The Deepest Water (22 page)

It was eight, eleven in New York, as good a time as any to call Christina. She had jotted down the telephone number on the memo pad, and she saw her note there to call Coop Halburtson; she had forgotten that one, too. She called Christina, and once more was struck by her businesslike manner; apparently she simply didn’t indulge in any small talk.

“Abby, I’m glad you got back to me. The movie contract came in yesterday, and it looks okay. I’ll FedEx it to you. It’s clearly marked where you have to sign, and where you have to have it notarized. It looks good. How are you coming with the novel?”

“It’s done. I’ll put it in the mail today. I found the missing sections and included them with a note to tell you the pages where they belong. I think we have it in the right order.”

When Abby disconnected, Brice was watching her expectantly. “Well?”

“The Hollywood contract arrived, she’ll send it FedEx. I have to have something notarized, then send it back.”

“Wow! Another movie! Honey, that’s great! I’m so glad for you.” His eyes were shining; he grabbed her and hugged her hard, then kissed her forehead. “Now you can have your toast and coffee, and I’m off to the salt mines. See you later.” Whistling, he dashed out of the kitchen, out of the house.

That morning she went to the post office and bought stamps and a large padded envelope, the kind Jud had used to mail his manuscripts. By eleven she had everything ready to mail on the table by the front door; and by then, she thought, Brice probably had talked to Lieutenant Caldwell. Or maybe not. Even if she hadn’t actually begged him not to tell the lieutenant about the checks, the school, she had asked him not to. That should be enough, she thought.

She returned to her room, where she regarded three piles of papers; one held ten or more short stories, or starts of stories; one held private papers that she had read; one was still unread, unknown. No safety-deposit box, she knew; they could subpoena the contents. If Brice confided in the police, she added. Nowhere in the house; they might search, or Brice might, looking for a clue to the priest, the school he didn’t believe in. Felicia’s place, she decided. At least for now, until she found a better solution.

Hurriedly, as if Caldwell might appear any moment, she searched for her old backpack, the one she had used daily when she rode her bike to high school, and later to her university classes. There were some broken pencils in it, scraps of paper, tattered and shredded Kleenex. She stuffed it full of Jud’s papers and closed the fasteners, and then, abruptly, she sat down on the side of the bed.

What was happening to her, to her marriage? She was simply assuming that Brice would tell Caldwell everything he knew, everything he suspected, in spite of her asking him not to. She never had kept secrets from him, not really; if there were things in her past they never had talked about—her life with Jud, her first marriage, even the fight with Jud—it had been more because she had known he wasn’t interested in her past than for any other reason. She nodded; he lived for now, right now, not yesterday or last year. Every day a new start, she thought again, every day a renewal of tomorrow’s dreams, never a replay of yesterday’s problems. That helped explain why they had never fought before the way they seemed to fight these days. There had never been anything left over from the day before to fight about. She had watched her parents’ battles, listened to them, feared them, and swore it would never happen to her. But it had happened with Matthew. After the first excitement of love, or lust, was spent, there had been nothing but in-fighting, and always about what had already happened, yesterday, last week, two hours earlier. Once out of that marriage she had sworn, never again, never, never… For years following her divorce she had avoided the suggestion of entanglement, of commitment; at the first argument, regardless of how trivial, how meaningless, she was out of it. Gone. No more, never, never. And that’s how it had been with Brice, both of them at once calm and passionate, with no arguments, no fights, no real disagreements.

No talk about the past, hers or his, or theirs. Yesterday’s mistakes, misjudgments, bad decisions, gone, dismissed and forgotten. Every day, every hour a new beginning. She remembered that she had meant to suggest that whatever had happened between him and his parents should be settled, put to rest, forgiven, and thinking of it now she knew there was no point. He had no regrets, no second-guessing, nothing to forgive or be forgiven for. Whatever happened was over and done with. Today a new day.

