Orchids and Stone (15 page)

She bit her lip. “I’ll pay for it.”

“I don’t want you to pay for it. I want my car.” His voice was raised and he didn’t raise it often.

“If I were yelling about something that just can’t be, say if I were ranting about wanting my sister back, or my father, you’d tell me to be realistic. To not wish for things that just can’t be.”

He looked too chagrined to be defensive and said, “Well, I’d say it very nicely.”

Her shoulders and ire dropped together. “You would,” she agreed.

Vic sat on the bed and eyed the bouquet of roses on the nightstand. “There’s something I want to say, to ask you, but it seems like there’s so much distraction lately.”

“Yes!” she exploded, wondering when he’d moved the roses up to the bedroom. “There’s so much distraction these days. Why is that?”

He held a finger to his lips, to hers, then cradled her onto the bed and set the note by the double bouquet. After stripping out of his shirt and socks, he took his time undressing her. He pulled two roses from one bouquet and swirled one over her left nipple, then her right, while tracing the curve of her shoulders with the other.

She softened, succumbing to relaxation.

Vic placed one rose between her breasts and pulled back the green sepals of the other, making all the bloom show. He’d taught her the names of the parts of the rose, the pistil and stamen and sepal, with the first rose massage.

Back then, he’d crunched some of the magic for her when he’d admitted to learning the names from Cassandra, a master gardener.

“Tomorrow,” Daphne breathed, closing her eyes. “I’ll get things sorted out tomorrow. Get your car out of impound. See this detective Thea found.”

“Then I want to go with you,” Vic said, his voice hypnotic. “We can go see him together when I get off work.”

She opened her eyes. “I don’t want to wait until tomorrow evening. I have the whole day off work. I don’t want to waste it.”

“Daph, it’s just one day.”

“I don’t want to wait. I’d go see him right now if I could.” She looked at the clock and felt a niggling sensation that something was wrong, something else. What had she let lie? But the temptation to relax into Vic’s seduction and be allowed to feel good pulled at her core.

Vic whispered, “I’ll be off work at four. We can go together before I get the kids at six.”

“I’ll just go by myself. I’ll take you to work, drop you off, and then I’ll go. I’ve got the whole day off.”

“Daph, you don’t have to go at all.”

“What?”

Vic stroked both hands across her hair, caressing as he murmured, “If I asked you to stop all this, would you?”

“All this . . . what?”

“All this tilting at windmills.”

“I’m tilting at windmills?”

He nodded and nuzzled her neck. “And it could be dangerous.” He held her face and smiled. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to go talking to men you don’t know?”

Her body went taut. “Every day since I was eleven.”

His smile fell and he nodded. “Of course. Well. Well, they were right. It’s someone you don’t know. Some guy you don’t know at some address you’re unfamiliar with. At least wait so I can go with you.”

“I’m going to talk to an ex-cop. They’re not dangerous.”

He tore several roses from the bouquet, and sprinkled a fistful of petals over her. Once she was littered from neck to thighs, he rearranged loose petals with two roses, tracing her breasts, her muscles, her belly button. Then he pulled a small silver ring from the change pocket of his jeans, and fed it onto one rose stem. Dangling the rose upside down toward her face, he twirled it back and forth. The cuts in the ring’s metal flashed in the low light.

“I never gave this to Cassandra. I never even considered it. With her it was . . .” He stopped himself even before he saw her glare.

Daphne clapped her hands over her eyes, refusing to engage and see the metal band blurring above the rose bloom. “Why . . . are you talking about her now? Or at all?”

He pulled her hands from her eyes and shook his head. “I let my mouth run when it shouldn’t have. She’s not a thought I want in my head or yours right now. You mentioned some grandmother’s brooch earlier, and it made me think of my grandmother’s ring and the whole thing in my head about who I never gave it to and why, and who I want to give it to and why, and how I’ve been wanting to say something to you for quite a while . . . Wait. I’m fouling this up.”

Clearing his throat, he rose from the bed and pirouetted three hundred and sixty degrees, then knelt at the bedside. “Starting over. This was my grandmother’s ring. My mother set it aside and so did I. Will you marry me, Daphne?” He ended with both hands on his heart.

She stared as her mind whirled and then words boiled out of the mix of emotions and thoughts. “I can’t believe you proposed. I mean, it’s unexpected. Thanks. I mean, I love you, too. I just . . .”

