A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense

by Christine Carbo

  “I got an internship with Timberhaus that led to a full-time job, but I always wanted to make it back to this area, even though my family moved away some time ago, so the next best thing was buying a cabin here,” she says.

  “Married?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head. “I had a boyfriend for six years, but we just broke up. Commitment issues.” She shrugs.

  I’m about to ask “Yours or his?” but realize it’s not relevant, and if she answered truthfully, I wouldn’t have a reply, especially as a single mom who isn’t sure whether the commitment issues ultimately lay more on Reeve’s shoulders or mine. “So, tell me about this particular visit and your relationship with Anne Marie. You’re obviously friends—close friends?” I don’t feel the need to rub the loss in her face, so I use the present tense for the sake of comfort.

  “Yeah, she was my roommate in college, at Gonzaga.” A mix of emotions flood onto Vivian’s face for the first time since I’ve walked in. “We’ve kept in touch ever since.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.

  She nods and swallows the surging grief back, her eyes watering, her cheeks flushing.

  “Can you tell me about your plans and why Anne Marie was staying at your cabin?”

  “We were talking last week—just catching up like we always do—and she told me that she planned on being in the Flathead this week because she had interviews to do up in the area, and she was interviewing someone who lived up the North Fork, close to my cabin. She was writing a piece about a dog program for someone—I think she mentioned the Sierra Club. So I offered her my place. She’s visited me there before, and I said I’d been thinking about coming out for a long weekend, taking a Thursday and Friday off, and why not do it when she was in town. I love it here in the fall”—she glances vacantly out the window at the lake—“and I hadn’t been out yet, so we made a plan for her to go ahead and stay on her own until I got there. There’s a spare key I keep hidden and I told her where to find it—under one of the flowerpots.”

  “And you planned on getting there when?”

  “I planned on leaving a little early from work on Wednesday and maybe stopping in Spokane to sleep and driving the rest of the way in the morning, but I ended up working late on Wednesday, and by the time I got on the road, it was already nine. I figured I’d be exhausted when I made it to Spokane, but I wasn’t at all. I was wired and didn’t feel like stopping, so I just drove. I guess I was excited to get to the cabin and to see Anne Marie. I wanted to have the whole day ahead of us in case we wanted to go for a hike or something.”

  “So you drove through the night—what, nine, ten hours from Seattle to your cabin?”

  She tells me that she didn’t notice the exact time, but stopped several times along the way to grab coffee, use the restroom, and whatnot. “Probably more like ten, in all,” she says.

  “What time did you reach your cabin?”

  “I think around seven. I pulled up . . .” Vivian’s face goes sheet white with the memory, and a mix of expressions pepper her face—anxiety, fear, grief. I wait for her to continue. “It was still fairly dark,” she says, “but when my car lights spread across the lawn and the sides of them fanned out on the front deck and steps, I noticed something in front, like maybe Anne Marie had left a duffel bag or something outside and forgotten to take it in. I didn’t want to leave the lights blaring, though, because I was aware she’d be asleep, so I turned them off quickly, thinking I’d pick up whatever it was that was left out and take it inside. But a part of me knew or sensed something was different, like it couldn’t be a duffel bag. It seemed wrong for that—too big, too oddly shaped. I thought maybe a deer or another animal had been shot in the woods and then happened to walk by and died right in front of the cabin, but even that seemed way too strange. I shooed it all away, though. Right? That’s what you do. Go on as usual, not thinking of such . . .”

  Her voice drifts off. I register the thought. She’s right. That’s all one does, proceed as programmed by ourselves, by our routines—in this case, grab the bags and head to the door and check it out, not conceiving of something as abnormal as a dead body. “So you did what?”

  “I turned the car off, began to get my bags out of the trunk, and then went to the cabin.”

  “Did Anne Marie know to expect you so early? Had you called her to let her know that you weren’t going to stop in Spokane?”

