“But we have a plan. We always have a plan.”
I try not to hesitate before I nod, but he catches that extra split second.
“You don’t think we could pull it off?” he says. “Starting a new Rockton? That was your suggestion.”
When I’m slow to answer, he tugs me on top of him.
“Seems tougher now, doesn’t it?” he murmurs. “Easy to say when you were new here, when you didn’t really see how much it takes to run a place like this. The work, the resources . . . You’re having second thoughts.”
“No.” I meet his eyes so he’ll know I’m telling the truth. “But you are right. It wouldn’t be as easy as I thought once. That’s what scares me. In the beginning, it was like . . .” I consider and then say, “Kids often threaten to run away from home. It seems easy, until you’re older and you realize exactly how difficult that would be.”
“You realize that things need to be really, really bad before you’d attempt it.”
I nod. “But we could do it. If we had to.”
“We just hope we never have to.”
I nod again and snuggle down against his chest as his arms close around me.
* * *
The next morning starts with a town meeting. Yesterday, Brian had offered to start work early to “cater” the event, which really just meant that I could start as early as I liked, without hearing grumbles that I was trying to avoid a crowd by holding it before people even had their first coffee.
I took him up on that, and he passed on the news. Town meeting, 6 a.m., coffee and pastries provided credit-free, in acknowledgment that it was hellishly early but the local police were busy and had to squeeze it in where they could. And, yes, it also means that half the town doesn’t show up. They might have intended to, but then the alarm goes off at five thirty and damn, that’s early. Hit snooze a few times and soon you just give up and reset it for seven. Someone will tell you what’s said at the meeting.
I explain the situation exactly as Dalton suggested. A simplified form of the truth.
We found a woman injured in the forest. We’re still investigating the cause of those injuries. She didn’t speak English, and Jay offered to help with translation. Her mental state meant she was restrained, but he thought she might communicate more freely if he removed those restraints. She attacked, her fevered mind mistaking us for captors. In the ensuing standoff, Anders and I were both forced to shoot her to save Jay—our resident’s safety coming first. The fact that we shot simultaneously proved that it had been absolutely necessary. Jay is unconscious but stable. As we continue to investigate the cause of the woman’s injuries, we’re suspending forest work details and doubling town patrols.
I also introduce Émilie, as a member of the board of directors—and former Rockton resident—who came to ensure the woman we found doesn’t present a security risk. Émilie takes over and greets everyone and plays up the sweet little old lady routine, which serves the dual purpose of distracting people from Jay’s situation and alleviating any concern over council intervention. If the council sent someone her age, obviously they don’t really see a problem here.
When I open it to questions, almost all are about the restrictions. Will that affect next week’s bonfire party? Will there be any wood rationing? What about harvests? We need to collect spring greens before it’s not spring anymore.
This might make our residents seem self-centered—forget the deaths, how does this impact me?—but it really is a sign of trust. They acknowledge there’s a problem, but trust us to resolve it so everything can go back to normal. It helps that Jay had only been here a few days. I had to explain who he was, and then watch people turn to their neighbors, whispering, “Did you know him?” Few did.
Post-meeting, Anders and I load up coffee and leftover pastries and head to the station. Phil, Dalton, and Émilie join us there, where we discuss the itinerary.
Anders’s job is simple. He’s the police force again today while Dalton and I are gone.
As for the big to-do on our list—speaking to the council—I have agreed to cede it to Émilie. That wasn’t easy. Dalton and I spent an hour talking about it last night. She offered, and my first reaction was “hell, no.” But as Dalton argued, we had things to do, namely his meeting with Cherise, which I wanted to attend.
The question wasn’t whether we trusted Émilie. We don’t. Not yet. The real question was whether we trusted Phil, who’d be there, too. The answer was “not entirely.” Yet at some point we need to test that. He wants us to trust him. Here was his chance. He’d facilitate the call between Émilie and the council, and if we find out he misreported anything, we’ll have our answer.
