Bitter Falls

by Caine, Rachel

  “Wasn’t all that great, or much work,” she says, and I hear the amusement in her voice. “Bon turned himself in; he’s no fool. Olly Belldene was a surprise; I figured his old pappy would hide him out in the hills, but instead they called us to come get him. I can only guess they don’t want us back on their property.” She quickly gets serious again. “Sam, I’m going to need Lanny to come in and make formal IDs, and give another statement on the record. When do you think you can get here?”

  “I’m a few hours out of town, just heading back,” I tell her. “I’ll give you a call.” I don’t commit to bringing Lanny in, or even what time we’ll be home. For one thing, I might be taking care of her now, but I’m not her parent or legal guardian; they won’t let me sit with her for the statement or lineup, and I want Gwen present. Not that I don’t trust Kez or Detective Prester; they’re both straight arrows. But things have been known to go sideways, and sometimes it’s nobody’s fault.

  I get the kids up. They’re not happy at the early wake-up call, but after the initial grumpiness they’re glad that the bad guys are safely behind bars, and we can get on our way. I don’t tell Lanny the police want to talk to her again; there’s no point in making her nervous. I get everybody in the car and on the road in an hour, which I figure is a world record, and we start the drive home.

  I receive a phone call when I’m about an hour out from Stillhouse Lake, and check my phone. The phone, as Gwen advised, is new; I put all my usual close contacts in last night. I wouldn’t normally accept a call from anyone off that list, but the caller ID says it’s Gwen’s boss, J. B. Hall. I feel ice form along my bones. I pull the car over to the side of the road and put the flashers on as I answer. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Cade?” The voice on the other end is warm but serious. “Gwen gave me your new number. I promise you I won’t give it out, first of all, I understand it needs to be kept confidential—”

  I interrupt, because I can’t wait. “Has something happened to Gwen?” I can’t think of any other reason this woman would be calling me. None. And I feel my heart racing, and taste the acrid, bitter surge of adrenaline.

  “She’s safe,” J. B. says, and I let my breath out in a rush. Oh, thank God. Connor was sleeping in the passenger seat, but the tension in my voice has woken him up, and he’s staring at me with worry. His sister’s still crashed out behind us with her headphones on. “She’s perfectly fine, Sam. I’ve just seen her.”

  “Okay. So why are you calling me?”

  “Because she’s been arrested on charges of assault.”

  I open my mouth and close it without saying anything. I can legitimately think of a dozen situations where Gwen might go mixed martial arts, but when I spoke to her last night, she wasn’t in any of those. J. B. doesn’t wait for me to ask, and continues, “The young woman she was interviewing? Carol? She set Gwen up the second Gwen left the room to talk to you. Self-inflicted injuries and a call to 911, and Gwen found herself off to a cell for the rest of the night. Carol refused hospital treatment and vanished as soon as she gave her statement, and the police are already figuring out the whole thing is bogus. I’m at the courthouse now, and she’ll be out on bail soon. Don’t worry, the case will be dropped. The detective in charge understands what’s going on here.”

  I remember the call with Gwen, the easy way we’d talked. Everything had been fine when we’d ended it, but things must have gone wrong immediately after. Gwen’s not easily fooled, or easily manipulated. This Carol must have been really, really good to pull it off.

  “Sam—” J. B. seems like she’s hating what she’s about to say next. “You realize that the story’s about to break that she’s been arrested for assault, right? The circumstances will be gas on a bonfire. The fact that a young woman accused Gwen of holding her prisoner—”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and take a deep breath before I say, “Media feeding frenzy. I understand.”

  “It won’t take them long to get to Stillhouse Lake and lay siege to your house. You can bring the kids to Knoxville—”

  “Yeah, bit of a problem with that. We need to talk to the cops in Norton. Lanny’s a witness to something that happened the other night, and she needs to make an identification. Can’t avoid that.” I think about it for a few seconds. J. B. waits. “Okay, we’ll go home, get what we need, go to the police station, and leave from there for your offices.” More hotels in our future . . . or maybe not. Maybe we just find a place in Knoxville and send movers back to pack us up at the house. Maybe this is just the clean break we really need. It won’t be easy for Gwen to make that move, but this does make it a more clear-cut decision. Solves our Belldene problems at the same time.

