by Carly Bishop
Amy stared at the stale bag of cookies, trying to see the humor in it. The most irrational fear of her life was of being locked away like Granny Fee for hearing voices that weren’t there.
“Look, Ames. We had fun, too. It wasn’t all that bad.”
She mistrusted his sudden attempt at reassurance. She couldn’t have pointed to any change in his demeanor or give a reason, but it seemed phony to her. Was he trying to see if she remembered the good times, or only the bad?
“I remember you making voices for my stuffed animals.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to remember hearing. Could you make your voice come from somewhere else?” If Fee thought she could hear voices, part of it at least, had to do with Brent’s vocal tricks.
“Like where?”
“Like, across the room.”
“Who told you that? The old lady?”
“No one. I was just trying to remember—”
“You were a kid. God knows you had an imagination that wouldn’t quit. So. What else?”
“About the day I fell.”
“And Mom croaked. What about it?”
She exchanged looks with Cy. It wasn’t her imagination. In the past few minutes, Brent had grown a lot less willing to talk. Defensive, maybe. “Something must have set her off that day, Brent. She was...livid. Isn’t that so?”
“She was screaming mad, all right.”
“Do you know why? What it was about?”
“Something you said?” he guessed.
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“You have to ask?” He baited the retriever to his side with an Oreo. “Look. What the hell you were blathering on about, who knows—but there’s no mistake about it. Whatever it was, you’re the one who set her off. What it was? I don’t have a clue.”
“How about an opinion,” Cy asked. “Was her death an accident?”
“What else?”
“Murder.”
“Perry give me up for it?” he joked.
“Brent!”
“It was a joke, Amy.”
“Why would you even joke about something like that?”
“Because this whole damned thing is a one big sick joke,” he snapped. “Who the hell cares how it happened?”
“I do. Your sister does. Your father—”
“Stepfather.”
Cy put his mug down. “Let me be real sure I understand you. Are you saying it wouldn’t matter to you one way or the other if your mother was murdered?”
“That’s not it at all.”
“Then suppose you tell me what it is?”
“It was an accident. You get that? You think I wouldn’t toast good old Uncle Perry if I could? If the son of a bitch really had killed her? Or the judge or his crazy mother? They’re all a bunch of self-righteous maggots as far as I’m concerned, but there wasn’t any murderer. No villain, see, means you don’t get to ride into town and be the big hero. Sorry. But that’s the way I see it.”
“Funny,” Cy mused aloud. “I thought your mother was still alive when you ran out.”
“So?”
“So if you were gone,” Cy pressed, “how do you know no one killed her? Maybe you didn’t run that far off. Maybe you were hanging around waiting to see what would happen. Maybe you saw your mom run out of the house and fall and then you took off.”
“Bullshit. I didn’t see anything because I was long gone.”
“You can’t have it both ways, bud. Either you were there to see an accident, or you weren’t there to see the murder.”
“Or it was an accident I didn’t see.”
“Then we agree you don’t really know what happened,” Cy concluded. “So what I want to know is, who planted you with the conviction that your mother’s death was an accident?”
“Stick it,” Brent snarled, dragging a hand through his hair. “No one planted a story on me.”
The dog had wandered back to rest her head in Amy’s lap. She sat stroking Fritzy’s silky, graying head, watching Cy dealing with her brother.
Ignoring Brent’s denial, he leaned back in his chair. “I’m thinking it had to be Perry. You know. Quid pro quo. He covers your ass, you cover his. Stick to your guns and nobody has to go down.”
“Except my ass didn’t need covering—” Brent broke off, recognizing the trap too late.
“But Perry’s did. Imagine that.” But Cy wasn’t done yet and he didn’t give Brent the chance to put a different spin on what he’d said. “Maybe yours needed covering after all.”
“Why, because I ran off when I should have stuck by my mom? Big effing deal.”
“Not exactly. You ever heard of felony menacing? How about reckless endangerment?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Amy.”
“That’s a lie.” But he paled. He couldn’t prevent the slow, tortured drop of his Adam’s apple. “That’s a goddamned lie.”
“Hey,” Cy jibed, spreading his hands. “Why would your own mother accuse you if—”
“Because she was crazy as a loon too.”
“Brent,” Amy interrupted, signing, “I don’t think you meant to hurt me—ever. But—”
“I didn’t do anything to you, Amy,” he complained bitterly, turning to Cy. “I played with her for Chrissake. I was the one entertaining the little freak-show brat all the damned time—”
Amy shivered violently.
Brent broke off, staring at her, his eyes wild and savage as a cornered badger. Cy looked at her too, waiting for her to say something, but she couldn’t. Her stomach heaved and heaved all the harder again, and it was all she could manage to breathe and keep herself from throwing up.
Cy misunderstood. He turned to Brent, his expression full of contempt. “Maybe you’re the one who killed your mother.”
“That’s another lie—”
“Is it, Brent? She blamed you for what had happened to Amy. You must have been really pissed. You shoved her down. Maybe she hit her head then. Maybe that was what killed her. Is that how it happened?”
“Sure,” he sniped. “I did it. I killed her.”