The reserve in Vic’s face ill-concealed his hurt and bewilderment. She turned away, knowing she’d caused so much distress today to so many, knowing she too was on the list of victims, of people who’d been put out by her actions. “Let me just manage one thing right now,” she whispered as she reached for the light and clicked it off. “Let me tell you I love you and thank you, and let’s go to bed. It can still be special. I’m . . . I feel so scattered right now.”

In the dark, he said, “In the history of the world, no man ever picked a worse moment to propose.”

“And no woman has ever been less . . . I don’t know.”

He fell asleep with her hands encased in his. Soon a disturbed slumber led him to pull a few inches away, half-rolling to his stomach, then pulling the covers above his shoulder. Daphne shoved the sheet and comforter down, ready to sweat, thinking about her reaction to his proposal. Part of her smiled, swooned a bit, and reveled in his desire. Part of her stayed stuck in questions past and present that had nothing to do with the man beside her. Vic’s fitful sleeping, uneasy with the unnatural switch to his circadian rhythm, might have kept her awake, but she might have lain awake all those hours anyway, her mind rehashing and second-guessing in anticipation of the confrontation she’d earned for the morning.

A man she didn’t remember, the man with the best chance of knowing, was going to explain to her what was missed.

CHAPTER 14

Daphne parked on a gravel driveway and checked the note again as she stepped out of her truck.

Retired Detective Arnold Seton. 216582 Amelanchier Street NE. Do not tell him where you got this address.

The house was small, older. She saw a man deep in the carport and called to him. “Mr. Seton? Are you Arnold Seton? You were with the Seattle Police Department?”

He dropped his metal tackle box with a clunk and angled his body like a boxer’s, his right leg stepping back, one hand darting under his jacket to his waistband. “Show me your hands.”

“Shit,” she said, dropping the note and throwing her spread palms into the air by her ears. “Don’t shoot me.”

“Who are you and what do you want?” The man didn’t step out of the carport and Daphne stood rooted in the open, glancing down at the note, wondering if Vic’s transcription of Thea’s warning was face up.

“I’m Daphne Mayfield. I’m, I was . . . Suzanne Mayfield was my big
sister. She was murdered twenty years ago. You were on her case. I was a kid
then. I never got to talk to you or anyone who knew anything about it.”

A half hour ago, she’d thought nothing could be more tense than driving one’s new fiancé to work—driving him because she’d wrecked his car—while they were not speaking. He’d said she was being ridiculous to badger her mother into going away for the weekend with her bridge partner, said she’d managed to pick a fight with her mother on a terrible weekend.
Daph, you’re creating friction with everybody.

She tried to shake such distractions off as she peered at the man half-hidden in the carport. “Can I put my hands down?” With her arms overhead, her black T-shirt rode up. The low-rider jeans she’d worn in an effort to not stand out today the way Carhartts made her unique amongst all the jeans-clad people now left her belly exposed.

He stepped out of the carport, ignoring the tackle box he’d dropped. Crowned with thick gray hair, wearing loose blue jeans, a baggy flannel shirt, and a thin cotton coat, he looked about sixty, but the spring in his step made him appear younger. “Never told you to put ’em up. How’d you get my address?”

Daphne lowered her hands, put one toe on the note, and gave a weak smile. “A friend got it for me.”

“Can you do better than that?”

“She works at a newspaper.”
Nice fortitude,
she told herself. While not yet diming Thea out, she’d cave if the man questioned her harder.

He nodded, then shook his head and hooked his thumbs in his belt. “I know who you are. I remember the Suzanne Mayfield case. One of my few suspended cases. And she was my first.”

“Suspended,” Daphne said, mouthing the word, assessing its flavor as she bent to retrieve the note and pushed it deep into her right front pocket. Suspended described her family while they waited for news when Suzanne went missing, a state from which they’d never recovered, even with the discovery of the body.

Daphne recognized this permanent state of waiting as the demon that cloaked her and her parents throughout her remaining childhood and knew it had killed her father as much as the rope he’d brought to the hotel room.

She felt Seton’s protracted consideration and wondered what he knew as he studied her. Struck by her category—the surviving sister of the murder victim in his first suspended case—Daphne fell silent.

Suzanne’s life was suspended and so is mine.

“I hate that it was suspended,” she said at last.

“So do I,” came his immediate response.

“You guys thought maybe the guy she was seeing at the time did it.” The thought made her father’s voice play in her head. Remembering his bitter complaint—
that boy
should be in jail
—put her mentally back in the jail cell, afraid to touch anything, wanting out of her cage. Yesterday. Just yesterday, she’d committed a crime, been jailed.

