Why the Rock Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  Jan dragged her stunned mind toward Lacey’s voice. “What?”

  “I said, are you okay? The paramedics can look you over before they go.”

  “They have to stay with Kitrin.” Jan’s tea sloshed onto her hands. “She needs them.”

  Lacey took the mug away and blotted the hot liquid. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing more they can do.”

  The words hit Jan in the ribs. “She can’t be.” Then, as she forced in a breath, she wheezed, “Where’s Michael? He can’t see this.”

  “He went off with his father today.”

  “But he’ll come back and want his mother.” Jan’s eyes overflowed. She mopped them on the towel. “Somebody has to phone Mylo. He can’t bring Michael home without telling him.”

  Lacey put the tea back into her hands. “Drink this. The police will need to ask you some questions.”

  “Police? Why? She drowned. You said yourself she was too weak to be in the water unsupervised.”

  “Deep breaths. Drink your tea. The police will take you through it, and I’ll be right here with you. Do you want me to call Terry to take you home after?”

  “He’s out at SAR training.” Maintaining his Search and Rescue certification took just two hours a week and one weekend a month, covering everything from why lost people behave like they do, to how to strap one into a basket for a helicopter lift. So why did it seem like, whenever disaster struck near home, he was either in training or out on Search? Jan swallowed a mouthful of tea. It seared her throat, but the warmth was a balm spreading in her chest. “God, I’ll have to tell him, too. And Rob. We’ve never lost a friend before. And she was a friend, you know. Even if I wasn’t glad to see her at first, we talked after supper, and she loved her son so much, and …” She mopped her eyes again.

  The paramedics were packing up their gear. One of them knelt before her. “You were in the water, too, miss?”

  Jan nodded.

  “I’d like to take your pulse and check you over, just to make sure you’re okay.”

  What could possibly be okay in this situation? She sniffed. “Yeah, I guess.” She sat while he listened to her heart and cuffed her arm for blood pressure, and then a policewoman took his place. She said dully, “Yes, I can answer questions,” to the woman and rubbed her forehead. The shade over her scoured eyes was a relief. “I arrived at the gate about ten o’clock and went looking for Kitrin. I couldn’t find her at first…. How long? Maybe ten minutes. The steward thought she was swimming, so I came out here.” She looked over her shoulder. “Through those doors. She was floating face down, and when I got near, I saw blood in her hair. I thought she’d tipped her chaise and hit her head on the side. I jumped in and tried to give her rescue breathing, but I stepped on a rock from the waterfall, so I was off balance and the current in the pool pulled us under the waterfall. Lacey came and pulled us out.”

  The officer looked at Lacey. “Did you notice any loose rocks?”

  Lacey said, “There was an incident recently with boys loosening rocks and throwing them into the pool. It might be one of theirs.” She pressed Jan’s hand. “Do you remember approximately where you stepped on the rock? I can go look for it.”

  Jan pointed toward her armchair, abandoned at the near end of the little bridge. “About a stride off the side there.” She watched them walk away and then forced herself to her feet to look down at Kitrin.

  “Step back, please, ma’am,” said an officer.

  “I just want to say goodbye. She was my friend.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss. Please sit over there.”

  Defeated, Jan returned to her chair.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A flush creeping up the back of her neck, Lacey tugged her towel tighter and toggled through all the cameras again. Constable Markov said nothing out loud, merely watched past her shoulder. But in her mind, he was thinking everything she’d be thinking — and possibly saying — about a slacker who let a camera go to hell on a security system for weeks without noticing. Worse, she’d left Chad unsupervised, and he had, accidentally or on purpose, turned off more cameras, thereby missing vital footage of the pool area at the time Kitrin died. She flipped back to the camera covering the garage frontage and scrolled backward, pausing on one that showed half a person’s head and one green-clad shoulder near the pool gate.

  “See, the only person who passed there is a staffer. You can tell by the polo shirt. One of the outside staff, because of the ball cap.” The wisps of visible neck hair looked brown or reddish, although it was hard to be sure with the shade of the garage over the staffer and everything beyond in bright sunlight.

