by Gregg Olsen
“You never answered, honey. Is Pietro’s all right?”
Again, silence.
Steam swirled and Emily flipped on the bathroom fan. A moment later, she slipped on a terry robe and padded down the hall to Jenna’s room—a space that had been her own bedroom when she was a girl. A rectangle of yellowed glue on the door revealed the spot were she’d once put up a “NO BOYS ALLOWED” sign to keep her little brother, Kevin, at bay. With each step, a memory. Through a knife-slit of light in the doorway, she could see Jenna typing out a message on her silvery Apple iBook computer. Jenna was a little small for her age. Her stature didn’t diminish her; it only made her stand out. Long hair like her mother’s framed her delicate heart-shaped face. Her eyes were blue, the cool color of the Pacific. She tapped on the keyboard with frosted pink fingernails, chipped and ready for another mother/daughter manicure session in front of one of the Law and Orders on TV.
Emily pushed open the door, startling Jenna, who looked up with a frozen smile.
“Oh, Mom, I didn’t hear you.” She closed the chat window and swung around to face her mother.
“Are you up to no good?” Emily asked, allowing a smile to come to her lips. Deep down, the very idea of her daughter chatting with anyone was more than she could take. She’d seen the way perverts worked the keyboards of personal computers and stalked their prey—unsuspecting children in seemingly safe and cozy homes all across America.
“Just talking with Shali,” she said. “And yes, we were up to no good. There’s a nice guy who wants to meet us at the Spokane Valley Mall next weekend. He says he looks like Justin Timberlake and Jude Law. Combined.”
Emily sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing out the sateen spread.
“He does, does he?” She knew when her daughter was pulling her leg and she started to play along. “Maybe I could meet him, too?”
Jenna shook her head. “Sorry, Mom, but you’re too old for him. Shali and I are probably too old for him. He seemed to lose interest when we said we were old enough to drive.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Sick, I know.”
“You know how I worry.”
“And you know that you don’t have to worry about me. I know the drill. I don’t make mistakes. My mom is a cop, you know.”
“So I’ve heard.” Emily removed the towel from her head and shook out her hair. “I’m not going to dry this mess. Let’s get out of here and eat. I’m beat.”
Jenna grinned. “Okay. Jude Timberlake can wait.”
With that, Emily returned to her bedroom, where she put on a pair of faded jeans and a cream-colored boatneck sweater. She looked in the mirror and gave herself a once-over.
“Not bad for almost forty,” she said, loud enough for Jenna to hear, which, of course, she did. “Maybe this Jude Law lookalike of Jenna’s would be interested in an old chick like me.”
Jenna appeared in the doorway and put her hands on her hips.
“You’re disgusting,” she said, a smile widening on her pretty face. “Shali and I had him first.”
Monday, 7:16 P.M.
Twenty minutes later they were sitting in a maroon and black vinyl booth at Pietro’s, the only place in Cherrystone that made pizza that didn’t taste like it came from the frozen-food section of the Food Giant. Emily was grateful that Jenna had outgrown the “cheese-only” topping option for something a little more adventurous—pepperoni and black olives. Emily ordered a beer and Jenna nursed a soda.
“You know, you don’t need to order diet cola, honey.”
Jenna swirled the crushed ice with a pair of reed-thin plastic straws. “You mean I’m not fat? Yeah, I know. But I’m hedging my bets. I’ve seen the future. Look at Grandma Anna.”
“Jenna! That’s not nice.” Emily tried to act indignant, but Grandma Anna was her ex-husband’s mother and it was true that she had thick thighs. “Besides, your body shape is more from my side of the family.”
Jenna drew on her straws and nodded. “Thank God.”
The pair sat and ate their pizza, but their mood shifted when the conversation turned to the storm. “We are lucky. All of us. The tornado ravaged those homes on Hawes, but no one was killed.” Emily swallowed the last of her beer, regarding the foamy residue coating the rim of the schooner. “I don’t use the word lightly, you know, but it was a bit of a miracle, really.”
