A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense

by Christine Carbo

  Present—Tuesday

  I PICK UP EMILY and Kaylee from school. They’re happy and overly loud. I have way too much on my mind to enjoy their giddiness stemming from their early release, but I try to hide my stress. I take them to a local coffee shop to get fruit smoothies and cookies before we go home so that I don’t have to fix a snack when we get there and can go straight to work. I have to tell Emily several times in the coffee shop to quit doing pirouettes in front of the counter because she’s so hyped up.

  When we arrive home, Emily starts doing cartwheels off the couch, and I have to yell at her to take it outside. They whine that they want to stay in, and finally they run off to Emily’s room to play, and I go to my home office. I’ve got less than two and a half hours before Shackley shows up when I’ll need to return. I check my phone again. Herman hasn’t called, and I think that’s a good sign, but a part of me worries he checked his bag and has already given up on me.

  I print out the reports, replace Herman’s originals in my bag, then lay out all the private notes and write-ups of interviews Anne Marie has had with various people. I focus on the criminals first—people she’s visited in jail. I pull out my records on the Smith file to cross-reference any names of people she’s visited in jail with names we have on record as being involved with the Smith case. I’m sure Herman has done the same, and I hate to duplicate efforts, but I need to start somewhere.

  It’s a slow process, and I keep hearing chatter and sudden shrieks of joy from upstairs. Sometimes I hear trampling across the upstairs hallway, and I think they’re playing hide-and-seek. Eventually, giggling emanates from around the corner, and I realize Emily and Kaylee are in the kitchen. I force myself away from my desk and go check on them. Emily’s grabbing sugar and flour, and Kaylee is grabbing a big mixing bowl from the cabinet.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” I say.

  “But we want to bake.”

  “No, Emily. Not this afternoon.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I said so. Now put it away.”

  “Mommy,” Emily whines.

  “Emily. No,” I say, harsher than I mean to, but I’m stressed, and this is the last thing I need. “Maybe go to your room and make a fort or direct one of those plays you sometimes make up for me?”

  She frowns because they’re not her ideas, but gives in and puts the bags of flour and sugar away. “Come on,” she says to Kaylee after giving me a pouty face, and they run into the living room, jumping onto the couch.

  I want to tell them no jumping on the furniture, either—that someone could get hurt—but I figure I’ll pick my battles, and I’d rather have them jumping on furniture than making a mess in the kitchen. I can see it now, flour and sugar everywhere, batter smeared across the counter and on their faces and in their hair. Not going to happen today, I think. I’m just about to return to my office when Rose comes in, saying, “Knock, knock,” as she enters.

  “Oh, thank god.”

  “That bad?” she asks.

  “A little on the crazy side,” I say. “Very”—I mouth the word—“hyper.”

  Rose smiles like she understands.

  “In fact,” I say, “would you mind taking them outside?”

  She grimaces. “Kind of cold out today, but I tell you what. I’ll take them to my place.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Emily, Kaylee,” Rose calls out. “Emily, want to show Kaylee my apartment?”

  Both girls erupt in yelps of glee as if seeing Rose’s apartment is like going to Disneyland, even though Emily has spent copious time in Rose’s apartment.

  After Rose herds them out, I return to my office and go back to checking the names of all the people, mostly men, that Anne Marie interviewed in jail. There’s one woman, Frieda Lynn Marker, who’s serving a life sentence for killing her husband. She blindfolded him and led him to a table with a cake for his birthday, pulled out a gun, and blew his brains out. He never even saw the cake, so lord knows why she bothered to bake it.

  I see no connection to the Smith case. The others are all men in jail for a variety of reasons, from shooting girlfriends in a rage to more calculated crimes. One man gunned down a competing drug dealer in the Evergreen area in Kalispell.

  It’s already four fifteen, and I know I need to get back to the office early, not just to have my wits together when Shackley arrives, but also to look for an opportunity to slip the documents back into the file in Herman’s bag. I don’t live more than ten minutes away from the office. If I give it fifteen more minutes, I can be there around a quarter to five.

