool.”
She sat on the front step and crossed her arms over her knees. The afternoon was breezy. The channel that morning had been thick white with fog; the railings on the deck had hardly been visible from the cabin, and when Sam went out to take her breaks, the air sat wet on her skin. Seagulls called nearby but she couldn’t see them. The ferry blew its horn. When they approached a harbor, there came the sound of chains moving, the announcements to prepare to disembark, but no sign of land. Then the thump, thump of docking. The boat rocked underfoot. Tourists came on board wearing fancy rain jackets and craving cocoa. Californians, loads of them, with their weighty metal credit cards and uniform tans. She spotted Ben, once, on the car deck, laughing with the other deckhands. She hadn’t tried to wave at him, and he didn’t look up to see her.
Her shift had ended at eleven-thirty. The fog burned off by noon. Now there was nothing to do for the rest of the day but watch Danny push strips of vinyl under each other and nail them into place.
“It’s not the right color,” she said.
He studied the wall. “It was as close as I could get.”
She checked her phone. Only Ben had texted: just had lunch, galley food no good without you, missing that spice. She texted back—nice try, wrong though, that food’s never good no matter how spicy—and put the phone down. It buzzed again but she didn’t bother looking. “When did Elena ask you to do this?”
The hammer tapped another nail in. “Yesterday.”
“I didn’t know you two talked.” He shrugged. Sam said, “That’s weird.”
Danny lowered his hammer and glanced at her. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
The hammer lay on his thigh. His jeans were tight on his legs. This was probably the closest she’d ever been to Danny Larsen. From this distance, she could see each twisting hair in his beard, the fine lines that years of reflexive smiles had made around his eyes. He smelled like soap. A drugstore smell. Scrubbed. He said, “These are the sorts of things neighbors do for each other.”
Yeah, right. She’d never seen him making repairs at their place before. Frowning, she stared out at the road. He picked up another piece of new siding. Then he said, “I hear you all have become the place for bears to be.”
Jesus Christ—so that was what was going on. He was trying to squeeze them for gossip. He must’ve pushed Elena into this exact conversation when she bumped into him while he was walking the dog. Smart of her, then, to put his nosiness to good use. He slotted the siding in. Sam said, “Where’d you hear that?”
Jolly, Danny said, “I have my sources.” Sam rolled her eyes. He pinched a nail out of the box at his feet and added, “Steve Packenham told me. Did you know him in school?”
Sam vaguely remembered: a skinny kid, tall, with a poking-out Adam’s apple. “He was your year?”
“The year above.”
“What does he know about it?”
“He works for the town now.” Tap, tap, tap. “Same building as the sheriff’s office. They talk. He said there were markings on your house. It’s been at South Beach, too. They found two dead deer down there.”
Sam’s heart thudded. Now she was the one who wanted to know more. “No way.”
Danny sat back. “Yeah, a doe and a fawn, half-buried by the parking lot. I guess that’s what a bear does, kill a thing and cache it for later.”
She grimaced. “Terrible.”
He picked up another strip. His hands were big, fingers long with trimmed nails and neat cuticles. He moved like he knew what he was doing. The siding he’d brought was cool white, where the old strips were creamier. Maybe dirt would make them blend together after a while.
She had to ask. “Have you seen it? The bear?”
“Me? No. You have?”
“Yeah,” she said. She couldn’t help it—she wanted to tell him. “It’s really scary. It’s huge.”
This was how these men got you. They seemed like comfort at first. He played his part well, she had to give him that. “You girls are brave. I would’ve freaked out if it showed up at our place. Run for my gun.”
“We don’t have a gun.”
“Even freakier.”
The breeze lifted the edges of the pieces he’d discarded. Tops of trees rustled. A bird called over them, innocent of any predator walking the island. Sam said, “It scared me so much.”
He put his tools down again. She looked at him, then looked away, toward the woods—she couldn’t hold his eyes. It was strange, no matter what he said, that he was here in their yard. Looking at him was seeing double; there was his high school self, that jock, laughing too loud and shoving his friends, and then overlaid there was this creased-skin man who knelt next to a box cutter and a speed square. The younger version, she believed, wasn’t to be trusted. But this one? She couldn’t reconcile the two.
“You know what else Steve told me?” Danny said. He was speaking quietly. This was the grown-up talking, not the teen. “That we don’t have anything to worry about. Bears are more scared of us than we are of them. This guy’s trying to make his way over to Vancouver with as little fuss as possible.”
“Right,” Sam said. “That’s what Elena says, too.”
She glanced at him, then. His hands rested on his legs and his mouth was serious. Had she ever seen him with this face before? He looked like a different man—subdued. “Your sister is the most levelheaded person I’ve ever met,” he said. “Listen to her. If Elena says it, then it’s true.”