by John Saul
“I’m all right,” Glen replied, but even to himself his voice sounded strained. And the voice was talking to him again, whispering to him: We could do it. We could do it right now. It’s an experiment, the voice whispered. It’s just an experiment. We won’t hurt him. He’ll be fine. You’ll see. The gray fog was drifting around the edge of his consciousness again, and once again fear rose inside of Glen, the same terrible fear he experienced when he’d been afraid he might fall asleep at the wheel. What if he couldn’t fight it off again? What if it closed in on him this time? “T-Tell you what,” he stammered, the words almost strangling in his throat as he struggled against the softness of the fog and the seductive sound of the words. “Why don’t you go downstream a ways, and I’ll go up. That way our lines won’t get tangled. Okay?”
Kevin, who’d been watching his father out of the corner of his eye, nodded quickly, reeled in his line, and began working his way downriver, jumping from one rock to another. A couple of times he looked back, but his father was going in the other direction, and even when Kevin called out to him, Glen didn’t turn around. Kevin felt a twinge of fear. What if his father was sick? What if he had another heart attack? What would he do? “Dad?” he called again, but again his father didn’t seem to hear him. Kevin paused. Should he go after his father, in case something really was wrong? Or should he do as his father had told him? Then he remembered the funny look he’d seen in his father’s eyes just now. It had been kind of scary.
Kevin made up his mind. For a while, at least, he’d poke around farther downstream. Maybe see if he could catch a frog, or even a turtle. Because right now, for some reason he didn’t understand, he just didn’t want to be around his dad.
Right now his father just didn’t seem like his father.
He seemed like someone else.
Someone Kevin decided he really didn’t like.
As Glen moved farther upstream, the strange sense of déjà vu that he’d experienced on the road upriver came over him again, even stronger than before. Though he was certain he’d never been here—except in the dream, which meant he’d never been here at all—there was still something very familiar about the place. The river curved again farther upstream, but between the two bends there was a straight stretch of perhaps a quarter of a mile where the water ran wide and shallow. The beach was a little narrower across the river, and beyond the rocky strip bordering the stream the bank rose steeply. Perhaps ten feet up above the beach, on what looked like a shelf of the bank, there was a pile of rocks.
A pile that looked familiar to Glen, though he was absolutely sure he hadn’t seen it before, even in the dream.
Now that he thought about it, the familiarity it triggered in his mind didn’t seem recent, but rather like something he remembered from long ago.
He searched his memory, trying to recall when he might have been here before, but found nothing. He’d been to the falls, a few miles upriver by the power plant, plenty of times. Once, years ago, he and Anne had even climbed down the steep trail to the beach below the falls. And they’d probably driven down the road to Fall City a couple of times, too. But they’d never stopped here, he was sure of it.
Standing on the bank, he cast the fly—the one that looked as though it had been made from a scrap of Hector’s feathers and a tuft of Kumquat’s fur—out over the river. Instantly, a trout struck, snatching the fly out of the air so quickly Glen almost missed it. The line started to play out from the reel, and Glen, uncertain what to do next, watched it go. Then, inside his head, he heard the voice:
Reel in!
He twisted the crank on the reel. On the first revolution the bail flipped into place and the line began to rewind onto the spool. Abruptly, it went taut and the rod bent. Then there was a buzzing sound as the force on the line exceeded the tension on the reel and the fine began to pay out again. The voice in his head directing him, Glen began playing the fish.
The game went on for fifteen minutes, and by the time Glen had finally brought the fish close enough to scoop it out of the water and drop it into the canvas creel he’d slung across his chest, he was halfway across the river. Only a few yards away was the cairn he’d seen from the beach just before the fish had struck. His eyes fixing on it, he waded across the river and the narrow beach that fronted it and climbed the bank until he came to the cairn.
Nothing more than a pile of rocks.
But the sense of familiarity was stronger than ever.
One by one he began removing the rocks.
Finally, when he’d pulled several away, the structure lost its stability; half of the mound fell away, the rounded river cobbles tumbling around Glen’s feet.