“And then Perry hauled her body outside and set up her so-called accident?”
“Yeah, old Perry. He’d be sure to cover my ass all these years.”
“You’re playing with the spinmeister of all time, Brent,” Cy warned. “If you didn’t do it, maybe you should give him up for it before he leaves you hanging in the wind.”
Brent slammed the heels of both hands into the table’s edge so hard that its legs jolted, screeching against the floor. “I think it’s time you got the hell out of my house and off this mountain.”
Chapter Nine
But it was Brent who tore out of the house.
Frozen in place at the kitchen table, Amy could feel his rage resounding through the floorboards of the old Victorian mansion, and sense the change in the flow of air currents when he jerked open the front door and then slammed it shut behind him. And even once outside, she knew by the percussion of shock waves roiling through the thin mountain air when the engine of his pickup roared to life.
Cy sat waiting for her, his front chair legs off the floor. The stillness returned, outside, if not in her heart. She didn’t know where to begin.
“What’s wrong, Amy,” he signed. “Talk to me. You remembered something. What was it?”
She shook her head. “Not that he killed her.”
His eyes narrowed. “What then?”
“It was the freak-show thing, Cy. When he said he was the one entertaining me?”
“Yeah.”
She shivered again. “He...it was...I remembered what happened. Or maybe it’s just that I finally understood what he had done.”
“Go on.”
“Julia had sent us outside. I was holding my March Hare—my stuffed rabbit?” Cy nodded and she went on. “I took it with me when she sent us away. Brent snatched March Hare away from me. Jerked him right out of my arms and ran away.
“He kept running and running. I couldn’t keep up with him. I was so mad I couldn’t even see straight I was crying. I fell down a couple of times. By the time I caught up with him he was sitting beside the ventilation shaft smoking one of Julia’s stash of cigarettes and I couldn’t see March Hare anywhere.”
Cy’s jaw tightened. She nodded. “He threw March Hare down the shaft. I think I knew it but I didn’t want to believe it. I begged him to tell me where March Hare was. He just sat there laughing and smoking, but then I heard these terrible cries coming from the dark hole.”
Cy swore. “Amy, you knew Brent was making the cries, didn’t you? Didn’t you always understand the voices he made for your animals were for pretend?”
Sitting at the kitchen table where she and Brent had so often conspired together, Amy continued, lost in the scene.
“I lay down on the ground so I could see inside the mine shaft. I saw March Hare. He hadn’t fallen that far. I thought I could reach him. I had to save him. I’m certain Brent didn’t push me, but somehow I reached too far. Brent was screaming at me to stop it, but I couldn’t. I got hold of my rabbit and then I was falling. He made a grab for me, I think, but it must have been too late.”
She stared into her mug, gently swirling the last swallowful of her tea. A sense of relief, of finally knowing what had happened settled over her, easing the biting nausea. Brent had been scared. He’d always been afraid—of family ground shifting beneath his feet, of his mother’s loyalties dividing, twisting, always threatening to collapse away from him.
“He wasn’t so very different from me at all, Cy.”
He understood. He couldn’t much sympathize with Brent. He’d as soon beat the living daylights out of Amy’s brother as look at him. But he understood her relief. What Brent had done with her March Hare to make Amy disappear as well made a terrible poignant kind of sense to her. It proved she wasn’t crazy or dim or suffering childish delusions or warped and dangerous memories.
She wasn’t the only one so adversely affected by the disastrous currents swirling between their parents. In his own way, Brent must have shared the same forebodings that had always haunted Amy, crowding her into spying on her grown-ups, even goading her to awaken and creep down the stairs to hear what would happen after her father had rocked her to sleep.
It hit him, then, like the full force of a steer hitting the end of a rope, that Amy had it in her to forgive what her brother had done. What scared the hell out of him was the shock of his own desperate insight that there was nothing he needed so much in this life as the kind of forgiveness Amy dispensed with so much heart, so little rancor.
His own heart thumped. He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t not look, either. He could feel his pulse high in his arms. He knew then that he was so far gone with love for her that he wasn’t going to make it back to a time when he thought he would be better off for cutting himself loose from her.
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t even know who he was if he could chuck his creed of honor out the window for the sake of weaseling the forgiveness he needed out of Amy Reeves. The only honorable thing to do was to cut her loose.
He didn’t know how.
He started to get up, take his mug to the sink, but then sank heavily back into his chair when it struck him what a fool he had been. Sensitive to every nuance of his expression, Amy leaned forward anxiously.
“Cy. What is it?”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to go with her where the sudden thought had taken him. He met her eyes. “Can you tell me what happened when you woke up that night?”
She shrugged. “I climbed out of bed. I took March Hare. I left my room and walked in the shadows and sat down on the landing where I always sat.”
“Why?”
“They were fighting. It scared me. Mommy and Perry. I...” Something out of place, out of time chafed in her mind, but she couldn’t quite grasp it.
“Take your time, Amy. They were fighting. Do you mean fighting physically, or arguing?”
“They were arguing, but she was...I don’t...I didn’t—”
“Did you see them, Amy?”
