Paradise Falls

by Jacobs, Jonnie

  Back in her car, Rayna called the DA’s office and was patched through to McKenna.

  “You wanted a body,” she told him. “Looks like you may have it.” She relayed what she knew about the female corpse in the river. “No positive ID yet, but indications are that it’s Caitlin Whittington.”

  “Any signs of foul play?”

  “What, you think she went swimming in the river?”

  “I meant, any details about how it happened?”

  “The body’s so mangled I’m not sure even the coroner will get that kind of information.”

  “Christ!”

  “So, do you have enough?”

  “Enough?”

  “To charge Adam Peterson.”

  “I need to look at the evidence before making a decision. But this does change things.”

  ~~~~

  At home, Rayna showered again. She washed the muck and cold from her body, but the sorrow wasn’t so easily flushed away. She knew she should call Paul Nesbitt and apologize for her quick dismissal of his invitation earlier that evening, but she wasn’t up to it. He’d want to know what had happened. He’d ask how she was feeling and probably offer to come rub her feet or something. Paul sometimes wore her down, even when he tried to be accommodating.

  Rayna realized the person she really wanted to talk to was Neal Cody. Not because of his forensic expertise but simply because she wanted to hear his voice. The expertise was a good excuse, however. She made herself a cup of hot chocolate, laced it with brandy, and placed the call. When she got the answering machine, she left a quick, businesslike message. The strength of her disappointment surprised her.

  She wondered how Grace was doing. Horribly was a given, but how was she handling it? Would Carl try to comfort her or was the rift between them too deep? Rayna recalled the look in Grace’s eyes. Denial and acceptance blending in an agonizing comprehension that this was the moment she’d been dreading.

  Rayna knew how painful that moment was. She’d lived it herself. And then lived it over again in her mind more times than she could count.

  It had been a summer evening and she’d been washing dishes. The scent of lemon soap was in the air. She had the radio tuned to a country-western station and Waylon and Willie had been warning mothers about the perils of letting their sons grow up to be cowboys. She’d actually been singing along.

  For months Rayna had known in her head that Kimberly was most likely dead, but knowing something in your head was different than knowing it in your heart. The sound of the doorbell hadn’t registered at first. It was only when a knocking followed that she realized she had a visitor. But when she ushered in the two detectives from county, she knew what they’d come to tell her before they opened their mouths.

  The body found in a nearby cistern was her daughter’s.

  Blackness darker than any night cut her vision. The roar of the ocean thundered in her ears. Her throat and lungs were on fire. The two detectives, both men, tried to be kind but they weren’t able to hide their discomfort. She’d barely listened to their words of sympathy, so eager had she been for them to leave. She’d practically pushed them out the door so that she could be alone with her grief.

  No, tonight would not be easy for Grace.

  Chapter 37

  Adam was in the kitchen scooping out a bowl of rocky road ice cream when his father phoned. Although he picked up, his dad insisted that Lucy get on the extension as well. That’s when he knew it was going to be bad.

  “The police were just here,” his father told them. His voice had wavered and he stopped to clear his throat. “They’ve found a body. In the river. They think it might be Caitlin.”

  A fire burned in the pit of Adam’s stomach. He swallowed hard and could think of nothing to say. On the other extension, Lucy tossed off questions, her voice growing more and more hysterical with each one. Where did they find her? What do they think happened? How did she die?

  “I don’t know, honey. They’ll tell us when they know more. I just wanted you to hear it from me first. I’m sure it will be in the papers by tomorrow.” His father seemed unsure what to do next. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked them.

  Lucy whimpered. Adam could hear her mewls and sniffles over the phone line. “Yeah, we’ll be fine,” he said, speaking for both of them.

  “It’s such devastating news. I don’t know . . .” His father’s voice sounded like it was short on air. “I’d like to be there with you but Grace needs me, too.”

  “Of course,” Adam said, although he didn’t see that it was really that clear-cut at all. “I’ll take care of Lucy.”

  When he hung up, he dumped the bowl of ice cream into the sink.