Tipping his head to one side, Arnold Seton looked at the high branches of hemlocks along his driveway, then over her head. “Do you have a boyfriend, a husband?”

She nodded. “Fiancé. Kind of.” The word was newly personal and she was interested to try it out. Vic didn’t know she’d gone into the park days ago to think about whether or not she could handle a future with him. He wanted to marry her.

Fiancé
. It felt odd. Or did Vic not count as a fiancé since she hadn’t yet responded to his proposal?

“If you were murdered, he’s the first person detectives would look at.”

“You’re all that cynical?”

“That experienced.”

“Seriously? It’s like that?” When he nodded, she shook her head, but in defeat, not argument. “Was my sister’s case the only one you never solved?”

“Please understand that numerous detectives, officers, and technicians are involved in an investigation as important as murder.” He cleared his throat. “And we did our best, the very best we could.”

“But . . .” Daphne chewed the inside of her lip, realizing questions would pour out of her mouth before she’d thought about them, before she identified what she wanted to know. She must not offend him or shut him down. She should know what she wanted. “But I mean . . . you said she was your first—”

“No, your sister’s case was not the only one I failed to solve. Yes, it was my first . . . failure.”

“Oh.” Daphne grimaced, rolling her lips tight against her teeth. “In my sister’s case, I mean, you probably don’t remember it well enough to discuss it in detail. Even if you’re willing to.”

And please don’t tell me you remember, but you won’t discuss details because of some rule or confidentiality thing.
She’d lost so much. A sister and a father. A decade and then another. Let no propriety block the balm of answers.

He rubbed his jaw and shifted his weight before saying, “I remember it pretty well. Murder scene never determined. Boyfriend acted hinky. Got himself thrown out of the funeral. Had a good alibi for the assumed night of the disappearance.”

“Assumed?”

He shrugged. “We can’t know, right? On the information we had, we didn’t know exactly when your sister went missing.”

Daphne nodded. “No, we didn’t. Not the exact time.”

He nodded. “Sometime in the afternoon, evening, night of, or next morning. It was a span of about twenty hours, if I recall.” Then he added, “And I do.”

“Do you remember talking to Ross Bouchard?”

“That the boyfriend’s name?”

She nodded. “You interviewed him. He failed his polygraph.”

Seton grunted and seemed lost in thought.

At last, Daphne said, “It wasn’t him? You don’t think he did it?”

“It could have been him, someone else she knew, or it could have been a stranger.”

“The Green River killer was active back then,” Daphne said, ready to show that while she hadn’t been a part of the investigation as a child, she’d paid attention since adulthood. She’d looked up the old news articles and wondered. She’d prayed, like her father told her to.

“We thought about him, of course. But he was killing another woman that day.”

“God,” she said. Imagine the alibi:
I
didn’t murder her; I was busy murdering someone else.

“Still there were a couple of other serial possibilities.”

“Other serial killers?” The possibility seemed remote, and she shook her head.

“Yes.” He nodded and studied her truck.

“Dear God,” she said, feeling repulsed by his world. Under his silent, watchful look, she added, “Serial killers.” The notoriety of it had occurred to her before, long ago. She’d been eleven and wondering who killed Suzanne. With the passing of decades, she came to realize it was a thing she might never know.

The not knowing, that was the killer.

“Don’t you guys identify a serial killer’s victims? Once you catch the bad guy?”

“No, not all, not always. There are other cases, like your sister’s. Suspended cases, which means they’re unsolved, in Seattle and outlying areas. Some of those killings are no doubt related. The Green River killer didn’t corner the market on killing women.”

Daphne shook her head again. “Well, there aren’t that many serial killers, are there?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I’ve been surprised before,” Daphne admitted, her voice worn. “But, serial killers? It’s pretty rare, right?”

“Rare is a relative term. Most murders are not done by a serial killer. Many serial killers are never caught. At any point there are numerous active serial killers. Right now, there are several in process, I promise you.”

“Seriously?”

“Welcome to the West.”

“You mean . . .”

“We have more serial killers out here,” he said.

Daphne shook her head. “But, I mean, but in my family, Suzanne . . . I never thought it was unsafe before she died. I’ve lived here all my life.”

“Me, too.”

“We have more killers than other areas?” Her voice sounded as small as she felt.

He nodded. “This coast is the capital for serial killers.”

“Why?”

“Isolation’s a factor.”

