Guilty as Sin

by Jami Alden

  When she’d agreed to have lunch here, she hadn’t realized how fast and hard the memories would hit her. She climbed out of the car and started up the walkway, only to stop in her tracks as she experienced a sharp, twisting vertigo. How many times had she parked in this driveway, walked up the front steps of the huge home built from logs and river rock? Caught the sweet smell of Andrea Burkhart’s peonies drifting in the hot summer wind?

  The last time she had been here had been with her family as they all gathered for yet another crush of a barbecue. Her father’s hand had rested absently on her shoulder as she said hello to the Burkharts before he went off to the bar to get drinks for himself and her mother.

  Lauren had waited for her father to turn his back before she rolled her eyes exaggeratedly in the direction of her latest crush.

  Michael barely passed go before he took off down the beach to play football with a group of boys, his skinny tan arms pumping as he ran, his wide smile showing off the braces that were to come off when they got home, just in time for school to start.

  Two days later he was dead.

  Somehow, the fact that Michael had died without getting his braces off set free a new, fresh wave of grief so keen Kate barely made it to the front steps before her legs gave out.

  Sometimes it hit her like this, unexpectedly, the pain so cutting she couldn’t even cry, so sharp she nearly blacked out. All she could do was sit with her head between her knees, struggling to breathe as she fought to beat the pain back before it consumed her.

  “Kate?” The voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a deep well.

  She squinted up at the dark shape silhouetted by sunlight. Though she couldn’t make out his face, she recognized the familiar set of John’s shoulders. She tried to answer him, but her voice was frozen in her throat.

  “Kate,” John repeated, the urgency in his tone breaking through the fog. “Are you okay? Do you need something? Some water?” He sank down on the stoop next to her and put his hand on her shoulder, but the warmth of his touch did little to chase away the cold that seemed to have settled deep in her bones.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed to choke out between gasps. “Sometimes I—” Her heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest, and his face started to swim in front of her.

  “Here,” John said, guiding her head between her knees. “Just relax and breathe.”

  Kate struggled to do exactly that as he rubbed slow, gentle circles on her back and slowed his own breath to a steady, deep cadence.

  Soon her heartbeat had calmed and her breath matched his. She lifted her head.

  “You okay?”

  Kate nodded, and he blew out a relieved breath. “Jesus, you scared me. For a second I thought you were going into anaphylactic shock or something.” Though he was smiling now, his blue eyes were still worried behind the thin lenses of his glasses.

  “More like a combination panic attack and flashback,” Kate said. “It hasn’t happened in a long time but, being here, seeing this place…”

  He grimaced. “Christ, I didn’t even consider that being here might bring back bad memories—”

  “It’s okay,” Kate said. She pushed herself to her feet, immediately regretting it when her knees buckled under her.

  John stood and caught her under her elbow, and she mustered up a grateful smile. “It’s really not the bad memories that got to me. More like I got out of the car and suddenly remembered how happy we all were. Then it hits me all over again how we’re never going to get that back.”

  She was grateful when John didn’t offer stupid platitudes about finding happiness again or how she couldn’t let what happened to Michael still affect her so deeply after so many years. Instead he just gave her a quick, sympathetic hug.

  “You okay to come inside?”

  Kate nodded and let John guide her through the front door. Once again it was like taking a step back in time, walking into the Burkharts’ lake house. Though John had made a few changes in the great room, like replacing the old TV with a new flat screen and swapping out the glass coffee table for one made from hardwood, it looked almost exactly as it had fourteen years ago.

  “You still have the leather couch,” she said with a half smile, running her hand across the back. Another memory hit her, one that made her grin spread wider.

  “What?” John asked.