  ~~~~

  Lucy cried off and on for the remainder of the evening. Adam tried to console her but gave up when it became apparent she enjoyed her heartache.

  Mom took a more practical approach. “Yes, it’s terrible news,” she said. “But hardly unexpected.” She sat with Lucy for a bit, patting her shoulder and telling her that life was sometimes unpleasant but that wounds healed with time, then retired to her bed to watch TV.

  Before going off to bed himself, Adam looked in on Lucy one last time. She was curled in a ball in the middle of her mattress.

  “Luce?”

  “What?”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  She untangled herself and shook her head. “It’s like, real now.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Adam swallowed against the dry lump in his throat. “Will you be all right tonight?”

  “I’ll live.”

  Adam wondered if she’d chosen her words intentionally.

  He went to his own room and lay down in bed. But he didn’t sleep. He spent the long hours of the night trying to imagine what it felt like to be dead.

  ~~~~

  Whatever flickering embers of hope Grace harbored were abruptly extinguished when Detective Godwin again showed up at their door a little after midnight.

  “It was Caitlin?” Grace spoke without preliminaries, her mouth so dry she had trouble forming the words.

  “I’m afraid so,” the detective told her softly.

  Grace’s heart stood still. It was already so filled with sorrow, she’d thought there wasn’t room for more, but she was wrong.

  “I’m so sorry,” Detective Godwin said.

  Grace nodded. She couldn’t find her voice to speak. The room seemed to tilt.

  Carl put his arms around her and held her tight, steadying her. “Thank you, detective,” he said gruffly. “For coming here at this hour to tell us personally.”

  Carl continued to hold Grace as he led her to bed. He kissed her tears and shed his own. But there was no comfort to be had.

  ~~~~

  Grace stared into the black night while Carl snored fitfully beside her. The sleeping pill he’d insisted she take had given her a couple of hours sleep, but even then she hadn’t been able to escape the heavy ache of loss. She’d been hoping to dream of Caitlin, to savor the joy of seeing her daughter alive again, however fleetingly and illusorily. But that hadn’t happened. Her dreams were not the welcome flights of forgetfulness, only the weighty shackles of anguish she dragged with her from wakefulness.

  Silent tears slid down her cheeks to her pillow. Dear God, where would she find the strength to continue living?

  Chapter 38

  Planning a funeral wasn’t something Grace wanted to deal with, but Jake pointed out that it needed to be done. He picked Grace up at home and they drove to the mortuary together. Now she was seated near him in a chair covered in crushed red velvet, a fabric she found particularly inappropriate for the circumstances. Across the darkly varnished table sat the funeral director, a jowly man named Mr. Culbert.

  Jake’s brow creased with intensity as he studied the thick, white leather binder Culbert had handed them moments earlier. The muscles in Jake’s jaw twitched and his mouth was grim, but he took his time, turning the pages one by one.

  Grace
couldn’t look. Instead, she stared at the ornately carved wooden door that led to the main lobby, as though she could will herself back out through the lobby and into Jake’s car. She shivered. The room was as chilled as a wine cellar. She didn’t want to be here—not today, not ever. She wanted to pretend the detective’s visit had never happened. She wanted to believe that Caitlin was alive. If only she could turn back the clock, undo these last few weeks.

  “Are you thinking plain white for the casket?” Mr. Culbert asked. “Or perhaps something with pink trim?”

  Grace’s heart flew into a panic. She needed to escape, to run away and hide. She should have told Jake no. She should have refused to come. What was the rush anyway? While her instinct was to flee and hide her head in the sand, Jake’s method of coping with adversity was to grab the reins. And that’s what he’d done, setting up the appointment without even consulting her.

  Jake turned to Grace. “What do you think?”

  Tears welled in her eyes. “Caitlin hated pink.”

