Down River

by Karen Harper

  19

  J

  ust to be near the river, let alone on it, made Lisa's heart pound. But the rapids were lower and the roar less upriver where they'd driven a gravel road in Mitch's SUV. Spike and Christine weren't along, so it was just Mitch and his Carlisle and Bonner guests. This is a safe part of the Wild River for multiperson rafting, Lisa told herself, repeating over and over silently what Mitch had said. The local authorities deemed it safe; Mitch had a license. And she had a PFD on again, the same kind that had kept her afloat downriver. Everyone was going in the same big raft, and Mitch would be there from the first. She could call it quits--no matter what Graham thought--at any time, and they would put her off on the bank where she could walk back on the road to the SUV. They were not in any sort of canyon, thank God, and Mitch said there were numerous landing spots in this area.

  "Everybody, strap your helmets on," Mitch ordered. "Jonas, are you sure you want to do th--"

  "I said I did," Jonas interrupted with a sideways glance at Graham. "I have a high tolerance for pain and fatigue. Learned that playing college football and from the demands of law school and working hard at the firm. I can take it."

  Lisa thought he might as well be wearing a placard around his neck with huge print: Pick me, Graham. I can take it--the promotion, the river, anything life throws at me!

  She saw Vanessa roll her eyes, so maybe the two of them really weren't in cahoots. The raven is very wise but very crooked. She seemed to hear Christine's low voice echo in her head.

  Really, she tried to buck herself up as Mitch demonstrated the correct paddling movements, this was a lovely spot. Two thin waterfalls spilled down a rock face like a crystal necklace across a line of Sitka spruce. Everyone had laughed at four bright Harlequin Ducks slurping down clams. She studied the Inuit fishing wheel Mitch had pointed out as it revolved in a mesmerizing motion, plucking the occasional reddish king salmon out of its watery home. Maybe those were some of the same fish she'd seen in the rougher water downriver, fighting their way back to their breeding grounds. She told herself, if they could make it through the brutal current, she could fight through her struggles. Yes, this area of the river was an inspiration, not a lurking boogeyman.

  "Okay, so you get the idea," Mitch said as everyone copied his movements with their own paddles. "Dig into the water, don't just take a swipe at it. Listen to my commands about paddling fore or aft or holding up, and, most of all, be a team. If you hit each other's paddles or get off rhythm, we're going to have the river controlling us instead of the other way around."

  "Bingo!" Vanessa whispered to Lisa. "Not much of a hidden lesson for Graham's agenda. Take your orders and do your best despite circumstances. And be sure to say, 'Sir, yes, sir!'"

  "A question or comment, Vanessa?" Mitch asked.

  "Just anxious to get going. I suppose for best effect, it matters who you put in front or in back."

  "Graham and I will have the tiller. Ellie's next to Lisa in the middle of the raft, and Jonas is across from Vanessa in front. After we put in and get to a rest spot, we may switch positions. And lastly, enjoy yourselves. The ups and downs are a lot of fun, a combination of low-grade roller coaster and a water flume ride."

  "Lisa," Ellie said, turning to her, "are you sure you want to do this? You do not have to prove you can get back on this river to get the position, I promise you don't!"

  Lisa's eyes teared up behind her sunglasses. "Thanks, Ellie. It's really not the same river. Teamwork's a lot better than riding raftless and solo. I'll be fine."

  Once again, Lisa thought, as they clambered into their assigned spots in the raft and Mitch and Graham prepared to push them off, there was proof that Ellen Carlisle Bonner helped to steer decisions that seemed to be only Graham's.

  "Thanks for coming with me to help feed the dogs," Spike told Christine as they left the sled dog compound and walked back toward his house.

  "It means a lot to me to get to know well-kept ones. I guess it's been one of my secrets that my husband abused his team something awful, and I hated them, was really scared of them."

  "And he abused you, too. And that's why..." Spike opened the front door for her, but she hesitated to go in until they had this talk that had been coming for months. Had the death of someone close to Spike made him want to know about her husband's death? He'd avoided the subject and her like a curse until recently, but she needed to unburden herself to him. She sometimes wondered if it wasn't the fact that Mitch trusted her that had helped to win Spike over.

