River's End

by Nora Roberts

  as she started the walk.

  She’d practiced her presentation that morning as she’d dressed and led into it very much as she had when her aunt had played tourist for her.

  When she mentioned bear, Celia didn’t squeal as Jamie had, but sighed. “Oh, I’d love to see one.”

  “Jeez, Mom, you would.”

  Celia laughed and hooked an arm around Noah’s neck. “Hopeless city boys, Livvy. Both of them. You’ve got your work cut out for you with these two.”

  “That’s okay, it’s good practice.”

  She identified trees for them, but got the feeling only Celia was particularly interested. Though Noah did seem to perk up when she spotted an eagle for him high in the moss- and lichen-draped trees. But when she cut over to the river and the world opened up a bit, all three of her charges seemed to get into the spirit.

  “This is the Quinault,” Olivia told them. “It runs to the coast. The Olympic Range rings the interior.”

  “God, it’s beautiful. It takes your breath away.” Celia had her camera up, busily framing and snapping. “Look at the way the mountains stand against the sky, Frank. White and green and gray against that blue. It’s like taking a picture of a painting.”

  Olivia scrambled around in her head for what she knew about the mountains. “Ah, Mount Olympus is actually less than eight thousand feet at its peak, but it rises from the rain forest at almost sea level, so it looks bigger. It has, I think it’s six, glaciers. We’re on the western slopes of the range.”

  She led them along the river, pointing out the clever dams the beavers built, the stringlike petals of wild goldthread, the delicate white of marsh marigold. They passed other hikers on the trail, singles and groups.

  Celia stopped often for pictures, and her men posed with patience if not enthusiasm. When Olivia managed to catch a red-legged frog, Celia took pictures of that as well, laughing in delight when it let out its long feeble croak.

  Then she surprised Olivia by stroking a long finger over the frog’s back. Hardly any of the women Olivia knew wanted to pet frogs. When she released it, she and Celia smiled at each other in perfect unity.

  “Your mother’s found a soul sister,” Frank muttered to Noah.

  Olivia was about to point out an osprey nest when a toddler raced down the trail, evading the young parents who called and rushed after him.

  He tripped and came to a skidding halt on knees and elbows almost at Olivia’s feet. And wailed like a thousand bagpipes.

  She started to bend down, but Noah was faster and had the boy scooped up, jiggling him cheerfully. “Uh-oh. Wipeout.”

  “Scotty! Oh, honey, I told you not to run!” The frantic mother grabbed for him, then looked back at her out-of-breath husband. “He’s bleeding. He’s scraped his knees.”

  “Damn it. How bad? Let’s see, buddy.”

  As the boy screamed and sobbed, Olivia slipped off her pack. “You’ll need to wash his cuts. I have some bottled water and a first-aid kit.”

  She went to work so efficiently, Frank signaled Celia back.

  “You’ll have to hold him still,” Olivia said. “I can’t clean it if he’s kicking.”

  “I know it hurts, honey, I know. We’re going to make it all better.” The mother kissed Scotty’s cheeks. “Here, let me clean off the cuts. Thanks so much.” She took the cloth Olivia had dampened and struggled with her husband to keep the child still long enough to see the damage.

  “Just scrapes. Knocked the bark off, buddy.” The father kept his voice light, but his face was very pale as his wife cleaned the blood away.

  Olivia handed over antiseptic, and one glance at the little bottle had Scotty switching from wails to ear-piercing screams.

  “Hey, you know what you need.” Noah pulled a candy bar out of his back pocket, waved it in front of Scotty’s face. “You need to spoil your lunch.”

  Scotty eyed the chocolate bar through fat tears. His lips trembled, but instead of a screech he let out a pitiful whimper. “Candy.”

  “You bet. You like candy? This is pretty special candy. It’s only for brave boys. I bet you’re brave.”

  Scotty sniffled, reached out, too intent on the bar to notice his mother quickly bandaging his knees. “ ’kay.”

  “Here you go, then.” Noah held it out, then tugged it just out of reach with a grin. “I forgot. I can only give this candy to somebody named Scotty.”

  “I’m Scotty.”

  “No kidding? Then this must be yours.”

  “Thanks. Thanks so much.” The mother shifted the now-delighted child to her hip and shoved back her hair with her free hand. “You’re lifesavers.”

  Olivia glanced up from where she was repacking her first-aid kit. “You should make sure you pick up one of these if you’re going to do much hiking. The River’s End Lodge gift shop carries them, or you can get them in town.”

