Sudden Exposure (31 page)

“That’s crazy. Why would I do something like that to a … friend.”

“Because Tiff was better than you were. You had to make the cut in the Nationals. You’d only been in the top eight twice, seventh once, eighth the other time. This was your last chance to get the three ‘top eights’ you needed to make the Olympic Qualifying Trials. With Tiff there your chances were minimal. Then, suddenly, the universe offered you a gift, right? All you needed to do was keep quiet. So tempting; so easy. A panicked decision made by a nineteen-year-old. A decision that makes a mockery of everything you stand for, everything you’ve done since. If word got out, your reputation would be ruined. The very name ‘The Girls’ Team’ would be a joke. You’d be like Ellen—you’d have to hide out.”

The wind stopped and there was no sound but the odd settlings of the cabin, board against board, squeaking futilely. Her face was ashen, her eyes unseeing. Her tight throat turned her words gravelly. “Tiff could have … checked with the agent. She didn’t. She could have … called the airline. No. She didn’t do anything. It was her fault the flight was at the last minute. She had an exam that day. Helena and I, we put off our flight for her. We should have gone a day early. But we didn’t; we waited for her …”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t change anything.”

The wind rattled the windows, scraping branches against the panes. It chilled my fingers. I looked down at Bryn’s hand; she had mashed the orange section to pulp.

“It just happened. I didn’t plan to do it. It was split second. I was there picking up my new ticket. The agent had the file open on his desk. There were two sheets of memo paper with Fannie’s name, her address, her phone number. Both places, the old and the new. I just picked up the new one and stuck it in my pocket. Nothing more than that.”

“On impulse.”

“I didn’t know it would keep her from getting to the Nationals. He could have called; her old roommates could have given him the new number. She could have called him to confirm. He could have called Information …”

Tiff wouldn’t have bothered to list her name with Information in her new place with only a couple weeks left in the term, but I didn’t want to interrupt Bryn. She was just throwing out excuses she’d tried on herself and rejected over the last twelve years, hoping desperately that this time they wouldn’t be too slippery to stick.

Her shallow breath caught, she breathed in deep and glared at me. “Okay! Okay, it was wrong, but I didn’t force her to go up on the platform and crack her spine. She could have just gotten drunk and come up with nothing more than a hangover. She didn’t have to dive.”

“But she did dive. And you do feel guilty,” I said softly.

“Guilt?” She looked puzzled. I wondered if she had walled herself off from emotion so completely that she had never even named the emotion she was hiding from. No wonder she had never been able to face Tiff. But she had allowed Ellen Waller to bring her confessional bench into her living room.

For the first time I could see the bond that had kept her and Ellen together, the pain of living with unmentionable guilt. Guilt that could never be voiced, never atoned, never forgiven. Ellen had agreed only to drive a getaway car; she had never dreamed she’d cause a death. Bryn had made a snap decision expecting to delay and disconcert her rival, not to maim her. Youthful, self-absorbed, ill-conceived decisions, pebbles tossed with no thought of the water. One killed, one injured. How many other lives corroded? Not the least of them Ellen and Bryn.

Now Bryn’s charge up to the microphones in the Olympics shone in a different light. “Could you have allowed yourself to win a medal?” I asked. Or had she been so obsessed with injustice at the Olympics she couldn’t have concentrated on diving?

She looked blankly at me. I wasn’t surprised, only disappointed. Bryn was not an introspective person and she’d had years of practice blocking out thoughts of error. “But Ellen did bring in the confessional bench. And she did start to talk about the benefits of confession, right?”

Bryn laughed, a weak sound, but still startling. “She tried. God, she tried. I told her if I’d wanted a therapist there were probably six within spitting distance—from
every
person in Berkeley!”

A gust of wind shook the house. For a moment I thought it was an earthquake. The rain smacked down on the roof. The windows rattled in their frames. Branches scraped across their panes like giant claws. Bryn Wiley sat rock still, braced as if against lashes of retribution.

I wondered if she was as maimed as Fannie Johnson, as dead emotionally as Karl Pironnen. But of course, emotionally dead is hardly the same as having a tag on your toe.

