“That was when I met Jim. Jim Lee was older. He wasn’t from Portland and he had a job at a mill in Camas. He had a car, a red 1968 Road Runner that would go like stink and turn heads on every block. Well, I thought it was love at first sight with Jim. Maybe it was, then. Maybe he was just my way out. Either way, we dated for three weeks before he proposed. We were happy when we were together, which wasn’t that often. He took me dancing. We picnicked. He could even afford to eat dinner in the finer restaurants. Jim said, if we lived together, we could be that happy all the time.
“Well, I left a note, I kissed Angie goodbye while she slept, and I moved to Camas. That happiness only lasted about a month. Jim’s house was a trailer, not even a double-wide, plunked down in the middle of a barely cleared lot on the outside of town. And there was the drinking, which pretty soon turned to violence. Like too many young girls, it took me way too long to figure he wouldn’t change. A year, maybe? By that time, there was no going back home to Portland. I’d spoken to Mom once, and the disappointment was too much. Proving her right and heading back with my tail between my legs would have been even worse. I was only twenty, or twenty-one. I owned nothing except my pride. It seems even Jim couldn’t beat that out of me.
“Then, come that night in November 1971.”
Keller spoke up, his voice slow and drunken. “Is that the same night?”
“I don’t know, Jack. It sure seems so. I was thinking of leaving him anyhow. I just couldn’t figure out where I would go. It’d been over two years and we still hadn’t married. Maybe it was because we both knew my bruises would have made for terrible wedding photos. Well, that night, he came home drunk as ever, but he wasn’t alone. He had several of his friends with him. Jim had never brought people home before and I got spooked. I locked myself in the bathroom and I told myself—”
She reached up and turned the rear-view mirror to look at Keller. “Does that happen to you? Do you ever step outside of your own body and see yourself?”
“Yeah.” He leaned forward, his eyes wide, hanging on her story. “All the time.”
Chapter Fifty
“I said to myself in that bathroom, if one Jim is that rough, then four or five will be the death of you. It’s now or never. I walked straight out of the bathroom, made some excuse, and carried on right out the front door. I didn’t have a plan past ‘anywhere is better than here’.
“A terrible thunderstorm had already set in and I knew I wouldn’t get far on foot. I didn’t even grab a coat. I made sure, though, to pick up his keys on the way out. Boy, he sure noticed that, because I heard him screaming at me as I drove away in that beautiful, red car.
“Like I said, I didn’t know where I was going. I couldn’t go back to Portland. That door was closed to me. Besides, I’d heard that Angie got herself a job at a new bookstore. I told myself she’d be all right. If I had to go back to Jim, either he’d kill me, or I’d kill myself. But I knew I was leaving Camas. Do you know Camas, Jack?”
Keller shook his head. “No.”
“It’s a small town on the mouth of the Washougal River. Well, it was small then. I don’t know about now. At the southeast end of town there’s a bridge. It may have been metal once, but it always looked to me like they’d built it of rust from the get-go. As I’m crossing this bridge going into town, I see something white hanging over the side.
“Now, remember, I was running. I can’t imagine now that those men were sober enough to follow me, but I didn’t know that then. Between my crying and the water pouring down over the windshield, I had no idea what I’d seen. Still, something compelled me to pull over. I remember ‘Riders on the Storm’ was playing on the radio and I felt there was some serendipity happening, some fate.
“So, I pulled the Road Runner over and walked back to the bridge. I was soaked to the bone and freezing cold before I’d even covered the twenty yards or so. It was dark when I looked over the side, and I had to rub the water from my eyes to be sure of what I saw. Hanging from the bridge was a man suspended by a parachute.”
“My dad,” Keller said in a whisper.
“I don’t know, Jack. Maybe it was. Well, I called down and I got no answer. I could see, though, that he was hanging so low he was touching the ground. Beneath the bridge is a little island. The river runs around it on both sides. In the fall, though, the river gets low and you can walk out to it, so that’s what I did. For all the rain and the cold, I might as well have swum out there.
