Mortal Fall (41 page)

“But what about a motive—just going to the school where Phillips worked is no motive.”

“No, but what if Phillips strong-armed him, did things he shouldn’t have and gave him reason to hate, reason to harbor a grudge?”

“You have any proof of that?”

I didn’t answer, and Ken must have sensed my reluctance to say more—to dip into darker waters.

“Okay then,” Ken said, not one to invite awkward moments. “We keep working.” He chewed his gum vigorously now. “Get the prints and go from there. I mean, even if his prints are on the box traps, what does that prove?”

“Nothing in terms of Phillips, but it does prove that he tampered with federal traps, then we know he’s lied because he told me he’s never seen them, and that’s enough to bring him in for questioning on two fronts: hindering a federal investigation and tampering with federal property. It might shake him up a bit.”

“Like I said then, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

I looked at Ken, rejuvenated to hear it said so simply. Yes, keep working, cross bridges one at a time, my mottos exactly. It was refreshing to hear him take the directive for a moment. “I apologize,” I said.

“For what?”

“For not treating you more like a partner.”

“It’s no biggie. I know you’re making the decisions here, but I just want to know where the hell we’re steering this thing.”

“Fair enough,” I said, then couldn’t resist as long as we were clearing the air—“and Ken, next time I call you for a ride, don’t tell a grape on the grapevine.”

Ken’s mouth fell open. “I—”

I held up my hand. “I don’t want to know and I don’t care. I probably shouldn’t have called in the first place. My mistake. I just didn’t think I’d have to deal with it when talking to Joe.”

“Charlie.” Ken shook his head in disappointment. “Can’t keep his mouth shut. The only reason I told him was because—”

“Like I said,” I interrupted. “I don’t want to know, and I don’t care about that, but this, Ken—what I just shared with you—this or anything else on this case that’s confidential gets around to Charlie or anyone else, then I start caring.”

“Got it, Harris,” Ken said. “I got it.”

42

W
HILE WORKING ON
my couch that night, I became suddenly exhausted and lay down on my side, thinking I would snooze for only twenty minutes or so because it was early, only nine o’clock and I had a lot I wanted to accomplish before going to bed. I lay my head on the rough-textured throw pillow and pictured Dorian’s grin, Adam’s flat stare, and my mother’s smile. My thoughts slid to her for no logical reason, and I found myself going down a hole trying to figure out when I first realized that something was wrong with her.

Of course, I couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment in time. It was a gradual dawning with no sudden epiphany, an accumulation of things, like watching other friends’ moms when I’d go to their houses to play—how their mothers didn’t sleep the afternoon away; stare into space with glazed, terrified looks; or go into manic sessions of full-speed, seventy-mile-per-hour stories that didn’t stop and had no rhyme or reason to them, then get angry that no one understood what she was trying to communicate—that we were in grave trouble and needed to stay locked up in the house with her or else something bad would befall us.

It might also have been the whispering of my kindergarten teachers to my father when he brought us to school, complaining that we were coming late, disheveled, and in clothes that didn’t fit. When we were younger, my father hadn’t made any money yet in construction and sometimes we’d go without much in the way of healthy meals. They’d wonder if we had had breakfast, and my father, tense-jawed and
in a hurry to get to work, constantly angry and frustrated, mumbling under his breath: “I can’t do it all.”

I drifted into a restless sleep of jumbled images of snickering, pointing teens and Nathan and I running away from them under a swollen moon, trying to find our way home, getting lost at every turn and going deeper and deeper into woods snarled with thick underbrush and hard, reaching roots that grabbed at our ankles and tripped our sneakers. When I finally thought I saw my house, it wasn’t our home at all. It was the county jail and when I peeked in, I saw Dorian and Adam both shackled to their chairs in an interrogation room, laughing and conspiring. Dorian spotted me, pointed to the window where I looked in, and when Adam turned and saw me, they both began to laugh—mouths wide open like black holes—their heads tilted back. They laughed so hard it sounded like roaring ocean waves, the undertow dragging me backward while I tried to stay standing, tried to figure out what was going on, but couldn’t make sense of it all.

