There was no sound from the back. I could have been talking to myself, for all I knew.
“Of course not,” I said. “Then the sonny-and-pappy bit was a convenient way to defuse any speculation about what two unrelated men were doing living under the same roof.”
A dry chuckle came from the darkness behind me. “That’s not a very enlightened attitude, Nebraska.”
“No? Well, the sixties weren’t a very enlightened time, I’m afraid. Much more of a stigma attached to, uh, the love that dare not speak its name. Especially given the twenty-year age gap, and that one of the consenting adults was barely an adult.”
Dianna was a step or two behind us. “Did he kill Meredith?” she wanted to know.
“Oh, hell yes,” I said. “Meredith had the bad luck to fantasize that she was engaged to Thomas. That wouldn’t do.” It had to have been a fantasy: Knowing, or even just suspecting, that Alexander had done in Stacy Eitrem, Thomas wouldn’t put another woman in that kind of danger. Unfortunately for Meredith Berens, she didn’t know any of this history. She put herself in danger, and Thomas’s efforts were insufficient to shake her off before it was too late. I went on: “You’d have to ask our friend whether he was motivated by a concern for Thomas’s future or plain old jealousy.”
She didn’t ask, and Wayne didn’t volunteer.
We had threaded through the empty downtown streets and under a low railroad trestle and were taking the long incline that intersected with the street that the Cott house fronted. But before we got that far up the hill, Wayne instructed me to turn off onto a narrow road that led down into a semi-wooded valley. There was a wooden sign along the drive, momentarily illuminated by our headlights as I made the turn: falls of the big sioux river.
“My guess is that he called Meredith and arranged to meet her someplace. As father of the prospective groom, any excuse would do. The hit-and-run trick would have been better, smoother, but it wouldn’t have been as easy to arrange with Meredith Berens as with Stacy Eitrem. The Eitrem girl walked to and from school, and Alexander either knew her route or learned it without trouble. Meredith, if she’s like everyone else in this part of the country, drove everywhere. Anyhow, they met and he killed her and stashed her car somewhere.” For Wayne’s benefit, I added, “He must be pretty unsure of himself, and of Thomas, if he has to keep killing anyone who has any real feelings for his ‘son.’ ”
“Thomas loves me and I love him,” said the voice from the backseat. “He’s my son.”
“You know what? After all these years that’s probably true. It may have started as a masquerade, a way to keep people from wondering or talking or being too inquisitive, but I suspect you’re right: Now Thomas is your son, and like anybody’s son he’s bound to leave you and lead his own life.”
“This will do.”
I thought he was referring to my yakkety-yak, but he meant I could park the car. I did.
We were off of the road and partly hidden from it by a big jungle of scruffy, untamed trees and bushes. The moon provided the only light, and it was liquid and cold. When I shut off the engine I could hear the loud swish and swirl and rumble of water tumbling over rock.
“The woman and I will get out first,” Wayne said.
He was pretty good, good enough, at least, to see that Dianna was too scared to try to pull anything. He held the gun aimed at the base of her neck, eight inches back, and synchronized his getting out of the car with hers, so that there was only an interval of a quarter of a second when the post between the front and rear doors blocked his aim.
I sat still with my hands on the wheel.
Wayne marched Dianna around the back of the car and to the driver’s side. He stood well away from the doors, Dianna still in his sights. “Now you.”
I got out of the car.
Wayne had brought something with him from the backseat: a heavy pole, like a closet clothes-pole, eighteen inches long and two or two-and-a-half inches in diameter. He carried it loosely in his left hand. It was not the pole he had beaten Meredith Berens with. That one would be long gone. This one was fresh and new and gleamed white in the moonlight.
“Does Thomas know?” I challenged Wayne. “Does he know you’ve killed the only two people who have ever become close to him, just so that you can maintain your influence over him? I wonder if that’s why he tried so desperately to end things with Meredith—if he suspected her affection for him could have fatal consequences.”
“The bitch was crazy,” Wayne said conversationally. “Thomas didn’t have any interest in her, or anyone, for that matter. All she wanted was to get her hooks into my boy.”
“You’d know all about that,” I agreed. “You hooked him but good. Cut him off from the only real life he’d ever known—a crappy life, okay, but his—took him away, gave him a new identity, remolded him in your own image …”
“Enough,” Wayne said. He sounded tired, not angry. “Over there.”
I found myself wishing that Thomas Wayne had been the killer. I knew from experience that I could provoke him easily, and with far greater success than I was having with his father. If Dianna had not been along, I had seen a couple of openings where I probably could have taken the gun away from Wayne. He was larger and heavier than me, but I was younger and, presumably, in better shape. I probably would have tried it, in any event, but Wayne cagily kept Dianna between me and him—and, more significantly, the gun—at all times. That may have struck him as another good reason for hauling her along, and I would have had to agree with him, based on how things were going so far. And he seemed impervious to any attempts to sting him, goad him into reacting rather than acting, into making the mistake, giving me the opening. He was imperturbable, damn him, and he was guiding us to the water’s edge.
