The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  Laura pulled away. “I forgot to tell her. We got started arguing, and then she felt ill—”

  “No matter. I’ll keep it for her.” And maybe check through it, just in case she actually had made some kind of Internet contact . . .

  “They won’t let me go into her room. I upset her too much. But I still ought to be there.”

  “Come back later, okay? Doesn’t matter how late. I don’t have to be at work till noon.”

  And she pushed me back onto the bed and kissed me quick and promised to come back.

  The next morning, Laura slipped in the backdoor, coming up against me with a sigh. “Making breakfast?” she asked, looking longingly at the omelet I was frying up. “I don’t suppose that’s an egg-white omelet.”

  “Nah, babe, here in the boondocks, we go ahead and cook the whole egg. I’ll share with you.”

  So we sat down out on the porch, watching the sun break over the mountains. We had one omelet, one plate, two forks, and she ate a third and I ate two-thirds of the cholesterol. “How’s your mom?”

  “Better. Her vital signs are good, and she’s awake. But we can only go in there for ten minutes, and we can’t say anything to upset her.”

  “I guess you got a lot you can’t say, huh?”

  Laura sighed and put her head back against the porch railing. “More and more every day. Last night Theresa—” She broke off.

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to hear all this family junk.”

  “My town, remember? And my secretary has better sources than the CIA. Trust me, I’ll hear it eventually.”

  She groaned. “If there’s gossip, Mother will—” Then she sat up straight. “To hell with it. It looks like Mother has been lying for thirty years.”

  “So did she admit she was Theresa’s birthmother?”

  Laura suddenly got occupied gathering up the dishes and the crumpled napkins. “Uh. Well. I might have been wrong about that.”

  “How?”

  “I had the right idea,” she said, a little defensively. “Mother hid a pregnancy almost thirty years ago. But we think maybe it wasn’t hers.” She set the dirty dishes on her lap, the forks arranged just so. “Cathy was with her when she went away that year.”

  I shook my head. “Your sister Cathy? But she would have been just a girl.”

  “She was fifteen.”

  That stopped me. I had a daughter not much younger than that. Slowly I said, “And your mother arranged it all. The adoption.”

  “That’s what we think. That Cathy told her, and to hide the pregnancy, they made up this story about how they were going on the horse show circuit.”

  “I thought the story was supposed to be that the girl was visiting an aunt.”

  Laura made a face. “Oh, I’d forgotten that. That’s what Mother told everyone when you and I ran off together. Probably they all thought I was pregnant.”

  I thought about this. Neither of us returned to the high school to hear the gossip after our elopement. “Says something, doesn’t it, that she’d rather have people speculating that you had a baby, than that we got married.”

  “My mother does have her values. Illegitimate children can be dealt with. Unfortunate marriages, however—” She reached over and touched my leg, just to make it clear she was being ironic. Then she rose, holding the dishes in both hands. “Back then, that’s what they did, you know. Went away, had the baby, gave it up, never mentioned it.”

  I followed her into the kitchen and we started washing up. “You know, it almost beggars belief that your sister would manage to have two babies no one knew about.”

  “Mother knew about the first. And I knew about the second. At least I knew she was pregnant.” Laura scrubbed at the omelet pan, her face tight, her gaze focused on the scrub brush. “And she wouldn’t be the first to, oh, re-create an event. Try to get it right this time.”

  “Yeah, you know, going after your sister’s boyfriend is the way to ensure you get it right.”

  She looked up, mad, and threw the scrub brush at my chest. I caught it, but it still sprayed soapy water on my t-shirt. “Come on, Laura. Maybe she did it to get her revenge on the male gender.”

  Laura sighed and took the brush out of my hand. “Or get back at Mother for making her give the first baby away. Not that I blame Mother, really, if it’s true. Cathy wasn’t old enough to raise a child. And I think she was trying to protect Daddy too. He was never in very good health, and to learn that Cathy had been in such trouble—”

  I was a father myself, and this bothered me. Just seemed like their father had a right to know if his daughter had gotten into that sort of trouble. So he could . . . take action. Break the guy’s leg or an arm, maybe. Okay, that was the father in me speaking. The cop said, “If she was only fifteen, and the father was older than eighteen, it’s a crime.”

