HIGHWATER
T. J. BREARTON
First published 2014
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is American English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.
©T. J. Brearton
Follow T.J. Brearton on twitter @BreartonTJ
Further novels by Brearton are scheduled for release in 2014/2105 by Joffe Books
OTHER BOOKS AVAILABLE NOW BY T.J. BREARTON
HABIT a #1 best-selling thriller that you won’t be able to put down
A young woman, Rebecca Heilshorn, lies stabbed to death in her bed in a remote farmhouse. Rookie detective Brendan Healy is called in to investigate. All hell breaks loose when her brother bursts onto the scene. Rebecca turns out to have many secrets and connections to a sordid network mixing power, wealth, and sex. Detective Brendan Healy, trying to put a tragic past behind him, pursues a dangerous investigation that will risk both his life and his sanity. Habit is a compelling thriller which will appeal to all fans of crime fiction. T.J. Brearton amps up the tension at every step, until the shocking and gripping conclusion.
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DEDICATION
For my son, Jude
Your kindness and decency are angelic.
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
PART II
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART III
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
PART IV
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
PART V
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
PART VI
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
PART VII
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
AFTERLIFE
PART I
VISITORS
Spring 2009
CHAPTER ONE
Elizabeth sat in the Adirondack chair behind the house and watched the dusk creep over the pond. She drew her blanket closer as the evening chill settled in. While she watched the silver surface of the water, she stroked the locket that hung around her neck.
Something didn’t feel right. It was different from the usual sense of dread that she carried with her. This was new. As she waited for the loon to resurface — the one she thought of as “guy loon” — she realized what was troubling her.
The pond was high.
After a long moment, the loon broke the surface, reappearing out in the middle of the water. There it floated beneath the moon, and Elizabeth felt a little better. It was spring, anyway, and while she wasn’t a native of the mountains, she assumed there was some logic to ponds, lakes, and rivers being higher in the spring. The winter built a snowpack in the forest which melted down from the peaks and formed freshets of icy water this time of year.
Considering herself consoled, she turned and reached for the wine glass beside her. Her finger knocked the glass and it nearly toppled over. She quickly steadied it by gripping the stem, and saw that the wine was gone.
She decided to go back into the house for one more glass before turning in for the night.
Elizabeth stood and took a moment to fold the woolen blanket. Somewhere in her mind she knew this was an act ingrained in her by her mother, but she let it be. As she folded the blanket and placed it on the footrest, she glanced out at the pond one more time.
Her loon was there. Guy loon had drifted further away, almost to the far shore, a couple hundred yards from her. As she watched, he skimmed along the silky, dark surface.
The feeling of dread returned, slipping over her like a shroud. She walked up the path to the house, watching the field stones beneath her feet. She thought of Jared. Jared was always saying how he was going to rip up the fieldstones and set the path with a fancier white stone. Jared had big plans for the house.
She lifted her head to look at it. The place was more like a camp than anything else. The screen wrapping the porch was overstretched and bulged in places. Its mesh was tight to keep out the black flies. Beneath the porch screening, the green paint was almost entirely peeled away from the steps, revealing the worn gray wood beneath. The whole place looked lonely, forgotten by the world.
Halfway up the path, Elizabeth realized she was crying. She thought of him, the other him, and remembered when they had first met, before things had gone so wrong, before he’d left her life.
As she neared the steps, the wine glass fell from her hands. It shattered on the hard fieldstone, and the sound of the breaking glass echoed in the surrounding woods. She heard a splash and turned in time to see ripples in the water where the loon had dived back under.
She looked down at the shards of glass, which reflected the moon back at her. Then she bent to pick them up. She placed the large pieces in one open hand and then kicked the smaller bits aside. Finally, she climbed the three steps to the porch and opened the door. She did this gingerly, mindful of the rusty squeak of the hinges. After the commotion of the broken
glass, she didn’t want to alarm any other woodland creatures, or herself.
She went inside.
* * *
He was standing in the kitchen. Not Jared, but the other. She hadn’t seen him in so long that at first she thought he might be an apparition.
