The Sight Read online

  Shay squeezes her old Saab into a space behind a boat trailer, and we all pile out, Shay grabbing the food basket. She knocks on the door of the studio. After about a full minute, we hear footsteps clomping on the floor. The door opens, and a guy a little older than Diego stands there, squinting at us. He’s slim, with sleek dark hair to his shoulders and eyes like chips of gray ice. His jeans are spotted with paint and his blue plaid flannel shirt has been laundered so many times it’s almost white. Underneath it, he wears a T-shirt that was once black and is now almost green. Together with those pale gray eyes, he certainly looks well-washed.

  “Hi, Zed,” Shay says. “How’re you doing?”

  “What’s up?” Which is not really an answer, I note. This guy is too cool to even say, “Okay.”

  “Is…”

  “He went for a walk up at Green Lake. I kicked him out, actually. He needed some air, man.”

  Shay nods sympathetically.

  “He’s got his cell on, though, if you—”

  “It’s okay,” Shay says. “I just wanted to drop this off.” She points to the basket and shrugs. “Just some food. Do you know my son, Diego? And this is my niece, Gracie.”

  Zed’s pale eyes flick over me. It is the shortest of glances, but I feel my face heat up. He doesn’t say hello, or even nod, just stands aside to let us in. Thanks for making an effort, Mr. Handsome.

  As I brush by him, I pick up an emotion. Worry. Worry about Rocky? Worry about something else? I don’t know, but I know he chews on that worry like a cow on grass.

  We walk into a sort of living room, with a cushy couch and a long table with some of Rocky’s glass pieces on it. They’re big vases shaped like chrome kitchen garbage cans. There’s even black shiny stuff that’s supposed to look like a Hefty bag rolled over the top of the rim. I’d seen Rocky’s work in Emily’s house—well, I passed by some vases and things on the way to the refrigerator—but these were big and different and kind of cool.

  Zed passes them by without a look and pushes open another door that leads into the studio area. It’s just one huge room. One wall is full of books on metal shelves. Long tables are in the middle of the open space, with paper and pastel crayons scattered on them. Big drawings of vases and vessels are drawn with huge loopy lines. The drawings are in black and white and blocks of bright color are in the margins, as if Rocky is trying to figure out what color they should be.

  A couch that matches the one in the other room is against one wall and has sheets and a blanket neatly draped over one arm. There’s a wooden screen in the other corner with a map painted on it. I realize that it’s a cartoony version of Beewick Island. Behind the screen is a rolled-up futon and a small table. Wooden cubes with clothes in them are stacked next to the bed, and I recognize some T-shirts of Emily’s. So that’s where she slept when she visited. Some dried lavender is stuck in a pretty yellow vase on the table. That makes me feel sad, because I see that Rocky had tried to make the place sort of homey for Emily, and I know it hadn’t worked.

  “Are you blowing today?” Shay asks.

  Zed nods. “Going to try, anyway. Work might help.”

  Shay puts the basket down. “How is Rocky doing?”

  Zed leans over and shuts the lid of the computer. “I don’t think he sleeps.”

  I drift away, over toward Emily’s corner. Shay is moving over to look at a table with some sketches. She is talking to Zed about Rocky, who, according to Zed, is a “freaking mess.”

  I see a T-shirt, neatly folded in one of the cubes, and pick it up. It’s from the computer camp that Emily never got a chance to go to this summer. She was so proud of getting into that camp. It’s a bright red shirt—not Emily’s best color, but she wore it a lot at the end of school. Then she stopped wearing it.

  The room fades suddenly, the gray walls rushing toward me like a waterfall. Then the water is like a wave, a gentle wave splashing against a beach full of pebbles. The pebbles are grayish, opalescent. Then the gray bleaches to white, and I’m looking at a bed. Light sweeps across it, and then darkness comes again.

  I’m standing in a doorway, looking down at Emily on a white bed.

  I’m angry at her.

  I’m angry at all of them.

  It’s all their fault, and they won’t try hard enough, and it’s all about that, isn’t it?

  If only they would listen to me. If only they would see that we have to share. That we have to love one another.