“No, I couldn’t see them from—” She struggled to remember. “I was on the landing where I showed you. I was crying. I had to be quiet, because if I wasn’t they would catch me.” Her mother would scold, she told Cy, and Fee would scold her and Daddy would catch her up and take her back to bed, not mean, never that, but put out with her.
“Except your dad wasn’t there that time.”
“No. It was Perry who came. Who... who found me spying on them all again.” A tiny wrinkle of worry creased her brow. “We’ve been over all this, Cy. I don’t understand—”
“Humor me,” he urged. “Did Perry accuse you of spying on them?”
“Yes, he said—” She broke off. Confusion swirled all about her. “Dear God.” She looked at him, stricken.
“I could still hear him. I could still hear them fighting, Cy! Otherwise, how could I have known what it sounded like when all Granny Fee’s music boxes were playing at once?”
Her hands described a clamoring that tugged at his heart, not so much for the noise, but for the question clamoring at her now.
He’d gotten it all wrong. They both had. The question was never really what it was that had turned her into such a vigilant little creature, but what it was she heard that night that had forced the terrible, unconscious decision to close her ears forever.
THE SNOWFALL HAD LET UP, and in one of those weather switchbacks the Rocky Mountains were famous for, the sun was shining when they left the forbidding ill-kept house where Brent still lived.
Outside, the road was what it had always been, twisting, winding, wending through a forest of towering old evergreen. The snow was piled deep. The sun shone, sparkling cold and bright. But inside Amy, her world, her landscape, her thoughts, little remained of the old order.
She could still hear, long after the ordeal everyone supposed was the cause of her deafness. She’d grown so used to the silence that she’d forgotten she had always known she wasn’t really deaf.
She was, but not for any reason she could either grasp or heal.
And she still didn’t know where to find the precise moment her terrified, subconscious young mind had shut itself off from hearing even one more thing. Had she been playacting, and forgotten how not to pretend? Withdrawn to safety only to forget the way back?
Huddled across the bench seat from Cy, she braced herself against the jostling of the pickup on the rutted, snowy road like any sane woman, but she was deep into pretending again. Pretending she was only pensive, a tiny bit sad. Because she thought if she didn’t, she would go mad, join her Granny Fee in a place meant for people who heard too many voices...or none at all.
She knew how to put on a happy face. She’d learned it at her father’s knee when she understood that the grief and guilt inside him over her lost hearing was so staggering that only her smiles would keep him with her.
Cy’s sorrow was much the same. She’d seen it in his eyes.
He thought she didn’t know how hard he resisted his feelings for her, how he fought to keep himself from investing himself, his heart and his mind and his sexual feelings in her, but he was wrong. She knew.
Falling in love with a hearing woman was one thing. Ordinary flaws only required ordinary lovers. Steeper ones like hers took a quite heroic man to overcome. But while she was convinced with all her heart that Cy McQuaid was such a man, he would find terrible fault with it even seeming heroic—to her or anyone else—that he loved her.
Even if Cy could rise above his reservations, she fought a constant seesaw battle of her own. He attracted her on every level. He told the truth, even when it was difficult. He treated people, from his partner to her uncle to Granny Fee to her, with respect.
He listened.
He paid attention.
He kept an open mind, and he held himself to incredibly high standards. But he was also a man who assumed charge, took c
ontrol and wouldn’t hesitate to pull rank on her... when she needed to stand on her own, be her own woman, make her own choices, take her own risks, and needed those freedoms like she needed the air she breathed.
By asking for his help, she’d opened herself up in ways she hadn’t ever, ever done before.
So she put on her pensive, independent smile for him when he looked at her.
“You okay with going on into town?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Sure?”
“I’ll be fine, Cy.” She might as well believe it.
The agent who had interviewed Brent had searched the coroner’s financial records. The theory had been that Courson might have demanded a payoff on the spot to deliver a finding of accidental death. But nothing in twenty-five years of federal income tax returns or bank statements had even come close to looking like ill-gotten gains.
While on the drive up it had occurred to Cy that it made sense to look through records of real estate exchanges in the county offices as well. In a ski town like Steamboat, resort property and real estate, even twenty-five years ago, were considered better than money in the bank.
Cy downshifted to slow the pickup as it neared the highway. But it was half-past noon by the time they reached town, and likely that the county offices were closed over the lunch hour. They bought a couple of deli sandwiches and got back into the pickup. Cy drove down near where the river cut through town, onto the end of the rodeo grounds, and parked.
He peeled back the wrapper on his sandwich and took a bite, gesturing with a tilt of his head toward the chutes across the arena, blanketed now with snow. “Busted my butt there one year.”
“How?”
“Bull riding.”
“The bull won?”
“Hell, no.” He sulked, pretending to be offended. “I was in second place going into the final round. That’s second as in a point off of first, woman.”
Amy smirked. “I see. Eight seconds to glory.”
“Damn straight.”
“Come hell or high water.”
“Are you poking fun at me, Amy?”
Her lips curved gently. “No more than you’re poking at yourself.” Her head tilted. “I guess you don’t grow up on a ranch in south Texas and not turn out a cowboy, huh?”