The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel)

by Loreth Anne White

  The judge did not rule, however, that Jeb was innocent.

  The result, claimed one newspaper columnist, was a violent man being set free. Another columnist argued that the police, the prosecutors, and the defense lawyers had all developed tunnel vision in an “overzealous” attempt to secure a conviction for a man they all believed was guilty of a heinous crime in a small community. In doing so, they’d shot themselves in the foot because a guilty man now walked free because of it.

  Jeb himself refused any interviews.

  I click on a photo and Jeb’s face fills my screen. Simmering, dark, sensual. A young Jeb. The way I knew and loved him. His father’s smiling Irish eyes, wickedly sensual at times, and at others, so full of deep mystery. One look from those eyes used to melt my stomach, give my skin tingles. I sip my drink and feel warmth spread through my chest—even now his eyes still do it for me, just in this photo. God, what am I going to do with myself? How am I going to rid myself of these twisted, conflicted memories? These feelings? It’s not easy to describe the depth of what I once felt for Jeb. I don’t think many people can understand what we had.

  When he first came to Snowy Creek Elementary, I was fascinated with him. He seemed apart from everyone else, mysterious. Special. He appealed to something in my imagination. He disappeared later that year, when his father died, but he returned to school the following spring. We became friends, kicking a ball on the bottom fields during lunch. Gradually he began to show me my own world through new eyes. It was the first time, I think, that I realized there were people in this world, like the First Nations community in the valley over, who thought and lived in a different way. It became an adventure, exciting. I started to meet him outside school, and while my girlfriends were hanging out in the village and shopping and going to movies, he and I went on adventures in the woods. He set the tomboy in me free. We played. We discovered. He allowed me to remain a kid inside my heart far longer than my peers. And slowly we grew into our respective sexuality. It was a thrilling sensation, to touch him, have him touch me. Jeb quite simply became part of me. Of who I was.

  And then he told me his deepest, darkest secret. He told me why he had disappeared that first winter.

  It was the ultimate confession. The ultimate bond of trust. And I betrayed that trust. In the trial. I used his deepest, most personal secret to help send him away. Guilt whispers through me.

  I click on another photo, this one taken outside the courthouse near the start of the first trial just over eight years ago. In this image the angle of the sun accentuates Jeb’s dusky skin, the flare of his cheekbones. His long black hair gleams. I can see his tattoo—the angry, masculine mouth of a coho swimming up his neck. Jeb told me once that the coho salmon possessed three traits he valued most: courage, tenacity, and a ferocity of purpose at the end game.

  I wonder, now, about his own end game.

  Gently, I brush the screen with my fingertips, touching his face. Familiar feelings of hurt and affection mushroom inside me. With them come the anger, hatred, and bitterness of betrayal, and it all swims like an oily cocktail in my gut. This man raped and left my schoolmate for dead. Quinn’s mother, Amy. Another schoolmate is still missing, presumed murdered. The judge has not said he was innocent of this. There is still no one else the police are looking at for the crime. That’s because the cops still believe he did it. It’s because there’s no one else they even suspect. Everything still points to Jeb.

  I curse and swallow the rest of the whiskey before sloshing another two fingers of the amber liquid into my glass.

  Here’s to you, Trey. Here’s to you, Jeb . . . here’s to some seriously messed-up past.

  I take another swig and scroll quickly through several more newspaper articles, stopping suddenly as a photo snares my attention. I click on it and the enlarged image floods my screen.

  It’s a group sitting at a picnic table outside the courthouse during the hearings to have Jeb’s conviction overturned. They’re having lunch. A sunny day. At the table are legal counsel for the Innocence Project, an older Asian woman—the retired tech from the police lab who testified in Jeb’s favor about the DNA—plus a blonde woman I recognize instantly as Piper Smith. It was Piper’s true crime docudrama that brought to light the errors in the police evidence log and the existence of additional DNA on the hoodie. Piper was the first to get the lab tech to talk. But it’s another face in the group that has my heart beating suddenly.

  Sophia’s face.

  My sister is sharing lunch and laughing with this group. This does not look like an adversarial relationship. My pulse quickens. I carefully set my whiskey glass on the side table and check the date the story was filed. Seven months ago. A month before she died.

  Sophia attended those hearings to free Jeb? How could she be so apparently intimate with this group fighting for the overturning of his conviction? Surely it would have been the opposite, especially given Sophia’s knowledge that Jeb was her own daughter’s birth father. Wouldn’t Sophia and Peter have been fighting their damnedest to see he stayed behind bars?

  Frowning, I scroll farther. I find another photo of Sophia and one of the Innocence Project lawyers conversing on a bench outside the courtroom during a recess. There’s an intimacy in the way their heads are bent close.

  I sit back, a strange sensation settling into me.

