by Tami Hoag
She congratulated herself on her resolve as she watched him drive out onto the road and disappear in a cloud of dust and a glow of taillights. But even as she stood there, resolute, there was a hollow pang in her chest.
The telephone interrupted her melancholy, ringing as suddenly and loudly as the starting gate bell at Churchill Downs. Elizabeth jumped to answer it, thinking—hoping—it would be Trace. Her temper had burned off, but not the need to see him and talk to him and try to reach him. She snatched up the receiver on the kitchen wall, smiling with a premature sense of relief. “Hi, honey, I—”
“Bitch.”
The word stopped her cold. She just stood there, stunned, her brain scrambling to shift gears. The silence on the line became so absolute, she almost had herself convinced she'd imagined the voice. Then it came again, like a dog growling, low and menacing, eerie and evil.
“Bitch.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth and closed it like a fish gasping for air. No sound came out, no air went in. The sense of violation was sudden and sickening. Someone was invading her home. She looked around wildly, as if she expected to see the caller standing in her kitchen doorway. There was no one. The house was dusky and silent. She was alone. The word brought with it an oppressive sense of dread and vulnerability. Alone.
“Whore,” the voice growled.
Shaken and shaking, Elizabeth turned and slammed the receiver back in its cradle, then jerked it back up and dropped it to the floor.
“Whore.”
She stared in horror at the receiver swinging down along the baseboard, too terrified to rationalize an unbroken connection. Then she jammed both hands down on the cradle and kicked the receiver as if to make sure it was dead this time. A dozen irrational thoughts ran through her head—it was Helen Jarvis doing her exorcist voice, it was Brock tormenting her, someone had seen her with Dane through the kitchen window, the killer was still running loose—
The killer was still running loose. And she was the next worst thing to being a witness.
We haven't exactly made it clear whether you saw anything incriminating or not. . . .
A loud bang sounded beyond the back door, jolting Elizabeth to action. She stumbled away from the phone and ran for the stairs to her room, slamming her shoulder into the doorjamb as she lurched toward the nightstand. She fell to her knees and yanked open the drawer. Her fingers fumbled through a tangle of scarves and scented lace-edged hankies, finally grasping cold hard steel.
The gun was Brock's. One from his collection. A stainless-steel pearl-handled Israeli Desert Eagle .357 Magnum automatic. Elizabeth closed both hands around it and lifted it out of the drawer. The thing was unwieldy and weighed a ton, but she felt safer with it in her hands than she did without it. She sank down onto the rug with her back against the bed, and clutched the gun to her, the flat side against her chest, barrel pointed toward the wall. And she sat there and waited as day faded into night, with nothing but fear and silence for companions.
MIDNIGHT HAD COME AND GONE BEFORE TRACE ROLLED HIS sleek racing bike into the old tumbledown shed they were using for a garage. He propped the bike against a stack of bald tires, trudged out of the shed and across the weedy lawn, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans.
He didn't like coming home to this house. He especially didn't like coming home when he knew his mom was liable to grill him like a cheese sandwich. Where you been, Trace? Who with? Doing what? He would have liked to have harbored some hope that she wouldn't know anything about the sheriff hauling him in and him providing Carney with an alibi, but that was about as likely as a snowstorm in hell. Aside from being a reporter, she was a mom, and moms sniffed out stuff like that quicker than a hound on a trail.
Determined to prolong the inevitable, he sat down on the back step, dug a cigarette out of the pocket on his T-shirt, and fished a book of Red Rooster matches from his jeans. He lit up and took a deep drag, fighting the urge to cough it all out. He didn't really care for smoking, didn't think it was a habit he would keep for long, but he would keep it for a while because it made him feel tougher, more like a man. He knew it wasn't good for him, but since nothing much going on in his life at the moment seemed good, he had a hard time caring.
