The Soulmate

by Carly Bishop

  The old gentleman sat up, spreading his thin arms on the rock behind him. “What reasons?”

  “That’s really what we came to see if you could help us with,” Robyn answered. “In Keller’s notes…I don’t know if you were familiar with Keller’s cartoon sketches—“

  “Oh, quite,” Ybarra interrupted. “I found him in contempt twice for scrawling cartoons when he should have been paying attention.” The skin around his old brown eyes crinkled nearly shut when he laughed at her startled expression. “I confiscated his drawings as payment.” Ybarra leaned forward, whispering, “I framed them. They’re of me. Quite good.” He sat back, laughing, roaring for his housekeeper to bring him a cigar. “But you were saying?”

  Robyn smiled and shook her head at the sly, funny old magistrate. “I was saying, that in Keller’s notes are several caricatures of Detective Crandall—all quite recognizable.” She described the series of drawings, ending with the courthouse being pulled into the hole Crandall had dug. “My question, Judge Ybarra, is this. Did Keller come to you privately and suggest that he mistrusted anything Crandall had done, or anything he’d testified to in court?”

  The housemaid was in the midst of lighting Ybarra’s cigar. He puffed on it several times, making smoke rings sail into the steamy vapor over the hot springs. The smoke rings didn’t last in the humid air like they might have in the crisp autumn air above.

  “Keller did, in fact, indicate a certain level of mistrust,” Ybarra stated.

  “Over the unidentified tire track?”

  Ybarra nodded.

  “Did he think the charges against Ms. Candelaria should have been dropped?”

  “No.” He sank back down again in the hot springs until the water rose to his neck. “Keller was troubled over that issue—but, and I tell you this now in confidence— even the defense investigators failed to come up with any specific identification on that tread.”

  Planting her hands behind her on moist rock, Robyn massaged the instep of one foot with the toes of her other. She exchanged looks with Kiel. “Judge Ybarra, were you also aware of the problem with Stuart Willetts?”

  “That, my dear, I was not. Not at the time, I should say. Mr. Willetts behaved with the utmost decorum in my courtroom, and as you may well know, I do everything in my power to absent myself from the social scene in this town.”

  “But now you know?”

  Ybarra nodded. “It’s my understanding, at least, that Mr. Willetts has moved into the house of the late Spyder Nielsen. I now know as well, although it’s purely hearsay, that they were…involved all the while Ms. Candelaria was on trial.” Ybarra frowned. “Very troubling,” he concluded softly.

  An understatement, Robyn thought, if she’d ever heard one. Though Ybarra was speaking frankly, she sensed his feelings were much, much stronger than his words would indicate. Known to be a very religious man whose strengths all sprang from his ability to separate his personal feelings from the law, his emotions from the facts, troubling was probably the least onerous word he could find for behavior he must find deeply offensive.

  Kiel rolled up his pant legs and let his feet drag the bottom of the pool. “The reason we ask, Judge Ybarra,” he said, “is that Stuart Willetts told us himself a couple of nights ago that Keller would have dismissed him from the special prosecutor’s staff. Keller’s own staff, of course.”

  “As well he should, had he known. I have never before seen misconduct of this nature—not unless you count the dish running away with the spoon.” He waited for the requisite laughter, the twinkle in his eyes acknowledging the absurdity. “In any case, I find it highly unlikely—no, prohibitively unlikely—that Keller Trueblood would jeopardize the prosecution by not coming forward with such information had he known. Which means he can only have learned of the affair sometime after Friday at noon the day before he died.”

  A glimmer of realization lit the old man’s nut brown eyes. The timing of Keller’s death, stated as he just had, boded very ill. He shook his head slowly. “The death of your husband was very fortuitous for Mr. Willetts, was it not?”

  Robyn nodded. “Only fortuitous, do you think?”

  Judge Ybarra let his head fall back. His eyes closed. For a long time he appeared to have fallen asleep. Robyn said no more, only exchanged glances with Kiel.

