by Chelsea Cain
“Not the tallest tree. That would be a sequoia named Hyperion in Redwood National Park. It’s over three hundred seventy-nine feet.” Susan caught herself. “Sorry.” She had been a newspaper feature writer for so long that sometimes these facts just bubbled out of her. “Yes. The tallest tree. In the crime scene area. On Mount Tabor.”
“And you know this because?”
Susan took the end of the gauze, where she had torn it, and tucked it inside the rest of the bandage. “Because I saw it on the local news. They had aerial footage of the scene. Review the tape. It’s taller than any of the trees around it. It’s the tallest tree.”
Archie was quiet.
“So that could be a clue, right?” Susan said.
“Maybe,” Archie said. “Or it might be a coincidence.” He was slouched forward on the toilet seat. Susan was sitting on the floor. She was suddenly aware of how small the room was, and how close their bodies were. His shirt was buttoned wrong. She found that weirdly charming. It was really hot in there. Archie reached his good hand toward her face, and grazed her cheek with his fingertips. Susan couldn’t move. “Your eye makeup is a little smeared,” he said.
She touched her face. “Oh,” she said. She could feel her cheeks warm. “Thanks.”
Archie stood.
“Why don’t you ever call me back?” Susan asked.
“I have a lot on my plate, Susan,” Archie said.
“Is it because of Leo?” she asked.
“I’m too hot in here,” Archie said. He left the bathroom. Susan stewed for a second and then hopped up and stomped after him. She found him sitting on the black couch, his bandaged hand in his lap.
“So?” she said, standing.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Archie said.
It was evening now and the apartment seemed strangely bright compared to the dark sky outside.
“I know you don’t like him,” Susan said.
“I do like him,” Archie said. “We have a history.”
She knew all about that. “You helped catch his sister’s killer,” she said. She sat down next to him on the couch, careful to leave a respectable eighteen inches between them. “It’s not the ideal way to meet,” she said. “But you of all people know what he’s been through. He thinks the world of you.” It was more complicated than that, Susan knew. Archie and Leo’s father went way back, and Archie knew exactly how Jack Reynolds made his money. “His father is hinky,” she said with a sigh. And by hinky she meant a drug kingpin. “Okay. I’ll give that one to you. But”—and she lifted her finger for emphasis—“he’s not like his father.” She reconsidered this. “I mean, he’s not perfect. But he’s not Scarface.”
“You don’t need my permission to date Leo Reynolds,” Archie said.
She didn’t. Certainly. That was ridiculous. Why would she?
Still . . .
“What if I wanted it?” Susan asked.
Archie looked at her for a moment, and then rubbed his eyes with his good hand. “There are things I can’t tell you.”
“No duh,” Susan said. “You are like a walking vault of things you don’t tell people. People who have secrets should pay you to hold on to them for them. You could be like a secret bank.” She rolled her eyes. “There are things you can’t tell me?” she asked. “Worse things than the things I know already? How is that even possible?”
Archie didn’t answer.
She wanted to remind him that she wasn’t with the paper anymore, that he could trust her, that she was his friend. She wanted to tell him that she wouldn’t betray him. But mostly she wanted him to know it, without being told.
“So you won’t get dinner with us?” Susan said.
“Susan.” He could make her name sound so long sometimes.
“We could just swing by a food cart,” she said quickly. “No pressure. Some Belgian fries and a Korean taco or two.”
Archie crossed his arms and looked at her. “I saw Pearl today.”
Susan immediately lost her train of thought and tucked her socked feet up under her on the couch. Pearl? Here? If Archie was lying, it was verbal kung fu par excellence. “Seriously?” Susan said.
“She lives at the halfway house where the victim was a volunteer. She may have been the last person to see him alive, besides the killer.”
It had been a year since they’d seen Pearl. “I thought she was back at her mother’s in Salem,” Susan said.
“Foster mother. I checked. She ran away again. The state put her in the house while they look for new placement.”
“How does she seem?” Susan asked.
“Like a defensive smart-ass with a chip on her shoulder,” Archie said.