Even as she thought this, her gaze was roaming about restlessly, and she realized that with the manuscript gone now, the cards boxed and in the closet and her notes gone, with the other papers stowed out of sight, the room looked barren. Brice might suspect she had taken away more than just the manuscript and notes; she jumped up to scatter the short stories around a bit, to give the room a more disordered appearance, the way it had been yesterday.

Her gaze rested on the mahogany box, and she said to herself, “Not my secrets. His.”

She left the room and went back downstairs, this time to call Felicia, make sure she would be home. Maybe they could take all the dogs for a walk, Felicia suggested; she would wait for Abby.

Then, reluctantly, Abby called the Halburtsons. She felt guilty about not calling sooner, for avoiding them when she had been at the cabin before. Florence answered the phone, her voice hesitant and her words vague, the way they always had been, as if in mid-sentence she lost track of where she had intended to go, or lost interest in whatever she was saying.

“Dear, I’m so glad you called. It’s earlier than we usually leave, but… Coop’s been so… He’s out doing something in the boat shed, I think… Maybe a change would be good. Saturday morning seems a good time.”

Abby closed her eyes listening. “I’m sorry I haven’t gotten in touch,” she said, and was interrupted.

“Dear, we understand. But we’d hate not to see you before… Coop even thought we might drive in to Eugene, but…”

“No. Don’t do that,” Abby said. “I’m coming out there this week. On Friday. I’ll come see you on Friday.”

The first time Abby had asked Felicia if it was all right to bring Spook with her, Felicia had snorted. “Don’t be silly. Bring her, bring an alligator if you want to. That’s why I bought this jail cell instead of just renting an apartment, so I could do what I want in it. If I decide to drive nails in the wall, or paint my floors red, no one’s about to tell me to stop or kick me out.”

Abby took Spook after that. Now she carried her backpack into the condominium and set it down; the dogs all greeted one another with suspicious sniffing, front to tail, and they all passed muster. Spook looked like a roughneck country cousin next to the elegant white poodles; both of them could have passed for wind-up toys in her presence.

“I have some papers in there,” Abby said. “Private things.” Wrong beginning, she thought, and stopped, started over. “Yesterday I went to San Francisco and met someone who used to know Dad. There’s no blackmailer, no extortionist, nothing like that. Dad was financing a school, it’s that simple, but Brice can’t believe that in this day and age anyone would do that and not claim it on his tax return, or let it be known. Their attitudes about money—Dad’s and Brice’s, I mean—like day and night. Brice still thinks there’s extortion or something like that.”

“Accountants,” Felicia said scornfully. “That’s exactly how Jud would have done it, privately. He didn’t care any more about money than those foolish dogs do.” She looked at the backpack. “So what do you intend to do with that?”

“I thought for now, for a few days at least, maybe I could leave it here. On Friday I’m going up to the cabin. I’ll take the stuff with me. I’ll try not to get in your way or keep you from anything. If that’s all right.”

Felicia looked at her shrewdly. “You think Brice will tell the police about your trip, that you learned something?”

Miserably Abby nodded. “He really believes Dad was being blackmailed to keep some gang quiet about something, and that he finally said he wouldn’t pay any more, and they killed him so he couldn’t expose their extortion scheme. He’s probably already called Caldwell. They might even come here to see if you know anything about it.”

Felicia nodded. How she would love to sit in on Brice’s talk with Caldwell, she thought. “Let them come,” she said.

They took the dogs out then and walked the quiet residential streets behind the condominium, and Felicia marveled, as she had often done in the past, at how fate sometimes took a hand. If the Halburtsons were leaving on Saturday, she told Abby, then she had a perfect reason to go home on Friday, to bid them good-bye. Even her children could understand that.

“I can give you a ride out,” Abby said quickly.

Felicia shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know when I’ll be coming back. Maybe not until the Christmas holiday season. Some work to do, things to finish up; besides, I hate living in town, and so do my girls.”

She would take Willa, Felicia thought then, and they would stay at the cottage for several days, at least through Sunday or even Monday. And they would all three get together and have a real talk. But she wanted her own car, wanted to come and go when she felt the need, and not be a captive rider. She had no intention of begging at the door and waiting for someone to open it for her.