He took another long pull and concentrated on the sound of a door banging against the barn while his lungs burned. There was another storm brewing. Lightning flashed across the night sky like a strobe, and thunder grumbled in the distance, a mirror image of what he was feeling inside—turmoil, anger, uneasiness, as though something were about to happen but he didn't know what, couldn't say how the feelings would escape. Restless, he smashed the cigarette on the cement step and flung the butt out into the yard, pretending it was a basketball and he was the star guard of the Duke Blue Devils shooting a three-pointer to win the NCAA tournament at the final buzzer of triple overtime.
Of course, he wasn't. He was a long, long way from it, and that knowledge weighed on him like a stone. He wouldn't go to Duke to be a Blue Devil or anything else. He was stuck here, in Minnesota, in a dump of a house with no friends but Carney Fox. Christ, did life get any worse than that?
“Well, if it isn't the Lone Stranger.”
Trace winced at the edge in his mother's voice. Life did indeed get worse. His stomach churned at the thought of what would come. They would end up fighting, like always. She would try to get him to talk to her, he would push her away. They didn't seem to be able to do anything else. It was as though they were caught up in a continuous loop of time, like on Star Trek, where they just kept on reliving the same conversation over and over.
He looked over his shoulder at her and his eyes widened at the sight of the gun she held propped against her left shoulder as she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. It flashed silver as a beam of the yard light caught on it, flashed as bright and dangerous as the lightning overhead. Trace bolted to his feet and swung around.
“Jesus, Mom, what are you doing with that thing?”
Elizabeth glanced down at the Desert Eagle as if she had grown so used to its weight in her hand she had forgotten about it. She debated telling Trace about the call, but it seemed less menacing now that he was here with her. It was just a call. A voice on the phone. A shiver ran down her arms at the memory of that voice, raising goose bumps in its wake.
“I was feeling a little jumpy,” she said. She nudged the screen door open with her hip and stepped outside, her eyes going automatically to the sky. The wind had picked up and shook the trees like pompons, rattling their leaves together. The barn door banged and thumped.
“They've got a suspect for Jarvis's murder,” she said, dropping her gaze to her son. “But then, you've heard all about that, now, haven't you?”
Trace looked away, the muscles in his jaw working. He jammed his hands at the waist of his jeans and sighed the sigh of the oppressed teenager. “Why don't you just go ahead and do it?” he challenged.
“Do what?”
“Bitch me out and get it over with.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together and tamped down the urge to do just that. She didn't want to fight with him, really, she didn't. Beneath the urge to rail at him and shake him and scream out all her frustration, what she really wanted was to hold him to her and take them both back to some point in the past before everything had started to go wrong between them. Back before Atlanta, before Brock and all his money, back to San Antonio, where they had come as close as they ever had to living a normal life. She wanted to go back to a time when he had still been sweet and trusting, and she had felt in control, the all-knowing, all-powerful mama, able to heal hurts and hug away tears. It seemed the years had taken away whatever power she had had or Trace had imagined she had had. He was sixteen now, nearly half her age, and perfectly able to see she wasn't anything but mortal and couldn't fix things with a kiss.
“Trace, I can't hear about you giving out an alibi for Carney Fox and not be upset about it,” she said. “He's a suspect in a murder invest
igation.”
“Yeah, well, he didn't do it.”
“You know that for a fact?”
He glanced away, dodging her question, dodging her gaze. Lightning flashed as bright as a spotlight on his face, illuminating what he didn't want her to see—the brooding look, the secrets. Elizabeth felt her heart sink, and a mother's panic seized her by the throat and squeezed. She descended the steps and rushed toward him, driven by a need that threatened to overwhelm her. Trace started to turn away, but she caught him by the arm with her left hand and held on, her fingers biting into firm young muscle.
“Answer me, dammit!” she snapped, raising her voice to be heard above the gathering storm. “Do you know he didn't kill Jarrold Jarvis? Were you there?”
Trace jerked away, wrenching his arm free and rubbing at it, scowling. “He didn't do it. We were playing basketball.”