Through the roaring waves of their laughter, I heard it—a low mumble, a car motor . . .the crunch of tires on pavement in my drive. I woke with a start and instantly thought,
one of Dorian’s clan.
I felt my heart pound in my ribs. For a moment, I was frozen with terror because I felt helpless, as if Adam might be right, as if he really had protected me all along, and I wasn’t capable of defending myself. I shook it off and eased myself up and off the couch and slowly reached for my gun from the coffee table where I had placed it while working, the waffle grip of the handle and the weight of it instantly reassuring.

I walked across my tiny living room in small steps, trying to move sleek as a cat, but my toe caught with a rip on the lounge chair’s leg and I shot forward, lunging toward my front door. I caught myself before slamming into it and stood between the door and the front window. I cocked my elbow and held my gun before my chest. I craned my neck and peeked through the side of the window as I heard a car door carefully shut.

It was dark outside, one inky-black blanket spread across the entire
front patch of lawn and driveway, and I fought for my eyes to see through it as I heard the shuffling sound of footsteps. I braced the pistol with both hands and made my wrists firm and held it close to my side, my heart now in my throat. When my eyes finally adjusted and I made out who it was, I heard myself make a sound—half sigh, half moan. It was Lara. As she gently knocked, I relaxed my grip, hit the porch light, and opened the door.

She looked down by my side at the gun. I walked over, turned a lamp on, and set it back on the table.

“Your gun.” She motioned to it. I suddenly felt ashamed. In all the years we’d been together, she’d never seen me have it out like that. I always had it stored safely away in a drawer at home and never had felt the need, even when we’d heard strange noises outside. A gun was never a solution to any situation when I was at home and off duty, and she knew it. “Did I scare you?”

“I had dozed off. You took me by surprise.”

“I called you, but you didn’t answer.”

I grabbed my phone off the coffee table and looked. Sure enough, she had called twice, and I noted the current time: eleven thirty. “I guess I forgot to put the ringer back on.”

She stood quiet for an awkward moment, then said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. I know it’s late. I guess I shouldn’t have just come like this, but I couldn’t sleep.”

“No, no, it’s fine. Here, have a seat.” I held my palm out. “It’s no problem. I was wanting to get more work done anyway. If you hadn’t have come, I probably would have slept right through till morning.”

“Is, is everything okay?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I ran my hand through my hair. “I was just going to ask you the same. What brings you here this late? Is everyone all right?”

“Oh, everyone’s fine. Most of my family has left by now. I just wanted to see you.”

I offered her some tea, water, or wine and she said, “No, thanks,” then added, “Are you angry I came?”

“No, no, of course not. Look, I know I shouldn’t have left you like that, but . . .” I sank into my armchair, my legs still shaking slightly from the instant push of adrenaline, then relief that it was only Lara, then fear that it
was
Lara and that something serious had happened to bring her by so late. I was going to continue speaking, but then realized I didn’t really have anything to say. I wasn’t interested in apologizing to her, not for what happened at her family reunion. If anything, I was still on the angry side, but I pushed it down and asked, “How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been okay.”

“And your family? How’d they take the news?”

“I . . .” She looked down at her hands. “I didn’t really fully explain the situation.”

“Seriously? How’d you explain to your mom that I left, headed home?”

“Told her that you were really busy on a case that required you to stay up in Glacier for a few days.”

“And she bought that?” I squinted at her.

“Kind of, I mean, your black eye sort of demonstrated that you were in something serious. Maybe she and my sisters didn’t buy it completely, but they didn’t push it. I don’t think they really want to know either. I think they probably suspect something, but no one wanted to deal with it while we were all together for a reunion.”

Here I had been thinking that I’d left Lara with a major drama on her hands, dealing with her humongous family and her critical parents who would be disapproving and outraged at first, pumping her for the truth and endlessly encouraging her to get back together with me, just as she’d been claiming they would if I didn’t help out and put on false pretenses that we were fine. A part of me had felt sorry for her to have to handle it all, and now I realized, she’d just sidestepped it, avoided the conflict altogether. And they were happy to do the same. The thought of it made whatever warmth I was feeling to see Lara so unexpectedly, quickly vanish. “I see,” I said. “So why are you here?”