  I have more names to check. I know if I look them all up now, I won’t have enough time to check them out thoroughly, but I want to get through them, just to see if anything rings a bell on the Smith case before I have to deal with my supervisor. I glance at the clock again. Four thirty. I have to get going, but I have only about another three names to look up: Vince Giles Reiko, Perry Thomas Sandow, and James Roger Kurtz. I look more closely. Vince Giles Reiko rings a bell, but I’m not sure why. It’s the kind of name you remember, though. “Vince Giles Reiko,” I whisper out loud. “Where have I seen you before?”

  I tap my pen on my desk. Are you connected to the Smith case? How do I know that name? I repeat it several times without the middle name: Vincent Reiko, Vincent Reiko. Vince. Reiko. Then it hits me. I feel like my world is slipping sideways, although I’m not sure I know exactly why; it’s just that a forceful sweeping motion overcomes me. I type it in, holding my breath. My memory is confirmed: Vincent Giles Reiko. Sentenced at the age of twenty to fifty-eight years in prison for the murder of Kim Farrows, who just so happened to be home sick from school the day Reiko broke in. I don’t need to look up Kim Farrows—or, as Rose called her, Kimmie. I found out about her when I first interviewed Rose, before I hired her.

  My pulse picks up, and my breathing goes shallow. I still feel confused, but every sensory antenna in my body is on high alert. I hear a dog barking in the distance, a siren from far away, an airplane flying above, a noisy squirrel busy in the backyard angrily chirping at something. I feel the cool draft filter in from the window’s edges behind me. In my mind, I’m also replaying Emily’s voice from early in the morning—which now seems like days ago: I know her, she said, her petite finger straight as an arrow as she pointed at Anne Marie’s photo in the paper.

  From your daddy? I had asked. She had shaken her head, not because she was picking up on my irritable tone and protecting Reeve.

  The conversation now takes on a different meaning. She didn’t meet Anne Marie through her dad. My mind reels, casting everywhere to try to fit pieces together, but then my trance is broken by the loud report of a gunshot, much too close. It sounds as if it has boomed out from my backyard, right outside my window. Rose’s apartment, I think. Fear explodes in my chest.

  I tear away from my desk, hitting my leg on its corner, and fly out the back door. I run up the stairs to her apartment, taking the steps two at a time while I grab my service weapon from my shoulder holster. When I reach the top, I throw open Rose’s door.

  Emily is standing in the center, sheet white, holding a rifle in both of her hands, the weight of the rifle butt hanging toward the floor like she’s going to drag it around. “Mommy!” Her face begins to crinkle in fear and fold in on itself when she sees me. She begins to wail.

  Instinctually, I do a sweep of the room. Kaylee is kneeling on the couch, alive and well, her eyes large and scared. A coat closet door is open to my right, and I’m assuming that’s where Emily must have found the gun. The small kitchen looks clear, and I’m wondering where Rose is when she runs out of her bedroom, sees me with my gun out, and halts in the entryway to the main room. Her hair is up in a beige towel, and it looks as though she has hastily thrown on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt because her jeans are unzipped. She must have just gotten out of the shower, which explains how I got here before her.

  “Baby, you’re okay.” I go to Emily immediately before asking
Rose what’s going on, sliding my weapon back into its holster. She is scared. Her chin is shaking, and she begins to cry louder. My first priority is getting the gun out of her hands. “Let’s give this to Mommy, okay?” I kneel down, trying to take the rifle out of her hands, and she’s holding it so tight that I have to pry it from her. “Let go, honey.”

  She lets it slide from her white-knuckled fingers.

  “Where did you get this?”

  She looks to the gaping closet. Jackets hang innocently and snow boots and several pairs of shoes lay in piles below. She grabs for me and grips my forearm with both hands so hard that it seems almost impossible for a girl her age to have that kind of strength, that kind of desperation.

  I look down at the Winchester .30-30—at the smooth Woodmarbe stock and the twenty-inch barrel. It’s a lever action rifle, and on its side is the inscription of the initials BC. I recognize it instantly. It’s Reeve’s. He got it from a friend whose name he doesn’t even remember. Berry or Benny Colburn or something, he guessed, but couldn’t remember for sure. I feel like I’m on a merry-go-round that won’t quit spinning. I look over my shoulder at Rose. “Why do you have Reeve’s rifle?”

