Redemption Lake

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  In the silence, with no way to force the memory back this time, Matt heard the fear in Justin’s voice so vividly that he had to brace himself to keep from turning around to look for his cousin. An instant later, Matt was back in Lake Powell, twelve years old and kicking his legs to stay afloat.

  * * *

  All around him rusted mountains rose—carved by nature and mirrored on the water’s surface. The lake was cool with only the slightest ripple. To his left, a tuft of white cloud peeked over the ridge of Gregory’s Butte. Everything was quiet except for the slapping sound of waves caressing the shoreline in Mountain Goat Cove. On a rock ledge about twenty-five feet above Matt, Justin’s hair gleamed like polished mahogany in the angled sunlight. The sky behind his cousin was so bright it hurt to look up and Matt had been momentarily blinded before the sun dropped behind a cloud and turned the lake to sapphire.

  Matt heard the soft slapping sound of Justin’s wet feet on the rocks.

  “Don’t be a chicken,” Matt had yelled up from the water. “Get a running start like I did.”

  “I can’t,” Justin shouted. “I’m scared.”

  The rock canyon amplified and echoed sound as if it had a voice of its own. Scared…Scared…Scared.

  “Yes you can. Be brave. It’s so easy.” Easy…Easy…Easy.

  Justin stood as still as a statue.

  Then Matt said the worst thing he could think of. “You’re acting like a little girl. A sissy crybaby.”

  Justin still didn’t move.

  Matt swam towards the shore, got out of the water and climbed up the cliff until he stood directly behind Justin. “You jumped off the high dive at the YMCA pool. You can do it,” he said. “I know you can.”

  Justin’s arms went out to his sides like a tightrope walker as he inched to the edge. He stood for a moment looking down at the water, his legs visibly trembling. “I can’t. I’m too scared.”

  “Yes you can.” Matt gave him a small nudge.

  Justin stumbled forward and dropped off the ledge. His legs scissored back and forth for an instant, then dangled loose as if they’d become disjointed from his body. When the wind caught his bright red bathing trunks, they billowed out like a balloon. His chin dropped to his chest and he seemed to hang in the air for a moment.

  Justin looked so amazing as he fell that Matt applauded. Justin would love the thrill of the fall, the way his heart beat faster and his body felt free and light as a hawk. Justin would get over his fear and next time they’d jump together and land side by side.

  And then everything slowed down. Another cloud passed over the sun, leaving a golden ribbon across the lake. It was into this ribbon, near the rocky edge, that Justin entered the water. Concentric circles grew bigger and bigger, then disappeared.

  Matt got a running start and jumped from the ledge. Once he entered the water, he opened his eyes and looked for his cousin. Bubbles rising from his nose, he sunk deeper into the lake. He saw nothing and decided Justin had already risen to the top.

  When Matt’s head popped out of the water, he skimmed the lake’s surface, searched the cove, but saw no sign of his cousin. “Come on, Justin. You’re scaring me.”

  As Matt waited for him to surface, for the shining wet head to bob up, the cliffs reflected by the water moved with the lake’s ripples like spirits dancing.

  He waited and waited, but Justin didn’t resurface.

  Matt dove so deep, his fingers and toes tingled, then went numb. A dull roaring sound filled his ears as he dove again and again. Dove until his stomach hurt and his eyes and lungs burned as if the lake were on fire.

  His arms aching, his breath coming in short gasps, he fought his way back to the yellow dinghy he and Justin had pulled ashore. Matt had to get help. Alone, he paddled faster than he’d ever paddled before. When Aunt Kelsey, Mom’s twin sister, spotted the dinghy with only him inside, her dark eyes widened and her face went white as she looked from him to her sister and back again.

  A hollowness filled his chest, as sharp and brittle as a skeleton. “Justin and me,” he said, choking out the words. “We jumped into the lake. He didn’t come back up.”

  For a moment, everything was still. And then orders were shouted.

  “Radio the marina to call search and rescue. Get the speedboat.”

