Cold Case

by Stephen White

  Kimber shook his head emphatically. Even his most hushed whisper would be too robust for their circumstances.

  I said, "You're sure?" He was.

  The woman's voice again, more distinct this time. She said, "I don't want to wait."

  "What?" the man replied, loudly. I knew the voice. The man was Dell Franklin.

  Tami's father.

  The woman said, "Shut up." Was that Dell's wife, Cathy? I wasn't sure.

  I took a step in the direction of the voices and Kimber grabbed my left wrist, almost yanking me off my feet. He was pointing in the direction of the trailhead opposite the way we had entered the clearing. He grabbed one of Phil Barrett's ankles and I took the other. We had managed to tug Phil's body halfway to the trailhead when an explosion erupted on the hillside to my left.

  I tried to make sense of the sudden noise and the brutal concussion.

  Kimber and I paused. The ground below our feet started to shake as though heavy trucks were passing. The vibration soon became a rumble, the lights from the two electric lanterns flickering around the clearing. Kimber yelled, "The trees are coming down! Run! Leave him!"

  Kimber was closer to the trailhead than I was and he made it to the entrance to the path in two long strides. I tried to follow him but my left foot caught on Phil Barrett's huge body. I tumbled over him. Above me, the falling trees had started to roar as they spilled down the hillside.

  Momentarily, the roar quieted and the air rumbled the way it does as a big thunderclap is starting to build. Beneath my feet the ground shook as though from an earthquake. Desperately I tried to scramble to my feet. Across the clearing Kimber was screaming something at me, but the words didn't register.

  The sound was swallowed by the rumble.

  Pieces of trees began to cover the ground. A huge piece of an aspen trunk catapulted over me-finally coming to rest near the trail where we had entered the clearing. Others flew above my head like missiles. I was transfixed, staring at the flying trees as though they were a circus act or an athletic performance.

  Two feet from me the dry trunk of a long-dead fir impaled itself in Phil Barrett's chest with a thump that sounded like death. The sight sucked the air from my lungs. I looked away. When I looked back the image of the dead tree growing out of Phil Barrett's body cavity was right where it had been. I tried to scream, but I don't think I was able to force any sound from my body. If I did, it was swallowed by the tumbling trees.

  When I looked up I could barely see the trailhead where Kimber had sought safety. All around me the clearing was filling with the skeletal remains of the forest. I crawled to my left, hoping for some shelter along the wall of the clearing that was closest to the hillside. Above me, the stars had been extinguished by the tumbling trees and by thick clouds of dust.

  I stepped past Phil Barrett and felt along the wall of trees, edging closer to Kimber and, I hoped, safety. Each tree I touched vibrated in my hands. My eyes were filled with dirt and the air was thick with debris. I couldn't see more than a foot or two and I could barely breathe. I thought of Lauren and the baby as I groped along the wall. Inanely, I tried to conjure baby names. I wanted to know his or her name when I died.

  My hand touched human flesh.

  Kimbers hand clasped around my wrist and pulled. I tried to stay with him, but between us were obstacles I couldn't even see. I tried to climb and lost his grip. I poked all along the wall trying to find his hand again. I yelled his name at the top of my lungs and couldn't even hear my own voice.

  A tree blocked my way at waist level. I climbed over it and frantically prodded the air to my left. No wall of trees! I moved another step in that direction.

  There were still no trees.

  Was this the (railhead?

  I forced another step and ran headfirst into the trunk of a tree. The bark was hard and brittle and a piece broke off in my mouth and mixed with my blood. I spat and poked my hand into the air to my right. Nothing. I stepped around the tree trunk I'd banged into and walked right into Kimber. He captured me in a bear hug and without hesitation carried me at least twenty feet down the trail.

  When he released me we started dodging and skipping as fast as we could away from the tree slide.

  Behind us the cacophony continued for another twenty seconds or so. When the noise had quieted enough that I felt I could be heard above it, I said, "Kimber, stop." He did. I pointed behind me.

  "Phil Barrett's dead. A tree pierced his chest. Right next to me. I saw it."

