In addition to her sorrow about Breena, Clyde, and Kayley, Tessa felt a different sadness, one she thought had been put to rest long ago: the feeling that her parents were never going to be hers alone. She could have been the only child of Martha and Kenneth Griffins. But that would never have been enough for her mother. Martha opened her arms and her heart to the other children they’d taken in to the big log house on the edge of the forest.
“It’s high time you left, Tessa. Savannah can drive you into town. I’ll pick you up there, and we will go together to the hospital.”
Tessa pushed away the unfinished bowl of cereal.
“Couldn’t I take your car and come back here with it to pick you up?”
Her father would not hear of it. He needed the Pathfinder.
Savannah put on a worn-out jeans jacket over a much-too-tight pink top, which was covered in sequins.
Tessa kissed her mother’s wet face. “I will tell the children how much you love them,” she whispered into her ear.
Martha Griffins threw her arms around her. “I hope Fran didn’t do anything bad,” she whispered back.
Tessa froze. She freed herself from her mother’s embrace and looked her in the eye. What she saw there was desperation. And fear. Tessa cursed the fact that she couldn’t speak to her mother right away, alone. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, Mom. I’m not going anywhere.”
Martha Griffins nodded and wiped away the tears.
Again she avoided looking at her husband.
“You really look very different, more like a city slicker,” Savannah remarked as she drove down the unpaved driveway.
Tessa tried not to roll her eyes. She couldn’t help noticing that Savannah’s large breasts were flattened by the seat belt. “Thanks for the compliment. I’ve never seen you as a bleached blonde, either.”
Savannah didn’t get the ironic undertone. “I think I look a lot better as a blonde. But I also like your red highlights.”
Tessa noticed the black roots of Savannah’s hair and the smell of her perfume. In her law firm, perfume was not allowed due to her clients’ potential allergies. Company rules. But that sort of custom had not yet reached Whatou Lake.
She looked out the side window. The dull sky spread a gray veil over the mountains and valleys. A bald eagle took off from a tree branch and disappeared out of sight. Wherever she looked, she saw a green carpet of trees. She had never been more aware of the fact that it would be very easy for a person to disappear into this labyrinth.
Everything was so unreal. She couldn’t believe she was talking to Savannah about hair color on their way to the morgue, but she had to attempt to be friendly. She needed Savannah on her side.
“Where do you work again?” she asked.
“In the new day care on Elmo Drive. Three days a week.” Savannah glanced at her. “Do you still have the same boyfriend you used to have, the tennis player?”
“No. And he’s not a tennis player. He’s a squash pro.” Mom must’ve told Savannah about him.
“I’ve given Abe the boot, too. He spent all his money on a new snowmobile. He’ll never manage to buy a house that way.”
They reached the highway. Tessa suddenly saw a new building down below in the valley. Whatou Lake hadn’t yet reached this end of the plain because a large part of the land belonged to the government of British Columbia. Moose and deer could often be seen in these grassy areas.
She stretched out her arm. “Who owns that house down there?”
“That? You’ re not going to believe this. Harrison Miller built it.”
Tessa couldn’t hide her amazement. Right here, virtually within sight of the Griffins’ house, was where Hank’s parents had chosen to settle down? No wonder her father always felt like the mayor was provoking him.
“You know that at the end of April Fran was here in Whatou Lake?” Savannah said.
“Yes, Mom told me that.” Tessa noticed that her voice sounded somewhat irritated.
Savannah didn’t seem to have heard it. “Officially she was at the dentist’s; he comes here every four weeks. And maybe she was. But I saw her at other places, too.” She paused dramatically before she went on: “She was at Pleeke’s.”
Pleeke’s was the funeral home in Whatou Lake.
Tessa snorted. “What? You want me to believe that? You must be kidding.”
“Whether you believe me or not, I saw her going in there.”