  If only they could see that.

  How much harder can I try?

  They make me sick, they make me so mad…

  The walls move back again, and I’m in the studio. The fear starts from the ground up. I feel it surge through me and I want to scream. I want to run outside and gulp air. My mouth tastes like greasy coins.

  I’ve been in his head.

  I’ve been in the kidnapper’s head.

  I’ve seen through his eyes. I’ve felt what he’s been feeling.

  He’s on the edge of something. It’s like he’s holding back a great torrent of black emotion, holding it back with the fraying ribbons of his control.

  And Emily was there. I saw Emily.

  But this time, I didn’t really register her. I was too overwhelmed by the thoughts. Emily hadn’t been a real person to me.

  Because I was looking at her through his eyes.

  I sink onto the futon.

  She’s not a real person to him.

  It makes me feel sick to my stomach.

  She existed for him. She wasn’t Emily to him.

  How could someone look at someone else and be so detached, so…wrong?

  I realize that I’ve crushed Emily’s T-shirt in my hands. They feel stiff as I try to smooth out the shirt. Something tells me to act normal, not to call attention to what just happened.

  I get up and walk toward Diego, who has wandered over to another door. I just need somewhere to move. As he opens the door, I see something. Flames.

  I shake my head. Is that something I see, or something I imagine?

  I walk quickly to the doorway, my heart pounding now. I stand in the doorway and see the ovens. The opening of the oven is square, and flames are shooting up, burning hot and orange.

  A white square with flames shooting out…

  “What is it?” I ask.

  Diego turns slightly. “It’s called the glory hole. It’s where the glass is kept hot before it’s shaped.”

  I’m so confused I can’t think clearly. There’s too much information flooding me at once. I can’t pick up one single thread. When I hear Shay’s voice behind me, I jump.

  “Time to go,” she says.

  I turn automatically. We walk toward the door.

  “I’ll stop by the Harborside soon,” Shay says to Zed. “You working tonight?”

  “No, next weekend.” Zed nods for a good-bye. His eyes meet mine for a brief second. I don’t know whether I’m chilled or attracted. There is so much that is wrong here that I can’t pick out what is important, what I need to know.

  The door closes behind us. I take a breath of fresh air, but it feels thick and humid and doesn’t help to clear my head.

  The beach. The light, then darkness. The man standing in the doorway. The flames.

  What does it have to do with Emily? Are they clues I can follow? How can I find Emily based on flashes that come in bursts of light and then go before I really see anything?

  I’m so balled up with frustration I want to howl and kick the car door.

  I am sick inside, and afraid.

  What I really want to do is walk away. Walk away from all of them, from all of this.

  But I’m trapped, and I know it. I push away the panic, grind it down with my foot. I try to hone in on the first thing I can. Zed’s worry. What was it about?

  “The Harborside?” I ask as we walk toward the car.

  “Zed’s father owns a restaurant on Beewick Island. Zed cooks there on the weekends. He stays in a fishing shack near the place,” Shay ex
plains. “Zed became a gaffer for Rocky just recently, when he got out of college. He also happens to be the fastest oyster-shucker on Beewick Island. Which means he’s probably the fastest oyster shucker just about anywhere.”

  Shay opens the car doors, and we pile in.

  Oysters.

  Those weren’t beach pebbles I saw, they were shells. Oyster shells.

  I look down and realize that Emily’s shirt is still bunched up in my hand. I put it down carefully and buckle my seat belt. “Where’s the Harborside?”

  “In Greystone Harbor,” Shay says, pulling out of the parking spot.

  Greystone Harbor is the next town over on Beewick. It’s where the tourists go. The town is pretty, white houses and flowering bushes, all built around a horseshoe-shaped cove. Very postcardy. There’s even a lighthouse.

  Light sweeping, then darkness. Was that a lighthouse in my vision?

  Let’s get ice cream, Emily had said. The ice cream place is in Greystone Harbor.

  A long, hot walk on the hottest day of the year. She couldn’t have wanted ice cream that badly.

  I remember Zed’s silver eyes, the way he looked at me. Had Emily ever mentioned him?