Something caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a worn pocketknife. Its handle was made from tarnished silver, inlaid with turquoise. Its blade was somewhat rusted, but not so badly that Glen couldn’t open it. Its edge, well-protected by the handle, was still wickedly sharp. Glen gazed at the blade for a long moment, then closed it and dropped the knife into his pocket.
Squatting down, he moved another of the rocks.
Now he could see something else.
A bone.
A long bone. Like the leg bone of a deer.
Except that the moment he saw it, Glen knew it wasn’t the bone of a deer at all. It was a human bone.
He reached out and moved more rocks, exposing more bones.
What should he do? Call the police?
But how would he explain what he’d found? It wasn’t as if he’d simply stumbled across it—he’d had to cross the river, climb the bank, then pull the cairn apart stone by stone.
He stood up, still uncertain. Then, from across the river, he heard Kevin calling him. “Dad! Hey, Dad!”
The boy was still close to the bank, but he was wading into the stream. “Don’t!” Glen yelled. “Stay there!”
Kevin kept coming, wading deeper into the swiftly moving water. “What is it? What did you find?” he called.
Even on Glen the water had come up almost to his waist. On Kevin it would be nearly neck deep. “Don’t come any farther!” Glen yelled. “It isn’t anything! Just a bunch of rocks!” Looking down at the skeleton again, he hesitated for just one more moment, then kicked enough of the stones over it so that it was no longer visible. “Just stay there,” he called to Kevin once more. “I’m on my way back.” Moving quickly, he scrambled back down the bank, crossed the beach and started back across the river. When he came back to the bank where Kevin was now waiting for him, he opened the creel to show him the fish he’d caught. “What do you say?” he asked. “Shall we have it for lunch?”
Kevin eyed the fish warily. “Can’t we just have a hamburger?” he asked.
Glen’s eyes shifted back to the stone cairn on the other side of the river, and suddenly he wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t look familiar, that didn’t make strange things happen in his mind. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Let’s go.”
But as they started back toward the car, Glen felt the strange fog closing around him once more, and heard the voice whispering to him yet again.
An experiment, it said. It will only be an experiment. Use the knife.…
CHAPTER 61
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Anne muttered, gazing dejectedly at the plate of uneaten food on the table. Beyond the window, water was cascading over Snoqualmie Falls, but even that magnificent vista had done nothing to lift her spirits.
“You still have to eat,” Mark Blakemoor had told her when he’d suggested they meet here for lunch. “I know you’re upset, and I’m not about to say you shouldn’t be. But you have to eat, and so do I, and we might as well talk over lunch.”
So she’d followed him up the road from the campground to the falls, but so far she’d eaten nothing. Now she gave up entirely on the idea of eating and pushed the plate away. “Edna Kraven,” she sighed. An image of the heavy woman with her shoe-polish hair and the clothes that never quite suited her, came into Ann
e’s mind, and with it a discomforting recollection of the woman’s hostility as she consistently refused in interview after interview to concede that her eldest son could have been a serial killer. Edna, right up until the end, had maintained her faith in Richard Kraven’s perfection, just as she had maintained the utter contempt she had never failed to display toward her younger son.
Even now, as Anne sat in the dining room of the Salish Lodge with Mark Blakemoor, she remembered Edna’s scornful clucking when she’d been told that Rory Kraven had killed both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. “Well, that’s just ridiculous! Rory couldn’t even talk to a woman, let alone kill one. Now, my Richard—there was a ladies’ man. Of course no one could take the place of his mother. But Rory? Don’t make me laugh—I was his mother, but I believe in being honest. And Rory just wasn’t much of anything. Why, either one of those women could have just barked at Rory, and he’d have run the other way!”
There’d been more—a lot more—but Anne had tuned it out, not simply because she’d heard most of it before, but because she’d tired years ago of listening to Edna Kraven’s version of reality. Anne believed firmly that most, if not all, of Edna’s sons’ problems could be traced directly to their mother, and had she not known better, both of Edna’s sons would have headed her own list of suspects in the woman’s murder. But with both sons already dead … “My God,” she breathed, an idea blooming in her mind. “Mark, what if she knew? What if she knew who killed Rory?”
