Mortal Fall (32 page)

I got another cup of coffee at Starbucks and drove straight to Diane Rieger’s—now Diane Hanson’s—house. She was one of Mark Phillips’s ex-girlfriends and had written the poem I found in his office. I needed to talk to Adam too, but not until I did all my homework, so I headed to Kalispell first. I found Diane’s house on the east side surrounded by big maple trees green and busy with birds and squirrels and knocked
on her door around eight forty-five. I wanted to catch her in case she and her family had plans for the day and were leaving early.

She answered, completely dressed in what looked like green nurse’s scrubs, which squared up with the information I had found: that she worked for the valley’s main hospital, the same place Lara worked.

Unlike Beverly Lynde, she was petite, even smaller than Lara—no more than five foot two or three, and I realized that she could not be the one Nick Ferron was thinking about. She wore clogs and had dark Snow White hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck. Her skin was pale and spotless, her eyes the color of her pale-green uniform. Her smile revealed dimples, like parentheses on each side of her mouth, as if everything she was going to say was going to encase beautiful secrets. Yes, she was the type to write a poem, I thought. And she seemed lovely enough for any guy, including Mark, to hold onto a poem written by her, even if it was juvenile and sappy.

When I asked if she was going to work, she said she was and that hospitals don’t stop just because it’s a holiday. “The Fourth is actually a hugely busy day for us. Lots of stupidity going on.” She smiled. I agreed and said it was the same in my line of work. Then her smile faded, and I told her the reason for my visit as she stood in her doorway. With over a decade having passed since she was with Mark, she looked confused at first. But once she understood, shock registered on her face and said she could spare a few minutes. She invited me in and offered me coffee. I told her I’d already had a bunch and was good.

She introduced me to her children, a boy and a girl sitting slack-mouthed and mesmerized by cartoons, and told me she’d have to leave a few minutes early to get them to the day care at the hospital. Then she brought me out back to her porch nestled in a small rectangular-shaped, well-mowed backyard with a small koi pond made out of stone. It was fitted with a skimmer and filtration system and looked as if it had a heater attached for the cold weather. “You keep those around all winter?”

“Try to,” she said. “It’s my husband’s hobby. Sometimes the raccoons get in and eat them, but these’ve made it through this winter.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Thank you. We like it.” We sat down at her outdoor table after she took off the cushions and placed them on a rock wall by the patio to dry because she said they were still wet from the rainstorm the night before. She said she couldn’t take them out of the rain because she was at work and her husband was out of town for his railroad shift. I reassured her that I didn’t mind sitting on the chair’s iron mesh without the cushion.

“So, Mr. Harris,” she said. “How did you even know that I used to date Mark Phillips?” She looked at me confused.

“I found this in his home.” I pulled out her poem, tucked in a plastic baggie, and she reached out and took it, her fingers petite like Lara’s. She inspected it through the plastic. “In his office among other memorabilia,” I added. “And from there, I discovered that you two worked together at Glacier Academy and that’s how I found your maiden name.”

“Oh my God. How embarrassing.” She put her hand to her lips, looking surprised. “This is a blast from the past.” Then her dark, delicate eyebrows slanted down pensively. “And how in the world does this old poem help now, all these years later?”

“I’m not sure it does,” I said. “It’s a long shot that you can even help, but I’m just looking for a clearer picture of Mark Phillips. Anything might help. You can start by telling me how long you dated.”

“Oh gosh, not that long. Maybe just six or seven months, but we were young and you know how those relationships feel overcharged and important even if they were fleeting. Back then, it felt like it lasted a lifetime.”

I nodded, thinking of Serena—how we’d found our own haven together on Sundays when my brother was busy with duties doled out to him by the academy, most likely by Mark Phillips.

“Were you a counselor too?”

“Yes, I was. For a little over two years. I dated Mark the second year I was there.”

“And did you think the place was run well?”

“Well, no, not particularly. There were lawsuits eventually. Why? What does Glacier Academy have to do with Mark’s fall?”

“Perhaps nothing. Like I said, just trying to understand history, especially after finding your poem. Again, not that it means anything in particular, just one more person who knew him.”

