The Deepest Water (8 page)

“No! He was busy, traveling, book signings, and writing. And I was busy with my school work, and we just weren’t as close as we used to be. It happens that way when your lives take you on different tracks.” She fought to keep her voice even. “Who told you that?”

“Did you usually wait for an invitation to go visit him?” he asked, ignoring her question.

“No. I used to drive out and call him on the cell phone when I got to Coop’s place and he’d come over and pick me up. Or sometimes I’d call first to make sure he’d be there. Sometimes he wasn’t, and I used the boat and went over anyway. We didn’t need appointments,” she said coldly.

“But since you both got so busy, did you usually wait for an invitation?”

She stared at approaching headlights, then more headlights, more. “I just didn’t have the time like I used to,” she said. “He asked me out now and then if there was a special reason, like when he got an advance copy of his novel, something like that.”

“Has anything come to mind about what he called you for the last time? It must have been something special.”

“I don’t know why he asked me out,” she said in a low voice. “You were going to tell me a little something about Willa Ashford,” he said.

She shook her head slightly. “No, I wasn’t. There’s nothing to tell. She was my instructor, then she was appointed the director of the museum, but she continued to be my advisor. I work for her.”

“Was she your father’s lover?”

“Ask her.”

“First I have to find her,” he said reasonably. “Okay, okay. Will you be keeping the dog now?”

“Of course,” she said, surprised.

“I thought maybe Halburtson would take her back.”

“They go down to southern California for the winters,” she said. “It was hard enough to get two dogs admitted to the community where they stay. It would be impossible to bring in another one. Anyway, she’s part of the family, she’s mine.”

“Mr. Connors likes dogs, too?”

“Sure. He grew up on a farm with livestock and a lot of dogs and cats. He’s always been around animals.”

“I wondered,” he said. “Halburtson said his dogs wouldn’t let anyone but you and your father near the boat ramp. Did he mean they wouldn’t let your husband in without raising a rumpus?”

She had to think about it. Every time she and Brice had gone, she had had to order the dogs to stop barking; they didn’t accept Brice as family, but they hadn’t known him all their lives, either. She had a flashing memory of the one time she had gone with him to visit his folks in Idaho. The dogs there had not accepted him, either. He had been gone too long, he had said; his mother had added, “Eight years. It’s a whole new generation of cats and dogs.” The visit had been awkward, the weather too hot and dry; the dust-laden air smelled of chemicals and fertilizer. After an inane discussion of the new crops, the weather, a new irrigation system, there had been nothing for anyone to say. The farm was several miles from the nearest town, nearly that far from the nearest neighbor. Driving away after their short visit Brice had said bitterly, “See why I had to leave? If I never come back here it’ll be time enough.” The dogs had barked as they left the property; all the way to the county road, the dogs had kept barking.

Lieutenant Caldwell cleared his throat, a gentle nudge that a question was still in the air. Abby said, “I doubt they’d let him through without barking a lot.”

“How about Willa Ashford?”

He had been leading back to her all along, she realized. Wearily she said, “Ask her. I don’t know.”

By the time they reached Eugene and he pulled into the parking lot of a motel on Franklin Boulevard, she had a pounding headache. “Home,” he said. “You can take over the driving now. I appreciate the time you’ve given us today, how hard it must have been for you. Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

They both got out and she walked around the van to get behind the wheel. “Goodnight, Mrs. Connors,” he said, then strode away.

She drove home.

Coop always maintained that dogs, at least the dogs he trained, understood a limited number of words, and the first thing to do with one of them was to lead it around the property and say repeatedly, “Home.”

“Then it will know where it can go and can’t,” he had said.

When Jud got Spook from Coop Halburtson, she had been a puppy, not quite eight weeks old, still a ball of gray fluff; Abby had carried her as Jud rowed across the finger.

“Have you named her yet?”

He said no. “How about Dust Ball?”

“Oh, Dad!” She studied the little dog. “She looks like Casper. You know, the Friendly Ghost?”

“Thank God, Casper isn’t a girl’s name,” he said. “I can’t see myself living with a dog named Casper.”

