A Wrongful Death (3 page)

Elizabeth sat on a park bench with an open book, but she was not reading it. She had learned that if she pretended to be absorbed in a book no one stopped to chat and she always carried one when she took Jason to a park to play. He was swinging, calling for her to watch now and then, probably singing to himself, the way he did when he was content. He had stopped singing in the car. He was getting so tired of traveling, exactly as she was. So very tired. Now, in Las Vegas, she knew this had to stop. She had to go somewhere and stay, to let him settle down again, and to get some rest. She eyed a man warily, looked down at her book, then surreptitiously glanced at him again. She felt certain he was watching her, but she had felt that way so many times in the past weeks, she recognized it as a symptom of her fear, or paranoia, not necessarily a real threat. But what if he was?

Always the fear followed her reasoning.

She was very aware when the man stood up and took several steps in her direction, aware when he stopped, then turned and walked away. Only then did she really look at him, his hands thrust in his pockets, shoulders sagging. She drew in a breath of relief, lust another lonely guy looking for a friendly face. But she knew she had to make some kind of plan, do something besides drive endlessly with fear her constant companion.

She would finish scanning the material that night, she thought then, and tomorrow she would find a day-care center where she could leave Jason for an hour or two, take the original material and put it... Where? She couldn't use a bank safe-deposit box, not without an account. A locker. Train station? The airport, she decided. And when she was ready to pick it up again, it would be a simple matter to get it back. Then what?

Her mind was not functioning properly. She could think only in small increments of time. Time to find a motel. Time for lunch. Time to let Jason run and play for awhile. Time to drive on. Tomorrow hardly ever played a part in her planning, just the immediate needs to be taken care of.

That morning she had read in the newspaper that Joe Kurtz had died, and the family would have a private funeral in Portland, Oregon. She had been reading newspapers carefully whenever she could find one from a major city, looking for any mention of her and Jason. Although she doubted that Sarah would have called the police, it was a possibility, and she had looked. She had assumed Joe had already died, she realized, but apparently he had lingered for those past weeks. She looked at Jason swinging, and thought, /Your grandfather died and you'll never know a thing about it, or him/. With that thought, her hatred of Sarah flared again.

If she had known when she took the file what she now knew, would she have taken it? The question had come back repeatedly, and remained unanswered. Probably not, she thought. She had put Jason at risk, as well as herself. Probably not, no matter how much she hated Sarah. All thinking stopped then and she felt every muscle tense as a couple stopped strolling to gaze at Jason.

/Move on/! she willed. /Keep walking/!

It seemed a long time before they continued their walk. As soon as they passed, she got up and went to Jason. "Time to go," she said.

He shook his head. "No! I don't want to!"

"Tell you what I saw when we were coming over here," she said. "A toy store. How about that? Just waiting for us to come visit." She knew she was bribing him again and again with new toys, with promises to see something wonderful, or have more ice cream, whatever came to mind to avoid having a scene in public, drawing attention to them. Hating what she was doing,

she took him to the toy store.

That night they built a LEGO castle, and she read to him. As soon as he was asleep she returned to her scanner to finish the original material, to get it all on her hard drive, print it out, back it up to disk. It promised to be a late night, but at last she was making a plan as she worked. Put it in a locker, check her road map. Buy some warm jackets, boots, rainproof outerwear. She knew where she would take her son, where they would be safe, where no strangers would stop and stare at her or her child, no one would follow them. A place where they could relax and she could decide what to do with the material she had stolen.

Chapter 3

The little cove was no more than half a mile from one headland to the next, and it was very secluded. The south rock wall was possibly climbable for a dedicated mountaineer, or a goat, Barbara had decided, and the north wall was treacherous, a trap for the unwary. At low tide it was possible to walk between basalt skeletons of volcanoes, scramble over a few, ease between others carefully and find oneself a quarter of a mile from the coast village beyond with its own crescent beach. But when the tide came in, the rocks were aswirl with foaming water, and swift currents cut new channels, changing the landscape on a twice daily basis. Locals in the village knew all about the deceptive wall and newcomers learned quickly. At high tide the tiny beach vanished, waves washed against the surrounding cliffs, crashed and roared and the only way to return to the village was by hiking up a steep trail, finding the right place to reverse course and start back down to reach the other side of the stacks, a mile and a half of rough hiking through the rain forest.

