Adrift in the Sound by Kate Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

cooked it, boiling away the impurities.
    Lizette smelled the sulfur from the matches, watched Carl wave the flame under the spoon. He filled the syringe all the way and tied off Fuzzy’s skinny, outstretched arm, palped a scarred vein, pierced it. A spurt of blood flushed into the syringe, glowing red-orange in the glass tube. Cadillac Carl firmly pressed the plunger, smiled gently into Fuzzy’s hazy eyes. “How’s that?” Carl asked.
    Fuzzy’s face softened, his eyes rolled back. “Far out. Good shit, man. Good.”
    He crumpled to the floor under the piano. Lizette gasped into her scarf. Cadillac Carl looked around like he’d heard something and went and stood in the dining room archway, assessed the dozing Dogs in the living room. He watched the end of the game by himself, clapped once for a good layup. The Sonics lost. Fuzzy turned blue, stopped breathing.
    Lizette studied Cadillac Carl’s dark form through the crack in the basement door, saw evil standing upright and unashamed. Her heart curled shut like a tide pool anemone protecting itself. She slipped backwards down the stairs on hands and knees, covered herself with the blankets she’d tossed there, squinched her eyes and forced herself to think about damp green forests, fairies dancing among blades of grass.
    Cadillac Carl stepped outside when the game ended and lifted a case of beer from the trunk of his car, ice cold from the crisp winter air. He roused the Dogs with the cold bottles under their chins, pulled a rotten, dusty curtain from a dining room window, and rolled Fuzzy’s body into it. He signaled Bomber to help him. The Dogs watched bleary eyed as they worked the load out the front door and piled the wadded drapery into the open trunk of Cadillac Carl’s Coupe de Ville. Without a word, Bomber went back inside. The Dogs said nothing.
    Lizette heard the Caddie hum to life outside and pull away. She waited a long time in the dark, waited until there were no more sounds overhead and slipped out the basement window, panted along Eastlake, took refuge in a crease where dirt met cement under the freeway. She pulled flattened cardboard boxes over her and waited until first light. She caught the bus to Anacortes, took the ferry to Orcas Island.

SEVEN
     
    ORCAS ISLAND emerged from the mist like a fairy world in a children’s book. Lizette watched the shoreline sharpen as the state ferry Kalama churned toward the landing, its decks bucking against the rolling current. The island rested before her, unchanged since the beginning of time. Trees blanketed the hills above verdant plains and spired along the dark hump of Turtleback Mountain. The foamy sea sloshed ashore in ebullient waves.
    She bounced her ankle on her knee, bone striking bone, and puffed her hair, anxious to see Marian, eager to get to the ranch and her studio. Only conscious restraint kept her seated. A smile broke out on her face as she smelled the cedar and seaweed, the lush rot of the sea feeding new life. She touched her face with her fingertips, traced the stiff muscles around her mouth, surprised by a joyful stirring she hadn’t felt in years, in forever.
    The engines shuddered into reverse and the ferry slowed. Passengers gathered their belongings and prepared to disembark. Those remaining for the ride to Friday Harbor and Sidney in British Columbia looked bored as they watched the jumble of bodies gather around the car ramp. The wide-bodied boat nudged the dock, bounced against the pylons, settled into its berth like a lumbering beast nestling into a safe burrow. Cars shot off the ramp and accelerated up the hill, hurrying home in the waning afternoon light.
    Locals on foot trudged off the ferry, indifferent to the magic that hovered over the Salish Sea, its islands scattered carelessly across the far Western edge of America. When it rains on the mainland, the sun shines on the islands. Canada’s Vancouver Island shields the outcroppings in the straits of Juan De Fuca, Georgia and