Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  But Jana Marsh was scared, Jess could tell. She watched the woman’s features harden at the mention of Makah County, her grip tighten on the frame of the door.

  “You’re a long way from home, Deputy,” Jana said.

  She was striving for an attitude that Jess knew well, that comfortable kind of airiness that money brought to the equation. But the tremor in her voice betrayed her; she just couldn’t pull it off, and Jess knew in that instant that Burke had been right to ask her to come here. This woman knew something about Brock Boyd’s demise that very few others did.

  Jess looked Jana Marsh in the eye. “Brock Boyd,” she said, trying to sound more in control than she felt. “I have a feeling you just might be able to tell me who killed him.”

  The other woman didn’t reply, not at first. She stayed stiff in the doorway and looked away from Jess’s eyes, stared out into the front yard beyond her as if there might be any kind of absolution there. She seemed to be weighing her options, and Jess knew that this moment was pivotal; she wasn’t here on behalf of Sheriff Hart or any other arm of the law, and Jana Marsh would be well within her rights to kick her off the porch.

  But Jess hoped she could bluff her way into the house. Into this woman’s story. “Invite me in, Mrs. Marsh,” she said. “You’ll find it easier to talk to me than the Mounties.”

  Jana stared out at the trees for another moment. The hedgerow, the blue skies. The burbling pond. Then her shoulders seemed to slump, and she turned, wordless, and led Jess into the house.

  * * *

  The house had never quite felt like home. Not in all of the years Jana Marsh had lived here.

  It was beautiful, of course; it had cost Ronnie a fortune when they bought it and was worth even more now. She’d come to appreciate the way the sun filled the kitchen with light and streamed down through the skylights above the living room and the master bedroom. She appreciated the calm that came with living in secret, behind hedgerows and gates and double-locked front doors. She liked that nobody knew her name here, except as Ronnie’s wife, and that nobody here had ever heard of Levi “Broomstick” Cody and the things that had been done to him.

  But she’d never felt at home here, and perhaps it was that this wasn’t her hometown and wasn’t even her country, that it wasn’t her money that had purchased this place. Perhaps it was Ronnie and how he’d always been good enough, but no better. Perhaps it was her children and how when she looked at them she saw only the men like Brock Boyd who waited for them, out in the world.

  Or perhaps it was that Jana could walk a couple of blocks to the beach in the morning and gaze out over the ocean and see the mountains in the distance, and know that if you followed those mountains west about as far as you were able, you’d come to Makah County and the ghosts that still haunted it, ghosts of a brother and of the sister who’d once idolized him, loved him more than just about anything else she could think of.

  A sister who’d died almost as sure as her brother had when he’d jumped from that cliff. Who’d been replaced by a young woman defined at first by her grief and then later by her anger.

  Who would only go back to Makah not to visit her ghosts but to avenge them.

  She led the young sheriff’s deputy through the house to the kitchen, where that bright midday sun shone in through oversized windows and the sliding door to the backyard, a tidy manicured lawn and Ronnie’s putting green, a tipped-over tricycle, a soccer ball and a net.

  Jana saw the house, the whole property, through the deputy’s eyes, as though she’d never before in her life set foot in here. “How did you find me?” she asked.

  She expected to hear that the men had ratted her out, the men she’d hired to help her and dispose of Brock Boyd, that they’d turned on her as she’d been afraid they would, but the deputy shrugged and said instead, “Your lipstick.”

  She explained how the investigators had searched Boyd’s house, how they’d found the place immaculate, pristine, everything in its right place. Except—

  “In his garbage can,” Deputy Winslow said. “In the kitchen, sitting on top of his trash. A broken wineglass, Mrs. Marsh, about the only indication we had that he’d been entertaining a woman before he died.”

  It felt something like relief. Jana turned again, to look out through the windows at the sun and the lush green beyond, but it wasn’t her backyard she was seeing.

  FIFTY-THREE

  He poured the wine in front of the fireplace. The house was beautiful, of course, but Jana had known that already, and she supposed there was something beautiful about Boyd too; she could certainly see he was an attractive man, how it might not be so unusual to him that a woman from a bar—a stranger—would be willing to come home with him, to sleep with him.

  She’d followed him long enough that she felt confident she knew his movements. His routines, his predilections. She knew that he liked to drink at the Cobalt, raise hell in a back-corner booth with a rotating collection of acolytes and hangers-on, drink until near closing, and then stagger out to his fancy Cadillac truck and try his damndest to navigate the couple of miles back to his house without swerving into a tree or running anyone over.

  It was in the parking lot of the Cobalt that she’d found him, bourbon on his breath a testament to another good night, the lot half filled with cars but devoid of humanity, Boyd just zipping up his fly after pissing nearly all over his truck and his boots besides.

  His eyes swam some when he saw her; he leered and reached for the hood of his truck for balance. She’d come out of the shadows and pretended to just recognize him, pretended she was on her way somewhere else. Let him succeed, in his clumsy, near incoherence, to believe he’d seduced her.

