The Deepest Water (15 page)

No one ever mentioned how exhausted the survivors would be, she thought. In novels and movies they simply picked up the pieces and got on with things. How would Jud have handled that fight downstairs, she wondered then. And her eyes jerked open. Had he written about their fight over Willa? Had he seen her point of view? Had he written himself as villain? Her gaze fixed on the box that held his unpublished and unpublishable scraps, scenes, his camcorder reports. Their fight had been about Willa. Had he already been in love with her two years ago? What had he written about Willa?

Suddenly it occurred to her that her fight with Brice had started out with Willa; that was the root of it. Willa. Twice now. The only really bitter fight she’d ever had with her father, about Willa. The only fight at all she had ever had with Brice, about Willa.

She wondered again how Jud would have written about her fight with Brice. He would have seen both sides, she told herself, and tried to make her mind work the way Jud’s mind had worked. Brice’s side: worried about her, frightened that she had been more than a little crazy for a week, more frightened that she seemed oblivious to what he believed was the truth, that she could be in danger if she meddled in police matters, that Willa was a prime suspect and could be dangerous. As aware as she was that if anyone fell into the lake, that person could die; the water was so cold now that hypothermia would be swift following the shock of a plunge into ice water. Worried about her driving in the snow; she had not told him about the studded tires, but that wouldn’t have alleviated his worry all that much. He always said it was the other guy you had to be afraid of when it snowed, a maniac losing control, going into a skid, hitting you.

And of course, he was a survivor, too, probably almost as tired as she was. And the stress of having the police suspect him, as, of course, they did. Motive: money. What else? Her money, but his, too, as far as the police were concerned. Having the police check his alibi, question his associates, check the motel he had stayed in, everything.

Then, his work. This was always a bad time of year, starting to prepare the annual reports for the clients, on top of the day-by-day routine. Preparing for the annual audit, making sure everything was in order. And this year was particularly bad, as he had said, with the market doing insane gyrations, and clients who were anxious and demanding.

From his point of view, she was the one being unsympathetic and unyielding, unreasonable at a time when they both were under such tremendous stress that they needed each other’s support, not withdrawal and contention. She bit her lip as the realization hit her that this was probably how Jud had worked through so many things, by seeing both sides clearly.

She sat thinking, unmoving for a long time, and finally decided that it didn’t really matter if they believed different things; it never had mattered in the past, and it didn’t now. They were different in almost all ways, but neither of them had cared. She could never believe Willa had killed Jud, and he did believe it was a possibility. Since neither of them knew anything concrete about Jud’s death, there was no reason to talk about it. All they could do was speculate, and then quarrel. So, leave it alone. He wanted her to stop working at the museum, and, gazing at the many boxes of papers scattered about the room, she agreed, she should quit for now. Attend to matters at hand. And he would have to accept that she was seeing Felicia now and then. No reason to say every day, she told herself, but neither would she pretend she wasn’t seeing her. Compromise, she told herself. Take the first step, or the anger that had arisen would deepen and become too ugly to deal with later. What she would not do was let it simmer just below the surface the way her fight with Jud had simmered for two years. She nodded at her own reasonableness, and left the study.

It was after six-thirty when she tapped on his door, then opened it. “Pizza? Anchovies?”

He looked startled, almost disbelieving. It was a standing joke: he had said once that anchovies on pizza made him want to throw up. She always suggested them. She grinned at him, and he got up from his desk, crossed to her and put his arm around her shoulder, and together they went downstairs to discuss pizzas.

11

Waiting for Lieutenant Caldwell to arrive the next morning, Abby went over the list of things she had to do that day: drop by the museum and pick up the few things she had left there. She had called Willa and told her she wouldn’t be able to keep working for a while. She had to buy a laptop computer. Knowing she couldn’t afford it, she had decided to use a credit card, and by the time the charge appeared, she would have something ready to tell Brice. In six months she might become a rich bitch, she thought darkly, but today she was broke. On reflection it seemed that had been her life as long as she could remember, always something coming in tomorrow, seldom enough today. She returned to her mental list. She had called Felicia and planned to go there from the computer store. Then grocery shop. It was time to start cooking again.

Lieutenant Caldwell arrived promptly at ten, as he had said he would. He looked different, she thought, admitting him, and realized it was because he was wearing a very nice business suit, dark gray wool, even a necktie, and he was carrying a well-worn briefcase. He looked like an attorney.

