Devil Creek

by Stephen Mertz

  "No," said Robin. "I want an explanation of who you are right here and right now, before you decide to drive off."

  "I won't drive off." There was a strong undercurrent of melancholy in her words. "I'm Kelly Shaw. That was Carol's maiden name before Carol and Mike got married. I'm Carol's twin sister."

  Robin considered this for a moment.

  Then she said, "Let's sit down and talk."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When they were seated at one of the stone tables, Robin said, "The first question I need to ask is, are you having an affair with my husband?"

  "That's a straightforward question," said Kelly, "so here's a straightforward answer: no. Look, Robin, I know this is embarrassing." Her tone of voice and manner were mild, with a peculiar, gloomy resignation. "I should have known it would be, and I know I've made a real mess of things. I was going to slink out of town like the coward I am, but it's better this way, talking with you face to face."

  They had the small patio to themselves, which was just as well. As it was, Robin recognized some of the boys loitering on their bicycles at the store entrance, but they had pedaled on to greener pastures.

  This was dirty laundry—back pages, whatever you wanted to call it—which she did not want filtered into local circulation. She loved small town life, but the old saying was true. Everyone knew everybody's business. But only Ben Saunders knew that Mike had been briefly suspected of his wife's murder in Albuquerque, before the handyman was arrested and subsequently committed suicide. It was a closed case as far as the Albuquerque police were concerned. Chief Saunders had assured her of that. And it had been a closed case in her mind.

  She responded to the woman's tone and manner. There was something about this person: a seriousness, an earnestness that was only apparent when you saw her up close, like now across this stone table.

  Kelly had physical beauty, but the beauty was brittle, as if a façade were being maintained, as if nature's gifts of physical beauty were sustained while hurt and pain were in her eyes for anyone who truly looked for more than a passing glance. There was something about her, which had to be taken seriously.

  Robin said, "You're Mike's ex-sister-in-law? Then he knows you from when he was married to Carol?"

  "No, he doesn't. Mike and I are not only not having an affair; in fact, we've never met."

  Robin sighed. "I don't know what to think."

  Kelly said, "I've got a lot of explaining to do, don't I?"

  "I think I like you, Kelly. But yes, I do want to know what's going on. And your being in Devil Creek has nothing to do with Jeff Lovechio?"

  "That's right," said Kelly. "I don't know. Maybe everything's a coincidence or nothing is. But that's what this is, your ex-husband and I both showing up at the same time. No, I've never heard his name before."

  "That's a relief, at least. And if there are no coincidences, well, life sure has sent a whole lot of circumstances into my life to collide all at once. It feels like . . . it feels like my world is collapsing."

  And then the unthinkable happened.

  Robin began to cry.

  How long could she have expected everything to stay bottled up inside, submerging and concealing her emotions? Her heart and her mind and, yes, her entire reality, had been twisted and yanked and torn in every direction at once during the preceding twenty-four hours. Yes, there was a gentle strength to Kelly Shaw that had drawn forth Robin's honest assessment of her own situation, and in putting it into words, spoken to another woman, she realized how overwhelming this past day had been, from Mike showing up late for their anniversary, to Jeff arriving and talk of suspicious circumstances surrounding a death, to her thinking Mike could be cheating on her and what happened this afternoon at the newspaper office, and now sitting here speaking and sharing with Kelly.

  Kelly sat next to Robin on the same stone bench and, before Robin knew it, Kelly gave her a warm hug.

  "Hey, believe it or not, I came to Devil Creek to see if I could help you. Maybe I still can."

  Robin wiped the tears away with a tissue from her purse. "I'm sorry. This isn't like me at all, really it isn't." She gave her nose a mighty honk into the tissue, reached over and disposed of the tissue in a trash receptacle. She gave Kelly's arm a squeeze as it slid from around her. "Thanks, Kelly. You're a good person."

  "I try to be, but I think that I'm a good person who could have acted a whole lot smarter."

