A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense

by Christine Carbo

“We didn’t say that either.”

  Judging by the tightness in his jaw and neck muscles, he wants to wring both of their necks, and I hope for his sake—for our daughter’s sake—that he doesn’t do anything stupid.

  He stares coldly at them. I can feel my heartbeat pick up. Be polite, Reeve, I’m repeating in my head. Don’t anger them.

  “I’m confused,” he finally says respectfully, and I find myself surprised at the relief I feel that he’s cooperating and not being the belligerent man I know he’s capable of being. An image of his losing his temper with a stranger in a bar we went to when we were first dating because the guy was being rude to me comes to my mind. Later, we had fought because I was so angry that he had failed to remember that I was a trained agent and more than able to defend myself. “Is she or isn’t she okay?” he asks.

  “She’s not okay, Mr. Landon.”

  I watch the information sink in. Reeve’s head draws back slightly and his brow pinches immediately in confusion. He’s either surprised or simply a decent actor. I consider myself a good judge of character, but with him, sometimes I’m not so positive. “What’s happened to her?” he asks.

  “Why don’t you tell us,” Reynolds says.

  “I have no idea,” Reeve says.

  Brander holds up his hand. “Let’s slow down, Mr. Landon, we need to stick to our protocol. We need to know step by step what Anne Marie’s movements were yesterday.”

  “I’ve told you,” Reeve says.

  “Have you told us everything?” Brander asks. “Because every little detail might help. Did she make any calls that you noticed?”

  Reeve shakes his head.

  “Did you meet anyone else at the Merc or on your hike?”

  “Just the usual patrons were at the Merc—the owner and a few tourists I didn’t recognize.”

  “And the hike?”

  “No, no one,” he says, then sits still, his mouth set in a frown. He looks taken aback by the news that Anne Marie is not okay, but I’m not sure he understands exactly how she’s not okay. He confirms my impression and asks again, “What’s happened to her? Is she injured?”

  Neither Brander or Reynolds answers him directly, and I realize they’re stringing him along. They want him to say it first—that she’s dead—so that they can box him in with the fact that he knew it without them having informed him of it first. It’s an outdated and somewhat hackneyed interview technique, but sometimes it works. I look at the commander, who’s standing so close to the glass in the chilled room that she’s throwing small clouds of fog onto it with each breath. I ask what’s going on.

  “Suspect says he was with the reporter during the day until sunset, when he drove her to her car at the Merc and dropped her off, which is verified by a witness at the Merc.”

  “And?”

  “And the same witness closing up the store says she saw a woman who matches Anne Marie’s description hop into a black Nissan that had been parked there all day until around five p.m. She said she saw the woman follow the Toyota Tundra north.”

  “And what does that prove? Wasn’t she staying in a friend’s cabin up that way?” I ask.

  “She was, but to get to the cabin, she would need to turn south. She was slightly surprised because she’d had a conversation with the gal in the morning while she was waiting for him, and the victim had told her that she was staying at a friend’s cabin down the North Fork road, even told her the friend’s name, and the lady at the Merc knew her and where her cabin is—toward Columbia Falls, the opposite direction. In other words, she figured the woman would head south, not north, if she were heading home to the friend’s cabin.”

  I bite my lower lip, wondering if she could have had something to do toward the north. There was little up that way besides meadows, streams, the North Fork and mountains and the people who built cabins amid the beauty of it all. It’s not like she could have been running an errand. Still, it proved nothing to the detectives that she headed that way. She could have been wanting to find a spot to take a sunset photo for all anybody knew.

  “And what does the suspect say he did after dropping her off?”

  “Says he went home with his dog and fed him. Says he was alone and didn’t leave his cabin all evening or night, which means he’s got no alibi.”

  I reach into my pocket and feel the plastic bag with the scrunchie. I’m angry at myself and conflicted. I should not have tampered with evidence. Damn it, Reeve, I say in my head. What have you gotten mixed up with? “The cabin of the friend,” I say. “You have an address?”