He petted Spook, who had come to sniff him, renewing acquaintances. “How are you?” he asked Abby. “Feeling a little better, I hope.”

“I am,” she said. “Can I get you coffee?”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’d love some. I hate that drive from Salem. I hate I-Five,” he added. “Is the mutt adapting to city life okay?”

“She’s fine,” Abby said coldly, and turned to go to the kitchen. The lieutenant followed.

“Maybe we could sit in here and talk,” he said gazing about the kitchen, the dinette table. “I’m a kitchen kind of person at heart.”

She shrugged and started to make coffee. He sat down at the table, opened his briefcase and pulled out a folder, then put the briefcase on the floor.

“Just a few things I’d like to show you, talk over with you,” he said. “I don’t want to take up too much of your time, and I’m due in court right after the lunch break.”

She looked at him in surprise. An attorney going to court; she had been right. “This case, my father’s murder?”

“No, no, nothing to do with it. In my work things sort of pile up, old cases, new ones. This is an old one.”

She came to the table as the coffee dripped through the machine. “It takes a couple of minutes.”

“Yeah, I know. Okay, first, this drawing. It’s an artist’s drawing from a description we got. Familiar to you?”

She studied the drawing he placed on the table before her. Male, long blond hair, two gold studs in one ear… the man Brice had told her about. She shook her head. “He flew into Bend that night?” she asked. “Didn’t he have to give his name or something? I didn’t know there were flights to Bend at night.”

“No commercial flights. This was a private delivery company. You know, steaks from New York, orchids from Hawaii. Special wedding dress from Chicago. Things like that. Pay enough and you can get delivery on the same day of almost anything from almost anywhere. Sometimes the pilots make a few extra bucks hauling a passenger. Against company policy, but the pilots are underpaid and the company turns a blind eye to anything they can’t afford to see. So anyway, this guy knew about the regular Friday night delivery to Bend, and he offered the pilot two hundred bucks for a ride. No name asked for, none given.” He sighed and moved the picture aside.

Abby went to pour the coffee and brought the filled mugs to the table. He took his black, he said, and thanked her. “But you should add some cream and sugar to yours,” he added. “And eat a doughnut or something.”

She felt her cheeks grow hot. “What else do you have?” she asked crossly.

“A list of people who reserved camp sites for that Friday. Fourteen sites in use Friday, more folks drifted in on Saturday, but we passed on them.” He handed the list to her.

She scanned the names, then started over and considered each one. Finally she shook her head. “But what about the others in the groups? This one says a party of four, or six in this one.”

“Another list,” he said. “We got all their names.”

The second list was longer, but as fruitless as the first had been.

“Okay,” he said, putting the lists aside with the picture. “It’s a wash. We thought it might be. Pete Tolman, you know him, the kayak guy?” She nodded. “He swears he was the last one to leave the finger, to leave the lake just when it was turning dark, and he and his gang were at the shore loading up to go back to Bend until after dark.”

“Why are you bothering with all this if you know it’s pointless?”

“Making sure it’s pointless,” he said mildly. “Tying up loose ends when and where we can.”

“You checked my friends, I suppose, made sure I was at the coast?”

“Sure, and the manager of the place where you stayed,” he said. “They verify you were up until nearly two. Couldn’t make it work,” he said with a slight grin. “And we checked your husband’s associates, and the motel where he stayed. Again, a long drive, three and a half hours at a minimum, and only if you hit the gas hard and never let up. You guys were the first two we checked out. Usually it’s a family matter,” he added, rummaging in the file folder. “Next, moving on, the cashier’s checks. Take a look, will you? See, the first column is what he was paid and when for his novels. The second column is when he withdrew the cashier’s checks and the amount. And the last column is a list of trips that followed immediately after he got the checks.”

She felt her brain go numb as she stared at the figures. Then at the trips. Each time he got a cashier’s check, he had gone to San Francisco.

“See,” the lieutenant said, as if aware that she was not really tracking the numbers, “his first novel, published in nineteen eighty-nine only made him twenty-six thousand, minus the agent’s ten percent. So roughly twenty-three thousand, spread over two years. Not much to live on for two years. But he managed to get four thousand in a cashier’s check in ’ninety-one, and take off.

“The next time, he did a lot better financially, but again, not as great as the numbers make it look. His agent explained that; although the figure adds up to over three hundred thousand, he got about half that after taxes and commission. And that was over a three-year period. Say one hundred seventy-five thousand. And over that period three checks that came to forty-one thousand, and ten grand to you for a wedding present.”