  Markov peered closer. “So this person could confirm whether Mrs. Matheson was in her chaise when they passed the pool gate, letting us narrow down time of death almost to the minute. Can you figure out where they went after this shot?”

  Lacey skimmed through the other working cameras over the terraces, but none showed the staffer. She backed over to the garage camera and time-stamped a still of the head to print out for Markov. “They could have gone either into the house through the pool doors — no cameras indoors — or around outside the pool walls.”

  Markov scratched his head. “I don’t like that the only working camera there was off-line while Chad must have been talking to her. Is there any connection between them, that you know of?”

  Lacey shook her head. Chad had absolutely no excuse for turning off cameras or for chatting up a house guest. She’d have to report him to Wayne now. “I’ll stay here and log every person who was caught on other cameras in this area for half an hour either side of the approximate time of death.”

  Markov shook his head. “Do nothing until the homicide squad comes to supervise. Chain of evidence, you know. I should lock you out of here.”

  “Except then I won’t be able to watch for your people arriving at the gate and instruct Travis who to let in. You know some sharp reporter will have monitored their police scanner, and there are only a half-dozen houses on this road. They just have to drive straight up to find out the incident is at this one.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He looked at the photo in his hand. “I’d better get on with the staff interviews.”

  Lacey glanced at the console clock. “You’ll find most of them eating lunch in the staff dining room.” She pointed it out on the estate map. “Ask Sergeant Drummond if he wants me here as a Victim Services volunteer for when the husband and son get back. I’ve met them both.”

  “Will do.”

  When Markov left, Lacey picked up the house phone and asked the cook to send sandwiches to the security room and the gate. It could be a long afternoon. Then she started a past-twenty-four-hours backup running to the remote server Wayne kept in his city office. The air conditioning kicked in, reminding her she was still wet and now chilled. What a day to be without her gym bag. She clutched her phone in wrinkled white fingers, thankful it had been in her tool belt on the tiles instead of in her pocket in the pool, and texted Dee. Can you run a change of clothes up to Jake’s? Undies and all. You’ll have to leave them at the gate. I’ll tell you everything when I get home.

  In the end, Lacey combined the roles of witness and Victim Services volunteer for Jan. Once the homicide team from Calgary released them, she drove Jan’s van home. As they pulled up outside the Brenners’ front door, she flashed back to the first day they’d met, over a year ago at the art museum. She’d driven Jan home that day, too, in a similar state of collapse. This time she knew a lot more about Jan’s illness and had a better idea how badly the stress and shock could affect that flaky brain wiring.

  “Stay in your seat,” she told Jan. “I’ll unlock the door and get you inside.” Jan sat limp, eyes closed, while Lacey set up the portable wheelchair from the back of the van. “Sunroom or straight into bed?”

  Jan frowned, as if even that small decision was painful. “Living room couch.”

  Lacey put her there, lifted her feet to slide a cushion under them, and draped
an afghan over the whole. “I’ll make you some tea, unless you want a cool drink.”

  “Rehydration drink in the fridge. Yellow pitcher.”

  The yellow pitcher was labelled in permanent marker, Jan’s goop. Lacey poured out a large glass and carried it, already condensing around her fingers, into the next room. “You get that into you. I’ll call Terry.”

  “No, don’t. It’s whitewater rescue training today. They need everyone.” Jan tipped her head up and sipped the cold drink.

  “Then I’d better make you food before I leave. Soup?”

  “Rob’s coming up soon.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Jan shivered and set the glass aside. “Yeah, he invited himself for supper. Wanted me to invite Michael, too, but he was going with Mylo to Tyrone’s ranch and didn’t know when he’d be back.”

  “Rob’s playing with kids? That’s new.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jan shut her eyes again. Tears seeped from the corners. “Poor Michael. I wish they’d come back while we were there. He’ll be all alone except for Mylo, who is probably useless with emotional support.”

  “Where’s his nanny? Georgie?”

