Bitterroot Lake

by Alicia Beckman

  She pulled out her phone. “Cross your fingers for reception.”

  “Mine’s dead,” Janine said, laying her phone on the table, the screen shattered. “It cracked when I dropped it, when I thought …”

  “Thought what?”

  “When I thought the killer saw me. I ran for the door, I tripped, it went flying. I grabbed it and got out of there, fast as I could.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I don’t know.”

  Sarah pushed a few buttons, but nothing happened. Her mother had said the landline was shut off, but hadn’t mentioned trouble with cell reception. Of course, her mother regularly ignored her cell phone, often for days. Sarah eased the cat onto the floor and stood. “Why don’t you hunt up some quilts or blankets while I try outside? It’s clear enough, I might get a signal without having to drive up to the highway. We’ll sleep on the couches tonight.”

  “Sarah,” Janine said. “About Jeremy. I’m so sorry. I meant to call, or write, but …”

  Sarah swallowed, her eyes stinging. When would her eyes stop stinging?

  “He didn’t deserve to die so young,” Janine continued.

  “No one does,” Sarah snapped. “Cancer doesn’t care how old you are or what you deserve.”

  Two minutes later, she stood outside, her twill jacket with the belt and too many pockets zipped tight. She’d spoken too harshly, she knew. Part of the fallout of losing your husband at forty-seven. The therapist had said she might feel anger at the wrong things, say something she hadn’t intended to say. Might yearn for alone time, though she’d always welcomed company.

  That’s why she was here. Where the unexpected presence of an old friend in need had changed her plans yet again.

  “Focus,” she muttered, staring at her phone. Leo and his wife had come to Seattle for Jeremy’s funeral—the McCaskill clan had outnumbered the Carters—and he’d enveloped her in a hug meant to say that everything would be just fine. Even though she knew nothing would ever be fine. Leo had always been that way.

  She trusted him. But that didn’t mean Janine would.

  Two bars. She scrolled through her contacts, then punched CALL. “Go through, go through.” The body must have been found by now, by a secretary or partner. By a client, coming for an appointment. Or his wife, wondering where he was and why he didn’t answer his phone. Did Lucas Erickson have a wife?

  If anyone else had been in the building, anyone besides the killer, he or she would have called it in. If he, or she, had seen Janine, there would be a lookout for her—what did they call it? All-points bulletin—APB? BOLO—be on the alert? Despite her cousin’s job, all she knew about law enforcement came from TV or the paper.

  The line rang on the other end. “Pick up, pick up.” Maybe Leo was still at the scene, his personal cell on mute. Should she call 911? But this wasn’t an emergency, was it? Surely the body had been found.

  A voice began speaking. “Leo, it’s Sarah,” she managed before realizing she’d gotten voice mail. She started over, more slowly. “Leo, it’s Sarah. I’m at the lodge. Call me when you get this. It’s urgent. I’m okay, I’m not in trouble, I’m not in danger, but—call me.”

  The stars shone down on her. The scent of the woods enveloped her. She gripped her phone tightly and wrapped her arms around herself.

  Only a few weeks ago, she and Jeremy had talked about the crash. He’d been growing weaker and they’d had to admit it was time for hospice. Hospice was for the elderly, she’d always assumed—decades away, until it wasn’t. He’d still been coherent, his usual calm self—she was the angry one—replaying his life. They talked about Michael Brown, imagining his future had he lived. Michael’s quirky smile was easy to recall, the dimples in his dark brown cheeks. Tall, six-six or seven. Not good enough for the major college teams in Southern California, his home, but plenty good for UM.

  And they’d talked about Lucas. She’d heard he’d taken up the life of a small-town lawyer, but when Jeremy had told her Lucas lived in Deer Park, she’d been sure he was confused. Mixing up the present and the past. But he’d been insistent, and he’d been right.

  Had it been prescience, that the subject had come up? They say the dying are in touch with the other world, the world where unseen connections become visible, and Jeremy had at times seemed to be slipping beyond her grasp. But then he would return to her, giving her that smile that always made her tingle, even when she knew the end was near.

