Portrait of Vengeance

by Carrie Stuart Parks

  Beth’s mouth gaped, then she began to laugh. She dropped Winston’s leash and the dog took off for our room, I’m sure aiming to get on the bed while we were doubled over with mirth.

  We were both sitting on the floor in the hall, still laughing, when Eric came through the door wearing a straw hat and carrying his plastic tub of gardening tools. He stopped at our appearance.

  I wiped the tears from my eyes and tried to get control of my aching mouth. “Ssssorry. Rough day at the office.” My comment sent Beth into another fit of mirth.

  Eric slipped past us as if concerned that our humor was contagious. Or that we were crazy. The thought reminded me of Holly. Abruptly the laughter was gone. I stood. “Come on, Beth, we have work to do.”

  After helping her up, I retreated to my room. I’d gotten chilled by the rain, so I changed into sweats. I moved my drawing materials, the envelope with the autopsy report, and the case binder to the game room we shared. Beth emerged, hair up and damp from a quick shower, wearing beige cotton slacks and a cashmere top. “Do you want to go first,” she asked, “or should I?”

  “I’ll go first.”

  Opening my sketchpad, I told her about the sniper attack in the police parking lot.

  “Sounds like someone wants you dead.” Beth’s face paled. She rubbed her arms, stood, and slid up to the window. After peeking through the blinds, she returned to her seat. “Okay . . . um . . . you’re not hurt or anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did a SWAT team show up?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “They wear the coolest uniforms, black, with shiny—”

  “Beth.”

  “—helmets. And those special—”

  “Beth!”

  She glanced at me, mouth still open.

  “The Nez Perce Tribal Police in Lapwai, Idaho, does not have a SWAT team.”

  “Oh.” She looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

  I gnawed on my lip for a moment. “Um . . . but they did use SWAT sign language.”

  Beth leaned forward. “Sign language?”

  “Like this.” I made a circle with my thumb and forefinger, then made a fist over my head. “Sniper. Cover this area.”

  “I didn’t know you knew SWAT signs. Do you know any more?”

  “Mm. Just a couple. Freeze. Crouch. Mm . . . pistol . . . I understand. And the super-secret signal.” I made a circle with both hands, flashed both hands open and closed, and rubbed my fingers together.

  “What’s that?” Beth sat up straighter.

  “Krispy Kreme hot light is on. Grab a free donut.”

  “Very funny.” She sat back in her chair. “What about your meeting with your former sitter?”

  “I did meet with Holly, but she won’t be any help. Nor the staff. One thing’s for sure, she didn’t write those letters to the editor. But I did get some information from a patient.” I told her about Amy’s revelation. “And there was a J. Pender on staff. Holly called him Jacob, and he was very protective of the woman.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “And I drew this.” I pulled out the sketch of four-year-old Jacob and wrote his name on the bottom.

  “I tried to locate a Jacob Greene, but that’s a relatively common name . . .”

  “And he could have changed it.”

  “There’s that as well. Anyway, no luck.” Beth took the sketch from me. “You said Holly never married. What about . . .” She held up the drawing.

  “I was nine when he was born. I don’t remember any men around, never any boyfriends, but there was no doubt Holly’d been pregnant.”

  “What about when she gave birth?”

  Shaking my head, I took the sketch from her and stared at the image. “I don’t even have a memory of her going to the hospital to give birth. He’d just . . . appeared.”

  A sudden memory flashed through my mind. Holly sobbing.

  I dropped the art.

  “What?” Beth reached over and touched my arm.

  Where had that been? And when? Closing my eyes, I focused on Holly’s anguished weeping. Pale walls, olive-green carpet, the light coming from windows with white sheer curtains.

  “Were you remembering something?” Beth asked.

  “Holly. And a room.”

  Beth leaned forward. “Can you see the room in your mind?”

  I nodded.

  “Draw it.” She handed me a pencil.