  “I thought she went with them. She always wants to be near Mylo.” Jan sniffed. “Poor Kitrin. If you could have seen her face when Michael said his nanny had gone off to a meeting with Daddy…. I’m pretty sure she thought they were having an affair. It would be on form for Mylo.”

  Well, that was interesting, especially when added to Lacey’s glimpse of Mylo and Georgie on camera yesterday. The nanny had better have been somewhere with witnesses. The police hadn’t yet ruled out homicide, and they’d look really hard at Mylo’s lover’s whereabouts while his wife had a fatal accident. Probably more so since Mylo was in a helicopter with the pilot and his own son at the time, and thus cleared of personal involvement in a potential domestic killing. “I’ll head out. Call if you need anything, and I’ll come right back up.”

  “Thanks so much. You’ve gotten really good at taking care of me.”

  Lacey smiled. “Spinoff benefit from a year of Dee’s recovery. Get some rest.”

  It wasn’t quite a three-minute walk down the road and up Dee’s driveway. When Lacey opened the mud room door, Dee called out from her office. “What the actual was going on up there? I saw half a dozen police vehicles from the gate, but the guy I gave your clothes to wouldn’t say a word.”

  Lacey slumped into the spare armchair and propped her feet on a tapestried footstool. There was no sense keeping it quiet. Someone had died on her second day as a security team supervisor, and there was no record because she had stupidly left unreliable Chad to his brother’s supervision. “Kitrin Devine was found dead in the swimming pool.”

  Dee gasped. “By you?”

  “Worse. By Jan.” Lacey rubbed at an incipient headache above her eyes. “She saw Kitrin floating face down and jumped in to rescue her. I heard her yelling and pulled them both out. Too late for Kitrin.” She summarized the past few hours and dissuaded Dee from going up to comfort Jan immediately. Then she sat down with a glass of iced tea on the shady back terrace. Time to bring Wayne up to speed.

  “We can’t keep Chad after this,” she said once she’d described the drowning and the camera situation. “It’s beyond incompetent to have shut down three security cameras so he could chat up the celebrity house guest. For all we know he was hitting on her and dumped her in the pool when she turned him down.”

  “You think he’s an incel?” Wayne asked. “He didn’t strike me that way.”

  Lacey considered. “No, maybe not. He was strictly professional when I briefly worked with him in Vancouver. But that beating and its long recovery could have left nasty psychological trauma. If he did hurt her, it would be an impulse attack. I saw him coming out of Kitrin’s suite minutes earlier, and he wasn’t more than ordinarily nervous then at being caught where he shouldn’t be.”

  Wayne made that growling noise she associated with his most annoyed mood. “Turning off cameras, invading guest quarters, making contact with Jake’s guests … none of it looks good. I’ll come out tonight and deal with him after I reassure Jake that there’s no murderer on his estate, lurking to kill someone else. There’ll be reporters once the news breaks. Can you spell off gate shifts over supper until reinforcements arrive?”

  “Glad to. I’ll eat now and be back there in an hour.” Wayne hung up, presumably to start calling his contacts for more temporary security people, and Lacey sat a while longer, soothed by the wind shushing through the spruces. Wayne didn’t blame her for Chad. Her job seemed safe. She could leave Kitrin’s death for the active-duty RCMP to handle. It was probably exactly what it seemed: accidental drowning of a woman too frail to be left unsupervised. But she would mention to investigators that she’d spotted Mylo and Georgie in a heavy make-out session, just in case it wasn’t.

  The sun fell behind the western peaks before Lacey got home again. She was hot, tired, and cranky, as well as stuck with Chad for now. Wayne simply couldn’t find a replacement he trusted more on short notice. She was self-aware enough to know her foul mood was partly from that and from being surrounded by male RCMP officers all evening. Men who walked and talked like Dan, who wore the same uniform. And here she’d thought Earl Caine was triggering. Constable Markov had been released when the Major Crimes squad took over, leaving all unfamiliar officers rather than those she knew from the Cochrane detachment. The squad had photographed every inch of the waterfall area, grilled everyone possible about the boys’ rock-throwing incident, and taken over the security office to make their own copy of all the camera footage. They’d interviewed every staff member on the grounds that morning, too, but none would admit to being nearby at the critical moment. Were they afraid of being charged with negligence — or merely fired by Jake — for not keeping an eye on Kitrin in the pool? Would Mylo, being a litigious American, try to sue Jake or someone else who might have saved his wife? She made the rounds of the house, doing her usual nighttime check, and wondered what news the morning would bring.