We were moving upriver, toward the high point of the falls. The water wasn’t particularly high, since the season hadn’t been uncommonly wet, and the falls themselves were nothing too dramatic—no Niagara—but the rush of water over them was swift, and you didn’t need a great deal of imagination to guess what would happen when the energy inherent in that rush slammed a human body against the outcroppings of rock that glistened in the moonlight.
The noise of the falls would be sufficient to muffle the sound of two gunshots.
We moved past the viewpoints roped off for the public and onto the rocks. They appeared to be the same pink quartzite that half the buildings in town were constructed of. They were worn smooth by the glaciers that deposited them there and the water that had flowed over them for centuries without number before the river narrowed to its current bed. They were slippery from the mists kicked up by the waterfall. Dianna slipped once and almost fell. I slipped and went down on one knee, hard. Alexander Wayne, cuss him, was as sure-footed as a mountain goat.
We reached the highest point, a triangular ledge poking out into the water. It was as far as you could go and still be dry. Two bodies pushed into the river from there would be swept over the cataracts—down a short drop and over a shelf of rock and then down a longer drop and into the lower river—ending up broken and battered and God knows where. Wayne’s plan was transparent. The pole had made it so. A blow or two to kill us or at least render us incapable of resistance, then he would tip our bodies into the river, to be swept over the falls. The deaths might well appear accidental, then, the injuries from the pole indistinguishable from the injuries from the rocks in the water.
It only remained to be seen what Wayne intended to do with the one of us while he took care of the other. I assumed he had a plan.
“I’m surprised Martha Cott isn’t with us,” I said. I risked a glance over my shoulder. “Or do you have other plans for her?”
“What would be the point,” Wayne said. I knew what he meant. “This is where we part company.”
I looked at him again. We were at the very tip of the triangular ledge, where the point disappeared into the black-silver water. He was behind us—too far behind us for my liking—with the gun. He pointed i
t at me and set the pole on the ground, kicking it toward me and then stepping away from it. Out of range.
“Pick it up,” he said.
“Phooey on that noise,” I said.
He jerked the automatic.
“I’m ahead of you, Wayne,” I said with a nonchalance that I didn’t feel. “I’m supposed to take the stick and give Dianna a couple of good whacks. Then you’ll use the stick on me. No bullets. Nothing to trace back to you. Not a bad plan, although I would certainly put up a fight the minute you put the gun away to bludgeon me. We won’t know how that would turn out, though, because I’m not cooperating. You have a contingency plan?”
It was the gun. “I’ll use this if I have to,” he said.
“It looks like you have to. If you’re a good enough marksman in this light.”
“I am. If I have to be.” I didn’t doubt it. And with the sky and the moon behind us, we were good targets.
When I had slipped and fallen farther downstream, it was because a loose, flat rock had twisted underfoot. When I had gone down, it was to palm the rock, which was larger than my hand and about two inches thick, but which I hoped would go unnoticed in the tricky light. It had. For all the good it had done me, since Alexander Wayne had given me no opening. But now Dianna Castelli did. Wayne barely had his last words out when she let out a cry, the sound of a night’s worth of tension and fear escaping, and turned and sprang at him.
It was a damn fool thing to do, but she was doing it and it was the first opportunity to come along. I whirled.
Wayne had the gun up but Dianna slammed into him and the shot that leaped from the weapon disappeared into the night, whining against a rock somewhere as it escaped.
I moved in and shoved Dianna out of the way and brained Wayne with my rock. Tried to, anyhow. For a big man he moved fast. The stone took him in the collarbone and a low groan escaped him as something under the fleshy skin gave. But in a movement that almost mirrored mine, he brought the gun to the side of my head and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the shot was so loud that I could hardly hear it: My ear sort of filled up and all that came through was a high-pitched kind of feedback. The flash was blinding even through my closed eyelids. I felt warmth on my face, pleasant at first but then, in an instant, too hot, and there was a hotter, searing pain along the left side of my head, above the deaf ear. I was lucky, if you want to call it that, that Wayne had had neither time nor room to take aim, and that, when he brought the gun up, the butt had clipped me on the cheek. The angle of the slug was up and away from me. Two degrees the other direction would have taken it through my empty skull.
As it was, though, the shot stunned me and blinded me and deafened me. It carved a shallow gutter in my scalp over my left ear and took the very tip of the ear with it when it went. And, through some strange physical reaction that Isaac Newton would have understood, the shot at my head took my feet out from under me and I went down, backward, into the cold black water.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Some part of my brain, the one one-hundredth that was neither numb with shock nor frozen with panic, registered the sound of another gunshot. By the sound of it, it had been fired on Venus.
The water behind me was not deep. It was cold, and unbreathable, but not deep. The ledge on which I had been standing was in fact part of one long shelf of rock that dipped down into the water and then jutted up again thirty feet out. Where I fell, then, the water was no more than two feet deep. But it was moving fast and the stone beneath me was smooth and slippery with moss or algae or some other aquatic vegetation, and I barely had time to cough out a choking mouthful of water and suck in a strangled breath of air before I was swept off the shelf and down toward the falls.