The repetition of my question made her fidget and she looked irritated that I’d asked it again. “I told you, I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know exactly why, Monty. Do I need a reason?”

I didn’t answer. I knew I wasn’t making this easy on her, but I didn’t care. She certainly hadn’t made the past year a walk in the park.

“I just, I don’t know, wanted to check on you. See how you’re doing. I felt bad about the way things were left.”

“I did too, Lara. I did too.”

“And Adam?”

“What about him?”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because”—she bit a cuticle on her thumb—“because, I don’t know, because of the way things ended that day. It was so crazy and you were so angry, and . . .” She dropped her hands and plopped them heavily into her lap.

“I was angry for a reason, Lara. You had lied to me. Did you forget?”

“I just didn’t tell you everything because I know how you feel about him and I knew you’d overreact. It was just a fib. You’re making it into a huge deal.”

“If you’d been talking to my brother, you should have told me.”

“I had no idea he’d show up there. I was just as surprised as you.”

“You didn’t seem all that surprised.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Jesus, what’s going on with you?”

“Nothing’s going on with me.”

“You look, I don’t know, tired and stressed, and for goodness sake, getting your gun out?”

In that moment, I almost told her to go to hell and to leave. My resentment surprised me, how easily it ballooned, making my head spin and say things I knew I’d regret. As hurt as I was when I moved out, I’d never felt this rush of fury before. How dare she walk into my small haven in Glacier Park where I came to lick my wounds, to grieve the
fraying of our marriage, and have her tell me I looked stressed? “Look,” I said when I was sure I’d reined it back in, “I don’t want to fight. I’m just, I guess I’m just really frustrated right now. I told you that when your reunion was done, I wanted to get this solved. Are you ready to do this thing?”

Lara looked down at her hands. She was holding her keys in her left hand. She had quit wearing her wedding ring months ago, and then I had followed her lead. That had stung too. “Do what thing exactly?”

“You know, move forward with things . . .” It was difficult to say the word. She looked up at me, her eyes drooping and sad. She looked like a child. “With the divorce.”

“Is that what you want?”

I stared back at her. I wanted her to leave, but I also wanted her to stay because I wanted answers, and I was so tired of living in limbo, of feeling like no matter what I did, there was my wrecked marriage sticking to me like it was steel and I was a magnet. It seemed as if she could go on and on living this way, and that thought alone made me lose respect for her. Problems needed to be solved, not just splayed all over the place for you to trip over every minute of your life. “I don’t know exactly what I want, but I know I don’t want this anymore”—I waved my hand between the two of us—“and I’m sensing we can’t go back, so that leaves one last option.”

“So you just want to give up, just like that?”

My bubble of patience was shrinking. “Lara, what the fuck do you want from me?”

She looked at me horrified, her eyes widening—two large pools of blue. I never swore at her.

“To just to sit on the sidelines forever?” I continued. “To wait here for you whenever you need me? In the meantime you can do whatever you please, including getting a relationship going with my estranged brother?”

“You know that’s not at all what I’ve done. You’re being totally ridiculous.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, Monty. Yes, you are. Why do you have such a problem with your brother?”

“You know why. Why are you sitting here acting like you don’t know me?”

“I don’t know everything about you. I don’t know why you’d pull a gun out when the Monty I know would never have done that. I don’t know why you’d hate your own brother so much after all these years and wouldn’t let bygones be bygones. Just because he did some bullying and made some bad choices as a teenager doesn’t mean he’s some evil villain trying to ruin your life now.”

“I never said he was. But I’m also adult enough to decide who I want to have in my life at this point. Who’s toxic and who’s not, and quite frankly, I think my brother is pretty damn toxic.”

“Well, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you don’t know everything and have every little thing figured out—squared away all perfectly like you think you do.” Lara held her chin high and proud.