“You mean, because there’s more land out here? A lower population density?”

“I mean we have a bit higher divorce rate, a bit less religion, a bit less history in our communities. Less structure and other social support. People are more isolated from each other, from help.”

“Loneliness,” Daphne said.

“Yes, loneliness explains part of the problem. Our killers lack support growing up.”

“Our killers,” Daphne mumbled. Was this a stock resource every community had to some degree? Like, our industry? Our rivers? Our killers.

“And not just our killers. Our victims lack support, too. With fewer resources, being more on their own, they make better prey for our somewhat more common killer than is found in the Midwest, in the Northeast.”

Prey. “I had no idea,” Daphne said, shaking her head, shaking inside as his single word resonated. Prey.
Prey
.

Pray to God,
her father said. Before he wanted vengeance, he sought prayers.

Arnold Seton shrugged and gave a wry smile, indicating something she couldn’t decipher. That it wasn’t her job to know? That she wasn’t expected to understand, nor to do something about it?

He waved his arms, gesturing to include all points of the compass. “It’s all linked. More death penalty sentences are handed out here than, say, in New England. Folks opposed to it say violence breeds violence but you are not talking to a guy who supports that theory. Violence often has to be responded to with violence, but chicken and egg arguments aren’t too useful.”

Uninterested in a death penalty debate, Daphne raised her hands in a gesture for peace and they stood in silence for a minute. Geese honked, out of place. The big birds shouldn’t be here now. Water wasn’t ready, the rivers icy with snowmelt.

“But I thought killers, I mean, a murderer . . . it’s not usually a stranger, a random bad guy, right?”

“Well, most killings are done by someone known to the victim—”

“But when it’s a stranger, like in my sister’s case . . .” And she realized where she’d erred. “I mean, if it was a stranger who killed Suzanne, then why . . .”

He waved her speculation down. “It could make you crazy, trying to puzzle out the why. There are no good reasons. Movies would have you believe killers get into games with the police. Like we’re playing chess with each other or something. Bad guy leaves little clues, maybe wants to get caught. Movies are full of nonsense. Bad guys don’t want to get caught. And good guys, the regular citizens, they suffer Bystander Syndrome.”

“Bystander Syndrome.” She whispered the words with dread. “That’s when someone doesn’t help someone who needs help? A stranger?”

He hesitated. “It’s . . . a collective response. When a group of bystanders see, say an accident, an altercation, something suspicious, but none of them move to help. They all think someone else will do something. Or should do something. Or someone else knows better what to do. And none of them moves a muscle.”

“Bystander Syndrome.” She sucked in a long breath, feeling gutted. He knew nothing more or new about Suzanne and her death. Of course he didn’t. No one did. Conversation twenty years after the fact hollowed. Her mission failed. All she’d learned was there was a name for her inaction toward Minerva Watts in the Peace Park, and the West won the prize for the most serial killers.

Gravel crunched as Arnold Seton turned and retrieved his tackle box, then plucked a rod and reel from the carport wall, coming out with a smile as he waved it at her. “You fish?”

Daphne shook her head, not trusting her voice anymore.

“I’m a lunker,” he said. “Spoons and bait. Don’t get those fly fishermen. They say they’re playing chess with the fish. That’s giving a trout too much credit in my opinion.”

She looked away from his tackle box. “That . . . syndrome . . .”

He raised his eyebrows, waited.

“Is there a name for it when there’s one lone bystander?”

“You have”—he stopped, and raked his fingers through his hair in one slow motion—“you have something you want to tell me.”

He wasn’t asking, just stating the obvious, Daphne decided. But why not tell him about Minerva Watts? Arnold Seton wasn’t Vic or Thea. He didn’t know her and had no reason to push her into or away from getting involved.

And he’d been a cop for a long time.

“Do you have time to hear about this?” Daphne asked with a deep breath, checking for his nod. Then she launched into the whole deal, starting with seeing the old woman in the park Wednesday night and the couple hustling her away in a car. Vic’s belated call to the police. The reassurances from the responding officer who said he’d put out a locate. And how, like Vic, the officer on Wednesday night thought the chance of there being a real problem was minuscule.

“And then that night, we walked back into the park and I remembered her name. Minerva Watts.”

“Did you call that in to dispatch?”

“Yes,” Daphne said, pleased when he nodded, like she’d just given the right answer on a pop quiz. “And the next day my friend who’s with the newspaper, banged around on a bunch of websites or databases or something and found an address for Minerva Watts on Eastpark.”