“The way he hung, it was almost like he was down on his knees, praying. I checked him for breathing. I checked him for a pulse. He’d died, Jack. I don’t know when and I don’t know how. When I found him, though, his body was near frozen with chill, and he was definitely gone.
“He had no shoes. Other than that, he was dressed real dapper, in a black business suit and a white shirt. There was a bag he wore on his belly. It was like a backpack, but it was tied around him, too. It had come open and, as I was trying to get him undone, it tore open some more.”
She paused to look at Keller in the mirror. “And, you know what I found.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Keller said, nodding.
“Almost,” she continued. “Some of it must have fallen out, but close enough. All twenties. I’d never seen so much money. Here I was, finally trying to escape, trying to hide, and I come upon a man in a suit, praying in a river who offers me a way out. Sort of like an angel.”
“What did you do with him?”
“I couldn’t bury him. Even though I’d near forgotten about Jim and his friends, it’s a rocky little island. But the Washougal is a pretty swift river that empties into the Columbia. I helped him down as gently as I could. I said a prayer, and I let the current take him away.”
Chapter Fifty-One
The scraping in Keller’s voice yanked Bernadette back to the present. “That wasn’t for you. It’s mine.”
Disgusting, fine spittle shot from his mouth as he spoke. She fought the urge to wipe the back of her neck.
“I didn’t know that, Jack. And, he had already died. If anyone found him, that money was going to the police. You don’t need to be a detective to know that this was an unusual situation.”
She looked again in the mirror, hoping to see a teary-eyed Keller. Instead, his eyes were vacant, unreadable to her. Not since Jim had she seen a look so inhuman.
They turned onto Richardson Street.
“Jack, you will want to know this. I gathered up his parachute before I left and took it with me. A bunch of the ropes to the canopy of the chute were cut. The red ones looked snapped, like someone had deliberately weakened them. If you want my two cents, I think it’s the FBI or the government who are responsible for him being unable to land properly. Maybe he got blown around, or wasn’t able to steer, or something.”
Her suggestion had not calmed him at all. “I don’t want two cents,” Keller said. “That money is worth millions today. I want my family’s money.”
Bernadette adjusted the mirror to once again look at Frieda. “I just thought you would find that interesting. His straps were fine.”
Her eyes met Frieda’s. “He had strapped himself on all right,” she added, as she tugged on her own shoulder belt. She saw the young girl’s eyes dart to the twitching belt and back. Frieda’s eyes widened.
“I don’t care now,” Keller said, “I don’t—”
The car’s sudden acceleration cut him off. Bernadette stomped on the gas pedal, taking aim at the colossal chestnut tree in front of the house. He reached into the front seat and pulled at her arm.
In that instant, as she wrestled against Keller’s overwhelming strength, Bernadette heard the satisfying click of Frieda releasing his seatbelt.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Bernadette unbuckled her seatbelt. Ache rushed in across her chest like a massive bruise.
“Frieda, are you okay?”
Keller’s torso was half-draped onto the front bench seat next to her, and she couldn’t see past
him into the back. His head and arms had disappeared over the seat, beneath the dash. The windshield was opaque and webbed with cracks.
“I’m okay,” came a small voice, followed by sounds of a door opening.
Keller stirred. In a slurred voice, he said, “You bitch. What have you done?” She felt his hand, wet, groping around her ankle.
“Out of the car, Frieda,” she shouted. “Run to the house! Run!”
Bernadette struggled to get her door open halfway; metal caught on metal. Her left arm was numb from the shoulder down, where the seatbelt had restrained her. Still, it was enough for her to slide out and onto the ground. A sharp jolt in her side made her double up. She wondered for a second whether she had been stabbed, before realizing that it was the ordinary pain of her cancer. She rose and looked about. They had missed the tree and the front of the car hugged a telephone pole, which leaned at a precarious angle over the car. The engine ticked away its last gasps. From this side, she could see the dent that Keller himself had made in the windshield.
