Stormy Cove (28 page)

I’ll tell you something: you just wait long enough, and somebody’s going to talk. They think nothing’s going to happen to them after twenty years. They think time fixes everything. But it ain’t so, uh-uh, that’s not the way it is.

We’ve never given up on Jacinta. Who do you mean? The fisherman’s wife, the one who wanted to leave her husband and then disappeared? Yes, OK, so we do have some unsolved cases. But what do you expect—anybody here can easily disappear, and sometimes it’s quite natural. In a blizzard. Or falling out of a boat. Or a hunting accident that’s hushed up. God knows I’ve gone through enough of that in my time.

Sure we had suspects. But no evidence. And no witnesses. Just rumors aplenty. And you can’t build a case on rumors. Whenever you’re starting to get serious—omertà, as the Italian Mafia says. Silence. Just a wall of silence.

And then, suddenly, something gets the ball rolling. Something nobody saw coming. Then skeletons crawl out of the closet, and tongues start wagging. And if the guilty parties don’t talk, others do it for them.

CHAPTER 33

“Every stone, every grain of sand speaks to us,” Lloyd Weston pronounced.

He stood with legs wide apart beside the burial mound as Beth Ontara and two students cataloged every single stone and its precise location. The monument was to be reconstructed exactly as it had been found.

Lori photographed each step of the procedure but had difficulty concentrating. Noah and the search party had combed every corner of Frenchman’s Hill until dark but didn’t find a trace of Reanna.

Will Spence had alerted the police. Reanna Sholler was now officially a missing person.

When Lori came home the previous night from the Hardy Sailor, she found Noah’s message on the answering machine, saying he couldn’t come to the pub because he was helping look for a missing person.

She tried to reach him the next morning, but by then it was six o’clock and his boat had probably just set out.

Weston phoned her an hour later. She first thought it was a good idea to fly with the archaeologists to the Barrens. That would get her mind off her dark thoughts and hidden fears about Noah. She was determined to find out the exact circumstances of his trip to Frenchman’s Hill with Reanna—and his intentions.

But it turned out she was just hanging around without much to do most of the time while the others painstakingly brushed off the top layer of the burial mound. She watched Beth lugging a boulder that weighed at least twenty-five pounds. Although Beth was strong, it must have been backbreaking work.

A drizzle set in later, and the site was covered up with plastic tarps. Gideon flew her back, along with a representative from NORPUNT visiting the site, while the excavation crew crawled into their tents.

So Lori found herself back home much earlier than expected. Her plans to call her mother for advice were derailed when she saw she had a visitor.

She didn’t immediately recognize the classy, well-dressed lady emerging from a white rental car. But Molly’s words popped into her head. Maybe it hadn’t been Selina Gould asking for her? The stranger came up to the house and knocked on the door.

“Hello! I hope I’m not disturbing you,” the lady said with a pronounced accent. Lori now recognized her: the German baron’s wife. She hurried downstairs.

“Please come in,” she replied before bringing her visitor up to the kitchen, then deciding on the living room.

“So you do recognize me,” declared the lady, who hadn’t removed her shoes.

“Yes, but your name . . .”

“Ruth, Ruth von Kammerstein. But please call me Ruth—everybody uses given names here.”

Ruth turned down Lori’s offer of a coffee.

“Might you have some water? Bottled spring water?”

Lori didn’t, but went to get some orange juice, which Ruth thinned with tap water. Lori poured herself some juice—undiluted—as well, and sat down. The baroness took off her green loden jacket with embroidered sleeves—Lori had seen ones like it in Germany—and laid it beside her on the sofa. Lori estimated that she was in her late forties, a soignée, slim lady with a broad face but surprisingly small hands and expressive eyes. Her dark blond hair was straight and pulled back with a red band.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” her visitor began as she smoothed down her casual dark blue pleated skirt. It occurred to Lori that Ruth von Kammerstein might well be the only woman ever seen in Stormy Cove wearing a pleated skirt.

“I came by last week, but you weren’t in. I . . . I’m here in fact for a friend of mine, Waltraud; she’s the mother of the young woman who used to live in the therapeutic community at Lindenhold. You lived there once, didn’t you?”

The baroness immediately recognized her faux pas. “No, not in the
community
, of course, but in the
house
, am I right?”

The palms of Lori’s hands felt damp. This was about Katja’s death. It had to happen. Eventually the past always catches up.

