Where I Can See You

by Larry D. Sweazy

  “You smell like the inside of a tavern,” Burke said to Hud, coming to a stop at the hood of Varner’s cruiser. Sloane stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the chief, her face blank and unreadable. Every cell in her being looked to be on alert, stiff with attention, but she didn’t seem to be angry or to need to prove herself to anyone, including Burke. She was in observation mode, just like Hud.

  Hud shrugged. “I took a time-out at the hotel bar. Ordered a coffee.”

  “If you say so,” Burke said.

  “I do.”

  “You should pick a better place to spend your time. That place has changed since you’ve been away.”

  “Thanks for the advice. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You’re on duty until I say you’re not,” Burke said. The German shepherd barked in the distance, closer. The warning bounced off the surface of the lake behind Sherman’s house and lingered a long second before fading.

  “If you say so,” Hud answered, not breaking eye contact with Burke.

  The air suddenly turned thick with silence. Mist quickly covered Burke’s windbreaker jacket, and he was the first to look away, but not before biting the corner of his lip and glancing at Sloane. They had a silent language. Hud made note of what he saw. Added it to his own list of curiosities and suspicions. Beyond that, he was sure he had a lecture on obedience coming. It wouldn’t be the first time that had ever happened, but it would be the first “official” one from Burke.

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” Burke said to Hud.

  “Just got here. Varner says no one has come in or out. Mrs. Sherman is obviously confused and upset. I’m sure she’s going to be thrilled to have us come into her house like she’s a criminal.”

  “She might be,” Burke said.

  “Never say never,” Hud replied.

  “Let’s go.” Burke pulled away, leading the two detectives to the door. Varner stayed behind, in the cruiser; the rear guard, waiting, as always, for orders on what to do next.

  “What about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you avoid attachments?”

  “I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”

  “Humor me.”

  “If I have to.”

  “I would appreciate an answer, but you know you don’t have to give me one.”

  “I was married once, early on. It lasted a year. She didn’t like being married to a cop. I was gone a lot. The job takes its toll. People need their releases. She didn’t like my choices. Simple as that.”

  “And that’s all there was to it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Nothing since?”

  “I really don’t see how this matters.”

  The three of them walked up to the door in a solemn line, Burke leading, Sloane following, and Hud bringing up the rear. Burke knocked gently on the front door next to a fall wreath made of plastic red maple leaves. Hud stood behind Sloane with his hand at his side, two fingers from the .45. He caught the scent of her bath soap: simple and pure, nothing flowery. She was consistent. He liked that about her.

  No one answered the door, and no detectable sounds came from inside the house. No radio, no TV, no barking dog. A guy like Sherman always had some kind of bouncing hunting dog.

  Burke looked at Hud. “You sure Kaye didn’t leave?” There was no mistaking the frustration in his voice.

  “I’m just telling you what the deputy told me,” Hud answered.

  “And you trusted that?” Burke seemed immediately comfortable in his doubt about Varner’s capabilities, which wasn’t a surprise in such a small department that was mostly overused and underappreciated.

  Hud knew the best thing he could do was keep his mouth shut. The line Burke was taking was obvious. The chief was pissed because of the time Hud had taken at the hotel. He’d really blow his stack if he knew about Goldie.

  Burke knocked on the door again, only this time harder, with authority. It no longer mattered if there was a personal relationship between Burke and the Shermans; there was a warrant to serve. “Mrs. Sherman?” he demanded, just short of a yell.

  The door creaked open, and Burke stiffened. They all did. Burke spun to his side, grabbed his gun, a black Glock 9mm, and glanced at Sloane. “Cover the back door. You come with me, Matthews.” He had dropped his voice to a whisper. It was Matthews here, not Hud. This had just turned serious.

  Sloane nodded, produced her own Glock, pushed past Hud, and disappeared into the dark, misty night. Burke said nothing more, just eased the door open gently, and slid inside. “Stay close,” Burke ordered.

  Hud had wondered why Burke had sent Sloane out on her own to cover the back, and not him, until that moment, when the first order came, and then he understood: Burke didn’t trust him, hadn’t seen him in action. It was an understandable reaction, but it still rubbed Hud the wrong way.

  Every hair on Hud’s body stood at attention as he followed Burke inside the Shermans’ house. The light was almost blinding. There wasn’t a lamp, sconce, or overhead light that wasn’t turned on. A furnace fan hummed in the distance, and it sounded as though there was water running, a faucet left on somewhere close. Other than that, everything looked normal, tidy, no sign of any kind of disturbance. The floor was so clean you could eat off it.

  The interior of the house reflected the exterior: simple, austere, rustic. A ten-point buck’s head hung over the fireplace, its glassy eyes focused and unnerving. The furniture looked worn and comfortable: thick green corduroy with knitted afghan blankets thrown over the back of the sofa and chairs. Twenty-year-old pictures of three perfect blonde-haired children adorned the walls, along with a cheap print of an outdoor painting framed in barn siding. A clay pot full of potpourri, dried flower petals and herbs, scented the room with a faraway woodsy smell. There was no sign of anyone at home.