  Kate pressed her lips together but couldn’t stifle the giggle. “Michael called it the fart couch, because any time someone shifted in their seat it sounded like someone ripped a huge one. I remember one time, your mom—” She broke off into an uncontrollable fit of giggles. “She was wearing this short dress, so when she moved—” She broke off again, tears streaming down her face. “She looked horrified, and your dad—” She struggled to compose herself, remembering John’s father, Phillip, rowdy, raucous, and always ready to joke. “He goes, ‘good lord, honey, next time use the bathroom.’ ”

  “I don’t remember that particular incident, but that sounds about like my dad.” John chuckled.

  “Your poor mother was mortified”—Kate laughed—“and I thought Michael was going to wet his pants he was laughing so hard. After that we used to have contests to see who could make the loudest sound.”

  “I must have missed that,” he said dryly.

  “You used to leave so fast you practically left skid marks when we all came over. Way too immature for a college man like you. Not that I blame you, now that I remember the kind of ridiculousness we were up to,” she said, and wiped a tear from under her eye.

  “I thought I was too cool.” He nodded. “I clearly had no idea what I was missing.”

  The last of Kate’s giggles faded. “We had a lot of fun here, in this house, on this lake.” She looked at John and felt her smile falter at the corners. “It feels good to talk about Michael, to remember him with someone who knew him too.”

  “He was a good kid,” John said, giving her another quick, sympathetic squeeze. “And you’re right, there are so many good memories in this place. Best memories of my life, that’s for sure. Maybe that’s why I never get around to redecorating. Though you do have me reconsidering that couch.”

  Kate let out a watery chuckle and followed him through the archway to the kitchen. “This doesn’t look anything like I remember,” she remarked. Cream Formica counters had been replaced with a pale stone and the matching Formica cabinets were now made of hardwood the color of butter. The layout had changed to include a huge, butcher block island, and the appliances were all new.

  “While there’s a certain value to nostalgia, I could hardly expect Magda to replicate her kitchen magic using a fifty-year-old electric range,” John said, nodding toward the tiny, dark-haired woman who was bustling around the kitchen. She paused when John said, “Kate, you remember Magda, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” she said, holding out her hand to the woman whose dark, deep-set eyes flickered nervously in John’s direction before she gave Kate a tentative smile and took her hand. Magda had worked as the Burkharts’ housekeeper and nanny for over two decades. When the Burkharts had come to Sandpoint in the summers, Magda had accompanied them.

  “It’s very nice to see you again, Kate,” Magda said in her thick eastern European accent. “You look beautiful as always.”

  Kate smiled and thanked her. “When I decided to move here full time last year, I brought Magda out with me,” John explained. “She’s going to set up lunch for us on the deck, if that’s okay.”

  Kate nodded and followed him through the sliding glass doors and stepped out onto the wraparound deck. Like all the houses on this street, John’s sat right on a private beach and offered breathtaking views of the lake and the mountains beyond. The Burkharts also had a dock that extended two hundred feet into the lake. At the end was a boathouse that was big enough to house both a ski boat and a small motor yacht as well as store kayaks and Jet Skis.

  John must have noticed her wistful look as she watched the boaters speed by an
d listened to families setting up on the beach to picnic in the distance. “You must have missed it here,” he said.

  Kate nodded. “I missed what we were in this place. The time we spent here was the only time my family seemed normal—well, when my father was normal,” she corrected herself. “When he hung out with your parents and our other friends, it was the only time he wasn’t ‘Senator Beckett,’ you know?”

  “My dad kept trying to convince them to come back, you know.”

  Kate nodded. “He might have, but my mom was—” She swallowed hard, her throat clenching as she thought about the silent wraith that had replaced the beautiful vibrant woman in the weeks after Michael’s death. “He mentioned it to her, and she didn’t get out of bed for two weeks. Even my father knew better than to ask again.”

  John’s reply was lost as Magda softly called that lunch was ready.

  Kate took a seat at the large teak table shaded by a canvas umbrella and tried to redirect her brain from the maudlin course it was taking. No small feat. As she’d pointed out to CJ that morning, every breath she took here in Sandpoint brought back memories. All of them—even the good ones—came with a measure of pain.

