The First Time I Fell

by Joanne Macgregor

  His hands stilled, but he said nothing.

  “Or did you see her on the Sunday she died?”

  “I saw her the day before, when she brought her bike. She waved at me.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “No, she hung her bike up in the office, then she left. It was Saturday morning, not Sunday.”

  “But did you see her on Sunday?”

  “No. I came in on Sunday afternoon to clean the boilers, but she wasn’t here. Just her bike was. It was muddy, so I cleaned it for her.” He twisted the sharp end of the new spile through the bark and into the trunk of the tree at a downwards angle. “I thought she would be happy to see it clean on Monday. But she didn’t come in Monday. She was already dead.”

  “Did you ever go with Laini to the quarry?”

  “No.”

  “Did you leave flowers there, after she died?”

  “No.” He gave the spile three taps with the head of the hammer, driving it deeper into the tree.

  “Did Laini like you?”

  My only answer was the sound of Jim flicking the new metal tube a few times.

  “Because you liked her, didn’t you? You liked her a lot,” I prompted.

  “There’s going to be a cold snap soon,” he said, coming back to ground level. “It’s going to freeze and snow.”

  “You liked to watch her, to take pictures of her, to imagine the two of you together.”

  Jim’s lips clamped together, and his brows lowered. Hoisting the ladder onto his shoulder, he pushed past me and walked to the next tree, grabbing a pink bunny-bucket on the way.

  I trailed after him. “You were her stalker, Jim. You spied on her and followed her around, taking lots of photographs.”

  He slammed the ladder against the tree and spun to face me. “Get lost!”

  “And you also sent her pictures, didn’t you? Naughty pictures of yourself,” I said, pointing at his groin. “Was it exciting to think of her looking at those?”

  “Go! You’re not allowed to be here.”

  “I know what you had in your locker. You knew someone had been in there, so you took it all down before the cops came calling. But I saw, Jim, I know the pictures you had, the pictures you made.”

  Clearly eager to get away from me, he scrambled up the unsteady ladder, going higher than necessary to swap the buckets. I stepped closer and cricked my neck to look up at him.

  “You’d better get out of here right now!” he shouted in his gruff voice.

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll make you!”

  “Did you make Laini go away, Jim? Because she didn’t want your gifts, didn’t want to be with you? Maybe she confronted you and made you angry. Did you push her into the quarry?”

  “No! I never hurt her!”

  His face was scrunched into a tight, wrinkled grimace. Any moment now, he’d break down, and maybe I’d find out something important. I needed to keep up the pressure.

  “I saw the lock of her hair, Jim. How did you get it? Why did you keep it? What did you do with it — sniff it, maybe? Did you rub it against your cheek, or maybe other parts of you?”

  Jim made a sudden hard swipe at me with the Easter bucket. I leapt back, only just managing not to fall over, but Jim lost his balance and tumbled off the ladder. I heard a sharp sickening crack as he landed, and then he began to scream.

  “Jim!” I scurried over to where he sat clutching his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “It hurts! Something’s broken.”

  “Shit, shit, shit!” I groaned, taking in the pallor of his face and the odd angle of his wrist. “Here, let me help you up. I’ll take you to the hospital, it’ll be quicker than calling an ambulance.”

  He was reluctant to trust me, but I managed to coax him into my car. Figuring he’d need x-rays and possibly even surgery, I sped directly to the hospital in Randolph. Jim, white-lipped with pain, rambled all the way — insisting he’d loved Laini and never hurt her, that she was a nice lady who’d always been kind to him and tried to help him, and how I was a mean bitch and it was my fault he’d fallen.

  No argument from me on the guilty-as-charged front. He was clearly in considerable pain, and I felt awful that he’d gotten hurt. But feeling bad about what had happened didn’t stop me having doubts about Jim. I hadn’t felt safe with him in amongst the maple trees, and his obsession with and behavior toward Laini had been sinister. Now he seemed merely pathetic, like the sort of runty dog that barks loudly and bares its teeth, then turns tail and runs away when confronted.