  Burke edged his way to the entrance to the kitchen, drawn there, like Hud, by the sound of the running water. One step inside the small shadowy room was like walking from one season to the next in the blink of an eye. Everything changed. The light, dimmed and soft, the overheads off, the texture of the air, a sudden drop of temperature, and most noticeably the smell. Gone was the sweet aroma of the front room, orchestrated to provide comfort and a sense of well-being. It had been replaced by a more repugnant and unfortunately familiar smell. The first hint of blood and death touched Hud’s nose.

  Burke stopped. “Shit.”

  Hud pushed up next to him and saw the reason for the exclamation, knew before he had to witness it. A middle-aged woman lay on the floor just in front of the sink, her eyes fixed distantly past Hud; blood pooled under her head, fresh enough to still have a shine to it. The back door stood wide open, and Sloane’s concerned face suddenly appeared.

  Chapter Eight

  “How long was it before you realized that she was never coming back?”

  “A trip away overnight wasn’t out of the question for her, but it was unusual. Gee usually knew where she was and when she’d be back. It was a day or two before the real panic set in, before Gee set off the alarms that something was wrong. I felt it deep in my stomach, but I didn’t know what to do about it.”

  “They had an agreement?”

  “I don’t know that I would call it that. Gee was hard on her because of me. I think she wanted her to settle down, find a respectable man, find me a father-figure, get on with her life. Gee worried about that, made her disapproval clear, but she was good at knowing how far to go with her opinions, especially with my mother. They tried to keep their fights away from me, but I could always tell when the water was choppy.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “What about her?”

  “Was she concerned about you having a father-figure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know that?”

  “She never talked about it. It was like our life was as normal as everyone else’s. It was the three of us and that was enough. Ju
st Gee, her, and me. We had the souvenir shop to feed us, plenty of things to keep us busy, and we lived in a wonderfully beautiful place, according to her, especially between Labor Day and Memorial Day.”

  “When all the vacationers were gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you? Was it enough? You know, with just the three of you?”

  “What do you think? Every boy who doesn’t have one longs for his father. She’d given me hope that things were going to change, and then she was gone. I had nothing but Gee to hang onto.”

  The moment Burke found a pulse Sloane dropped down and started performing CPR on the woman. Hud had thought she was dead, that Sloane’s lifesaving attempt was a hopeless task, but there was no question he would’ve done the same thing. Maybe not with such fervor, but he would have tried to save her nonetheless.

  He stood and watched, impressed by Sloane’s work ethic, all the while taking in the scope of the kitchen, silently cataloging everything he saw. At first glance, the running faucet was the only thing out of place in the kitchen. There was no weapon on the counter or floor; no knives or tenderizing mallets, thick with blood, lying in plain sight. Nothing. It looked like Kaye Sherman, and it was still an assumption that the woman on the floor was Kaye Sherman, had walked into the kitchen, slipped, fallen, and hit her head on the counter. Which could have been the case under normal circumstances, but Kaye Sherman’s husband had disappeared and was a person of interest in an ongoing murder investigation. There were three detectives in her house to serve a search warrant, and, sooner rather than later, the media was going to show up and start hounding her. Normal was hardly the case at the moment.

  Hud’s eyes trailed to the back door. It was standing wide open. Not quite a murder weapon, but perhaps an escape route, an indication that someone else might have been in the house. Or, maybe it was nothing more than a matter of coincidence—that normal circumstance that always lurked as a possibility. Maybe Kaye Sherman really had come in from outside and slipped and banged her head right before the police showed up. It was a plausible scenario but an unlikely one. Hud had learned a long time ago to never trust his first assumption. Proof was required on all fronts. Even if it meant not trusting himself, what he thought he saw or didn’t see. He looked across the kitchen again for a weapon, for any sign of a struggle.

  Burke continued to bark orders into a handheld that had appeared from underneath his overcoat. He looked at Hud after calling for an ambulance and said, “Go take a look outside.”

  Hud nodded, but a cookbook caught his eye. It lay on the lip of an old hutch as though it had been taken out and not put back in. It was a big book, The Joy of Cooking, and he had to wonder if the weight of it could knock someone out. The short answer was yes, maybe from behind, in a surprise move. That would work, to grab the first thing available if you were inside a house you weren’t supposed to be in and the owner came in unexpectedly. But why not have a weapon, a gun? Hud asked himself. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t want to make any noise. Maybe they were looking for something.

  Sloane continued to count off her chest compressions. “One, two, three . . .” It sounded as if she was playing an accordion without any music coming out of it.

  “You have a flashlight with you, don’t you?” Burke said to Hud, pulling him out of his thoughts.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Go on, take a look, see what you can find.”