“I know it must be very difficult for you to recall your time there; it’s hard for all of us, but particularly for Waltraud and her husband. Waltraud implored me to talk to you, since we were already in Newfoundland. Do you remember Katja?”

Ruth von Kammerstein’s voice was firm but not unfriendly. If Lori hadn’t lived with Germans before, she’d have probably regarded her visitor’s presence as slightly pushy.

It suddenly dawned on Lori who it was that had quizzed Andrew: Katja’s parents.

She sat bolt upright in her armchair, “Did your friends speak to my son in Lindenhold recently?”

“Yes, exactly,” the baroness said in delight, as if Lori had uttered a password. “Your son told them you were here in Newfoundland—isn’t that a crazy coincidence! Although”—she leaned forward as if sharing a secret—“we would even have flown to Vancouver. You see, we’d go to any length for poor Waltraud.”

Lori turned cold. “What’s so urgent that you would have come to Vancouver to find me?”

“You see, Waltraud always wanted to tell you something, but somehow didn’t have the courage to—she suffered so much because of Katja. Her daughter’s death aged her twenty years, believe me.”

Lori was speechless, her head spinning. Ruth couldn’t know anything about her confrontation with Katja in the kitchen, nor could Waltraud. Unless Katja told them? But did Katja have the time for that before her . . . terrible end?

The baroness sipped her juice, holding the glass in both hands as if she had to cling to something solid. Which didn’t offer Lori any comfort as she waited, mesmerized, for whatever Ruth was about to disclose. Reproaches. Accusations. Or even worse: the threat of revenge.

But things took a different turn.

“You photographed Katja once, I believe,” Ruth said in that familiar German accent. “That gorgeous picture where she looks so happy. That’s what I told Waltraud. Katja looks happy. And completely . . . healthy. So fresh and healthy. Full of dreams. You know the picture I mean, don’t you?”

Lori was so taken by surprise that she nodded mechanically.

“You should know that Katja gave it to her parents as a present. And said that’s the woman she wanted to be. The one in the photograph. That’s who she wanted to be. She said she knew now that it was possible because she had some evidence. That very picture, you understand?”

“I think—”

“Do you know what Katja told her mother? ‘Lori sees the beauty in me. Not sickness and weakness—the beauty.’ Aren’t those wonderful words?”

Lori felt uncomfortable. Luckily, the baroness didn’t wait for a response.

“You gave Katja hope, and you know, hope was the best thing anyone could give her. And you gave Waltraud and Erhardt hope as well. And Waltraud wishes to thank you for that.”

Lori looked at her visitor blankly.

“But Katja . . . she, I mean, this hope, in the end she didn’t . . .”

“. . . make it a reality, is that what you mean? True, but Katja ultimately chose the path she did, and we’ll never know why. There’s something we all had to learn: to let go. We had to let Katja go. A few days before she died, she tried to get more money from her parents. We all knew what that meant. She wanted it for drugs. But Waltraud and Erhardt had to turn her down. Somebody eventually did slip her some. She begged from just about everybody. You, too? Did she ask you for money too?”

Lori shook her head. The baroness folded her arms across her chest and leaned back.

“We tried our hardest. But we could not save Katja. She was the only one who could save herself. But she decided differently.”

The conversation was too much for Lori. She wished the woman would disappear, just dissipate.

But Ruth kept on talking.

“Waltraud and Erhardt still have your photograph. That’s how they wanted to remember Katja. It’s a great consolation for them both, that picture. And I’m happy to be able to finally tell you that.”

Lori tried to respond but couldn’t utter a sound.

Ruth looked at her with empathy.

“I know it was terribly hard for people in Lindenhold back then. Franz and Rosemarie did so much for Katja. But sometimes you’re just powerless. That’s the way it is. Powerless. But I’ve kept you long enough. I have one more question. Shall I give Waltraud and Erhardt a message from you?”

Lori stared at the baroness as if she were asking for a handout.

She racked her brains feverishly to try to extricate herself from the situation. Her thoughts turned to Katja’s mother, to the loss and suffering and pain she’d gone through. Emotions her own experience had taught her all too well.

She cleared her throat.

“Please tell her . . . tell her it’s nice to know that . . . we sometimes do more good than we are ever aware of.”

The baroness’s face lit up at once.

“Yes, that’s true, so very true. And that’s why I needed to pass this on, and it was of great concern for Waltraud and Erhardt too.”

She stood up.

“It’s very nice indeed that we met this way. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. It is too bad my husband could not be here; he was tied up with his affairs.”