  "Let's sit out here a little," she suggested, perching on the end of the wooden bench on the porch. He nodded, closed the door and sidled over to sit down beside her. She took a deep breath, then began. "Yes, Clay beat me. He drank a lot. I should not have stayed. But he was a tribal elder's son, a good match, everyone said. My parents were dead, and my older brother was honored by our links to Clay's family. I had some money from making my dolls, but not enough to go out on my own, so I stayed. In that way, what happened was my fault, too."

  "Not really," Spike said, turning toward her. "You didn't deserve that, no matter if you would have been a bad wife, and I know you weren't."

  "No. But I--I lost a baby--in the womb, a boy, and Clay hated me for that, too. He blamed me."

  "But you didn't do anything to cause that, did you?"

  She shrugged her shoulders and stifled a sob. "Fell out of bed, trying to sleep so far away from Clay he couldn't grab me when he was drunk."

  "The guy was an idiot!"

  "You're the first person outside of Clay and my brother--we saw the little mite was buried proper--I told about losing the baby. Not even my lawyer, though it might have helped get me off. My boy's death, it is like a sacred secret to me, but now--now I'm glad I told you, even though you have your own grief, rawer than mine."

  "I'm glad, too. Honored you told me, not even Mitch."

  "You know," she said, gripping her hands together hard in her lap, "I did hate Clay, especially after he called me a murderer of my own unborn baby. So maybe, deep down, I thought about killing him, like premeditated murder. I don't know. But I never would have just--just killed him in cold blood if he hadn't threatened to kill me that day. He probably wouldn't have done it, but he would have beaten me bad, and I was angry. I said in court I wasn't angry but scared for my life, but I was angry and hated him when I shot him! So, however much it turned me into a Yup'ik outcast, God forgive me, I got some justice out of his name being smeared when the jury ruled for me."

  She almost choked on a sob she'd been holding back, holding back for years. She hadn't shed a tear over Clay's death, not after the big river she'd cried over her lost son.

  Spike put one large hand over hers. She shook her head. Why, she wasn't sure. Still regretful of what she'd done or that she'd finally come clean with someone? Or was she trying to tell him not to take the next step with her she felt coming, especially when his emotions were so raw over Ginger.

  She sat stunned that she'd told someone her true feelings--that she shot Clay in anger and hate, not just fear. That could have sent her to prison for fifteen years to life. Motive. Premeditation. Her lawyer had harped on all that. She'd never even told Mitch. Fifteen years to life! Years away from this life here, this place, her job, her blessed boss--and this man.

  "Sorry," she said as tears plopped on his hand clasping hers. "It's not like me to cry. I didn't mean to dump all that on you, with Ginger's loss."

  "It's all right," Spike said, lifting his arm from her hands to put it around her shoulders and hug her sideways to him. "Somehow, we've got to make things right." She wasn't sure what he meant, but she was amazed to feel the big, strong man was shaking, too.

  Mitch kept a close eye on Lisa, but she was doing great. Everyone whooped and hollered at each pitch over a small rapid or spin in a whirlpool they got snagged in. More than once, on one side or the other, they had to use their paddles like braces to get the raft around a rock.

  Despite the fact Christine had
warned both him and Lisa not to be too obvious watching others, he, like Graham, was taking mental notes. Jonas was powering his oar as if he were trying out for an NFL team; Vanessa obviously hated getting her hair and clothes splashed; and Ellie, as petite as she was compared to the other two women, was really pulling her own weight, but then she was in great shape for her age and had worked out for years with a personal trainer who came to their house.

  Although both he and Graham had their hands on the tiller that controlled the rudder, Mitch was doing most of the steering while Graham intently observed. He'd said earlier he'd be watching for teamwork and wanted no slackers. Mitch had tried to read him for days, trying to figure out which person he favored for senior partner, but he had to admit Graham had a good poker face.

