The Divide (7 page)

“Well, I guess you’re right. Listen, will you call me when you’ve got a moment to yourself?”

“Okay.”

“Bye, then. I love you, son.”

“Yeah. Bye.”

The Valley View Funeral Home and Crematory—“Serving Missoula’s Bereaved Since 1964”—stood between a used-car lot and a sinister-looking bar called Mountain Jack’s. It was skirted by a thin strip of lawn doing its best to appear elysian. Ben parked in the otherwise empty lot and, thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets, walked toward reception. The building was all Palladian pillars and swirled cream stucco, a curious hybrid of temple and hacienda that at any other time would have made the architect in him smile. Beyond it, away to the west, lightning flickered against the gunmetal shroud that had lowered itself over the mountains. The air smelled of wet dust and just as he reached the cover of the portico a first few plump raindrops began to smack and speckle the asphalt.

The reception area was a hushed expanse of mushroom-pink carpet and magnolia walls, decorated with elaborate arrangements of fake flowers and framed prints. Away in the far corner, a muted TV was entertaining a coffee table and a pair of empty couches in blue velour. Ben pressed the soundless button at the reception desk and while he waited wandered with soundless footsteps, inspecting the pictures. All were landscapes and all featured water of some kind—a river, lake, or ocean. There was a unifying, bland tranquility to them, nothing too poignant or risky, no sunsets or stormy skies, not a hint of hell or eternal judgment. He wondered if they ever censored the pictures to suit the special sensibilities of their clients. Maybe they had already done it for him because there sure wasn’t a single snowy mountain on the walls.

“May I help you?”

A young man with a friendly round face and a body that seemed too long for his legs was heading across the mushroom pink toward him. Ben introduced himself and saw a fractional retuning in the man’s smile. He wasn’t overdoing it, just finding the right calibration of professional sympathy. This was the Jim Pickering both Ben and Sarah had spoken with on the phone.

“Your wife called to say you weren’t going to make it today.”

“She had to get a later flight. I flew up this morning from Albuquerque. We’re not married anymore.”

He didn’t know why he had volunteered that, but the man nodded, readjusting the smile again, just a touch more concern.

“Is it inconvenient for me to see . . . ?” Ben couldn’t finish the sentence. Should he say Abbie? My daughter? The body?

“Not at all. We’re all ready for you.”

“I just wanted to, you know, make sure—”

“I absolutely understand.”

He asked Ben if he would mind waiting a moment and hurried off the way he came. He disappeared down a corridor and the silence reasserted itself. The place had the best soundproofing Ben had come across in a long time. He caught himself wondering what materials they had used. What was the matter with him? Waiting to see his daughter’s body and thinking about goddamn acoustics?

Jim Pickering came back and asked Ben to follow him. As they walked a sequence of corridors, he explained that they had embalmed the body, as Mrs. Cooper had requested, and that the search-and-rescue people over the mountains had made the process a lot easier by keeping so much ice around her during recovery and transportation. The results, he said, were consequently a lot better in the circumstances than one might have expected. Whether the man was making a modest professional boast or simply trying to allay anxiety, Ben couldn’t decide.

“We didn’t have any clothes, so she is in what we call a hospital gown. And, of course, we didn’t have any reference for hair and makeup, so you’ll see we’ve gone for quite a natural look. There is scope for some minor adjustment, should you wish. And the casket is only temporary. Mrs. Cooper didn’t say whether you would be interested in purchasing one from us or from the funeral home back east. We do have quite an extensive range.”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, here we are. This is our viewing room.”

He stopped in front of some white double doors, his hands poised to open them. He was looking at Ben for the signal to proceed.

“Are we ready?”

Ben nodded.

The room was about fourteen feet by ten, and lit with a roseate glow by four tall uplighters, their tops flared like lilies. The plain, pale wood casket stood open on a waist-high table. From the doorway, all Ben could see of its interior was a band of pink satin lining.

“I’ll leave you,” Jim Pickering said. “I’ll be just along the corridor. Take as long as you need.”

“Thank you.”

The doors closed quietly behind him. Ben stood there a moment, trying to conjure a trace of his earlier, absurd hope that the body would be someone else’s. But he knew it was Abbie. He could feel his blood pulsing fast and insistent in his ears and an icy weight turned in the pit of his stomach. He swallowed and stepped forward.

It was almost three years since he had seen her. Her hair then had been dyed black and cut short and spiky, as if to advertise her anger. But now it was back to its natural reddish blond and longer and neatly combed so that it framed her slender neck and softened her. The face, with its pert nose and prettily arched eyebrows, was light-years from the hostile, screaming contortion that had haunted his head since that terrible night. Death, perversely, had warmed her. The funeral makeup had given her skin a clever, healthy luster. There was even, in the tilt of her chin and in the dimpling at the corners of her mouth, a curious immanence. As if something in a dream had amused her and at any moment she might smile or wake and tell him what it was. And open those eyes. Gray-green and flecked with hazel. He wished he could see them just one more time.

The only other body Ben had ever seen was his father’s, almost twenty years before. And the undertakers then had gotten it all wrong—his hair, his expression, the way he knotted his necktie, everything. They had plastered on so much rouge and mascara and lipstick that he looked like some frightful, unwigged drag queen.

But in her white gown, like the bride she would never be, his daughter looked only serene and innocent and utterly beautiful.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered. “My little sweetheart.”

He gripped the rim of the casket and bowed his head and closed his eyes. And the sobs came quaking through him and he didn’t try to fight them. Alone now, he would allow himself this, and later be the stronger for Sarah.