  “That’s a brilliant idea.” I opened the pad and began sketching the curtains, then added a sepia-painted door to the right. Beyond that . . . a courtyard, and more apartments. The room had smelled of dry earth and fried onions. I tore off that page and started a new sketch, this time mentally looking to my right. A cheap print hung on the wall, a painted landscape. Beneath the art, a brown sofa squatted with a fake chipped-wood coffee table. Holly was curled up on the sofa, crying. I drew her, then sketched a Christmas tree.

  No. I erased the tree. We’d been in Yakima. Yakima, Washington, and were getting ready for Christmas. I closed my eyes. Holly had promised a tree that year, but no tree ever appeared. Or presents. We moved about a month later to Oregon. Jacob was born that August. Opening my eyes, I counted on my fingers. “Nine months.”

  “What did you remember?”

  I put the sketches together and pointed at the drawing of Holly. “This was just before Christmas.” Picking up the Jacob drawing, I placed it below the other two. “Nine months later, Jacob was born.”

  “So—”

  “Something happened then. She had a secret boyfriend who broke up with her, maybe a married man. Or maybe she was raped.” I took a deep breath. “As a child, I never put it all together. She changed about that time.” I nodded at the sketches. “Going from cheerful and singing all the time to crying jags, not getting out of bed, headaches—”

  “Clinical signs of depression.”

  “When Jacob was born, she could barely look at him.”

  “So you think—”

  “She didn’t want that baby for whatever reason. I’d put my money on Holly being raped,” I finished for her. “I basically took care of Jacob. He was a sweet boy, very quiet, and prone to accidents—No. Wait. That’s not right.”

  Beth raised her eyebrows.

  “He seldom had an accident when he was with me. But he was always covered with bruises. Holly was the one who said he’d fallen or run into something.”

  “Did you ever see Holly hit him?”

  “No . . .”

  I looked at the sketchbook in my hand. I’d always loved art, filling book after book with my drawings. Without thinking, I drew a cardboard box on the empty sheet of paper. “I was too absorbed with my art,” I whispered. And when I’d left, thinking they were both dead, did I leave four-year-old Jacob with his abusive mother?

  The old house whispered and sighed around us.

  Beth cleared her throat. “Now, as to the plane that crashed with your parents.” She cleared her throat again. “Well, I had a long talk with the owner of Meyers’ Flying Service here in Lewiston. Turns out it was his brother, Ron Meyers, who was the pilot killed. At first he was very defensive, but I told him . . . well, I lied.” She inspected her notes as if they may have changed in the past few seconds. “I told him we were with the top-secret TBIC government agency and were investigating your dad.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat across from her. “Tibic?”

  Beth’s face colored. “I had to think fast. He was suspicious that I was investigating pilot error or some kind of lawsuit against his company.”

  “Yes, but why Tibic?”

  “I thought about us and how we’re partners, sort of.” She quickly glanced at me. “So it stands for Two Broads In Cahoots. TBIC.”

  My case of giggles threatened to surface. “I see. What did Ron Meyers tell you?”

  Beth’s shoulders relaxed and she tapped the papers with a manicured fingernail. “As you can imagine, he remembers that day like it was yesterday. His
brother was flying something called a Skymaster.” She laid a printout of a plane in front of me. The design was unusual. Instead of the traditional outline, the plane ended just behind the wings, with two pods extending backward, rather like a catamaran design on a boat.

  As I studied it, I became aware of the murmuring of guests in the lobby and Winston’s snores. The smell of cooking apples and cinnamon drifted up from the kitchen below.

  “That smells good,” Beth said.

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “I guess there’s no other way to say this. Mr. Meyers was present when your parents, with apparently you in tow, came in to book the flight. At first your dad, who said their names were John and Mary Smith, didn’t want to tell him where he wanted to go. Mr. Meyers insisted on knowing your dad’s destination as he needed to file flight plans. He said your dad wanted to fly over the dam upriver from here to check it out. Meyers thought the whole thing was odd, especially when your dad paid in cash and asked that the flight plans be kept confidential.”

