Why the Rock Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  Lacey frowned. “Do you know if the RCMP investigators now have this text?”

  “They didn’t mention it the first time they took me in, just kept hammering at me about what exactly my relationship had been with her, and if we’d been in contact before she arrived here. How much I’d seen her in the intervening years. Over and over and over.”

  Jan groaned. “They had divers in Jake’s pool, looking for that phone, but surely they could access her cloud backups or whatever?”

  “Probably. Go on, Rob.”

  “I kept telling them I hadn’t seen her. We hadn’t spoken or emailed or anything since that first year she went south with Mylo. I don’t even remember if we sent her a baby present.”

  “I sent one,” Jan said, “and put your name on the card, too.” She let out a breath. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this sooner? I’m your best friend in the world.” Was he ashamed of sleeping with a woman? Would he kill to avoid being reminded? That was not the Rob she knew. That Rob wouldn’t raise a hand to anyone to ease his own path. But the RCMP didn’t know that Rob.

  He turned his phone over again. His thumb hovered over the button. He closed his hand tight instead. “When Mylo came back for her a couple of weeks later, I was glad. Keeping her alive was someone else’s burden. I got on with my final papers and never thought about that night again. You might think the last woman I ever slept with would stick in my head, but it honestly wasn’t worth remembering. The sex, I mean.” He looked pleadingly at Lacey. “How bad is this? If they have my text?”

  “It gives you a credible motive,” she said with what seemed like deliberate brutality, “for bashing her over the head in a fit of anger. And you know your way around Jake’s place because of all the parties we’ve been to up there. If Bart won’t give you an alibi, you might have to choose: out him and let the chips fall for him with Orrin, or face a trial for murder.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The drive north was the least comfortable Lacey had ever felt around Bart or Andy. She drove while they sat in the back seat, far apart and staring out opposite windows at the trees flickering by. The trail of dust spread out behind the vehicle, and gravel rattled under the tires, but otherwise there was nothing distracting her from wondering whether this was related in any way to Orrin’s disappearance. The only reason Bart might have for making Orrin disappear would be if Orrin had found out and threatened to disinherit. Wouldn’t he have blown up around the rest of the family, though? Thrown Bart off the ranch like he had Ben? But he hadn’t. The very day he’d vanished, Bart and Andy had been at the ranch teaching Michael Matheson to climb.

  If not that, then what had triggered the sabotage of Orrin’s Rover? The last time the whole family had gathered was the previous weekend, for Tyrone’s birthday. Cheryl, the only family intimate who wasn’t actually a relative, would have heard about any arguments, but would she be too loyal to Sloane to repeat them?

  When the ranch’s first no-trespassing sign appeared, Lacey turned off Highway 40 and took the couple in by the south gate to avoid any media out front. She dropped them at their cabin and drove on to the garage. As she pulled in, a mechanic came to take over.

  While he backed the vehicle out to the gas pump in the staff parking lot, the other mechanic said, “Driving okay? Any issues?”

  “The air conditioning didn’t cool as much as I expected. Don’t know if that was the outside temperature or the coolant getting low.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  She nodded to him and hauled her kit bag from home up to the office. She should run down and change that lock on the workout room door right away, since Wayne had obligingly left a replacement lock at Dee’s that afternoon on his way to Jake’s. What she’d really like to do was have a shower and a cool drink, followed by a light supper. But she couldn’t walk into Andy’s cabin as if none of the afternoon’s revelations had changed anything. She’d eat in the main kitchen for the first time and then occupy herself until bedtime. Meanwhile, here she was, back in her stuffy office, squinting at a monitor as she scrolled through the archived images from the weekend before the sabotage, trying to spot any heated discussions among family members. Earl’s wife and daughters were all slim and invariably wearing ball caps or sunhats, so she never did figure out which was which as they came and went from his cabin. She guessed the older girls would be the same pair who briefly appeared on the stable camera one evening, but otherwise everyone appeared on good behaviour, even when Orrin jabbed his finger at their faces.