He stood up, holding his coffee mug. “You mind if I help myself? You want some more?”

She shook her head, staring at the figures before her. Over the past three years her father had drawn four more cashier’s checks. Each time he had then gone to San Francisco.

Caldwell returned to the table and regarded her soberly. “Mrs. Connors, who did he know in San Francisco?”

“I don’t know. He never traveled until recently; there wasn’t any money for traveling until recently. When he got out of the army, he went to Santa Rosa to stay with his parents for a few weeks, and then up to San Francisco, where he met my mother. They were married and came back here together. He was only twenty when they married. That’s the only time I know of that he was even in San Francisco until a few years ago when he went on a book promotion tour.”

“He was in Vietnam, wasn’t he? A nineteen-year old kid in Vietnam. Could he have met a girl then, had a child with her?”

Brice’s theory, she thought bitterly. Another family somewhere, a child he had to support. She shook her head hard. “He wouldn’t have kept it a secret,” she said. “He wasn’t like that. He acknowledged everything, accepted responsibility for everything he did, even things he wasn’t really responsible for. He didn’t try to hide anything.”

“Everyone has secrets,” Caldwell said. “I’ve learned that over the years. Everyone has something lurking in the background. And he used that money for something. Not into off-shore wells, heavy drugs, or race horses, was he?”

“No! I don’t know what those checks were for!”

He took the paper back and gazed at it for a moment, then with a sigh placed it on top of the other papers he had put aside. “Let’s pretend for a moment that he did have another family somewhere, just for the sake of a theory. Okay?”

“It’s not okay! He didn’t.”

“Well, I’ll pretend. How would that have affected Ms. Ashford, if she found out?”

Brice again, she thought angrily. “I won’t speculate on that because it’s not true, or even close to the truth. They were going to get married.”

“Can you give me the name of a single person who knew that before she mentioned it herself?”

“No, I can’t. Felicia Shaeffer knows it’s true, even if no one told her. He intended to tell me that day. That’s what his call was about. He wouldn’t have told anyone else before he told me.” She jumped up and went to the patio door and stood with her back to him, seeing nothing outside. “You can’t place her in the cabin that night, you can’t get her in and then back out, and you know it.” She swung around. “When you drove up there, were there little trees on the roadway? Did you see any knocked over?”

“Good,” he said. “Good thinking. The answer is no trees knocked down until I got there. One of the reasons I wanted to drive up was to see the condition of the road. Afraid we did a lot of damage, set back the reversion to wilderness quite a bit that day.”

“But Brice… “She stopped. “You encouraged him to speculate that someone might have gotten in by road. Even when you knew it couldn’t have been like that, you let him think it.”

“I encourage everyone to speculate,” he said apologetically. “Never know when someone will come up with an idea you might not have thought of yourself. Why don’t you speculate just a little?”

“Dr. Beardwell,” she said after a moment. “He knows the dogs, he treats them, gives them shots; they wouldn’t bark at him. He could have gone over and back.”

“You know better,” he chided. “Apparently everyone knows his gang goes out there to play cards and get smashed. Every other weekend, regular as tides, that’s what he does. And what he did that night.”

She did know that. He never drank even a glass of wine between his bouts with the bottle, but when he was off, when his partner was on call, he got flat-on-his-face drunk.

“All right. Try this. Someone called Dad and he picked him up and rowed him to the cabin. After he shot my father, he swam back to the other side, not to Coop’s ramp, up where you were looking at the tree roots.”

“Better,” he said. “Of course, the water temperature was down below fifty, maybe too cold for a middle of the night swim?”

“He took a wet suit with him, like scuba divers use.”

“Better yet. And carried his clothes in his backpack?”

“You didn’t find any trace of a boat being dragged through the woods, did you?” she asked then.

He shook his head. “Nope, not a sign.”

She returned to sit at the table, then said slowly, “In the past, before Dad got serious with Willa Ashford, now and then a woman would go to the cabin in the daytime, stay overnight, and leave the next morning. In her own boat. It could have happened that night, and when he said no, he wasn’t interested, she shot him, then rowed out as soon as there was enough light.”

“Names?” he asked mildly.