  I remember asking her how her weekends were in Seattle. She’d said they were grim. She said Rocky trying to please her made her feel strange. Usually, the weekend would disintegrate somehow, and Emily would suggest that Rocky go to work. She liked to watch him blow glass.

  And she’d said, But the sightseeing is pretty fine, if you know what I mean.

  Clueless me thought she was talking about…sightseeing. But I think back on the way she said it now, and I realize what she meant. She’d been talking about Zed. Zed in his faded jeans, his tight T-shirts, his cool, silvery eyes.

  Zed with the worry inside that doesn’t go away, no matter how much he tries to bury it.

  TEN

  Shay takes us out for an afternoon of fun, she says. We watch them throw salmon for the tourists in the Public Market. We have an early dinner at Etta’s, and then we go to a big, old bookstore in Pioneer Square, which Shay calls a Seattle landmark. I lose Shay in Cooking and Diego in History.

  I wish I could lose myself.

  It’s like this thing with Emily has cracked me open, and I don’t want to say like a nut. But suddenly, it’s like I can read what other people are feeling. Not Shay, and not Diego. Not everyone I see. But sometimes, a wave hits me, and I know.

  I know that the fat man in Travel is worried about his daughter’s marriage.

  The woman in head-to-toe Gore-Tex just threw up in the bathroom. She’s pregnant.

  It’s a girl, I want to tell her. Don’t worry so much.

  The man in the green shirt taking down a book in Fiction wonders why books can’t save him from falling in love with women who hurt him.

  The woman with the long silver ponytail has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. She’s worrying about cancer as she chooses a book called Living Simply in an Age of Stress.

  You’re okay, I want to tell her.

  But what good would it do? She’d think I was just another passing lunatic.

  Emily isn’t okay.

  I’ve got to screen everything else out. I’ve got to figure it out, I’ve got to decipher it.

  I’ve got to break it down.

  I go downstairs to this little café they have. They’re out of soda, and the girl behind the counter suggests coffee.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” I say, which I realize is enough to get me deported from the city of Seattle.

  “We have juice,” the girl behind the counter says. She has a pierced eyebrow and a seriously punked-out haircut. Her gaze is somewhere between hostile and bored. She hates her job and pretty much hates her life, but I’m relieved that I get no insight, no flash into why.

  “I don’t like juice,” I say.

  She shrugs. I finally ask for tea, which I don’t really want. I find a table and start dunking the teabag like I’m trying to wash it clean.

  Forget about the visions, I tell myself. What else did you see?

  Detective Fusilli had asked me if Emily had a crush, and I’d said that Emily never talked about boys. I thought I’d been telling the truth. But what if she’d been trying to talk to me about a crush, only I was too dense, too locked in my own head, too busy trying to hear music that I wanted always, always playing? I wanted the music to block out everything in my head, and it wound up blocking someone talking just a couple of feet away.

  I remember Zed closing the laptop as Shay moved toward the table. Had he been hiding something? How could I get back into the studio and find out? I couldn’t drive, which was a serious handicap. I discovered something essential: Detectives need cars.

  Maybe I could talk Shay into going back so that she could see Rocky. Why was she taking him food, anyway? Why wasn’t she taking food to Mrs. Carbonel? Did Shay have a crush on Rocky? Was she using this as an opportunity to move in on him? That would be totally snaky of her, but I really don’t know how Shay operates in her love life. All I know is that for an overweight middleaged woman, she has plenty of dates. You’d think on an island you’d run out of men at some point.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Shay and Rocky are already involved. Maybe Shay is the reason the Carbonel marriage broke up. I try to think back about that night we went over there. Mrs. Carbonel hadn’t even said hello to Shay.

  Shay plunks down a bag of books on the table, making me jump. She points to the tea with her chin.

  “I didn’t know you liked tea.”

  I push the tea away. She sits down. I look at her sandaled feet, then look away. Shay has feet like a hobbit. Her toes are chunky and round. You’d think that if you had toes like that, you wouldn’t want to call attention to them. You’d be too embarrassed to get pedicures. Not Shay. Her toenails are bright red.