People started coming out of the café behind them.
Frieda had already reached the front steps of the house. “Come on!”
Bernadette took one last look at Keller, who had now pulled himself into the front seat, and hurried after the girl.
They held hands as they ran up the stairs and into Bernadette’s apartment. She locked the deadbolt behind them. The living room appeared untouched. Some papers had been tracked in from the bedroom. She had known that he’d discovered the writing desk. Still, the violence with which it had been thrown and broken made her shiver.
Bernadette closed the bedroom door from Frieda’s eyes, walked to the couch, and sat. She picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1.
People will already have called because of the car.
They don’t have a clue who they’re dealing with, though.
“Frieda, what was the name of the police officer we spoke to at the hospital?”
“I don’t remember,” Frieda said, sitting next to her. “Ask for Constable Sonja Tipton, though.”
When Tipton came on the line, Bernadette described the attack at the hospital and the accident outside. “He was out of control, and I didn’t know what else to do. This was the only place that I could think of where we could get behind lock and key.”
“You took an awful chance with the pole,” Tipton said. “We’ve got cars heading your way and I won’t be far behind. In the meantime, don’t open the door for anyone. Are you sure he’s incapacitated?”
Bernadette cradled the phone between her chin and shoulder, trying to massage feeling into her left arm as she spoke. “He’s alive, but he isn’t going anywhere if that’s what you mean. Frieda, look out front and tell me if you see anything.”
“Just a bunch of people standing around the car with their phones.”
“We’re safe,” Bernadette relayed into the phone.
“Stay close to the phone and wait for us to arrive.”
“I hear sirens,” Frieda said from the window.
“We’ll be right here,” Bernadette said before hanging up. “That wasn’t the same officer we spoke to at the hospital, Frieda. How do you know her?”
“She’s nicer than the jerk at the hospital and the big guy who told Henry about the body.”
Bernadette looked at her with wide eyes. “What body?”
Frieda spoke excitedly. “Julian Corbeau, who owned a pawnshop downtown. He and Mr. Creepy, Keller, met online. Keller came here from the States to get something, but he killed Julian and he’s been using the pawnshop as a hideout this whole time. I think he was sleeping in the back. And Hen’s friend, Dr. Well, told us that he’s not taking his medication, so he could be having blackouts and not even knowing what he’s doing.” She paused. “The police told Hen that they found the guy’s body in the freezer.”
“Julian Corbeau?”
“Uh huh,” Frieda said. “It means ‘crow’.”
He really did follow some sort of trail.
“You’ve been to this pawnshop downtown?” Bernadette asked. “On East Hastings?”
“Yeah,” Frieda said with a cocked eyebrow. “How did you know that?”
“It’s a part of the story I was telling in the car.”
“You mean that was real?” Frieda’s voice rose to a high pitch.
“Those were strange days, Frieda, and lots of people were doing desperate things,” Bernadette said.
“People were protesting in the streets. The government had lied about what was going on over in Vietnam. The news had something fresh every day about prison riots, oil spills, political lies or police corruption. Well, I thought about all those young men who had dodged the draft and gone north to Canada. So that’s what I did. I took that hotrod I’d stolen, and I tore a path up here.
“I told myself that was Jim’s one gift to me, that car. I took back roads. I stopped just to wash up in Amboy and get rid of the parachute equipment and some of Jim’s things from the trunk. Truth be told, I was searching the car for drugs. I didn’t know what Jim kept in there, but I knew that I didn’t want to get arrested crossing the border. I’d just be swapping one prison for another.”
Frieda listened with wide eyes. “You didn’t tell any of that stuff about money and your different name to the police.”
Bernadette patted the young girl’s hand. It was small and smooth, spotless even, compared to her own. “Yeah, I don’t know how I’m going to handle that yet.”