  “I didn’t know myself until it was pretty late. I reached Spokane around two a.m. and texted her to say I was going to continue on, but I wasn’t sure how far I’d go, that I’d stop somewhere if I got tired. The cell service is sketchy at the cabin. I have Wi-Fi there, but it doesn’t always work so great for texts. She didn’t reply, so I figured she was already asleep or wasn’t getting my texts.”

  Two magpies with long dark tail feathers and iridescent bluish-green wings land on the deck outside the French doors. One squawks obnoxiously, and Vivian startles, then rubs her face with both hands as if she needs to wake herself out of this new reality. Pesky birds, I think. Even though it’s a coincidence that they’re on her deck, I’ve lived in Montana long enough to know that they’re known for finding the wounded, for picking at insects or ticks on the backs of cattle or other livestock and making the wounds worse. Since it’s not officially my case, I feel sort of like the magpie, pestering her when she’s already been through it all with the county. I wonder if Vivian has slept at all after pulling an all-nighter and then dealing with the police all day. She still looks pallid, but I nudge her on, knowing this is the tough part, but she’s already been over it, so she’ll be okay telling it again. “And then?”

  “I saw the . . .”—she pauses—“you know, I saw her. Lying crumpled like that on the ground.”

  “You could see it was her?”

  “Not at first. Like I said, it was dark. I had my flashlight turned on on my phone. And her face, well, it was turned down slightly. She was on her side, but I could see it was her—her hair, her body, her clothes. The blood.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “It was awful, I panicked. I looked around, but it was quiet. I knelt down and shook her, wondering if maybe she’d been drinking and passed out or something weird like that, but I saw . . . I saw the . . . all that blood under her, and then I screamed. I ran back to my car and got in and tried to call for help, but then I quickly realized that my phone didn’t have service out in the car. So I had two choices: go into the cabin and use the Wi-Fi or drive to the Merc and roust someone up to use their phone. I ended up going in the cabin and calling 911.”

  “Was it locked?”

  “Yes, it was, and I had to use my key.”

  “You keep your key on you at all times?”

  “I do. On my key chain.”

  “And there are no extra keys besides yours and the spare Anne Marie had?”

  “No, just the two.”

  “Did anyone besides Anne Marie know you were coming?”

  “Only a few friends in Seattle and my parents.”

  I tear off a sheet of paper, hand it to her, and ask her to write the names of her friends and her parents down. “Where do your parents live?” I ask.

  “In Denver.”

  “Do you know if Anne Marie told anyone that she’d be staying with you?”

  She shrugs. “I have no idea. Obviously, the guy she was interviewing knew she was staying somewhere around here. I’m not sure if she told him exactly where, and I have no idea if she told anyone else. I’m guessing Jeffrey O’Brien, the guy that runs the dog program, might have known she was coming here to do the interview, but I don’t know that for sure.”

  “And how do you know about the guy who runs the program?”

  “She’s mentioned his name.”

  I’m thinking it’s slightly odd that a reporter doing a write-up on the dog handlers would bother mentioning the name of the program director to a friend. But maybe they simply gabbed a lot. This is when it’s nice to have an
other agent with you. If Herman had been here, I could bounce it off him after we leave or at least throw him a glance to check out his response—watch him raise an eyebrow to show he also thinks it’s weird or give a one-shouldered twitch to suggest he doesn’t. “So,” I continue, “Anne Marie mentioned the director of the program to you?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She looks down and to her side at the carpet, and I get the feeling that she’s hiding something. “Just, you know, in passing.”

  “Did she mention the name of the dog handler up here she intended to interview?”

  Vivian looks at me again, and I notice her eyes are bloodshot. She crinkles her brow, thinking. “She probably did.”

  “And do you recall his name?”

  “No, I can’t remember it.”