  During a real-time camera sweep, she spotted Cheryl in an upper hallway, taking a tray downstairs. Lacey immediately headed to the main house, hoping to intercept and question the woman about events not caught on camera that weekend. As she hurried down the hallway with all the portraits, Earl’s voice came from Orrin’s study.

  “I’ve told you everywhere I remember. Do you honestly think I’d hold back when my father’s life is at stake?”

  There was a crash, as if something had fallen off the big walnut desk. She turned. The back of a twin was stomping out the door she’d come in by. Probably Bart, unless Earl had finally given Ben a fob. Although Ben was more likely to have swept something off the desk in a rage. Whichever it was, they were still hunting down any place Orrin might have taken Tyrone for a test of manhood. Good on them. Now, which door led to the kitchen?

  Cheryl was slumped in an alcove where house staff ate their meals, gazing blankly out at the trees. Sliding into a chair opposite her, Lacey asked, “Mind if I join you? I’m Lacey, the security company’s rep.”

  Cheryl’s brown eyes focused. “Is there something I should know about the search? Something you want me to pass on to Sloane?”

  “Nothing to report, sorry. I’ll check with the SAR base after I eat, to get the latest. How’s Mrs. Caine doing today?”

  “She’s asleep, finally.” Cheryl sighed. “I hope she stays that way until we have news of some kind. She’s always lived on her nerves, and this is about the last ragged edge.”

  “I’m sorry. It must be awful for her.”

  “Yeah, it is. I’m trying to convince her to come to the city with me tomorrow, just for a few hours, to get her unstuck. She’s afraid if she leaves here, she’ll miss some crucial message.”

  “If it will help, I can take your phone number and immediately relay anything that comes in.” Lacey waited a beat. “I’m curious, though, about why Mr. Caine would suddenly take off with Tyrone like that, not telling anyone where he was going or when he expected to return. Is that usual?” She knew the answer, at least according to Ben and Bart. But with everything she’d learned about their secrets in the past twenty-four hours, she could no longer afford to accept their versions at face value.

  “Orrin’s never been much for reporting his movements, even though he tracks everyone else’s.” Cheryl looked back at the trees. “There’s two things that might be relevant that I can think of. And I might be completely off the mark on one of them.”

  “Bounce it off me, as an outsider, and see if it still seems likely.”

  “Okay. It might sound strange, but you’d have to know Orrin to see how it’s possible.”

  “Consider me warned.” Would this be a first-hand account of a family uproar that gave someone a motive?

  “Michael Matheson,” said Cheryl.

  Lacey blinked. “What about him?”

  “Um, you’ve met him, right? At that supper I heard so much about?”

  Lacey nodded.

  “Well, if you didn’t notice, he and Tyrone look a lot alike. Sloane came home from Jake’s place seriously freaked out about the resemblance. Even though it didn’t seem like Orrin had ever met Kitrin Matheson before, she’s afraid … well, that Orrin is Michael’s father. That he had an affair while she was pregnant with Ty.” Cheryl looked across the table with an expression only half hopeful. “Would you know if Michael’s adopted?”

  “Um, no. Michael is not adopted, and I’m reasonably sure his mother
never met Orrin before last Thursday.” Unless there’d been a drunken hook-up right in that same window twelve years ago, and Kitrin didn’t remember? Rob had said she was lonely and desperate for reassurance, and she’d had a thing for older men. But a third possible father for Michael was just too improbable. “No,” she said again. “Kitrin is definitely Michael’s mother, and she was nowhere near an oilfield when she conceived. Not even in Alberta.”

  “Oh. Well, she’s dead now, I hear, so we can’t ask her, anyway.” Cheryl pressed the bridge of her nose between two fingers. “I’ll pass that along to Sloane if she brings it up again.”

  “She didn’t ask Orrin already?”

  “God, no. He would torment her forever if he thought she cared.”

  A truly charming man. Ugh. “You said there was a second thing?”