By eight, we were walking to our meeting with Cherise, three kilometers from Rockton. The distance conveyed a message: This is as close as we want you to our town.
When we arrive, I greet Cherise while Dalton assesses their reactions. Her attention will be on me—it always is, as if she knows no other dynamic than a female-led relationship. Owen’s is also on me, though I never know whether that’s genuine interest or him just goading Dalton. Meanwhile, Dalton studies them for signs of apprehension. Do they seem nervous? Concerned by what we might have found in examining those bodies?
I pull out the coffee and a bulk box of condoms. She lifts the latter and peers at the item count with a smirk. “That’ll keep us going for a month or two.”
“I couldn’t get the money just yet,” I say. “We don’t keep much cash in town. Eric uses the bank machine in Dawson.”
That’s a lie. There’s a safe filled in town so we don’t leave an ATM paper trail. They don’t need to know that.
When Cherise opens her mouth to protest, I take five twenties from my pocket. “Here’s a hundred. And we have something to offer in potential trade for the rest.”
From the bag, I pull out a gun case and two boxes of ammunition. I open the case to reveal the spare 9 mm from our locker.
“Holy shit, yes,” Owen says, reaching for the case. “Come to Daddy, baby.”
Cherise smacks his hand, as if he’s a misbehaving child.
“Oh, come on, babe,” Owen whines. “That sweet piece of steel would make me a very happy man.”
“And what will you use it for? Strutting around like him?” She waves at Dalton. “If you want to play sheriff, I’ll buy you a hat.”
“His gun is a revolver,” Owen says. “Like something out of the fucking Wild West. Antique piece of shit. That”—he points at the box—“is a fine piece of modern weaponry.”
He’s right on one out of four here. Yes, Dalton carries a revolver, but it’s a hardly an antique and certainly not what they’d have used in the Old West. As for the Smith & Wesson I’m pretending to offer, if Owen thinks it’s the latest in handgun technology, he’s been up here far too long . . . or knows very little about guns. From the way he’s salivating, I’m going with option two. I’ve seen that look on far too many guys down south when they saw my service weapon.
“Again, I ask, what the hell would you use it for?” Cherise says.
“Hunting?”
The inflection at the end makes her snort.
“The only thing these hunt is people,” she says. “You just want one because you want it, and the answer is no. The deal was for two hundred and fifty dollars more, not a gun we can’t use, with ammunition we don’t stock.”
I hold up the boxes of ammo.
Cherise shakes her head. “Sure, let me take that gun. Owen can go shoot some birds and bunnies, and when he’s out of bullets, you can find something else to trade for more, overcharging me so my husband can amuse himself with a toy.”
She turns to Owen. “Remember that knife you liked in Dawson? With the fancy handle? I said no because it’s just a knife, and I can get them a whole lot cheaper. It’s yours on the next trip.”
His eyes light up. “Seriously?”
“You aren’t a child, Owen. I don’t promise you things to quiet you down and hope you’ll forget
later. You found the bodies.” She hands him the hundred dollars. “Yours. For that knife or whatever else you want . . . as long as it doesn’t require special ammunition. I’ll give you fifty more after Casey pays it.”
She shoves the gun back at me. “Because Casey is going to pay it, with ten dollars interest for every week she delays.”
“You’ll get it after our next trip to Dawson,” I say.
I try not to glance at Dalton as I put away the gun. Our first question has been answered. They don’t have a handgun, meaning they didn’t kill the settlers, which is a relief. There’s manageable trouble, and there’s the kind of trouble I don’t want to get near.
“So you found the bodies,” I say, turning to Owen.
“Yep,” he says as he pockets the money, the gleam still in his eye.
“Tell me about that,” I say.
He shrugs. “Not much to tell. I was out hunting. Shot a bird, went to fetch it, and the bodies were there. Cherise wasn’t far off, so I called her over.”
“The family was in their camp?”
He nods. “Looked as if they’d been eating when they were attacked.”