  But even cowardly dogs can bite when challenged.

  – 33 –

  The devil makes work for idle hands — that was one of my mother’s favorite maxims. And my hands were idle that Monday morning.

  I stared at my computer screen and tried to cudgel my brain into creating a perfect conclusion for my thesis, but my mind kept straying back to the embarrassments and disasters of the previous day.

  Ryan being chewed out by Ronnie Capshaw, taking the heat for my involvement in a case on which I’d shone little — if any — light, with my unreliable “talent.”

  That deeply uncomfortable ride back to Ryan’s place, the silence reverberating with unspoken regrets and misgivings — a stark contrast to our friendly banter over dinner the night before.

  Being dismissed like a pesky kid by Agent Singh.

  The horrible confrontation with Jim, dealing with him clumsily. I’d scared him and was ultimately the cause of him falling and getting hurt.

  The ear-singeing phone call from Bethany Ford last night, in which she’d called me a menace, blasted me for entering her property without permission, ordered me to keep well clear of her staff, and threatened to lay charges against me for damaging her business, because just how was she supposed to do the next boil without Jim? Did I comprehend what a setback I’d caused? Did I know how hard it was to find good staff for maple production at the height of the sugaring season? She had a serious mind to lay a complaint with the police.

  A restless night’s sleep hadn’t helped. I still felt ashamed, guilty and stupid. Helpless and frustrated, too. Then the phone rang, and things got worse.

  It was Hugo from the hardware store, calling to tell me he’d found the stack of pamphlets about self-defense classes under a box of paint scrapers. They were run by a local resident, Mark Bolton, who I’d find behind the counter in the post office.

  “How are your varmints doing?” Hugo asked.

  “I haven’t checked the traps in the attic, but I still sometimes hear sounds.”

  He gave a knowing chuckle. “You shoulda gone with the poison.”

  “I’ll pop by sometime and get your most deadly bait,” I vowed. “Bye, Hugo.”

  “Before you go, did ya see the newspaper this morning?”

  “No,” I said, wondering if it had a feature on pest extermination.

  “You’re in it, did ya know that?”

  Fetching the copy of that day’s Bugle from the front path, I opened it on the kitchen table and groaned as I read the article printed beneath a glamorous photograph of Laini Carter and an unflattering old picture of me lifted from my high school yearbook.

  Stumped cops consult psychic

  Pitchford Police Department appears to be relying on crystal balls and tea leaves rather than forensic evidence in its enquiry into the recent death of Laini Carter.

  While all signs appear to point to suicide being the cause of her death, Police Chief Ryan Jackson has, according to a confidential source, involved former Pitchford resident, psychology student and self-proclaimed “psychic detective” Garnet McGee in the ongoing investigation, going so far as to include her in witness interviews.

  When approached for comment on this unorthodox approach, Chief Jackson stated only, “This initiative was done of my own volition and does not reflect the policy of the Pitchford Police Department.”

  It has yet to be seen if Jackson will face sanctions for employing eccentric and unp
roven methods, particularly after McGee’s involvement in the injury of Sweet ‘n Smoky factory custodian Jim Lundy yesterday. A confrontation between the so-called clairvoyant and Lundy ended with the latter being admitted to Randolph County Hospital and treated for both a fractured wrist and a broken collarbone. Lundy did not choose to give details about the clash, except to say that McGee is “a nasty woman.”

  The investigation into Laini Carter’s death continues.

  Rubbing Darcy’s fuzzy belly with my toe, I thought about who the Bugle’s confidential informant could be. Bethany Ford, and possibly her assistant, as well as Carl Mendez, knew I was a special consultant hired by Kennick Carter, but as far as I knew they were ignorant of my supposed abilities. Kennick knew, of course, but surely he wouldn’t have spoken to a reporter about our arrangement. Which left only one person.