  What were you doing at those hearings, Sophia? Why didn’t you talk to me . . . ?

  Guthrie’s words curl through my mind. He said Sophia made an appointment to come in and update her will. But she died just before she could do it.

  What changes, Sophia? Were they to do with Quinn?

  The wind moans in the rock formations across the water, an eerie sound like howling wolves that always gives me a shiver. I reach for my glass and take another sip of Trey’s very fine, very expensive, cask-aged scotch, and exhaustion falls like a blanket over me. I shut down my laptop. Tomorrow I’ll look up flights, book something, call in to work. I’ll ask Cass, my editor, and Marjorie, my sales manager, to jointly manage their respective sides of the business for a week. I’ll explain that I have an emergency and need to get out of town. If they lose the prospective advertising accounts in the process, I’ll deal with the fallout later.

  It’s going to be fine.

  By the time Quinn and I return, Jeb might have left town, or Adam might have taken him in. I rest my head back against my granddad’s chair, letting the comfortable old arms enfold me, enjoying a few more moments of the warm fire and the sound of crackling logs, before heading up to bed.

  Something starts me awake.

  My eyes flare open. I listen, hands tense on the armrests.

  I must have fallen asleep in the armchair. My head feels thick from the scotch. The fire has died to pulsing embers, and cold seeps in from corners of the room. Outside, the wind has increased, shifted direction, and is now wailing like banshees through the rocks on the other side of the lake. Was that the sound that woke me?

  I don’t think so.

  Tiny fingers of fear touch my skin. Quickly, I gather the fleece blanket from the back of the chair around my shoulders and pad up the stairs. I listen at Quinn’s door. All quiet. Just the howling of wind in the rocks.

  Yet the chill deepens through me.

  I try the door. It opens. Quinn is sleeping in a puddle of silver moonlight, her dark hair tangled over her white pillow. Tiptoeing in, I draw the duvet up gently around my niece’s shoulders. I stand for a moment, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, listening to her soft breaths. My chest squeezes. She’s stubborn, like her father, erecting walls of anger around her sensitivity for her own protection. The thought startles me, and I wonder if it will cease one day, or if I will forever be reminded of Jeb, of the past, when I look at Quinn.

  Bending down, I place a soft kiss on her hair. Her scent reminds me of kittens. Hay. Sunshine. This child is different fro
m her dad. I will forget. It’ll all fade, eventually. I just need to give it time.

  The fact Quinn is sleeping peacefully, that she’s unlocked the door, brings a measure of peace to me. One day, one baby step at a time . . .

  But as I exit the bedroom, gently drawing the door closed behind me, a clatter sounds outside in the yard. Trixie begins to yip downstairs. Adrenaline sparks through my body.

  I rush down to the kitchen window, peer out into the night. All I can see are the swishing skirts of conifers, dark shadows interplaying with the silver moonlight over grass. I watch for a while, trying to discern other movements, hoping to see the hulking black shape of a lumbering bruin. Because then I’ll feel safe. I’ll know it was nothing to worry about. I go to the other window, from where I can see the boathouse. Waves are lapping against the dock, which is rocking and swaying against its moorings. An old canoe is tethered to a rack on the wall of the boathouse, and a piece of rope is whipping against the siding in the wind. A flying pine cone suddenly smashes against the windowpane, right near my face. I gasp and jump back, my heart slamming into my throat. Then I give a soft laugh.

  That’s all it is. The wind hurling things around—branches, cones. Something must have landed on the metal roofing.

  I glance at the clock. Ten p.m. Still time for a decent night’s sleep. But as I head for the stairs, a gentle rapping sounds at the door. I freeze. It’s not cones or branches, or wind.

  It’s him.

  He’s come.

  I know it—instinctively. Fear grips my throat. For a moment I’m unable to move, to breathe.

  Again, the rapping sounds, a little louder, more insistent. Trixie whines and starts barking loudly. I shoot a glance up to Quinn’s door on the upstairs landing, and panic slices through me. I can’t let Quinn wake, or find out he’s here. Fighting fear, I rush toward the front door and flick on the outside light. Then I remember the bulb has blown. I peer through the peephole. My heart stalls.

  Jeb.

  In the silvery moonlight, all shadow and darkness.

  I begin to shake deep down inside my belly.

  He bangs just a little louder. “Rachel!” he calls. “I need to talk.”

  Trixie barks wildly.

  I’m frozen with terror, indecision. And something else, darker, trickier, a primal kind of mouth-drying thrill I can’t even begin to articulate. Oh God. I drag my hand over my hair. I should call the cops. Adam will put him away for trespassing or something.

  Except he’s not trespassing. He’s a free man knocking on a door.

  Images from the news stories race through my mind. Sophia’s face in the pictures. Her smile, her intimacy with the Innocence Project lawyers—what am I missing?