  Kimber nodded, touched his finger to his lips, and raised his eyes toward the hillside. Whoever had just tried to kill us was still close by. Kimber leaned down and touched his ankle holster, then raised his palms to the sky. He wanted to know if I still had Phil's gun with me. I felt in my waistband, back and front. I didn't have the gun. I'd apparently lost it during my frantic escape from the clearing. Kimber looked disappointed.

  He proceeded down the trail. I followed him until we reached a fork. One leg of the trail went uphill, the other down. I pointed toward the uphill trail.

  That's where we went.

  We climbed. After five minutes the tunnel of fallen trees on each side of us was only a pile thigh high, then shortly after that, knee high. Another hundred yards and we were standing in a lush, living forest of healthy green aspen trees. The air was cool and the sky above the treetops was brilliant with stars. I felt as though we'd been adrift at sea and had finally floated ashore.

  We'd escaped the blow down

  We both sank to the ground. I was slightly downhill from Kimber. I tried to say something to him, something to express my gratitude to him for staying close enough to help me out of the clearing. But my throat was so parched that I wasn't able to free my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

  I was surprised when Kimber said, "Stay right where you are." "What?" I said, coughing the word as much as speaking it, and turned to look at him in order to puzzle out the meaning of his words. Behind him stood Dell Franklin holding a big old shotgun that he was pointing right at us.

  I felt like kicking someone.

  It just didn't seem fair.

  Dell killed Tami?

  From the moment I'd heard his voice on the hillside before the explosion that set the trees moving it just hadn't made any sense to me. Seeing the sadness in his eyes as he took Kimber and me hostage didn't make it any easier to understand.

  Dell had us sit back to back. He stayed uphill from us, leaning against a pair of aspen trees that were growing from the same root ball. His finger rested close to the trigger guard of the gun. From where I sat the big gun looked like a howitzer. Dell couldn't look us in the eyes as he mumbled, "You two should be buried down there. Where's the sheriff? Is he dead?" I said, "You mean Phil?"

  "Yes sir."

  "I think so. I saw a tree hit him." I spread my hand across my chest.

  "I think that it crushed him." Kimber asked, "Where are my friends?"

  Dell shook his head. Was he telling us that he didn't know or was he refusing to answer the question? I couldn't tell.

  Dell was staring at the sky. I couldn't see Kimber's face, didn't know how he was reacting to the awareness that his good friends were probably already dead.

  I thought about the little gun that was strapped to his ankle.

  In my only previous opportunity to be with Dell, he and I had managed some connection that had allowed him to talk with me openly. I decided to try to reestablish that connection.

  "Dell?" I said. I had to repeat his name before he'd look at me.

  "You didn't kill Tami, did you?"

  He looked hurt.

  "Oh no. Dear Lord, no," he said.

  "Be like killing one of God's own angels."

  "Then what are we doing here?"

  "What I should have been doing back then, maybe. Protecting my family. It's all I have left that's worth protecting."

  "Joey?"

  Dell knew what I was asking.

  "Joey did a lot of stupid things when he
was young.

  But, no, he didn't kill his sister."

  By my count we were running out of Franklin family members.

  "Cathy killed Tami?"

  "By accident." The word came out "ax-ee-dent."

  "Want to tell me what happened?" "No. He doesn't," Cathy Franklin said from farther up the hill.

  "He wasn't there that day. He didn't know about any of this until recently. But I was there when those girls died. I can tell you what happened if you want.

  Because this night's going to end the same way that one did-with bodies in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness. See, it doesn't make any difference. You're both going to die tonight, too."

  Kathy voice started off shaky and high-pitched. It reminded me of water flowing rapidly over stones in a shallow stream. "You've probably met everybody by now, haven't you?" She was directing her words to me.

  "You've been busy. I know you talked to Joey, figured you talked to Dr. Welle.

  I bet you probably talked to Mariko's parents, too, didn't you?"

  "Yes. I spoke to her father, Taro. Her mother is in Japan."

  "So you probably know about the girls being picked up for smoking marijuana?"