“That’s called being seventeen,” Susan said. She’d liked Pearl. Pearl hadn’t meant to Taser Archie. Well, she’d meant to Taser him, but how was she supposed to know that her then-boyfriend was going to drag Archie away, suspend him naked from meat hooks, and try to hack him up with an ax?
Hadn’t everyone had a bad boyfriend at some point?
Pearl had made some bonehead choices, but she had a good heart.
“She lied to me today,” Archie said.
“A teenager?” Susan said with faux surprise. “Lying to an authority figure? Impossible.”
“She told me that she was smoking outside, and that she hid when she saw Jake Kelly go by because he didn’t like her smoking,” Archie said. “Claire took a team to his house this afternoon. Said it smelled like an ashtray.”
Susan was feeling self-conscious about the pack of American Spirits in her purse. “So he smoked,” she said. “That doesn’t mean he was cool with her doing it. Maybe he thought she was too young.”
“Or maybe she lied to me,” Archie said.
“Do you want me to talk to her?” Susan asked. “Use my teen interrogation skills?”
Archie smiled. “You two do have a lot in common.”
Susan suspected that wasn’t a compliment. “Maybe we can go get piercings at the mall,” she said.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at ten.”
Susan studied him. He looked tired. “This is supposed to get me out of your hair, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said.
She stood up, and as she did, her phone rang. It was in her purse, which was more of a velvet sack with very long straps, and which Susan wore slung across her torso. She dug out the phone and glanced down at the number. It was that guy from the Oregon State Hospital again. They’d been playing phone tag all day. She wondered if Archie had gotten a call from him, too. Then she glanced over at the pieces of Archie’s phone and answered her own question.
“Need to get that?” Archie asked.
She knew that she should tell him that she had accepted Gretchen’s invitation to meet with her for an interview. He would want to know. He would want to talk Susan out of it.
Scratch that. He would want to forbid it.
And then Susan would have to go see her anyway, and then Archie would be disappointed and worried.
That was the thing Archie didn’t know about Susan. He was always working so hard to protect her that he didn’t realize that she was just as interested in protecting him. Archie had nearly killed himself getting out from under whatever spell Gretchen had had on him.
She wouldn’t tell him. Not yet.
Susan turned off the ringer on her cell phone, already looking around for her beautiful, painful boots. “It can wait,” she told Archie. “For now.”
Archie Sheridan wasn’t the only one who could keep secrets.
CHAPTER
11
It was the noise from the construction crew this time.
Part of the esplanade walkway had buckled under the floodwater and they were using earthmovers to finally haul away what was left of the broken concrete. It sounded like giant metal teeth chewing on boulders. Archie gave up trying to sleep and sat up in bed.
He looked at the clock. It was 2:59 A.M.
; His neck was stiff and as he reflexively reached up to rub it, his fingers found the scar across his neck where Gretchen, with a draw of her scalpel, had sliced open his throat.
That was the thing that Henry and the others didn’t understand. Why Archie could put himself in her path again and again after what she had done to him. He knew she wouldn’t kill him.
Not on purpose.
Even as he’d fallen to his knees, the blood draining down his chest, he’d known it wasn’t a fatal wound.
Archie sat on the edge of his bed. The fan tickled the hair on his naked body. Sweat crawled down his back. The air felt thick and warm, concentrated, like it was pressing in on him.
He kept his hand on his throat, the scar a fissure under his fingers. They had stitched the gash closed, and each stitch had left its own scar, very Frankenstein. He could feel his blood beating in his fingertips. She had felt his pulse, too, when she had cut him, would have used it to gauge the location of the carotid artery, careful to miss it as she pulled the blade through his flesh.
Life was a series of near misses. Car accidents dodged by quick reflexes. Railings that broke falls. Antibiotics. Seat belts. Helmets. We should all be dead a hundred times over.
Archie had tried to kill himself with pills. Slow suicide, the shrinks had called it. Archie wasn’t sure he believed them. He had a gun. He knew how to put a bullet in his brain.
He hadn’t taken the pills to die, he’d taken them because they were the only way he could stay alive.