  “Yeah. Orrin has an obsession about boys becoming men at age twelve. We thought Sloane had talked him out of doing any of the stupid, dangerous things from the old days, but maybe we were wrong.” Cheryl gave a rundown similar to what Lacey had heard from the twins: how Orrin would dump his sons on an off-roading trail or cutline and make them find their own way home. “This was all before my time, you realize. I’ve only been here since Ty was born.”

  “Orrin didn’t try anything like this with his granddaughters?”

  Cheryl laughed mirthlessly. “The only thing he did with them was make nasty comments about their makeup and clothes. They spent their time here avoiding him. Mostly they snuck down the bluff to smoke and drink with the cowboys. None of those guys would dare set a finger out of line, but it gave the girls something to occupy themselves with.”

  “I saw they’d damaged a few cameras so they could come and go without their grandfather finding out.”

  Cheryl nodded. “Orrin and his cameras are a pain in the ass. He put tracking on everybody’s phones and vehicles, too. Except his own, of course.”

  “But not Tyrone’s?”

  “Oh, for sure Ty’s. But the first thing he would do, if he was set on some crazy rite of passage, is take the phone away so Ty couldn’t look up his location or call for help.” She looked around the kitchen. The only other people in the big room were on the far side, chopping vegetables. She leaned forward. “Sloane thinks one of the family fucked up the Rover on purpose. Orrin’s the only one allowed to drive it, you know.”

  Lacey stretched closer. “Any particular person?”

  “If we had to guess? Earl. He hates her, and Ty, too. Orrin spent the whole birthday weekend claiming he’d change his will to leave Ty everything. Rubbing Earl’s nose in how subservient he is — well, he said it less politely. Humiliating him in front of his daughters. He’s always needling the older sons about all the ways they don’t measure up, but this was the first time he straight-up said he’d move Ty to the front of the line.”

  “I heard him say something similar at Jake’s.”

  There was a lull in the cooks’ activity. Cheryl called over, “Can you throw me together a salad with some ham? Mrs. Caine is only having a smoothie when she wakes up.” She looked at Lacey. “Did you want supper while we talk?”

  “Sure. Same as you, I guess.”

  “Garlic bread?” Lacey nodded. Cheryl called out the additional items and got a wave back.

  “So you and the staff are pretty informal?”

  “Oh yeah. We’ve been together for ages, mostly in town. We don’t winter out here unless Orrin takes it into his head to have an old-fashioned ranch Christmas. Which he does sometimes, when the weather’s good or he wants to make everyone dance to his fiddle.”

  “So the house staff comes from his place in the city?”

  “Yup. This house is kept just above freezing in winter, and Ike checks on it daily when it’s not being used. He’s here year round, with the stock and the hands.”

  “He’s a tough man, I can tell,” said Lacey. “I wouldn’t want to winter out here. Can you tell me who all was here for Tyrone’s birthday? Family and guests.”

  “Let me see … all three of Orrin’s wives, Earl, his wife, his girls, Bart, and Andy. I think that’s everyone who was here for the cake and presents on Saturday.”

  “Not Ben?”

  Cheryl shook her head. “He’s persona non grata. Not that it stops him. The hands won’t run him off. They just don’t bring it to Orrin’s attention if he’s been around filling up his truck or working out in the gym or visiting Bart. I’ve seen him around myself, sneaking in at dusk, and kept my mouth shut to avoid another blowout.”

  “Sloane doesn’t think the twins are a risk to Tyrone‘s inheritance?”

  Cheryl checked that the cooks were still occupied far away. “Neither Bart nor Ben want to run the company. If Orrin left them nothing, they’d be okay. They’d need jobs of some sort, but they wouldn’t starve. Their mother was pretty shrewd, for a pothead hippie type. Frankly, apart from Sloane, she’s the woman I have the most respect for. She knew what she wanted out of Orrin, she got it, and she left.”

  “But she was back that last weekend of August?”

  “Yeah, her first visit in years. I wondered if she came because Bart and Andy were going to announce they’re finally pregnant, but if they did tell Cass, they didn’t tell anybody else.”

  “And what about the first Mrs. Caine? Giselle, is it?”