  “Don’t you want to buy a book or two? I’m treating,” Shay says.

  I shake my head.

  Shay looks distracted. She lifts her hair off her neck and lets it fall again. Her hair is thick like my mom’s, but it’s brown, not blond. Not that my mom’s was natural. Mom used to call me her “tell,” which meant that because I have brown hair, everyone would know her blond hair was fake. She used to ruffle my hair when she said it; she really didn’t care, she was making a joke. I feel anger grip me in a fist and squeeze. Shay’s feet, her hair, annoy me. Her breath, the fact that she’s breathing. The fact that I’m sitting here, in a strange place, with a stranger, miles away from what I know. What I’ve loved.

  “Are you after Rocky?” I ask her.

  Shay looks confused for a minute. “Am I…”

  “Are you trying to move in on him?” I ask. “Is that why you’re bringing him food?”

  Knowledge floods Shay’s eyes. I see it happen, filling her brain as the blush fills her cheeks. So it’s true.

  “That’s a horrible thing to say,” she says.

  She is furious. I’ve never seen her angry, at least at me. Only at Detective Fusilli, or at a driver going too fast on a country road.

  “You think I’m using Emily’s disappearance to spice up my love life?” she asks. Her green eyes are intense, watching my face.

  I shrug. I press my finger on the teabag on the table and watch the brown stain spread out.

  Shay stands up. “I’ll meet you at the car,” she says.

  I sit there for a few minutes. I’m not feeling too great about myself. I tell myself that detectives have to ask questions that people don’t want to answer, but deep down, I know something that I’m afraid to admit. I enjoyed asking the question.

  Finally, I stand up. Diego is coming down the stairs to get me. He waits while I wipe up the tea and throw the napkin and cup away. We walk to the car without saying anything. I can tell he knows Shay is upset, but I’m not sure if he knows why.

  Shay is sitting in the driver’s seat. “I hope we don’t hit traffic,” she says in a neutral voice. “There’s a Mariners game letting out.”
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  We do hit traffic, but I think she’s relieved, because she gets to concentrate on driving. I want to say something, but I don’t know what. So I start thinking about how to investigate Zed. It’s up to me, and I know it. If I go to the police and babble about oyster shells and feelings, they’ll laugh me out the door.

  Shay had said that he stays in a shack on the beach. If I could get inside, maybe I could find something.

  Or maybe Emily could be inside. Maybe Zed got her to go away with him, but then she changed her mind. Maybe he’s keeping her there, and that’s what I saw in the vision.

  “Why don’t we stop for ice cream on the way home?” I suggest.

  Diego turns from the front seat and looks at me, surprised. Shay glances in the rearview mirror. It’s the first time I have ever suggested prolonging an outing. It could be the first time I’ve suggested doing anything together.

  “How about that place in Greystone Harbor?” I say.

  I see how Shay’s face relaxes. I realize that she thinks that this is my way to apologize. I’m embarrassed. I should have thought of it as an apology. Instead, it’s just a ruse. But at least it gets me somewhere closer to Emily.

  ELEVEN

  Diego gets vanilla, which is weird, because I’d never peg him for a vanilla person. Shay gets chocolate, which is not a surprise. I get toasted coconut. Diego knows the pretty girl who serves the ice cream, of course, since he knows every pretty girl on Beewick. So he hangs out at the counter, licking his cone, while she giggles and pretends to fill napkin containers.

  I’ve got news for Diego. She likes him, but she’s using him. She’s overdoing the giggles, hoping her boyfriend comes early to pick her up so she can make him jealous.

  Shay and I head for a table. The silence is awkward, at least for me. Shay licks her cone and looks out the window. The sun has already set, and we’re getting the last of the light. Across the street from us are the restaurants and shops at the harbor’s edge. They’re built up on a kind of pier over the beach. I can see the lights of the Harborside, which looks like the kind of place Bluebeard’s pirates might hang out in. Creaky wood siding and lanterns outside casting dim pools of light into the dusk. Fishnets hung on the siding. All for the benefit of the tourists.