Outside, the rain was as thick as plastic sheets. In here, it was dark as dusk. I could have used that bowling ball of a candle I’d bought on the Avenue. But I didn’t dare light a candle. If anyone had followed me, he or she could trot up within spitting distance of the house and I’d neither see nor hear. Right now the killer could be out there.

Or in here.

Bryn was a good enough shot to have taken out Ellen. And setting her house on fire after Ellen was dead neatly turned the focus back to herself. Everyone assumed that Bryn was the intended victim. She could go on being Bryn Wiley, the Olympic Hero. Eventually she would get another secretary, and people would forget she’d ever had this one.

Bryn had snatched Tiff’s address impulsively. A quick, sure movement, the way she walked, sat, drove. I remembered her the night she shot out of the driveway and nearly hit the nudist.

But not everyone was this impulsive. Some killers needed time to prepare. I had a thought. “Bryn, Ellen wasn’t comfortable driving, right?” I asked.

“She hated it. She drove like a snail and stopped dead if she saw a squirrel.”

“So anyone who had observed the two of you pulling into the driveway would know the difference?”

“I should hope,” she said, sarcasm dripping from her voice.

I was amazed how quickly she could regroup. Were the wheels already turning to push today’s disclosure behind her? “If you had called her to pick you up, would Ellen have gotten back in the car and driven to get you?”

“At night? Maybe if I were bleeding on the sidewalk, if I could pluck her heart strings enough. But I don’t know that I had enough emotional pull to do that.”

But Ellen took the car home after the rally. And then three hours later she went out again, and got in the car, ready to drive. The key was in the ignition. There was only one “bleeding” that could have made her do that.

There was a sudden shattering of glass. Bryn screamed.

I shoved her to the floor.

“G
ET DOWN!”
I
YELLED
again.

Bryn jolted up, ran to the window.

A second shot cracked through the air. She staggered back a step, staring down at the blood coming from her shoulder.

I grabbed her and pulled her to the futon. Blood oozed on her sweater. A few inches southwest and that bullet would have killed her. “We need to stanch the blood! Towels? Where do you keep your towels?”

She stared at the wound. Athlete’s shock, I’d seen it before. Bryn couldn’t believe that her shoulder, a key part of her dive, could be mangled like this, away from competition.

I yanked open the curtain in front of the closet, pulled out a sheet, tore it into wide strips, and wrapped them tight around her shoulder. “Press it hard against the wound. Don’t let up.”

She complied without comment, pressing down with her right hand.

Squatting, I moved to the window and leaned against the wall beneath it, listening. Rain still smacked the roof; the casement windows had burst open and banged against the house. Nose to sill, I peered outside. But the rain was like one of those old hippie beaded curtains; it blocked out everything but its own shimmer. In the time I’d spent settling Bryn, the shooter could have moved anywhere.

Keeping down, I moved to the back window and repeated the procedure with the same results. There were three more windows, one on the other end of the back wall, a high one at the end, and another on the front wall. On the futon, Bryn was beginning to moan.

“Bryn! Quiet!” But I might as well have kept still. I didn’t know how long shock would mask the pain of her wound. Or how many hours before blood poisoning set in or she would bleed to death. Damn it, why hadn’t I studied the first aid manuals? Why had I always counted on having an ambulance at the ready?

With one eye on her, I squatted by the front window, listening. The rain shielded us from view, but it blocked any chance of my spotting our assailant outside. It was late afternoon, already dark. In a couple of hours there would be no light at all. If we survived until morning, Bryn would be delirious with pain or gangrene or loss of blood, if we survived, we’d face another day like today, only worse.

I thought of Ellen Waller, sitting safe in Bryn’s house when the phone rang. The last thing she had wanted was to drive Bryn’s station wagon again, in the dark. Volvos shift hard, even for drivers used to manual transmission. I’d driven my friend Mary’s old Volvo once and stalled out six times going across town. I’d been furious and humiliated. What could have drawn Ellen into the car?

I recalled the Volvo wagon as I’d last seen it, with the punctured window, and the Victorian house comforter that covered the backseat.

“Bryn, did you keep a comforter on the backseat of your car?”

She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, then turned back to her wound.