  “First on my list. Along with emergency chocolate. Thanks again.” She looked over to Frank and Celia. “You’ve got great kids.”

  Olivia started to speak, then ducked her head and said nothing. But not so quickly that Celia hadn’t seen the look of unhappiness. “You two make a good team,” she said cheerfully. “And that little adventure worked up my appetite. When’s lunch, Liv?”

  Olivia looked up, blinked. Liv, she thought. It sounded strong and sure and smart. “There’s a nice area just a little farther down. We might get lucky and see a couple of beavers instead of just their dams.”

  She picked her spot, a shady area just off the trail where they could sit and watch the water, or gaze off toward the mountains. The air was warm, the sky clear in one of those perfect summer days the peninsula could offer.

  Olivia nibbled at her chicken and held herself back just a little. She wanted to watch the Bradys together. They seemed so easy, so meshed. Later, when she was older and looked back on that comfortable hour, she would call it a rhythm. They had a rhythm of movement, of speech, of silences. Little bits of humor that were intimately their own, tossed-off comments, teasing, body language.

  And she would realize, remembering, that however much she and her grandparents loved one another, they didn’t have quite that same connection.

  A generation stood between them. Her mother’s life, and her death.

  But just then all she knew was that she felt a tug of longing, an ache of envy. It made her ashamed. “I’m going to walk down a little more.” She got up, ordering herself to do so casually. “I’ll see if I can spot some beavers. If I do, I’ll come back and get you.”

  “Poor little thing,” Celia murmured when Olivia walked down the trail. “She’s lonely. I don’t even think she knows how lonely she is.”

  “Her grandparents are good people, Celia.”

  “I’m sure they are. But where are the other kids? The ones her age she should be playing with on a beautiful day like this?”

  “She doesn’t even go to school,” Noah put in. “She told me her grandmother teaches her at home.”

  “They’ve put her in a bubble. A spectacular one,” Celia added as she looked around, “but it’s still closed.”

  “They’re afraid. They have reason to be.”

  “I know, but what will they do when she starts to beat her wings against the bubble? And what will she do if she doesn’t?”

  Noah got to his feet. “I think I’ll walk down, too. Never seen a beaver.”

  “He has a kind heart,” Celia commented, smiling after him.

  “Yeah, and he also has a curious mind. I hope he doesn’t try to pump her.”

  “Give him some credit, Frank.”

  “If I didn’t, I’d be going to look for beavers, too, instead of taking a nap.” With that, he stretched out and laid his head in his wife’s lap.

  Noah found her sitting on the bank of the river, very quiet and very still. It made a picture in his mind—very much like, yet so very different from, the one he had of her as a small child running from grief.

  Here she simply sat, her c
ap over her butterscotch hair, her back straight as a die, staring out over water that ran fast and bright and clear.

  She wasn’t running from grief this time, he thought. She was learning to live with it.

  It was sort of her personal river’s end, he supposed.

  Her head turned quickly at his approach. She kept her gaze steady on his face, those rich eyes of hers solemn, as he moved to her and sat down.

  “They come to play here,” she told him in a low voice. “They don’t mind people too much. They get used to them. But you have more luck if you don’t make a lot of noise and movement.”

  “I guess you spend a lot of time just hanging around.”

  “There’s always something to see or do.” She kept scanning the river. He made her feel odd in a way she couldn’t decide was pleasant or not. She only knew it was different from anything she’d felt before. A kind of drumming just under her heart. “I guess it’s nothing like Los Angeles.”

  “Nothing at all.” At that point in his life, L.A. was the world. “It’s okay, though. Mom’s big on nature and shit. You know, save the whales, save the spotted owl, save the whatever. She gets into it.”

  “If more people did, we wouldn’t need to save them in the first place.”

  She spoke with just enough heat to make him smile. “Yeah, that’s what she says. I got no problem with it. Mostly I like my nature in the city park, with a basketball hoop.”

  “I bet you’ve never even been fishing.”

  “Why should I?” He sent her a quick flash of a grin that had the drumming inside her picking up its beat. “I can walk right into McDonald’s and buy a fish sandwich.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Hey, you want yuck? Sticking a defenseless worm on some hook and drowning it so you can pull up some flopping, slimy fish.” The fact that she smiled a little, that her eyes shimmered with a mild and adult kind of humor, pleased him. “That’s disgusting.”