  Robin sniffed away the last of her sniffles. "It all started going off-balance for me when I saw you talking to my son, Paul, yesterday in the parking lot at the supermarket. Uh, Kelly, I need to ask. What were you and Paul talking about?"

  Kelly returned to sitting across from Robin. "I pretended that I was thinking about moving here. I asked him how he liked Devil Creek. I told him that I had a son his age."

  Robin nodded. "That's what he said. But what do you mean, you were coming here to help me? Until a minute ago, I didn't even know you existed."

  "That's right, and I didn't know you. And I didn't know Mike, either. Like I said, we'd never met. Did he tell you about our . . . encounter this morning?"

  "No." Robin frowned. "If he saw you this morning, that would explain what happened this afternoon."

  "He not only saw me," said Kelly. "He chased me. He caught me spying on him. I panicked. I ran. He almost caught me. We grappled and I got away."

  "That explains so much. Mike is a recovering alcoholic."

  "I know. Carol told me that she helped him get him off the bottle."

  "She was the reason he quit drinking," said Robin. "It was to win Carol's love. Mike has always been devoted to your sister's memory and I've been grateful to her spirit for what she did for Mike."

  "She was a good woman," said Kelly. It was a simple statement of fact.

  Robin nodded. "I know. That's one of the few things I can take on blind faith. And seeing you . . . Mike thought that you were Carol. He fell off the wagon this afternoon for the first time since I've known him."

  "Oh my God, Robin. I'm so sorry. What a terrible mess I've caused."

  "He's okay now. Mike's covering the fire. A family friend and I sobered him up. But that's one of the things that brought the tears, just now."

  "I will make this right to you," said Kelly. "I promise."

  "Paul said you asked for directions to the construction site."

  "That was just something to say," said Kelly. "I saw you walking towards us and, well, I panicked and just wanted to get away. I'm a coward."

  "Paul said that you had a son his age."

  "I don't. I guess I'm a liar, too. Not very good credentials for friendship, are they?"

  "Unless you're being overly harsh on yourself, and I think you are."

  "Not as far as this is concerned. I told Paul that I had a son just to make it sound like I had a reason for asking about his life. But I don't have any children." Kelly swallowed hard and her eyes dropped to her hands, folded in her lap. "The Shaw line will end with me." There was deep, deep sadness in her voice. Her gaze lifted to meet Robin's. "It's all about family, you see. I'm here because of my sister."

  "Please tell me about that."

  "About my sister and me?" Her faint smile was a sad curve of the lips. "Or about why I'm here?"

  "Your choice. I need some answers, Kelly."

  Kelly nodded. "So did I. That's what brought me to Devil Creek. I'll tell you about Carol and me, because that will tell you why I came here. Robin, do you have any brothers or sisters?"

  Robin was mildly startled by the sudden, direct question. "No, I was an only child. Sometimes after Mom and Dad were gone, I wished I did have someone, a sibling, so I could, I don't know, share the grief, I guess, and help me to get through."

  Kelly said, "It can work that way sometimes, when our siblings become our friends. But more often, I think, it happens the way it happened with Carol and me. We chose very different paths through life. I've never bothered to read Dr. Spock or even Freud—and he probably would h
ave done me a heck of a lot of good!—but have you ever noticed how nearly everyone has an aunt or uncle who is very different from their parent? I mean, like a an uncle who was a soldier and maybe a boxer while your parent is shy and worked at home at a factory job during the war, or an aunt who's shy and conservative while your parent is outgoing, a mover and a shaker. I've found that almost everyone's got a favorite aunt or uncle, a sibling of one of their parents, who's really so different than the parent that they often become a favorite relative."

  Robin thought of her Aunt Char, who still lived in Duluth. "I think I know what you mean." She tried to keep puzzlement out of her voice, but wondered where Kelly was going with this.

