by Nora Roberts
He’d stayed, more for Meg, she knew, more for the daughter who was the image of him than for the woman who’d given him that child. He’d stayed, but he’d never settled.
She’d resented him for that. Resented Meg. How could she do otherwise? She wasn’t built to do otherwise. She’d been the one to work, hadn’t she? To make sure there was food on the table and a roof over their heads.
And she knew, when he’d gone off, to pick up jobs, to take a break, to climb his damn mountains, that he’d gone to whores.
Men wanted her. She could make any man want her. And the only one she really wanted had gone to whores.
What were his mountains but other whores? Cold, white whores that had seduced him away from her? Until he’d stayed inside one and left her alone.
But she’d survived, hadn’t she? She’d done better than survive. She’d found what she wanted here. Most of what she wanted.
She had money now. She had her place. She had men, young, hard bodies in the night.
So why was she so unhappy?
She didn’t like to think long thoughts, to look inside herself and worry about what she’d find there. She liked to live. To move, to keep in motion. You didn’t have to think when you were dancing.
She turned, vaguely irritated by the knock on her door. “Come on in.”
She smoothed her face out, and the sultry smile was automatic when she saw John. “Well, hi there, good-looking. School out? It’s that late already?” She patted her hair as she looked at her desk. “And here I’ve been daydreaming, wasting the day away. I’m going to have to get out there and see what Big Mike’s whipping up for tonight’s special.”
“I need to talk to you, Charlene.”
“Sure, honey. I’ve always got time for you. I’ll make us some tea, and we’ll get all cozy.”
“No, don’t.”
“Baby, you look all frowny and serious.” She crossed to him and skimmed a finger down each of his cheeks. “Of course you know I love when you’re serious. It’s so sexy.”
“Don’t,” he said again and took her hands.
“Is something wrong?” Her fingers tightened on his like wires. “Oh God, is someone—something else—dead around here? I don’t think I can take it. I don’t think I can stand it.”
“No. It’s nothing like that.” He let go of her hands, eased back a step. “I wanted to tell you, I’ll be leaving at the end of the semester.”
“You’re taking a vacation? You’re going to be taking a trip just when Lunacy’s at its best?”
“I’m not taking a vacation. I’m leaving.”
“What’re you talking about? Leave? For good? That’s just nonsense, John.” The flirty smile faded, and something hot and sharp stabbed in her belly. “Where would you go? What would you do?”
“There are a lot of places I haven’t seen, a lot of things I haven’t done. I’ll see them. I’ll do them.”
She felt her heart sink as she looked up into his dependable face. The ones who matter, her mind whispered, leave you. “John, you live here. You work here.”
“I’ll live and I’ll work somewhere else.”
“You can’t just . . . why? Why are you doing this?”
“I should’ve done it years ago, but you get into the drift. Float your life away. Nate came to see me at school last week. Some of the things he said made me think, made me look back over . . . too many years.”
She wanted to find her anger, the sort that pushed her to shout, to break things. The sort that swept her clean. But there was only dull worry. “What does Nate have to do with this?”
“He’s the change. Or the rock in the stream that caused the change. You drift, Charlene, like water in a stream, and maybe you don’t notice as much as you should what’s going by.”
He touched her hair, then dropped his hand again. “Then a stone drops into the stream, and it disrupts. It changes things. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But nothing’s quite the same again.”
“I never know what you’re talking about when you go on like that.” She pouted as she turned around and kicked at her desk, and the gesture made him smile. “Water and rocks and streams. What does that have to do with you coming in here like this and telling me you’re leaving. You’re going away. Don’t you even care how I feel?”
“Entirely too much for my own good. I loved you the first minute I saw you. You knew it.”
“But not anymore.”
“Yes, then, now, all the years between. I loved you when you were with another man. And when he was gone, I thought, Now, she’ll come to me. And you did. To my bed, at least. You let me have your body, but you married someone else. Even knowing I loved you, you married someone else.”
“I had to do what was right for me. I had to be practical.” She did throw something now—a little crystal swan. But its destruction gave her no satisfaction. “I had a right to look out for my future.”
“I would’ve been good to you, and for you. I’d have been good to Meg. But you chose differently. You chose this.” He spread his hands to indicate The Lodge. “You earned it. You worked hard. You built it up. And while Karl was alive, you still came to me. And I let you. To me and to others.”
“Karl wasn’t after sex, or hardly. He wanted a partner, someone to take care of him and this place. I kept my end,” she said passionately. “We had an understanding.”
“You took care of him and this place. And when he died, you kept taking care. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve asked you to marry me, Charlene, the number of times you’ve said no. The number of times I’ve watched you go off with someone else or slide into my bed when there wasn’t someone else. I’m done with it.”
“I don’t want to get married, so you’re just going to take off?”
“You slept with that man the other night. Part of the hunting group. The tall one with dark hair.”
She jerked up her chin. “So what?”
“What was his name?”
She opened her mouth, realized her mind was blank. She couldn’t remember a face, much less a name, and barely remembered the groping in the dark. “What do I care,” she snapped out. “It was just sex.”