I take a pad of paper and pencil from my bag. “Since the scene no longer exists, I need to draw it from your memory. I’ll put the campfire here, and this arrow points north. Now, tell me where the tent was.”
“Uh . . .”
Cherise snatches the pad and pencil and a few minutes later passes the pad back with a complete drawing of the crime scene.
“She’s good, ain’t she?” Owen says with pride. “Could be a real artist.”
Cherise huffs and shakes her head, but I can tell she’s pleased even as she says, “It’s a sketch, not a work of art.”
True, but it’s hardly an X for a tent and stick figures for bodies, which is pretty much what I’d have done. In a few deft strokes, she’s depicted the scene as well as any crime-scene artist. Basic figures, all clearly identifiable.
While I examine it, she fingers the pencil. It’s only as I look up that she seems to realize she’s still holding it and thrusts it back at me. I reach out, but Owen lifts a hand, blocking her from returning it. Then he pulls a twenty from his pocket.
“We need the pencil,” he says. “And the book after you’ve taken the page. I’ll give you this for it.”
Cherise opens her mouth in protest, but he cuts her off with a firm “We need it.”
They don’t “need” it. He noticed her reluctance to part with that pencil, and he’s buying it for her, along with paper to draw on.
I don’t understand their relationship. I’m not sure I want to. But with this, I realize I should not mistake it for a purely functional partnership. There is genuine affection here.
Giving Owen money to buy a knife wasn’t a sop to shut him up about the gun. It was, in its way, an apology. I cannot let you have that thing you want, so I will give you a different thing instead.
I think of the kind of life Cherise has led, where paper and pencils are luxuries she cannot afford. No, she can afford them—the family is wealthy, in settler terms—but she cannot justify the expense, however small, for something as frivolous as a hobby.
“It’s a cheap pad of paper and a pencil,” I say. “Five bucks, tops. I’ll take it out of what I owe you.”
He shakes his head. “Take the twenty and bring more. She’ll need a sharpener, too.”
This time, when Cherise starts to protest, I accept the money and hold out the sketch saying, “Is this to scale?” I pause. “Are the distances—”
“I know what ‘to scale’ means. I can read a map. It’s not perfect, but it’s proportionally correct.” She looks at me. “Would you like me to define ‘proportionally’?”
“No, thanks.” I look at Owen. “Did you move anything before Cherise arrived?”
“Hell, no. There were three hacked-up people on the ground. You think I wanted her walking over to see my hands covered in blood?”
“So they were lying just like this?” I show him the sketch. “Around the fire?”
“Yep. Like I said, looked as if they’d been attacked during their dinner. Coals were still hot.”
He’s wrong. Not lying, just not playing through the scenario enough to understand that his conclusion is inaccurate. Dalton glances at the sketch and grunts, telling me he sees the problem. Not so much a problem, really, as confirmation of our original theory.
Owen says they were attacked over dinner. Technically correct, but he means someone set on them with a knife while they ate. If that happened, at least one would have had time to rise and fight, moving the action—and their corpses—away from the fire.
The placement of the bodies means all three were shot quickly, not giving the victims time to do more than rise from their seat on seeing their loved one fall.
“Tell me about the blood,” I say.
Cherise’s brows shoot up, but Owen nods.
“You mean the blood patterns.” He looks at Cherise. “Cops can tell how people were killed by the way the blood falls.” He looks back at me. “There was a lot of blood, but they must not have fought very hard, because it was all under them, soaked into the ground. It wasn’t, like, dripping from the trees or anything.”
“Did you notice any blood spatter?”
“ ‘Spatter,’ that’s the word. No, their stuff was clean. It must have happened fast.”
Again, Owen’s mistaken here. Blood doesn’t spatter because people fight. It can, but most of it would be arterial spray. The family fell from the gunshots and were stabbed where they lay.