“Well, I think we can presume she did at the end,” the detective observed.
Anne glared at him. “That’s sick.”
“Cop humor,” Blakemoor replied. “It’s always sick—goes with the job.” Now he, too, pushed his unfinished meal aside. For the last hour he’d been trying to analyze the feelings he’d had when he’d first read the note that arrived in Anne Jeffers’s mail that day. He should have been able to take it in stride, to look at it with the detachment of his years of experience with the Homicide Division.
He should have been able to look at it simply as one more scrap of evidence, one piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
Instead, it enraged him. He wanted to grab hold of the creep who’d written it, slam him up against the nearest wall and beat the holy shit out of him.
So much for objectivity, he’d thought wryly as he struggled to keep his rage from showing while he studied the note far longer than he really needed to. For the rest of the morning its ramifications had preyed on him, and now he was worried in a way that went far beyond mere professional concern for a possible victim. Still, when he spoke again, he did his best to keep at least a semblance of a professional patina on his voice. “Look, Anne, have you got someplace you can take your kids until this is all over?”
Anne deliberately shifted her eyes away from him, as if the view beyond the window had finally caught her attention. She’d been thinking about exactly the same thing herself. In fact, she’d already made up her mind that tonight she and Glen would discuss the possibility of temporarily moving out of the house. Mark Blakemoor, though, hadn’t made any mention of Glen at all. And she was pretty sure she knew why. Deciding she had to face the issue squarely, she fixed her eyes on his. “Me and the kids,” she repeated, her voice flat. “What about Glen?”
Now it was the detective’s gaze that wavered, but only for a moment. “What about him?” he asked.
“I believe I asked you first,” Anne said, her voice hardening perceptibly. “I didn’t miss your implication the other day that he might have killed Heather’s cat. Are you now suggesting that he killed Rory Kraven? And Edna?” At least he has the good grace to blush, Anne thought as her words brought a bright flush to the detective’s face.
“I don’t know what I think,” Mark replied. “There’s no way I can rule your husband out of what happened to the cat, and you’re a good enough reporter that you can’t deny that. Not honestly, anyway.” Now it was Anne’s turn to redden, and Mark had to steel himself against the instinct to apologize for his words. But the fact was, no matter how he felt about her, he still had to tell her exactly what he thought. “As for the other stuff, no, I can’t say he did it. And I won’t say he did it.”
As he saw mollification settle over Anne, he was tempted to leave well enough alone, but once more his job wouldn’t let him. “On the other hand, neither one of us can prove he didn’t do any of it, or all of it.” Anne’s eyes darkened and her jaw set angrily, but Blakemoor pushed doggedly on. “Let’s assume he’s not your husband, okay? Just for the sake of argument. So, we’ve got a man whose whole personality has changed in the last few weeks.” He held up a hand to preclude Anne’s interrupting him. “Don’t argue that one—you’re the one who told me. And you also told me he had Kevin bring your whole Kraven file down to him in the hospital. And if you really want to get down and dirty, try this one on for size—let’s just build a scenario, all right? Let’s just say that since he’s been home, he and Cottrell got a little extra cozy, okay? And don’t go all uptight on me—you know this kind of thing goes on all the time. So maybe he and Cottrell have a thing going, and maybe he’s awake the night she gets whacked. Maybe he’s even thinking of dropping over there.”
“That’s disgusting,” Anne said, fury rising in her.
“Sure it is,” Mark agreed, knowing he should just drop the whole thing, but also knowing he couldn’t. “So’s murder. But it all happens, and we both know it. So he’s thinking about going over there. Maybe he’s even out on the back porch. And suddenly her back door opens and he sees Rory coming out, carrying his girlfriend’s body. What’s he do? Call the cops? Hell, no—that means explaining what he was doing snooping around Cottrell’s house in the middle of the night. So maybe he just waits. He recognized Rory-boy—hell, his picture’s got to be in your files somewhere—and he hatches a plan. He’ll kill Rory himself. He’s already killed the cat—what’s the difference?”