  But damn, I hate to think about the reporters who are going to come hunting us. J. B. will protect our privacy as much as she can, but inevitably we’ll be found. I can already imagine the clever questions: So, as the brother of one of Melvin Royal’s victims, how does it feel to hear Gina Royal is being charged in connection with assault and abduction? Or, Do you believe, given this new accusation, that Gina Royal is still innocent of involvement in her husband’s crimes? I’ve got zero interest in answering any of those things, unless my response starts and ends with fuck off.

  I finish with J. B. and click the flashers off. I pull back into the sparse traffic before I ask Connor, “Did you get all that?”

  “Some of it,” he says. “Mom’s in trouble?”

  “Maybe not for long,” I tell him. I don’t want the kid worrying. “We’ll see her this afternoon at the latest, okay?”

  “Okay.” He’s quiet for a moment before he says, “Sam? I—I wish things could just go back to the way they used to be.”

  “Oh yeah? When?” That’s bitter, and I wish I hadn’t said it. “I’m sorry, Connor. Didn’t mean that. You mean a couple of summers back, when we were building the deck?” That was when we’d gotten to really know each other, and I’d realized what amazing kids Gwen had raised. And what a good woman she was. And yes, it had been a sweetly glorious time.

  “Yeah,” he says softly. “I just want things to be okay again. Not all the reporters and the people hating us and coming after us all the time.”

  “Normal life,” I say, and he nods. “Okay. I promise you that we’ll try to get there. It’s never going to be boring, though. You know that, right?”

  He smiles and looks out the window. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, Mom. Not boring.”

  “Nope. Me, I’m pretty boring, though. Maybe it’ll even out.”

  “I don’t think you’re boring.”

  “Good to hear.” I ruffle his hair, and he punches my arm, and we’re okay again. For now. But the kid’s right. We need normal. Badly. Between Connor’s horrible experience at school, Lanny’s close call at the lake, Gwen’s arrest . . . not our best of times. I’m looking forward to the relative peace of Knoxville, and I’m hoping that J. B. will take Gwen off this case and let us just deal with things.

  We’re a few miles from Norton when I get another call. This one’s in my phone book, and even though it’s not legal to talk and drive, I grab the phone and lift it to my ear instead of putting it on speaker. Connor’s already on edge. I don’t want to make things worse.

  “Hey,” I say. “Javi?”

  Javier Esparza says, “Man, when you guys fall in the shit, you really get in there, don’t you?”

  “You calling just to cheer me up or what?” Javier is a good friend, a good dude and retired marine; he calls me Chair Force, and I call him Jarhead, and we’re still brothers in arms in every sense. He runs the local gun range, which is one of my favorite places around Stillhouse Lake. We have a friendly game of center bull’s-eyes at the target range. So far, he’s up by one point out of thirtysomething matches. He’s way better than me at longer-range matches, but short range, I can give him a run. Javier is a genuinely stand-up guy who’s had our backs in several nasty situations.

  Speaking of which, I owe him either a round of cleaning toilets at the
range for losing that last shooting match, or letting him teach me how to scuba dive. I have no intention of scuba diving. I hate swimming. I’d rather scrub the men’s room.

  “Wish I was,” he says. “Kez is worried.” Kezia is Javier’s mostly live-in girlfriend.

  “What’s she worried about, exactly?”

  “She’d kill me if she knew I said anything to you, so I didn’t say anything, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “She’s worried that this is going to fall wrong for Lanny. Look, Bon and Olly aren’t good people; everybody knows that. Problem is they’re telling consistent stories. And she hasn’t disclosed everything.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She was with somebody else at that party, man. She didn’t come alone. Some girlfriend or something. You need to get her to come clean before this goes bad. She can’t hold back if she wants them to believe her story over theirs. Hell, they turned themselves in. That earns them a listen, at least.”