  A motor started, strong arms pulled him out of the dinghy and into the already moving boat. Uncle Bryce grabbed his shoulders and shook him hard. “Show me the exact spot where he went in.”

  Dad and his uncle dove again and again. The terror-filled minutes elongated into a lifetime, then collapsed like a stack of dominoes. Uncle Bryce had found Justin, his right foot wedged between two boulders jutting out from the canyon’s rock wall.

  For six years, Matt had believed that afternoon at Lake Powell would always be the worst time of his life, but he’d been wrong. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on Travis. Matt had never seen Travis cry, not even at Justin’s funeral. Travis could have a breakdown like Aunt Kelsey did after Justin died.

  Light from the restaurant windows seemed to scatter into meaningless splotches. Matt leaned his head back against the seat. There was a horrible nakedness in the silence. It was hard to breathe. He opened the driver’s side window and sucked in some air. It smelled like the hamburgers his dad used to grill on their backyard Weber.

  On the other side of the lot, the backdoor of a gray Toyota Camry opened. The dome light came on. Under its glow, a man and a woman tried to arrange their bodies into one small backseat.

  Oh shit. He tried to remember if Crystal had closed the blinds before they’d started to dance. If the candles had given off enough light for them to be seen through the window. Dancing? What was he thinking? They’d had sex without a condom. The police would find his semen inside her. Travis could disappear from Matt’s life the way Justin had.

  On television, they never let the victim bathe until after the rape test was done. Crystal had sat in a bathtub of water for a couple hours after they’d had sex. That might change the results. He unclamped his hands from the steering wheel and wiped them on his thighs.

  Travis returned, stood by the driver-side window. “She never showed up for work. Gracie said as soon as I drove off, Crystal got in some fancy car. Figures. No wonder I hate her.”

  Matt swallowed. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

  Travis’s eyes widened. “I just wish she’d stop screwing everything up for me.”

  Matt stared at the steering wheel. Travis was about to get his wish. Crystal would never screw anything up again. She’d never laugh at their antics or teach them another dance step. Never see them graduate from high school. Never watch a NCAA game where Travis played for the Arizona Wildcats and slammed the baseball out of Kindall field.

  “She’s going through a bad time,” Matt said.

  Travis cocked his head, gave Matt a suspicious look. “How do you know?”

  Above them, the moon slipped behind a cloud, rearranging the shadows on Travis’s face.

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Matt said. “And maybe you don’t know what she’s going through right now either. But your mom is the best person I know.”

  “She’s been drinking too much, man.” Travis slapped the Mustang’s door. “Go on home. She’s probably waiting for me. I’ll make sure she’s okay and then be right over.”

  “If she got a ride, what’s to worry about? You can call her in the morning.”

  “I’ll change and be at your house in a half hour,” Travis said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “If she’s drunk and passed out, she’ll be freaked you saw her that way.”

  “I can help you get her into bed.”

  Travis shook his head sadly, then lumbered away, his shoulders slumped, his head down.

  A better friend would have gone home with Travis, no matter the cost. Matt thought about the blood, the wound in Cr
ystal’s neck. A wound that would soon belong to Travis. And no amount of stitching could ever close it.

  Chapter Five

  Radhauser stood at the living room window for a moment, thinking about the victim’s son. Had his own son lived, he would be entering high school this fall.

  As the paramedic backed the ambulance out of the driveway, a white Ford Escort screeched to a halt on the road in front of the house. The driver’s door opened and a tall, lanky boy wearing a white dinner jacket dodged the ambulance and raced across the landscaping stones to the front walk. His hard-soled shoes clicked against the paved walkway like manic drumsticks.

  The front door was flung open. The boy ran into the room. He had blond curly hair and pale skin with a scattering of blemishes spread across his forehead like freckles. “What’s going on?” There was more than a trace of fear in his voice. “Has something happened to my mother?”

  Radhauser’s blood turned to ice water in his veins. How does a kid recover from something like this? He removed a leather case from the inside pocket of his jacket, flipped it open and flashed his badge. “I’m Detective Winston Radhauser from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.” He slipped the case back into his pocket and took out a small black notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped to the cover. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Travis Reynolds. I live here with my mother. Was she in that ambulance?”