  He’d seemed to sober up some by the time they reached his house, and to his credit, he didn’t rush her. He asked for her coat and hung it away for her, made no secret of his appreciation of her figure as he followed her into the great room, built a fire for them, and poured wine.

  He asked her to sit on the couch, and she sat, and he sat near her but not too near, patient despite the clear hunger in his eyes.

  She wondered then if the men she had paid had followed her as they’d promised, if they’d managed to sneak around the gate in Boyd’s driveway, if they were outside right now and preparing for what must come next.

  She wondered if she was dreaming, if this was really going to happen.

  She’d waited such a long time to do this.

  * * *

  She had watched her brother die over time, gradually, like how sometimes the tide came in and you weren’t aware until it was lapping at your toes. She wondered, often, later, if there was something she would have done if she’d realized what she was seeing. If there was any way she could have saved him.

  She was never sure what had marked the tipping point, but she knew it had started with that trip to Olympia. If she thought back on it, he might have been paler when he came home, might have seemed a little more hollow when she looked in his eyes, but she’d had her own life to contend with and hadn’t paid much attention. It was only when the nickname started to spread that she noticed how worn down he looked.

  “Broomstick.”

  Her brother couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it. Certainly not school, and nowhere after, either. At home, he stopped eating; even she noticed that. He spent long hours in his room, and he pretended to be sick so he wouldn’t have to go to school. Still, he never missed a hockey game, never a practice. He never let the boys on the team see how they’d hurt him.

  The Makah Screaming Eagles won the state championship that year. Brock Boyd was named the most valuable player, as he had been every year since he first laced up skates. Levi played well in the finals; she was there. She cheered for him even as the crowd jeered whenever he touched the puck, as mockery and ridicule rained down from the stands. She flushed bright red and nearly burst into tears; frustrated, she wanted to storm out of the arena.

  When he came home, he told her he didn’t hear the cat
calls, that it didn’t matter. They’d won the game and were champions, the whole team.

  She didn’t understand the nickname. Not until afterward, when she read the note. She knew only that Levi was somehow different and that it seemed like the entire county was laughing at him.

  Afterward, she understood.

  She believed that what her brother had written, and what he did after, would mean that Bad Boyd wouldn’t play hockey anymore. She imagined there would be some reverberation, the county looking inward and confronting its failings.

  She screamed for justice, but her voice was weak. Boyd continued to play hockey, and continued to win. The county continued to idolize him.

  He went away and became famous, the pride of Makah. She stayed behind and remembered how her brother had faded. How he’d come home from Olympia and wasted away. How the nickname Boyd had given him had followed him everywhere, a chorus, a constant reminder of what must have been the most terrifying and traumatic moment of his life.

  She stayed and grew older until there weren’t more than two or three people in the whole county who could recall Levi’s name.

  She grew, and she expected the pain to dull. She expected the anger to cool. But the pain didn’t dull, and the anger burned hot. She remembered her brother, and she remembered Brock Boyd.

  She’d been waiting for this night in front of the fireplace since the moment Levi jumped.

  * * *

  Finally, there she was, sharing a couch and a bottle of wine with the man who’d been the focal point of her hate for years, and she felt her pulse racing and her thoughts racing too, her whole body rebelling at the prospect of what she’d come here to do, while her mind urged her onward at a dizzying speed.

  She hoped the men were outside and she hoped they would come soon. And at the same time, she wished she had never come back to Makah County at all.

  Boyd offered her wine, which she drank, hoping the alcohol would calm her, give her strength. And then of course she dropped the glass, after barely a sip; sent it crashing to the floor and spilling wine everywhere.

  If Boyd was angry, he didn’t show it. He laughed and went off for some paper towels, tidied up the mess and brought the broken glass to the kitchen, and when he returned, Jana was standing, purse in hand, and she asked him if he would show her the balcony, if they could stand above the cliff face and look out at the sea.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  In the kitchen, Jess watched Jana Marsh blink, shake her head clear, come back from wherever it was she’d gone. Jess could see how her hands were shaking, how the skin on her knuckles got whiter and whiter as she gripped the countertop.

  “You know what Boyd did to my brother?” Jana asked.

  Jess nodded. “I heard the stories.”

  “They weren’t just stories.” Jana’s eyes flashed. “Stories are what you tell your friends around the campfire. This was…” She trailed off, lost something for a moment and then seemed to find it again. “What Boyd did to Levi, that killed him. Sure as if he’d pushed him off that cliff himself.”

  “It was a horrible thing, what he did,” Jess replied. “Unimaginable.”

  “You don’t think Boyd deserved it?” Jana asked. “What he did to my brother, what he did to those dogs, you don’t think the world’s better off without someone like that?”

  Jess leaned against the countertop beside Jana. “Of course I do,” she said. “I’m not losing any sleep over Brock Boyd being dead. If circumstances were different, I’d be applauding you. It’s just—”

  Jess dug into her jeans for her phone. Swiped to a photo she’d saved: Burke, smiling, on the breakwater that protected the Deception Cove boat basin, Lucy beside him, and the sun shining on the water. It hurt Jess to look too hard at it, knowing how he was back in Deception, in her jail, waiting on her to get him freed.