It was trademark Savannah, the chief tattletale. Tessa, at the last moment, refrained from making the caustic remark on the tip of her tongue. She had to get every morsel of information about Fran.
“What do you make of that?” she asked.
“No idea. Maybe you’ll find out something more.”
“Does Mom know about it?”
“Certainly not from me.”
“Savannah, don’t try to tell me that you didn’t tell Mom about this right away.”
“But I didn’t. Fran worries Mom enough as it is. But she knows anyway.”
“What are you trying to say? Did somebody else tell her?”
Savannah tilted her head and looked at her. “It’s quite possible that somebody else also saw her at Pleeke’s.”
Once again Tessa wished she could talk to her mother. Without Savannah.
They drove toward Whatou Lake. On the right-hand side junked RVs cluttered the landscape. They had been temporary housing for miners who had no place to sleep because building could not keep pace with the mining boom. And now the poor guys couldn’t buy houses because the bottom had fallen out of the zinc and copper markets. And they didn’t know how long they might still have jobs.
“Do you still live on Willow Road?”
Savannah stepped on the gas. “Yes, but I often sleep over at Mom and Dad’s. You have to be at the police station in half an hour, right? We can do that easily.” It took a few seconds for her to pick up the thread again. “Mom wants to have me around all the time.”
“Your mother?” Tessa knew that Savannah’s biological mother lived in Edmonton. She had left Savannah behind in the care of the Griffins and had done practically nothing for her.
“No. I mean Martha. She says that the house is much too big and seems so empty.”
Tessa remained quiet. A feeling of guilt had been gnawing away at her since she had left Whatou Lake five years before. Nobody talked about it, but everybody thought Tessa Griffins had left her parents in the lurch.
A sign came into view: Whatou Lake is taking part in a contest to be “Canada’s Cleanest Small Town.” Help us by cleaning up our town.
Tessa felt the pressure inside her already building up and up. And she had only arrived a couple of hours ago. Savannah continued to blabber on. “Are you sure you want to go with Dad to the hospital? You don’t have to, Tessa. It was bad enough back then for you, that stuff about Jenny Dole.”
“Stop it. Right now!” Tessa yelled at her so loudly that Savannah briefly lost control of the car.
“For goodness’ sake, I’m just trying to help you. In the end we’re all in this together. We’re all at the end of our tether, not just you. I’m going to let you out here. It isn’t far to the police station. I don’t want to run into any police cars since they gave me a ticket just yesterday.”
Tessa got out and shut the door behind her without saying a word. She threw her purse over her shoulder and zipped her jacket up high. When she looked around, she saw Tsaytis Chelin on the other side of the street. Something that looked like a bunch of keys dangled from his hand. She hadn’t expected to see him in Whatou Lake. She hadn’t met him for five and a half years. Now she was painfully reminded of her last confrontation with him. A few months after that, she had fled to Vancouver.
She could not take her eyes off him. He would always stand out in every crowd, with his shiny black hair, chiseled features, and fire in his dark eyes. Her fascination with him went back years, and it had been mutual. The son of the Sitklat’l chief had fallen for the daughter of the hi
ghly respected town doctor when he was still a teenager. Then two things happened that changed all that.
Together they had witnessed the death of Jenny Dole, mauled by a grizzly. This had traumatized both of them, it followed them into their dreams. And later the self-confident young man didn’t want to be seen by the members of his tribe as an intimate friend of the whites. He found himself a Sitklat’l girlfriend.
Tsaytis Chelin got into a black pickup. Tsaytis, she wanted to cry out. Wait. Too late. The pickup turned down the street and drove off. She shut her eyes in frustration. She had missed the chance to talk with him about Hank and the children.
In her anger about herself she had almost gone past the police station. Somebody nearby honked the car horn. It was Savannah, pointing at the entrance to the building. Had she been following Tessa? Or was she spying on Tessa the way she had once spied on Fran? In any case, she must have long ago figured out what Fran had been doing in Pleeke’s Funeral Home.
