The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  She was quiet. “I didn’t feel courageous. I felt terrified.”

  “Ralph once told me that fear is one of the key ingredients to courage. That if your life’s in danger and you’re not afraid, you’re just a moron. And a liability.”

  “But it felt good to kill that man,” she said softly, almost imperceptibly, and with fragile honesty. “I was glad I did it. That’s different from just being afraid. I’m not sorry he’s dead, I’m sorry it felt good when I shot him.”

  She was quiet, and the air seemed to beat with dark wings around us.

  I knew this feeling personally, this one she’d articulated. More than once I’d flirted with the seductive lure of the forbidden. Just one example: when I was apprehending Basque, I needlessly broke his jaw, and the gratuitous violence excited a part of me I’m ashamed is even there.

  “Tessa, I don’t-”

  “It’s okay. I know there’s not-”

  “Hang on, let me finish. I’m no expert on any of this. And you’re right, denial isn’t the answer. Somehow forgiveness, or making amends, or some sort of penance, is-has to be, or else-”

  “Or else you just gotta live with it, right? Let bygones be bygones, pick up the pieces and try to move on?”

  “Well…” Even I could tell that wasn’t really an answer, more of a metaphysical cop-out.

  Lien-hua’s observation came to mind: “We run from the past and it chases us; we dive into urgency but nothing deep is ultimately healed.”

  “They’re good questions.” I searched for something else, something more solid to offer her. “I need to think about all this some more.” I was struck by how completely unsatisfying a response that was.

  “Yeah, me too.” Then after a pause that went on too long, she said quietly, “I read the note.”

  “The note?”

  “The one from Amber. About last night. In the motel room.”

  “Oh, that note.”

  “Amber gave me her explanation this afternoon. I’ve been wondering if I could hear yours.”

  74

  I fingered the prescription bottle in my pocket. I could confront Tessa about the meds or delve into the whole issue of my dubious relationship with Amber five years ago.

  Great alternatives.

  “What’s the deal with you two?” Tessa pressed.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Whenever people say something’s complicated, they never mean complicated, they mean fractured, that somebody got hurt-and in this case it was both of you, wasn’t it?”

  I hate it when she does that.

  “All right. Here’s the edited version. Amber and I met when she was engaged to Sean. There was chemistry and-”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “No.”

  She waited. “But?”

  “But we did fall in love,” I admitted.

  “And how did that happen?”

  “What do you mean, how did it happen? We fell-”

  “C’mon, no one just falls in love. You drift there purposely. You make choices in that direction or it never happens.”

  It took me a moment to reply. “You’re right. Yes. We made choices in that direction.”

  Tessa was quiet. “What happened last night?”

  “Nothing. I would never cheat on Lien-hua. And I would never do something like that to my brother.”

  “But yet you fell in love with his fiancee.”

  “Yes.” This was not at all the conversation I wanted to be having. “I did.”

  I heard the garage door open. Sean must have finished shoveling.

  “You were right,” Tessa said. “That was highly edited.”

  The garage door rattled shut.

  Hearing Sean enter the garage, I thought of what Tessa had just told me a few minutes ago about my not believing him ever since we were teenagers and how that had hurt things between us. And now, as I thought about the awkward issue of my past with Amber, it struck me that on all fronts I’d been the one, not Sean, who’d sabotaged our relationship.

  Tessa seemed to be reading my mind. “Maybe you should go see how he’s doing.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  Go on. Talk to him, then get back to those videos and follow up with Tait to see if there’s been any progress on finding Kayla. And check for footage from other unsolved cases that might lead you to Reiser’s killer.

  I stood. Reached into my pocket and pulled out the bottle of pills.

  Tessa watched Patrick unpocket a pill bottle.

  “Amber couldn’t get to the pharmacy,” he said, “but she had these here. They’re over-the-counter. She told me you were asking about getting a prescription filled? For sleeping pills?”

  “Um…”

  “I wish you would’ve told me.”

  “I was… I was trying to work some stuff out on my own.”

  “I would’ve helped. If you would have let me.”

  I was ashamed I needed it, she thought, but said nothing.

  “Where did you get the prescription?”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  “You’re seeing a psychiatrist?”

  “I was. I mean, I did. Just a few times.”

  He took a breath. “Look, I understand it’s been rough, but… just keep me in the loop. I know I’m just your stepdad but-”

  “No, you’re more than that. I should’ve told you. Seriously. I’m sorry.”

  He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, then held out the bottle to her, and she could see that he wasn’t angry. Not really. “Amber said to just take one. They’re supposed to be pretty strong.”

  She accepted the bottle. “Just one. Got it.”

  Then Patrick left to talk to his brother.

  And Tessa took one of the pills.

  75

  There was no room for a car in Sean’s garage.