  “That’s skill,” she corrected, almost primly, but she was looking at him now, instead of at the river. “Isn’t it crowded in the city, and full of noise and traffic and smog and stuff?”

  “Sure.” He leaned back comfortably on his elbows. “That’s why I love it. Something’s always happening.”

  “Something’s always happening here, too. Look.” Forgetting her shyness, she laid a hand on his leg.

  A pair of beavers swam cheerfully upriver, their slick heads skimming the surface, ripples shimmying over the water in widening pools around them. Then, like a dream, a heron rose up over the opposite bank and glided with a majestic flap of wings across the river, so close its shadow flowed over them.

  “Bet you never saw that in the city.”

  “Guess not.”

  He amused himself with the beavers. They were really pretty cute, he decided, circling, splashing, flipping over to swim on their backs.

  “You know about my mother.”

  Noah looked over sharply. She was facing the water again, her face set, her jaw tight. There were a dozen questions he’d wanted to ask if he found the opportunity, but now that she’d opened the door he found he couldn’t.

  She was just a kid.

  “Yeah. It’s rough.”

  “Have you ever seen any of her movies?”

  “Sure. Lots of them.”

  Olivia pressed her lips together. She had to know. Someone had to tell her. He would. She hoped he’d treat her like a grown-up instead of someone who needed constant protecting. “Was she wonderful in them?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen one?” When she shook her head, he shifted, not sure how to answer. The best answer, his mother often said, was the simple truth. “She was really good. I mostly like action flicks, you know, but I’ve watched hers on TV. Man, she was beautiful.”

  “I don’t mean how she looked.” Her voice snapped out, surprising him into staring. “I mean how she was. Was she a good actress?”

  “Sure. Really good. She made you believe. I guess that’s what it’s all about.”

  Olivia’s shoulders relaxed. “Yes.” She nodded. “She left here because she wanted to act. I just wanted to know if she was good. ‘She made you believe.’” Olivia murmured it, then tucked that single statement into her heart. “Your father . . . he came here because I asked him to. He’s a great man. You should know that. You have parents who care about things, about people. You should never forget that.”

  She got to her feet. “I’ll go get them so they can see the beavers before we head back.”

  Noah sat where he was. He hadn’t asked her the questions in his head, but she’d answered one of them. How did it feel to be the daughter of someone famous who’d died in a violent way.

  It felt lousy. Just lousy.

  noah

  It takes two to speak the truth—

  one to speak, and another to hear.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  nine

  Washington State University, 1993

  There was nothing to be nervous about. Noah reminded himself of that as he checked the address of the trim two-story house. He’d been planning this trip, this connection for a long time. And that, he supposed as he parked his rental car at the curb in the quiet tree-lined neighborhood, was exactly why he was nervous.

  Maybe he sensed his life could change today, that seeing Olivia MacBride again could alter the course he was on. He was willing to take that new direction. There was no gain without risk, after all. That’s where the damp palms and jumpy belly came from.

  It was nothing personal.

  He combed back his hair by using the fingers of his hands in two quick rakes. He’d thought about getting a trim before coming here, but hell, he was on vacation.

  More or less.

  Two weeks away from the newspaper, where his struggle to make a name for himself as a crime reporter wasn’t as satisfying as he’d thought it would be. Politics, print space, editors and advertising concerns got in the way of stories he wanted to tell.

  And he wanted to tell them his way.

  That was why he was here. To write the one story he’d never been able to forget, and to tell it his way.

  Julie MacBride’s murder.

  One of the keys to it lived on the second floor of this pretty house that had been converted into four apartments. They and others like it had been designed to accommodate the overflow from the college campus. For those who could afford separate housing, he thought. Who could pay the price for privacy. And who wanted it badly enough—who didn’t look for the pace and companionship, the bursts of energy in college life.

  Personally, he’d loved his years on campus at UCLA. Maybe the first semester had been mostly a blur of parties, girls and drunken late-night philosophical discussions only the young could understand. But he’d buckled down after that.

  He’d wanted his degree in journalism. And his parents would have killed him if he’d washed out.

  Those two incentives had worked for him in equal measure.

  And what, he wondered, was Olivia’s incentive?

  If after nearly three years on the job he’d learned he wasn’t a reporter at heart, he was still a good one. He’d done his research. He knew Olivia MacBride was majoring in natural resource science, that her grades were a straight four point oh. He knew she’d spent one year, her freshman year, on campus in a dorm. And that she’d moved out and into her own apartment the following fall.

  He knew she belonged to no clubs or sororities and was