  “White,” Jake said decisively. “And simple. None of these curlicues or cherubs.”

  Over the years of their marriage, Grace had often resented Jake’s propensity to take charge, and while she felt railroaded into this afternoon’s meeting, she was grateful to Jake for leading the way. She could not have done it without him.

  As if he’d read her mind, Jake reached for her hand and squeezed it reassuringly.

  Grace listened as if in a dream while Culbert guided them like lost children through the unfamiliar wilderness of planning a child’s funeral. Did they have a preference for music? Or verse? Did they want to address the mourners themselves?

  Jake considered each question, weighing it like a purchase of precious metal. Then he’d look to Grace for guidance. At first, the questions barely registered with her. This wasn’t a wedding or a graduation or even a sixteenth birthday. Caitlin was dead. What did it matter?

  But her daughter’s memory did matter. It was all that Grace had left.

  “This arrangement for the top of the casket,” Grace said, pointing to a photograph of freesias and peonies in shades of white. “And these standing sprays of wildflowers bracketing the casket.” Caitlin had loved wildflowers.

  “And these,” Jake said. “Baskets of lavender. Lots of them”

  ~~~~

  They left the funeral home without speaking. Without touching. Yet Grace felt Jake’s strength in a way she hadn’t in years. Carl had done and said all the right things last night. He’d held her and comforted her and shed tears of genuine sorrow himself, but Grace understood that Carl’s grief was balanced against his more deeply felt distress about Adam. Carl cared about Caitlin, but Jake was the one who cared about her in the same way Grace did, which was ironic since Grace used to accuse him of not caring enough.

  “You want to get a cup of coffee or something?” Jake asked when they reached the car.

  “I don’t think I . . . I’m not really . . .”

  “No, me either. But I can’t just go on with my day. Not yet.” He gripped the steering wheel. “Remember Caitlin’s first bath?” he asked, turning to Grace with damp eyes. “We set that white plastic tub up on the kitchen table. She was so tiny, I was scared to death I’d hurt her. Or that we’d traumatize her forever.”

  “I was scared, too, sure I’d do it all wrong. Bathing a baby seemed such a momentous undertaking when I read about it in those baby books. But Caitlin made it easy. Do you remember the expression on her face when you set her in the warm water? She seemed to enjoy being bathed, even in the beginning.”

  “I remember I used to dribble the water from the washcloth over her belly. She loved that. She’d coo and laugh like she was on top of the world. And those eyes! Remember how she’d look at us with those big wide eyes, so focused. Like we were the only thing in the world that mattered.”

  “We were,” Grace said with a sadness that was suffocating. She’d accepted the weight of that responsibility in a way that now seemed almost naive. It was only looking back that Grace could fully appreciate what a profound undertaking parenthood was.

  “Well,” Jake said, starting the engine. “I’ll take you home then.”

  Home. A place where old memories and present tensions were waging a battle that left Grace unable to breathe.

  “On second thought,” she said, “maybe a cup of coffee isn’t a bad idea.”

  ~~~~

  Since the moment of his father’s call, Adam had known it was only a matter of time before the police would want to talk to him again. So when his attorney and his father showed up at the house the next afternoon, he was only mildly surprised.

  “I’ve got nothing more to tell them,” Adam said, flopping down into the leather recliner his mother usually claimed for herself. But she wasn’t home yet and despite the tone of casual indifference he’d managed to pull off, he wasn’t sure he trusted his legs to hold him up. “They’re wasting their time asking me the same stuff over and over.”

  Sandman cleared his throat and took a seat catty-corner from Adam, on one end of the couch. “It’s not that they want to talk to you, son. There’s another warrant out for your arrest.”

  “My arrest?” Adam’s throat closed. He sat upright. “Can they do that? I mean, they tried that once before.”

  “But now they have a body. It’s officially a homicide. We talked about this, remember? About how being released didn’t mean it was over?”

