“When you say he’s still mad at you . . .”
“Oh, don’t take that the wrong way. I mean, he loses his temper sometimes, but everyone does. It’s nothing compared to what I’ve done to him, the way I betrayed him. See—Max, he came up here. A few times, since we moved here. I tell him not to, and we agree it’s over, and he has to come up this way for business, and he texts me and I try, oh, I try so hard to say no. But Gus is gone so much, and I’m so lonely, you know? And we can’t go to a motel because neither one of us could put it on our credit cards, because he’s married too. And there’s no way I’d bring him here.
“Last week he called because he had to be up here for a morning meeting. And this time, I said I’d meet him because . . .” Tears streaked down her face, and she grabbed another tissue. “I was going to break it off for real because of the baby. Gus thinks it’s his, and I wasn’t going to ever tell him the truth, because it would destroy him. He’s proud, you know? Max left home super early in the morning, and I took a chance too—I go to the gym in the morning a lot of times before Gus gets out of bed, so I knew he’d think that’s where I was. We met at the building site a little after four in the morning—I knew the code to the door because it’s the same as our ATM pin; it’s what Gus always uses. Max and I left our cars on the road down below and came up the trail. We were only there an hour, maybe a little more—and I told him we were done. I told him we could never see each other again.”
“Wait a minute—are you telling me that you were there the night of the fire? Marlene . . . did you start the fire?”
“No! I swear I didn’t. It was still dark when we left. I went first, because Max thought we shouldn’t leave together, in case anyone saw us.”
Underneath Marlene’s obvious feelings of shame and guilt, Gin couldn’t help noting that she’d done some careful planning.
“Did you turn the trail cameras off?”
Marlene’s face froze, and she stammered, “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about, I—”
“I’m not trying to get you in trouble,” Gin assured her. “But you said you knew the door code. It would make sense you’d have known about the cameras too. And it would explain why they were off that night. I’m just trying to piece together what happened, since both Jake and Gus are having to answer for what went on that night.”
Marlene stared at her hands in her lap for a moment. Then she glanced up, looking even more stricken. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That was me. I turned them off. But Gin, I saw something. It almost gave me a heart attack, honestly, as nervous as I was. There was a pickup parked around the bend, off the road—it had pulled into that flat area where the rock slide was. Somebody got out of the truck, and I ran into the woods where they couldn’t see me—but I could see them, a little, through the trees. They went around behind the truck and got something out of the back that I couldn’t see. A box, maybe, or a crate. They carried it up the hill.”
“What did the person look like, Marlene?”
“Well, it wasn’t Jake, that’s for sure.” Marlene dabbed at her eyes and wouldn’t meet Gin’s gaze. “Too short. I think . . . I think it was Gus.”
18
When Gin got home, Jake’s truck was in the drive, and wood smoke trailed from the chimney. Jett came loping around the house, a feather in her mouth, wagging her tail. A moment later, Jake appeared, his ax over his shoulder and his face sheened with perspiration.
“Have you been working out your frustrations again?” Gin asked tentatively.
Jake grimaced. “I guess you could say that. Or maybe I can get a job felling timber. At least we won’t have to start burning the furniture for heat.”
He wouldn’t look at her, his jaw set as hard as the granite outcroppings along the ridge. Jake had been stubborn as a teenager, and the years had only seemed to make him determined to go it alone when things got tough. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—let her in, couldn’t expose what he felt was his weakness, even to her.
An image of Tuck Baxter came unbidden to Gin’s mind, and she felt her face flood with shame. What had she been thinking? When Tuck had brought up his attraction to her, she should have shut it down firmly and quickly. She had to do better, to focus on healing the damage in her relationship with Jake. She loved him—had loved him forever—and she wasn’t about to give up on him now, no matter how hard he tried to push her away.
“You don’t have to go through this alone. I’m here, remember? We should be facing this together.”
He glanced at her, then quickly away. “Your last offer of help involved you opening up your checkbook,” he said. “That’s not going to happen. Not now, not ever.”
Frustration shot through her. “How can you turn me down like that, without even considering it? What if I told you that I would like to consider it our money? That when I think about the future, it’s always a future with you?”
Other than those exquisitely tense moments in Tuck Baxter’s office . . . She hadn’t been thinking about Jake then, had she?
She forced the thought away as Jake heaved a sigh and set down his ax, finally turning to face her. “It’s easy to make offers like that,” he said bitterly, “when you’ve never had to wonder where your next mortgage payment was coming from. Or how the guys who work for you are going to put shoes on their kids’ feet.”
“Okay, I’m sorry!” Gin erupted, suddenly unable to keep her frustration in check. “But I’m sick of having to apologize for the way I was brought up. My parents have money—it’s true. I didn’t ask for it, and I’ve never taken a cent from them since I finished school.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m getting at,” Jake said. There was a coldness to his voice that Gin had never heard before. “You’ve been a success your whole career. Everyone respects you. You’ve got publications and awards and shit—I don’t even know what else. I’m just a guy with dirt under my fingernails. When you get sick of playing house here with me, when you want more of a challenge than a few hours of consulting work a week, what then? You going to give me an allowance while you commute to the city? Or do you want me to move somewhere closer to your job with you, and I’ll just keep house and have dinner on the table when you get home?”
