The year She Fell (67 page)

I pulled free. “I’ve got to go after him.”

She was beside me then. She took hold of my arm again, a firm, gentle grip. “Stop,” she murmured. “Think of your daughter. Think of me. Don’t risk your life for someone like him.”

I hesitated, and the car slipped under the surface, and Laura set my hands free. I stood there staring at the dark water, and listened to her call this in, asking for the sheriff to send a diving team up to the old mining pit.

She was right. He’d called this fate down on himself, and it wasn’t my place to get in the way.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I had a nightmare that night, about drowning. Occupational hazard. I woke up, wanting to find Laura beside me—I’d gotten too used to her too quick. But I sat up in the darkness, chilled to the bone, and remembered that she was back with her family.

But the sun had hardly crested the mountains to the east when she arrived at my door. She was dressed simply, for her, in a tank top and shorts, and her eyes were tired. We’d been up late at the old mine, watching while the state police divers searched for the body and finally dragged it to shore. Now I faced a day of questions—an important man had died, after all.

We had to get our story straight, I reminded myself, and headed for the coffeemaker.

“Okay,” I said a few minutes later, when we were settled out on the porch with our coffee and our view of the ski slope. It was a startling green under the motionless ski lifts. “We were driving out that way, and saw a car turn towards the old mine, and I got concerned and followed it.”

“And we got there just in time to see him unwittingly drive into the lake,” Laura finished.

“Right.” It was . . . wrong. Wrong that I was making up this story, however close it was to the facts. This is what criminals did.

But there was too much at stake, and nothing to gain by being too candid.

Laura looked down into her coffee cup. “So does this mean that the whole Internet and murder issues stay . . . under wraps?”

I shook my head. “Depends on what’s on that hard drive. And I’m going out to look for it soon.”

Laura insisted on going along, and watched in silence as I gathered up my rappelling equipment from the back closet.

When we got out to the scenic overlook, I took my time hooking up the harness. It was a cool morning, with mist clinging to the edges of the valley. As I looped the rope around the guardrail, Laura came close. “Be careful,” she said, bending taking hold of the rope just beyond the knot, like she could by brute force keep me from falling.

“Don’t worry. It’s not a sheer drop.”

No, not a sheer drop—just a steep incline, covered with brambles and wind-stunted trees that caught at my boots and snagged at the rope. But I made my way down slowly, watching all the way for some sign of the hard drive. Once I hit the sloping bottom, I unbuckled myself and let the rope dangle as I prowled around, searching the tall grass.

And then I saw a glint of metal in the sun. Maybe just a soda can, tossed from a car— but I crossed the few yards and my hand closed on the flat cool rectangle.

I stuffed it in my shirt, reminding myself that it was probably damaged and useless. And even if it wasn’t corrupted, he would have deleted anything criminal. And yeah, Theo could say all he wanted that nothing could ever be completely deleted, but somehow he wasn’t able to recover the March expense reports that I’d managed to send into the ether last month.

But whatever was on the hard drive scared Urich enough that he wanted it lost forever. And that was reason enough to put my hands back on that rope and make the hard climb back up the ridge.

Laura held the hard drive on her lap all the way back to town. “Do you think—” she started, and then said, “It doesn’t matter, does it? He’s dead.” She gave a small smile. “You should have seen my mother’s face this morning when I told her. She was so . . . triumphant. It was better than any medicine. They’re going to send her home later today.”

“That’s good.” I thought of the tangled skeins of family ties, and said, “What about Theresa? How’d she take it?”

Laura sighed. “She was very quiet. I think all along she’d been hoping—I don’t know. That she’d find her old family, the Prices, and it would feel right, and everything would fit again. But there isn’t anyone really left in that old family, and it wasn’t even her family, as it turns out. And the truth is so terrible.”

“But at least it’s the truth,” I said. I had to make that point. The truth was better than a lie.

Laura said doubtfully, “I suppose. And she’s still got us. More than ever, maybe. And she’s got Brian. And that Mitch Price. He turns out not to be her brother, but at least he’s a connection to the past.”

“What about Ronnie?” I asked. “The other Price boy.”

Laura’s frown of concentration eased as she remembered. “Oh, yeah. Ronnie. I think he’s dead. She didn’t say specifically, only that all the Prices except Mitch were gone.”

I spared a thought for that broken boy I’d known so long ago. I could have gone that way, I knew, graduated from reform school to jail to death. But something along the way diverted me, gave me hope for something better.

As we crossed the bridge back into town, I glanced over at Laura. “So what’s next?”

She knew what I meant, but pretended she didn’t. She wanted me to speak the words, I realized. All she said was, “I guess it depends on what’s on this hard drive.”

“Yeah.” I took the long way around to the courthouse square, but it wasn’t till I was pulling into my reserved slot that I could speak with the appropriate casualness. “So when are you headed out?”

She kept her gaze down on the gray metal of the hard drive. “I don’t know. I need to get Mother settled. She’ll need a nurse’s aide, I’m sure. But—” Her mouth quirked in a wry smile. “I left a hundred thousand dollar remodeling job in the
Hamptons
, so I probably ought to get back there.”

“And renew acquaintances with your architect.” I couldn’t help myself. I had to say it.

