And so he told her everything. She listened without interrupting. When he got to the part about the attacker with the stun gun he watched her carefully. No skepticism on her face, but it occurred to him that she might be doing the same thing she’d done when listening to Frank’s pyramid scheme.
“You don’t believe me,” he said when he’d finished.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know, but Lieutenant Stiles didn’t believe me.”
“That’s because you already jerked his chain once,” Becca said.
“And because when it came out I almost didn’t believe it myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if Frank had told me. This is Vermont. Stuff like that doesn’t happen here.”
Becca opened her desk. “Look what I found.” She tossed an employee badge on the desk. “Rosa’s. Found it in the snow. Looked like an imprint of a body, but the snow has melted a bit, so it’s hard to tell for sure. And she might have just tripped and lost it in the snow.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t know. I did a minute ago.”
He picked up the badge. Rosa was an attractive girl with chestnut hair and dark eyes. She became suddenly real. “You should go to the police.”
“You know what? Saul Cage, our administrator, already called them last week, on my insistence. I didn’t think anything had happened, but you know, someone disappears in the middle of their shift and you want to be sure. The police went to Rosa’s apartment. Said she left a bunch of stuff, but they didn’t see anything suspicious. They checked out her social security number, figured out it was fake, and wrote her off as an illegal who packed up and went home.”
“Lieutenant Stiles didn’t tell me that,” Wes said, feeling irritated.
“Why should he? It’s not his job to tell you everything he knows. Especially not when he thinks you’re a loose cannon.”
“Is that what you think about me?”
“You’re a cannon, but not loose. Fixed down at all times and blasting away at distant objects. This thing about your brother. I swear there’s nothing sinister going on. I’ve been here long enough to know that kind of stuff is typical. That it happened more than once is just bad luck. Sorry.” She shrugged. “But it doesn’t mean you’re wrong about Rosa or that you’re making up stuff about someone attacking you or what you heard your mom say on the phone.”
“Well, thanks for that, I guess. But I’ve got to know, do you think I’m onto something or not?”
She looked at him without speaking, as if mulling it over. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “Yeah, maybe. I can half convince myself you made up that you were attacked—not saying you did—but Rosa’s badge, the expensive apartment…”
“Then you do believe me.”
“But why you? That’s the part that doesn’t make sense. You don’t know Rosa.”
“It’s Eric, I tell you,” Wes said. “It’s the only connection I have to Riverwood.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Question is, what now? We’re not going to get anywhere with the police. Saul Cage is an idiot in the non-clinical sense of the word. He won’t help us. You said you’d talked to Carolina and Yamila?”
“I did. They were hostile at first, but I think they believe me now. Maybe they’ve got a good explanation for how she afforded that apartment. If not, maybe we can figure out how to get hold of Rosa’s family.”
“That’s another connection, isn’t it?” Becca said. “That Costa Rica thing that set off Carolina and Yamila. How big is this gulf place you were talking about?”
“The Golfo Dulce? I don’t know. Twenty thousand people on the peninsula side maybe. Not that big. I guess there’s a chance I know someone who knows Rosa. Maybe someone else was thinking the same thing as Carolina and Yamila. That I knew her somehow. And they’re trying to scare me off.”
“I like your idea of tracking down Rosa’s family,” Becca said. “I might be able to dig up something, too. I’ve got access to employee records. And maybe there’s an incident report with Rosa’s name on it.”
“Can you show me where you found Rosa’s badge?” Wes asked. “We should have a look just in case anything else fell off.”
Becca shut down her computer and gathered her papers into a stack. She locked the door behind them as they left her office. They made their way through the darkened lounge and dining room and into the west resident wing. Two men came down the hallway toward them. One wore a lab coat and the other was dressed in a business suit.
“Dr. Pardo,” Becca said, sounding surprised. “You’re here late.”
And to his surprise, Wes knew the man in the suit. “Uncle Bill.”
“Hey, Wes. Your mom said you’d got a job here. Not going to law school anymore?”