“I know. Shali and I were talking about that,” Jenna said. “Now you know that Jude Law Timberlake is not real. Nice fantasy, though.”
Emily managed a faint smile. “I’ll say.”
Emily Kenyon was a homicide detective, not an emergency responder, but Ferry County was so small that when the storm hit she immediately reported to work to do what she could. She had to do something. Anything. She’d grown up in Cherrystone and it was her town. Always would be. The house on Orchard Avenue had been her childhood home. Her parents, who died in a tragic car accident, had left the family home to Emily and her brother. Since only one could live there, Emily bought out Kevin with savings and took a small mortgage. The house, with its bay windows and high-pitched roofline, was the reason she returned to Cherrystone. Not the only reason. Her divorce from David, a surgeon with a quick wit and an even faster fuse, was the other. The divorce made him mad. Emily made him mad. The world was against him. Cherrystone was about as far away as she could go for the safety net of feeling like she belonged somewhere. Leaving a detective’s position in Seattle wasn’t easy, but the move was never in doubt. It had been the right thing.
Of course, in the middle of it all was Jenna. She loved both her parents, but felt her mother needed her more than her father. At sixteen, the courts allowed her to schedule her own visitation with her father. She saw him once a month, usually in nearby Spokane. And that, she was sure, was enough.
Emily asked for a pizza box to take home the remainder of the pie.
“We can have it for breakfast,” she said.
“Only if it lasts that long.”
Emily’s cell phone rang, its dorky ring tone of Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” chiming from her purse. The number on the LED was dispatch—the sheriff was calling.
“Kenyon,” she said.
Her mother’s hands full, Jenna picked up the flat carton and they walked toward the door. With her free hand, she fished some Italian ice peppermints from a bowl by the hostess lectern and offered one to her mother.
Emily shook her head, her ear pressed tightly to her flip phone as they walked to the car.
“I see,” she said. Her tone was flat, like someone checking a list for which there was no need. “All right. Okay. Got it. I can take a drive out there tomorrow, first thing.”
Emily looked irritated as she put away her phone.
“Do you know Nicholas Martin?” she asked.
“Sure. Who doesn’t? He’s a senior and besides, he’s kind of a freak.”
Emily turned the ignition and the Accord started. She put it into drive.
“Freak? In what way?”
“You know, one of those country kids who didn’t get the memo that the Goth look was so last millennium.”
“Black clothes? White face?”
“And eyeliner, Mom, even eyeliner. But what about him?”
Emily sighed, glad she didn’t have a son to deal with.
“Did you see him at school today?”
“I don’t know. Although, if I did see him, I’d probably remember. He’s the memorable type. What’s up, Mom?”
“Probably nothing. His aunt in Illinois has called the office a couple times. She’s panicking because she hasn’t been able to reach anyone from the family since the storm. The big cell tower past Canyon Ridge was knocked out in the twister. Sheriff wants me to drive out to their place tomorrow morning and have a look around.”
“I think Nicholas has a brother, Donovan. He’s younger. Third grade?”
“Oh, now I remember. Nice family. I’m sure they’re fine.”
“I could IM
Nicholas when I get home. He hangs out in that Goth chat room Shali and I go to all the time.”
Emily attempted to suppress a weary smile. “Uh, you’re kidding, right?”
“Yeah, I’m kidding.”
“No need, honey. I’ll handle it.”
Emily parked in front of the house. The night air was filled with the scent of white lilacs her mother had planted when she was a girl. They were enormous bushes now, nearly blocking the front windows. Emily didn’t have the heart to give them a good pruning, though they desperately needed it. She only thought of the job when springtime rolled around and the tallest tips were snowcapped with blooms. The memory brought a smile to her face that fell like a heavy curtain with the ring of another call.
Sheriff Kiplinger, again.
She glanced at Jenna and flipped open her cellular. “Kenyon, off duty,” she said, putting a reminder of her status up-front.