She gave me a quick glance as we got out of the car, but all she said was, “I probably ought to make sure that he didn’t run off with all my money. Or put a fountain in my living room.”

She was waiting for me to say something. I was waiting for her to say something.

We stood on the sidewalk in front of the police building. Then she handed me the hard drive and said, “I’ll just walk home and check on everything. Let me know if you find anything interesting there.”

She headed down the sidewalk. And it was all still unspoken, whatever it was between us.

But then, just as I turned to go in, she came back. In front of all the interested citizens there in the courthouse square, she threw her arms around me and whispered fiercely, “He ran. It was his own fault. Not yours. You just tried to stop him.”

“Yeah,” I said, and kissed her. No need, I supposed, to discuss that high-speed chase, the adrenaline rush of danger, the triumph—we both understood. That was our secret.

That was why she wanted me, after all. And why, probably, I wanted her.

I looked up the steps to find the interested regard of two young officers. “Don’t you have streets to patrol?” I said, and pushed past them into the building.

When I arrived at the
Wakefield
house that afternoon, the front drive was full of cars. I recognized Tom O’Connor’s black jeep next to his wife’s Audi. I’d been married long enough to read the cards there— he’d gotten tired of waiting for Ellen to give in, so he figured he’d better come back and give in himself. Women, even the most congenial ones, could be a lot more stubborn than any man, and the sooner a guy learned that, the better.

Next to the jeep was the kid’s beat up sedan, and beyond that a nondescript Ford with rental plates. I pulled in beside Laura’s Porsche, and got out, carrying the manila folder.

In the front parlor, Mrs. Wakefield was sitting straight up on the couch. She looked fragile and pale, but that was apparently no excuse for slouching or for putting her feet up on the coffee table. Her youngest daughter—or her granddaughter, I supposed—was in the armchair next to her. They didn’t seem comfortable together. Too much to adjust to too quickly.

“Mrs. Wakefield,” I said. “Maybe we could get everyone together.”

Theresa left to gather the others, and Mrs. Wakefield gave me with a sharp glance. ‘You handled this very efficiently.”

I assumed she meant that as a compliment. “Thanks. It would have been simpler if—” No use finishing that sentence. Mrs. Wakefield wasn’t going to learn any lesson from me. She thought things had turned out well. “How’s Theresa taking it?”

A shadow passed over her face. “I wish . . . I wish there had been a way that she—”

“Was kept in the dark? I don’t think that was going to work out. She was already suspicious.”

Laura came in then, trailing the kid. He was finding himself in clover, I guessed—a rich grandmother, a couple nice aunts, and even a helpful half-sister. The new father maybe wasn’t so easy, but at least he hadn’t prosecuted.

I didn’t think young Brian ought to get off so easy. So I fixed him with a cop scowl, and he glanced away, and sat himself on the window seat, out of range.

Pretty soon Theresa arrived back with Ellen and Tom O’Connor, who was probably wondering how his long-ago indiscretion led to all this coming to light. At least his action seemed pretty minor comparatively. Even Ellen looked halfway to forgiveness, sitting in the love seat next to him. Not touching, but close enough.

I opened up the folder. “There wasn’t much retrievable on the hard drive. No logs of chats. “

“So—” Ellen’s hands were gripped in her lap. “But it must have been important, if Urich went out in the dark to get rid of it. I mean, that’s a sign of guilt, isn’t it?”

I knew what she wanted—what I wanted too, to tell the truth. Something concrete that said he deserved to die. Laura didn’t need that, I guess. She had a certain ruthlessness I kind of admired. As far as she was concerned, Urich had done plenty to deserve death, starting with seducing a fourteen-year-old girl.

I withdrew the single page. “There wasn’t much on there. But the tech found this.” I rose and took the sheet to Mrs. Wakefield, and Theresa shifted to sit beside her.

For the benefit of the others, I said, “It’s an email from a couple months ago. He’d dumped all his Outlook files, but there was a—the tech called it a shadow. A saved draft, deleted differently. An anonymous hotmail account. Anyway, it’s to a girl he’d been in correspondence with. It sounds like she was talking about telling her parents. I don’t think she’d figured out who he was exactly, but she had some idea he was important. And I guess he’d threatened her back. This seems like it’s his second email on the subject, backtracking from a threat he’d made in the earlier email.”

Mrs. Wakefield was staring at the page, and finally Theresa took it from her hand. She scanned it and then, slowly, read it out loud. “No, I’m not threatening you. I said with that other girl, it was just an accident. But accidents happen when you start talking out of turn.”

I looked at Mrs. Wakefield. “After she had to give away a second baby, Cathy knew something was wrong. That something was broken in her, that she’d go so far. She came to you and said she wanted to go to the authorities, report this former teacher of hers. You didn’t think it would work, and you were probably right. It’s hard enough to make a case like that, but there would be statute of limitations problems since it had been more than a decade since the original crime. But Cathy couldn’t let it rest. So she must have arranged to meet him. He’d want it away from the college, away from where someone might see them together. So they went back to where they used to climb together—the river gorge. He probably thought he could persuade her to keep quiet, that she had as much to lose as he did.”