“But we’re talking years ago.” She held her palm to the sky to suggest none of this made sense, and part of me felt disingenuous and sheepish for bothering her, knowing my brother had been there around the same time, and I had no intention of telling her about that.

“I’m just being thorough, Mrs. Hanson. Did you keep in touch with Mark over the years?”

“No, no, not at all.” She motioned with her chin to the poem. “I have no idea why he’d keep that silly thing all those years. Look, Mark and I fell for each other, but it was short-lived.”

“Why was that?”

One shoulder twitched up, and I could sense an irritation rising, perhaps reentering old territory she’d worked hard to put behind. “Because, like I said, we were young, and, well, maybe I wasn’t such a great judge of character back then.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. That place.” She threw her hand in the air. “It was just messed up. Everything started great. I was so excited to have a job helping troubled kids, to make a mark on the world, to do something heroic and useful, you know, like Greenpeace, without going to the edges of the world, but . . .” She blew out a puff of air. “I was just a kid too. I must have thought of myself as so much older and wiser, but I wasn’t. None of us were, especially Mark, and the owners—they just weren’t organized. I think they meant well, but they just didn’t know what they were doing and having young adults like us in charge, well, that was just a disaster waiting to happen.

“I remember”—she shook her head in part disgust, part amusement—“the first time we had to go through the kids’ things. You
know, when they check in, they’re supposed to surrender all their belongings so we can make sure there are no sharp objects, no stashes of drugs, that kind of thing. Mark, a guy named Steven, and I were in this little room with about three suitcases and backpacks and stuff from three different kids checking in, but we had no system in place. We had their stuff spread all over the room, checking underwear, bras, pants’ pockets, and on and on—clothes strewn all over the floor—until we got giggly and confused and couldn’t remember who owned what. It took us forever to try to get it all back in the correct suitcases.” She laughed, the parentheses widening, framing her mouth as she recalled the disorder and shook her head. “It was crazy. We were just so, so young ourselves.” She sounded wistful, like a part of her was lost forever and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She tilted her head and looked reflectively across the lawn at a small sandbox in the corner with tractors and other toys embedded in it like an abandoned worksite.

But I had locked onto one particular word she had used when she began. “Why
especially
Mark?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He acted so sure of himself, more confident than the rest of us, like he knew what he was doing and what those kids needed, but . . .” She caught her breath. “He was the lead counselor and he, he just shouldn’t have . . .”

“Shouldn’t have what?”

“Shouldn’t have treated those kids the way he did.”

I could feel my shoulders tense, picturing Adam and the other kids with Mark as their counselor. “How did he treat them?”

She shook her head in nearly imperceptible oscillations. “I don’t know, just wrong. I guess he thought all that tough discipline stuff was the way to help these kids—a lot of them were really nasty and mean, and us so young—you know, practically needing therapy ourselves, and here we were with all this power bestowed upon us. He, well, I don’t know, he was too harsh.”

“How so?” I asked softly, but a squirrel in a plum tree began protesting,
chip-chipping fiercely at a cat that had jumped up on the white wooden fence between her yard and the neighbor’s.

“What’s that?” she asked, my voice having been drowned out by the squirrel’s objections.

“How was he too harsh?”

“He just . . . he did some cruel things.” She frowned and looked down and picked a stray piece of lint off her pant leg. The twinkle of amusement and reflection from her earlier story had faded, a shadow moving over her eyes like dark clouds across the sun.

“Like making them carry buckets of water for hours and putting them in solitary confinement?” I asked, maybe a little too pointedly.

“Yeah.” She clasped her hands together. “That kind of stuff, but again . . .” She looked at me. “Why does this ugly history have to be brought up? Does it really have anything to do with today?”

“It could,” I said. “It very well could. If Mark was treating people that poorly, there might have been someone out for revenge.”

“After all these years? That would be crazy.”

I shrugged. “Again, Mrs. Hanson, I’m just being thorough. Sometimes in my business, you have to follow every path. Do you remember something in particular that Mark did that would make someone carry a grudge?”