  She woke in the dawn to buzzing and grabbed her phone before it shook itself right off the nightstand. “McCrae.”

  It was Wayne. “Can you be ready to head up to Jake’s with me in half an hour? We’re cleared to repair those cameras. And I need to talk to you about something that might become quite urgent.”

  “Now you’ve got my attention,” said Lacey as she steered her tired body toward the bathroom. “About Kitrin’s death?”

  “No. Do you still keep a bug-out bag packed?”

  That was new. “No, but I can have one ready by the time you get here.”

  “Do it,” said Wayne.

  With five minutes to spare, she waited for Wayne on the deck between the garage and the house with her steel coffee mug filled and her backpack at her feet. Above her, the pale morning sky was streaked with high, thin clouds. Another hot day ahead. Watched by the two sleepy dogs flopped over in their shady pen, she pulled the hose from its reel and watered all the flower baskets hanging from the pergola. For good measure, she rinsed and refilled the dogs’ water trough and their splash pool. Wayne’s truck turned into the drive as she stowed the hose. She climbed into the truck with her gear.

  “All right. My bag’s packed. What’s up?”

  Wayne headed down the drive. “Might be nothing. We’ll know more by the time we’re done with those cameras. You may have to take my truck up to Orrin Caine’s ranch. But you can’t say anything to anyone about this.” At the road he swung hard right toward Jake’s hilltop.

  “I’ll go, but what can’t I tell anyone?”

  “After Mylo Matheson and his son left the ranch yesterday afternoon, Orrin took his youngest boy, Tyrone, for a drive. They didn’t say where they were going and didn’t return last night. No answer from their cellphones. Could be as simple as a flat tire stranding them outside cell range, but the ranch hands went out on horseback and ATVs to check all the usual places and didn’t find them. Sea
rch and Rescue is staging this morning, and the RCMP is going house to house looking for anyone who might have seen Orrin’s old Rover on the surrounding roads.”

  “What do they need a security person on site for?”

  “Ostensibly, you’ll brief their staff on repelling reporters without getting charged for assault, and hang around to monitor cameras, etc. The news isn’t out yet, but it will be if he’s not found today.”

  “That’s bigger news than the death of a Hollywood director’s wife?”

  Wayne rolled an eye in her direction. “A drowned stranger against the disappearance of a king of the oil patch? Do you have any idea how many individuals and businesses will be in turmoil if there’s a sudden power shift at the top of Caine International?”

  “I’ll have to take your word for that. Less ostensibly, what am I going there for?”

  Wayne pulled up at Jake’s gate and tapped his horn. Travis climbed out of a truck parked just inside and opened up for him. As Wayne drove through, he said, “This is the part you keep under your hat. Orrin asked me on Friday to start a rush investigation that could have nasty implications for his family. You’ve met most of them. There’s a lot of resentment, and it’s possible one of them wanted him unavailable, or even dead, this weekend. You need to quietly find out whether that’s likely, and if so, which of them is behind it.”

  The truck stopped at the stables, and Lacey unbuckled her seat belt. Another chance to prove herself competent. She wouldn’t blow this one. “I’ll give it my best shot.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jan’s bedroom door opened, flooding the room with light that spilled around the edges of her sleep mask. She crooked her arm over her eyes and groaned. “What?”

  Terry said softly, “Sorry, but Mylo’s phoned three times already. This time he says it’s urgent. It’s about Michael.”

  She pushed her mask up, blinking in the light, and reached for the phone. “Hi, Mylo? What’s wrong?”