  The memories made it difficult for Kate to do more than pick at her salad, gorgeous as it was, made of fresh local greens and grilled Idaho salmon. She pasted a smile on her face, one that became more genuine as John seemed content to let the past go for a while in favor of easier subjects, such as work and TV.

  “So it’s not like Law & Order, these cases you work on?” he asked. “Nothing seems to get wrapped up in a neat little package.”

  “Sadly, no,” Kate said. She set down her fork, admitting defeat in the face of the gnawing sensation in her stomach, one that never seemed to quiet. “A lot of times it’s like the kids just vanish into thin air. The families go months, years even, without any information. As horrible as it was losing Michael, I imagine not knowing what happened to your child is its own level of hell.”

  John was about to reply but was distracted by the fall of heavy footsteps on the stairs leading up from the beach. Kate looked up and saw a young man in his late teens or early twenties. Tall, broad shouldered, with coffee brown hair and equally dark eyes, he showed promise of being a real heartbreaker one day if he hadn’t earned his stripes already.

  He stopped short when he saw them at the table. “Mr. John, I finished stacking the wood under the deck like you told me to.” Something about the way he spoke, the way his hands curled awkwardly, signaled something wasn’t totally right with him.

  “Christian,” John said, an edge to his voice. “Do you see that I have company and that you’re interrupting?”

  “I’m Kate,” she said with a smile as she stood and offered her hand.

  “Christian Lazlo Goragus,” the boy said, his gaze aimed at the redwood boards of the deck as he pumped her hand once, his grip just shy of too hard. Kate sat back down and Christian’s gaze followed, his head cocked to the side as he studied her.

  “Christian,” John started to warn.

  “I know you!” Christian burst out, pointing enthusiastically. “You were on the TV, talking about that girl.”

  “Yes, I was talking about Tricia,” Kate said, straightening. “Do you know her?”

  “No.” He shook his head emphatically. “I saw her a few times. She’s pretty, really pretty. And sad sometimes.”

  “Why was she sad?”

  “Kate—”

  Kate shot John a silencing look. People tended to tune out kids like Christian, treat them like wallpaper, but if he’d been around Tricia, it was possible he’d seen or heard something important. “Did she talk to you about why she was sad?”

  He shook his head. “No. She won’t ever talk to me. I just hear her crying down by the lake sometimes.”

  The hairs on Kate’s neck stood up. “What do you mean? Where do you hear her?”

  John put his hand over hers and gave his head a little shake. “He gets his tenses mixed up. It’s a language problem associated with his condition,” he said quietly. “He also has a difficulty with the concept of time. Christian,” John said more loudly, “when did you hear Tricia crying?”

  “The other month ago?” he said uncertainly.

  John gave her an I-told-you-so look. “Christian, since you’re finished with the chores, why don’t you help your mother in the house.”

  “Okay,” he said, his big, hightop-clad feet slapping against the boards as he went inside. As he left Kate heard him singing tunelessly. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it sounded like “All the pretty girls go away.”

  She gave John a puzzled look. He shook his head with an exasperated air. “I’ve had the news on too much lately. I sometimes forget how easily he gets obsessed with certain things. It’s even worse with this because he’s familiar with Tricia.”

  “I never realized Magda had a son,” Kate said when Christian closed the door behind him. “I didn’t know she was married.”

  “She wasn’t,” John said. “She got pregnant my sophomore year of high school. She never said who the father was, and by that time she was part of the family. There was no way we were kicking her out on the street.”

  That would explain the handful of summers Magda didn’t join the family at the lake, Kate thought.

  “I believe the current favored term is ‘mentally disabled.’ But as I heard it, Magda had a very difficult birth, and as a result Christian was deprived of oxygen long enough that he suffered some brain damage,” John said gravely.

  “That’s awful,” Kate said.

  “He’s done very well, considering, and of course our family always made sure he had the best care available.”