“You’re not going to find what you’re looking for, not with nameless men nearly half your age. But if you have to keep looking, I can’t stop you. That’s been clear enough right from the start of this. But I can stop being your fallback position.”
“Go on, then.” She scooped up a pile of paperwork from her desk, threw it into the air. “I won’t care.”
“I know. If you did, really did, I wouldn’t go.”
He stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.
HE WAS DAZZLED BY THE LIGHT. Nate couldn’t get enough of it, no matter how long the day lasted, he wanted more. He could feel it penetrating flesh and bone, charging him.
He hadn’t woken from a nightmare in days.
He woke to light, worked and walked through it in the day. He thought in it and ate in it; he soaked in it.
And each night he watched the sun slide down behind the mountains, he knew it would rise again in a few hours.
There were still nights when he’d slip out of Meg’s bed, walk out with the dogs for company to watch the lights play havoc with the night sky.
He could still feel the wound, throbbing under the scars on his body. But he thought the pain was a healing one now. He hoped to God it was. A kind of acceptance for what he’d lost and an opening to what he could have.
For the first time since he’d left Baltimore, he called Jack’s wife, Beth.
“I just wanted to know how you were. You and the kids.”
“We’re okay. We’re good. It’s been a year since . . .”
He knew. A year today.
“Today’s a little rough. We went out this morning, took him flowers. The firsts are the hardest. The first holiday, first birthday, first anniversary. But you get through it, and it’s a little easier. I thought—hoped—you’d call today. I�
�m so glad you did.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me.”
“We miss you, Nate. Me and the kids. I worry about you.”
“I’m okay, too. Better.”
“Tell me what it’s like there. Is it awfully cold and quiet?”
“Actually, it’s around sixty today. As for quiet . . .” He looked over at his board. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty quiet. We’ve had some flooding. Not as bad as in the southeast but enough to keep us busy. It’s beautiful.”
He turned to his window now. “Like nothing you can imagine. You have to see it, and even then it’s hard to imagine.”
“You sound good. I’m glad you sound good.”
“I didn’t think I’d make it here.” Anywhere. “I wanted to. I didn’t care so much until I got here. Until I was here, and then I wanted to. But I didn’t think I would.”
“Now?”
“I think I will. Beth, I met someone.”
“Oh?” There was a laugh in her voice, and he closed his eyes to hear it. “Is she wonderful?”
“Spectacular, in so many ways. I think you’d like her. She’s not like anybody else. She’s a bush pilot.”
“A bush pilot? Isn’t that one of those people who fly around in those tiny planes like maniacs?”
“Pretty much. She’s beautiful. Well, she’s not, but she is. She’s funny and tough, and she’s probably crazy, but it fits her. Her name’s Meg. Megan Galloway, and I’m in love with her.”
“Oh, Nate. I’m so happy for you.”
“Don’t cry,” he said when he heard the tears.
“No, it’s good. Jack would find a million ways to tease you, but under it, he’d have been happy for you, too.”
“Well, anyway, I just wanted to tell you. I just wanted to talk to you and tell you and say that maybe sometime you and the kids could come up. It’s a great place for a summer vacation. By June it won’t be dark till midnight, and then they tell me it’s more like twilight than dark. And it’s warmer than you think, or so they tell me. I’d like you to see it, to meet Meg. I’d like to see you and the kids.”
“I can promise we’ll come for the wedding.”
His laugh was a little jerky. “I haven’t moved in that direction.”
“I know you, Nate. You will.”
When he hung up, he was smiling. The last thing he’d expected. He left the board uncovered—a kind of symbol that he was investigating in the open now—and walked out of his office.
It still gave him a jolt to see Peter with his arm in a sling. The young deputy sat at his desk, punching keys one-handed.
Desk duty. Paperwork detail. A cop—and that’s what the kid was—could die of sheer boredom.
Nate walked over. “Want to get out of here?”
Peter looked up, one finger of his good hand poised over the keyboard. “Sir?”
“Want me to uncuff you from that desk for a while?”
Light came into his face. “Yes, sir!”
“Let’s take a walk.” He grabbed a two-way. “Peach, Deputy Notti and I are on foot patrol.”
“Um. Otto’s already out,” Peter told him.
“Hey, crime could be rampant out there for all we know. Peach, you’ve got the helm.”
“Aye, aye, captain,” she said with a snicker. “You boys be careful.”
Nate took a light jacket from a peg. “Want yours?” he asked Peter.
“Nah. Only Lower 48ers need a jacket on a day like this.”
“That so? Well, then.” Deliberately, Nate rehung the jacket.
Outside it was brisk enough and overcast. Rain was probably on its way, and undoubtedly, Nate thought, he’d regret the gesture of leaving the jacket before they were finished.
But he headed down the sidewalk with the damp, frisky air blowing through his hair. “How’s the arm?”
“Pretty good. I don’t think I need the sling, but between Peach and my mother, it’s not worth the grief.”
“Women get all fussy when a guy gets himself shot.”
“Tell me about it. And try to be, you know, stoic about it, and they’re all over you.”
