I don’t laugh or say anything. Not to be rude—I’m just too exhausted.
Wallace grabs the chair and slides it over beside me. “I didn’t go back because I found out Susan was having an affair while I was gone. Yup, that’s right, it can happen to old people too.”
I can see the pain in his face despite the joke, and my heart twists with sorrow, and I do something so uncharacteristic of me that it shocks me a bit too: I reach out and grab Wallace’s forearm and hold it. He freezes, unsure what to do, and then I see moisture gather at the corners of his eyes. I squeeze again, then slowly slide my hand away.
“We’ll talk more when you’re better,” he says. “You don’t want the sordid details now. I’ll be here this winter,” he adds. “I can help you, you know, while you heal.”
“I’d appreciate that,” I tell him, then close my eyes for a second. “I’ll need it.”
“I can see that.” He stands and looks me over from head to toe. “Damn,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. You get some rest now.”
When he leaves, Ali comes in and sets her hand on my arm, just like the doctor. “Ali,” I say to her. “I’m sorry for everything. Sorry for dragging you into this mess.”
She shushes me. “None of that matters now. You’re no longer a suspect.”
My eyes open all the way for the first time. “I’m not?”
“Nope. It’s not public knowledge yet, but they’ve found the person who killed Anne Marie Johnson.”
“They have? Who?”
“Sleep now,” she says. “It’s just one of those crazy things. I’ll fill you in later. It’s nothing for you to worry about right now. All you need to know is that you’re completely off the hook. And”—she looks at me, and she seems a little scared, but I can’t tell for sure—“if, well, if it’s okay with you, when they release you from here, you’ll come home with us. Okay?”
I stare at her, at her curly hair and her energetic eyes. But behind all that energy, there’s a softness I haven’t seen in ages. I think it’s the drugs, but I can’t help myself. My eyes begin to well, and I can feel a hot tear break free and roll to the bandage on my right ear. I grab her hand and hold it. I don’t have anything in mind with the gesture—or anything in mind for the future. I just want to touch her. “Thank you,” I say again. “Will you two stay here, just for a little while longer?”
“Of course.” She smiles at me again, picks up my hand, and kisses the back of it. “Of course we will.”
Ali
* * *
Present—Wednesday
I IMAGINE IT LIKE this: Rose waits outside in her car in the drive outside Vivian’s cabin in the dark. She’s gambled that the nosy journalist will return after spending the day with Reeve and be in the cabin by the time she arrives after dark, after I’ve come home from work late because Herman and I have followed a lead to Polson on the Smith case.
Rose thinks about how Anne Marie doesn’t even know that Reeve Landon is the father of the little girl she babysits. Anne Marie has no clue what she’s messing with. How—if she keeps digging—she could ruin Rose’s life: bring attention to the law and take her away from the little girl and the job she’s come to love. Or worse, land her in prison, which would rip everything normal away. She thinks, There’s no way I’m going there.
She has kept her promise and visited Vince a couple of times, mainly because she realized Vince had the power to tell on her. Thus far, he’d kept his word because he adored her, and even through the trial, he had never breathed a word about her involvement with him. He had kept to the story: it was a robbery that went wrong. He was looking for goods to steal to sell for drug money, that’s all. It was an easy secret to keep because that was part of the bargain. He’d get rid of Kimmie and make his girlfriend happy and get some goods to pawn off as well. Her dad had an expensive camera, a high-end television, and good golf clubs; her mom had nice jewelry, pricey artwork, quality silver, and a laptop.
Rose drives up the North Fork road after nine, after she’s put Emily to bed and I’ve returned from Polson.
When she arrives at Vivian’s place, it’s after ten and dark. The porch light is on, but no rooms are lit inside the cabin. She wonders if Anne Marie has gone to bed. She knocks on the door to wake her up. She didn’t drive all the way up the North Fork to not take care of things. She wants to speak to her, to demand that Anne Marie give her the photograph back, to warn her to quit poking around where she doesn’t belong. She’s borrowed Reeve’s gun out of the back of his truck just in case she needs a little muscle, something to threaten her with.