  “I don’t think that’s an issue,” Laura said, “The father was probably a boy in her class. Just the usual teenaged romance gone wrong.”

  I thought of what I remembered of Cathy Wakefield. She was still dominating the high school when I was starting junior high, and everyone knew her. She was tall and lithe and reckless, and every boy I knew felt a combination of lust and terror. Maybe more terror than lust, because we figured she could snap our puny little spines if we looked at her the wrong way. Somehow I doubted a boy her own age would have had the courage to knock her up.

  And besides—

  Laura was continuing. “But Mother—this is the part that gets to me. She didn’t want Theresa to be far away. So she got the housekeeper to adopt her. It’s all so weird. Theresa’s . . . well, the one she thought was her birth brother, Mitch. He said that his mother raised Theresa as her own, never even said she was adopted. And then Daddy dies, and Mother snatches the child back.” She dried her hands on the dishtowel and looked over at me. “I got the idea it kind of messed up his family, to lose a child that way.”

  “Yeah. I knew Mitch. I used to hang with the other brother Ronnie. And, not that I remember his little sister much, but no one ever thought of her as anything but his sister. We all thought it was pretty strange when she was suddenly given to your family. Well, not so strange. You were rich. They were poor. We figured it had something to do with that. Like your mother bought her. Only the Prices didn’t seem like they had any more money afterwards.”

  “But Mother—” She sighed. “She wanted what she wanted. Her grandchild, raised as a Wakefield. And that’s what she got, I guess. I wonder what Cathy thought. Whether she agreed to Mother’s action.”

  “How much later did she go after Ellen’s boyfriend?”

  “He wasn’t Ellen’s boyfriend then,” Laura said, as if that made all the difference. “But it was several years after Theresa came to us. I mean, it wasn’t a reaction to what Mother had done. I don’t think.” She folded up the dishtowel and put it on the counter. Then she came to me, putting her head right against the soap blotch she’d made on my t-shirt. “I wish Cathy were here. I wish she could explain it. But it had to be so painful, treating her daughter like a sister. And for part of that time, when Theresa was first adopted, Cathy was there at the college, a half-mile away. She couldn’t ever get away from remembering the mistake she’d made.” After a second she added, “Not that Theresa is a mistake.”

  “I know what you mean.” She was warm and slender in my arms, and I wanted to take her back to bed. But even as I formed the thought, she sighed and pulled away.

  “I saw her, you know. Cathy. When she was pregnant with Brian. I wish she would have said something then. I was so aghast, you know. I probably wasn’t as open a listener as I should have been. Maybe she would have explained why she’d done it again. Why she’d done it in a way that was sure to hurt Ellen.”

  “But she told Tom, right? He knew about the child all along.”

  “Well, not from the first. She told him just a few months before she died. And I’m not sure he believed her.” Laura brooded for a moment, and then sa
id, “She must have felt like it was a bad recurring dream—having a baby and then giving it up. And she had so little time left.”

  “So how’s Theresa dealing with it?”

  Laura shrugged. “She’s pretty disoriented, I guess. But she said it kind of fits. Ironic. She’s lost a brother—Mitch—but gained another one. Brian. Her half-brother.”

  “This is so . . . West Virginia.”

  She didn’t have the brush to throw at me this time, so she balled up her fist and punched my arm lightly. Then she sobered. “It’s really hard for them both, I think. Theresa has to face that she’s been lied to all these years—and in the name of love. It wasn’t just Mother who deceived her, but the Prices too. And Brian—well, here he’s been searching for his birthmother, and he finds out that she died when he was a baby.”

  “Yeah,” I said over my shoulder, as I went into the bedroom to dress for work, “what a shame. There’s a parent he can’t kidnap and hold hostage.”