“I haven’t talked to you too much about the incident. Initially I told myself I’d made a mistake taking you out there.”
“I spooked him when I got out of the car. Incited the situation.”
“A squirrel dropping an acorn would’ve spooked him, Peter. I said initially I told myself I’d made a mistake. The fact is, I didn’t. You’re a good cop. You proved it. You were down. You were hurt and dazed, but you backed me up.”
“You had the situation controlled. You didn’t need backup.”
“I might have. That’s the point. When you stand with someone in a volatile situation, you have to be able to trust him—no reservations.”
The way he and Jack had trusted each other, he thought. So you’d go through the door, into the alley, no matter what waited in the dark.
“I want you to know I trust you.”
“I . . . I thought you had me on the desk because you were trying to ease me out.”
“I’ve got you on the desk because you’re injured. In the line, Peter. A commendation regarding your actions during the incident is going in your file.”
Peter stopped, stared. “A commendation.”
“You earned it. It’ll be announced at the next Town Hall meeting.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Stoic works.”
They crossed the street at the corner to swing up the other side. “I have something else to tell you, and it’s sensitive. Regarding the investigation our department is conducting. The homicides.”
He caught Peter’s quick glance. “Whatever the State Police have determined, this department is treating them as homicides. I have several statements from individuals giving their whereabouts during the times in question. Most of those statements, however, can’t be corroborated, at least not to my satisfaction. That includes Otto’s.”
“Oh, but chief, Otto’s—”
“One of us. I know. But I can’t cross him off the list because he’s one of us. There are a lot of people in this town, or outlying it, who had the opportunity for these three crimes. Motive’s a different thing. The motive for the two subsequent arrow back to Galloway. What was the motive for his murder? Crime of passion, gain, cover-up? Drug-induced? Maybe a combination of those motives. But whoever it was, he knew.”
Nate scanned the streets, the sidewalks. Sometimes it was what you knew that waited in the dark. “He knew them well enough to do that winter climb with his killer and with Max. Just the three of them. He knew his killer well enough to indulge in, I guess we’d call it role-playing while they were up there, enduring harsh conditions.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“He had a journal. It was on him—and left on him. Coben gave me a copy.”
“But if he had a journal, then—”
“He never used the names of his companions. They were on some sort of lark. The kind that tells me if he hadn’t been killed up there then, he’d have died on some other climb unless he’d straightened up. They were smoking grass, popping speed. Playing Star Wars. Galloway as Luke, Max as Han Solo, and ironically enough Galloway’s killer in the Darth Vader role. The mountain became that ice world they were on.”
“Hoth. I like the movies,” Peter added with a little hunch to his shoulders. “I collected the action figures and stuff when I was a kid.”
“Me, too. But these weren’t kids. They were grown men, and somewhere along the line, the game got out of hand. Galloway wrote how Han—I believe that was Max—injured his ankle. They left him behind in a tent with some provisions and kept going.”
“That proves Max didn’t kill him.”
“Depends on how you angle it. You could speculate that Max decided to follow, caught up with them in the ice cave and went crazy. You could further speculate that Max held the Vader role and killed both his playmates. Those aren’t
my personal theories, but they’re theories. And the State accepts the second one.”
“That Mr. Hawbaker killed both guys? Then got himself down alone? I can’t see it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I know I was just a little kid when all this happened, but Mr. Hawbaker never had a rep for being, you know, bold and, um, self-sufficient. You’d have to be both to handle that descent.”
“I agree. Later in the journal, Galloway wrote that the Darth character was showing signs of—let’s call it lunacy—anger, risk taking, accusations. A lot of drugs involved in this and, from what I’ve read, a by-product of the strain, altitude sickness, the high some climbers get from being up there.”
Nate watched Deb come out of The Corner Store to take Cecil for a walk. The dog was wearing a bright green sweater.
“Galloway was worried, worried about this guy’s state of mind,” he continued as he casually exchanged waves with Deb. “About getting them all down safe. His last journal entry was written in the ice cave. He never got out of it, so he was right to be worried. But he still wasn’t worried enough to take definite steps to protect himself. There were no defensive wounds on the body. His own ice ax was still in his belt. He knew his killer, just like Max knew his. Just like Yukon knew the man who slit his throat.
“We know him, too, Peter.” He sent another wave to Judge Royce, who strode toward KLUN with a cigar clamped between his teeth. “We just haven’t recognized him yet.”
“What do we do?”
“We keep going through what we know. We keep working with the layers until we know more. I’m not telling Otto about the journal. Not yet.”
“God.”
“This is tougher on you. These are people you’ve known all your life, or a good part of it.”
He nodded down the street where Harry stood on the sidewalk outside The Corner Store catching a smoke and talking to Jim Mackie. Across from them Ed walked briskly in the direction of the bank but stopped to exchange a word with the post mistress who was out sweeping her stoop.
Big Mike came out of The Lodge and jogged, undoubtedly heading for The Italian Place and his daily bout of shoptalk with Johnny Trivani. His little girl let out belly laughs as she rode his shoulders.