  Cheryl curled her lip. “She’s here every summer when her granddaughters are. Way back, it was good to have extra hands with all those young kids, but I don’t know why she still comes. Her daughter-in-law was never good enough for her precious son, and she makes sure Susie knows it. The girls don’t like her much, either. But it’s a tradition that Earl and Susie have weekends away in Banff during the August gathering — except for Ty’s birthday, of course — and Granny always comes to stay with her precious darlings, even though they’re old enough not to need her. She just likes to keep a foothold here, like that empress woman in I, Claudius.”

  A cook brought two generous plates of salad greens topped with spiralized carrots, radish roses, cucumbers sliced so thin they were almost see-through, and shaved ham only a fingernail thicker. The garlic bread wafted warm, buttery flavours over the table, and suddenly Lacey was ravenous. She was about to stab her fork in when the second cook came over with a pitcher of lemonade and a caddy filled with oils and vinegars for dressings.

  “When did everyone leave?” she asked while she drizzled lime-infused olive oil onto her greens. “Was any of the family still around on Monday?”

  “Andy and Bart went back to town on Sunday night to put his mom on her plane.” Cheryl picked an oil with Provençal herbs. “I think Earl took his wife out for a last night in a hotel on Sunday, or was that Monday night?” She speared some salad and chewed. “No, I remember now. He took his wife and daughters to the plane on Monday and stayed over at the house in town that night.” She gave another sour laugh. “Or maybe he slipped off to the nearest whorehouse. Who really knows?”

  Lacey laughed along with her while taking mental notes about who was where last Monday night. “I’m curious why Sloane stays. Orrin can’t be the easiest husband in the world.”

  “That’s an understatement. If he was still trying for more sons, she’d be gone. But he got sterilized by prostate treatments years ago and doesn’t bother her any more.”

  “So Tyrone’s his last child? He didn’t freeze any sperm?” Lacey forked up some salad.

  Cheryl’s lip curled. “And reveal to his HR department’s benefits clerk that the mighty Orrin Caine was infertile? The only people who knew he even had prostate treatment were those clerks, and they’d never dare mention it.”

  This was turning out to be a most revealing conversation. “So life’s good enough for Sloane for now?”

  “Except now he’s paranoid that she’s making up for his deficiencies with the ranch hands or any other convenient males.” Cheryl stabbed a cherry tomato. “Hence the cameras pointing at her suite. As if any woman would be that obvious.”

 
“Sounds grim.” That too was an understatement. After only a few months of coping with Dan’s accusations of infidelity, Lacey had been a wreck. How had Sloane survived years of it? Probably having a close confidante in Cheryl helped. If Lacey’d had her current female friends back then, she might have been more resilient then, too. But every woman had her limit. Was Sloane behind the Rover sabotage? “So she wouldn’t be too distraught if he crashed his Rover?”

  “Nobody around here would be broken up if he’d driven himself off a cliff. But Ty …” For the first time, Cheryl’s voice trembled. She looked up at Lacey with haunted eyes. “If something’s happened to Ty because somebody wanted Orrin gone, I will kill that person myself.”

  Leaving Cheryl to pick at a slice of cold cherry pie, Lacey stepped out the kitchen door past a smoker in a lawn chair and rounded the corner to the terrace, automatically looking up to check that the staircase camera still pointed where it should. She wasn’t ready to lock herself away in the stuffy security office, and even less willing to intrude on Andy and Bart at their cabin. Instead, she found a bench in the thin wedge of shade by the house’s north wing and sat down. Her feet ached. She’d been wearing these workboots since nine this morning, but her running shoes and sandals were both down in her room at Andy’s. She’d have to suffer a bit longer, but at least she could do some of it out here while watching the sun creep behind a peak, shimmering redly through the heat haze. There ought to be a thunderstorm after a day like this, but no clouds boiled up behind those mountains.

  Reviewing the day, she realized she hadn’t had a chance to hear Jan’s results from the garage video. She pulled out her phone, checked on Dan’s last recorded location, and dialled.