  Instead, the space was jammed full of tackle boxes, cross-country skis, fishing poles, tents, duck hunting decoys, and sleeping bags. A workbench rested against the far wall stacked with boxes of birdshot, shotgun shells, and tools. One of his guns lay on the bench, a Mossberg 930 Tactical; it looked like he might’ve been interrupted in the middle of cleaning it. A small fridge sat beside the door, and I imagined it might be for his night crawlers in the summer, his beer and brats year-round.

  The trophy deer heads and muskie that he’d removed from the living room for Tessa’s benefit were propped against a huge cardboard box stacked high with back issues of Wisconsin Sportsman magazines.

  “So, did you get it all shoveled?” It was a lame conversation starter, I knew that. But that’s the way things were between us.

  “As much as I could. It’s still blowing pretty hard.” He stowed the snow shovel in the corner of the garage near the workbench. “At least we should be able to get out if we need to.”

  The garage was deeply chilled, and even though I’d grabbed my coat, I still caught myself shivering.

  As I was trying to think of a way to transition into the topic of the accident twenty years ago, Sean said abruptly, “I thought there was a detective from Denver you were interested in?” His question took me off guard. I’d never told him about Cheyenne, and I was surprised he’d heard about the potential relationship that had never gotten off the ground.

  “Cheyenne Warren.”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  Cheyenne had been the one to fire the shots at the man who, as it turned out, was Tessa’s father. Since that terrible night, her relationship with Tessa had remained visibly strained, although both of them claimed things were all right. In the disquieting wake of the shooting, Cheyenne had left law enforcement and gone back to ranching. Neither Tessa nor I had seen her in more than three months.

  “I’m with Lien-hua now,” I told my brother.

  “I got to know her a little on the trail groomer. She’s nice.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  Telling him that I was thinking of proposing to Lien-hua seemed like the sort of th
ing that might serve in some way to draw us closer together, but also a little too personal to share at this point.

  He stamped the snow off his boots. “Well,” he said ambiguously, then headed for the refrigerator. “Want a beer?”

  “Naw.”

  “Can’t drink while you’re on duty?”

  “Something like that.”

  He went to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of Leinenkugel’s for himself, screwed open the top.

  Absently, I picked up one of his ice-fishing poles. “Has it been a good year out on the ice?”

  “Hasn’t been bad.” He watched me. “Oughta take you out before you leave. I know all the best spots in the area.”

  “I’m afraid ice fishing’s never really been my thing.”

  “It’s warm in the shanty. We have lawn chairs in there. A heater. Wieners. Some beer. Unless after what happened in the river… I mean, if you need to stay off the ice for a while.”

  I gave him a halfhearted smile. “I appreciate that. When things settle down with this case, I’ll have to give it a shot.” I leaned the pole against the wall again.

  A small pool of silence.

  The more we fumbled around in the quagmire of small talk, the more painfully obvious the shallowness of our relationship was.

  I decided to just go for it.

  “Sean, remember how things used to be between us?”

  He took a long draught of his beer. “How do you mean?”

  “When we were kids.”

  “When we were kids.”

  “Yeah. We’d go fishing with Dad all the time. Never seemed to catch much, but-”

  “I remember.”

  “Trolled around the lake a lot.”

  “Lake Windemere.”

  “Yeah. We got to know that shoreline really well.”

  “I remember.”

  “I think the last time we went fishing together was that autumn before the accident.”

  He regarded me for a moment. “The accident.”

  “On New Year’s Eve.”

  “I know which accident you meant.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No.” He took another drink. “Don’t be.”

  “I mean, I’m sorry for the way things were after that. Between us.”

  “The way things were?”

  “The way they are.”

  He lowered his beer, assessed me coolly. “Is that what you came out here to do? Go through that again? That night she died?”

  “We’ve never really gone through it, Sean. Never really talked about-”

  “Right. Okay.” He moved toward the door. “Hey, what do you say we head inside, see how the women are getting along?”

  “Sean, I’m saying I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. About the deer. I know it hurt things between us.”

  For a moment I thought he might just walk away, but then he faced me and I searched his dark eyes for understanding, for some kind of reprieve, but it didn’t come and I wondered if maybe our relationship was scarred in a way that would never heal. “I made things worse,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” I protested. “I did.”

  “It was me.”

  I shook my head. “I should have-”

  “No.” He cut me off forcefully. “It was me. If we’d left that party earlier, if I’d let you drive, she never would have died. I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.” I saw his hand tighten around the bottle. “It was an accident. You swerved to miss that-”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, I do understand. You-”

  “There was no deer that night.”

  “What?”

  He shifted his weight. “There was no deer.”

  “The ice? Is that what you’re-”

  All at once he turned from me and launched the beer bottle across the garage. It spun wickedly through the air, leaving a spray of suds in its wake until it smacked into the wall, sending an explosion of beer and glass splattering across the concrete.

  The random movement above us in the living room stopped, and a moment later I heard purposeful footfalls moving across the room toward the stairs that led to the garage.

  “I had too much to drink.” Sean was staring in the general direction of the shattered beer bottle, but he seemed to be looking beyond it to another place. “I had… I shouldn’t have been drinking.”