“There were a lot of incidents. That poor girl, Miranda, hanging herself.” Diane closed her eyes, and when she opened them, I nodded that I knew about the Miranda incident. “That was after I had gone. Thank God I wasn’t there to witness that. And”—she continued, her voice lowering as if to share a secret—“before that, there was another boy, a big, strong guy, but Mark couldn’t stand him—probably because he acted tough and he was competition to Mark on some level because, like I said, I think Mark was really immature and insecure himself. He disguised it well and acted all in control, but he could be really inappropriate, really mean and cunning. Mark made life especially hard for that kid. Adam, I think.”

I could feel my entire body go rigid. I suddenly had an urge to
leave, to not let her go on. I felt exposed even though I knew she had no clue that Adam was my brother. Probably even if she remembered his full name, she still wouldn’t connect the dots. Harris was a common name. “Made life hard for him how?”

“He used to put him in that solitary confinement you were mentioning—in that awful shed—for hours. And one night, he got two of the other counselors to go with him: a guy named Elan and another named Ron. I only know this because one of them, Elan, felt so guilty about it, that he told me a few weeks later. That’s when I broke it off with Mark. I couldn’t date a guy like that. Someone who could do that.”

“Do what?” I said coolly.

“Just, you know, such weird, mean things.”

I sat patiently, not saying a word until she offered more. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of a willow tree near her back fence and I could have sworn it was trying to tell me something, murmuring some warning to me in the soft sway of its long, drooping whips.

She blew out a loud, frustrated stream of air. “Elan said because Mark was the leader, they felt they had to go along with what he said and yada yada.” She rolled her eyes. “All that crap—the power of suggestion and that high-testosterone mentality, I guess.”

“What exactly did Elan say they had done?”

“Are you going to use this information for anything particular? I mean, I’ve already talked to attorneys years back when that whole Miranda thing was going on, but they settled, so thankfully, I didn’t need to go sit on the witness stand. I really don’t want to dredge up—”

“No.” I held up my hand to stop her. “There’s nothing to dredge up here. Again, I’m just trying to figure out what happened to Mark, and sometimes a person’s history can tell us a lot about the paths he ends up down later in life. That’s all,” I said calmly and reassuringly, trying my best to look professional and convince her that the things she might tell me didn’t count, as if I was only working a case gone cold and not the real, blood-pumping police investigation I was actually on. And, behind all that, as excited as I was to be working the case, a part of my
conscience niggled that perhaps the things she told me didn’t matter in the scheme of my actual inquiries. So what if Mark Phillips wasn’t the most stellar young man around in his younger years? And so what if he worked at the same place my brother attended years ago? Did it really have any bearing on his life now, before the fall? Was I wasting my time? Was I here talking to this pretty woman who’d written an innocent poem years ago to the victim, only because Adam went to Glacier Academy?
You owe me
.

But I knew that when things were messy and confusing, the only path forward was to search for more information to bring context, and from context comes direction. Plus I had dealt with a contemptible victim in my last case with Victor Lance, an animal-torturing meth addict, reconciling how just because a guy might have a lot of enemies and maybe wasn’t even worth the dollars investigating, we still needed to do it. I sat up tall, feeling the wrought-iron curlicue flower designs on the back of the chair dig into my spine as I waited for her to go on.

“Apparently Mark got them to take the poor guy out of his bunk in the middle of the night, tied his hands up, and I guess they just got caught up in the frenzy of it all. Thought it would teach him a lesson.” She looked across the lawn at the squirrel jumping higher and I watched her eyes absently trace its movements as it hopped from a lower branch to a higher one near the top of the tree, chip-chipping and squawking.

I could feel my mouth go dry and I when I swallowed, it felt hard and sharp. “What happened?” I asked again.

“They pretty much sexually assaulted him.” She looked toward the fish pond, the sound of its aeration bubbly, playful and calming, incongruent with the things we were discussing. The squirrel suddenly quieted; the tabby had jumped back into his own yard. The bushes along the fence cast blunt shadows that mocked summer’s fleeting nature. I felt an achiness—maybe just from the booze the night before, but it settled somewhere deep in my bones—to the marrow.
You owe me.