Barbara liked her own private piece of beach, her own little ocean front, where no one bothered her, no one intruded. At least it had been like that for her until the last two days.

She had walked to the south cliff barrier that day, stopping at tide pools on her way to observe the many-colored starfish, crabs, a sand dollar one day, even a tiny pink octopus once, all minding their own business. She never bothered any of them, simply looked, then walked on.

It was time to head back now that the tide had turned and waves were tumbling in farther than only minutes before. It was like that; it seemed to come in faster than it went out. One of the mysteries of the sea.

A light rain had been falling all morning; it had become heavier as she walked, but she didn't mind the rain, swathed as she was in waterproof everything — slicker, boots, hood, even gloves. One hand, ungloved, was in her pocket, holding a folded sheet of paper.

She began to walk a bit faster, with the rain full in her face. Then the child appeared, slipping and sliding down the trail. She had seen him and a woman, presumably his mother, twice before, and the two women had nodded at each other without speaking. Barbara had left her private beach to them both times. Now the boy, having reached the sand, started to run toward the deceptive rocks, and she broke into a run also, caught up with him and seized his jacket collar, stopping his headlong flight.

"Hey, slow down! Where's your mother?" She looked toward the trail he had come down, then back at the child. His face was streaked by tears or rain, impossible to tell which. His jacket was open, and he was hatless, and in socks without boots. He had run without hesitation through the shallows of a creek that tumbled to the sea here, with Barbara's trail on the north side of it, the one he had exited on the south.

He grabbed her hand and began to pull her toward the south trail. "Mama's hurt!"

"Hold it, kid," Barbara said, and picked him up. He was soaked, shaking hard and sucking in air in spasmodic gasps. She realized quickly that she couldn't climb the trail with him in her arms, and after a moment she stopped and said, "You'll have to ride on my back. You know, piggyback. Come on, let's shift you around." He wasn't very heavy, but she needed her hands to hold on to a tree or even a rock now and then. With him on her back, his arms nearly choking her as he clung, she climbed the trail. When it leveled out, she set him down and ran ahead. A woman was lying facedown in the dirt a dozen feet from a cabin where the door was standing open. The little boy had run nearly as fast as she had, and now stared and began to shake harder.

"Go inside and get warm," Barbara said. "I'll bring her in." She wasn't dead, she thought in relief as she knelt by the woman. A head wound had bled, was still bleeding. She was unconscious, but breathing. She was very cold, her lips looked blue. Although she had on a jacket with a hood, the hood had been knocked back and her hair was streaming water and blood. Moving quickly, Barbara took off her slicker and worked it around the woman's body as well as she could, then rolled her over so that it was under her, and she began to pull the slicker and woman toward the cabin, trying to keep her head from bumping on the ground. She was sweating by the time she reached the two steps up. She hesitated, but it couldn't be helped. She had to get her inside, no matter how bruised she became, and she could not lift and carry her. But she did have to get her out of the rain, warm her up and try to see how badly she was injured. She pulled her up the steps and inside.

The woman was beginning to moan and stir as Barbara moved her toward a low sofa. She managed to get her up on it and began to work on removing her boots. Strip her, she thought, wrap her in a blanket, get the kid dry, build up the fire, warm up the place, clean that head wound...

The little boy continued to stand nearby, big-eyed and shaking, and now it was clear that tears streaked his face. "Hey, kid, go get some dry clothes and bring them out here. Scoot!" He fled.

Minutes later, the woman was semiconscious, swaddled in blankets and the little boy crept in under the cover with her. He had put on dry jeans and a sweater. The woman's arms tightened around him, drawing him close.

"Look," Barbara said, "your phone doesn't work, and you need a doctor. That head injury probably needs some stitches. My name is Barbara Holloway, and I live in Eugene. I put wood on the fire so it will get warm in here. Now I have to go get some help. I'll be as fast as possible. Just stay still and rest until I get back. Can you hear me?"