She knocks several times, the rap on the door loud in the field beside the cabin and the woods out back. When all goes silent and no one comes, she turns the flashlight on and checks the side windows. She sees a travel bag with clothes spilling out of it in one of the rooms and assumes it’s Anne Marie’s. She checks the rest of the windows, looking for the black carrier bag Anne Marie had with her when she came to talk to her. She pulled out a notebook from it when she came to interview her and held it in her lap to take notes, then shoved it back in when she left. It would be much simpler if she could just break in and grab the bag, but she’s certain the journalist has it with her. She goes back to her car. I can wait, Rose thinks, until she comes back.
She gets impatient when Anne Marie doesn’t show after an hour. In fact she’s angry. Maybe she’s not coming back at all. Maybe she’s staying somewhere else. Maybe she’s with Reeve, whom she spent the day with. And that pisses Rose off even more, because there’s a part of Rose that cares for Reeve because he’s Emily’s dad. Maybe she even likes him, or maybe she just feels sorry for him because she knows about his past, and it turns her stomach to think of the pushy journalist with him late into the evening. Rose considers driving over to Reeve’s to check, but what good would that do if she sees that she’s there?
No, she decides. She’ll stay put. There’s no other chance to see this woman. At the very least, she’ll have to come back for her things, and Rose intends to get things straightened out with the annoying woman who has come out of nowhere and poked her nose in Vince Reiko’s and her past. She can’t leave with Anne Marie Johnson knowing her secret, knowing her past. The longer she waits, the angrier and the more stubborn she becomes.
Minutes tick by, and Rose hears an owl hooting in the side woods. She refuses to let herself think about those days when Kimmie came to live with them. About how one awful girl could enter their home and turn her life upside down. But worse than that, she doesn’t want to think about how her own mother let it happen, practically encouraged it, and how her own father was too weak to stop it.
And under all of that, there’s a deep prickling knowledge that she refuses to pay attention to in the deepening night, a knowledge that infuriates her more than anything else as she sits and waits. It’s the understanding that, for the rest of her life, it will require a battle of sheer will to act like she is normal when, in reality, her conscience is constantly waging war in her head. She knows that she will never, ever return to whatever innocence she possessed before she had a teenage fantasy of getting rid of her sister to spite her parents and hatched a plan to embolden Vince Reiko to do something about it, and she understood that one malignant move could make her veer into an entirely different lane for the rest of her life.
She forces the thought out of her head and thinks about prison. About the two times she’s visited Vince Reiko to keep up the charade that she still cared about him so he would remain loyal to her. The thought of being confined is too scary for her to handle. When she decided to stop visiting him—considering that even if he mentioned something about her to someone, it wouldn’t matter anyway because no one would believe him—she had no idea that he had a photo of the two of them together. She’s angry at herself that she’s forgotten something so important. The stale visitation room with its skanky medicinal odor of disinfectant and the broken panel on the ceiling exposing the electric wiring above has stayed in h
er mind. It unsettles her that no one cared enough to fix it. It had to be ten times worse inside the actual prison quarters.
She needs that picture back, and even more, she thinks how nice it would be to shut Anne Marie Johnson up forever. She pictures Reeve’s rifle and fantasizes about pulling the trigger—about how one pull could solve so many problems. And this time she’d be solving her own problems, not relying on some stupid guy. And her conscience? That’s already destroyed anyway.
Before she knows it, it’s going on one a.m. Rose has turned the car on a number of times to heat it up, but it’s off now, and everything is quiet until she hears the sound of tires on gravel and turns to see headlights coming up the long drive. Rose stays in her car, her fists clenching. When Anne Marie drives up, she sees her turn a dark head to look at the waiting car, then pull past it and into the main parking area of the drive.
Rose steps out of her car so that Anne Marie can see her. She’s holding the rifle, perhaps just for show, perhaps for more. She’s not sure how this will play, but she’s glad she has it as a show of strength.