  "At the hot springs at Strawberry Park."

  "Right. Well, that's when it all started." She shook her head, disbelieving.

  "With a couple of damn college boys on spring break giving a couple of country girls some free marijuana. And now look at us." She waved her hands out toward the blow down

  "Over ten years have passed, and there's still dead bodies as far as you can see. Who would have predicted this?" "No one," I said. I was guessing at my lines, reading the cues from her eyes.

  "No one," she agreed.

  "No one would have predicted it."

  Dell nodded in agreement. Kimber barely moved.

  Cathy asked, "Did Phil Barrett ever tell you why the girls weren't arrested that night after he picked them up at the hot springs? Did he tell you that?"

  She sounded almost defiant.

  "Yes," I said.

  "He did. He suggested he was being magnanimous. Didn't want them to suffer their whole lives for one small mistake."

  She snickered as she walked from the heart of the woods to stand beside her husband.

  "Magnanimous? Phil? Let me tell you something. Phil Barrett was being a prick.

  There's only one reason that those girls weren't arrested. Want to know what that is? It's because I agreed to have an affair with him. That's why the girls got off that night." Dell took one hand off the shotgun and slid it to the small of his wife's back. She looked up at him with an expression that I could easily mistake for love.

  "Dell didn't know. He didn't know any of this until recently. I did everything else on my own. I did it to protect Tami."

  I had an image of an old model train I'd had as a child. Of placing the individual cars on the track. Of aligning the wheels. That's where we were in the story. The cars were on the track. Some of the wheels were aligned, some weren't. I couldn't guess where the train was going to go.

  "Phil Barrett was blackmailing you?"

  She seemed to like the sound of that. She said, "I guess."

  "It sounds that way to me."

  She glanced up at Dell again, this time plaintively. His eyes stayed fixed on Kimber and me. We remained still at the end of his shotgun. Cathy said, "Then. you know what Joey did to that girl? The Japanese one. Mariko's little sister?"

  Now, Cathy was looking right at me. I nodded in response to her question. She continued staring, hard. I said, "Satoshi. Her name is Satoshi. Yes, I know what Joey did to her."

  "After I found out about the… thing with Joey and that girl, I knew that I suddenly had another child to protect." I asked, "How did you know what Joey had done to Satoshi? Did he admit it to you?"

  She appeared surprised at my question.

  "Joey? Joey wouldn't admit to me that he'd passed gas in a lift line. No, Ray Welle called and told me. You know he'd been Joeys therapist?"

  I nodded.

  "Thought you knew. That whole thing with Joey having to go see Ray for therapy had started right after the last time Joey had gotten in trouble. Anyway, Ray phoned me that afternoon-the one, well, you know-and he said he'd gotten a call from Mariko asking for his help for her little sister. She'd told him what Joey had done to her, why her sister needed his help."

  "The earlier incident with Joey was the one in the girls' bathroom at school?" I asked.

  Cathy snorted.

  "My. You do know everything." "No," I said.

  "I don't." I still don't know where this train was heading once it made it around the bend.

  Ray Welle had danced lithely through a slender crack in the rules that govern confidentiality. When Mariko had informed him that her sister had been raped by Joey Franklin, Mariko was no longer his patient. Her psychotherapy had terminated. Therefore, the information she shared on the phone about Satoshi being raped wasn't technically confidential. By any ethical standard, Ray Welle should have kept the news private, but legally he wasn't required to. And he didn't.

  "After I heard what Joey had done, I immediately called Phil. I assumed that he and me were going to have another problem-like the one we'd had with Tami and the marijuana. I assumed I was going to need Phil's help again to keep one of my kids out of trouble." Her tone conveyed a combination of defeat and disgust.

  "Phil agreed to meet me at the Silky Road. To talk about it."

  "That's where you-"

  "That's where we usually met."

  I tried not to look at Dell, could only imagine his outrage at this story. I asked, "Did Ray know about the meetings on his ranch?"