  Reeve

  * * *

  Present—Thursday

  I GO STRAIGHT DOWN the hall to the attendant in the entrance foyer, with one of them—Reynolds or Brander—following closely behind me. I don’t turn to see who it is, but I realize they’re not going to let me walk through the building alone and one of them needs to escort me out. When I get to the front, I ask the woman at the desk for my cell phone. She looks past my shoulder and I finally turn to see it’s Brander, the pleasanter one. Brander nods for her to give it to me. He takes out a card from his pocket. “Mr. Landon, if there’s anything else you think of, please give us a call.”

  “I’ll do that,” I say, taking the card. Suddenly I feel foolish, like I’ve misread the situation—misinterpreted their treatment of me. Maybe I’m paranoid. I thank the woman for my phone and head for the glass doors. In the western sky, a peach color spreads behind the tree branches because the sinking sun has illuminated the cloud banks from underneath. The branches that are bare look spindly and frail. I check the time on my phone: it’s 5:26 p.m.

  I draw in a deep breath of autumn air. It’s delicious. I want to gulp it like it’s cold water, so I stand for a second and continue to take it in, my mouth open. The golden maple trees lazily drop their leaves, one or two falling silently at a time, and I have this strange longing to go scoop them up, to smell the pungent earth, as if that scent is dearer to me than anyone or anything. I stand for a moment to get my bearings, but I sense I don’t have time for that—that I should hurry and get going. Once again, a strong urge to see Emily overcomes me, so I continue to my truck.

  I hop in and call Ali. The phone goes to her voicemail and I leave a message for her to call me as soon as possible. I’ve just put my key into the ignition when a loud rap on the glass startles me, making me flinch. “Jesus,” I say when I see Detective Reynolds standing beside my car. I roll down my window.

  “Sorry to scare ya,” he says, a lopsided grin on his face. “But just wanted to catch you before you left. We forgot to mention that we might want to chat with you again, so we’d appreciate it if you made yourself available—you know, didn’t go far.”

  I sit still for a moment without commenting, my heart skipping a beat. There’s something in the cockiness of Reynolds’s face that makes me feel like I’m being stalked, like I’m trapped even in my car as I try to leave. He holds out his card. “I know you have Detective Brander’s info. You should have mine too. Call us if you think of anything else, and again, please stay available.”

  I grab the card. It feels prickly in my hand and I want to crumple it into a small ball and toss it. “Okay, but my job demands I go to remote areas that have no cell service.”

  Reynolds looks like he’s thinking about that, then says, “Like I said, we’d appreciate it if you made yourself available.” He walks off, the sound of his boots scuffing the pavement. It’s not until I hear them fade that I feel like I can begin to relax.

  I sit for a moment before starting the engine, staring at the bright maple leaves falling from the trees and scattered in piles across the curbs. My heart’s still hammering in my chest, and I whisper out loud, “What have you done, you fool? What’s happening?”

  I’m scared and pissed off. I consider going back in and asking to speak to Reynolds or Brander so that I can tell them that she came over. But an ominous feeling overtakes me. If I go in and tell them that, my life may never be the same.

  I call Ali again, and this time she picks up. “Reeve,” she says, “what’s going on? Are you still at the county justice center?”

  “I’m out in the parking lot. I just left even though they wanted me to stay longer.”

  “I see,” she says. “How did it all go?”

  I don’t answer. “Where are you?” I ask her instead.

  “Emily’s at the house with Rose. I’ve got McKay. I’m on my way back to Kalispell now. I can meet you there in ten.”

  I agree to meet her. All I want to do right now is to see my daughter and my dog. I turn the ignition, back out, and drive to Ali’s, hoping the afternoon drops away from me like the falling leaves.

  Ali

  * * *

  Present—Thursday

  WHEN I REACH my house, Reeve’s truck is already in the driveway, off to the side, leaving me room to pull into the garage. McKay has been letting loose low moans and anemic-sounding whimpers the entire way back from Whitefish, probably from being in my car too long and perhaps because he hasn’t played fetch all day. When he spots Reeve’s truck, he starts in with an excited, full-pitched cry. I park next to Rose, get the leash on McKay, and let him out. He strains against the lead, smelling the ground for Reeve, heading for the front door.