His artery throbbed.
He could feel the scar under his fingers.
She had missed his carotid by one centimeter. About the width of an average shirt button.
Lucky, they had said.
But bleeding out from an artery was not a bad way to go. He’d seen it. Death came quickly. He’d watched a young man die after Gretchen took her scalpel to his femoral artery. No centimeter reprieve that time. She’d cut clean through it. That man’s life had seeped away in minutes.
Another person Archie hadn’t saved.
The screech of metal against concrete echoed through the open windows and Archie stretched his head to his shoulder until he heard a satisfying crack. Then he lowered his hand from his neck and inspected it. His palm was wet with sweat where Susan had wrapped the gauze. He unwound the bandage, now specked with dry blood, and then got up and walked into the bathroom. He tossed the gauze in the trash and ran his hand under the cold faucet for a few minutes, until it stopped throbbing, and then he splashed some water on his face.
When he looked up, he was faced with his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. His curly brown hair, gray flecks at the temples. Crooked nose. Skin scattered with broken blood vessels. He’d gained back the weight he’d lost during the two years he’d spent on medical leave after Gretchen had tortured him, but he’d never look the same as he did before. The deep wrinkles on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes made him look ten years older than his forty-one years. Even his pubic hair was graying.
Pearl had been right. He did look old.
Archie smiled.
He wondered what Gretchen looked like. Right then. Locked up at the State Hospital.
He hoped she had a mirror, too.
Archie lingered on that thought. The water from the sink ran in rivulets down his face and along his neck. His hair was damp with water and sweat.
Patrick’s kidnapper had been drenched—his hair matted with blood—in those last moments when they grappled with each other in the floodwaters.
Archie turned away from the mirror, pulled a towel off a rack, and dried his face and hair. He could still feel the resistance of the man’s head as Archie held it below water, his hand knotted in the dying man’s hair.
Archie slung the towel around his neck and felt for his pulse in his throat. When he found it he dug his fingers into his neck and kept them there. He counted to ten.
There was something comforting about that throbbing. His heart was still pumping. His body hadn’t given up on him yet.
After a few moments, he was able to look in the mirror and see only himself, hair disheveled, face a little raw from the towel-scrubbing, but still Archie. He was still here, wasn’t he? She had marked him with her fingerprints, the scars, literal and figurative, but he was still himself, he was still in control.
He opened the medicine cabinet and removed four large prescription pill bottles.
The labels on the pills read Prilosec and Prozac. He opened one of the bottles and tapped out a few white oval pills onto his palm. The sound of the pills tumbling out of the plastic bottle made his mouth water. Each pill was stamped with the letter V.
Vicodin.
When Archie had agreed to check himself into rehab, Henry had gone through his apartment, gathered up every last painkiller he could find, and flushed them all down the toilet.
Henry knew Archie, knew to go through all of Archie’s pants pockets, his jackets. But Henry had never thought to look for Vicodin in Archie’s other pill bottles. Where better to hide them?
Now Archie eyed the Vicodin in his hand. He still ached for them, for the bitter chalky taste, for the flush of pleasure that came ten minutes later.
He liked to take them out and look at them. Sometimes he lined them up on the back of the toilet tank, counted them. He liked knowing they were there. But he was already letting the pills drop from his fist back into the Prilosec bottle when he heard his phone.
He screwed the cap back on the bottle, put everything away in the medicine cabinet, and returned to his bedroom, where his phone was ringing insistently on the bedside table.
When he’d broken it, he’d knocked out the battery and split the casing into two pieces. He’d put the battery back in and secured it all together with duct tape.
Apparently, it still worked. There were some advantages to not having a smartphone.
He picked it up and sat down on the bed.
“Hello, Patrick,” he said.
“Did I wake you up?” Patrick asked.
“No,” Archie said, rubbing his eyes. “I was already up.”
“I’m seeing that counselor again,” Patrick said.
“I’m glad,” Archie said.
“Can I come visit you?” Patrick asked, and Archie could hear the pleading in his voice.