“Emily, you’ll need to go out to the Martin place tonight. Jason will meet you there. Neighbors say they think the twister might have touched down that way.”
“Jesus,” Emily said, waving Jenna inside. “Can’t it wait until morning? I’m about half dead right now.”
“You know the answer. Once we get a call from a concerned citizen we have to act on it right away. Damned public relations. Damned lawyers.”
Sheriff Brian Kiplinger had a point. An adjacent county nearly went bankrupt in the late 1990s when a woman reported that her sister was being abused by her husband. When law enforcement arrived two days later, the woman was paralyzed from a beating that happened after the sister phoned in her concerns.
“All right,” Emily said. “I’m going.”
“Jason’s already on his way.”
Emily exhaled. She was needed. She told herself that she’d be back home in bed within a couple of hours. She grabbed one of Jenna’s Red Bulls from the fridge, thinking that the energy drink’s sugar and caffeine could fuel her for the drive out to the Martin ranch on Canyon Ridge, about fifteen miles out of town. Once there, she knew adrenaline would kick in. So would Jason Howard’s bottomless reserve of energy. Jason was only twenty-five, a sheriff’s deputy with a four-year degree in criminology from Washington State University. He was single. Bright. Always up for anything. Youth and enthusiasm counted during the grindingly long hours after the storm.
She glanced at it, but ultimately ignored the red Cyclops of the answering machine light. Whoever had called could wait. She blew a kiss at Jenna, who was now in front of the TV watching some trashy dating show set on a cruise ship. Emily was too tired—and too preoccupied—to say anything about it. She clutched her purse and went for the door. The car radio was playing a B. B. King song, which was like comfort food for her soul. She loved that New Orleans sound—B.B. was her favorite.
This, too, shall pass, came to mind as she drove.
The sky had blackened like a cast-iron pan, pinning her headlights to the roadway. A tumbleweed, a holdout from the previous season, skittered in front of the Accord. The wind that had converged on Cherrystone and obliterated everything in its wake had become gentle, but was still present. Dust and litter swirled over the roadway as she drove into the darkness of a spring night. Lights off the highway revealed the neat ranch homes amid fields of hops and peppermint—the two most important cash crops of the region. Emily felt the buzz of the Red Bull’s caffeine as she took a sharp left off the highway.
The mailbox announced who lived there: MARTIN. She’d been out there before, of course. She’d probably been to every place in the entire county before she got her detective’s shield—despite her big-city credentials. Growing up in Cherrystone had also brought even more familiarity, though much of the place had changed. She vividly remembered the Martin place as a typical turn-of-the-century two-story, with faded red shutters and gingerbread along a porch rail that ran the length of the front of the house. The roofline featured a cupola covered with verdigris copper sheathing, topped with an elegant running horse weathervane. The house sat snugly in a verdant grade etched by meandering, year-round Three Boys Creek.
Emily pointed the Accord down the gravel driveway. Dust kicked up and the sound of the coarse rock crunched under her wheels. She was surprised by the contrail of dust following her car. It billowed behind her, white against the night sky. She didn’t think she was going fast and she didn’t think that any dust could have remained in the county. She negotiated the last curve and saw Jason’s county cruiser, a Ford Taurus made somewhat more legit by its black-and-white “retro police” car livery. It was parked with its blue lights stabbing into an empty darkness.
“What in the world?”
Emily Kenyon could barely believe her eyes—the Martin house was gone.
Before the tornado, exact time and place unknown
Those who saw it later considered it to be a scrapbook of horror, a dark album of so much that could never be forgotten. Why memorialize such things? Affixed to each black paper page were the yellowed clippings of his unspeakable crimes. The most notorious among the nine he claimed were the ones for which he was convicted—Shelley Marie Smith and Lorrie Ann Warner. They were college roommates from Cascade University in Meridian, a midsize port city in the extreme northwestern corner of the state. Both girls worked at a store that specialized in hardware and garden supplies. Shelley had wanted to save the world one child at a time; elementary education was her major. Lorrie Ann had been less sure of her future than her roommate. She’d bounced from major to major, unable to decide her life’s calling. She told her parents that she was still “searching for a passion.”