  And once he'd made his selection, would he invite "the chosen one" to the Bonner weekend estate in West Palm Beach, and would their precious daughter be home from college for it? Or had that been a setup only for him, Ellie's matchmaking at its finest? He knew how upset Ellie had been when he and Lisa told them they had been dating and were going to get married, as if she had him picked out for Claire despite the difference in their ages.

  At first he'd thought that might be why Graham had pulled them off the casino case--punishment to have that potentially high-profile case taken away--but he'd obviously had other motives. Lisa was right. They had to get their heads together on that. So why was it he kept thinking of getting their bodies together? He was going to set up some private time with her tonight. If he had his way, private, passionate time. Business first in the wine cellar, then later, if he could manage it, in his room.

  They were almost to the landing spot from which they could walk back to the lodge, but, as the water was pushed between narrowing banks, a series of rapids got stronger. A salmon, leaping over a rock, flopped right into the boat between Lisa and Vanessa.

  Vanessa screamed and stopped paddling, which spun the raft a bit, but Mitch was pretty sure Graham wouldn't hold it against her. How much could being senior partner in a Southern, urban law firm relate to liking Alaskan outdoor life? And Graham had said Vanessa had two things going for her: her gender and her ethnicity.

  Jonas looked like he was going to either bash the fish or flip it back into the water with his paddle, but Lisa was faster. Just as she'd run to Jonas earlier when he'd fallen off his sled, her instinct was to help.

  "Oh, look," she cried as she managed to pick up the struggling fish, "his sunset colors are fading already, out of his element."

  "Good observation," Graham said. "If you'd ever been fishing, you'd know that's what happens as they die."

  "I knew that," Jonas said. "Lisa, leave him in the bottom of the boat for Christine to cook and get your paddle back in."

  "No," she said, "this salmon's almost home and deserves to live." She hefted the heavy fish back into the current and began to paddle again. "And that fish is a female," she said, "full of eggs. I hope she names some of her offspring after me for giving her a second chance."

  Mitch had to grin at that; Graham didn't change expressions or blink an eye. Vanessa snorted, Ellie shook her head and Jonas frowned at being put down a bit.

  "Yeah," Vanessa said, "but they are just hustling into this area to die, and that's not fair, not after all that hard work."

  They shot over a thick plume of water and got thoroughly soaked as foam sloshed into the raft.

  "So who said life's fair?" Ellie's voice rang out as they all shivered from the chill wash of water.

  Mitch was waiting for Lisa later as she managed to avoid Jonas and Vanessa and hurry down the steps into the wine cellar. She saw he had a large piece of paper spread out on top of the crate and two glasses of white wine balanced there precariously. And he'd brought an extra chair down.

  "The light's not great in here," he said, "but I thought this might help us to get down to business about the casino case."

  She noted he had drawn some sort of diagram on the paper. Picking up her wine, she started to lift the glass to her mouth, but he said, "To us--remembering." He clinked his goblet to hers.

  She stared at her hand on the stem, remembering the night he'd told her he was leaving Florida, leaving the practice of law, and asking if she would go with him. She'd snapped the stem in her anger and cut herself--but not as deeply as he'd cut her. She realized how strongly she felt for him now that she'd been here and they'd gone through so much together. They had less than twenty-four hours left. Not much time to straighten out so many things.

  "I thought I'd mention business," he said, leaning over the diagram, "because my mind keeps wandering to other things when we're together, especially alone like this. Oh, hell, all the time." He cleared his throat, still not looking at her. "I've sketched a sort of combination flow chart and Venn diagram here, so we can try to track who was who, who knew whom, all of that."

  Though she wanted to touch him, she stared down at the intersecting circles he'd labeled with people's names--the client and his corroborating witnesses, informants they'd been working with, potential character witnesses. She was amazed at how much he recalled after he'd been living in a completely different world for over a year. How brilliant Mitch had been at what he did hit her with stunning impact. And he'd left all that--not that he wasn't good at what he was doing here. But for him to be brave enough to step out into the relative unknown made him seem even stronger in her eyes.