She couldn’t see his eyes. He was looking down at the floor, his hand resting beside him on the counter top. There was a puddle of water at his feet.
Elizabeth wondered why he was wet. The moon had been hanging over the pond, the night was clear and cold, no rain to speak of.
“Christopher?”
He continued to look down. His hair was wet, black, and shining. She noticed that he was wearing the same knockabout jacket that he usually wore, a long denim coat. The coat dripped on the old yellow linoleum of the kitchen floor. It was linoleum that Jared said he was going to rip up someday and replace with tile, but it wasn’t Jared Kingston standing there.
“What are you doing here?”
He didn’t respond. The water at his feet was spreading. He regarded it with silent fascination.
Elizabeth felt afraid. The house sat on a rise by the pond. The embankment was steep, with snarls of root and rock to snare footing. The only other way out was behind the man standing in her kitchen. He was standing between her and escape. He had always been between her and escape.
“What did you . . . did you take a shower?”
He stood there, his head down.
“Will you look at me?”
* * *
Investigator Tom Milliner sat in his Chevy Blazer drinking coffee under the starlit night sky. He wasn’t supposed to have caffeine. His doctor discouraged it. Friends pointed to his insomnia. Milliner told himself that he couldn’t sleep whether or not he had his coffee so damn what they said.
A few minutes had passed since the kid in the denim coat had entered the Kingston house.
Unlike the younger breed of cops, inclined to sit for hours blasting the heat while their SUVs guzzled gallons of gas, Milliner was content to sit quietly in a cool vehicle. Maybe he felt a cut above the rest because of his hardened constitution, or perhaps a nameless fear lurked in the notion of today’s cops getting soft.
Thing was, you didn’t know anything until you’d done a takedown, foot-chased a fugitive and had him put a gun to a little girl’s head. You were less significant than a hayfart in a harvest wind until you’d seen that body swinging from the barn rafters and had to cut down the lifeless teenager.
Before becoming an investigator, Milliner had spent nine years on the beat: busting up bar brawls, doing drunk-stops, and chasing down thieves and addicts. Some called it paying one’s dues. He called it basic training. During those first years he had cut his teeth on a wide variety of heinous experiences; the pair of frozen hikers, the suicide in the minister’s barn, the young boy who called the cops the day before he’d gone missing. Milliner doubted the academy prepared young cops as well as experience had taught him.
For most of his twenty years as an investigator, he had been able to leave his work at the office and sleep soundly at night. During the past five, however, sleep had not come so easily. For one, Stephanie had left, leaving that side of the bed cold and empty.
Milliner shivered in the frigid car. He took another sip of coffee. Something seemed to move in the trees by the road. He leaned forward and craned his neck to look up. A critter had hopped from one branch to another, leaving one of the pine boughs bobbing. Maybe a squirrel, he thought; more likely it was a raccoon or some large bird. He saw it again — a dark red blur high among the evergreen sashes. Probably a bird.
Then there was nothing. The trees were still. Milliner sat back.
He wondered if he was seeing things. He’d spent more nights in motels in the years since he’d made detective than in the previous forty-odd years of his life. It was tough to sleep in those places, and took its toll. Not only did it mean you were hip-deep on a case, but you had to deal with what motel-sleeping brought with it.
Dreams got left behind, like the stains on the yellowed wallpaper, or those vitreous floaters you sometimes saw when you closed your eyes.
Milliner lit a cigarette. Another habit he wasn’t supposed to be indulging in, according to his doctor or anyone who knew him.
He couldn’t sleep, so he roamed around at night. Sheriff Johnston gave Milliner guff about his negligent appearance — plain clothes, unmarked car — but he never stopped Milliner from following that style. It had, after all, been successful over the years. Earlier that evening, Milliner had gotten a hunch, locked on to someone, and here he was. Plain and simple — cold and lonely.
Milliner watched the Kingston house — just one window he could see through the trees, really — and smoked and drank his coffee as the temperature continued to drop inside the Blazer.
* * *
She couldn’t figure out where the water was coming from.
“Can I get you a towel?”