“Jake!” Gin exclaimed, shocked. She had no idea his anger ran so deep. “Those are—if we ever—decisions like that would need us both to treat each other with respect and—and you can’t keep shutting me out if we’re ever going to—”
“I’m not the one shutting you out,” Jake shot back. “You can’t—won’t—even talk to me about the case. Hell, you’re working for the county. The people who are trying to shut me down, if you haven’t noticed. I have to wonder, sometimes, how much you could care about me if you can’t remember whose side you’re on.”
“I’m trying to help you!” Gin protested. “Meanwhile, I find out you’ve been talking to a bankruptcy lawyer without even discussing it with me first!”
A bleak expression settled onto Jake’s face. “I hate to break it to you, but this is just the way it goes for regular folks. Sometimes you can’t buy your way out of your problems.”
He picked up the ax and started walking away. Jett looked worriedly between the two of them and whined before trailing after him.
Gin stood rooted in place for a few moments, fuming. He was determined to go it alone, which meant that she could either accept the cold, empty silence between them for however long it took Jake to snap out of his funk—or she could leave. There was a third option—the most difficult, the one that would require the most of her.
She could keep trying to convince him to let her in. But until Jake saw a way out of his current problems, there was no way he would be receptive. Which meant that their relationship was riding on the investigation.
And Gin only knew one way to help with that. Which was to bring all of her skills—analytical, scientific, and investigative—to the case. Where Jake was impulsive and passionate, she could be calm and thorough. Where he saw clo
sed doors, maybe—just maybe—she could see a way to make sense of what had happened at the building site.
Calmer, finally, she made her way down the hill. Maybe it would be wiser to simply take what she knew to the police and let them deal with it . . . but Gin knew that if she didn’t share what she’d discovered with Jake, he would see it as a betrayal.
She found him at the sink, staring out over the snowy woods, a glass of water in his hands. Hearing her come through the front door, he turned and looked at her with an anguished expression. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m an idiot. It’s just that I don’t—I can’t—”
“Some things happened today,” she said. “Things you should know about.”
She stayed on the other side of the bank of cabinets separating the kitchen from the dining area, the distance between them emphasized by the expanse of stone and hickory. She told him about the events at the bar and the motor pool, downplaying Tuck’s role in both discoveries. He listened with increasing agitation, erupting when she told him about Marvin Morgensen.
“What the hell am I supposed to make of that?” he burst out. “A total stranger may have tried to kill my girlfriend, for no reason?”
“Jake, Tuck thinks that Morgensen might be the dead man on your land. We still don’t know who was riding his motorcycle that night.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
Gin sighed. “Look—at the moment I’m here, with you, safe as can be. But I’m still not finished telling you what happened today.”
Jake rubbed his eyes incredulously, cursing under his breath. “Okay,” he finally muttered. “Tell me the rest. All of it.”
So she told him about the visit to see Marlene Sykes.
“No, not a chance,” Jake said, practically before she’d finished repeating what Marlene had said. “Gus would never do something like that. He’d never try to hurt her—or anyone else.”
“But how well do you really know him?” Gin pressed. “I mean, he’s only been working for you for less than a year.”
“It’s not about how long I’ve known him,” Jake said. “Look, how do you think my business has survived as long as it has? I’m a damn good judge of character. It’s true that when I hired him I was going by my gut more than anything. But you show up with a man at the crack of dawn and work side by side in all kinds of weather, day after day, you get to know him pretty quick.”
Gin wasn’t as trusting. She’d seen too many family members shocked by the secrets their loved ones kept until their dying breath. There had been the husband who never knew his wife’s infertility was caused by uterine scarring from chlamydia. The priest who’d died of opioid abuse, whose parishioners thought he had a seizure disorder. The woman who’d compulsively ingested cigarette ashes for over a decade.
In Gin’s professional experience, often people knew only the sides that their loved ones wished to show them. It was entirely possible for people to hide the things they did, their secret passions and fears.
“Just for the sake of argument, talk this through with me, okay?” she said. “They were living in Steubenville, right? They had a whole life there. Jobs, a home, family nearby. He left it all behind so that they could make a fresh start. Only, Marlene didn’t stop her affair as she had promised. Don’t you think that could push him over the edge after he gave up everything for her?”
“Look. We can talk about this all day long, and it’s not going to change the fact that I’ll never believe Gus would set fire to the work we did. We both put our hearts into this project. And besides, he was going to earn a hefty bonus when those houses closed. It’s in the contract. Why jeopardize that?”
“I’m not saying it was planned,” Gin said. “It could easily have been the heat of the moment. An impulsive decision he made when he discovered that his wife was still cheating on him. And the fact that she was doing it inside the house he had built with his own hands—that could have been the trigger.”
“Then why didn’t he simply try to kill her at home? It would have been a lot easier to cover it up.”