She really did want to go home, she realized, and she wanted to stay there. Bend was not that far from her cottage; she had friends in Bend, more than in Eugene actually. And if her children wanted to see her, have her watch her grandchildren grow up, let them do the traveling. More and more often the prospect of giving up the townhouse altogether and settling down in the cottage was floating up in her consciousness, calling her. She missed the lake, the mountains, the solitude, the freedom…

But first she had to see this thing through with Abby and Willa. First things first, she told herself.

That night Abby grilled salmon and baked potatoes, made a salad, did a quick stir fry with broccoli and green onions, and had it all ready by the time Brice came downstairs after changing his clothes. He always did that immediately, took off his suit, hung it up neatly, and put on a sweater and jeans, loafers, his at-home bum clothes, he called them. Cashmere sweater, designer jeans, Italian loafers, she had scoffed the first time he said that.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” he said, seating himself at the table without a glance at the food.

“After we eat,” she said firmly. She did not want to hear about his talk with the police yet, and there were things she had to tell him, but after they ate, not before.

The dinner was not at fault, she thought a few minutes later, when it appeared that neither of them had much appetite. She was braced for what she knew would be another ugly scene, and she suspected that he was annoyed that she had put him off as she had. They both drank the wine.

Finally Brice said, “Good dinner, but I had a late lunch. Now can I talk?”

“Me first,” she said. “I decided to go out to the cabin on Friday to see Coop and Florence before they take off for California. They’re probably leaving early Saturday morning.”

“I thought we were going together on Saturday.”

“You said that, I didn’t. I want to see them, get the key to the boat shed, and then spend a few days at the cabin working on the papers there. And I want to make certain they understand that the deal they had with Dad is still good. He planned to buy their house some day; they counted on that. I’ll tell them I’ll buy it myself, if they can hold off for six months. They may not want to sell out for years, but they should know the offer is still good.”

He was staring at her in disbelief. “Buy their house! What for?”

“The same reasons Dad had, to be sure of easy access to the cabin, and to keep the electricity operating without having to move everything.” The electrical service box was on the back of Coop’s house; Jud had said he had no idea where they would put it if Coop sold to someone else, and no meter reader would swim across the finger in order to read the meter.

Brice shook his head. “You’re out of your mind! You don’t intend to keep the cabin now, not after what happened. You can’t intend that.”

“I do intend to keep it. And access to it.”

“Every time you go there, you’ll see his dead body, blood, and this nightmare will never end.”

“No, that’s not how it is,” she said slowly. “The happiest memories of my childhood, of growing up are connected with the cabin and the lake. That’s what I’ll see and remember.”

He rubbed his eyes, then pushed his chair back and stood up, walked stiffly to the sink, where it appeared he was trying to hold it in place. “You know how I feel about the cabin,” he said. “It’s never been a place where I felt comfortable. You’d do this without talking it over, without even mentioning it first, knowing how I feel about it.”

“Did you talk to the police today?”

He nodded. “I had to. There’s a murderer out there. You have information they need and they need all the help they can get. Caldwell’s coming to town tomorrow afternoon, to the office.”

“And you know how I feel about that,” she said. Then, quickly, before he could respond, she said, “You’ll never have to set foot in the cabin again if you don’t want to. I don’t even want you to come up this weekend. I’m going to bury my father, and I want to do it alone. You were right, it’s time.”

She had expected a yelling match, a storming rage from him; now she could feel some of her tension drain away as he continued to stand without moving, without speaking. She began to feel that she had hurt him deeply, that she had been unreasonable in presenting her plan as done, something she had already decided alone. Even taking his case to Caldwell was a rational act on his part, she thought without conviction, since she had not told him enough to dispel his belief in an extortionist scheme. Unhappily she drank her wine and wished she had more without having to cross the kitchen to get it; she didn’t want to break into his silence with any motion of her own, not until he had finished whatever he was going through in his mind.