“Casperella?” They both laughed. She considered Ghost, but shook her head. You didn’t really want to walk around calling ghosts. If not simultaneously, then no more than a half beat apart, they both said, “Spook.” And Spook she was. Later Jud had reported wryly that Coop was putting both him and Spook through some schooling.

After they both graduated, when Coop said it was time, Abby had trailed along with Jud when he led Spook around the cabin and the surrounding area that was her territory, and as far as Abby knew, Spook never had strayed off the property, nor had she allowed any stranger to enter it without a challenge.

Now Abby proceeded to introduce Spook to another new home. She snapped on the leash and led the dog around the back yard, all along a high fence, past the attached garage to the front yard, around the house, and back inside through the rear patio door. Although the yard was small and well-lighted, it was a slow process; Spook had to squat again and again, marking her territory, and she had to smell just about everything. “Home,” Abby said over and over. Spook wagged her tail in apparent understanding.

Inside the house Abby took her through each room. She would repeat the whole process the next day, just to be sure, she thought then, in the kitchen making a pot of coffee. It was after six, but Brice had said he would work late all this week, catch-up time. She took two aspirin tablets and sat down to wait for the coffee to drip. Spook lay at her feet; her ears twitched now and then as she registered unfamiliar noises—a car on the street, a neighbor’s door closing, something Abby couldn’t even hear. That was how Spook had been at the cabin; she knew whenever a boat was in the finger, and she never let out a sound unless and until it landed at Jud’s property.

“If only you could talk,” Abby murmured. “If only you could.” She was trying to construct a scene that had her father up in the aerie, and Spook anywhere except near him. Then she must have heard someone dock and started barking at an intruder in the middle of the night. Jud could have admitted someone, put Spook out, then gone back upstairs. She shook her head. In the middle of the night? How? She kept coming back to it. How had anyone crossed without launching a boat from Coop’s ramp? And his dogs had not barked.

“Someone must have been there already, all evening,” she whispered. Had Spook barked because she wanted in, not because an intruder had come? She stared at the shaggy gray dog whose ears kept twitching. That was the only scenario that made any sense. Someone must have gone to the cabin early, before dark, and stayed overnight, left as soon as there was enough light to get through the narrow passage back to the park ramps. Or to one of the cottages.

She was still at the table, sipping coffee, when suddenly Spook jumped up and began to bark, and now Abby heard it, too. A car in the driveway, then the garage door opening.

“Quiet, Spook,” she said. “It’s Brice.” The dog stopped barking, still on full alert, but quiet. Abby hurried to the front door before Brice reached it, and opened it to await him.

“Hi,” she said when he entered. “Hi.” She stretched out both arms to him, and he grabbed her and held her so hard it hurt.

“Oh, God!” he whispered into her hair. “God, I’ve been so scared. Abby, you’re okay? You’re okay!”

She nodded against his chest. “I’m okay.”

Spook sat down and watched them; her tail swept back and forth, back and forth.

A little later, sitting on the couch with her head on his shoulder, Abby began to tell Brice about her day, why the murderer couldn’t have been a stranger, a camper or anyone like that. She stopped talking when he drew away in order to watch her face, as if he didn’t yet believe she had come out of the stupor that had benumbed her all week.

“You don’t know how it made me feel,” she said, “knowing that I could have been there, might have prevented it somehow. But it had to be someone Spook knows, not a stranger. If I’d been there when she came in, she would have stayed for a while probably, then left, the way they do up there. She could have gone back the next day, or any other day, when I wasn’t there.”

Brice nodded. “I think you’re right, honey. You realize you kept saying
she
?”

“I know,” she said. “But a man wouldn’t have been invited to spend the night. Dad would have taken him across the finger, and driven him home, to the cottage or wherever. Dr. Beardwell stayed too late a couple of times, and that’s what happened.”

Brice took her hand. “Abby, don’t breathe a word of what you think about this. Oh, you can tell the cop your theory, but no one else. Okay? Will you keep mum about what you think happened?”

Surprised, she said, “Who would I tell?”

“I don’t know. The Halburtsons. That old gossip, Felicia Shaeffer. Someone. I just don’t think you should let it be known that you might have seen something, noticed something, or even suspect something.” He tightened the pressure on her hand.

