by Wes Markin
He stood in the water to his chest, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Was I supposed to start squealing?”
“Well, some form of compassion would be nice.”
“Why? If you’re stupid enough to drown yourself!”
“You’re heartless.”
“Or I’m just not like the women in those eighties horror movies you watch with your dad. I’m not turned on by macho men, and I don’t need you alive to keep me safe.”
He smiled.
“Now, fire in bone.”
“What about it?”
“What does it mean?”
“Come in and I’ll tell you.”
“For fuck’s sake.” She waded in and folded her arms tightly against her breasts. It did little to warm her, and she shivered as the water reached around her thighs. No way she would do this normally, but she’d only recently started to have sex. Parker had assured her that sex in the water was the best thing ever, and she didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to try it out. “Is this the same spot you brought Sandra to?” It was dark, so Scarlett couldn’t be sure if he blushed, but she suspected he did.
Sandra was his ex-girlfriend and Scarlett’s ex-best friend.
“No.” Parker brushed his long hair out of his eyes and pointed at the bridge that connected Blue Falls to Sharon’s Edge. “There’s a patch under that bridge that’s real quiet too.”
“You want to fuck there tomorrow night?” She wrapped her arms around him and was unsurprised and happy to feel his erection pressing into her thigh.
He kissed her neck.
“Now, fire in bone. What does it mean?”
He carried on kissing her.
She pulled backward, and he rolled his eyes. “I thought everybody knew this!”
She broke from his embrace and edged away. She was shivering quite hard but still managed to get her words out. “Clearly not everyone, shithead. Now, what the fuck does it mean?”
He waded toward her.
She smiled. The erection she’d felt under the water had shown he was ready, but she saw it just as clearly on his face. New to sex, she was really enjoying the education. Lust was interesting. It weighed so heavily on her, but yet also made her feel so light and happy when addressed.
“The Abenaki believe a fire burns deep inside us all.”
She stopped and allowed him to approach. She let her hand close around his erection. “It’s definitely burning in you.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “They believed the waters of the Skweda would best show you how to use that fire.”
“Then how’re you going to use your fire?” She stroked the end of his erection over her thigh, moved it gently toward her crotch, and lifted her leg up his side.
He moaned over the promise of what was coming. He leaned in to kiss her again, but she yanked away, laughed, spun onto her front, and swam farther into the river. “What are you doing to me?”
She turned, treading water. “Stoking the fire!”
“Very funny.”
“I want you burning hot.”
“I am. And your attempts at stand-up comedy are failing miserably.”
“Come and get me then!” She raised her hands in the air and let herself sink under the surface. Unsurprisingly, it was pitch black under there, but it didn’t bother her. Cold had always been the issue for her, not darkness. The swim had helped though, and she almost had the shivering under control. She swam around the silent darkness, holding her breath, enjoying the sudden deprivation of senses. Eventually, when she broke the surface, she whooped.
“Keep it down,” Parker said, who had swum out to join her.
“Why? No one’s here!” She whooped again. “You were under the bridge with Sandra! We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“Still—"
“Still nothing.” She dove under again and swam down a couple feet. She still couldn’t see anything but could sense Parker’s body close as he swam with her now. She reached out and stroked part of him, then turned and kicked hard with her hands extended to see if she could touch the bottom, although she had no idea how far away that was.
Her hand brushed against Parker again.
She reached in the darkness, searching for his hand. When she found it, she clutched it and—
She reeled backward. Terrified that the sudden impact of adrenaline would send her spiralling into the emptiness, she bolted for the surface and shouted Parker’s name when she broke through.
“What?” Parker asked from several feet away.
“A hand. I touched someone’s—something’s—hand. It was small and cold, and hard. I think it was bone.”
“Nice try.”
“I’m fucking serious.”
“Jesus!” Parker’s eyes widened, and he pointed to her right. “What’s that?”
Shivering again, and not from the cold this time, Scarlett turned in the water. The smooth surface of a skull bumped against the top of her breast. She shoved the skeleton and screamed.
In this moment, lying among the tangled sheets with Piper Goodwin and still catching his breath, did Jake Pettman dare to feel optimistic? He was all too aware of how influential the chemicals in the brain could be. He’d experienced these rushes before—first with Lacey Ray, and then with his ex-wife, Sheila. And look what happened on both of those occasions. Yes, it was all too easy to ride that train of euphoria and buy into the false belief that things would turn out just great.
“Thoughts?” Piper asked, reaching up and stroking his face.
“Trying to avoid them.” Jake ran his fingers down her damp midsection. “The most perfect moments don’t need them.”
She laughed. “I’ve either stumbled on the most romantic tourist or the most peculiar. Jury is still out on that one.”
“So, I’m still just a tourist?”
“It takes more than a couple months in Blue Falls to lose that tag, even if you did help restore order to the place.”
Jake looked away. Only two other people knew he’d been forced to pull a trigger on someone to make that happen, and neither of them were in the room right now. “I barely did a thing.”