  I want to argue Lanny’s innocence, but fact is, I wasn’t there. Gwen and I entered this particular story after most of it happened, and though I believe the kid, I can’t know what happened. He’s right. Having one of the Belldenes, of all people, turn themselves in? That’s a pretty strong statement.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll talk to her.” I make sure not to glance back at Lanny, though I’m tempted. This can all wait until we’re home. In the rearview mirror I can see she’s still lying down, eyes shut. I can hear the tinny rattle of headphones from here. “Any other good news?”

  “Well, I booked the pool for tomorrow like we agreed,” he says.

  “Javi—okay, first of all, I never said I’d do it . . .”

  “You lost the bet, man. You owe me. You put on the gear and get in the water. Hey, if you’d won, you’d have definitely taken me up in one of those prop planes and barrel-rolled me until I puked.”

  “I would,” I admit. “But given the circumstances with Lanny . . . maybe I’d better just go for cleaning the toilets. Option B.”

  “You ever seen what these toilets look like? I get hill people and truckers in here. None of them have good aim off the range. But sure. Your choice.”

  He’s trying hard to lighten the mood, even though the Lanny thing is serious. I appreciate that. “I will personally scrub that porcelain until it shines. You can’t make me a marine no matter how hard you try.”

  Javier sounds like he’s suppressing a laugh when he replies. “Okay, okay, I know. Hey, I’ll be kind. I won’t even make you use a toothbrush to clean the place.”

  “Better than boot camp.”

  He lets a beat go by, and when he comes back, he’s serious. “You take care out there, my friend. And remember: you got people who care.”

  “I know,” I tell him. “So do you. In case you were wondering.”

  “I’m not the one in trouble. When I am, you’re my first call. Well, second. After Kez.”

  “Fair enough.”

  We sign off, and despite the worries, I do feel better. We aren’t hunted and alone.

  Well, not alone anyway.

  The road turns familiar. Norton’s the same sleepy place it always is, and then we’re past it on the road out to the lake. I glance over at the beach at Killing Rock as we pass it; someone’s made an effort to clean it up while we were gone. No debris that I can spot, though there’s a torn flutter of police tape still tied to a tree. It just reminds me that our troubles aren’t over.

  And I’m going to have to have a serious conversation with Lanny, as soon as we’re inside.

  As we pull to a stop in the driveway, my instincts wake up. I don’t even know why until I fix my gaze on Lanny’s bedroom window.

  It’s open about three inches, and a little flutter of sheer curtain is ruffling.

  Lanny’s yawning, and she and Connor are already bickering about who’s going to get the shower first when I say, “Quiet.”

  I get their instant and baffled attention. “Uh, sorry?” Lanny says. “Did you just tell us to shut up—”

  “Why is your window open?”

  I’m looking at her in the rearview mirror, and I see the exact second guilt hits her. She knows what I’m talking about, but she says, “I don’t know! Maybe somebody broke in?”

  “Without setting the alarm off.”

  She doesn’t answer that. I’ve already figured it out: she cut her window out of the alarm system. That’s how she got out the other night, and I should have realized that and fixed it before we left. Dammit. We were too distracted. And too worried about her.

  But I can see by her expression that sneaking out isn’t the whole story. I think about Javier’s call, the fact that she was with someone at the party. And I say, “Who’s inside our house, Lanny?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Yes, you do,” Connor says. “It’s probably Vee.”

  “Shut up, you traitor!” Lanny snaps.

  He shrugs. “Your fault,” he replies, and turns to me. “Vee’s been coming to the house.”

  “Vee Crockett,” I say. Jesus, Vee is one messed-up kid. I care about her, but . . . there’s no denying how much baggage she carries. She had problems even before her mom’s death, and I can’t imagine that made things better. I don’t want Lanny caught up in her drama. “You didn’t tell your mom about this either?”

  She just shakes her head.

  Dammit. I’m realizing this explains a lot. “Vee’s the reason you went to the party at Killing Rock.” It was well out of character for Lanny to do that; Vee instigating the whole thing makes perfect sense.

  No answer that time, but I’m sure I’m right. I’m not that old. I remember why I sneaked out to parties at that age, and it wasn’t just to hang out with my buddies. It was usually to impress girls.