7
The young woman at the desk looked at Tessa with obvious curiosity, as she was trying to reach Ron Halprin, the sergeant of the RCMP, on the phone. Then she led Tessa up the stairs to the first floor and left her in front of an open door.
Two men in plain clothes were standing inside, talking. One of them turned to her when she came into the room.
“Tessa Griffins,” she said, introducing herself. “Sergeant Halprin?”
“Yes, that’s me,” he confirmed. He introduced her to the second man, a constable.
Halprin pointed to a chair. “Please take a seat.”
The constable took up his position outside the open door. He seemed to be texting on his cell phone.
Halprin sat down behind the desk and leaned back with his right arm on the armrest, his left elbow on the table.
Tessa thought that, for an investigator from Vancouver, he seemed to act pretty down-to-earth. He could just as easily be a well-to-do farmer from the Canadian prairies. His brown hair was not completely under control, despite a neat cut and a splash of gel. His rolled-up sleeves revealed sturdy forearms; his upper body seemed to be more compact than athletic. No one in Whatou Lake would think of calling the RCMP man from Vancouver a city slicker.
“I want to express my condolences for your loss,” Halprin began, fixing his gaze on her. His piercing blue eyes strongly suggested Scandinavian ancestors. “Our people can certainly understand what a tragedy this must be for you and your family.”
The sergeant had the face of someone who was permanently short of sleep but young enough that it didn’t affect his looks. On the contrary. Tessa put him in his early forties.
“Thank you,” she replied and tried not to think about the children. Not the children. She had to stay strong and professional. “The worst thing about it is the uncertainty that weighs on my family. We have only basic information about what actually happened. More than anything, we’re in a panic because of Fran. Are you searching for her, and if so, where have you looked?”
“You know that I can only give you a certain amount of information, since the investigation has just started. With regard to Fran Miller, we have sent out a missing person alert to the media. We’re watching the streets, the harbor, and the airport. We are going house to house. A helicopter is in the air. We’re doing what we can.” He leaned forward. His eyes darkened. “We need your help. The more we know about Fran and Hank Miller, the better.”
Tessa nodded. “I’ll help you as much as I can. I know from my mother that a friend of the family called all the acquaintances and relatives. Hank’s brother, Lionel, and his wife, Cindy, are also checking with everyone. But apparently nobody knows anything. It’s a small world here. News, especially bad news, spreads like wildfire. In general the people here are very willing to help.”
He didn’t comment on her exposition, instead asking the first question immediately: “When and where did you hear about these terrible events?”
“Yesterday afternoon. My father called me up. For the last five years I’ve lived in Vancouver. I went to university there, too, before. Is this an official questioning?”
Halprin’s left hand opened as if stopping an onslaught. “No, I’m not recording this. I just want to get some clues so we can move forward. At the moment we have nothing to go on. Okay?”
“Is Fran a suspect?”
He took a pen and pointed it up like a lance. She didn’t mistrust him, at least not at first glance. She needed to create a good relationship with him so that he didn’t look at her as an adversary.
“At the beginning we can’t exclude anything; I am sure I don’t have to explain that to you. When did you last talk to Fran Miller?”
“Three weeks ago, by telephone.”
“What about?”
“It was her birthday. I wanted to wish her a good one. She told me about her everyday life with the children—little things. She was disappointed that Hank couldn’t get the day off because he had to work at Watershed Lodge, even on her birthday.”
“Did you often have contact with Fran?”
“Maybe every two or three months. She doesn’t have Internet at the house. Only a satellite telephone. That’s not really private. Other people in the area could theoretically listen to the conversations.”
He made a note. Then he looked at her and waited.
He suspects something, she thought, a real bloodhound. He’s going to want to find out if someone listened in on her phone calls.
She disclosed some more: “We had some differences of opinion, but we basically liked each other.”
“Differences of opinion?”