She turned his head to face her. “Besides, it’s what you’ve contributed since then, in the last few months, that I value.”
She was, of course, referring to the support he’d given her after she had discovered that Jotham MacLeoid, the man Jake had ended, had actually been her father. Discovering you were descended from such a vicious man would destroy most people.
“Don’t credit me with that.”
She shook her head. “You helped me through it. You’re a good man.”
He blushed. And there it was again. That contentment. A sense that maybe, just maybe, he was getting another chance at happiness. “Maybe we can drop the tourist for a day or two to see how it feels?”
Piper made a show of looking around the tiny room. “Jake, you’re still living in a motel.”
Jake shrugged. “I’ve grown quite attached to it.”
“Have you grown attached to the cockroaches too?”
Jake laughed. “Not so much. Just the price, really.”
“Until your medical bills explode. Which they will if you stay in this hole too much longer.”
Jake removed some photographs from the bedside table and handed them to her.
“What are these?”
He shrugged again. “Because I love you.”
She fell silent while she processed these words. It was the first time he’d said them, after all.
He was tense while waiting for the response but was unsurprised when it came.
“And I love you too. So, what are they?”
“They’re of my son, Frank. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” He took a deep breath.
“How old is he?”
“Five.” He could feel the tears threaten.
She kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for telling me.” She sat upright and looked through the photo
graphs.
He watched her and observed the collision of his two lives: the old and the new.
“Beautiful,” she said, looking at a photograph of Frank in a football shirt.
“Very. It’s Southampton FC.”
“Never heard of them. I was talking about your boy.” She smiled at Jake “He looks just like you.”
“Yes, I fear for him.”
She stroked his chest. “He’s a lucky man.”
I hope so. He’ll need all the luck he can get, descended from me. “There’s something else …” Jake paused and ran a hand through his hair. “I was lost for a time, Piper. And then … And then I became involved with … I …”
She stroked his chest. “If it’s not the time …”
“It’s the time. It would always be hard to say—"
Piper’s cellphone rang. “Ignore it.”
“Answer it. This can wait.” Because the story of Paul Conway, the poor boy caught in that car explosion because of my involvement with cruel people, will always be there.
She reached for her cellphone and checked the name on the screen. “Hi, Sadie. Everything okay?”
Jake was certain he could hear crying.
“Slow down. A child?”
Jake sat upright.
As the conversation wound on, Piper’s expression darkened considerably. “That’s awful.”
Jake edged closer to Piper to try to hear Sadie speaking.
“Drive to my parents’, honey,” Piper said. “I’ll meet you there.” After the phone call, Piper turned to Jake. “That was one of my best friends. She’s panicked. It’s awful, Jake. They’ve found a body in the Skweda.”
Jake took Piper’s hand. “A child?”
Piper nodded.
“How did she find out?”
“Driving back from work, she saw police vehicles in the road running alongside a small patch of woodland beside the river. When she got home, she called Tom, one of her close friends. He’s a police officer here.”
Jake rolled his eyes. “One of Gabriel Jewell’s finest, no doubt. Relaying the events at a crime scene to a civilian, for pity’s sake! Is anything done right in Blue Falls? Do they know who the child is?”
“I don’t think so. The body is old. It’s rotted. Jesus, this is awful.”
“Anything else?” Jake asked, climbing out of bed.
“No. Where’re you going?”
“Drop me a pin on a Google map where Sadie saw the vehicles and text it to me.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
He turned and raised an eyebrow.
“And ridiculous!”
Jake shrugged. “I just want a look for myself.”
“Why? No! Actually, save it. I don’t want that ‘once police, always police’ bullshit.”
“Text it over please. It’s a flying visit, I promise. I’ll hang back. I just want to see if I can catch a word with Lillian, or even Gabriel himself. You know what they’re like; they may need whatever help they can get.”
She sighed and grabbed her cell to text him the map. “Sadie’s worried. I’m meeting her at Mom and Dad’s to calm her down.”
“Good idea.” Jake nodded. “I’ll call you if I find out anything else.”
2
THE CHIEF OF the Blue Falls Police Department, Gabriel Jewell, hadn’t been surprised with the rapid response from the Maine State Police, nor had he been surprised when the Major Crimes Unit had contacted him immediately to issue a hands-off order on the body. They would see Gabriel’s department as a dangerous entity—a potential source of evidence contamination and a hinderance—rather than a catalyst toward the truth.
Just shy of two hours later, the suited-and-booted Lieutenant Louise Price, tall and black, with energetic eyes, and hair pulled tightly into a bun, burst onto the scene, and Gabriel had been relegated to a gofer.
The first task Louise had given him had been to take detailed statements from the two young lovers who had unearthed the body, Scarlett and Parker. The lieutenant had made it sound like a crucial task, but was it? Really? The kids had gone skinny dipping in the Skweda—as thousands of young people before them had over the years—had dislodged an old body, which had then floated to the surface. Despite the shock, Parker had demonstrated some responsibility in pulling the skeleton to the bank rather than allow it to float downstream. That was it, really. It didn’t matter how detailed the statements, there was nothing more to know.