  She followed me in, angry now for real. She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “That’s not fair. He’s just a boy.”

  “He’s old enough to go to prison for kidnapping. Now that would make him maybe think being an over-privileged adopted kid wasn’t so bad after all.” Couldn’t help it. I didn’t like the kid and his whiny quest for his identity, or whatever he called it.

  “Don’t be mean,” Laura said. “He’s not the first teenager to go to extremes.”

  This might have been a reference to our elopement twenty years ago. Or it might just be a general observation. But it wasn’t the same at all. I did my time in jail. This kid got off scot-free, which, in my experience, was usually what happened to boys with family connections.

  Class resentment was an ugly thing. I let it go. “Can’t be pleasant, to find out all this about Cathy.”

  She settled against me, her shoulder nudging at my chest. “I’ll be okay. It’s worse for Theresa. Her whole life turns out to be a series of lies.” She sighed. “I guess I have to stop thinking of her as my sister, and start thinking of her as a niece. Remembering to send her a check on her birthday.”

  “And taking her up to Charleston to go Christmas shopping at Kauffman’s.”

  “And go with her to see Beauty and the Beast.” She pulled back and looked up. She was smiling, and beautiful, and it made me think we had a chance—Too early to worry about that now, I told myself. Just . . . enjoy what we had while we had it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It was a slow afternoon, which was always good. But the FBI APB reports didn’t grab me, and after awhile I got up from my desk and addressed something that was nagging at me. Best not to ask my secretary for help. I found my way to the storage room and quickly located the right file drawer—the last chief had his faults, but at least he insisted on regularly scheduled filing.

  The folder was a little dusty, but thick with photographs. I took it back to my office and closed the door. I had been in Bristol when Cathy Wakefield died, and didn’t hear about it till years later. So my knowledge was limited to “climbing accident,” which wasn’t all that unusual around here, where climbing schools were almost as common as ski schools, and greenhorns fell off mountains with some regularity. What was unusual was a local dying in a climbing accident. Not that locals were such great climbers— only that very few were dumb enough or reckless enough to take up that hobby. Mountains were for mining, logging, and skiing, not climbing.

  But Cathy Wakefield wasn’t the normal local. She was reckless and athletic, and probably no one was surprised when she took one risk too many and it killed her.

  What nagged at me was Laura’s suggestion that the accident wasn’t an accident.

  There were some cops who believed, just like Freud, that there were no such things as accidents. They assumed every single-car accident was really a suicide, that every accidental overdose was really planned. These cops tended to be cynics and pretty grim about life, but they also tended to be right. Suicide is always suspected when the accident victim is young and single, or old and sick. Not that we share our suspicions with the family— what good would it do? It makes them guilty as well as grief-stricken, and sometimes it screws up the insurance settlement too. Better to say, “He fell asleep at the wheel,” and leave it at that.

  So I leafed through Cathy Wakefield’s file, looking for evidence that the investigating officers were thinking suicide. The signs were there, if you knew how to read the reports. The observation about oddity of her rappelling alone in the late afternoon, when the mountains cast deep shadows across the hollows. A tinge of skepticism that an experienced climbing instructor would buckle her harness so wrong that she fell out of it. The mention of her recent return to her mother’s house after two years away.

  I went to the storage locker and removed a climbing harness— we had the equipment because sometimes we’d have to help locate a stranded hiker. Then I took the harness and the folder out to my squad car and drove across the river, past the gas station public phone where someone had called in to say a pickup truck was abandoned on the old bridge, up the other side of Croak Mountain. From there, the road wound down, switchback upon switchback, three miles in driving distance, but nine hundred vertical feet from the pine ridge to the river. The river bottom was a place known to every teenager in town because of the little sandy beach, just past the rapids. We used to have parties there, taking the path down beside the bridge, dangerous, yeah, when you were carrying a 24-pack, but seldom lethal.