  I keep going. “Lanny, you outright lied to the cops about being alone at the party. And to us. Was she up on that rock with you too?”

  “Vee didn’t do anything!”

  “Oh? And were you with her the whole time at the party?”

  She doesn’t say anything to that, which is an answer in itself. Vee tearing through a party, with Lanny chasing after. It’s incredibly worrying that Lanny’s covering up for her, when it’s Lanny’s ass on the line now.

  Connor’s still watching the open window. He says, “You shouldn’t go in there. What if it’s one of those Belldenes, not Vee?”

  He’s got a point, but I’m pretty certain that the Belldenes would have set off the alarm. They’re not subtle; they’d just put a boot through our front door, trash the place, and be gone before anyone arrived. And how would they even know the window was off the system?

  Still, he’s got a point. It isn’t as if we don’t have multiple threats coming our way. So I tell them to stay in the car. Lanny grips her cell phone in white-knuckled hands; she’ll call for help if it comes to that. I can count on her for that much, at least.

  I walk up to Lanny’s window and part the curtains to look inside.

  Vee Crockett is sitting on the edge of the bed staring at me, gripping a bat she’s grabbed up off the floor. She’s panicked and ready to swing. In Wolfhunter, she alternated between feral and traumatized. I can’t say this is miles better. “Easy, Vee. It’s just me. Sam Cade. Remember? I live here.”

  It takes her a second, but the bat gets lowered. She still hangs on to it. “Oh. You’re back,” she says. “I was asleep.” She looks it. Her heavy makeup is smeared, her hair’s a mess, and she seems completely hungover.

  “I’m coming in the front door,” I tell her. “Stay there. Don’t run; you’re not in trouble.”

  She doesn’t believe that; I can see it. I shut the window in case that will delay her a couple of seconds, go to the front door, unlock it, and type in the code as I step in. Then I move back to the window, where Vee has thrown out a dirty blue duffel bag and has one leg out to follow it. “Please don’t,” I tell her again. “We’re not your problem. Come in, take a shower, rest. It’s ok
ay.”

  She’s wary, but she’s also bone tired, I can see it. And scared. “Is Lanny here?”

  “Yeah.” I turn and gesture for the kids to come out of the SUV. They do, and both join me at the window.

  “Hey, Vee,” Connor says. “You look like hell.”

  “Nobody asked you,” she snaps back, but she’s looking at Lanny. And Lanny’s looking at her. And I know that expression. I get it myself from time to time when I see Gwen.

  Man, I really don’t need these two to be in love.

  “Inside,” I tell everybody. “We’ll get the bags later.” I head to Lanny’s window and pick up Vee’s duffel bag from the ground. “Except this one. This one goes into the living room with me.” Because I know she’s not going to abandon it. If she would have, she’d have run and left it behind when I gave her the shot.

  “Hey!” Vee protests, and makes a grab for the bag. I step back out of reach. She’s still half out the window, glaring.

  “Come on. I’ll make coffee.”

  I don’t know if it’s the promise of coffee or me hijacking her bag, but when I look back, she’s ducked back inside Lanny’s room and slammed the window. I’ve earned a few minutes of her time, at least. I’m sure that isn’t how Gwen would have done it, but I feel pretty sad for the kid. She’s had a shit life, and it looks like it hasn’t gotten much better since we left her in Wolfhunter.

  We get in. Coffee gets made. Lanny and Vee perch together on the sofa; I say perch because Vee looks like she’s ready to launch herself up to fight or run at any second. I recognize that bone-deep wariness. I see it in Gwen from time to time, and I know where it comes from.

  I keep it light and calm and easy. I make the coffee the way they ask for it—not for Connor; he gets hot cocoa—and make an offer of lunch once the coffee’s down. Vee looks less likely to bite and flee, and at the prospect of a home-cooked meal she has a moment of real longing. “Spaghetti’s easy,” I tell them. “Fifteen minutes.” That’s cutting corners, but I don’t feel like this is a situation where attention to the culinary details is going to be useful. Lanny’s gaze begs her to say yes, and Vee finally nods. Stiffly, like her neck’s a steel rod.