  Determined to confront her and to apologize to Ryan in person, I drove directly to the police station and hurried inside. Ryan Jackson stood at the front counter, talking to Ronnie Capshaw.

  “Can I talk to you in private?” I asked him.

  “I don’t have time for this now,” he replied, his face grim.

  Capshaw shot me a filthy look. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

  “Please, Ryan, it’ll only take a minute,” I said.

  He opened his mouth to reply, but just then the door was flung open, banging into the wall with a crash that startled all of us, and in came the one person guaranteed to exacerbate the situation.

  Michelle Armstrong, town clerk and all-round Pitchford big cheese, marched in on a blast of cold air and freezing disapproval, clutching a copy of The Bugle. Her baleful gaze immediately locked on me and in a voice that thrummed with hostility, she declared, “You!”

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “If it is, it’s no thanks to you! How dare you show your face in here? Why are you even in Pitchford at all? Haven’t you done enough to damage the reputation and ruin the economy of our town without this latest fiasco?”

  “I —” I began, but Michelle Armstrong cut me short.

  “Ryan” — she slammed the newspaper down on the counter — “your office. Now.”

  A muscle pulsing in his jaw, Ryan followed her down the hall to his office, and I heard his door bang shut.

  Face hot with embarrassment, I spun around to face Capshaw. “How could you do this? Look what’s happened now because you couldn’t keep your prejudices to yourself and your mouth shut.”

  Capshaw’s face tightened with anger. “How dare you? I would never leak information to the press. I’m,” she said with heavy emphasis on the word, “a professional! More likely the leak came from you. Were you trying to get some extra publicity to drum up business for your ridiculous racket?”

  “It wasn’t me! I would never do anything that would hurt Ryan, or cause him problems.”

  “Lady, where have you been the last five minutes? You already did.”

  Face hot and tears burning behind my eyes, I snatched up the paper, marched outside and strode down the sidewalk to the offices of The Bugle several blocks down from the police station, eager for someone to kick. Capshaw was right. I had hurt Ryan, certainly professionally and probably personally, too. And he was one of the few people in this town I cared about. He was a good guy — smart, funny, attractive. I liked him. A lot. And he’d seemed to like me in spite of my uncensored mouth and prickly defenses. Plus, he’d been the only person who was open to believing me about my strange experiences. Well, except for my mother, and she was open to believing anything and everything.

  The Bugle reporter who’d written the piece on me was a short woman with close-cut black hair and the stained fingers and wrinkled mouth of a career smoker. In defiance of regulations, she had a lit cigarette tucked in one corner of her mouth.

  “I can’t tell you that,” she said when I asked who her informant was. “I protect my sources.”

  “This isn’t Watergate,” I snarled. “National security doesn’t rest on the gossip your piddling rag prints.”

  In response, she merely narrowed her eyes. Smoky tendrils curled around the cigarette clenched between her teeth and eased their way out of her mouth. Out of her pores, too, probably. She reminded me of a devil in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of hell.

  “When it comes to the bit about tagging along on interviews,” I said, “it could only have been Carl Mendez who told you that. Or Bethany Ford,” I added, realizing Mendez might have told her about that.

  The cigarette dipped briefly.

  “Aha! I knew it,” I said, pointing the rolled-up newspaper at her, seriously tempted to swat her upside the head with it. “And who told you about the psychic angle?”

  “Oh,” she said, deflating a little. “That’s no big secret. It was your mother.”

  My jaw dropped. “What?”

  “I called the number listed for McGee and had a chat with your mother. Funny lady, your mom, has quite the way with words. And she’s really sold on your abilities, so at least you’ve got one person fooled.”

  My mother. My idiotic, foolish, brainless nitwit of a mother was the one who’d sold me out.

  At my horrified reaction, the reporter subsided into a guttural, phlegmy bout of laughter. Without another word, I spun on my heel and left. Her unpleasant cackle and the stink of smoke followed me all the way out onto the street.