  “Did he really think a man and woman with a four-year-old child—”

  “He said he just had a bad feeling about the whole thing so he made sure the plane’s black box would record the cockpit conversation.” Beth pulled out a cassette tape and tape player. “He gave me a copy of it.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the cassette. My folks’ voices. Their last words.

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  Did I? I licked my dry lips. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  STATIC FOR A FEW MOMENTS. “THERE’S YOUR TARGET, Mr. . . . ah . . . Smith,” the nasal voice of what must be the pilot said. “Put a mess of C-4 inside the drain holes of that dam and boom!” The roar of an engine in the background made it difficult to hear.

  “That looks like it would take more than a little C-4 to bring it down,” a second male voice responded. My father.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, m’friend. During construction, a whole bunch of cracks formed. Big cracks, some like four hundred feet long. They had to drill drain holes to relieve the pressure. Now they claim to have fixed the problem, but don’t you believe it.” The pilot laughed. “My cousin was an engineer on the repair crew. He said they just applied a Band-Aid to fix the leaks. I figured he should know.”

  “Useful knowledge.”

  “If this dam goes, it’s a domino effect. There’d be some delay before the water would hit the downstream dams, so they’d try to push out enough water to hold, but we’re talking catastrophic failure. Billions of gallons of water. And at the end of all these waterways? Portland, Oregon.”

  “There’s a road over there. Would that be an escape route?”

  “To get away from the flood—”

  “No. For law enforcement.”

  The pilot was silent for a moment. “You’re kinda limited on roads out here. That one down there takes you to the highway. From there, go west and you’re in the path of the escaping water. Go east toward Montana and it’s easy to set up a roadblock. I’d say your best bet is avoid roads entirely. Head north into the Clearwater National Forest. Millions of acres of rugged wilderness.”

  For a few moments all we could hear was the roar of the engine, then the pilot spoke. “You could take one of those logging roads. Not a lot of traffic.” He chuckled.

  “It’s beautiful,” a woman said.

  My mom. I swallowed around the lump in my throat.

  “Too much clear-cutting for me,” the pilot said. “Let me show you some real back country.” More engine noise. “Now, down there is God’s country. Over four million acres of wilderness.”

  “You’re right,” Mom said. “Breathtaking.”

  “Yeah, but deadly. Grizzlies, cougars, wolves . . . ah.” The pilot’s voice grew louder as if he’d moved the mic closer to his mouth. “Speaking of deadly, when you booked this flight, you said you were doing a . . . What was the word you used?”

  “Scenario. Possible terrorist targets.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Like something from the Russians or Chinese or Arabs.” He pronounced it Ay-rabs.

  “Sort of, yes.”

  “And . . . ah . . I forget. What agency did you say you were with?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  The engine sputtered, then grew silent.

  “Dear God!” Mom’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “Look for a place to land,” the pilot said. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is November six-one-one Bravo. Location approximately forty-six miles heading one-sixty-three southeast Homestead. Forty-eight hundred feet.”

  A snapping, then—Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “Crack your door,” the pilot said.

  A crash—Boom!

  Mom screamed.

  An ear-shattering shriek of metal seemed to last forever, then silence.

  Beth turned the tape deck off.

  I couldn’t move. My white-knuckled hands gripped the table.

  Beth’s hand touched mine with a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry.”

  Was my dad a terrorist? Or could he have been doing exactly what he said—checking out scenarios for a terrorist attack? That would make him proactive and probably in law enforcement. I wanted—needed—to believe the second possibility.

  “I did some research on what happens when a dam breaks,” Beth said. “In China, over 170,000 people died. And the official death toll of the Johnstown Flood, caused when the dam collapsed”—Beth shook her head—“was the third largest loss of civilian life after the Galveston Hurricane and the events of 9/11.”