  I parked the car on the gravel shoulder just this side of the bridge, and walked up along the road to the spot where Cathy had hooked her rope. The guardrail was old and dented by collisions, but when I put my hand on it, I could feel scrapes in the warm metal. The gouges were recent and sharp. Climbers either didn’t know that one of their number had died here, or, more likely, took the stories of Cathy’s death as a challenge.

  I gripped the guardrail and leaned out over the cliff. I’d done a bit of rappelling myself, for the department here and in Bristol. Plus it was part of the curriculum at reform school, you know, all that Outward Bound shit, sending us out in the wilderness so we’d learn survival skills. Mostly what we learned was how to hide our stash of weed from the counselors. But those of us who grew up in the mountains had a healthy respect for heights. I took a deep breath of the cool air, gazing down through the two hundred-foot drop to the rocky river below.

  The canyon face would have been an easy rappel for an experienced climber, and an easy climb back up. It was the sort of climb Cathy probably did just to pass an hour or two, as another woman might shop in a department store even if she didn’t have much to buy.

  But no one died during a shopping trip.

  She’d fallen while rappelling down, or while climbing back up, and landed down there on the sand, just beside the river.

  I got the folder from the car and sat down on the guardrail, looking through the accident-scene photos. They were sharp and well-framed, probably taken by the photographer at the newspaper. I pulled out a magnifying glass and studied them one by one.

  Cops get used to seeing people they know lying dead. In Bristol, it was usually our homeless pals, the ones who got themselves arrested every week so they could get a shower and a few decent meals. Then one or the other would be found lying dead in an alley, from heart attacks, mostly, or pneumonia, but sometimes a beating that went on too long. It wasn’t particularly weird seeing them dead. They looked half-dead when they were alive.

  It was different, seeing the pictures of Cathy Wakefield’s body. Even splayed out on the little sandy shore, she looked young and fresh and ready in her nylon climbing shorts and tank top. Her eyes were open and her face unmarked. There was no sign of injury, though the autopsy report had listed a fractured skull and a crushed ribcage as causes of death.

  Tragic. Waste. Lost.

  I spent some time studying the picture of her harness. The leather was unbroken, the buckles intact. But the strap was dangling loos
ely. A stupid mistake. An amateur mistake.

  Or not a mistake.

  I pulled my own harness on, fixing the line between my legs and buckling the straps. Hmm. To fall out of the harness- as she must have done, to end up down on the beach without it— she would have had to be dangling almost upside down. Even without the strap tightly buckled, the leg lines would ordinarily keep her solidly in the harness. Unless she was upside down and fell out.

  Okay, I’d been known to end up dangling headfirst when I was learning to rappel. But she wasn’t a beginner. She was a professional climber. She wouldn’t make the mistake of neglecting to tighten her strap and then finish up by turning upside down. Unless that’s what she planned.

  She was the purposeful sort. Made a goal (like getting her sister’s boyfriend) and went after it. If she wanted to kill herself but spare her family, she’d do it right. She’d make it deniable enough that the small-town cops and the coroner would ignore the evidence and call it an accident.

  And that’s what she’d done. Didn’t matter now. Not like I was going to say anything to the family, after so many years. I just needed to know for myself. For Laura.

  I squared the photos and started to put them back. But I hesitated, looking once more at the photo on top, of the body laid out in the sand. There was an indentation a yard away from her outstretched hand, just inside the yellow police tape.

  When I got back to the office, I took one copy of each photo of the sandy bank and cut out the half with the body. Then I took them down the street to the camera store. Judy was intrigued by my request— usually she just got requests for extra prints of wedding photos, she said— and took an hour off her other work to blow up the images, then scan them and put them on a CD.

  When I got back to the office, I spread the blowups on my desk and stuck the CD in my computer. I went through the four pictures, zooming in on that dent in the sand.

  It was a shoeprint. And in the middle was a rectangle— a logo.

  No one in this town knew more about shoes than Laura. She’d know what that logo was, I’d take a bet on it. I was looking back and forth from the big photo to its counterpart on my computer screen, when Laura came in response to my call.