  Until that Saturday night seventeen days ago. Both kids had flown home for a visit. He’d told them all he loved them, they were the light of his life, and closed his eyes one last time.

  “Oh, Jeremy,” she said out loud, her voice cracking and squeaking, her hand flying to her mouth. “What am I going to do without you?”

  But there was no answer. She glanced at the phone. No answer there, either. No call, no message, no signal.

  She was on her own. She and Janine and the cat. So much for her plan to sit on the deck with a glass of wine and watch the stars blink twice—once in the sky and again reflected in the dark, glassy lake.

  This day wasn’t turning out at all like she’d expected. Her life wasn’t turning out like she expected.

  “Deal with it, Sarah,” she muttered, then slipped the phone into her pocket and went inside.

  TUESDAY

  Eighteen Days

  3

  Where was she?

  Sarah opened her eyes to light streaming in through the windows. The dirty windows, her first clue that she wasn’t in the house in Seattle. Besides, the sun was streaming in the wrong way, the windows facing south.

  And this was definitely not her bed, the cat curled up on her feet.

  The cat. She hadn’t had a cat in years.

  It came back to her then, how she’d reached the lodge last night and found Janine, and the cat. Janine’s gruesome discovery, her attempt to call her cousin the sheriff. The cups of stale tea they sipped as they tried to piece it all together.

  And a night wrapped in a musty wool blanket on the bumpy old leather couch. No wonder her dreams had been unsettled, vague images slipping away with the morning light.

  She slid one foot up, then wriggled the other free, not wanting to disturb the cat. Too late. It turned its head and gave her the stink eye.

  “Figures.” She sat up, pulling the small, warm body closer. “You a he or a she?”

  “It’s a she,” Janine said as she approached, two heavy white mugs in hand. “I checked.”

  “Oh, coffee. Bless you.” Sarah pushed the blanket aside with one hand, put her feet on the floor, and set the cat next to her. As if unsure how to respond to the indignity of forced relocation, the cat stood, circled, and settled back down, tucking her tail beneath her.

  “My grandmother’s ironstone, what she always called her railroad dishes.” She took the mug Janine held out, its shape familiar and comforting, and let the first sip linger in her mouth. Hot, bitter, perfect. “You know, I don’t think anyone’s made me coffee, at home, since Jeremy got sick. He’d start the pot before he went out on his run and it would always be a toss-up whether he’d get back before I got up.”

  “Bakers and runners,” Janine said. She still wore Sarah’s T-shirt and black leggings, both long on her. “We get up early and spend the best part of the day on our feet.”

  The world beyond the windows shimmered despite the grime. Bitterroot Lake was shaped like an uneven piece of elbow macaroni, the lodge at the outer edge of the bend, town to the southeast, hidden by the curve.

  What time was it? Sarah had no idea. Where had she left her phone? Odds were the signal wasn’t coming through anyway, not in the daytime, despite the clear skies, making the phone a pricey clock. If she stayed more than a few days, they might need to reconnect the landline.

  If. The controlling word in her world right now.

  She took another sip of the Italian roast she’d brought with her from Seattle. Even a thirty-year-old Mr. Coff
ee knew what to do with good beans.

  But coming back to Montana hadn’t changed the key fact. Each day brought so many questions. Why, just as they were getting used to being empty nesters, getting to know each other again as people, not just parents, had the cancer come back and killed him? Quickly, too—less than six months from that first sharp pain in his low back to the end. To the ashes she’d brought with her. She and the kids had spread a handful on Lake Washington, not far from their house in Seattle, but she’d saved some for Bitterroot Lake, where it had all truly begun.

  Now Lucas Erickson was dead, too. Had the three young men been cursed? Michael and Lucas had been roommates in the dorm, Jeremy a friend, jumping at the chance to visit the girls at an old lodge on a mountain lake. What young men wouldn’t have?