“I’ve got a lighter course load this semester. I’m working on a special project. What are you doing here?”
Uncle Bill said, “Your mom wanted me to take a look at Eric. She said you were worried something was happening to your brother. You were so insistent she started to second guess herself.”
Bill Carter was the youngest of the three Carters. He’d never married; Wes’s father joked that Bill’s bride was Northrock. Or maybe just his lover. Because men sometimes tired of their wives, but Bill continued to shower the company with time and attention. In that way, Wes supposed, his uncle had inherited something from Grandpa Carter.
The thing was, Ellen Carter had become estranged from her father and her brother, Bill over something to do with the company. Uncle Davis had tried to bring his brother and sister together again after Grandpa died, but now Davis was dead, too, and as far as Wes knew, his mother and uncle dealt with each other only so far as necessary. Strange that she’d have asked him to take a look. She must be more worried than she’d let on.
“Well, thanks,” Wes said. “I appreciate that.”
“No problem. I meant to stop in earlier, but we’re bidding to pour on a nuclear reactor in Upstate New York and I’m up to my eyeballs in paperwork. Doctor Pardo and I just looked in on Eric.” Uncle Bill gave a sympathetic shake of the head. “Wes, he looks alright to me.”
“I didn’t see anything, either,” Dr. Pardo said. He spoke with a slight accent. “We read the incident report. Very straightforward, Mr. Pilson. And whenever I’ve seen your brother, he seems happy to be here.”
“That’s what I keep telling him,” Becca said. She looked at Dr. Pardo. “Did you sign him in?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay, thanks. Don’t forget to sign him out, too. Saul has been on my case lately about that.”
“I will.”
As the two men started past Wes and Becca in the other direction, Uncle Bill said, “For what it’s worth, it’s a good thing you’re doing. Doesn’t look like anything is wrong here, but I can totally see why you’d want to be sure. If you can fit it in with school, so much the better.”
“So you’re not the only one thinking about Eric,” Becca said and she and Wes continued down the west wing. “Hope you’re feeling better about all that.”
But Wes was still frowning in confusion. “Totally doesn’t make sense. Why the hell would she call Uncle Bill?”
“Second opinion, sounds like. You freaked out, got her freaked out.”
“You don’t understand. My grandpa cut my mom off from the family when she married my father. Even after my grandpa died, my uncle didn’t want anything to do with her. Only got worse after Uncle Davis died—he was the peacemaker of the family.”
“Your grandpa. That’s the rich guy?”
“Yeah, founded Northrock. Elwin Carter. The guy the engineering building at UVM is named after.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Becca said. “There still a lot of money in the family?”
“You could say that. Not much in our withered branch. My mom sold most of her stock to her brothers to fund my dad’s adventures. Grandpa never gave her any more. After Grandpa died, things were better for awhile. We used th
e family beach house in Costa Rica.”
“Maybe things are changing,” Becca said. “Your uncle obviously cares about Eric.”
“He barely knows my brother. Most of the time, Eric didn’t even come with us to Costa Rica. Probably hasn’t even seen Eric in five years.”
She turned as she pushed open the door. “You sure about that? Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen him here.”
And now Wes was really confused. He couldn’t think of any reason for his uncle to visit Eric. It occurred to him that he wasn’t the only one in his family with a connection to Costa Rica. Could this have something to do with Rosa Solorio?
They kicked around in the snow where Becca found Rosa’s employee badge. “I’m still thinking, I don’t know, that she just fell down,” Becca said. “We’re not just taking a bunch of unrelated things and mashing them together in a conspiracy, are we?”
“Someone attacked me, remember?” He shook his head. “No way I’m going to let that go.”
“Yeah, well don’t get yourself killed,” Becca said. “At least not until after state certification.”
“Thank you for your concern.”
She met his eyes, and gone was the teasing tone, replaced by a serious set to her eyes and mouth. “Okay, now I’m serious, Wes. Be careful.”