  “Those were single dams.” I looked out the window. “But if this dam were blown up, it would be catastrophic to every dam downstream. And every town.” I looked at my friend. “I need to go to the site of that plane crash.”

  Someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” Beth called.

  Lila entered with a tray. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Eric just made a batch of fresh applesauce and thought you might like some.”

  “That’s very kind,” Beth said.

  Winston stood as she entered, sniffed the air, then slumped to the floor, obviously not interested.

  “That is one big dog.” She walked to the table and placed the tray down. It held two glasses of what looked like fresh lemonade, homemade bread and butter on stoneware plates, and two steaming bowls of applesauce.

  I took a sip of the lemonade. “Thank you,” I said. “Does Eric cook all the time?”

  Lila nodded. “Two days a week, pretty much all day. Tuesday is shopping, Friday he makes whatever I need for the week, and Wednesday is bread day.”

  “You have that many guests?” I asked.

  “Eric takes food to the homeless shelter and spends time several days a week at the food kitchen.” Her eyes were shiny and her cheeks glowed.

  “Are you two an item?” Beth asked.

  “Well, um, we’ve been seeing each other, you know, outside of work.” Her cheeks were now crimson.

  Though I wasn’t the least bit hungry, my fingers had relaxed their grip on the table.

  Beth glanced at my hands, then winked at me. “You must have Eric share his recipes with Gwen sometime,” she said sweetly.

  I scrunched up my face at her.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you disparaging my cooking?” I lifted my head and looked down my nose at Beth. “I’ll have you know I recently added canned peas to my tuna noodle casserole. And spices.”

  “Really? What spices?”

  “I don’t remember. Something green—maybe oregano—yellow, and a rusty brown. I made leaf patterns on the top instead of using potato chips.”

  Beth leaped from the table and raced into her room, startling Winston. I could hear her peals of laughter.

  “Is she okay?” Lila asked.

  “It’s been a tense day. She’s just . . . letting off steam.”

  “Oh, well, actually.” Lila cleared her throat. “The real reason I came in was something Eric suggested.�
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  Beth returned. Her eyes were red, and the corner of her mouth twitched, as if another fit of laughter was just below the surface.

  “You’d asked about the history of the house and guests from before we started the guest book,” Lila said. “We have a lost and found. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it goes back to almost the first guests who stayed here, maybe sometime in the sixties. We never threw away anything of possible value.”

  “It’s worth a try, sure, we could go through a box or two—”

  Lila laughed. “Oh no. This stuff’s not in a box. Lost and found fills an entire room in the attic.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AFTER KENNELING WINSTON IN HIS MESH PEN, WE joined Lila in the grand hall. Instead of climbing the main staircase just outside the door to the game room, we crossed the parlor to the hall where we originally entered. “This house was built in 1905 and modeled after a French castle near Vienna,” Lila said over her shoulder to Beth and me. “This side of the house was originally the servants’ section.” We climbed a smaller set of stairs to the second floor, then a narrower and darker set to the third floor. A number of rooms opened off the sparse hallway. She turned to the closest door, took out a set of keys, and opened it.

  Steep, dusty steps disappeared into the gloom at the top.

  “We’ve talked about cleaning this all out, but, well . . .” She reached forward, grabbed something, and pulled. A 40-watt bulb dangling from a wire dimly illuminated the stairs. “At the top you’ll find a light switch. Let me know when you’re done so I can lock it back up.”

  “You’re not coming with us?” I asked.

  “No. I . . . I have some work to do in the office.” With a final glance up the stairs, she left.

  “No time like the present.” Beth started up.

  “Wait!”

  Beth turned. “You’re not afraid of dark, creepy attics, are you?”

  “I’m not scared of the dark.”

  “Dust? Um . . . toe monsters?” She raised her hands and made claws of her fingers. “Muwhahaha. Are you afraid of ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night—”

  “Spiders.”