  “I do.” And just like that, she gives it to me—such is the trust in these parts between us and the local law. “Vivian Gould is her name.”

  “And she has an alibi?”

  “Apparently she was traveling all night, from Seattle to here. We’re in the process of getting some security footage from the two gas stations she stopped at—one to fill up and one to use the restroom and buy coffee and snacks.”

  “And where’s she staying while her place is sealed?”

  Vance tells me and I jot it down and excuse myself.

  • • •

  Sometimes I wonder if it’s my own inability to trust that draws me to men like Reeve, men incapable of forging intimate, sustainable bonds, as if my own detachment is like a shield that makes theirs so difficult to detect. It’s not just Reeve’s shocking childhood story I mull over. I also have my own nagging, defining moments.

  Picture this: I’m in fifth grade and I’m called to the principal’s office and showed to a small room off to the side to meet with a woman I’ve never seen before. The principal, Mrs. Picaretti, says she just needs to chat with me about a few things. She’s already sitting in the room when Mrs. Picaretti shows me in. The woman smiles when I enter, and I see immediately that she’s wearing a bright red blazer and perfectly creased navy pants and that she’s pretty. My younger sister is already in the room too, smiling and very chatty. When I walk closer, I notice the woman smells like flowers.

  She offers me a seat, and I take it, studying her cautiously. I suspect why she’s here. I have this feeling it has something to do with my dad, because he’d come over the night before and he and my mom got into a shouting match. Mom screamed for Toni and me to go to our room, and we did, but we could hear the vicious yelling continue until someone arrived, so we crept out of the room and down the hall to see a policeman standing at the doorway.

  After I sit down, the lady introduces herself. She says her name is Sara Seafeldt, and I decide I like the sound of it, how it plays jump rope with my tongue. I say it a few times in a row: Sara Seafeldt, Sara Seafeldt, Sara Seafeldt; Sara Seafeldt sells seashells by the seashore. Toni is telling her about everything under the sun: what kind of picture she’d been drawing in class; what the school served for lunch; how our dad brought pizza one time when he came to visit; how our mom doesn’t like Daddy coming to visit because “sometimes he’s mean.”

  I glare at Toni to give her the message that she shouldn’t just continue rambling, but it doesn’t matter. She keeps at it while Sara Seafeldt smiles and nods at her, asking her questions like “What does your daddy do when he’s mean?” and Toni replies, “He makes Mommy hurt.”

  “What kind of hurt?”

  “You know, like crying hurt.”

  “So, like emotional hurt?

  “Yeah, and bruises.”

  I tell Toni to be quiet. Toni tucks in her chin and frowns at me.

  “I see.” Finally Sara turns to me and asks how my day has been. I shrug but don’t say anything. She asks me a series of questions about my age, what grade I’m in, if I like school, if I like being home more than I like being at school or the opposite. I give one-word or very short answers. “Ten. Fifth grade. Yes, I like school. I like being in both places,” fibbing about the last.

  She nods, still smiling, and asks me if I ever get to visit our daddy.

  “Sometimes,” I say. “But usually he visits us.”

  Toni
is practically crawling into her lap at this point. She continues to ask questions about our parents and things in general: “Do they fight a lot in front of you? Does your mom make you breakfast? Does your dad take you places to eat when you’re with him?”

  Finally, when she gets up to leave, Toni gives her a big hug, encircling the lady’s hips with her small, thin arms and only reluctantly letting go. Then Toni turns to me with a beaming smile. “I love Sara Seafeldt.” She looks back at Ms. Seafeldt and asks, “When are you coming back?”

  Ms. Seafeldt smiles, pats Toni’s head, and says she’ll be back to see us in another week. When she does come back a week later, Toni practically jumps into her arms while I remain in my seat in the school office.