She crossed her arms. Something she had often noticed in her work was now happening to her. A crime like this forced everybody involved to reveal themselves. Intimate details, family secrets, private confidences—everything was dragged into the cruel light of the public sphere. A murderer not only killed his victim, but also robbed innocent people on all sides of dignity and privacy.
“I’ve always tried to convince Fran that she should send the children to school in Whatou Lake. I . . . I think that children need other children. They have to develop interpersonal skills. But Fran wanted to teach them at home.” She concentrated on the pen in his hand. “In our last talk together, she admitted that she sometimes wondered whether she wasn’t exposing the children to unnecessary danger.”
Halprin sat up straight. “How exactly did she put that?”
“It was only one sentence. She still loved her life in the bush, but sometimes she thought about what I had said and wondered whether her decisions hadn’t unwittingly put her children at risk.”
“What decisions?”
“The house in the wilderness. The isolation, the loneliness. The distance from everything. The two-hour drive to Whatou Lake. In the winter, it’s a long way on the snowmobile. Their homestead is really far away.”
“I know. I was there this morning.”
She took this in. Naturally he had to get to Fran’s farm right away. The crime scene. Were the bodies still lying there when he arrived? Or had they been removed before nightfall? And what about the two dogs and the three cats?
Halprin broke into her thoughts. “We flew in with a helicopter, but nevertheless I got a feeling for the distance.”
She changed position on the chair. “Don’t misunderstand me: it was the life that Fran and Hank wanted. Away from everything. Being self-sufficient. It meant no access to electricity and only water from the spring. Hank had an accident when a big branch from a tree he was cutting down suddenly snapped and knocked him to the ground. He broke all kinds of bones. Logging had become too dangerous for him. So he took a job at Watershed Lodge. After that, Fran was often alone. In my opinion, too often.”
“Did she know how to use a gun?” The sergeant threw this out nonchalantly.
She answered with a question: “So what I heard is true: Hank and the children were shot to death?”
He took his hands off the desk. His demeanor remained poli
te. “Unfortunately I cannot tell you this at the moment.”
Frustrated, she looked over at the constable, who was still busy with his cell phone while standing by the door. “Yes, Hank taught her. Just in case. She could shoot pretty well.”
She put her arms on the desk to give her next statement some weight. “So can I. When you grow up here in the bush, you learn things like that. You didn’t ask me, but I’m telling you straight out, there is no way Fran would do anything bad to her children. She is the gentlest person I know. She’s not psychotic or sick in any other way. I think it’s more likely that she’s been abducted. And it’s driving me crazy to be sitting here while she’s . . .”
She didn’t want to articulate the thoughts that were really bothering her.
Halprin remained calm. He must have encountered many extreme situations like this. Just like she had.
“Who could have abducted her?” he asked.
“Some crazy person. A psychopath. What do I know? Wasn’t there recently a guy on Highway 48 who faked car trouble, and then almost strangled a woman who stopped to help him?”
“That man is now in jail. He couldn’t have done this. Can you tell me what Fran was doing when she came to Whatou Lake at the end of April?”
So he already knew. From whom?
Tessa pondered briefly whether she should tell Ron Halprin about Savannah’s information. About Fran’s visit to the undertaker. But then she decided she should do some more investigating first. Savannah had good reason to spread rumors about Fran. Fran was her competition for the favors of Martha Griffins. Always had been.
“Fran Miller was seen on Monday in Whatou Lake,” the sergeant said. “Do you know what she was doing here and who she was with?”
Tessa stared at him amazed. On Monday? A day before the murders? “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I . . . I have to ask my parents. But they didn’t mention that, and I . . . .”
At that moment his cell phone vibrated. He excused himself with a gesture and went, cell phone in hand, out the door. She heard him talking in the corridor but couldn’t understand anything.
MURDEROUS MORNING: A heart-stopping crime novel with a stunning end. Page 4