  “You see this guy here?” she asked Jana. “He’s in jail right now because they think he’s the killer. And that’s the man I love.”

  She looked at the phone some more, the picture, and she could smell the low-tide brine and hear the gulls call, see Burke smiling about the happiest smile she’d ever seen from him, like everything he’d ever wanted in the world was before him and there was nothing else he could ever think of needing.

  You. Me. Lucy. That’s it.

  Jess could hear Burke saying it, every time she saw the picture. She wondered how Jana Marsh could look at the photograph and not see who Burke was and what he meant to the world, to Jess and to Lucy. How she could not want to go back to Makah and set things right.

  Jana studied the phone but didn’t take it from Jess. “They told me he was just some nobody,” she said. “Just some greasy ex-con from back east. They said nobody would care if it came out like he’d done it.”

  “‘They,’” Jess said.

  “The men who killed Boyd,” Jana said. “Because I didn’t do it.” Then her expression turned hard, and she looked away again.

  “I didn’t shoot Boyd,” she said, “and that’s the honest truth. And I swore I’d never tell who did.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  At first, Jana was too torn with grief, too young and heartbroken. She was younger than Levi; she was twelve when he jumped, and barely understood what had happened.

  But the stories lingered, after he’d gone. The punch lines. The nickname. Even after her brother was dead, there were still people in Makah who called him “Broomstick.” Who still laughed about Levi, when they thought she couldn’t hear. And Bad Boyd kept playing, and the county celebrated him.

  Of course there were plenty in Makah who regretted what Boyd and his teammates had done, how far the hazing had been allowed to go. A few of Levi’s teammates showed up at the Cody house, tearful; they tried to apologize, tried to explain themselves. And even young Jana could see their suffering, how they were lost. How they would carry with them what they’d done for the rest of their lives.

  But not Boyd.

  She hoped the dogfighting and the trouble that followed would lead to some karmic retribution. She read about the proceedings with interest, the grisly details and the public indignation. She expected that someone—a dog lover, an angry anonymous angel—might do to Boyd what she knew he deserved. Maybe in prison, a fight. It wouldn’t matter if his death had no tie to Levi. Just so long as he suffered.

  But Boyd survived prison, and by many accounts he’d been as much a celebrity on the inside as he’d been on the outside. Even the fact that he’d murdered dogs didn’t hurt him. As far as Jana could tell, Bad Boyd was going to coast through life bringing harm and unhappiness to others, and profiting without consequence while he did.

  It was when she learned that Boyd was to be released from prison, that he planned to return to Makah County, that Jana realized she couldn’t wait for someone else to administer the punishment she knew he deserved.

  It was then that she began to formulate her plan.

  Now Jana could see how there was still a chance she might make it out clean.

  The law didn’t seem to know about the men she’d hired. They had tracked her here by the lipstick she’d left on Boyd’s wineglass, not by the testimony of the killers. The men she’d paid, who’d taken her money and promised to make things right, and followed her to Boyd’s house.

  As long as they didn’t know about the men, Jana thought, she might still survive.

  She regarded the young deputy across the kitchen countertop. “You don’t have jurisdiction here,” she said, with renewed strength in her voice. “You can’t prove I was involved with anything more than a glass of wine. Everything else is circumstantial.”

  She swiped back through the phone to the picture of the handsome, rugged man whom the deputy claimed to love.

  The deputy took the phone and studied it for a beat, and then—reluctantly, it seemed—she slid the phone back into the pocket of her jeans.

  “Jana—” she began.

  Jana cut her off. “It’s time for you to go, Deputy,” she said, pushi
ng away from the countertop. “My children will be home soon, and I don’t want you here when they come.”

  The deputy straightened too. At her full height, she was taller than Jana by a couple of inches. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and Jana tried to hold the other woman’s gaze and prayed she would leave.

  Finally, Winslow nodded. “Fine,” she said.

  FIFTY-SIX

  “One more question: Do you know who Charlene Todd is?” Jess asked Jana Marsh as they reached the front door.

  “I don’t,” Jana replied, “and I mean that. So whatever else you’re thinking of accusing me of, I can promise you, you’re wrong.”

  She was still scared; Jess could tell. She was afraid but trying to hide it behind bluster and aggression. But Jess wasn’t intimidated. Nor was she convinced that Jana Marsh hadn’t killed Brock Boyd.

  The only thing Jess could think of was to keep Jana talking. Hopefully pry some more information out of her. She pulled out her phone again. Swiped to a new picture, and handed it to Jana.

  Jana looked at the picture and her eyes went wide. “What are you—” she said. “Why are you showing me this?”

  She tried to turn away. Jess wouldn’t let her. Held the phone up, the autopsy photo, held it steady in front of Jana’s eyes so she could see, really see, what had happened to Charlene Todd.

  “You ought to look at it, and look close, if you ask me,” she told Jana. “If you choose to kill a man, you’d better be prepared for the ramifications.”

  “I told you,” Jana said. “I didn’t kill Boyd. And you’ll never prove—”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jess said. “Take a look.”