  Years later, I took higher-level psychology classes at Montclair State University in New Jersey—a feat in itself in my family since neither of my parents went to college, though my being the first to go helped us get the extra financial aid we needed. I thought I wanted to become a licensed clinical social worker just like Sara Seafeldt. One of my professors gave an entire lecture on the symptoms children display when they are in neglectful environments. They are either too clingy or too standoffish. If they’re clingy, they don’t have appropriate boundaries with strangers. They say affectionate things like “I love you” too often, frequently to people they barely know. They easily hug anyone who compliments them or shows them any attention at all because they are so starved for attention themselves. They later become manipulative and dramatic just to get attention.

  I sat in the classroom, remembering Toni’s clinging to the social worker, not wanting her to leave and talking about how she couldn’t wait for her next visit, how she loved her. I remember secretly longing for her visits too, but I always remained aloof even when I didn’t want to. Yet here I was sitting in classes to become just like Sara Seafeldt. My breathing quickened and the professor’s words seemed to elongate as if he was in a tunnel, as if I were in a movie where the actor has just been told by the doctor that he has cancer and the doctor’s voice fades to the edges. This was the moment I realized I would be a fraud if I was going to try to become a social worker because I would be suffering from the same emotional baggage I’d be trying to coach clients through. I’d heard the old saying that it’s the psychologically damaged who become psychologists. It was then I knew I didn’t have what it took to become a social worker because I was one of those children—the one who stayed detached—while Toni was the one who attached too easily, both of us on either end of the spectrum, setting ourselves up to get hurt time and time again. Both of us ultimately starved for affection. I was haunted by the question of how I could help people deal with their troubles and emotions and remain objective if I was emotionally damaged myself.

  I told myself I refused to follow either pattern, Toni’s or mine, because both headed to the same place. My sister’s path led to giving herself up too often, too frequently, to any male who paid her any attention at all. I, in contrast, gave myself to no one—that is, until someone I deemed worthy would come along, a shiny person I thought I could trust, and then I’d jump in like a starving puppy dog.

  My first two relationships ended badly because I clung too tightly, just like Toni, in the end. I told myself I’d never do that again, and I didn’t for a very long time. I thought I had mastered the ability to avoid relationships altogether. My gruff, aloof attitude at work helped hone the faculty even more. But the minute Reeve Landon showed up in my life, I hopped right in. The difference with him, though, was that I never allowed myself to get clingy.

  When we were together, Reeve used to make me laugh. A smile almost sneaks onto my lips when I think of how he used to look at me and sweetly say, “You’re crazy, Ali. You know how I know?”

  “How?” I’d ask.

  “It’s your hair.” He’d twirl a long strand of one of my wavy chestnut curls around his forefinger and wink at me. “It gives you away.” I can still remember how that wink would make me giddy.

  Sometime after we first began dating, after I knew about Sam, Reeve and I were talking in his cabin and Reeve opened up to me. “Sam and I had been best friends since preschool,” he said. “We used to walk to a pond about a mile and a half from our neighborhood and go fishing for brook trout. One time we didn’t get back until it was late, after dark, and we both got into trouble from our parents. I had to eat dinner in my room, just like the boy in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are—you know, the story about the monsters.”

  That was the moment I fell for him. I realized then that Sam’s death marked the death of Reeve’s childhood. As the days proceeded and our relationship grew, the juxtaposition of the unconquerable man before me with the vulnerable boy I knew resided in him made the giddiness I was feeling unspool into a deep, intense attachment.

  But the more I felt the force of my emotions, the more afraid I became. Being at such odds was nothing new—dealing with my own father always made me want to submerse myself and simultaneously pull away to protect myself. Though it was through no fault of his own, it seemed like a bad sign that Reeve evoked in me the same unsafe emotions.

