The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George

she understood at once why Seth had suggested she check out the public facilities.
    It wasn’t just that she’d slept with the dogs. That was bad enough, and it contributed to her rank smell. But it was also how Laurel had altered her appearance so that she looked gross, so unlike her normal self that should Jeff Corrie pass her on the street, he’d never notice her.
    Aside from the ugly color, her hair was also a chopped-up mess, hanging just beneath her ears. She was wearing more makeup than she’d ever worn in her life, sort of like a marginal goth, and at the moment it was streaking on her face, the eyeliner looking like sooty tears and the mascara creating semi-circular smudges.
    Becca removed the phony glasses and looked around. There was soap and water, so she washed her face. If she was going to meet this woman called Debbie, she didn’t want to give her the wrong impression.
    When she left the restroom, she still smelled like a dog but at least she didn’t look like one. She went out into the open air, dug out her cell phone, and made her next call to Laurel. She was feeling much better all around. She knew this had a lot to do with having eaten the sandwich provided by Seth Darrow and having found the restroom. These two circumstances were the kind of thing that made a person believe in possibilities.
    Becca’s contentment did not last long, though. Once again the cell phone told her that Laurel was out of range.
    Well, she thought reasonably, her mother would have stopped somewhere for the night. She and Laurel had gone over the route together, the highways she would take to get to Nelson, B.C., so she’d have paused somewhere in the Cascades. Some small town or a motel in the middle of nowhere. She could even be on the other side of the mountains by now but in an area without a cell tower. A few more hours would take care of the problem. Since she was fed and warm and somewhat clean now, Becca knew that she could wait.
    In the open air, the morning was cold and damp. With time to kill until she was meant to find this woman called Debbie, Becca decided to warm up by riding her bike and practicing with the gears, as Seth had told her to do. She’d explore as well, she told herself. There didn’t appear to be a lot to explore in the village, so that wouldn’t take long, but it was something to do.
    Langley, she discovered, couldn’t have been less like San Diego, with its housing developments all painted beige with red tiled roofs. Here there was nothing but seaside cottages, with clapboard and shingle siding on them and with roofs that were often green with moss. There were trees everywhere, trees gone wild, trees gone completely beserk, and their leaves were just beginning to turn in what would eventually become a panoply of red, orange, yellow, and gold.
    Becca found that her initial impression of the village had been correct: It was a town in miniature. She discovered a squat brick city hall–cum–police station, a library with a purple front door, a pizza parlor, several restaurants, an abandoned old tavern called the Dog House, and—this being Washington—four coffeehouses competing with each other.
    Becca ended up at the place she’d always felt the safest: the public library. She gazed in the windows and thought she might wait till it opened so she could find a spot to remain until it was close to one o’clock. She’d read a book, she decided, and she’d be perfectly at ease among whatever whispers were in the air since library whispers had always been soothing to her as people’s minds drifted into the worlds of what they were reading.

    IT WAS TWELVE-THIRTY when she left the library and consulted her Seth-drawn map. She saw that the place she was looking for was right up Second Street, and since the library stood at the corner of Second Street, she wasn’t going to get lost trying to find the spot. It was, of course, all uphill. By the time she found the small white cottage that Seth