The woman made an inarticulate sound without opening her eyes. At least she wasn't blue any longer, and the way she had reached for the child and now held him was reassuring. Barbara had tried to clean the head wound that continued to leak blood, and finally she simply pressed a washcloth on it. The woman's nose had been bleeding. Her face was swollen, scratched and dirty. Barbara had put a towel on her hair, both to soak up the water, and to help keep her warm. She regarded the woman and the boy for a moment, but there was little more she could do here.

"I have to leave," she said. "Can you understand what I'm saying? I'll be back as soon as I can. You just rest there and wait for me to bring help."

The woman raised her hand from the child's head, then let it rest again on him. He snuggled even closer.

Barbara pulled on her jacket and the slicker and left the cabin.

After a glance at the dirt road leading from the cabin, she shook her head. There was no way of knowing how many miles it might meander through the coast range, where it would come out to a real road finally. She didn't bother looking for a car, but turned to go back down the trail to a place where she could cross the small creek, go up the other side to her cabin, take her own car to the Norris house. He would know what to do.

Sam Norris was in his early seventies, wiry and so weathered that his face looked like bark. The day she had met him he had been wearing a wide-brimmed gaucho hat, complete with a chin strap, and he was wearing it when she found him hammering in one of the cabins near his house. When she told him a woman from a cabin across the creek had been injured and needed a doctor, he glanced at the forest between his cabins and the isolated one across the way. He nodded, and in what seemed slow motion, he walked across the narrow road to his own house, entered and returned with a metal box.

"First aid, "he said, motioning toward a truck. "Get in, we'll go see to her. Cora will call the sheriff."

Neither spoke as he drove to the highway, about half a mile up a narrow winding road, then headed south. Barbara had spotted his cabins for rent by the week or month just six days earlier, after leaving San Francisco. Just what she needed, she had decided, and without further thought had turned in and rented a cabin for a week. And it would have been perfect if that other woman and her child had not appeared on the scene.

"Old man Diedricks' place," Norris said, breaking the silence. "Only cabin up this way."

He turned onto a road even narrower and twistier than the one to his house, unpaved, more like a forest service road than a real one. The trees crowded closer than they did on his road. The rain was coming down harder and his headlights were dim, his windshield fogged. He wiped it from time to time with his gloved hand, making it worse, leaving streaks. They came upon the cabin without warning, after a sharp turn in the road there it was.

There were no lights in the windows, no sign of life. Barbara was nearly holding her breath, fearful that the woman had died waiting for help. She jumped from the truck and ran to the front stoop, pushed the door open and entered. The room was empty, a soggy blanket on the floor by the sofa. Norris came right behind her and flicked on a light; he pushed past Barbara and went to the bedroom.

They were gone. The cabin felt empty, without a sound except for her boots and those of Sam Norris on the wood floor. He looked in the kitchen and she glanced inside the bathroom, then the one other room, but they were gone.

"Guess she wasn't hurt all that much," Norris said. He pulled out a cell phone and called his wife. "Tell Curtis we don't need a doc after all, "he said and listened a minute, then said, "Right," and broke the connection without further conversation. "Deputy sheriff's on his way. I'll have a look outside." He nodded to Barbara and walked out.

Without touching a thing, she went through the rooms. The bedroom had a double bed, bedding in disarray, an open drawer on a chest of drawers, two miniature cars on the floor. The bloody washcloth was in the sink in the bathroom, a soiled towel on the edge of the bathtub. In the kitchen there were signs of a hasty exit, the refrigerator door not closed all the way, a half-empty carton of milk and a yogurt container inside, a skillet on the stove with a bit of egg sticking to it. The remaining room had a long table with several straight chairs and a floor lamp. Back in the living room she saw that the low couch was a futon, stained with blood and discolored where it was still wet. There was a wood-burning stove, overheating the cabin now, a wrought-iron wood holder with several split logs, two upholstered chairs and a television, a couple of end tables and another small table, with another straight chair. A wastebasket close to it held a used printer cartridge, and there was a computer cable on the floor, still plugged into an outlet.