Bitterroot Lake

by Alicia Beckman

  “God damn you, Lucas Erickson.” It wasn’t rational, blaming the man for his own death, for his death interfering with her grief.

  But very little made sense anymore, and she saw no point pretending that it did.

  She turned toward town. Her destination was her mother’s house, her mission—what? No family was perfect. No one got everything they wanted from the people closest to them. But was it expecting too much to think that after inviting her home, only nineteen days after her husband’s death, that her mother would be eager to help her at the lodge? To comfort and console her?

  No, it was not too much. And her mother’s absence was unlike her. So what was going on?

  In town, she turned left off Lake Street. Passed the post office and made a right. The crime scene tape that had surrounded the law office was down, and a woman stood in the entrance, about to open the door.

  Sarah parked and quickly crossed the sidewalk. “Hello,” she called. “I was hoping to catch someone here. I’m so sorry—”

  “The office is closed,” the woman said, glancing over her shoulder, then stopping, her mouth open.

  Sarah was equally startled. It was the woman she’d seen yesterday, searching for wildflowers.

  The other woman recovered first. “Are you here for the files?”

  Sarah’s turn to be puzzled.

  “For the lumber company,” the woman added. “You are a McCaskill, aren’t you?”

  How did she know who Sarah was? And what files? Did Lucas do legal work for the company? No reason Connor shouldn’t have hired him, and no reason she should have known. But the thought didn’t sit well.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, yes, that’s my family. I’m Sarah McCaskill Carter. My brother runs the business. I—I went to college with Lucas, and I stopped by to offer my condolences.”

  The door was open now and the woman held it, stepping back for Sarah to enter.

  “I’m Renee Harper.” Now that they were face-to-face, Sarah could see that the other woman appeared to be a few years older, sharp-eyed, hair colored a shade of red that didn’t match her skin tone. And too thin, her black-and-white striped blouse loose on her frame, the skin around her eyes drawn. “Secretary, bookkeeper, mail clerk. You name it.”

  Sarah matched the woman’s wry smile and stepped inside. A pleasant space, despite the dingy exterior and the mingled smells of paper dust and bleach. A curved counter hid the reception desk. In the small waiting area, chocolate brown leather chairs faced a couch that sat beneath a giant topo map of the lake. To the right, a door stood open, but the space beyond was empty. The ex-partner’s office, she presumed.

  What had Janine said about the body? On the floor near the entry. She instinctively shuffled her feet and looked down. Had she been standing where a man died?

  “Farther back,” Renee said, answering her unspoken question. “Before you get to the conference room.”

  “I’m so terribly sorry,” Sarah said, surprised to find that it was true. She wasn’t ready to give up being angry with Lucas for what he’d done to Janine, Michael, and Jeremy. To all of them. But her anger felt almost extraneous at the moment. Like a burden she’d carried for so long that suddenly meant nothing.

  “Sheriff took most of our equipment.” Renee gestured toward her desk, where a monitor and cords sat, untethered, and an empty space on the back counter appeared to have held a printer. “Why, I have no idea.”

  Sarah tightened her lips.

  “He left the files,” Renee continued, “but I’m not allowed to return them to the clients yet. Not until they’ve combed them for clues, I guess. Although I can make copies if the client needs anything.”

  “I’ll let my brother know,” Sarah said.

  “At least they let me reconstruct a client list, so I could help Dan notify people. Daniel Fleming.” The secretary gestured to the front window, the black-and-gold letters backwards from this angle. “They dissolved the partnership a couple of months ago, but we hadn’t changed the sign yet.”

  “Oh.” Sarah wanted to ask how the two men had gotten along, why they broke up the partnership, whether Lucas had seriously been considering a run for office, and a million other things a casual acquaintance from college should not be asking the secretary of a murdered man.

  The woman’s skin paled, her jaw tightening. Anger, or fear? Her hands went to her face. “I can’t believe this. I cannot believe this.”

  Renee Harper’s response was hard to read. Had she been in love with her boss? If not that, then something equally problematic. Or just struggling with the horror of it all.