  Cursing violently under my breath, I called my mother and gave her an uncensored piece of my mind that ended with a stern instruction never to talk to any member of the media about me ever again. And not to mention the phrase “psychic detective” in my or anyone else’s earshot unless she truly desired to witness me utterly losing my shit.

  Storming back through town to my car, my gaze was caught by a sign a few doors down: Post Office. Not wanting to scare anyone inside with a face that must’ve been flushed with fury and contorted with the murderous impulses roiling inside me, I forced myself to wait outside until the heat of my temper had come off the boil before going inside to find Mark Bolton, postmaster and part-time self-defense instructor.

  He was a man of medium build, mild expression and friendly manner. He didn’t seem like the sort to be teaching anyone blocks and tackles, but what, I thought savagely, did I know about anything?

  “Oh, yeah, I remember her,” Bolton said when I showed him the photo of Laini in the newspaper. “I was sorry to read she went over the edge at the quarry. Was she a friend of yours?”

  “Did she do one of your self-defense classes?” I asked.

  “Nope, not her.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed.

  “She brought someone else along to do the course.”

  “Oh?”

  “She told me he’d been assaulted by a crazy junkie and needed to learn how to protect himself.”

  With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I recalled Ryan telling me about an assault committed by a heroin addict.

  “But I got the sense he’d only agreed to the course to please her,” Bolton continued. “Because the guy couldn’t take his eyes off her. Neither could I, come to that, she was hot. Crazy beautiful.”

  “This guy, who was he?”

  “Dunno. He only came the once.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Little guy.” Bolton cupped his hands on either side of his jaw. “Big ears.”

  – 34 –

  The migraine hit as I was pulling into the Andersen driveway.

  I blinked hard as spots of white speckled my vision. A jagged crescent of flickering light shimmered at the corner of my left eye and already the pain was tightening its vise around my head, dulling my brain.

  Wincing at Darcy and Lizzie’s loud excitement when I entered the kitchen, I filled their food and water bowls, then shut them inside and trudged upstairs, holding tight onto the balustrade because the scintillating arc of light had flared as it crept across my field of vision, leaving me all but sightless to the outer world.

>   Swallowing a serious dose of painkillers, I made myself drink a full glass of water before drawing the drapes and inching carefully into my bed. I wanted to weep, but knew it would only worsen the headache; wanted to throw up, even though my stomach was empty; wanted to be under the covers, warming away the shivers which raised gooseflesh on my arms and legs, even though it hurt to have anything touch my skin.

  My phone rang, loud as a claxon, jangling my brain. I fumbled on the screen, trying to kill the call, but wound up answering it instead. It was Kennick Carter, asking for an update on my investigation. For a brief second, I considered giving him details of who I’d interviewed and telling him I was planning to follow up on some good leads, but my head hurt too much to talk, and my pride was too bruised to spin stories.

  “Bottom line, Kennick? I’ve got nothing solid to tell you.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, though he sounded more relieved than disappointed.

  “Tell me where I can find you, and I’ll pay you back your hundred bucks.”

  “I’m going home on Wednesday morning, but you can catch me tomorrow at Dillon’s — that’s where I have breakfast.”

  “What time?”

  “Between eight-thirty and nine-thirty.”

  “Will do. And, again, I’m really sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Maybe it’s for the best.”

  A corner of my mind wondered why he was suddenly keen to let the investigation slide, but the rest of my brain demanded a cessation of all mental exertion. I slowly lowered my head back onto the pillow, trying to breathe against the pain, pinching the tender spot between thumb and palm on my left hand hard, hoping the counter-pain on the pressure point would distract from the migraine.

  I woke up in the late afternoon to the third call of the day. This time, it was the Andersens’ landline ringing. My head still aching dully, and muzzy with sleep, I stumbled into the main bedroom, but before I could reach the phone, it cut off. As I turned to leave, it started ringing again.