She shook her head. “I don’t know who. But I could tell a woman had stayed overnight a few times when I went up there.” She remembered a cruel joke she had overheard years ago. If you had a missing wife, check under Jud’s loft to see if she had parked a rowboat or a canoe there before you called the sheriff. Her fairy cave, she had thought miserably; she never had gone into it again after hearing that. “She could have put a canoe under the loft.”

“That space goes back a ways, doesn’t it? Ten, twelve feet?”

She nodded. “And it would have been deeply shadowed, impossible to see if anything was there unless you got close and really looked.” She was seeing the fairy cave again, the ledges that made up the floor, stair steps to the farthest end, sometimes a dungeon, or a tower, where she had placed a foam mattress on the highest shelf, with just enough space to lie down and reach up to touch the planking over her head and pretend she was aboard a spaceship, or a sailing vessel going to an exotic land, a stowaway in hiding, Rapunzel waiting for her prince…

“Well,” he said after a moment, “I asked you to speculate. You sure opened the door to a lot more possibilities, didn’t you?” He grinned and said, “I thought you might have mentioned Halburtson.”

“You’re out of your mind!”

“Probably.” He did not sound happy as his gaze came to rest on the list of camping parties. “But someone in one of these groups…”

Abby watched him suspiciously, afraid he was simply lulling her into believing she had given him a valid idea, the way he had lulled Brice into believing Willa could have driven up the mountain road.

He shook himself, then asked, “Did you and Ms. Maas read the novel manuscript? Is it all there?”

“I haven’t read it yet. She said parts seem to be missing, but she can’t be sure until she tries to put it in order and then reads it again.”

“That’s what our guy is finding. We’re beginning to think that no one in the department is going to be able to put the novel pieces together right. We’re barely literate up there, much less literary experts. Our guy keeps complaining that a writer should have an outline, notes, something like that. But if he did, we haven’t found them.”

“He didn’t. He never outlined or made notes.” He just had a huge stack of raw material, camcorder records, to sift through, she added silently.

“Well, I guess that’s all I was after now,” he said. “I’ll leave the picture and those names with you. Look through that stuff now and then, let it sink into the back of your head, and maybe you’ll recall something. Try to imagine that man with slightly different hair, shorter, darker, longer. Like that. And without the ear studs. He doesn’t look anything like Matthew Petrie, does he?”

“Good heavens! No! I never saw that face before, I’m sure of it. But, Lieutenant, it doesn’t make sense that a stranger flew into town just to kill my father! If no one in Bend recognized him, he must be a stranger to the area.”

He stood up and said reflectively, “Well, not many people hang out at the airport that time of night. You know, we were talking about speculations. Here’s another one. Someone could have hired him to go there, could have told him about the dog, the dog door, the gun, everything.”

She stared at him, aghast. “You’re talking about a… a hit man? A paid assassin?”

“Speculating, Mrs. Connors. Just speculating. But remember, there’s a lot of money unaccounted for, a hundred forty-five thousand to be exact.” His look now was sympathetic. “You know what the title of the new novel was?”

She shook her head.

“The file is labeled GUILT.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. He hardly ever started with a title. It was the last thing he did most of the time. That probably was just the working title.”

He shrugged. “If you come across anything in his papers or the manuscript that you think is relevant, I hope you’ll let us in on it.” He started toward the hall to the front door. “I can let myself out.” Then he paused, and turned to her. “If you recognize any of those names, or that face, or find anything in the papers, Mrs. Connors, I think you’d better not mention it to anyone. Or if anyone approaches you for a large sum of money, the next payment, maybe, just give me a call. Any time, day or night. A message will get to me.”

She continued to sit at the table for a long time after he left; he had been warning her to be careful, exactly as Brice had warned her. Don’t talk, don’t tell anyone if she found anything incriminating in the novel. She felt benumbed, unable to move, to think. A hit man! Next payment! All that money! GUILT.

12

When Abby went to the museum later she met Willa in her office and told her that she and Felicia were going to spend time together and find the missing pieces of the novel, put it all in order, see if they could find a clue about who had shot Jud.

“Let me help,” Willa said desperately. “Please, Abby, let me help.”

Abby hesitated a moment. Slowly she said, “You know he wrote about all of us, the people he knew. You might find yourself…”

“Don’t you think I know that? My God, Abby, the police think I did it! Maybe there’s something in there to show them, to prove I’m not lying.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Maybe there’s something that no one except me will see, something that only I will understand…”

Abby nodded. That was how it worked much of the time. No one on the outside could see what he had really been saying, only the one person who had been there, had heard the words, seen the expressions, could read the hidden text. Willa looked ill, she realized, haggard, as if she had not slept enough for weeks. She had lost her father, Abby thought then, but Willa had lost her future. She embraced the older woman and it was settled. Willa would help with the novel.