How long he stood there, he couldn’t tell. When he could cry no more, he straightened himself and walked across to a little table where a box of tissues had been placed. And when he had dried his face and composed himself, he walked once more to the casket and leaned in and kissed his daughter’s cheek. She smelled of nothing and her flesh against his lips was as cold as stone.

S
arah let the waitress fill her cup with coffee for the third time, and tried not to watch the two men across the table finishing their breakfasts. The sight and smell of all that egg and bacon and fried potato was making her feel queasy.

Jet-lagged, she had taken a sleeping pill sometime after midnight and all it did was plunge her into a shallow semicoma fraught with anxious dreams. She woke twisted in her sheets like a mummy and with a blurred and aching head that two heavy-duty painkillers had failed to clear. Outside it was still raining. It hadn’t stopped since she arrived.

Benjamin had met her when she got off the plane and had driven her to the hotel in the ridiculous little car he’d rented. Why he had to be so cheap, she had no idea. But she hadn’t mentioned it. On the flight she had given herself strict instructions to be civil. But, God, it was hard. Even the sight of him now, eating his breakfast and talking trivia with this sheriff character, made her feel angry. He had grown his hair longer and bought himself some trendy little wire-rimmed glasses. All very Santa Fe.

Benjamin had booked them adjoining rooms at the Holiday Inn Parkside and after checking in last evening they had borrowed an umbrella and walked over to a Japanese restaurant on North Higgins. The food was fine but the conversation hideously stilted, perhaps because they were both trying so hard to avoid talking about Abbie. Benjamin had seemed barely able to look her in the eye and kept asking all sorts of eager questions about Venice. She wanted to scream at him to shut up. Who on earth
was
he? This polite stranger who had shared her life for all those years and was now treating her like a guest with whom he’d gotten trapped at a cocktail party.

She knew she was being unfair and that it was probably her fault that he behaved that way. Some curious defense mechanism seemed to have clicked on inside her brain. Being cold and brittle and angry with him was the only way she could cope. Allow herself to be any warmer or more receptive to comfort and she would lose her foothold and fall off the edge, spiral into the black whirlpool she knew was waiting for her below. Her little girl dead, lying cold in a box . . . No, she wasn’t going to let her head go there. But when he put his arm around her on their way back to the hotel she almost had. And again when he kissed her good night in the dingy corridor outside her room and they went off to their lonely, separate king-size beds, so thinly partitioned they could hear each other’s every shuffle and cough and flush of the john.

Sheriff Charlie Riggs didn’t have an office in Missoula, which was why he had suggested they meet for breakfast here at The Shack. It was a place Abbie had once taken them to, tucked away on West Main and just another short, wet walk from the hotel.

The sheriff had been there waiting for them, his rain-soaked Stetson and a white plastic bag beside him on the bench of the little wooden booth. He stood to greet them, a tall man, even taller than Benjamin, but bulkier, with a bushy mustache that was going to gray. His eyes were gentle and had in them a sadness that Sarah suspected was permanent, not merely contrived for their benefit. He had those old-fashioned Western manners that she had always been a sucker for, politely nodding when he shook her hand and calling her ma’am.

He declared at once how sorry he was about Abbie.

“I have a daughter myself,” he said. “Can’t even bear to think of such a thing happening.”

“Not wanted for murder just yet, I hope,” Sarah said with a withering brightness before she could stop herself. The poor man winced and Benjamin looked away.

“No, ma’am,” the sheriff said quietly.

They sat down and the two men chatted about the weather and nothing much else until the waitress came and took their orders. Then, leaning forward and talking in a low voice so as not to be overheard, Sheriff Riggs had taken them through what had happened. He told them about the skiers finding Abbie in the ice and how the autopsy at the crime lab hadn’t been able to establish either how she came to be there or how exactly she had died. He asked if they had any ideas about why she might have been in that part of the world and Benjamin said they hadn’t. Abbie had suffered head injuries, the sheriff went on, as well as a broken leg and a dislocated shoulder. And there was water in her lungs, which suggested she might have drowned. The best guess at the moment was that the injuries had been sustained in a serious fall, the cause of which remained unknown.

“You mean, someone could have pushed her?” Benjamin said.

“That has to be one possibility, yes, sir.” He glanced at Sarah, no doubt gauging her sensitivity to such talk. She felt vaguely affronted.

“What about suicide?” she said.

Benjamin looked at her in surprise.

“Abbie would never do that,” he said.

“How would you know?” she snapped.

They both stared at her. The spite just seemed to come spouting out of her of its own accord. She hurried on, trying to soften it.

“I mean, how can any of us know? She’s been missing so long, we don’t know what might have been going on.”

“You’re right, Mrs. Cooper,” Charlie Riggs said gently. “It has to be another possibility we can’t yet rule out.” She could tell he was getting the measure of how things stood between her and Benjamin. He probably already had her down as a prize bitch. She would have to get a grip and curb her tongue.

“Anyhow,” the sheriff went on. “I want you to know that this is a top priority. We’re going to keep going up there while the snow starts to melt. Hopefully we’ll find something that’ll help build us a picture of what happened.”

If either of them wanted to go see where Abbie was found, he said a little awkwardly, he would be happy to show them. Benjamin thanked him and said he might well come back in a week or two to do that. How absurd and pointless, Sarah thought but managed to stop herself from saying. She couldn’t think of anything worse—except seeing the body itself, which they were planning to do later, though she wasn’t at all sure she could handle it.