“I’d have no reason to mention anything to them,” she said. Then very slowly she added, “You really mean Willa, don’t you?”

“I’d include her in the people you shouldn’t say much to,” he admitted.

“She had nothing to do with it,” Abby said. “You don’t know how much she loved him. She would never have done anything to hurt him.” She pulled her hand away. “You just don’t realize how she felt about him.”

“I think I do,” he said soberly. “Today I had a talk with Harvey Durham about the cashier’s checks.” Durham had been her father’s attorney, and was the executor of his estate. “He should know something,” Brice said, “but he claims he doesn’t have a clue about them. Who they were for, anything. But, Abby, it smacks of blackmail, extortion, something like that. Why the secret otherwise? Why not just regular checks? But what if there’s a woman out there somewhere, maybe with a child, someone Jud had to pay off over the years? What if Willa found out about her, about a son or daughter he never acknowledged but had to support? What if he was married to her? You don’t know and neither do I. But someone was raking in a lot of money. And if it was anything like that and Willa realized she was going to be dumped the way all the others were over the years…”

Aghast, she stared at him. She had forgotten about the cashier’s checks, over a hundred thousand dollars unaccounted for. Could Jud have been paying off a woman, supporting another family? She remembered the two bottles of champagne. A celebration. To introduce her to her stepmother? Maybe that was who was with him that night. And he told her it was over? Why champagne if that was the case? They were being reconciled? Her headache had come back.

“Honey,” Brice said, “I didn’t mean to upset you all over again. And that might be way off base, but the fact is we don’t know what those checks were for, and I think you should let the police do their own work, and just not be talking about it with anyone.”

She nodded. “I’ll tell the lieutenant that in the past a woman did go over and spend the night and leave the following day. It happened, and could have happened again. Someone could have stayed and left at daybreak.”

“Good. And now, let’s talk about food. Out, or order something in? I choose ordering in. Sound okay to you?”

“Okay,” she said.

She felt as if days and days had passed with her in a drugged state, unable to keep anything in conscious memory long enough to consider what it meant. Next week, she thought then, she might sign a contract that would eventually bring in more than a million dollars, and she had not given it a single thought. Of course, she wouldn’t see a penny of it until six months had passed, but even so, a million dollars! And then she thought about the two codicils her father had added to his will, another datum she had not wondered about, had simply accepted as given. Why had he done that? Why, why, why…? All the things she had ignored seemed to be surfacing in waves, and they all ended with the same question: why?

7

The trouble with their neighborhood, Abby said on Sunday, was that there was no good place to walk a dog. It was a neighborhood for rising young professionals: doctors and dentists, who, like Brice, were still paying off their school loans, lawyers who had not yet been made partners in prestigious firms, financial advisers on the way up. Landscaping was meticulous everywhere, with gardeners who came in regularly to maintain it, houses modestly up-scale, SUVs in abundance, soccer moms the norm, a good neighborhood. Although Abby had blanched when she first saw the size of their mortgage payments, Brice had insisted, this was the place to be, and they managed to keep up payments, to keep up with all the Joneses, but if Jud had not footed her education expenses with checks twice as big as her school costs, she would be working full time, she knew.

Cars were not that numerous, and bikes not too bad, but there were no sidewalks and Spook flinched when anything on wheels got near. She was a forest dog, a cabin dog, a recluse of a dog, not a city dog. Spook did not like this neighborhood.

“I’ll take her to the Arboretum,” Abby said, picking at a sandwich at the kitchen table with Brice. He had been working all weekend, still catching up, he said, but since she had little real knowledge of what he actually did at work, she couldn’t imagine how he could catch up at home. The stock market had to be open and running for him to buy and sell, that much she knew. He often talked about his clients, but aside from buying, selling, or advising them about investments, trusts, annuities, what else was there for him to do? Record keeping, for one thing, he had said tiredly, research investment possibilities in a constantly changing market. Review various portfolios so he would have some notion of what to tell old man Donaldson, or Mrs. Meyers… He was way behind after a week of doing little or nothing.