If Cherise and Owen caused the damage themselves after they found the bodies, they’d have noticed a lack of blood flow. Rather like butchering after the blood has settled. Without a crime scene—and no way to contest their story—they’d make up something consistent with what you’d expect in a frenzied attack, with blood dripping from trees, as Owen said.
I ask more questions, poking their story from every angle. Owen happily answers. This is all very interesting to him. Cherise is mildly intrigued and doesn’t complain when I backtrack over old ground. Their story has just enough consistency to give it the seal of truth. Sometimes they disagree. Sometimes they admit they aren’t sure. Not a rehearsed recital. An honest witness account.
They didn’t shoot the settlers, because they don’t have a handgun. And they didn’t stab the bodies to trade as hostile kills, because if they had, they’d do a better job of selling it as a frenzied knife attack.
They did exactly what they said. Found three bodies that they presume were killed by hostiles, wrapped them up, and stored them for us. Nothing more.
18
Dalton, Storm, and I are heading back to Rockton. Am I relieved Cherise and Owen aren’t the perpetrators? The last thing we need is to have to confront Cherise with murder. But if they’d been guilty of staging the hostile attack on otherwise dead settlers? It would mean I could never trust them again, but I’m already uncomfortable with them. Maybe I’d have appreciated the excuse. I do feel as if we need an excuse.
It’s like when I’d been on the force, my first partner retiring, and it looked like I’d be set up with a guy I knew was dirty. I absolutely did not want that. Yet what could I do? Make vague excuses about his racism and sexism, which were, let’s be honest, only garden-variety? I’d breathed a huge sigh of relief when he was paired up with someone else. Likewise, I think I’d have been happy to discover Cherise and Owen did the damage, giving me an excuse not to work with them.
The problem with that, though, is that they did me a favor here. Okay, so maybe “dumping more dead bodies at my feet” doesn’t seem like a favor, but it is something we needed to know about. They preserved the bodies and, sure, they sold them to us, but it proved they could be the sort of eyes and ears Rockton needs in the forest.
I’ll cross them off our suspect list and not think too much on whether I’m disappointed by that. It does put us back to the original question. Well, beyond “Who the
hell did this?” The question of whether we’re looking at one situation or two. Did someone shoot the settlers and then stage a hostile attack? Or one party did the shooting and another did the staging? Without the crime scene, I can only go by Owen and Cherise’s account, which suggests enough blood that the two events happened in a tight time frame. Murder and then staging. Most likely by the same people.
Yep, that gets me pretty much nowhere.
When Dalton changes the subject, I don’t think much of it. We’ve talked this one to death—last night, on the walk out, on the walk back . . .
Then Storm makes a noise, and he pats her head. I figure it’s an animal—caribou or moose—and he’s thanking her for the warning. Midconversation, he says, “Hello, Felicity. If you’ve come to take us to Edwin, you can turn around right now. Casey isn’t in the mood for a fucking summons.”
“This isn’t a summons, Eric,” a voice says. A voice that is not Felicity’s, though when I glance over, I do see her standing just off the path.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Dalton mutters.
“You know, Eric, if you used less profanity, people might have a higher opinion of your intelligence.”
“Why the fuck would I want that?” Dalton stops in front of Edwin, towering over the old man by nearly a foot. “Now turn your wrinkly ass around and toddle back to your settlement.”
“My, my, you are in a mood. You usually manage a veneer of respect.”
“Yeah, I did, before you started haranguing my detective, kicking her ass like she’s sitting on it, twiddling her thumbs. Now your granddaughter here has told you about the woman we found, and you gave us a few days to swing by and talk to you. When we didn’t—because we’re too fucking busy solving the problem—you came to hassle Casey in person.”
I lay a hand on Dalton’s arm. “It’s okay. I’m happy to talk to him. Saves me a trip.”
Dalton’s brows rise only a fraction before he catches my expression and nods with a gruff “Fine, but he’d better not make this a habit.” He turns to Edwin. “You ever show up again unannounced, and your granddaughter won’t be welcomed back.”
A Stranger in Town: a Rockton novel Page 16