  Something soft swished against her bare arm. The cat. “You hungry? Me, too.”

  She took another sip and glanced at Janine, sitting on the other couch staring at a phone, her striped Pendleton blanket neatly folded. The letter lay open on the coffee table. “I thought your phone broke.”

  “I borrowed yours while you were asleep. Walked up toward the highway until I got a signal.” She set the phone next to the letter. “Still no reception down here.”

  “Did you call Leo?”

  “I called Nic.”

  Nicole. “Why? What can she do from four hundred miles away? Oh. You think—”

  The sound of a car outside interrupted her and she stood. Strode to the nearest window and pushed the lace curtain aside.

  “Better wash another cup,” she said. “We’re going to need it.”

  * * *

  “I have to confess,” Sheriff Leo McCaskill said after Janine had told her story, “I don’t get why you didn’t call us. Smart to leave the building—the killer could have been hiding anywhere. But you should have called us the moment you got to safety. Or driven over, if you were too scared to stay, or your phone wasn’t working. The courthouse is only two blocks away.”

  “Leo,” Sarah said, resting a hand on the kitchen table and leaning toward her cousin. “You have to understand. There’s history here.”

  “So you say. But without a report …” Though Leo had the McCaskill height, he didn’t have the classic Irish coloring of Sarah and her siblings. His nearly black hair was shot with gray and his eyes were the same dark brown as his uniform shirt and the matching stripe on the outer seam of his tan pants. “Look, it’s not that I don’t believe you about the assault—what, twenty-five years ago? But history is no defense to failure to report a crime. That’s a crime itself, you know.”

  At least he hadn’t said history was no defense to murder. Fingers crossed that meant he didn’t consider Janine a suspect.

  “I didn’t know that,” Janine said. “And Sarah did try. How did you know we were out here?”

  “You, I had no idea. When I got Sarah’s message, I tried to reply, but no luck. So I called your mother,” he said to his cousin. “She knew you were coming home, but not when. And hearing you’d already arrived from me did not make her happy. You have to call her.”

  “I have to call her,” Sarah repeated, staring into her empty coffee mug. “How did you find Lucas? Did you find the gun?”

  “His secretary, Renee Harper, found him when she came back from the post office. She swears he was alone when she left, and that she was gone no more than half an hour.” He swallowed the last of his coffee and set the mug on the table. “And no, no weapon. Just the body and the blood.”

  He’d already taken Janine’s T-shirt into evidence, tucking it into a paper bag he’d sealed and initialed. He’d taken the letter, too.

  “A lot of blood,” Janine said, her voice thick with the memory.

  “And you don’t own a gun?” he asked, though he’d asked once before. The answer was the same—a shake of the head.

  “Was Lucas popular?” Sarah asked, thinking of that possible run for office. “Well liked?”

  “Well known,” Leo replied, his careful choice of words saying plenty. “Soon as you two are cleaned up and dressed, come into my office and give official statements. We’ll need both your fingerprints.”

  “Mine, too?” Sarah asked. “Why?”

  “You touched the letter, right? Getting prints off paper isn’t easy, so there’s no guarantee we’ll get a match. But at least we can eliminate yours.” He rubbed the cat’s head one more time. “And pick up some cat food.”

  * * *

  Thank goodness she’d remembered to switch on the water heater last night. The hot shower had felt so good.

  There might come a day when Sarah McCaskill Carter would walk down the streets of her hometown wearing second-day clothes and second-day hair, but this was not that day.

  She took pity and set the last of her yogurt on the floor for the cat, who polished the bowl clean before sitting on her haunches and asking for more. “Don’t get used to it. People food isn’t good for you and I have no patience for picky eaters.”

  The cat did not reply.

  Sarah found a tunic for Janine to wear over the borrowed leggings, then pulled on slim-cut black pants, a white silk T-shirt, and a bright blue blazer with a notched collar and rolled-up sleeves. Black flats. She’d only brought one bag, a woven straw tote with a leather strap. Finger-combed her light brown hair, the red flecks catching the light. It would do.