“When Ellen was shot, there was a comforter covering the backseat. Victorian houses on it, etched in black on white.”

Still staring at her shoulder she said, “That’s Ellen’s.”

“Was it there when you drove the Volvo to People’s Park?”

“No. Of course not.” She drew in a deep breath and looked up. “I keep my car clean. I don’t have crap on the dashboard or debris on the floor. I was only taking a box of flyers with me and they fit on the floor. Why would I pull the comforter off Ellen’s bed and stick it in the car?”

“To protect the backseat?”

“From what?”

“From a dog.”

Suddenly I understood what the comforter meant. There was only one person whose opinion mattered enough to Ellen for her to drive the Volvo at night—Karl Pironnen.

What had Pironnen said when he called her? “Nora’s cut her paw; she’s bleeding. She’s got to get to the vet. My car won’t start. Please help me! Meet me in your car; I’ll carry her over there.” Something like that.

And Ellen, anxious to help, worried about a sick or bleeding dog lying on Bryn’s leather seat, would have grabbed her comforter—the only thing she owned that was big enough—and spread it over the backseat.

“Bryn, when Ellen took Pironnen’s dogs to the vet, did she ever miss an appointment?”

There was no answer from her; but the sadness and the horror hit me hard. Karl Pironnen. I didn’t want the killer to be him.

When I had pounded on his door a week ago, I was in uniform, patrol car pulsar lights still flashing, a dozen armed cops behind me. Now reality had flipped over and it was he out there, backed up by his knowledge of the woods, a force greater than a score of police officers. At the door that night I had hidden beneath his view and waited until he peeked through the leaded glass window in his door. Then I’d leapt up and got him.

Like he could get us.

I knew now how he’d felt, an alien in a friendless place where lights mean only danger. I understood why he’d backed away when I came near. And I realized how long a leap of faith it had been for him to take me into his brother’s room. He had brought Ellen there, exposed the core of his life to her, and then she had kicked it aside so she could get on with her own life. If his brother Dan was forgotten, that was fine with her; that’s what she
wanted.

His attack on Bryn’s van, on her look-alike in her car, and then the fire would assure the world that Bryn Wiley had been the intended victim all along. Like Dan Pironnen, Ellen Waller would be merely a nameless footnote. The pebble she had tossed when she drove the getaway car splashed Dan Pironnen not only with death but anonymity. Now Karl had sent that karma back at her. Now she would be dead and forgotten. Bryn had agreed with Ellen—the past is past. Bryn could die.

There would be no reasoning with him; there was nothing left that he cared about saving.

I shivered. As he had shivered that first night. After he had shot Ellen. Automatically I reached for my radio, the radio I didn’t have, on which I could not call in 10-99. Out here I wasn’t a cop. I was just a city person with the odds stacked against me. He was out there with his dogs, and we were cornered like foxes. City foxes. Out here I had nothing to grab on to, no backup, no experience, no knowledge. I could feel panic rising, overwhelming me.

Bryn moaned louder.

No time! I had to move. If I waited until dark, I’d never find my way out of the forest. I had to make my move now.

Keeping low, I hurried across the room, put a pot of water on the burner, and dumped in all the coffee in the tin. When it came to a boil, I brought the whole pot over to Bryn.

“Bryn! Listen! We can’t both just sit here and wait. I’m going out there. And you’re going to have to give me cover.”

Her eyes widened.

I repeated the instruction.

The third time, she nodded. But how long would she remember? How long would she have the strength to care?

“Here’s a cup. Dip it in the pan; keep drinking coffee. You have to stay awake. Do you understand?”

Her head bobbed. Her normally hooded eyes were almost closed.

I grabbed her good shoulder. “Bryn! If he kills you, only Fannie—Tiff—and Sam will be left. When reporters ask them about how you got in the Olympics, what do you think they’re going to say? You will be dead, and all people will remember of you is that you were a cheat!”

She dropped the bloody sheet and backhanded me across the face.

It startled more than stung. This was one woman who would keep herself alert until she dropped. “Bryn, if we get out of here, then this case will focus on Dan Pironnen and Ellen Waller. Sam and Fannie and the Olympics won’t even be part of it. I’m leaving you your rifle.”