He was still looking at the floor. He was dripping — more like leaking or overflowing. The puddle at his feet was spreading across the linoleum, and would soon touch her feet, and she only had her moleskin booties on.
“Christopher,” she called. Her tone was firm. “Look at me, please.”
She thought he would.
He didn’t. He was still looking at the floor. She looked down now, too. The water on the floor reflected the fluorescent light above, the pine cabinets, Christopher, and the door behind him.
The door that was her escape route. She touched the locket which hung around her neck.
“What are you looking at?” She couldn’t help asking, and hated that her tone had shifted from stern and in-control to something closer to fascination.
He didn’t answer. Now the puddle was almost a pond covering the whole floor. She resisted the urge to step back. She struggled to hold her ground and her composure. His silence and refusal to make eye contact made her extremely uncomfortable — even more so than the fact that water was seeping from him like he was generating it himself. Not to mention that she hadn’t seen him for more than two years.
Christopher had gone silent before. It had become something that she expected, in a time which now felt like a previous life. Sometimes entire car journeys to Maine had been made in silence.
In the beginning, before she’d even asked him about it, he had preempted her.
“You’re wondering why I don’t talk a lot,” he’d said.
“No,” she’d lied.
“Yeah you are. And the answer is, I don’t know.”
And that had closed the subject.
But he’d always looked at her. On that drive, the one up to Falmouth, he had made eye contact during that brief explanation, and his eyes, as always, had been level and direct, and the most magical emerald green.
“Liz,” he said at last.
The sound of his voice sent a quiver through her, as though she’d been plucked like a string. There was something in that voice, something in the way Christopher sounded that she’d never heard before.
“What is it? Why are you here? You need to . . .”
What? What was she going to say? You need to stop oozing water out all over my kitchen floor?
Since she didn’t know what to do for Christopher, or how to proceed, or what to say, Liz could only stand and be silent too, and just be with him and whatever it was that was going on.
How much time had passed since she’d come inside? How long had they been in the kitchen, in this standoff with the spreading water — two minutes? Five?
“How did you get here? Did you drive? Why are you so wet? Why aren’t you saying anything? Christopher? Chris. Will you at least look at me?”
Her tone became increasingly agitated.
Still nothing.
She shuddered.
“I’m cold,” she said. “I’m going to get a blanket. I’m going to get one for you, too. Take off your jacket and put it on the porch.”
Liz went to the linen clo
set in the hall and retrieved two blankets.
When she came back, Christopher was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
Milliner saw him coming down the road. The detective slouched down in the driver’s seat. The kid didn’t seem to notice him. In fact, as he approached the Blazer, he didn’t so much as glance in Milliner’s direction.
Milliner saw him clearly enough — a gibbous moon shone down over the conifers and birches, lighting the dirt road. Milliner could even see the faint shadow the young man cast as he approached.
The young man’s head was down as though he was studying the road. Was he drunk? Trying to keep his footing? Lost along the one-track mind that often comes with a good booze on? Milliner didn’t think so.
He passed, less than ten feet from the Chevy. The boy exhibited none of the gait of a drunk, so familiar to the old investigator. He was more reminiscent of the lost boys of the eighties — dressed in dark colors and listening to the likes of Motley Crew and Skid Row. He imagined tattoos and perhaps even eye shadow.
Milliner knew the kids in Red Rock and this wasn’t one of them. They populated the crumbling apartment buildings along the small downtown strip. They were brooding, morose, slicing themselves with box cutters or burning their arms with cigarettes; sometimes taking their own lives.
It was safe to conclude that the young man was from further south, from the city or down near it — Westchester, maybe — and there might be a drug connection. So Milliner had taken an interest in him. He had nothing better to do.
The youth wore the right uniform — three-quarter coat, black jeans, and work boots — still, he appeared more like a young guy who’d just been dumped by his girlfriend than one high on a substance. Or he was deep in thought about some mystery of the universe, like young men often were.
He watched the kid until he rounded the bend and went out of sight. Milliner sat and waited for a few seconds, giving the young man time to turn onto the other road. He started up the Chevy and with a bit of coaxing it coughed to life.
HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 1