  "I doubt it. Gloria and I were friends… She was helpful to me. She and I worked out the details, and Phil and I met during the day times when Ray was in town. Gloria would always let me know when those two gay cowboys of hers were going on the road."

  "But there was a problem that day. You and Phil arrived at the ranch before Mariko and Satoshi had left. They were still up at the house meeting with Dr. Welle."

  "Yeah, that was a problem. I expected they'd be gone already. Didn't see how it would make much difference, though. Boy, was I wrong." She turned away from us, moving close to her husband. Almost inaudiblly, she said, "I don't want to talk about this anymore, Dell."

  He shook his head, touched her hair.

  "They should know, hon. They've come a long way for the truth."

  "But I don't want you to have to hear it again."

  He shook his head once more.

  "That's not what's important right now."

  I waited for Cathy. When she didn't continue on her own, I tried to prompt her.

  "But Mariko saw you arrive at the ranch or she saw your car, or something.

  Later she told Tami what Joey had done to Satoshi and told her that your car was over at the Silky Road. Tami probably wanted to confront you about Joey. Is that what happened?"

  Cathy looked at Dell. He nodded to her to continue. Her voice was much flatter when she resumed her story.

  "Yes, basically. The two girls came back to the ranch a while later. I'm sure Tami wanted to yell at me about her brother.

  Knowing Tami, she would have wanted me to string him up by his toes right then and there. When she and Mariko got to the bunkhouse, I guess they saw my car. I was still… visiting… with Phil."

  I watched Dell's eyes narrow. He swallowed twice. His finger caressed the trigger guard on the shotgun. I wondered exactly where and when he was planning to kill us.

  I also wondered exactly what Kimber was planning to do with his little handgun.

  Cathy stretched her neck, her chin as high as she could force it.

  "Tami walked right in on us. Me and Phil. She didn't even knock, just walked right on in to the room." She said it as though the big sin of that day was Tami's failure to knock before she entered.

  "Me and Phil were… whatever. We were… in the middle of things. I jumped right
up from the sofa to try to calm Tami down. She was… upset, real upset. But she stepped back from me too fast and she tripped right over Phils boots. She stumbled and she fell over backward. That's when she cracked her head against the stone wall that runs around the base of the room. I still hear that sound. That thud. It was a wet sound and it was hard and oh, my, it was loud. I hear it in my dreams still. I hear it on the ranch. I hear it mostly when it rains. Don't know why that is, exactly."

  I sensed self-pity creeping into Cathy's story. I wanted to snuff it out before it established a firm footing. I said, "But Tami wasn't dead, Cathy. The autopsy showed she didn't die from the blow to her head."

  She changed her posture so that she was looking up at her husband.

  "None of this was supposed to happen, Dell. You know that, don't you? It was all just a stupid tragedy. Just a tragedy" She waved her hand toward Kimber and me.

  "I really don't want any more of this, Dell. What happened, happened. It's time to be done. Let's get it over with."

  "All in good time, hon. Finish. Do it for me."

  Cathy sighed and looked at her feet.

  "Anyway, we thought she was dead. Tami. I felt her, her, um, arm. I couldn't find a pulse. Phil checked her, too. He said she was dead." Kimber asked, "Then why "

  "Mariko." Cathy hissed the name.

  "Mariko came rushing into the room looking for Tami. Saw her on the floor. Saw all the blood. And, dearest Lord, there was a lot of blood. Some of the stone wall where she'd hit her head. Most of it on the floor. Mariko saw it all, saw Tami, and she started screaming. Phil grabbed her.

  She tried to run away, break away from him. But he caught her. He was holding her from behind, his arm around her neck. I could tell that he was squeezing her too hard. I told him he was choking her. She kept fighting him though. I guess he thought she was going to run but I could see she wasn't getting any air. I told him to let her go. When he finally did let her go, she just fell to the ground like a rag doll."

  I said, "Phil told us he didn't kill anybody."

  "Phil Barrett's a damn liar. He killed both of them." I noted that she looked sideways at her husband when she accused Barrett.

  "What do you mean 'both of them'? You just told me that Phil said Tami was already dead."