  “You found him. That must have been dreadful.” Sarah’s mind’s eye flashed on Jeremy, lying in their bed, his lifeless hand in hers.

  “I’d gone to the post office,” Renee said. “I ran into Becca Smalley. Chattiest woman in town.”

  Except when you’re newly widowed and she can’t wait to get away because death might be contagious.

  “She’s always going on about nothing,” Renee continued. “If I hadn’t been gone so long, maybe I could have …”

  “Or maybe you’d have been hurt, too.”

  “The moment I got back, I knew right away something was wrong. I could smell it.” She shuddered. “Now all I can smell is the bleach or whatever it is they used to clean up. The place reeks.”

  “It stings the nostrils, for sure. Why don’t we get out of here—grab some coffee at the Spruce?”

  “No. No, thanks,” Renee said. “I just came in to get some personal things.”

  “Then I won’t keep you,” Sarah said. “Unless you could use some help.”

  The secretary’s brow wrinkled and she lowered her chin, then replied, her voice husky. “Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”

  Renee directed her to the storage room by the back door for a box, and on her way down the hall, Sarah tried to open herself to the space. To sense what it held. Conflict, beyond the murder? Hard to tell. Hard surfaces, like the conference room’s glass wall and the porcelain tile floors, didn’t pick up emotion the way rugs and carpet did. Bookcases filled with law books lined the hallway. Wasn’t most legal research done online these days? But she knew from her design work that people often held on to the things that symbolized their trade and their past, especially if they’d invested a lot of time or money acquiring them.

  Across the hall sat the classic lawyer’s office. A large desk, stained a dark cherry and highly polished, dominated the room. A brass lamp with a creamy white pleated shade sat on one corner, a matching credenza behind it. A black leather desk chair and two client chairs. A Persian rug. No computer, as Renee had said. A wall full of diplomas and certificates interspersed with photos. Age aside, Lucas had looked much the same as the young man she remembered. One of those men whose features were too strong to be considered handsome, the jaw too firm, the eyes too intense, but he had been—what? Not imposing. That suggested a big man, and he wasn’t that—he stood several inches shorter than the man he was shaking hands with in the first photo, the current governor. Other photos showed Lucas in small groups of smiling men and women in suits. He stood out. Compelling. That was the word.

  And then she spotted the snapshot behind the desk, at the end of a row of family photos, school portraits, shots of two boys in sports uniforms. She had never seen this picture before, but knew it in an instant. He’d handed her his camera and she’d taken the picture of Michael, Jeremy, and Lucas on the lawn below the lodge, the lake sparkling behind them, the day before everything changed.

  She turned and fled.

  At the end of the hallway, she found the restroom. Shut herself inside and leaned against the door until her breath steadied. Had he kept that photo to remind himself of what had happened? Of what he’d done?

  Had she misjudged the man?

  The tissue box was empty. She opened the cabinet beneath the sink and found a fresh box. Blew her nose and fluffed her hair, then grabbed two empty bankers’ boxes from the storeroom. Glanced o
ut the rear door, then faced the hallway. Took a step forward, then another. The front and back doors were offset, but once a person got about five feet inside, he or she could have seen someone come in the front.

  Whose presence had Janine sensed? Had the killer been close enough to identify her? Anyone else—a deliveryman, say, or a client coming in the back—would have called out at the sight of a body on the floor and a woman bent over him. Would not have hesitated, would have rushed forward, frightened but determined to help, at the very least to call 911.

  Would not have been skulking around.

  She stopped. Renee was watching her.

  “Popped into the restroom,” she said. Lifted the boxes. “You always need more boxes than you think.”

  The woman glared at her, as if Sarah hadn’t been speaking English.

  “Yes,” she finally said, turning back to her desk. “Yes. You want to help, you can box those up.” She pointed to a stack of picture frames.

  Sarah glanced casually at the photos as she packed. A younger Renee with a small girl on her lap, and another she guessed to be the girl’s senior portrait. A narrow black frame held a certificate from a legal assistant training program.