  “She was lucky your family is so generous,” Kate said, and took a sip of her iced tea.

  John nodded. “Even with our help, though, it hasn’t been easy for her. It really makes me question sometimes if I’ll ever have kids. So much can go wrong. Jennifer and I were trying but…”

  Kate’s heart squeezed at the mention of John’s wife, who had committed suicide two years before.

  “I know this sounds sick, but I think sometimes it might have been a good thing that we didn’t pass on her genes.” He shook his head sadly. “But my next thought is that I’m sad that I don’t have a piece of her still with me.”

  “I’m sorry I never got the chance to meet her.” Kate had heard about the marriage months after it happened, through one of her infrequent email exchanges with Lauren. Lauren hadn’t been invited to the wedding either—no one had, as they’d eloped after John met Jennifer while he was in Florida for business. She’d met Jennifer in Aspen when Kate’s family and the Burkharts met to ski over New Year’s.

  All Lauren had said about Jennifer was that she was gorgeous, seemed young for John, and didn’t talk much.

  “I think you would have liked her,” John said sadly. “She was smart, very intense. But troubled. She had a very bad childhood, and even though I thought I could help her, she was never able to leave her demons behind.” He shook his head, hard. “Enough going on about our sad pasts. Just because we lose someone we love doesn’t mean we can’t still live, right?” he said, and his hand came over to cover Kate’s.

  Her heart sank a little at the look in his eyes, the first and only indication this entire time that he felt anything other than friendship for her.

  “Kate, I was wondering—”

  When her phone rang it was hard for her not to let out a gusty sigh of relief. She held up a finger and pulled her phone out of her bag. It was Tommy. “I have to take this.”

  Of course, it could have been the cable company doing a customer service survey and she would have taken it.

  “How’s lunch? Did he serve you on gold plates with diamond-encrusted silverware?”

  Maybe figuring out how to let John down easy would have been more pleasant. “Do you have something you want to tell me, or are you just calling to be a pain in my ass?”

  John’s ey
ebrows shot up and Tommy let out a reluctant chuckle. It sounded rusty, coming from his throat, like he didn’t laugh very often. Kate felt an inordinate shot of pleasure at the sound. “I got a few hits from the home healthcare service and some from other service providers who were in and out of Frankel’s house leading up to the robbery.”

  “So is CJ going to follow up?”

  Tommy paused for a few seconds, then: “We were hoping you could help us narrow them down, based on the information we have on them. Give us some pointers on where to start.”

  “I’m not a profiler. The FBI—”

  “We’ll send the information to the FBI, but they’ll take at least a couple of days to respond. I know you’re not a pro, but as you like to point out, you have enough experience that your eye will be better than mine or CJ’s. We all have our areas of expertise in this, and it would be nice if you could help out. Now if you’re too busy having lunch with Mr. Wonderful—”

  “Of course I’ll help out,” Kate snapped. Jackass. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “CJ’s office. I’ll bring all the information there.”

  Kate hung up her phone and gave John an apologetic smile that she hoped didn’t betray the excitement buzzing through her body. She told herself it was due entirely to the fact they might be closing in on a lead and not because Tommy, in not so many words, might be starting to respect her as more than just a talking head. “I’m so sorry to eat and run, but I have to go.”

  John stood from the table. “Something about Tricia?”

  Kate nodded. “I can’t get into details, but Tommy thinks he might have found something worth looking into.”

  The muscles around John’s mouth tightened. “Tommy?”

  “Ibarra,” Kate clarified.

  “Oh, I know which Tommy you’re talking about. I didn’t realize you two were getting so chummy again. I can never get a break when he’s around.”

  The butterflies of excitement sank like rocks in her stomach. “That’s inappropriate, and completely unfair. Tricia’s father asked Tommy to help with the investigation. It’s in Tricia’s best interest that Tommy and I put aside whatever differences we have in order to find her. I think you should do the same.”