by Kate Wilhelm
She wondered if Brice had approached him again; if so, neither of them had mentioned it, but the hard feelings on Brice's side had intensified over the past year or two; she had assumed because of her father's affair with Willa, her own fight with Jud, that Brice must have sensed her tension, suspected the cause. But Brice had been the one to suggest a visit in August, surprising her, pleasing her. That was right after the stock market fell drastically, when he first started complaining about his clients and their fears. His fears? That was when something happened, and he must have asked Jud for money the afternoon she had taken a walk with Spook up into the forest, to some of her old haunts, leaving them alone in the cabin.
Suddenly she wished she had not mailed the manuscript, because there was something... She went to the closet and brought out the laptop computer that held all of Jud's files, and she began to search the novel sections, those written after August. She had not seen Brice in the novel earlier, looking as she had been for a clue about the mystery of her father's past, but now, as she scanned the pages on the screen, she was looking for Brice in whatever guise Jud might have cloaked him in.
She wanted to weep when she found it.
But what difference did it make if Brice knew last summer that he was in trouble, or just found out yesterday or even this morning? Bottom line, she thought bleakly, he was in trouble.
18
Sometime around midnight Brice tapped on the door and opened it. He didn't enter the room, merely stood in the doorway. She was at the desk, trying to comprehend the many papers Christina had left with her—numbers, contracts, royalty periods, amounts due and when.
"It's late," Brice said. "I keep thinking of the things I didn't tell you, and ... Can we talk?"
"What more is there?" She swiveled her chair around to look at him.
"Can I tell you what happened, what I did?"
She shook her head. "No, don't." If he told her, then she would be involved, she thought, and if she became involved, she would have to assume responsibility, not out of choice any longer but out of necessity. "Do details really matter?"
"Okay. You're right. I am involved. I made a stupid mistake, and then followed it up with a couple more trying to get out from under the first one. But, Abby, I have to tell you why. It's killing me not to tell you why. I kept seeing Jud out there living the life of a hermit, suddenly striking it so rich. Thinking, I owed him this house. You had a car because of him. He even paid your insurance. I was afraid. He could give you all the things I wanted to and couldn't. Then this guy came in, a client, with a tip that he was bursting with."
Distantly she thought, Someone asks, Can I tell you something, and you say No, don't, and he tells you anyway.
"This guy's son told him the company he worked for was going to go public in a few weeks, get in on the ground floor, double your money in a matter of weeks, then sell. He put in a lot of money, and he's no idiot. All I could think of was that I could make a lot of money fast, pay back what I owed, and then we'd go on a trip somewhere, the two of us, a real honeymoon. And I'd buy you anything you wanted, anything you even looked at twice. I was crazy thinking like that, but that's how it was."
He cleared his throat, as if speaking were painful. "All those months, it never occurred to me to hit up anyone, you or anyone else, for money, not until you mentioned the Halburtson place, buying it. It came to me in a flash—if they wanted to sell now, next month, you would borrow the money to buy their house. You could borrow money for us, for you and me. What really scares me isn't going to jail, although that's scary enough. What really scares me is the thought of losing you."
He had not moved from the doorway; she had not moved from her chair. He looked like a boy standing at the principal's office, afraid to enter, more afraid to leave, pleading not for sympathy or approval but for understanding. She made a motion toward the papers she had spread out. "I've been going over all these files Christina left. I need a little time to think about what we'll have and when we'll have it."
"If you decide," he said huskily, "if you think we can do it, I want it all in your name, a loan in your name alone; if we buy the house, in your name. So you won't have cause to worry that I might do something else stupid. But I swear to you, Abby, never again. I've had the shit scared out of me, a pretty bitter lesson, but I have learned it."
She stood up. "There's something you have to understand. I don't think of Dad's money as mine, not really. There were things he planned to do, things I have to do for him."
"What do you mean?"
"Like the Halburtsons. That was a promise. I can't renege on his promises. And there's the school. It's real, and he promised to help financially in the future. Now I have to do it."
For a moment his face went blank, then he shook his head. "I do understand. I really do. I know how you felt about him, and frankly I've been jealous ever since I met you. Once I'm out of this mess, we'll make it without a cent of his. You'll see.
"Tell me one thing," she said slowly. "Is there really a house for sale?"
He looked down at the carpet and mumbled, "There's a place I can get for thirty-five thousand cash. That's real enough. The rest would go to replace what I borrowed. We can apply for the loan, or you can, and on Monday or Tuesday, whenever you get back from the lake, go see it for ourselves. If it's a shack, that's the end of it. I'll go to old man Durkins and tell him what I did, and take my lumps."
Durkins was the senior associate of the Eugene office; he wore silk shirts and custom-made suits and vacationed in the Bahamas, or the Cayman Islands. "That's my future," Brice had said before they were married, talking about his prospects, his future. "Our future," he had said. Now he gazed at her for a moment, then said, "Good night, Abby." He stepped back into the hallway and pulled the door closed.
