Inside Passage. Burt Weissbourd
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be released to the newspaper if anything happened to her. It had to be a bluff—she had no evidence. Still, he would be a politician soon, and then the press wouldn’t need proof…so it was more of a threat than she knew. What it was…it was a stain, a debasement, hovering just out of reach, poised to soil his candidacy. She did that after two women tried to kill her in prison. She wasn’t stupid.
He wondered, yet again, how much Al had actually told her. His cousin was smart enough, and careful, but she had him on some kind of short, good-father leash. What was that about? Pussy-whipped. That was all he could think of. Which was okay, except several years ago Al had dug up some dirt in L.A. and tied Lester to the Russian diamonds. It was a fluke, a one-in-a-million deal. Al was checking out known diamond traders from the eighties on some case he had caught, and he recognized Lester, the same man Nick had paid him to ferry to Vancouver, B.C. twenty years earlier. This was the kind of thing only Al could have put together. No evidence, but still.
Nick sat back, troubled. Maybe two years now, this had been worrying him. He stopped himself before he started going over and over the same things. The bad worries could suck the juice right out of you.
And he could see how the bitch was working her way under his skin, little by little.
Three
Corey was watching Billy’s house. She was in her car across the street trying, unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on her excitement. The house was shabby, an eyesore in a transitional neighborhood. She tried to imagine Billy living in this house. She felt suddenly apprehensive. Corey checked her watch: it was time, three o’clock. But where was Sally, the caseworker from Child Protective Services? She was supposed to be here too. Trying to be patient, she stared at his house and worked at waiting—going over, for the umpteenth time, Billy’s sorry foster care history.
Billy lived in this group home along with four other foster children and one of their babies. He had started in an individual home, but after five months his foster parents decided they didn’t want to keep him. She wasn’t sure why. Six months later he was moved from his second foster home.
Until they found another foster placement, the state had kept Billy in the King County juvenile detention center for eleven days: a nightmare, she was sure. He finally got placed in this group home, in yet another school district where they made him repeat the ninth grade because he had fallen behind.
Corey winced; she wasn’t at all sure what to expect. Billy had visited her only once, sixteen months ago. Her friend Jamie had driven him fourteen hours each way. It hadn’t gone well. Since then, she wrote him long letters at least twice a week. He responded to her letters sporadically, and his replies were short and often unfocused. His letters stopped coming at all almost a month before she was released. Starting today, she was allowed to see him once a week for two hours. Sally, the caseworker, was “monitoring the reintroduction of the family unit.” Sally was okay, except that she always seemed too busy.
Corey couldn’t wait another minute. When she stepped out of her pickup and crossed the street, she could see that the group home needed a new roof and some hard work in the front yard. She walked up three steps to the iron outer door. She could feel her pulse, pounding in her ears. The basement windows had rusty wire-mesh grills dotted with cobwebs. A teenaged girl answered when Corey rang. She carried a baby on her hip.
“I’m Corey Logan, Billy’s mom,” Corey said. She could hear a television somewhere in the house.
The girl left the iron door closed, shouting over her shoulder. “Billy here?”
“How would I know? He thinks this is a damn motel. He’ll do extra loads if he comes home late.”
“Yeah, right, that’ll work good,” the teenage girl muttered to herself. Corey guessed she was sixteen. She was eating a candy bar. Her acne was pretty bad. “He’s not here.”
“I was supposed to meet him here,” Corey explained.
The girl shrugged, closed the inner door and went inside.
In prison there were times when she would lose her bearings and turn on herself, savagely self-critical. She did that now, blaming herself for all of the things that had gone wrong for Billy and certain that he must hate her. At these times, Corey felt as though she was being sucked under freezing cold water. She had learned to weather these episodes, to let her feelings run their course. Still, it was a long, bad moment. After it passed, she summoned her strength. She rang the doorbell, then she rang it again.
A wiry Caucasian woman reopened the inner door. Her body looked forty, though her hard, pallid face was older. Her red-rimmed eyes were tired.
The woman wiped a strand of hair from her forehead. “Why are you still here?”
“I’m Billy’s mom.”
“Billy, huh. He’s never here when you need him.”
“I was supposed to meet him here at three o’clock.”
“Well, now you get the picture. Sorry.” She closed the door.
Corey moved toward her car, panicky. Inside, she locked the door and carefully dialed Sally. She said yes, she would hold. She closed her eyes and wiped out her thoughts about Billy’s foster home, her confused feelings about well-meaning Sally, and even her worries about her missing son. Corey kept her eyes closed, her cell phone to her ear. She would keep her head clear and empty until Sally picked up. She knew how to wait. When Sally came on, Corey started right in, pleasant enough. “Do I have the wrong day or something?”
“Is this Corey? Corey Logan?”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Hey. Billy left me a message. He couldn’t make it. I didn’t know where to find you.”
“What?”
“Look, he doesn’t have to see you at all.”
“What?”
“Let’s try again next week.”
“I can’t wait another week. He’s my son.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll talk with him. Do what I can. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Corey said, breathless.
It was late. Corey couldn’t sleep. She sat at her worn plank table, her back to the smoldering fire, writing in her diary:
“Where’s Billy. Why wasn’t he there to see me? My ideas about that scare me. I have to find out. Right away. And who is that woman he lives with? And the girl with the baby? How many other kids live there? What have I done?”
She closed the book, hid it behind the chimney brick, then went into her bedroom and laid down on the bed. She would find Billy tomorrow, after her time with the doctor. She would try not to think about these things until she saw her son, talked with him. When she had finally put Billy out of her mind, Corey slept.
It was 7:30 a.m. The tide was out, and Corey was poking around the tide pools, killing time before taking the ferry to Dr. Stein. Her rocky beach was part of the Blakely Shelf, a rock formation that stretched under Puget Sound. The shelf revealed its hiding places—its shallow crevices, its nooks and crannies teeming with sea life—when the tide was low. She had already seen sea stars, a small flounder, tiny black eels, sculpins, and a Dungeness crab.
She sat on a partially submerged rock, watching a sea anemone swaying gracefully in the water between her knee-high rubber boots. She was working to keep the demons back, wanting to feel okay about herself before seeing Dr. Stein. She slowly turned her head north, toward the little cedar cabin her mother had built and the fancy new house next door. Her dad William Logan had died at sea four months before she was born. His troller went down in the Ouzinkie Narrows between Kodiak Island and Spruce Island, Alaska. He left the Bainbridge property behind—her mom always said that he left it for his daughter. Three years ago she, Billy, and Al, had painted her mother’s cedar cabin white. Now the paint was peeling, worn by wind and rain.
The owner of the new house had sent a balding