“I won’t tell them if you don’t want me to.” The young girl delivered her promise with a gravity that should be reserved for later in life.
It’s never been a question of whether the past would catch up, has it? Just a question of when.
“I’ll never ask you to lie, Frieda, and you shouldn’t lie to the police. I will ask you to let me be the first person to bring it up, though. Okay?”
Frieda nodded.
“But if anyone asks you outright, you answer them honestly.”
Again, nodding. “You don’t have to tell me any more about how you knew the pawnshop guy who was killed if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t mind. I’m not going to be around forever, and maybe someone should be the keeper of the truth, eh?”
Bernadette stood and stretched her arm across her chest. Tingling had replaced the numbness, and there was a growing throbbing where the seatbelt had bit into her shoulder. Even still, given everything, she should expect to hurt worse than this. Maybe it’s the adrenaline?
“I never met Julian, although I’d heard his name. I knew his uncle, Kevin, who used to run that pawn shop.”
“Was he DB Cooper?” Freida asked softly.
“Oh, you know that much?” Bernadette said, sitting back down on the couch. “No. They were brothers.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
“They were brothers.”
The words were strange to hear aloud. It was years since any of them had brought it up. Time and Kevin’s death didn’t make any of it easier.
“The man on the bridge had a wallet, and his driver’s license said he was Wayne Fullarton from Vancouver. I had no plan, but I was certain I’d be more able to hide better in a bigger city, so I followed the trail.
“When I first arrived, I had a little of my own money. I was scared to use any of the cash that I’d found because it felt like my salvation, and it didn’t feel like mine. Either way, I didn’t want to lose it. I could afford to stay at the Cambie downtown, though. That place has had its ups and downs over the years, and in those days it was definitely in one of the downs. It was clean enough. More importantly, it was cheap. Then I started looking for someone who might know him, the man from the bridge. That’s when I met Kevin and Ron.”
“Mr. Benham?” Frieda asked.
“Yes, Mr. Benham. The two of them went way back. I found Kevin because of his name on the pawnshop. It must have been obvious I was in a hell of a mess. I don’t even recall how or why, but pretty soon I had given him
my whole story. I told him about the body and the money, and even leaving home, Jim, and stealing the car.
“I was going to leave the money with him and carry on running. Wayne was his brother, after all. I never could tell if he didn’t somehow hold it against me, what happened. Even until the day he died. But he brought Ron in, and that made us a trio. Maybe I trusted Ron because he reminded me of my memories of my dad. Anyhow, he stood out because he wasn’t like other men I’d known. He wasn’t down and out or anything, but he had barely enough to pay for lunch, like most folks. Ron would get dressed up, and he’d go to his job as a realtor every day, even though business was terrible and he couldn’t sell a thing. He was leaving his wife and was between places to live. So I stayed, and he moved in to the Cambie, too.
“Kevin didn’t have any wife and kids. Instead, he was married to his pawnshop. Wayne was his older brother who’d gone down to the States to become an engineer. That little shop wasn’t making money hand over fist, but Kevin got by. It paid for Wayne’s school.
“But plans get blown off course, don’t they?”
She drifted off, and her attention turned to the kitchen. “Was that a noise?”
Frieda went to stand, but Bernadette’s straight arm held her back. Bernadette walked on tiptoe toward the kitchen.
Shima came running from the kitchen at full speed. Bernadette gave a sharp cry, and the cat ducked under the couch.
Bernadette laughed out loud at herself. “Well, speaking of surprises,” she said, picking up where she had left off.
“Each of us saw this as a chance to start over. Ron knew an excellent lawyer, and he introduced me to trustworthy people.”
“So, you kept the money?” Frieda asked.
Bernadette raised an eyebrow. “We did. I did. Those two men never treated it like it was anything other than mine. Ron was clever, and he was right. The police were looking for a man who had hijacked a big passenger jet, not a young woman.
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