  Kelly said, "I think there's a reason for that, and I know Doctors Spock and Freud must have given it their attention. I think it's standard behavioral development for kids, when they start developing their own personality, consciously or subconsciously trying to be different from their siblings as a way of establishing their own independent personality."

  Robin gave a small smile. She liked the way this woman thought and expressed herself. "It sounds to me like you've read Freud, at least."

  "No, but I have spent my recent past paying attention to the people and the world around me and trying to learn, more than I used to, at any rate. And far too late to help me much, as it turned out."

  "Is that how it was with you and Carol? Sibling rivalry?"

  "Big time. You can imagine that it can be even more intense with twins which, obviously, is what Carol and I were. They say twins are supposed to have some sort of psychic bond but if that's true, then our sibling rivalry wiped that away and only the rivalry remained. It started young. Little girls bickering over a Barbie doll. What a treat for our poor mother! But Mom and Dad loved us both until the end, and honestly, I think it was easier for them to love Carol than me."

  "Oh, don't say that, Kelly."

  "You haven't heard my story. This rivalry, let's call it, continued right through high school where we went from quarreling over dolls to fighting over boys and over our values. Carol was a grade A student. I was anything but. I ran with the fast crowd. I left home at seventeen after my first abortion." Her eyes misted at the word. She swallowed hard again and said, "I committed most of the sins of a girl gone wrong, even though I did manage to amount to something. I became a set designer in Hollywood. Even got my name at the end-credits of a few movies. That's a fast life. I traveled around the world with production companies. There were drugs and booze and too many boyfriends. I fell in love a lot and I believed it every time, until I woke up the next morning or until the coke ran out on Monday. And all the while, Carol kept getting her straight A's and applying herself and wanting nothing more than to be a teacher, which has to be the noblest profession in the world, especially since it's done for slave wages."

  Robin smiled dryly. "I can attest to that. Did you and Carol stay in touch?"

  "No, not at all. That is, not until a Christmas card toward . . . toward the end of her life. She wanted me to know about Mike, that they'd gotten married. She wanted me to know how happy she was. Carol wrote me how she helped Mike cure his addiction to alcohol. She knew about my addictions, and never stopped criticizing and lecturing me. She sent me a beautiful picture of her and Mike on their wedding day, and I'd never seen her happier. When I got their card that Christmas, I was in Spain on the set of an indie western. I was drunk and snorting blow the whole time. That one card from Carol in, like, eight years . . . and I was too fucked up to even write back."

  This time when her eyes moistened, a tear formed in the corner of one. She brushed the tear away with the back of an index finger and sniffed once.

  "I was in London when I got the word she had died. Some part of my doped-out brain must have realized that I had screwed up the last opportunity Carol had extended to share her joy with me. I was working as first assistant to a set designer for a stage play that had been running for years. I finally came to my senses, or what was left of them. I flew back to L.A. I read a pamphlet some Buddhists handed me at LAX. And guess what, it turned my head around. It was like a light bulb going off. Well, it wasn't quite that simple, of course. I had a few friends left who cared about me enough to get me into rehab, and I've been straight and sober for more than a year."

  Robin said, "You were getting clean to make peace with your sister's memory. That's beautiful, Kelly. I'm glad you're doing well."

  "Actually," Kelly said in a quiet voice, "I only look like I'm doing well. And the funny thing is, most days I don't even feel sick, which is the damnedest thing. But the doctors tell me that I should expect that to change before long. When I have bad days, they're really bad days."

  "Kelly, what's wrong?"

  "I'm dying of ovarian cancer. I have maybe six months to live."

  Robin's throat went dry, and she reached across the stone table and took both of Kelly's hands in her own.

  "Oh, no. . . ."

  "Oh, yes," said Kelly. "And that's why I'm in Devil Creek. I needed to know something for sure before . . . before I die."

  "What do you need to know?"

  "I need to know," said Kelly, "if your husband killed my sister."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Robin felt as if she'd taken two hard body blows: a hard right, followed by a knockdown left hook.