“Oh, it’s you,” Anne Marie says. “I thought you were my friend Vivian.”
Rose forces a lopsided smile through her pent-up anger.
“What are you doing here? Why do you have a gun?” Anne Marie looks scared.
“Just, you know,” Rose says, “it’s late out here. You never know what you’re going to run into. Always good to come prepared. Plus, I thought you might want to see it, you know, for your story. Pretty sure this one here”—she cradles it in both palms, letting her hands sink and lift a little with the heft of it, not knowing Reeve well enough to know the story behind the weapon she’s holding—“could be responsible for the accidental shooting of a little boy in Florida by the very guy you just spent the day in the woods with.”
“Reeve?” Anne Marie asks.
“That’s him.”
“How do you know him?”
“It just so happens I nanny for his little girl, Emily, and when you told me about interviewing a dog handler, well, there’s only one man in these parts who does that. Small world.”
“Oh.” Anne Marie begins to scoot a little closer toward the cabin because even she knows it’s strange to run into the young woman she’s just tried to question about her involvement with a previous boyfriend in jail, who shows up unannounced and carrying a rifle in the middle of the night. “And how did you know I’m staying here?” Anne Marie asks.
“You got that call from your friend when you were talking to me, remember? She gave you the address and you wrote it down on your notepad: 7900 North Fork Road.”
“I see. But it’s kind of late. What is it that you need?”
“I’d like for you to give me the photo that Vince gave you.”
Anne Marie turns to face her straight on because she can’t resist. After all, regardless of the fact that a woman is holding a rifle, she may get more information on the story she’s after. And thus far in Anne Marie’s life, she’s been invincible, just like a fast-driving, carefree college student—the kind of person who leaves empty beer bottles on her lawn. Deep down, she doesn’t believe anything bad will really ever befall her, in spite of the tragedies she writes about and reports on. “You’re admitting that you do know him?”
“I didn’t say that,” Rose says. “I just want the photo.”
“Why would I give it to you?”
“Because I’m standing here with a rifle.” Rose lifts it and points it at Anne Marie. She already removed the safety when she got out of the car, just to be ready. Just in case, she told herself.
“Whoa, now.” Anne Marie lifts up her hands. She has a backpack draped over one shoulder, so one of her arms doesn’t lift up quite as high as the other. “Is that necessary?”
“Is it necessary that you come snooping around my life?” Rose snarls at her. “What makes you think any of this is your business?” The fury begins to spill out, the resentment at her mom, at her dad, at Kimmie, and most of all at herself for getting into something so unwise with Vince Reiko when she was a teenager. Anger at the fact that there’s no turning back once you’ve gone down certain roads in life. “You show up acting like everyone’s story is your own and that you have a right to dig up information like it belongs to you. Well, it doesn’t, and I want the photo back.”
Anne Marie’s face looks white in the porch light and she begins to back up toward the cabin, realizing that she’s not in a good situation. “Okay,” she says. “Just wait out here. I’ll get it. It’s inside.”
“No,” Rose says. “I don’t believe you. Where’s your bag, the one you had the other day?”
“It’s inside.” Anne Marie takes another step backward.
And that’s all it takes—just one more step. Rose pulls the trigger. Anne Marie clutches her chest immediately, her face shocked, and falls back in one swift motion. Anne Marie crumples to the ground. Rose can hear the crunch of Anne Marie’s skull on one of the decorative rocks beside the porch steps.
Rose stops breathing for a second, and when she begins again, she can barely catch it because it comes too rapidly. She doesn’t have time to think about what she’s just done. She rushes to Anne Marie, who has been knocked unconscious, kneels down, and rummages through her backpack. She finds the notebook, opens it up, and sees some notes about Reeve and, further in, about Vince. She flips through the pages nervously, finding the photo tucked into one of the dividing manila folders in between the pages. She looks at it for only a second. It’s a picture of her and Vince she’d completely forgotten about—one taken by a stranger, a fisherman passing by, she now remembers, in front of the Flathead River, a place they went to meet and hang out at. She looks so much younger in the picture, her cheeks still full of adolescence and her hair streaked naturally by the sun. She shoves it in her pocket, replaces the notebook, and runs back to her car. She throws the rifle in and drives home.