  Sandman had explained it. So had his dad. But Adam hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  “I’ve arranged for you to turn yourself in tomorrow,” Sandman said. “Voluntary surrender. No flashing lights or rides in the back of a police car this time.”

  “We’ll both be right there with you,” his father added, coming to Adam’s side and draping a protective arm around his shoulders.

  Right there with him. What a laugh. They’d be with him when he turned himself in. But not after that when the cops searched him and watched him shower and hauled him off to his cell like some disgusting piece of garbage. Once he was taken into police custody, he’d be alone.

  “What if I don’t go?”

  “You have to,” Sandman said. “It will be a whole lot worse for you if they have to track you down. And they will do that.”

  Adam thought he’d been mentally preparing for this possibility. It was staggering how unprepared he actually was. He could feel uncontrollable trembling begin deep in his bones.

  “How long before I can get out on bail?”

  Sandman looked at his father then back to Adam. “There won’t be any bail, Adam. Not in this case. You’ll have to stay there.”

  “Until trial,” his father added quickly. “The prosecutor has to prove you did this. They can’t send you to prison without proof.”

  Prison. Images from every bleak movie Adam had ever seen about life behind bars flooded his brain.

  “We’ll put on a strong case, Adam. I can promise you that.”

  Adam’s mouth felt so dry, he had trouble speaking. “And if the jury believes the prosecutor instead of you?”

  Sandman’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Let’s not worry about that now.”

  Adam turned to look at his father whose hollow eyes and slack expression mirrored the raging fear inside Adam.

  “Do you have any questions?” Sandman asked.

  Adam shook his head. He had hundreds of questions but they weren’t the kind Sandman was talking about.

  “Fine. Your dad and I will pick you up tomorrow morning at eleven. I’ve arranged for us to go in through a rear door to evade the media.” Sandman held out a hand, then reconsidered and placed it on Adam’s shoulder instead. “I know this is tough, Adam. But it’s going to turn out okay.”

  His dad stayed a little longer, but it was awkward and uncomfortable for both of them. His father made stabs at conversation, offering reassuring platitudes, trying to deflect the rank fear they both felt with mundane talk of sports and movies. Adam couldn�
�t respond to any of it. He couldn’t concentrate. There was buzzing inside his head that wouldn’t stop. Finally he told his dad he needed to be alone. He lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling.

  He was going back to jail. Maybe for a long, long time. It was terrifying and yet unreal.

  Jail. Then prison. Forever.

  Adam walked to the window and looked out. The sky was a dreary gray, the trees bare. Wind gusts swirled debris across the yard. Everyday common events and suddenly very precious. The thought of being locked away sent Adam into a state of panic.

  His father had tried to be encouraging. “Sandman’s got a good reputation,” he’d said. “They have to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.” He offered words of strength and love. He hugged Adam. But he never once professed an unwavering conviction in Adam’s innocence.

  If his own dad thought he might be capable of hurting Caitlin, how could he expect a jury to believe any differently?

  ~~~~

  Lucy got hysterical when she heard that Adam was headed back to jail. His mother, closed-lipped and rigid. But he saw real tears in her eyes. He couldn’t recall ever seeing her cry before.

  He barely touched his dinner and went up to his room right after. He knew what he had to do but he wanted a little time to say goodbye first.

  This had been his room for seventeen years. His crib had been over there in the corner. He didn’t remember it, of course, but he’d seen photographs in his baby album. A big poster of colorful balloons had hung on the wall above the changing table. When Lucy was born, the crib went into her room and he got a “big boy” bed, the same bed Adam slept in now, despite the fact that his feet hung over the end. He had a desk instead of a changing table, and a new dresser because the top drawers on the old one had fallen apart when he was twelve. Probably because he’d hung his backpack from them.

  He’d suffered embarrassments and longings in this room, worries and frustrations. But also moments of jubilation and gratification. A lifetime of memories. His memories. He wondered what his mom would do with his room when he was gone.