The young women were found bound, shot in the back of the head, dumped along a sandbar along the Nooksack River late in the summer. An unlucky kayaker had found the dead young women some three months after they’d been reported missing. Their bodies were badly decomposed, but the telltale evidence of their horrific last hours had not been obliterated by the warm summer days or the icy mountain waters. They had been sexually violated and tortured. It was the most disturbing crime ever reported on the pages of the Meridian Herald.
Yet they were not his first victims. Certainly not his last. Even so, they held the distinction of commanding a full ten pages of Herald clippings in the black memory album. It might have been because there were two victims or because they were so young. But when their photos and clippings were pasted into the book, it told a story.
No one knew it, but it was a love story.
In turning the pages it was easy to see there was more to come.
Chapter Two
Monday, 10:48 P.M., Cherrystone, Washington
The temperature had dropped and Emily Kenyon felt the chill of a late spring breeze nip at her. The strobe of blue from the police light made her shudder and she grabbed a jacket as she got out of the car. Jason Howard, his flashlight like a light saber, raced toward her. Broken glass and splinters of wood were everywhere. It was like the heavens had opened and snowed fragments of the Martin house all around them.
“Glad you’re here,” Jason said, his flashlight’s beam aimed at Emily’s face, making her look even more tired and almost ghoulish. She blinked back the light and made a quick nod. “I think I found Mrs. Martin,” he said. Emily caught the fear in his voice. She also saw it in his deep-set dark eyes, burrowed into his head under a characteristic knitted brow. The kid is scared shitless.
Before she could say anything calming, her eyes followed the swift movement of the young deputy’s flashlight beam.
“She’s over here,” he said.
Amid the darkness, the light fluttered over the ground like a moth. Emily’s heart sank when a white figure popped against the darkened backdrop.
“Oh, dear, there she is,” she said, her voice catching slightly.
“I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”
“I can see that, Deputy.”
Margaret “Peg” Martin was splayed out nude; her clothes appeared ripped from her body by the fury of the storm. She was facedown
in the mud. Kitchenware was scattered helter skelter. Broken dishes. Fiestaware, Emily thought. Shards of glass glittered around her chalky frame. Pieces of fabric and slivers of paper fluttered as the wind passed through the gully that once held the pretty home. It was as if a bomb had gone off. It was Bosnia. It was Baghdad.
It was Cherrystone, Washington.
“Jesus,” Emily said, stooping next Mrs. Martin’s lifeless body. “We need some help out here. We need to find Mark Martin and the kids.”
Jason stood frozen, his brown eyes dilated to near black. Perspiration rolled from under his thick, wavy hair.
“I heard that one time a chicken was plucked by a twister in Arkansas,” he said, a non sequitor that came from a nervous mind.
Emily knew he was rattled, so instead of saying, “What the hell are you talking about?” she shrugged, and said, “Heard the same thing.” She retrieved a Maglite of her own and pointed its beam over the wreckage, noticing for the first time that the roof had been ripped from the house and planted some twenty yards away. The walls had fallen like dominos, one on top of the next. The light swept back over to the naked body. Emily leaned closer and touched Peg’s neck. It was a formality, of course, but it had to be done. She was, very sadly and very completely, dead.
“Calling the sheriff, now,” Jason said, now with the cruiser’s radio in hand. A cat meowed, something shifted somewhere in the dark, and Emily steadied herself. She turned toward the noise. Glass crunched under her feet.
She couldn’t think of the little Martin boy’s name, but she called out the others.
“Mark? Nicholas? Anyone? Can you hear me? Try to move something, say something.”
She stood still, but nothing. Again the cat yowled and Emily found herself wishing the poor thing would stop.
Shhhh kitty, kitty, she thought.