  Their feet accidentally brushed together below the surface of the hot, churning, sulfur-smelling spring. Their eyes clashed. The slick, intimate sensation went on as neither of them moved. For a pleasurable, intense few moments before Ybarra spoke again, Robyn’s heart pounded.

  “I cannot think,” Ybarra said at last, in the moment. Robyn made herself move her foot, “that Stuart Willetts could have done what the timing implies.”

  Robyn nodded her agreement. “I have thought that as well. But then the question about Detective Crandall remains. What do you think Keller could have meant by his cartoons?”

  The judge’s features drew together in concentration. “Is it possible Crandall was the one who brought Keller’s attention to the affair between Willetts and Candelaria?”

  “It’s possible, sir,” Kiel answered. “But it doesn’t explain the tire in the muck.”

  “But you indicated the tire appeared in later drawings in the pile behind the Crandall caricature. Wouldn’t that indicate a discarded possibility?”

  “Or,” Kiel suggested, pulling his feet from the hot bubbling spring, “one that Crandall dug up and succeeded in burying again.”

  “Then, the only remaining possibility, to my way of thinking, is that Keller became aware of some other damning piece of evidence as to the credibility of Detective Crandall.”

  ON THE DRIVE BACK to town, uncertain as to whether their interview with Judge Ybarra had been at all productive, Kiel reminded Robyn it was Stuart Willetts who had suggested Crandall’s attitude should be looked into. “Remember what he said? That Crandall had it in for anyone with two cents to rub together?”

  “Are you thinking his attitude can’t have been much of a secret?”

  “Not a secret at all.” Kiel slumped deeper in the leather passenger seat. “Do you remember Chloe Nielsen had an airtight alibi for the murder?”

  Robyn frowned. “I remember hearing that, but I don’t know what it was.”

  “Well, get this. Chloe was in the county jail house overnight for driving under the influcnce. What do you want to bet Crandall was the arresting officer?”

  As soon as they got back to the offices where the files were kept, Robyn looked up the telephone number for Spyder’s daughter. Robyn kicked off her shoes and leaned against the desk because the seat of her jeans was still wet from sitting on the rocks at Ybarra’s hot spring. Kiel plunked down into his chair while she dialed the number.

  Spyder’s daughter answered on the fifth ring. Robyn got no further than to introduce herself and ask if they could meet somewhere to talk about the murder of her father when Chloe cut her off.

  “You people never give up, do you? Is this some sick excuse to get a rise out of me for that DUI? Or print that picture of me behind bars in the tabloids again?”

  “Actually, Chloe,” Robyn said firmly, calmly, “I want to know if Ken Crandall is the one who put you there.”

  After a long silence, Chloe said simply, “Don’t call me again,” and then hung up. But her silence told Robyn their conjecture must be true—and that if she hadn’t feared some retaliation on Crandall’s part, Chloe would have said quite a lot more.

  THEY WENT TO DINNER that night in a Victorian-style restaurant tucked away on Durant Street where sepia photos of historical Aspen adorned the walls and lush green plants separated the bar from the eating area.

  After dinner Robyn left their table to go to the washroom. A woman younger than Robyn slipped in behind her, and went directly to one of the four sinks in the marble counter. Examining her hair and lipstick in the mirror, she never made direct eye contact with Robyn at all. It didn’t matter.

  “Do you know me?” the you
ng woman asked, as if speaking to the mirror.

  “Yes.” Robyn only recognized her from an old newspaper clipping she had seen of the funeralgoers at the burial of her father, Spyder Nielsen. “Chloe Nielsen.”

  Chloe’s long dark hair fell past her narrow shoulders, and an aloof expression reflected in her sculpted, almost anorexic features. Her clothes and hair smelled of smoke, as if she’d been waiting in the bar for the chance to catch Robyn alone.

  “Yes. I’ve changed my mind about talking to you. I’ve been checking around. You’re digging into what happened to my father. Who killed him.” Her eyes, a murky gray, flicked to Robyn’s in the mirror.

  “That’s true.” Robyn put her shoulder bag down on the marble counter and turned on the faucet to run warm water over her hands. “Is there…someplace we can meet to talk?”