She shuddered, remembering something else about Durkins. At her wedding reception, he had patted her arm and said, "I don't usually give out advice about personal matters, but I told Brice to grab you before someone else did. Glad to see he took it seriously."
It was a bad night. She studied Christina's figures until her eyes burned, then lay down on the bed, not to sleep, just to rest. Sometime during the night she woke up, chilled, and pulled the bedspread over her, and slept again. She dreamed she was being chased by tigers, that she kept slipping and falling down on a plain covered with little balls of ice. She dreamed that Jud came staggering in from the woods carrying a gigantic rock, that he heaved and grunted with effort, and finally put it down and joined her at the ledge, where they both dangled their feet in the water. He said, "Honey, go bring that rock over here, will you?" She went to it and lifted it easily: pumice, full of holes, full of air. Laughing, they watched it float on the black water until a giant ray snapped it up and vanished with it.
She heard Brice open her door, then close it softly, and she didn't stir, pretended she was still asleep. She waited until she heard his car leave before she got up. No more explanations, no more talk, no more lies, she thought.
At the kitchen table she started a list of the things she had to get to that day and the next in order to be free on Friday to go to the cabin, where she might be able to think clearly. She had to get the Xuan Bui Institute papers from her car and put them in her backpack at Felicia's house. She had thought they would be safe locked up in her glove compartment, but then she had been thinking only of Brice's searching for something, not of the police, too. And it had come to her during the night that she should bury all of Jud's private papers with his ashes. She would go to an import shop and buy a second box to hold them; it wouldn't be as fine as the mahogany box, but she would get a good one, possibly even one from Bali. Also, she had to be on hand to receive the package from Christina, and sign the contract and get it notarized.
She accepted that if she borrowed against her inheritance, she would have to pay back the full amount in the spring. And when the Halburtsons decided to sell, she had to honor her father's pledge to them. They might make that decision soon
, she knew; they were old, and without Jud nearby, no doubt they were very lonely. They would miss him in many ways, not just his companionship; he had helped Coop keep his boat in good repair, helped maintain their house and ramp, had run errands for them.... And what about the Xuan Bui Institute? Jud had told Father Jean Auguste he would donate five hundred thousand dollars, spread out over time as he received various payments. Jud's pledge was now hers. She didn't question that; she had never thought of his money as hers, not when he was living, not now that he was gone.
Her father had not believed in borrowing; taking out the mortgage on the cabin must have pained him terribly. Yet, here she was being coerced into doing something he had preached against all his life; spending money she didn't have. Spending his money. Playing with someone else's marbles. "I'm not being forced to do anything," she muttered, and realized she was rehearing words spoken by Brice, that he had done it for her, to buy her whatever she wanted, that he had always been jealous of Jud, that they lived in this house because of Jud's wedding gift. She remembered how he had looked, like a sullen child dark with resentment, when Jud had presented her with the sports car, which, Brice said, cost him close to thirty thousand dollars. Brice was making payments on his own car, and would be making them when he traded it in on a newer model, and in fact would forever be making payments on a car. Suddenly she wondered where he had gotten the ten thousand dollars he had put up as his half of the down payment on the house. At the time he had said he saved it up over the years, but how? In school, graduate school... His parents were not wealthy; they couldn't have given him that much money as a gift. And Brice, she well knew, was not a saver.
She had read that more relationships were fractured by disagreements over money than by sexual problems, and she had to admit there had never been any sexual problems in this household; she and Brice liked sex a lot. Liked it with each other, often. She had always known that their attitudes about money were polar opposites. In spite of Lynne's lecturing, she had adopted Jud's position after all. If you had more than you needed, you found a worthy cause and gave to it. Jud had been wrong about one thing, she thought then; he had said she was getting more like her mother, like Lynne, who had desperately needed security. She knew she had never expected real security in that same sense with Brice; she had said yes because she had been horny. And because they never argued or fought over anything. Never used to, anyway. Simple as that. She had known from the start that Brice was envious of those with wealth, that he yearned for it the way a child yearns for a bicycle like the one the rich kid down the block has. Brice believed money was power and freedom, but who had been freer, her father or Brice?
In vexation she forced herself to return to the list she was making. She should buy a shovel; there might be one at the cabin, but she couldn't remember seeing it in years. Then there was Caldwell. He would see Brice in the afternoon, and no doubt give her a call afterward. Or would he simply appear at the door?
She made a grocery list, enough for several days, a week possibly, in case it snowed and she couldn't get out right away. She closed her eyes, visualizing snow at the lake, the flakes melting silently on the water, vanishing without a trace, without a ripple. The world turning white and black, like a surreal painting or a photographic negative, and the silence. Everything hushed and still. The lake never froze—the water by now was as cold as it got, thirty-eight or forty degrees—but sometimes ice formed at the edges, then broke away, miniature icebergs slowly diminishing; the water looked like India ink then, with incredible ghostly white shadows afloat in ethereal shifting patterns for a short time.