Chapter Eight:
Wes entered the security code and the gates glided open. The valley-facing bank of lights from the Vail-style lodge lit up the hillside above him. Faux-gas lamps blinked on automatically ahead of the car, then shut off as he passed. A twelve foot fieldstone retaining wall shored up the left side of the lane. On the right, a sweeping view toward the village of Stowe.
His tires crunched gravel as he pulled in front of the house and automatic lights lit up the porch. Somewhat self-consciously, he parked his ten-year old Civic between a Cadillac Escalade and an Audi convertible and stepped out. It was impossible not to turn toward the village in the valley below before approaching the doors. The property commanded a fantastic view of the white spire of the church and the brick and clapboard buildings along Main Street. Must look even better in the day when you could see the forests and mountains. It had turned cold again, and even though it was supposed to snow later in the weekend, he could hear the roar of the ski resort’s snow guns, getting a jump on mother nature.
Wes walked between the log columns that supported the porch and rang the bell. His aunt opened the door seconds later.
“Wes!” she said, embracing him. “Come in.”
“Thanks, Aunt Charlotte.”
“Oh, god. Charlotte, please. That aunt stuff makes me sound so old.”
Charlotte looked anything but old. Wes thought she’d been a good fifteen years younger than his Uncle Davis when they married. That made her, what? Mid-thirties now? But if he’d run into her on the street he’d have thought her in her late twenties. Petite, bursting with energy, like someone who has downed one too many coffees, and frankly, pretty damn hot. She wore linen pants and a v-neck top that showed some nice cleavage.
He followed her into a front room that could have swallowed the Pilson house beneath its cathedral ceilings. A stone fireplace rose from the floor like an extension of Vermont bedrock. The second floor balcony overlooked the room. The whole house looked vast and extravagant—okay, so it was—but Wes also knew that his uncle had been obsessed with energy efficiency and had spent a good chunk of change to remodel the house to make it as energy efficient as possible.
A man sat on the couch reading with a glass of wine on the coffee table in front of him. He stood and offered his hand. “You must be Wes. I’m Christopher.”
Christopher was tall and fit and much younger than Wes’s uncle had been. He wore glasses and had a bookish look about him.
Wes took his hand in a firm grip. “I heard about the engagement. Congratulations to both of you.” He smiled at Charlotte. “My mom will ask about the ring, of course.”
She held up her hand, showing a huge, glittering thing that nevertheless stopped short of gaudy. Wes made a few appreciative comments although frankly, he didn’t know diamond from glass.
“So you’re at Harvard Law,” Christopher said. “You know I wore the crimson myself back in the day. M.B.A.”
“Cool. I understand you’ve got some biodiesel thing going?”
“Biodiesel is the competition, actually. We’re doing cellulosic ethanol, which means making gas from wood chips, agricultural waste, that sort of thing. There’s lots of energy in stuff we’re currently throwing away.”
“If it means we can stop buying oil from dictators and terrorists, I’m all for it.”
“Exactly,” Christopher said with a nod. “Well, I’d love to talk more about it. Fact, Charlotte would tell you I can talk all night about fascinating tangents like enzymatic hydrolysis, but I understand you’ve got other stuff, so I’ll leave you two to it.”
“Seems like a decent guy,” Wes said as he and Charlotte climbed the stairs to the second floor. “All that stuff about alt energy reminds me of Uncle Davis. That time in Costa Rica, that’s all he was talking about.”
He stopped, awkward. Uncle Davis had drowned on that trip, just a couple of days after Wes had flown back to Vermont. The news had come as a horrible shock. He’d attended the funeral, even though he hadn’t known his uncle nearly as well as his father’s family, not after so many years of estrangement from the Carter family.
But if he’d upset Aunt Charlotte, she didn’t show it. “That’s how I met Christopher, you know,” she said. “Davis had a bunch of investments in these little startups and they’ve taken off the last couple of years. I had to keep an eye on them. I don’t know if Christopher’s company will come to anything, but with gas so expensive, everyone is paying attention.”