  “What will happen to this office?” she asked. “And what will you do? Work for Fleming?”

  “His office is in Whitefish, and I can’t make that drive every day.”

  “Oh, so he left Deer Park?” The box was full and she set it on the floor. “Why did they dissolve the partnership?”

  Renee’s eyebrows rose. “He and Misty, Lucas’s ex-wife.”

  “Oh-h-h.” They would have warranted a close look anyway, wouldn’t they, the victim’s former partner and his former wife, but if they were together … No wonder Leo had refused to give Nic any specifics about other suspects.

  “I heard,” Sarah continued, “that Lucas was considering a run for office.”

  “Everybody wants to know about that.” Renee wrapped a small ceramic robin in a crumpled piece of newspaper and placed it in the other box. “All I know is he talked with a few people. If he had any plans, he didn’t tell me.”

  “You knew him. What do you think happened?”

  “No idea.”

  “Misty? Fleming? An angry client or an ex-employee?” The woman jerked back, as if Sarah had slapped her. “I’m sorry. I’ve upset you.”

  “No, no. It’s important to talk about it, even if you didn’t like him any more than the rest of us did.” She held up a hand. “It’s true. I see it on your face. Lucas was a difficult man.”

  The woman’s insight was rather breathtaking, as was her willingness to speak so bluntly to a near-stranger. But that didn’t answer Sarah’s question.

  Dislike was easy; murder was hard. Wasn’t it? Either it happened in an instant, a snapping, or the killer nurtured the anger, the resentment, the unrelenting hatred for a long time, tending it, polishing it, until it became a reason to kill.

  Could Janine have done that?

  Please, God, don’t let it be Janine. Because if it had been … Because if it had been Janine, then she was to blame, too.

  * * *

  So much had changed. So much was going to change. Such a relief that the Blue Spruce never changed.

  Sarah took a seat at the counter and ordered coffee and huckleberry-peach pie. When she’d last had a slice of real live, honest-to-goodness pie, she could not recall. You could get pie in Seattle, of course. In Fremont, a shop served nothing but pie, and a diner in Lake City served killer coconut cream. The last time she’d taken a visitor downtown, to Pike Place Market, they’d seen crepes and donuts, fancy cheesecake, fresh croissants, and fruit-filled piroshky topped with sweet whipped cream. But pie? Not one slice.

  And huckleberries? Fat chance.

  Besides, if you were going to drink coffee and eat pie in a Montana café in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week, you ought to sit at the counter.

  She laid her phone next to her napkin. Cradled the steaming brown mug in both hands and closed her eyes. She needed this.

  Outside the law office, she’d loaded the box of pictures into the trunk of Renee Harper’s blue car. Emotion virtually swirled around the woman—sorrow, fear, anxiety about her own future? And maybe, or maybe this was Sarah projecting, a twinge of guilt over not having liked Lucas Erickson better when he was alive.

  Then Renee had driven off and Sarah had walked down the block, past the quilt shop and the locksmith. She strolled down the alley behind the law office. She could see the post office from here. It shouldn’t have taken Renee more than ten minutes to walk out the back door, drop off the mail, and return. But running into Becca Smalley had thrown her off schedule.

  Janine had been inside only a minute or two. According to Nic, no one in the nearby shops or offices had seen her. They hadn’t seen anything suspicious.

  But until Janine was formally cleared, they’d all be on edge.

  The coffee had cooled enough that it didn’t scald the roof of her mouth, like it had the other day. Which came first, the broken marriage or the broken partnership? Had there been arguments over betrayal, or money?

  She did not envy Leo the task of wading through that cesspool. Jeremy had once had two senior managers who’d been best friends until one man’s flirtation with the other’s wife, also an employee, turned into an affair, and the fallout had been ugly. Ultimately, all three had left, taking with them knowledge and experience nearly impossible to replace, and leaving a sense of distrust that lingered for months.

  But, murder?