  Chloe took out a brush and began fussing with her hair, still not looking at Robyn. “It’s not really me you need to talk to.”

  “Then who? Where?”

  Chloe grimaced and put away her brush. “I’m not sure he’ll talk to you. He’s tending bar at Lucinda’s party tomorrow night. He’s agreed to meet me later in the evening in the storeroom at the bar. He doesn’t know why.” She refreshed her lipstick. “Be there. Eleven-fifteen.” Before Robyn could double-check the time with her, Chloe had slipped back out the door.

  Thoughtfully, Robyn dried her hands and ran her finger through her own shining black hair. She dashed on a bit of lipstick, though for the first time in as long as she could remember, she had a little natural color without the sleepless bags under her eyes.

  She walked back and sat again at the table where Kiel waited. He’d ordered her a dessert—chocolate gateau with fresh raspberries. “You must be cheating again.”

  He looked aggrieved. “Angel tricks, you mean?”

  “Yes. Angel tricks. How else do you know the combination of chocolate and raspberries is my complete undoing?”

  Kiel looked down at his hands. He didn’t even have to make some verbal slip, to slip big time. He wouldn’t know. Keller would. Especially the undoing part. Keller would order them for the express purpose of undoing his wife.

  Kiel fended off whatever memories of Keller’s were hovering with a supreme effort. “Come on, Robyn. Everybody loves chocolate and raspberries.”

  She looked steadily into his eyes. She knew something was up, she just didn’t know what. She had to chalk it up to angel tricks. He’d promised to leave her fantasies alone, but she was being paranoid again. A lot of people like chocolate and raspberries.

  “Guess who I just ran into in the ladies’ room?”

  “Trudi?” he grinned. “Elsa?”

  “Oh, sure.” She shot him a look. “No. Chloe Nielsen.”

  “Really. Was she lying in wait for you?”

  “No, but she slipped in and out, staying only long enough to tell me that if I could slip away from the party tomorrow night to the liquor storeroom of the hotel, there would be someone there I should talk to.”

  He knew without asking that she didn’t intend to keep the assignment alone. “Any idea who or why?”

  Robyn shook her head, savoring a bite of the gateau and berries. “She just said she’d changed her mind about talking to me. She apparently did some checking around and heard I was investigating who killed her father.” Robyn put down her fork, determined to make the dessert last more than thirty seconds.

  “Did she seem nervous?”

  “No—at least, I didn’t get that impression. It was more on the order of a command that I be there.”

  Kiel watched her enjoying the rest of her dessert, jabbering between bites to extend the experience about meeting Chloe Nielsen and the mystery man at eleven-fifteen on the night of Lucinda Montbank’s birthday bash.

  When the waitress brought the tab, Kiel pulled a wad of cash from his pocket. Cash he’d materialized right out of thin air a few days ago when he needed to pay for the dinner trays at The Chandler House.

  He worried about it a minute, freshly stung for having pulled more angel tricks, but then, it hadn’t occurred to Robyn to think about asking where an angel laid his hands on money, so this stunt, at least, she couldn’t hold against him.

  He dropped four twenties on the table—dinner in Aspen came dearly—and hustled her out of the restaurant so she could forget that by now, post-gâteau, she must be undone.

  It was ten o’clock when they walked back along the park in the quarter moon and Kiel spotted the empty swings. Plenty of time, he thought, and the perfect opportunity.

  He knew how they worked, but only because he’d seen kids stretching out their legs going forward and tucking them under on the backward arc. “Come on. I’ve never been in these things.”

  “You’re kidding—no. You’re not. You really haven’t been, have you?”

  “Nope.”

  But he took to them naturally; body physics and flying were among those things he understood on an innate basis.

  He sat sideways on his for a while, straddling the swing seat, watching Robyn pumping back and forth, her braid catching in the air vacuum behind her like a little girl’s pigtail each time she leaned way back and pumped higher.

  After a few minutes she let the swing slow. The night air was cold. He sensed her shivering.

  “Do you want to go?” he asked.