  They drove the ten miles to Deer Park in the rented SUV, Janine’s face ashen, hands clutching her elbows. Sarah kept her eyes on the road, barely seeing the land she’d once known as well as her own face.

  On the courthouse steps, Janine paused.

  “The last time I was here, I was twenty-two, claiming what my mother left behind.”

  Sarah grabbed Janine’s shoulder and looked her square in the eyes. “You. Are not. Your mother.”

  Inside the office, the sharp smell of cleaning spray mingled with the scent of daffodils from a bouquet on the counter. The fortyish woman on duty said Sheriff McCaskill wanted to see Sarah first, and a young officer who introduced himself as Deputy Pritchard escorted her to the interview room. The fluorescent lights buzzed slightly and gave his pale skin a bluish tinge, though the table and chairs were not as old and scarred as she’d expected. Then Leo entered.

  It didn’t take long to repeat her story for the digital recorder that lay on the table between her and the two men. No, she replied to Leo’s final question, she had nothing more to add.

  “If you’re sure—” Leo said. She was sure.

  Back in the lobby, he beckoned to Janine. “No reason to wait,” he told Sarah. “We could be a while.”

  She turned to her friend. “Text me when—” But Janine had no phone.

  “I’ll ping you when she’s free,” Leo said. A good sign, right? He didn’t plan on clamping on the handcuffs and tossing Janine into the jail. Which surely did not smell of spring flowers.

  Outside on the sidewalk, Sarah checked her phone. Replied Gorgeous day in Montana—love you! to a text from her daughter, no doubt sent while scurrying between classes. She’d texted both kids from the train station in Whitefish yesterday, letting them know she’d arrived safely. Her son might not reply for a day or two. They had their own lives now, which was the point of raising kids, right? But though she’d been happy to see them choose their dream schools and move halfway across the country while their father was alive and well, now she wanted to drag them home and never let them out of her sight.

  Which was exactly what she couldn’t do.

  She dropped the phone into her bag. The courthouse anchored Main Street—literally; it stood in a circle at the south end of downtown, a few blocks from the lake. Despite the sunshine, the air held a slight chill. Mountain air. Fresh, and yet, filmy. Like a thin curtain had fallen between her and the rest of the world when Jeremy died.

  This is your hometown. There is nothing to be afraid of.

  She took a deep breath. One step, then another, and another.

  At half past ten, Ma
in Street was open for business. Flower baskets hung from hooks on some of the wrought-iron lampposts, while others sported nylon flags with bright images of birds and butterflies. “OPEN” signs glowed in the windows of the copy shop and the liquor store, and petunias and verbena spilled from window boxes outside the florist’s shop. Her grandmother had had a standing order for a fresh bouquet every week, and Sarah had loved going in with her to pick them up, even when the owner was away and they had to deal with the prickly woman who worked there. As a little girl, she’d wondered why someone who worked with pretty things always seemed to be in a bad mood, but her grandmother had said the woman had a hard life.

  “Good morning,” an older man called as he came out of Deer Park Hardware and crossed the sidewalk. She returned the greeting, though she didn’t know him. This was how she remembered town. Not like Seattle, where default mode was to pretend you didn’t see the woman who pushed her grocery cart between you and the shelf you were scanning for the right kind of mustard or the man next to you studying his phone while you waited for your latte at Starbucks.

  And yet, though it all looked so familiar, so friendly, it felt so different from when she’d last visited, a year ago.

  No. It was she who was different.

  And she whose tummy growled. The few bites of yogurt she’d eaten before giving the bowl to the cat had worn off.

  But when she glanced down a side street, a sharp tang swelled in the back of her throat. Between the quilt shop and the locksmith, across from the school playfields, stood a single-story sandstone building with a Kelly green awning, the corrugated metal dented and rusting at the corner.

  And blocking the sidewalk, two of those orange rubber traffic control thingies, strung with yellow CRIME SCENE tape.