  “Here you go, Miss Sarah,” Deb said as she set a white plate in front of her. Pie, oh pie, we love pie, the chorus in her head sang at the sight of the flaky, golden crust, deep purple goo oozing out between the strips of lattice. “The family favorite. Your mom loves it, and Leo always orders a slice when he comes in. I haven’t seen him lately. Murder on his menu.”

  Figured she’d know who Sarah was without an introduction—a waitress’s role in a small town. A movement at the other end of the counter caught her attention. A short, fiftyish woman with dark skin and close-cropped hair, tugging on a sage green blazer.

  A Black woman. Okay, so Deer Park had changed.

  Deb waved at the departing customer. Sarah picked up her fork and cut the first bite. Before it reached her mouth, Deb called out. “Crust first. I win.”

  Mouth full, Sarah let her eyes ask what that was about.

  “Some people take a bite of the crust first and work their way across.” Deb mimed the action with her hand. “Other people start at the tip and work their way to the crust.”

  “Does it mean something? And what do you win?”

  “Not a thing, and not a thing.” Deb flashed her a grin. “Just café nonsense.” She topped off Sarah’s coffee and moved down the counter.

  Sarah rested the fork on the plate and picked up her coffee. How could she possibly eat another bite, knowing she might have prevented all this? If she hadn’t dragged Jeremy out on the long ride. Hadn’t suggested they rest a bit at the homestead shack by the pond after they unsaddled the horses, since he wasn’t an experienced rider. Hadn’t said yes, when Jeremy’s eyes and hands asked.

  Hadn’t listened when Holly insisted her dream meant nothing, hadn’t persuaded Janine to move on.

  She picked up her phone. Distracted herself, replying to texts from Abby and the house sitter, listening to a voice mail from a friend. Saw the reminder for tomorrow’s phone appointment with her therapist. What would the woman say, if she knew what Sarah was thinking? “Are you perhaps imagining yourself a tad too powerful? Forgetting that other people made choices to act as they did?”

  Lucas sent those letters. He’d wanted to make sure Janine and Holly kept their mouths shut. To keep the past in the past, making sure no one brought up rumors that he’d once attacked a girl out at Whitetail Lodge. The good old boy sheriff had retired years ago. He was probably long dead. Had any deputies on scene heard Janine’s accusations? Had
Misty Erickson or Dan Fleming dug up the truth, and tried to use it against him?

  None of that had anything to do with her. It was Lucas’s actions, not hers, that had started this long ugly chain.

  But whose actions had ended it?

  14

  The pickup in front of her, pulling a boat on a trailer, signaled for the turn off Lake Street into the marina, and Sarah stopped behind him. Glanced over at the historic Lake Hotel, a FOR RENT sign plastered across the closed café. Why had it closed? Good food, great location. Fabulous views. The summer before her father died, she and Jeremy had motored down the lake one sunny afternoon and met Peggy and JP for a drink and a bite on the stone patio.

  Loud rock she couldn’t identify blared from the truck’s open window. Deb the waitress’s ex with his shiny new toys bought with hidden assets? The driver was waiting for a young woman pushing a stroller to cross the street. About a quarter of the docks were full, a mix of power boats and sailboats. That would change big-time this weekend, if the weather held. Yes, town was quiet in the off-season but with only the Spruce and the bowling alley for competition, surely this was a great spot for a decent café.

  A few minutes later, she parked in front of her parents’ house. Her mother’s house. Glanced up at her corner room, as she always did. Lights were on, and a figure moved in and out of view. Her mother was home, working in the studio.

  Bag on her shoulder and a go-box with a slice of pie for her mother in hand, she marched up to the door. Peggy wouldn’t hear her, might not have noticed her pull up outside.

  Locked, again.

  No need to check behind the downspout for the spare key. Instead, she circled around the house, passing under the old rose arbor, the canes beginning to turn green, to the back yard. Cones and branches littered the grass and deck, along with tiny yellow blossoms from the forsythia and pink petals from the neighbor’s flowering crab. Considering last night’s wind, it was good that her mother hadn’t gotten out the deck furniture yet, or filled the huge terra cotta pots stacked under the eave.