  Emily comes barreling out, shrieking, “Kay-Kay!” She gives him a big hug while he wags his tail and prances with excitement around her. Reeve follows her out and looks at me for only a second, then watches Emily with McKay, avoiding further eye contact with me. He gives them a moment before stepping in and commanding McKay to sit. Once he does, Reeve kneels down and pets his chest, telling him that he’s a good boy. McKay makes funny grumbling noises and pushes his head into Reeve affectionately, then begins sniffing Reeve’s hands and quivering with excitement.

  “I don’t have it,” Reeve holds out his palm, then looks at me. “You have his ball?”

  “No, I forgot it. Is that a problem?”

  “No. I have a spare in my pack.” He motions to his truck. “He’s just going to bug everyone until he gets his fix.” McKay whimpers loudly as if to drive that sentiment home.

  “Tell me about it,” I say.

  “Not me,” Emily pipes in. “He doesn’t bug me.”

  “I know, sweetie,” Reeve says. “That’s because he loves you more than his ball, which says a lot.”

  Emily grins with pride, her small pearly teeth shining in the fading light. The braids I put in her hair this morning are messy. Tendrils reach out like an electric current has charged them.

  Reeve looks at me and says, “Thanks for going all the way out there to get him.”

  “No problem.” I raise my brow and tilt my head in a we-need-to-talk gesture. “Hey, sweetie”—I turn to Emily—“would you take McKay around back?” I turn to Reeve. “If that’s all right?”

  “Remember, hon,” he says to Emily, “work before fetch. No exceptions. I’ll get his samples and his ball in a minute.”

  “I know, Daddy.” She grabs the leash from her dad and gives us both a big smile before running around the house with McKay to the backyard.

  Reeve and I step inside, and I tell Rose not to leave just yet and ask her if she can keep an eye on Emily in the backyard, since dusk is falling. Fortunately, Rose lives in an attached apartment on the side of the house that I took out a home equity line of credit to build when I was pregnant. I knew that once my maternity leave was over, I was going to need someone around at a moment’s notice to take care of my daughter. With my job, I sometimes get called out in the middle of the night. Rose understands that she’s pretty much always on call for me, and I pay her fairly well for it with Reeve’s help.

  I bring Reeve into my office and shut the door. He finds a spot against the wall and leans into it,
crossing his arms. I take note of his defensive position, but have no intention of handling him with kid gloves. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Ali”—he sighs and holds up a hand defensively—“I can’t go into it all right now, but I’m a suspect in something that has to do with a reporter who’s died.”

  “I’ve gathered that much. I saw part of your questioning.”

  “You did? How?”

  “Easy. Just walked right in.” I say this with satisfaction. “Through the one-way.”

  He stares at me. “And?”

  “And I caught the part where you didn’t admit that Anne Marie was at your place. Any particular reason for that? Because quite frankly, Reeve, I probably don’t need to tell you that if they didn’t have much to go on before, then you’ve just given it to them by not being forthright.”

  Reeve looks at me silently, his face rigid. Finally he says, “How do you know?”

  “Know that she was at your place?”

  He nods. He looks like a kid who’s been caught stealing in the candy shop, and I want to kick him to snap him out of it. I roll my eyes instead. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Wineglasses left unwashed.” I think, Scrunchie in your bed, but don’t say it.

  “Wineglasses?” he says. “That proves nothing. I could have had any number of people over for wine.”

  “Then did you provide their names? Who you had over so they can verify it? So they can give you an alibi?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Yeah, because there are no other names to provide except for hers, right?”

  He doesn’t answer at first, and I’m surprised at how much a hollow ache balloons inside me. It’s a sobering moment because it’s the first time in a while that it’s hit me straight on that there’s a chink in my armor when it comes to Reeve, that the story I feed myself daily—that I don’t mind being single and that I haven’t missed him—might have holes. I want him to say that I’m wrong, that a few friends just came over and that she was never there. I stare him down, feeling my chest rise with each angry intake of air.