The water shoved me toward the nearer bank and into a cropping of stone rising two or three feet above the foaming surface. Blindly, instinctively, I clawed at it. It was as smooth as glass, as slippery as ice. The water pulled me down, beneath the surface, and slammed me into a submerged rock formation. By luck rather than by skill I pushed away from it with my legs, propelling myself away from it and upward. That’s where the luck part came in: I couldn’t tell up from a 1966 Pontiac Catalina at that point.
I grabbed some air before the water took over again and flung me over the first drop.
This was the short one—maybe six feet from top to bottom. I went over easily enough, and the water itself provided some cushioning when I landed on the ledge below. Enough of my brain was working that I knew this would be a good stopping-off point, if I could manage it. The next drop was the killer.
I got to my feet, sort of, and scrabbled for the bank, sort of—slipping and gasping and sobbing for breath. The footing was too smooth and slippery and the water was too insistent and I was too tired, too tired …
I was eight feet from terra firma and I wasn’t going to make it.
Below the higher fall, I had noticed on our way up, jagged, broken rocks lay in testament to the destructive power of the water. Even if I survived the drop, I wouldn’t survive landing on those rocks. Not in any shape that would make me glad to have survived, at any rate.
I was seven feet from terra firma and I wasn’t going to make it.
The water simultaneously tugged at me, urging me over the brink, and impeded my pitiful progress toward the bank. My lungs were screaming for air, my muscles, which had hardly recovered from my beating the other night and my tumble down the stairs that evening, were throbbing in agony, and I was shivering almost convulsively from the effects of the cold water and mortal dread. The only thing that didn’t hurt, ironically, was my head. It felt six times its usual size, puffy and soft-hard the way your lip does when you have a mouthful of Novocain, but it didn’t hurt.
I was six feet from terra firma and I wasn’t going to make it.
In fact, I didn’t make it. I stepped on something slimy and both feet went out from under me as if I was on icy pavement, and that was all the invitation the water needed. I went down on my back and it rolled me over the edge.
There was a piece of wood, a weathered old four-by-four, wedged between the rock that formed the outside wall of the falls and an anvil-shaped formation that protruded from the shorter drop. Someone had thrown it in, or it had fallen in upstream, the current carrying it until luck took over and jammed it between the rocks there. When I had realized that I couldn’t make it to dry land, seconds before it became reality, I set my sights on that four-by-four. As the water rolled me over the edge I grabbed at it and caught it with one hand and threw the other arm around it, squeezing it tight in the crook of my arm.
With a kind of squeal against the rocks, the four-by-four slipped.
Slipped three inches, maybe, and held. I wrapped my other arm around it and, after a couple of attempts, got my right leg hooked over it as well. I hung there like a sloth from a tree branch, dripping, working on getting my breath back.
It all sounds pretty heroic, huh? Batman, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Sergeant Preston all rolled into one handsome package. Guess again. The moment Alexander Wayne’s gun went off my brain went to Fort Lauderdale for spring break, leaving my body to muddle through the best it could on instinct alone. That was just as well. Rational thought would insist that I couldn’t survive the waterfall, so why bother? Instinct, not knowing from rational thought, was only interested in keeping me alive and worked reflexively to that end. Once it saw that the danger had momentarily passed, my brain hopped back into the driver’s seat and started pushing buttons and pulling levers again.
A week later, maybe two, the signals reached the appropriate outposts, and my body, which had sort of thought its job was done when I glommed onto the four-by-four, went back to work. Slowly, very slowly, and painfully, I worked my way down the four-by-four to the wall it was jammed against. There were toe-holds there. I found them and climbed five or six feet to the top of the wall, which turned out to be a thick, short column whose top was at the same level as the ground, good old Ma Earth, some t
en feet over. The column must have once been connected to the mainland, but the vagaries of erosion had separated them.
I went down the column on the far side and carefully tested the waters at the base of the stone. It was calm here, sheltered in a kind of miniature bay between the column and a low, wide outcropping a few feet downstream. But that wasn’t what I was checking. I wanted to see if there was firm footing between the column and the wall that led up to the ground. There was. The column and the wall shared a floor of stone only two or two and a half feet underwater. I waded toward the wall slowly, an inch at a time, lest the floor suddenly disappear beneath me. It didn’t, and I reached the craggy wall and started up it. My shoes were wet and slippery and the toe-holds were wet and slippery and I nearly slid down the face of the wall once, but I made it to the top and rolled away from the edge, onto the gritty, dirty rocks and the sparse, coarse grasses that grew up between the fissures, and was never so glad of anything in my life.
Eventually I rolled up onto my knees and vomited up the remains of my supper. The heavy smell of chlorine from the swimming pool at the hotel hung in my nostrils.
Feeling better now, but still pretty shaky, I stumbled away from the water and across a paved parking area and across a playing field and into some thick bushes. I had no way of knowing how long my swim had taken. Anywhere from five minutes to a fortnight, I figured. Alexander Wayne may have been long gone by now, or he may have been hanging around, looking to see where my carcass ended up, waiting to finish me off if the roiling waters of the Big Sioux hadn’t taken care of me. If he was still loitering there, I wanted any confrontation to be at my instigation. I was in no shape to be on the defensive.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 28