Abby bought the laptop computer, made another copy of the novel manuscript and took it to Felicia’s townhouse, and they planned for her to be there daily after Brice went to the office. Willa would go after work, and Felicia would work at it off and on during the day and evening. She hadn’t told Brice about the computer yet, or about the other things Jud had written that she was not willing to share with anyone else, and she would not tell him that Willa was involved in any way. His fear for her, Abby, was too real, too immediate for her to add to it in any way.

She began making dinners again, hastily prepared meals that did not require much thought. Brice never complained about meals; he said he had been a bachelor for so long any home-cooked food was like ambrosia.

After dinner each night she went to her study to work on the notes of condolence, she told him, and to do more sorting of papers. He took that without complaint, also; he had seen the boxes of papers and knew they had to be sorted, but as the days passed, he began to show an irritability that manifested in unexpected ways. He complained about Spook, always wanting in or out. He complained about Christina Maas: where was the goddamn movie contract? What was she doing? And what were the cops doing? Nothing! They must have enough to make an arrest, to move forward. He complained about people she had never heard of, clients, she assumed, and about his work load with year-end reports coming up, and the annual audit, and did she remember to take his gray suit to the cleaners, and the house was starting to look like a teen-age hangout.

Well, that was true, she admitted to herself; she was not as neat as he was and tended to leave a sweater on a chair, or her shoes in the living room, and for weeks she had not dusted, or vacuumed, or done anything else about housework. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would clean things up a bit. Then she forgot when she got involved once more in comparing the disks to the hard drive. She found the missing pieces of the novel and read them, then reread them, making no sense at all of the contents. There was one entire chapter and a piece of another. Out of context, she decided, they appeared completely harmless to anyone, but in context, read by the right person, maybe they were dangerous. She put them aside to take to Felicia’s house, to be added to the manuscript.

“What’s really bugging you?” she asked one night when Brice said he had no clean shirts. He had several shirts ready to wear, she knew. He had put them through the washer and dryer himself when she had forgotten to do them. She was clearing the table, taking plates to the dishwasher, and had both hands full.

“You,” he said bluntly. “You’ve become so obsessed with what you’re doing, you don’t have time for me, for us. You were like a zombie one week, then gone for a week, and now, here in this house, every day you’re farther away, more distant. You’re never here when I call, or else you just don’t even bother to pick up the phone—and I don’t know which is worse. Abby, come back. That’s what’s bugging me. I want you back.”

She put the plates down and went to him, and they held each other fiercely, her face against his chest. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Brice, I’m sorry. I just feel like I have to get through with all that stuff before things can start getting back to normal. I can’t help it. I have to finish things. It won’t take much longer.”

“Christ,” he said into her hair, “I’ve done it again. Come on like a spoiled kid. I’m the one who’s sorry, who has something to be sorry about. I just miss you so damn much. I love you so much, it’s killing me to see you so hurt, so possessed. Let’s go upstairs,” he said huskily.

She nodded.

“Wait a minute,” he said, releasing her; he set a plate of scraps on the floor. “So she won’t whine outside the bedroom door.” They both laughed, and went upstairs.

Later that night, after Brice was asleep, she got up again, finished clearing the table, and then went to her own room to read some more. And on Friday morning she returned to Felicia’s townhouse. Possessed, she thought, ringing the bell.

The condominium was on a hillside overlooking Amazon Parkway, a meticulously landscaped site that Felicia called the prison yard. She called her one-bedroom unit her jail in town. It was a handsome jail, beautifully furnished with antiques, and with her artwork on the walls, and no messy paints or clay in sight. Abby was surprised to see Willa there; she had not noticed her car parked at the curb out front.

“I took the day off,” Willa said. “We’re so near the end, I couldn’t stand it, not finishing.”

Willa had found herself in the novel several times; one time she had blushed, and another time, she had wept. The passages were lyrical, joyful, erotic, but of course no one else would know he had been writing about her. Abby could imagine the lieutenant’s expression if they insisted that that was how Jud really had felt about Willa; he would be polite, she thought, and his noncommittal mask would snap right in place.