  Now at times when I think of how Reeve and I became intimate so quickly, I cringe. Not because I’m disgusted by it. Quite the opposite. I’m simply embarrassed to think that I ever actually thought that such charged closeness—Reeve whispering softly in my ear, Reeve running his fingers through my hair, Reeve leaning in for that first, knee-weakening kiss—could last. That we could both be saved from the dull ache of loneliness. In the end, I stoically detached from him despite the strength of my emotions because it seemed the end of our relationship was inevitable. We both seemed to be followed by a certain darkness like a stray dog you can’t convince to go away. It was as if we were always reminding each other that people never completely rid themselves of lonesomeness even in the company of a partner.

  So in college, instead of getting a degree as a social worker, I switched majors and got a generic degree in criminal justice that led me absolutely nowhere in terms of a solid career and began working as a secretary for a law firm. When I heard the FBI was looking for people with only two years of work experience after college, especially females, to meet their quota, I jumped. It seemed like a good fit, especially for someone who liked the idea of being a hard-ass. That part suited me—the grueling fitness routines, the badass attitude, the extensive training on how to keep your cool when in crisis—because what I also learned in psychology was that people like me often confuse mad and sad. Those wires get crossed and you jump straight to mad because it’s much easier to get fired up over something that causes you pain rather than to sit quietly in your grief, so much handier to let the heat of rage sear away the bite of sorrow.

  I’m not sure why I’m having these recollections as I walk into the forensics department in the county building in downtown Kalispell, but they do whisper to me that there’s no way Reeve—the boy with such deep regret over killing his best friend—could take another life. My first priority, I tell myself, is to protect Emily, and that might involve snooping around a bit in places I haven’t been asked to snoop around. But as long as I don’t have any direct effect on their investigation, no harm will be done.

  I find the woman I want to speak to, the lead CSI, in her office. Gretchen Larson’s head is down until she hears my boots scuff the carpet and looks up. Gretchen is a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman from Norway and has a slight accent to prove it. I’ve worked with her before, and I’m hoping she can fill me in on Anne Marie Johnson’s crime scene.

  “Hey,” she says, standing up to greet me. “Agent Paige. What do I owe this visit to?”

  “Just have a few questions about the woman in the North Fork. You worked the scene?”

  “I did. Since around eight thirty this morning. I just got back and got the body off to Wilson in Missoula. Ray’s still out there finishing up. That cabin on federal land?”

  “Nah, just checking it out anyway since it’s so close to
the park’s border. You know, in case your guys need a little assistance.” What I’m saying is plausible. We collaborate with local police and the county sheriff quite a bit. In fact, the last case I worked with Gretchen involved the abduction of a young teen in the park, and all local agencies were utilized. But still, I’m wondering if she’ll give me much.

  “You’ve already talked to Deputy Brander?” she asks.

  I sit on the edge of her desk. “I was just at the station. They’re interviewing one guy in particular—a suspect that owns another cabin up that way and that works in the area.”

  “I didn’t hear that. Glad they have a lead.”

  “What do you have so far?” I go out on a limb, but again, our agency’s relationship is so solid with the local force that Gretchen won’t think twice about talking to me. I feel a little guilty about it, but then I think of Emily, and how they were conducting a noncustodial interview, not interrogating Reeve, and I figure I haven’t really interfered in any major way.

  “Could be a number of things: a domestic fight—a lover’s rage—or something more sinister, like a burglary gone bad. She was found outside, on her side, a bullet through her chest. Were you out at the place?”

  “No,” I say. “I hear the place wasn’t hers. That it was a friend of hers lending her cabin for a few nights, and that’s who found her this morning.”

  “That’s correct. The woman came back early from Seattle after driving all night—around seven a.m.—and called from her phone in her cabin, where she has Wi-Fi.”

  “So she was shot? Do you know what kind of weapon?”

  “A rifle, but we’ll know more after the autopsy.”

  “Is that what killed her?”

  “Again, we won’t know that until the pathologist fills us in, whether the bullet killed her or the fall to the ground. She definitely hit her head on the way down. Not sure it matters, though. If someone intended to kill her, it shouldn’t matter if the rock did it because the bullet would have eventually anyway.”

  “Where was she found?”