They reached Uncle Davis’s old office. Wes had passed a den off the front hallway, but Charlotte said Davis had preferred to work up here where he could look out the windows toward the valley. It wasn’t untouched like Wes’s old room at home, but neither had Charlotte converted it to something else. A picture of Uncle Davis inspecting a work site hung on one wall. Next to it hung a picture of Davis on a boat with Uncle Bill, the two of them hefting a marlin. Various plaques and civic awards decorated the wall behind the desk.
“What’s this picture you’re looking for?” Charlotte asked. “Something from Costa Rica, you said?”
“Most awesome picture ever. I’m staring into the camera and there’s this enormous hammerhead over my shoulder.”
The photo had arrived in a mailer a full week after the accident. Wes hadn’t recognized the company—some photo lab that let you upload photos—and he tilted out the mailer’s contents without knowing what he would find. A chill spread down his back as he looked first at the picture and then at the printed note his uncle had included with the order:
Wes,
Check this out! It turned out even better than I’d hoped. I took one look and knew I had to send it to you. What a great dive. Hope we can do it again some day.
Davis
A message from beyond the grave, like those voice mails from the Twin Towers that people couldn’t bring themselves to delete. It all seemed so fresh that he could hardly believe that it had been five years already.
Charlotte swung open the closet doors and pointed to some cardboard boxes on the floor. “I’m not sure what picture you’re talking about, but if I have it, it’ll be in here.” She chewed at her lip. “It’s uhm, still difficult to look at the pictures, so I’ll wait downstairs. You can take anything you need.”
“I am sorry,” Wes said. “He was a great guy. I always wish I’d gotten to know him better.”
“You can blame that stupid Carter family stuff. If it had been up to Davis, he’d have put an end to it, but your mom and your Uncle Bill were stubborn as hell.”
“Yeah, I know. Before you go, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
Wes hesitated, afraid to push too hard and feeling g
uilty for lying about the picture. “How did Uncle Davis die? They didn’t tell us much, just that he drowned. But he was a strong swimmer. Did he get caught in a rip tide or something?”
“Nitrogen narcosis,” Charlotte said. “Went down too far. They said he was following a king angel fish.”
He nodded. They called it Rapture of the Deep, and it could take even the most experienced diver. Once you got to a certain depth the nitrogen in your bloodstream from breathing compressed air gave you a light, euphoric feeling. It was like drinking a few beers; you started to feel pleasantly buzzed, and forgot little things like your dive computer and your air supply.
“Wasn’t the first time he dove too deep,” she continued. “He just liked that feeling of leaving the real world behind. Never would have let him go down that far if I’d been with him.” Her lip trembled and her eyes looked moist.
“Well, thanks. Hopefully, this won’t take me too long. Sorry if I—”
She seemed to regain control of her emotions. “It’s all right, Wes. Take your time.”
Compared to his father’s collection of photos—when Dad hit a hobby, he hit it hard—Uncle Davis’s was a modest half-dozen cardboard boxes stuffed with photos and, in some of the older boxes, negatives. Still, a lot by most people’s standards. He dug in as soon as his aunt left the room.
The pictures spanned several years of time. The early ones focused on the company, starting with a series of pictures from a dam construction in Quebec. A few minor projects, then a fat chunk of pictures of the Moose Hollow Road; he recognized the aerial photos of the mudslide that had buried the highway. Northrock had won the bid to rebuild the road during winter, which included blasting away thousands of tons of rock. That was before Wes was born, but his father had hinted that Ellen Pilson’s blowup with the family was tied somehow to the project.
He skimmed these pictures and got to Uncle Davis’s later obsession, the alternative energy stuff. Wes found pictures of solar arrays in the desert and electric cars and high-speed trains. And windmills. Dozens of windmills: offshore, on mountain ridges, sitting alone in fields, or clumped in mountain passes.
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