The Edge of the Light by Elizabeth George Page B

She’d learned first that Parker was Canadian. In short order, she’d also learned that he’d come to Langley from the verysame town that Laurel had fled to: Nelson. When he’d made his return to British Columbia, then, Becca had maintained a secret contact with him. He’d been doing his best to locate for her a woman she’d explained was her cousin. Laurel Armstrong had immigrated to Nelson a few years ago, had been Becca’s claim, and the family had lost contact with her. A town of ten thousand people, Nelson wasn’t a huge haystack from which a single needle had to be drawn. But so far nothing Parker had done was sufficient to unearth Becca’s “cousin.”
    He’d accepted Becca’s claim that the situation was urgent. Thus, he’d put ads in the local paper and had posted have-you-seen-this-woman flyers throughout Nelson’s small downtown and inside a mall that stood a short distance from an arm of Lake Kootenay. He’d also posted flyers out on the docks in the lake on which Nelson sat, where people came and went from their boats, even in winter. He’d crossed over the lake to the other part of town and fixed posters to light poles there. But if Laurel Armstrong was indeed in Nelson, she wasn’t responding to his efforts to find her.
    Parker had pointed out in his last e-mail to Becca that she might want to expand her search to Castlegar and to Trail. And in this most current e-mail that he’d sent to her reply of “Parker, I know she’s in Nelson,” he offered a different possibility. Maybe, he wrote, her “cousin” Laurel had never actually immigrated to Canada. He pointed out that the nearest border crossing to Nelson was north of Spokane. Becca’s “cousin” could have decided that Spokane was a better situation for her, Parker wrote. “It’s a bigger city, there’s more action, and she wouldn’t have hadto go through the hassle of trying to get Canadian residency.”
    On the other hand, he went on to tell her, one of the regular customers at his family’s restaurant in Nelson was a cop. He’d see if that cop would contact Canadian immigration because, if Laurel
had
actually entered Canada at any one of the border crossings in the state of Washington, there was going to be a record of that.
    Throughout all of this, Parker Natalia hadn’t questioned why Becca was so determined to find an individual whom, she claimed, she hadn’t seen in years. From a large and closely knit Italian family, when it came to wanting to contact your relatives, Parker understood.
    Now more than ever, Becca needed to find her mom. With the reporter Olivia Bolding on the case, Becca ran the risk of being tracked down. She might need to leave Whidbey in a rush, and she didn’t want to do that, because Laurel would have no way of knowing where she’d gone.
    Becca headed out of town. The fog made her cautious. It increased the time it took her to reach the end of Sandy Point Road and its zigzag of streets that took her to Diana’s house. When she finally got there, she was wet from the damp and cold to her bones.
    She rang the bell. A chorus of barking followed. As before, all of Diana’s dogs came storming from the direction of the sunroom save for Oscar. He merely paced, and over the bouncing and bobbing heads of his comrades, he looked gravely at Becca through one of two windows that sided Diana’s front door. Dianaherself was nowhere to be seen. Becca frowned when the woman made no appearance as she waited.
    It was odd. Diana wouldn’t go off and leave the dogs inside her house. And she wouldn’t go off and leave Oscar behind. He was her constant companion, and even if Diana had for some reason gone somewhere without him, he and the other dogs would be in the run.
    Becca tried the door and found it locked, also highly unusual for Diana if she was home. She went around to the side