  She helped him fill in names and connections she remembered. "You know," she said, taking a big gulp of wine as if to fortify herself, "this guy here--the Miami Herald reporter Manuel Markus went to jail for contempt of court shortly after you left town. He refused to answer a federal judge's questions about interviewing Frank Cummings."

  "Ah, Cummings, the money man who was funneling big cash into something--but, we thought, not terrorist activities. So Markus is still rotting in jail? He had a large family to provide for."

  "And I never read him to be the kind of guy who would go to jail to protect someone. I'll bet he was threatened to shut his mouth--maybe by the same people who threatened us--and/or his family is being taken care of in style by someone while he's locked away."

  "Doesn't this kind of remind you of Nixon's Watergate mess?" Mitch said as he drew in extra arrows and wrote in prison by the reporter's name. "I mean, this reeks of a big cover-up from the top down by whoever was really getting this money laundered through the South Florida casinos."

  "Like you said before, it's a spiderweb. But who's the spider?"

  20

  D

  inner, though it was their last one at the lodge and the food was delicious, seemed to drag for Lisa. She and Mitch had agreed to meet on the patio in the midnight twilight to take a walk and talk about the casino case, and about their future. She wondered if he'd agree to visit Florida now and then and if they could try to establish a real relationship again. She knew he was hoping she might visit him for a while in the autumn or winter, so that--without the pressure of everyone else around--they could backtrack and then, just maybe, go forward, not at zipline or river-rafting speed, but step by step. Still, someone was going to have to compromise on location and career if they were to be together permanently, and she still couldn't quite fathom that. Everyone scattered after dinner: Jonas to his room, Vanessa to walk off their meal. The Bonners and Mitch were huddled in quiet conversation by the hearth, unfortunately, because Lisa wanted to whisper to him about another casino case connection she'd remembered.

  During dinner conversation, she'd suddenly recalled she'd heard that Manuel Markus had once written political speeches for several state congressmen, which meant he might have known the Bonners through their political fundraising for Ellie's brother, Merritt Carlisle. Maybe he'd even written speeches for him. If the coast was clear, Lisa decided she would pop down into the wine cellar and write that on their chart, then see if any of Mitch's lines and arrows connected to anyone else high up. Absolute power corrupted absolutely, and the spider in the web mus
t be someone powerful.

  She peeked in the deserted library and opened the cellar door. Utter blackness below. She switched on the light, closed the door behind her and hurried down the steps. The chart was where they'd left it, rolled up in one of the wine cradles, wedged in above a bottle of Chardonnay. In their haste to leave, they'd left their wine goblets on the crate. She unrolled the chart and, sitting in one of the chairs, smoothed it across her knees. Hunched over it, she took the pencil he'd left and, squinting to see in the watery, greenish light, she wrote her information in the correct place.

  But then, a slight shadow shifted and she looked up.

  She jumped to her feet and backed into the wall of bottles behind her. Two huge eyes blinked, shifted away. She refused to believe she was going crazy. She had not screamed for her mother when she found Ginger, and she had not imagined eyes staring at her.

  She grabbed a bottle and, holding it by its neck, she hefted it like a club. She edged toward the stairs and, bottle raised, peeked behind the opposite wall-to-wall rack of bottles.

  Vanessa was wedged in the narrow space between the back of the rack and the stone wall with an unlit flashlight raised like a weapon.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Lisa shouted, hoping Mitch would hear and come down.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Vanessa echoed. "I thought you might be planning another lover's tryst, sneaking down here to meet Mitch again to convince him to put in a good word for you, convince him with wine and kisses and the rest of you!"

  "I have not. You're a spy, Vanessa! You were here before. We've just been trying to work things out so--"

  "Oh, I'll bet. I'm telling Graham about this little love nest."

  That was the last thing in the world Lisa needed, but she knew better than to show Vanessa any weakness, so she counterattacked. "You just do that. He'll love to hear how you've been eavesdropping on us--probably on him and Ellie, too."