The phone rang, snapping her to rigid attention. Not Lieutenant Caldwell, not this early. It was Felicia. With relief Abby picked up the call and accepted an invitation for lunch with Felicia and Willa. It had occurred to her that Brice might decide to come home for lunch, and she needed more time before they talked again about a loan, the school, a possible house on the coast, or anything else.
It was after five when she arrived home; Brice was there already, looking worried.
"I called half a dozen times," he said. "What have you been doing all day?" He took a small bag of groceries from her.
She pulled off her jacket and hung it up. "Shopping. This and that. I had lunch with Willa and Felicia."
His mouth tightened, but he made no comment.
Sometime during the day she had decided to stop pretending she wasn't seeing both Willa and Felicia. Even if she hadn't lied about it, she had misled him by evasion, and one of them should start being on the level, she had told herself severely. She started to walk to the kitchen. "Hamburgers okay with you? I don't think I'm up to much more than that."
"Whatever. It's early. You don't have to start anything yet, and later on I'll help." He set the bag of groceries on the counter. "Did the FedEx come?"
"No. I really didn't expect it until tomorrow." She began to put away the cold things, milk, butter, ground beef. "I'll sign it and have it notarized and just put it back in the mail. If Christina said it's all right, I'll take her word for it."
He nodded. "I dropped in at the bank today and had a talk with Eddie Blankenship. He said if you want a loan, it's in the bag. Just a little paperwork. I brought the application home with me. All you have to do is sign it and take it back. It will be processed and the money transferred on Monday. They can notarize the contract signature while you're there."
Last night was gone, she thought in wonder. No carryover of bitter words, of her indecision, of separate beds. He really did suffer from short-term-memory-lapse syndrome, she mused. Or maybe not, maybe he enjoyed the syndrome. She almost wished she had it, too. She closed the refrigerator door.
"And Caldwell came by," Brice said, one matter over and done with, on to another. "I think they have it pretty much figured out. That guy who flew in to Bend, he must have gone to Portland from California by plane, hopped the flight to Bend, called Jud and got a ride with him to the cabin. That would explain a lot, if he was someone Jud couldn't refuse to see. There had to have been an accomplice, someone waiting for him, but the blond guy brought the ultimatum. So he went over to the cabin, and after he was done there, he waited until daybreak and started hiking back down, and his accomplice met him somewhere on the road. No signs of a car up that road because the accomplice didn't drive all the way up. Nothing else has made sense yet, but that does."
Slowly she crossed the kitchen to sit down at the table.
Brice was still talking, excitedly, rapidly now. "That explains so much," he said. "Spook wouldn't have attacked anyone Jud brought in with him. There was plenty of time for him to go through papers, get whatever he was after, find the right disk, everything. And Caldwell says there are a couple of places on that road where someone could have turned around to head back out, not in the dark, not at night, but in daylight it wouldn't have been a real problem. The killer might have walked five miles, not a big deal with so much at stake. Then they probably just headed over to Highway 97, and down to California, gone, vanished."
It was possible, she thought; it sounded plausible. And Caldwell had suggested a hit man, a contract killer. It was true that Spook would not have attacked anyone Jud had brought home in the rowboat, and Coop Halburtson's dogs wouldn't have barked at anyone Jud met and escorted to the ramp. She rubbed her eyes. Now they would search for a motive, as well as the blond man.
As if reading her mind, Brice sat down and took her hand. "Abby," he said in a low, urgent voice, "you have to tell them what you found out in San Francisco, the name of the priest, about the cashier's checks. That's where they'll find that guy, down in San Francisco, but they don't have anything to go on. You have to tell them."
She drew her hand away from his, then stood up. "I'll put on some coffee."
He turned his chair and watched as she moved around the kitchen. "You know I'm right," he said. "There's nothing you can say about your father that can hurt him now, nothing. And the worst thing you can do, the real sin, is to try
to protect his memory and let a killer get off. You have to face it, your father was human, he made a mistake somewhere in the past, and he tried to hide it. But it's not something you have to keep hiding. Even if that priest married him to a Vietnamese woman and there was a child, even if his marriage to your mother was bigamous, it has nothing to do with you, and it can't hurt him for the truth to come out now."
She had measured the coffee, poured water into the well of the coffeemaker, and now stood with her head bowed, trying to think what next.
"I think you were conned," Brice said. "But supposing you weren't, they'll look into it, verify the school story, and get on to something else, some other reason for killing Jud. No harm will have been done."
Her thoughts were bleak. What they would find out was that Jud had slept with the enemy and gotten her killed, and betrayed his own platoon, his own troops, led them into an ambush that wiped them all out. That was how they would see it, what they would believe, because that was what he had believed ever since that day in Vietnam.
"I feel grimy," she said. "I need a shower." She walked past him, to the hallway, up the stairs, feeling his gaze with every step.