She put on her loden jacket, and Lori escorted her to the door. Before going down the stairs, the baroness turned around.

“You know, Katja simply got into bad company. One should not associate with certain people. You have to steer clear of them, or they’ll be the death of you.”

Ruth von Kammerstein lifted her chin so high that her lips formed a line. Then her features relaxed, and she expressed some words of farewell that Lori, under different circumstances, would have found moving.

Lori made her way back to the living room and collapsed into the armchair, stunned. She was unable to think straight. She didn’t know how much time had passed when the telephone snapped her out of her brooding.

“Hello, my dearest. So what kind of a day are you having?”

Lisa Finning’s words triggered an emotional tsunami. Lori burst into tears, and her pitiful attempts to respond to her mother’s alarmed questions were drowned in loud sobs.

“Lori! What’s the matter? What happened?”

“It wasn’t . . . it maybe wasn’t . . . my fault at all,” she finally choked out.

“What isn’t your fault?”

“Katja . . . the Katja thing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Katja, she was in Lindenhold.”

A pause. Then her mother’s voice.

“The girl who overdosed?”

Lori sobbed again, but Lisa Finning, with well-practiced patience, wheedled out answers to her questions.

Lori told her everything: the scene in the kitchen, Lori’s anger at Katja, the knife in Katja’s hand, her panic and fear because of Andrew, Katja’s flight.

She threw in the baroness’s visit and the message from Katja’s mother.

“And you’ve thought all this time that you were to blame for Katja’s death?”

It was less of a question than a summarizing conclusion to Lori’s story.

“Oh, my dear child, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought . . . thought the fewer people who knew, the better. You always say that.”

“Yes, but Lori, that doesn’t apply in every situation, just to my work.” Her mother sighed. “You simply made assumptions . . . in the state you were in at the time. You couldn’t see clearly. It might have been—and it’s pure supposition, don’t misunderstand me—it might have been that Katja actually got the knife out to help you. And it wouldn’t surprise me if she . . . if she suddenly realized what a dreary life that was. A woman preparing beans in the kitchen for fifteen people while they’re outside taking in the sunshine.”

“What are you trying to say? That I . . . that this . . . my life was so demoralizing that Katja killed—”

“No, for God’s sake! I just meant you do not have the foggiest notion what was going on in Katja’s head during those few seconds, and that there is no causal connection between you losing your temper for a minute in the kitchen and what followed. The chain of events had begun much earlier, and you couldn’t have done a thing to break it.”

Lori heard a lawyer’s voice now and not her mother’s. Moments like these used to intimidate her, but now the factual tone of voice was reassuring.

“And something else, Lori. This should really stay between us. Her parents needn’t know what went on. We don’t know the truth and never will, and it would be no consolation for her parents. It would only open up old wounds—and for what purpose? We still wouldn’t be able to clear anything up.”

“So still keep it a secret?”

“It’s an act of love toward the parents, who obviously have found some kind of peace. They could decide they themselves were to blame for not giving Katja money. But that wouldn’t have helped their daughter either—just the opposite. And now dry your tears, my dear girl.”

“Mom, have you sometimes cried . . . after Dad and Clifford’s accident?”

“Yes, of course, but never in front of you. In bed, occasionally. There are . . . certain things over which we have no influence, Lori. And things we can’t prevent. To come to this realization you often need . . . I’d call it a certain humility toward life.”

“Thank you, Mom, for everything. And for the beautiful care package. I was thrilled.”

“You see? It’s the little things that count. I must be off, meeting to get to, but I wanted to give you a quick call—you’re very important to me.”

“You’re important to me, too, Mom, really important.”

Lori rarely expressed her feelings to her mother. Lisa Finning didn’t seem to need her to. But this time, Lori could hear the speechless surprise at the other end.

A brief pause, and then a slightly shaky voice said, “I’m lucky to have a daughter like you.” After her confession, Lisa Finning hung up quickly.

Lori wandered through the house like a sleepwalker, from the living room to the kitchen, down to the basement, upstairs again to her office. Then she settled into a seat by the large window. Fog lay on the hills behind the cove. The street was shiny and wet, and a light breeze blew the smoke from the chimneys to the northwest. She hadn’t mentioned Reanna’s disappearance or the bind Noah was in to her mother, and certainly hadn’t said a word about her own misgivings.

Maybe it was better; her mother would have warned her to keep her nose out of things, but it was already too late.