“Not right now,” Archie said.
“Are you mad at me?” Patrick asked.
It broke Archie’s heart. “Look,” he said, “even if your parents agreed, I can’t take care of a kid right now.” He couldn’t even take care of his own kids with his schedule. If he got a homicide call in the middle of the night on a weekend he had the kids, he had to bundle them up and take them back to their mom’s. They’d go to bed at his house and wake up at hers, which wasn’t ideal for anyone.
“Archie?” Patrick asked.
“What?”
Archie could hear Patrick breathing.
“I think my parents are scared of me,” Patrick said.
“They’re just scared,” Archie said. “Not of you. Just generally. They’re worried about you. And they’re worried about saying or doing the wrong thing.”
“Really?” Patrick said.
“Yeah,” Archie said.
Archie heard Patrick yawn. “I’m tired,” Patrick said. “I’m going to say good-bye now.”
“Talk to your counselor, Patrick,” Archie said. “Okay? Tell him what you told me. It’s okay. He can help you.”
“Uh-huh,” Patrick said, and then he hung up.
Archie set his phone back on the bedside table.
His knuckles were still raw, the fresh scabs ringed with pink. His hand had been wet when he had poured the Vicodin into it, and the pills had melted a little, leaving a white chalky residue.
Archie lifted his palm to his mouth and licked it.
The next time Archie’s phone rang his bedroom was filled with the milky light of early morning. He was still half asleep when he picked up the phone.
&nbs
p; “Look out your window,” Henry said.
Archie sat up and wrapped a sheet around his waist. “Which one?”
“West.”
He walked to his bedroom’s westward-facing window. A warm breeze came in through the open window, along with the sour scent of rot from the flood. The west side was ablaze with morning. The jagged tree line of the West Hills was bright against the sky. Windows winked at him. The river sparkled. It took a minute for Archie to register the smudge of gray against the sky to the north, and then trace it back, to the west side of the Burnside Bridge, where several fire trucks and at least five patrol cars were parked, emergency lights blinking. Traffic was backed up across the bridge.
“Can you see it?” Henry asked.
Portland didn’t have many visual landmarks. Its blush skyline. Mount Hood. The twin spires of the convention center. And then there was the fifty-foot neon portland, oregon sign erected on an Old Town rooftop. For much of its existence, the sign had advertised White Stag sportswear. Archie remembered it from his childhood trips to the city, an outline of the state of Oregon with a white stag leaping over the company’s name. Back in the fifties, someone got the idea to add a red Rudolph nose to the stag every Christmas. The sign was bought and sold, and the product being advertised changed. But anytime anyone talked about dismantling it, Portlanders rallied. They loved their composting, renewable energy, and recycling, sure, but they also loved that gaudy neon sign. The city had finally acquired it a few years ago, and had changed the lettering to portland, oregon, leaving the stag and state outline intact, ensuring that Rudolph would visit Portland’s children for generations to come.
Now the sign was smoldering.
“There’s a body,” Henry said. “And another lily.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Archie said. He lifted his face to the sun for a moment before he turned and headed into the shower.
CHAPTER
12
Susan Ward parked her Saab in a visitor’s parking spot outside the Oregon State Hospital. She had a knot in her stomach, and the start of a headache. The hour-long drive down to Salem had been brutal. She had thought she could beat the heat by going early in the morning. No such luck. Her air-conditioning had been broken for years, and even with both the front windows rolled down she had sweated through her T-shirt. The thermos of hot coffee she’d downed on the way probably hadn’t helped. She flipped down the visor and inspected her reflection in the mirror. The wind had done a number on her hair. She tried to get her fingers through the tangled thatch of tangerine, wincing as she worked out the snarls. Her lipstick was rubbed off on the mouth of the water bottle she’d been sucking on to keep hydrated, so she wiped the rest off on her hand and reapplied a shade of orange that almost matched her hair. Then she added mascara. She inspected her reflection again. Better. She saw a tiny coarse hair between her eyebrows, took hold of it between her thumb and forefinger, plucked it out, and flicked it out the window.