It was the same line he had fed Dane, and Elizabeth imagined Dane had heard the same flatness, the same ring of falseness she was hearing now. He was lying. Good God in heaven, he was lying about a possible murderer. Her son, her baby, the child she had held in her arms and dreamed such dreams for. Thunder cracked overhead and another flash of lightning cast everything in sharp, eerie relief, like a scene from an old Hitchcock movie, turning those dreams into a nightmare. The child had grown into someone she didn't know, couldn't reach; the baby was a face in her mind, a small voice calling to her from the end of a long, dark tunnel.
“Dammit, Trace!” she sobbed as the rain began to fall. “Tell me the truth!”
But he just looked at her, silent, drawing into himself, pulling his cloak of adolescent isolationism around himself like a force field. The rain streaked down across the lenses of his glasses and turned his T-shirt transparent in big splotches.
“I'm going to bed,” he said, backing away, his voice soft between the rumbles from heaven.
Elizabeth was rooted to the spot, the rain pouring down over her, drenching her, beating against her skin like a thousand fingers. She watched him disappear into the dark house, panic tearing at her inside, clawing to get out. She wanted to run after him, to grab him, to scream, but it wouldn't do any good. She couldn't reach him—not emotionally, not the way she wanted to, needed to—and she couldn't stand the idea of trying, only to fail. Tonight of all nights, she didn't have the strength for it.
So she stood in the rain, crying, the water pelting against her face like rocks, the weight of it dragging at her skirt. She stood until the strength drained out of her legs, then she sank to the ground and sat there, her hair hanging in wet ropes around her face, the Desert Eagle tucked against her as she hugged herself and rocked and wished with all her heart that this was just a nightmare instead of her life.
THIRTEEN
THE SMELL OF CARAMEL ROLLS TURNED THE WARM AIR in the kitchen buttery and sweet. Dane shouldered open the door and shuffled in, bleary-eyed, the tails of his black polo shirt hanging outside his jeans. It was after seven. He had overslept and was irritated with himself because of it. It was irrational to think he should be able to function in top form on little or no rest while the burden of a murder investigation weighed down on him, but he caught himself thinking it just the same. Great Dane, the hero, the gridiron god, possessed of superhuman strength and character. He gave a bitter half laugh as he poured himself a cup of Mrs. Cranston's strong black coffee.
Mrs. Cranston straightened away from the oven, redfaced from the heat and the strain of bending her bulk in two. Her small hands were encased in a pair of enormous blue oven mits, and between them stretched a cookie sheet lined with steaming sweet rolls.
“I'll have these iced and ready in no time, Sheriff,” she said, bustling to the table in the center of the light, airy room.
He leaned back against the counter and watched her go about her business setting the rolls on wire racks on the table to cool. She looked made for the scene: plump and grandmotherly, a sunny smile in a sunny yellow kitchen while country music played in the background.
The kitchen door swung open and Amy started into the room, hesitating as she caught sight of him.
“Morning, peanut,” he said, hoping her temper had cooled off during the night. When she met his greeting with nothing more than a stony look, Dane knew he wasn't going to get his wish.
She greeted Mrs. Cranston with notable enthusiasm, slid onto a chair at the table, and plucked up one of the freshly iced rolls to nibble at it.
“Heather asked me to spend the night,” she said without preamble, her gaze locking hard on Dane's. “I told her I'd have to get permission from my father, since I'm just a child.”
Dane pinched the bridge of his nose and bit back a reprimand at her tone. He was being punished for the unpardonable sin of wanting his daughter to remain his daughter. His natural inclination was to fight back. He didn't suffer insubordination lightly in his professional life and seldom encountered it elsewhere. But he held himself in check, a part of him feeling he deserved to be punished, if not for the way he had treated Amy, for the way he had treated Elizabeth.
“Fine,” he said at last.
Amy took another tiny bite of her roll, barely tasting it as she met her father's steady gaze. “She and Aunt Mary are going to Rochester, shopping. They said they'd pick me up at nine.”
“What about our ride?” Dane asked. “I thought I could make some time this afternoon, after the funeral.”
Spite outweighed remorse by a narrow margin. Amy lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug and looked down at her breakfast so she wouldn't have to see the hurt in her father's eyes.