Later in her apartment behind my place, where Emily and I lie quietly in our beds, Rose doesn’t get a wink of sleep. She listens to every sound in the night: the screeching tires of someone—probably invincible teenagers—out very late; the sound of cats fighting from a few houses over; dogs barking in response to the cats’ yowls. She strains to hear police sirens coming in the dark, but they don’t. Her thoughts spin in many directions, but she understands one thing: that although she will try to hide what she has just done so compulsively to the reporter, she will pay for it for the rest of her life. She will sneak Reeve’s rifle back into the compartment in his truck the next time she gets a chance; she will visit Vince and tell him she loves him, even though she doesn’t; she will try to act like nothing has happened.
No, Rose won’t be able to sleep peacefully ever again, because although she is a very troubled person, she’s not completely heartless. She’s suddenly more acutely aware than ever before, even more than after Vince went to trial, was convicted, and went to jail for an idea that began in her own mind, that there are always consequences, that the past has the ability to lock a tight chain around you, and there’s nothing to do but drag it around. And that’s where she’ll remain, dragging it around for a very, very long time.
Acknowledgments
Many thank-yous to the amazing team of publishing professionals at Atria, led by the revered Judith Curr. The team’s hard work in seeing my novels through to publication always astounds me. I am tremendously grateful to my editor, Daniella Wexler, for her impressive editing skills; and to the Atria copy editors for catching errors and inconsistencies in the manuscript. Many thanks to David Brown for his enthusiastic help and hard work in publicity, Will Rhino for his guidance in marketing, and Chris Sergio for his fabulous design work.
My agent, Nancy Yost, always makes all the difference with her business expertise, guidance, unwavering support, and, most importantly, sense of humor. Thank you also to Sarah Younger for being so helpful.
I owe special thanks to John Cooney and Bryan Denson for all FBI-rel
ated matters and for taking the time to explain how the Bureau and its agents work. Thank you again to Frank Garner, former chief of police in Kalispell, and Commander Brandy Hinzman with the Flathead County sheriff’s office for clarifying local law enforcement matters.
My appreciation is beyond words for Suzanne Siegel’s friendship and all of her assistance: priceless research, reading of drafts, wise counsel, and limitless reassurance. Much gratitude to Kathy Dunnehoff, friend, plotter, author, and instructor, for all of her support and spot-on writing advice, and to the brilliant Cindy Brown, fellow mystery author, for all of her inspiration and assistance in helping to shine light on several main plot points in this book. To Janet Vandermeer, thank you for the enormous help in reading pages and for all the invaluable book-launch help.
My family is an incredible support system as I continue to find my way through the world of publishing: my husband, Jamie; my children, Mathew, Caroline, and Lexie; my parents, Robert and Jeanine Schimpff; my brothers, Cliff and Eric, and their wives, Pam and Lee Anne; my aunts, Janie Fontaine and Barbara Dulac.
I owe countless thanks to many more folks for their generous support in my journey as an author. I can’t name them all, but I owe heartfelt thank-yous to Jackie Brown, Patti Spence, Ginnie Cronk, Mara Goligoski, Marian Ellison, Sarah Fajardo, and Derek and Elizabeth Vandeberg. Huge thank-yous to other supportive authors, all the extraordinary booksellers out there, book reviewers, all the amazing book clubs I’ve participated in, both local and afar, and of course all you wonderful readers! With each book, I continue to be overwhelmed and inspired by the encouragement I receive.
Any mention of landmarks, popular local establishments, or made-up establishments resembling actual businesses is only done to gain verisimilitude. Always, all errors, deliberate or by mistake, are wholly mine.
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