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  “You just had two. That’s not-”

  “It was more than two. It was a lot more than two.”

  Every time he reiterated his guilt, the words struck me harder. In many states there’s no statute of limitations on reckless vehicular homicide. If he really had been drunk that night, he could be The door to the stairs swung open, and Amber appeared. She peered at the foamy trail of beer extending the length of the garage, saw the smashed bottle, then fixed her gaze on Sean. Rather than asking what happened, she just shook her head slowly and then turned toward the stairs again.

  “Wait,” he called.

  “No. I’m tired of your-”

  “Amber, just give me-”

  “No!” There was razor wire in her voice and I couldn’t help but think of what she’d told me last night about her and Sean having their ups and downs. I could see this quickly moving into a major down.

  “Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you.” Sean started after her, and I followed to see if I could defuse things before they spiraled off any further in the wrong direction.

  76

  “It was my fault, Amber,” I said, entering the living room. “I brought up something that-”

  “No, Pat.” She was standing across the room from Sean and me, fiercely rooted beside Lien-hua. “You didn’t lose your temper. Sean did. You didn’t throw a beer bottle against the wall. Sean did. And this was not the first time.”

  “Okay, but the reason he was angry was-”

  “Do you know what it’s like being afraid of the person you’re supposed to feel safest being around?” The words blistered through the air, and no one moved. Immediately, I knew that this was not the right time for Amber to be confronting Sean like this, not when he was already so upset thinking about his culpability in Mrs. Everson’s death.

  Still, the idea that Amber feared for her safety around my brother struck me deeply.

  That’s why she’s leaving him. That’s why “You’re afraid of me?” Sean asked her. “Since when are you afraid of me?”

  “You’ll have to forgive us,” Amber said to Lien-hua. There was a tremor in her voice. “Sean and I… we’ve had some… rough times. Lately.”

  Sean repeated more forcefully, “Since when are you afraid of me?”

  There was no hesitation in her reply, no holding back: “Since drinking became more important to you than spending time with me.” Even though her words were on fire, her eyes were beginning to glisten.

  “Oh. Really.”

  “Listen-” I began.

  Amber looked at me. “He needs to know.”

  No, please don’t…

  “I need to know what?” Sean exclaimed.

  “Back when you and I were engaged, when I first met Patrick. We-”

  Lien-hua put an arm out toward Amber. “Maybe we can find a better time to-”

  “We were in love,” Amber said softly but firmly. “We fell in love.”

  Oh, not good, not good at all.

  Lien-hua lowered her arm.

  “What?” Sean looked from me to Amber to me. “What do you mean you fell in love?”

  “It’s not what you think, Sean,” I said.

  “Really?” He glared at me. “Then why did my wife just say the two of you were in love?”

  “We talked,” Amber tried to explain. “But it was never-”

  Ignoring her, Sean fired another question at me. “Did you sleep with her, Pat?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

&
nbsp; “We talked and-”

  “Talked. You talked. Well, were you in bed while you were talking? Were you holding her, hugging her, kissing her? Did-”

  “That’s enough,” Lien-hua stepped in. “Let’s just-”

  “We did,” I confessed to Sean. “Kiss. Twice. Yes. While you were engaged.”

  “You son of a-”

  My phone rang.

  “We never slept together,” Amber reiterated.

  “I’m speaking to Pat,” he said gruffly.

  For the moment I ignored the phone and came to her defense. “Don’t take it out on her.” Lien-hua gave me a cautionary look: Standing up for Amber at a time like this is not going to help things!

  I added, “I take full responsibility for what happened.”

  “Yeah? And what does that mean, exactly? Full responsibility?”

  The cell buzzed again. “This probably isn’t the best time to talk about this.” I drew the phone out of my pocket, and the caller ID told me the number belonged to Hank Burlman.

  Burlman? Did they find Kayla?

  Sean came closer until he was within arm’s reach. His eyes were narrow, his jaw set.

  Amber pleaded, “Please-”

  “Quiet!” he hollered.

  “I said”-my voice was firm, resolute-“don’t take it out on her.” Regardless of whether or not it was wise to intervene, I was not going to let him yell at Amber.

  Return the call in a minute. Settle things here first.

  I silenced the phone and placed it on the end table.

  “Guys,” Lien-hua said authoritatively. “Just, everybody, take a breath and calm down.”

  But things were not just going to calm down. When men get jacked up like this, they don’t just decide the issue wasn’t such a big deal after all, give each other a big hug, and sit down to a cup of tea. Something has to happen.

  And it did.

  Sean shoved me, not hard enough to send me flying, but assertively enough to let me know he was not joking around.

  “See, this is the reason!” Amber shouted. “How you lose your-”

  That stopped him. “The reason? The reason you and my brother were-”

  “No! The reason we can’t make things work, you and me!” By now she wasn’t even trying to hold back her tears. “Why I can’t stay with you anymore!”