“We'll just have to make it some other time, I guess,” she said, trying her hardest to sound as though it didn't matter to her in the least, despite the fact that she'd been looking forward to it. Riding was something they had always shared, just the two of them, because her mother wouldn't come within a mile of a horse. She didn't like the idea of anything intruding on that tradition, but she had a point to make, she reminded herself, steeling her resolve against the urge to go across the room and hug him. She was not a little girl anymore, and she would not be treated like one.
She unfolded herself from the kitchen chair, abandoning the half-eaten roll on the table. “I have to go fix my hair,” she said, and made what she thought was a regal exit—head up, shoulders back.
Dane watched her go, feeling his neatly ordered world shifting yet again, and not liking it one bit.
Mrs. Cranston glanced up from icing the last of the caramel rolls, the lines of her face softened by sympathy. “It's not always easy being a grown-up,” she said gently.
“You've got that right, Mrs. Cranston,” he grumbled, setting his coffee mug aside on the counter. “All in all, I'd rather be playing football.”
THE CONSTRUCTION SITE SMELLED OF SAWDUST AND MUD. The rain-washed trees along the perimeter shook themselves in the early morning breeze. A meadowlark sang a solo somewhere down along the creek. If you weren't looking at what would become the Still Waters resort, Elizabeth reflected, it was a pretty morning. Cool and blue and breezy. Clouds as puffy and ragged-edged as shredded cotton drifted aimlessly above. The sun had come up above a horizon done in watercolor shades. Now it slanted its beams across the field of young corn to the east, enticing it to grow better than “knee-high by the Fourth of July,” as the old farmer's saying went.
Standing there in the beautiful, peaceful quiet, it was hard to believe life could be complicated.
Elizabeth raised her stolen Nikon and took a wide-angle shot of the eastern horizon and the Amishman trudging across a distant field behind a pair of workhorses. It might make a nice picture for the next issue of the Clarion. They could do a story about the weather and how it affected both farming and tourism—provided no one was killed in the meantime.
She hiked her purse strap up on her shoulder and cursed the Desert Eagle she had seen fit to tuck into the Gucci bag. The damn thing was as heavy as an anvil, but she wasn't disgusted enough to leave it behind. The phone call ha
d rattled her. It didn't matter how much her brain tried to discount the incident now, in the light of day. It did no good to tell herself she had overreacted. Every time she did, she heard that voice, heard the malevolence in it, felt it touch her like a cold, bony finger. She had crouched by her bed with the pistol until Trace had come home.
She sighed now at the thought of the confrontation they'd had. She hadn't gotten anywhere with him. Not an inch. He had pulled up the drawbridge at the mention of Carney Fox and refused to let her across it. Frustration burned through her. He was hiding something. A half-wit could have seen it. If it had something to do with Carney Fox, and if Carney Fox had something to do with the murder . . .
She jerked around and snapped a series of pictures of the construction site: the office trailer, the rutted parking area, the superstructure. Still Waters in the Aftermath she would call this series. She would put it on the front page and give Charlie Wilder a stroke. That would make her popular.
The yellow police tapes had been broken and lay like discarded ribbons in the mud around the spot where Jarvis had met his end. Nothing else marked the place. The blood had washed away the first night during the storm. Still, Elizabeth took a shot of it, then she pointed the camera down toward the creek and snapped off another round of nature photos. She was about to lower the camera when a figure to the west caught her eye. Fiddling with the monstrous lens, she zoomed in.
It looked like Aaron Hauer, though he was too far away for her to make out one Amishman from the next. The set of the shoulders, the tilt of the head, made her think it was him. He was kneeling beneath the shade of a maple tree that stood up the hill from the creek. His head was bowed, his wide-brimmed straw hat in his hands.
The camera clicked and whirred before Elizabeth could catch herself. The man, whoever he was, was praying. She had no business capturing such a private moment on film. Amish people praying wasn't news, and her taking pictures of it made her no better than the tourists who thought they had the right to intrude on the lives of people like Aaron Hauer.