Gabriel wrapped up the interview as quickly as he could. He thrust his notepad into his pocket and waved over Tom Wright, one of his younger officers who had bought into this recent trend of neatly clipped hair combined with excessive unkempt facial hair. He instructed him to see the skinny-dippers got home safely after their shock.
He crossed the road, weaving around the many vehicles. He hadn’t seen so many vehicles at a police incident in his career; his world was one of domestic abuse, DUIs, and petty theft. This wasn’t Gabriel’s first body, of course, but it was the first one that wasn’t a drunken lowlife with a rap sheet longer than his arm.
The medical examiner had already suggested that the body belonged to a young girl between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. The same age as Collette when she disappeared.
Gabriel was yet to see the body.
He maneuvered through a layer of oak trees and emerged on the sandy bank of the Skweda. He looked left then right and noticed the trees jutted farther onto the banks in those directions, hiding this little patch and providing an oasis for the horny teenager, as well as the murderer who wished to drown a victim or dispose of a body.
Portable lights that worked off one main generator had been set up. The medical examiner, with a white oversuit clinging to his portly frame, was using tweezers to pull evidence from the remains. After sliding samples into small plastic bags, he would hold them up with a gloved hand to his assistant, who would scribble on the bag and slide it carefully into a backpack.
Lieutenant Louise Price stood alone at the water’s edge, staring at the distant, twinkling lights of Sharon’s Edge, one of Blue Falls’ two neighboring towns.
Nearer to Gabriel, whispering to one another, were two of Louise’s officers. When one of them laughed, it forced Gabriel’s top lip into a curl.
“What have you found out?” Gabriel called to Louise.
He expected her to turn. She didn’t. Even her two officers ignored him and continued to whisper.
The ME looked in his direction and gave a sharp, asthmatic cough, which made his facemask billow. “Her neck was broken. I suspect this is what killed the poor girl. I hope they did it before they removed her teeth.”
Gabriel took a deep breath. “What?”
“She had no teeth.” The ME pointed at the skull. “They look like they’ve been pulled clean out.”
“How long has she been under the water?”
“Too soon to say without testing. A long time.”
“Thirty years?”
“It’s possible.”
Louise called out without turning, “Why do you ask, Chief Jewell?”
Because that was when Collette disappeared. Gabriel prepared an alternate answer, but the lie he formulated died in his throat when a frogman broke the lake’s surface. Shielding his eyes from the sharp glow of the frogman’s headtorch, Gabriel marveled over the resources available to the Maine State Police at a moment’s notice.
The frogman tore out an oxygen regulator, and a deep female voice rose from the black river. “I found a small holdall loaded with rocks. A rope’s tied to its handle. At the end of the rope is a small noose, a perfect fit for a child’s ankle.”
The ME coughed. “Makes sense. The noose would have lost its grip on the ankle as it decomposed. That teenager swimming could have accidently jolted the victim’s remains, causing the foot to slip clean through.”
Gabriel took several steps toward the ME and the body. He didn’t expect to know if it was his sister or not, but now was the time for him to take his
first look. He felt a cold tightening in his chest.
The skeleton’s rags were a familiar dark blue.
“Is there a school badge on that clothing?”
Louise turned. “You can see that from there, Chief?”
No, he couldn’t, but he could sense its presence. It was becoming more and more like a vicious nightmare he couldn’t wake from.
The ME eyed him. “Yes. Blue Falls High School.”
Whipped by sudden nausea, Gabriel stumbled backward.
The ME coughed again. This time, he couldn’t stop himself, so he unhooked his facemask and let it dangle. “Sorry …” he coughed again. “Pollen must be high here.”
His assistant handed him an inhaler.
He sucked back the steroid.
Gabriel steadied himself against a tree. Collette.
One of Louise’s officers, Ewan Taylor, put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Gabriel brushed it off. “Don’t touch me.”
“Easy,” Ewan said. “Just trying to help.”
Gabriel shoved him.
The officer stumbled backward into his colleague’s arms.
“Don’t fucking touch me. Did you not hear?”
“Loud and clear, Chief.”
“Quit it.” Louise said, coming up alongside her officers but fixating on Gabriel. “Show some respect to this poor child.”
“Yes,” Ewan said, staring at Gabriel with narrowed eyes.
Louise faced her officers. “All of you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they both said.
Gabriel stepped backward toward Louise, who eyed him warily. “Her name is Collette, ma’am. She disappeared in nineteen ninety.”
“And you know this because of the school uniform?”
“Yes …” He looked down. “Among other things.”
Louise stepped forward so they were now barely a yard apart.
He looked back, noting that she was almost as tall as him. He wasn’t used to it, especially in the other gender.
“What other things?” Louise asked.
He felt like melting to the ground, but he also felt some overwhelming anger toward these aliens on his patch, so he used that adrenaline to remain dignified. “She’s my sister, and if you tell me to show respect around her body again, you’ll have to restrain me.”