  “All right.” Hud felt trapped inside a bubble and wasn’t anxious to leave, even though he was being dismissed. He was sure he was overlooking something, but he knew by Burke’s look that lingering much longer was out of the question, or at least a stupid thing to do.

  Without any further hesitation, Hud walked slowly to the kitchen door, eyes on the floor, then looked up the jamb and at the ceiling, inspecting everything as he went. Each move was methodical, planned, as he inched closer to the darkness of night. He saw nothing to stop him and continued on as he was ordered. Sloane’s attempt to raise the dead faded behind him and was replaced by the onslaught of wind and mist. This was not the welcome home that he had been hoping for.

  Hud’s flashlight beam cut sharply across the backyard, providing him a clear path to the lake. There were no unusual sounds, not even a siren, yet. The call had just gone out. It would take the ambulance ten or fifteen minutes to arrive this far out. The barking dog had gone silent, and there was no traffic noise, nothing but the dulled presence of nature settling into the deep isolation of a misty night. He felt like he was walking inside a black ball spun of wet cotton.

  The first place Hud headed to was the pier, a freshly painted white wood-slat walkway that extended twenty feet out into the lake. His windbreaker and face were instantly soaked. He was glad he didn’t wear glasses. He’d need windshield wipers.

  Sherman’s state CO boat was tied up to the end of the pier. It was a modified bass boat with a 250 horsepower Mercury motor on the back. The fiberglass hull was cut low to the water at the bow, and wide at the stern. The boat was built for speed without the intention of pleasure; it had been converted to be a police vehicle for the water.

  The sides of the pier were empty. If Sherman had a personal boat, it was either out on the water or stored for winter. It seemed a little early for a guy like Sherman to put his boat into storage. Hud aimed the flashlight downward to the water and saw nothing in the shallow blackness, then scanned the lake looking for a sign of movement, lights, anything sitting or moving on the water. He saw nothing, not even a duck. But that didn’t mean the lake was vacant of any boats. Not in this weather. Somebody could have been sitting on the edge of darkness watching him, spying on the crime scene with binoculars. He hadn’t felt a pair of eyes on him, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Sherman, of course, would be the main suspect in the assault on the woman inside, but there had to be other considerations. They just hadn’t presented themselves.

  The boat didn’t look like it had been touched. If there was one thing that stood out to Hud, it was the fact that the boat was open to the weather, uncovered. That seemed unlikely, too. It was obvious that Sherman took care of things. He would put a tarp over the boat on a night like this. Unless he didn’t have time, or he had been interrupted. Hud swung the flashlight beam slowly across the boat again, making sure there wasn’t any place for a man to hide. It was empty.

  He looked at the water again and suddenly felt vulnerable. It was too dark to see a clear reflection of himself, even on the surface of the water. For years he’d looked for any sign of his mother in the lake, everywhere he went as far as that went, but always in the water. It had been easy for him to imagine that she’d had an accident and drowned; one of the many scenarios that he had come up with that would have explained her disappearance. He’d wished she would wash up on the shore, beaten and battered by the waves, nipped at by the turtles, bloated by time, anything that he could have touched and mourned. It would have been better than the nothingness that had followed him all of his life.

  The mystery of the water had always been a draw to Hud, but now, after so many years away from it, he was unsure in its presence. He couldn’t rely on his old confidence, his old memories. That had been clear from the moment he had returned home, but he hadn’t realized that the uncertainty would stay, grow. He had thought he would be the same as when he left and known what he had known as a boy, but almost every skill had been lost or was so buried that he didn’t know how to retrieve it. He had never thought he would be afraid of the water.

  “Things have a way of disappearing around here, in that lake. It’s deeper than people think it is,” Harriet Danvers voice suddenly whispered in his head. It had felt like she had been trying to tell him something—or at least that she knew things. She had been right about the dead girl, had sent them to rescue the boy at the Dip. He was going to have to talk to her again.

  A dog barked, and the echo of it over the lake drew Hud’s attention away from the water. He turned back to t
he house, to face the bright glow of the interior, and blinked to refocus his vision. A rush of wind and a blur of movement suddenly approached out of the corner of his eye, but Hud was too slow to react, to realize that it was the first sign of an assault. The night screamed with a slap. He recognized the shape of an oar and bit his lip as the heavy wood slammed against the side of his face. Stinging pain exploded on the right side of his head. Wood against skin, force against bone, accompanied by the surprise taste of blood. The force of the blow buckled Hud to his knees, turned his neck, left him incapable of protecting himself.

  He had thought he had been alert enough to see a surprise attack coming, but he had been wrong. A second blow to the stomach, a kick or a punch—he wasn’t sure which—didn’t allow him to scream for help or order the attacker to stop. Blood mixed with the bile of failure and shame, and Hud wondered, as he fell to the ground in a heap, if this was going to be his last mortal memory: You failed to see it coming. You failed again.

  There were no dreams in the sudden darkness, just the helpless feeling of floating to the bottom of a black hole. There was nothing he could do to save himself.