  She begins to shake her head, either in confusion or denial. She looks caught, and suddenly the spinning stops and is replaced by a sensation that the ground has cracked open beneath me into a large black hole that will swallow us all. It’s the same feeling I had when my dad would begin to lose his temper and my mom would get a scared mollifying look on her face. Or the day I heard he’d been arrested. Or the time Toni and I left the office after seeing Sara Seafeldt and the other kids pointing and snickering. And then again, years later, on the day I turned down Reeve’s marriage proposal and I realized there are too many ways in which wounded people can’t make love work. “Rose,” I whisper again, “why do you have Reeve’s rifle?”

  “I . . . I don’t . . . I was just taking a quick shower.” It comes out as a whimper. “I thought the girls would be fine.”

  “But why do you have Reeve’s rifle?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” I pry myself out of Emily’s hands and stand up from kneeling by her to face Rose straight on. Emily tries to grab my arm, but misses and clings to my leg.

  She’s still crying, and I want to hug her close, to comfort her because she’s scared and shocked after she’s just unexpectedly fired a gun, the boom of it in her small, sensitive ears. But my training and my instinct to protect her and Kaylee from any more shots accidentally being fired hold me back momentarily. I switch the safety on Reeve’s rifle. I’m overwhelmed with relief that there’s only a hole somewhere in a wall or a chair and not in her, Rose, or Kaylee, but my mind is reeling, trying to fit the pieces together. I don’t want to let the rifle out of my grip for obvious reasons, so I don’t lean down to my daughter, who is still crying and gripping my leg. Out of instinct, out of training, I take my hand and push her away.

  “Emily, stay,” I command, and my heart instantly smarts with the agony of rejecting her when she is so scared, her arms outstretched, her fingers splayed, her face pinched with fear. I turn back to Rose. “Stay exactly where you are, honey,” I tell Emily again without taking my eyes off Rose. “Just for a moment.”

  Emily freezes, still sobbing. Kaylee has also begun to wail from her perch on the sofa.

  “Rose?” I’m about to repeat my question, but I see her eyes shift—the flicker of them toward the door, a glance I’ve seen many times in assailants who feel caught and who intend to dash. “Don’t,” I say, but in that instant she bolts for the door that’s still ajar and darts out, her feet bare, her towel still wrapped around her head.

  “Rose,” I yell as she runs out, “stop!”

  “Stay here.” I turn to Emily and Kaylee and say it like an agent in a serious situation, something transcending a serious-mommy voice, a deeper, stronger command she’s never heard. The shock of my order stops Emily from crying, and the room goes silent except for a small whimper from Kaylee. I hate to leave the girls alone, but I can’t let Rose go. “I’ll only be a minute. Watch some TV.”

  I hurry outside, taking the rifle with me, shutting the door behind me and bounding down the stairs and across the yard. The beige towel has fallen off Rose’s head and lies crumpled in the yard like an alien object among the other stray leaves.

  I spot Rose down the street as I cross my lawn. She’s running as fast as she can, her bare feet slapping the cold pavement. I chase after her, but I’m way behind, especially carrying the rifle. I make sure again that the safety is set, toss it gently behind some bushes on my neighbor’s lawn, and run as fast as I can after her, but she has a good lead, since I took the time to tell the girls to stay put and to close the door behind me. I curse myself for not grabbing my phone off my desk when I went to check things out.

  She’s almost three blocks ahead now. She takes a corner. When I get to it and round it myself, I don’t see her. The street is empty except for a few cars parked in driveways and more newly fallen leaves strewn about. My neighborhood has always been quiet; it’s the reason I chose it. It’s nothing special, an eclectic mix of houses built anywhere from the 1960s to the present: ranch-style houses mixed in with Cape Cods. Evergreens, arborvitaes, and lilac bushes shroud the sides and fronts of most of the houses on my street. I’m standing between a contemporary slant-roofed house with copious glass and a brick one-story ranch built years ago. “Rose,” I yell, “where are you? Come out.”

  I wait to see or hear something, but it’s quiet except for the wind, which has picked up. Another cold front. A dog barks in the distance, but it’s not frantic enough to be protective like someone is in its yard. It sounds like the same lazy woof I heard earlier from my desk. “Rose,” I call out again.