  She wrapped her arms around the chain links and shook her head. “I was just wondering if this is what it feels like to have wings. To fly.”

  It didn’t compare. Didn’t even come close. “A little bit,” he said.

  She turned her head to look at him. “But it’s not really, is it?”

  He swallowed. Shook his head. “Only in the way that you don’t feel…earthbound, I guess.”

  “Could you show me? Could you take me with you?”

  “You are undone, aren’t you,” he teased. “High as a kite on chocolate and berries.”

  “Is that a no, Kiel?”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s an ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ Robyn.”

  She gave a petulant sort of sigh. He knew in a heartbeat, in Keller-memory, that she was not giving up, but turning up the heat, the way Keller had never been able to refuse. “Are you always such a killjoy, Kiel?”

  He should have shut her down then. No doubt. But he couldn’t. He knew before he even answered her where this was going, and where they would go if he didn’t stop it. Though he could have let Keller’s memories feed his hunger, he wanted the original experience for himself.

  He recognized the seeds of emotional greed, the threat of lust, but the glimpse of hellfire and damnation wasn’t enough. He was, after all, the soulmate of this earthbound woman, and nothing that went on between them could be construed to send him down that path. And so, instead of shutting her down, he fed her fire.

  “You have a real mouth on you, woman.”

  Her stomach felt as if it had dropped, the way it feels in a dream when you’ve missed a step and you feel you’re going to fall. “Kell said that, too.”

  “Then it must be true.”

  “And is it true that you’re a killjoy? That you never cut loose?”

  “I cut loose plenty, in my own way.”

  She slowed and got out of her swing and took the three steps to his swing. Her leg no longer ached, her hands were healed, and so was her face where that mugger had knocked her nearly senseless. Kiel had even made love to her. It was true he had declined to tell her what he’d done to be cast into the role of Avenging Angel, but maybe he would do this for her.

  Maybe he would take her to the stars.

  “Show me, Kiel. Show me what it is to have wings. Fly me to the stars. Show me where Keller is.”

  His angel heart was on fire. He took her hand and laid it on his chest. Too much to hope, he knew, that that small gesture would tell her where Keller was. He turned straight on in the swing, then helped her climb on him, her legs around his hips, and he kicked the earth with his foot,
setting the swing into a gentle back-and-forth motion.

  She didn’t know if he would take her where she wanted to go, but she knew he wanted to kiss her.

  She raised her eyes and looked into his. She could only see the moon shining, reflecting, nothing of their color. His gaze fell to her lips.

  Her pulse raced. Between her legs, his hard masculine body shifted. His elbow caught around the chain, he let his hand cup the back of her neck, beneath her braid, and he pulled her closer.

  His breath touched her lips, and then it was his lips touching her lips, pressing, slanting. The gateau was sweet and wonderful, but as an aphrodisiac, it paled beside Kiel’s kisses.

  She felt the swing begin to move higher, felt lighter, safer against his body, and not so safe. His kisses deepened. Her heart thundered. The swing went higher up, higher back, higher up again.

  Deep in his embrace, deeper still in his kisses, she felt as if the earth had fallen away, and it had. He let her fall away from him, too, but held her hand and somehow they were soaring.

  Soaring, like Superman and Lois, only that could have been only a slick cinematic trick, and this…this was real.

  Far away, she saw with her own eyes the blue-green ball that was earth, the land masses, the seas. She should not have been able to breathe. Here with Kiel, she didn’t need to breathe. She should not have been able to slip the bonds of earth, to escape gravity, but she had.

  Joy flooded every part of her being. The perspective lightened her heavy heart. From here she could see into eternity.

  This was where Keller must be. Out here, somewhere, Keller must be.

  She laughed and cried, and when she looked at Kiel’s dazzling bright form she could see his halo, see how his thousand-candle smile outshone the sun without blinding her, and that his human form had wings attached— enormous, beautiful, shining golden white wings.

  He showed her the moon and the stars and the North Pole and the South. He showed her K-2 and the Angel Falls, Old Faithful and Sri Lanka, Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings and nebulas never seen from earth or its most far-ranging satellite probes.