  “No,” Radhauser said, jotting down the boy’s name and the time he’d arrived on the scene, realizing he’d probably given the poor kid a seed of hope his mother wasn’t hurt badly enough for an ambulance.

  “I need you to wait outside until my partner arrives and we finish up in here.”

  “Finish up what?” Travis ran into the kitchen, as if looking for his mother, then returned a second later and tried to push past Radhauser and into the hallway.

  Radhauser grabbed Travis from behind and pinned his arms to his sides. “You need to stay out of there.” Radhauser knew the house had been compromised by the paramedics, but intended to treat the bathroom like a crime scene until he’d had time to investigate. He led Travis back into the kitchen.

  “How bad is it?” Travis asked.

  “I’m sorry, son. But it’s about as bad as it gets.” Radhauser saw something pass over Travis’s face that told him he knew the truth, but wasn’t ready to face it yet. He’d give the boy some time—let him ask questions for which he already knew the answers.

  “Why did the ambulance leave? If she’s hurt so bad, why aren’t you taking her to the hospital?” Travis’s pulse thumped in and out of his neck like a frog’s throat. The ceiling light threw a dark shadow across his face. “Where is she? Where’s my mom?”

  Radhauser gently pushed Travis into a chair at the kitchen table.

  For a moment Travis sat, unmoving, his mouth open like a fighter who’d just taken a wicked blow to his head. And then he asked the question his blue eyes had been holding. “Is my mother dead?” His gaze lingered on Radhauser. Travis’s eyes were bloodshot and full of pain, but Radhauser could see them reaching for a negative answer.

  “No,” Travis said. “She can’t be dead.”

  Dead. The word echoed back at Radhauser, separate and hard as a stone. Dead. He shook his head to clear the old memory of the emergency room the night his family had died, and tried to focus on Travis. “I’m so sorry, son.”

  With no warning, Travis leaped from his chair and grabbed Radhauser by the shoulders. “What happened to her?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Radhauser said, though he was about ninety-five percent sure she’d been murdered. “The first officers on the scene thought it presented like a suicide.”

  The boy’s eyes grew wide and uncomprehending. “She wouldn’t do that. Please,” he said, his hands tightening on Radhauser’s shoulders. “Can’t you just tell me where she is?”

  “Come outside with me.”

  Travis didn’t budge. “Why can’t I see my mom?”

  Radhauser understood the need.

  He’d been out on a domestic violence call and had gotten to the hospital too late. In the basement morgue, he’d sat with his wife and son for hours, trying to understand how they could be present in the world one minute and gone the next.

  “I know I can’t say anything to dissuade you,” he said. “But until we’re certain a crime didn’t happen here, we have to protect the scene.”

  “I’m not going to do anything to your scene. I just want to see my mom.”

  The kid’s eyes held so much pain Radhauser had to look away. Knowing he’d behave the same way in Travis’s position, Radhauser kept his voice calm. “It’s procedure. You understand that, don’t you, Travis?”

  Travis reseated himself at the kitchen table. “Yes, sir,” he said, and dropped both arms onto the tabletop, rested his head on his folded hands and closed his eyes.

  Radhauser watched him from the doorway for a moment, then walked into the living room to look out the window for O’Donnell.

  When he heard the sound of a chair falling over in the kitchen, Radhauser turned back, just as Travis raced down the hallway. Shit. He should have seen that coming.

  Before he could stop him, Travis burst through the crime scene tape. One long yellow ribbon dangled against the doorframe when Radhauser caught up.

  Travis stepped into the bathroom and froze.

  Radhauser grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around. Travis had a wide panicked look in his eyes. His skin, even more pale than before, mottled with color as bright as welts. A tear dropped from the corner of his right eye and ran the length of his cheek, dropping straight and fast, like sweat on a summer glass.

  Jesus Christ. Maybe he should have kept those two deputies on the scene. What the hell was taking O’Donnell so long?