  I stand still and wait, but there’s no reply. “Where’re you going to go with no shoes and jacket? Come out. Let’s talk about this.”

  It’s silent except for the swirl of the wind in the treetops and some normally lazy chimes from the neighboring house tolling more frantically than usual in the strengthening breeze.

  “Rose,” I yell, “come on! I just want to talk.”

  A door to the ranch-style house on my right opens, and I swing to face it. Ample bushes hide most of the front of the house. An elderly gray-haired man peers out. “Can I help you, miss?”

  “Yes,” I say, “you can. Can I please use your phone?”

  Reeve

  * * *

  Present—Tuesday

  THE WIND WHIPS up my hair and pelts icy cords of half-rain and half-snow into my face. Sludging, that’s what Ali calls it, and now Emily calls it that too. One time Ali was staring out my cabin window when the rain began to turn to snow. “Sleet,” I said. She insisted that it wasn’t sleet. “Sleet,” she said, “sounds too refined, like tiny crystallized particles of rain. These are sloppy, messy streaks of dripping white snow. You Montanans should have a better word for it.”

  I remember being proud to be referred to as a Montanan, because that’s the way I felt, even though I’m not a native. But Ali, she clearly still saw herself as an outsider.

  I’ve decided to stay one more night, to get some more firewood and to pitch the tent back up when we return. As we pass by the head of the lake to go collect more wood, the “sludge” is intensifying. McKay’s off his game, I know, because this isn’t our usual routine. We don’t usually stay out this long; normally by now we’d be home in my warm cabin.

  I make my way to the mouth of the creek that flows out from the lake and head a little way down for protection from the wind and sleet. McKay points his nose up into the air to detect scent. What the hell, I think, why not let him work? Truth is, he needs it.

  “Go on,” I say, and he bounds ahead, sniffing through the brush and disappearing into it. It doesn’t take me long though to see that the riparian cover is too dense. Tangled bushes, trees, and twisted roots snake toward the streambed. Fallen trees crisscross across the
forest floor. The wood will be too moist anyway; plus, I smell the kind of putrid scent that could be coming from decaying fall foliage or, worse, from a dead carcass. If there’s one thing I don’t want to be anywhere near in the woods, it’s a dead carcass in the fall when the predators are hungry and possessive.

  McKay’s still a little ahead of me by the streambed, so I yell for him to come back to turn and go back, but before I’ve even finished calling his name, he yelps and comes bounding back to me, his fluorescent vest a streak of orange, and zips past me.

  “Hey,” I say, immediately realizing something is wrong. Terribly wrong. But because it’s in a split second, I barely have time to take a step back before a huge roar erupts from the brush. A large grizzly—maybe three to four hundred pounds of silver-haired creature—stands up on its haunches, towering above the brush. I try to take another step back as I reach for my spray, but he bounds at me in a flash. I yell loudly, trying to deter him, but he crashes toward me and swipes at my leg before I can pull the plastic safety off. He tosses me like a rag doll, and I can feel my backside crunch onto rocks and logs. I attempt again to lift my arm to spray, but the bear jumps on top of me and lets loose the loudest roar I’ve ever heard, a deep, throaty all-encompassing sound that feels like it alone will shatter my insides. McKay comes back and is snarling and barking.

  He bites my head, a mallet boring into my scalp, and I think this is it. This is the end. His hot breath pours over me, but then he lets go. He’s crushing me with his weight. From underneath, I can see only the underside of his snout and not his eyes. McKay keeps snarling and going at him from the side. The bear goes to bite my head again.

  This is it. This is where he snaps my neck or punctures an artery, and I bleed out in these unsympathetic woods before the indifferent faces of these mountains. But McKay is still lunging and growling, and the bear turns and goes for him. It gives me a moment, so I pull my arm up, pull off the safety on the spray I’m still clutching, and manage to scoot myself back a few feet. I think McKay has bitten him somewhere, and I’m about to spray to get him away from McKay, who is snarling, then running away while yelping to protect himself. But when the bear sees how small McKay is in comparison to him, he turns back to face me—the larger threat—and comes for me again.