  Was there one word in the modern world that packed more fear, dread and anxiety than the word cancer? And could there be a worse charge leveled against someone you loved than to hear the suspicion of murder?

  A big pickup truck gunned its diesel engine to life at one of the gas pumps in front of the convenience store, and for several moments, conversation was impossible without shouting.

  Robin was thankful for the interruption, the intrusion on this little corner of the world where she and Kelly sat at this table on the patio. As the pickup truck rumbled past them toward the highway, her mind raced.

  When the truck was past, she said, "Kelly, do you have any evidence to suggest that Michael. . . ." She found it nearly impossible to say the words, but she pushed on. "That Michael did murder Carol?"

  "No more than the police had in Albuquerque." Kelly did not sound sure of herself. She did not sound pleased. But she too sounded determined to push on. "Robin, does this make us enemies?"

  Robin was still holding both of Kelly's hands in her own. She gave them another squeeze.

  "No. No, it doesn't. But it does make me determined to assure you that my husband did not strangle your sister, his pregnant wife, whom he loved very much. That is beyond the realm of possibility."

  "And would you be offended," said Kelly, "if I asked if you have any hard evidence of his innocence?"

  Robin considered this. She could not be angry at this woman. Even this subject was being delivered head-on with an integrity that Robin could not help but admire.

  She said, "That's a fair question, and because you're a woman, I'll answer as a woman would understand. Have you ever been married, Kelly?"

  "No," said Kelly, and regret shaded her tone of voice with blue. "Too many live-ins, but no husband."

  "Well," said Robin, "I have evidence of Michael's innocence of any wrongdoing in the death of your sister because I've been sleeping with him for two years, and I've been watching him day in and day out as he's bonded and become a father to my son. Michael Landware is no murderer. Have you spoken to the police in Albuquerque?"

  "Yes, I visited the detective who was in charge of the investigation into Carol's death. I saw him at the detective bureau twice, and I pestered him on the telephone."

  "And what did he say?"

  "He told me that the department would never have marked the case as closed if they hadn't been certain that the man responsible for Carol's murder was the janitor of the complex where Mike and Carol lived. He showed me the man's criminal record from before Carol's murder. He'd been convicted for a similar break-in and rape in which no one had died. The detective told me that the evidence showed that
Carol had put up a struggle, and there were scratches on the janitor's face when they went to question him. And of course he committed suicide before charges could be filed."

  Robin said, "A DNA test would have cleared Mike."

  "Mike was already cleared in the minds of the police the minute they interviewed the handyman. I was told that the DNA procedure has drawbacks and isn't used as often as people think.

  That detective is a captain now. He's a family man with pictures of his wife and kids on his desk. He seemed like an honest, hardworking officer and I think he genuinely believes that they got the right man and that your husband is not a killer."

  "So you came to Devil Creek to investigate and make up your own mind?"

  Kelly nodded. She watched her hands move her purse idly about on the stone tabletop. "I learned very quickly that the knowledge of imminent death has a powerful effect on reordering the priorities in life."

  "God, Kelly, I can only imagine."

  "The little things in life become even smaller until the only things that matter are the big things, like why are we here and who do we love, and what will we do with our time that's left. Maybe some people think about that every morning when they wake up. That would be a good way to be, because when you're aware every day that your time is running out, you tend to squeeze and savor the most out of that life. Take it from one who knows. But see, I never thought like this until that day in the doctor's office.

  "I was living in L.A. with a stuntman. He was in the doctor's office with me when I got the news. And he managed to disappear out of my life within a week. A lot of people don't feel comfortable being around a person who's dying. They don't want to be reminded that it will be their turn soon enough."

  Robin said, "Kelly, I know we've just met, but I can promise you that if you want a friend, I won't run out on you. I'll help you find a place to stay here in Devil Creek. People are nice here. You can stay with us until—"