“And Edna?” Anne asked, her voice ice cold. “How does she fit into your little scenario, Detective?” She gave the last word just enough emphasis to make it poisonous.
“How about if she was going in when he was coming out?” Mark asked, determined to ignore her tone, and hating what he was doing almost as much as she did. But it had to be dealt with, whether she liked it or not. “How about if she saw him? She wouldn’t know Glen from Adam, but she’s in your files, too, right? So he knows she’s going to visit Rory, and he knows she’s seen him. And sooner or later she might be able to identify him.”
“So he whacks her, too, as you so charmingly put it?” Anne asked, her voice quivering with fury. “And I suppose Glen imitated Richard Kraven’s handwriting, too?”
“He’s an architect, right?” Blakemoor shot back, unconsciously hunching his body into a defensive position. “That means he can draw, doesn’t it?”
Anne stared at him, scarcely able to credit her ears. Had he gone completely crazy? It had been bad enough when he’d only implied that Glen might have killed their cat. Now, apparently, he was determined to wrap this whole case around Glen just the way she’d wrapped a whole case around Richard Kraven! Except there was a difference—Richard Kraven had been guilty, and Glen wasn’t! And what Blakemoor had just suggested wasn’t merely ludicrous and despicable—it was irresponsible as well. Pushing her chair back from the table, she rose to her feet. “I think this has gone far enough,” she said coldly. “I can’t imagine how you came up with this scenario, but I suggest you drop it. Because if I ever hear of you mentioning it to anyone else—anyone at all—I’ll have a long talk with Jack McCarty.”
“Anne—” Mark began, lurching to his feet, his hand reaching out toward her. But it was too late. She’d already turned and was rushing out of the dining room.
“Ah, shit,” he muttered, throwing some bills on the table to cover the check, then hurrying after her.
He got to the parking lot just in time to see her Volvo pulling out into the road, heading toward the freeway.
CHAPTER 62
By the time she arrived home, Anne’s rage had begun to subside a bit, not because she’d been able to find any merit in Mark Blakemoor’s ridiculous theory, but because her anger itself had finally run its course, leaving her drained and as tired emotionally as she was physically. As she turned the corner off Highland onto Sixteenth, she was surprised to see that Glen’s Saab was back. But Glen had said they wouldn’t be back until late in the afternoon—maybe even tomorrow morning. Sliding her car into a space that was miraculously open right in front of the house, she hurried up the flight of steps to the porch and went inside. “Glen? Kevin? Hello?”
“In the basement!” Glen called, his voice barely audible.
Coming down the stairs a moment later, Anne found her husband standing at the workbench, his back toward her, the bright fluorescent lights casting a harsh glare over everything. “How come you’re back so soon?” she asked, moving closer. Glen didn’t answer. As Anne approached the workbench she saw what he was doing: in his right hand he held a filleting knife, its thin, razor-sharp blade glimmering in the white light from above. On the wooden workbench, held in place by Glen’s left hand, was a large trout. As she watched, Glen jabbed the sharp point of the knife through the skin at the base of the fish’s head, then ran it quickly down its spine, laying the flesh open along the dorsal ridge and exposing the innards. Then, the knife flashing so quickly Anne was afraid he might cut himself, Glen cut the meat away from the bones, finally laying the bright pink fillet skin side down on the bench. With a single deft stroke, he peeled the meat from the skin, speared the skin with the tip of the knife, and dropped it into the wastebasket next to his feet. Only then did he turn to her.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Anne asked.
Glen shrugged. “I didn’t. Turns out it’s easy. Want to try?” He offered her the knife, but Anne shook her head.
“Where’s Kev?”
“Over at Justin Reynolds’s. Where’ve you been? I thought you said you were going to be glued to your computer all day.”