  He pulled Travis into the hallway and wrapped his arms around him. As he held tight to the sobbing boy, Radhauser stroked his back, real gentle, the way he’d want his own son treated.

  A siren pealed in the distance. Thank God.

  Travis pulled away and reeled down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  Radhauser replaced the tape over the bathroom entrance.

  The siren grew closer. A loud thumping sound came from the kitchen. Radhauser hurried toward it.

  Travis stood in front of the refrigerator, leaning into it with both hands as if he were holding it up. Between his two palms, an indented spot marred the smooth, avocado-green surface where he’d smashed it with his head so hard the force of it rattled the stack of trays and cookie sheets stored on top. When he turned to face Radhauser, Travis’s forehead dripped blood.

  For one long moment, Radhauser stared at the boy, understanding exactly why he’d done it. Anger came first. Then grief rolled in and settled over you like a thick and unrelenting fog. He pulled Travis away from the refrigerator, shoved him into a chair, then grabbed a dishtowel from the drawer, wet it under the faucet and pressed it against the boy’s head. The cut was in the hairline.

  “Her hair,” Travis said. “Why would someone cut off her hair like that?”

  Radhauser cleaned the wound, applied pressure and kept checking the bleeding. “She may have cut it herself.” As head wounds often do, it bled for what seemed like a long time. When it finally stopped, he wrapped ice cubes in another towel and handed it to Travis.

  “She wouldn’t do that. She cared about how she looked.”

  After a few moments, Radhauser checked the cut. It was a one-inch gash, didn’t appear to be deep, but he’d better watch for signs of concussion.

  “At the dance, I was talking to Jennifer about Mom,” Travis said, his voice soft and choked with sobs. “About how excited she was and how she’d probably ask me a zillion questions about the dance and…”

  The more Travis talked, the more sympathy Radhauser had for him. Radhauser was a grown man and still had nightmares about the mangled Ford station wagon. He still wished he’d taken the night off, as Laura had begged him to do, and been behin
d the wheel. Maybe he could have prevented the accident, driven fast enough to be long past the ramp where the Dodge pickup driver, drunk and confused, had headed south into the northbound lanes.

  Unlike this poor kid, Radhauser had coped with grief for a year—long enough to know the memory of his wife and son was a weight he’d always carry. He scratched his cheek, felt the beginning of his nightly stubble. “Do you have a first aid kit?”

  “Mom keeps it in the top drawer of her dresser.”

  “Are you okay to go get it?”

  Travis nodded.

  “Then I want you to sit and hold the ice on your head for a few more minutes.”

  Travis headed down the hallway toward his mother’s bedroom. When he returned with the first-aid kit, Radhauser put some Neosporin on the wound, used the butterfly strips to close it, and then sat quietly with Travis in the kitchen for a few minutes, hoping the boy would calm down enough to answer a few questions. Radhauser tried to assess what he saw and heard with the unbiased eyes and ears of a cop, but it wasn’t easy to do when the grief in the room was so thick it made it hard to breathe.

  With the screech of a patrol car coming to a halt outside, the siren ceased. After what he’d seen, there was no way Travis would return to that bathroom. No longer worried about protecting the boy, Radhauser met O’Donnell at the front door. “It’s about time you got here.”

  Tim O’Donnell was a short, solid, and shaved-bald man in his forties. He wore the navy blue uniform of the Tucson Police Department—his badge pinned above his breast pocket. Each time he saw Tim, Radhauser imagined a dark chocolate-colored fire hydrant. Tim had a sprinkling of even darker freckles across his nose and cheeks. He carried a long-handled police-issue Maglite that looked big enough to light up a movie screen.

  He looked over Radhauser’s attire, pausing for a moment at the hand-tooled boots, custom-made in Nogales. “What’s with the cowboy suit? You used to dress like a professional. Did you get called while two-stepping at the Get Up and Dance Saloon?”

  “Save your wardrobe critique for another time,” he said, then brought O’Donnell up to date on the scene and the teenage boy in the kitchen who’d tried to bash his head in with a refrigerator.