“I think it was a spur of the moment decision, like I said. Maybe all he meant to do was get proof of the affair, at first. He hears her get out of bed. He follows her—he’s careful, so she never knows. Maybe he sees her turn off the security cameras. He waits to be sure, and he sees them in the house, sees their cars parked down below. What he doesn’t realize is that they were just talking; Marlene tells him it’s over, they leave. He thinks they’re making love, and it drives him to do something crazy.”
Jake gaped at her. “So you’re asking me to believe my partner, my friend, flew into a jealous rage and burned down everything we worked for. Do you also think he tried to run you off the road and kill you? And what about the body—do you think Gus is responsible for that as well?”
“I never said that,” Gin protested. “I have no idea how it’s all tied together—or if any of it’s related to anything else. But I’m trying to help you here. The county’s ready to close the case. We only have a few days to stop them. At least I’m trying to do something, rather than sit here and wait for disaster to strike.”
Jake shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, Gin. I guess I can understand how you drew the conclusions you did. But you’re wrong. And I want you to promise me something: Don’t say anything about this to the cops, not for now. Not until I figure out how to talk to Gus about . . . all of this.”
Gin nodded reluctantly. “Okay. I . . . promise.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe she was being too hasty. She believed that Marlene had seen someone—but it wasn’t necessarily her husband. Quite possibly, her guilt and shame had predisposed her to make assumptions.
“Good,” Jake said. “Look, give me a little time. I’ll take Gus out for a beer, find a way to bring it up with him.”
“All right. But I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I’m going to go look up those reenactors, the ones up in Munhall.”
“Gin—you don’t have to drive all the way to Munhall just to find reenactors. They’re all in town to protest the site. They’re having a big get-together at McNally’s tonight.” He dug in his pocket and came up with a dog-eared, bright-yellow flyer. “They were spreading these around town today.”
Gin looked over the flyer, a photocopied hand-drawn invitation to “Learn How We Keep History Alive!” It advertised half-price well drinks for ladies and a halfhearted suggestion to “Bring all your FRIENDS.”
“Well, do you want to go?”
“Not especially,” Jake said gloomily. “But it beats sitting at home. Besides, the drinks are cheap enough even for me.”
* * *
The turnout was surprisingly large. A few patrons wore Civil War regalia, and an earnest man with long silver sideburns was wandering around with a petition, but most people seemed to be ignoring the event’s purpose and simply having fun. Many of the partiers seemed to be local people taking advantage of the opportunity to have a little fun on a weeknight, but one cluster of people were toasting each other with sloshing mugs of beer and singing what Gin took to be historic ditties.
When Jake came back from the bar with their drinks, Gin propelled him over to the singers, who’d given up on harmonizing and were moving on to a drunken game of darts. She approached the table, introduced herself to the two men remaining seated, and asked if she and Jake could join them.
“Absolutely!” the drunker of the two shouted. “Here, I’ve got another one. Raise your glasses, boys . . .”
He threw his arm around Jake’s neck and started singing.
“Here’s to the American eagle,
That gray old bird of prey,
Who eats on Northern soil,
And shits on Southern clay!”
“Bravo,” his companion said mildly. “Hey, Pete, how about you go see if you can get that hot reporter to interview you?”
“Great idea, Doyle,” his friend said, belching loudly before lurching off through the crowd.
“Sorry about that,” the man said, shaking hands with each of them. “My name’s Doyle Grynbaum. I swear we’re not all like that. Most of us are simply amateur historians.” He leaned across the table as if sharing a confidence. “Some of us don’t even dress up, but don’t let that get around.”
“My name’s Gin, and this is Jake.”
The man’s eyes narrowed in recognition. “Aw, shit. You’re Jake Crosby, the developer.”
“Is that a problem?” Jake said coldly.
“No, not for me, it isn’t. In fact, I feel bad about what’s going on up there. I didn’t join the protest, just so you know. I mean, I’m pretty jazzed about the possibility of a significant find, but not everyone wants to shut you down, man.”
Jake relaxed next to Gin. “Well . . . thanks. I guess you know the investigation has me in a jam. I just want to get through this.”
Doyle nodded. “I’d offer to buy you a drink, but I see you have a full one. No hard feelings though, okay?”
“I have a few questions, if you don’t mind,” Gin said.
“Hell, fire away. Least I can do.”
“I was curious about something. I know some reenactors carry replicas of Civil War weapons, and some collect authentic antique pieces. And I read online that some of these old guns actually still work. I was wondering about ammunition . . . does anyone make historically accurate bullets or musket balls?”
She held her breath, wondering if she’d gone too far, but Doyle seemed intrigued by her question. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but people make all kinds of things. You should come to one of our events—you can buy historically accurate insignia and footwear and even underwear.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Yeah, people do get a little crazy about this stuff. I got to say, I’ll be really surprised if the body does turn out to be authentic.”
“Yeah? How come?” Jake asked.
“There haven’t been any other artifact discoveries near here. To find a soldier buried in his uniform, away from a known camp or conflict site? I don’t see it.”
All the Secret Places Page 19