  “Rachel! Please. It’s important.”

  I swallow, grab my cell phone off the table, slip it into my sweater pocket. Holding Trixie by the collar, I unlock the front door, opening it just a small crack.

  But Trixie escapes my grasp and barrels through the crack, slamming the door open wide as she jumps up on Jeb with soft whines and body wiggles. I stare, dumbfounded. The dog remembers him. The old girl is acting like a pup again. Goose bumps chase down my arms.

  Jeb’s gaze locks with mine as he reaches down to ruffle the dog’s fur, and my mind crumples in on itself, time warping, overlapping. Stretching.

  He stands there like a ghost conjured out of my memory. Dark, tall, devastatingly, dangerously good-looking. Dressed in black jeans, black biker boots, a white T-shirt under his leather jacket. And he’s petting my dog as if it’s a decade ago. After all these years. Out of prison, here at my door. A dull roar starts in my brain. My knees turn to water. I reach for the doorjamb.

  “Jeb,” I whisper, my voice coming out hoarse.

  He steps forward and I brace myself, yet I’m unable to back away. I’m trapped, a mouse in the serpent’s gaze. His features catch the light from the hallway behind me. His jaw is tight and shadowed and strong, his features a little too gaunt, his raven-black hair a little too long. Wild. Everything about him is untamed. The brackets around his mouth have deepened. He seems taller somehow. The years in prison have done nothing to diminish his quietly crackling presence. In fact, it’s more powerful, a kinetic energy I can feel on my skin. It raises my hairs with its electricity, as if drawing me toward him on a cellular level.

  It’s been eight years since I last laid eyes on him in that courtroom. Nine since I’ve been near him. Spoken to him. Touched him.

  Kissed him.

  “I think she remembers me,” he says, giving Trixie another ruffle. The dog settles at his boots with a happy whimper. Memories swirl. Trixie as a pup, following Jeb and me over the grass. Swimming in the river. Jeb showing me how to teach Trixie to track through a dewy field early one morning. The three of us lying on a rug under soft sunshine, watching summer snow floating against an achingly blue sky. An endless sky. Like our dreams had been. Our future.

  The horrifying opening image from Piper’s docudrama suddenly swallows the memories: Amy dazed and beaten and half-naked on the railway tracks.

  I shake myself back to reality, slide my hand into my pocket, curl my hand tightly around my phone. “What do you want?” I say. “Why did you follow my niece at school? Is it revenge that you’ve come back for—to punish us all?”

  Something flares hard and sharp through his features. He regards me, gaze unwavering, intense, his carotid pulsing fast and steady beneath his tattoo, making it seem alive in the tricks of moonlight and shadow. I’ve made him angry, and it makes me scared. I’ve been shown what he is capable of.

  The wind howls again, and it rushes through the pine forest branches around us with the sound of an ocean.

  “The last thing I want is to hurt you, Rachel.” His voice is deep, thick. I detect hurt.

  I swallow. “Then what are you here for?” What does one say, how does one bridge the years of silence, the accusations, the bitterness, the goddamn hurt? The unspeakable loss, the hollowness, the betrayal, the rage? It all hangs like a sudden gaping black maw of a wound, nerve endings exposed to the wind.

  “Is Quinn asleep?” he says quietly.

  My mind scrambles in on itself. “What?”

  “I want to know if she’s sleeping.” He looks over my shoulder into my house. “Where is she?”

  I lunge forward and grab Trixie’s collar. I drag her away from him, into the hall. I shut her inside and I stand in front of the closed door in my socks, the paving ice-cold under my feet. I take my phone out my pocket, hit nine, then one. My thumb is poised over the keypad. “You’ve got exactly one minute to tell me what you want, then get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

  He raises his palms. “Take it easy.” His eyes flick between the phone, me, and the door. “I just want to talk to you, okay? About Quinn, but I don’t want her to know I’m here.”

  Confusion rattles through me.

  He has the markers of a sociopath . . . he’s a smooth and accomplished liar . . .

  He comes closer. Too close. I step back but my body butts up against the hardness of the door. I’ve trapped myself. I’m all alone out here. I don’t know what he wants. My thumb goes for the last one of a 9-1-1 emergency call.

  But before I can press down, he jerks forward and snatches my wrist in a grip so tight my fingers go numb and I drop the phone. It clatters to the cold paving at my feet. I stare at the phone on the ground, heart beating like a drum. Slowly I raise my eyes.

  His fingers are a vise around my wrist. His skin burns mine. His eyes laser me. His face, his lips, are close. So close. His scent so damn familiar. A muscle memory of desire, savage and raw, slices through my fear. I start to shake.

  “And you’ll tell the cops what?” he says quietly, eyes still burning into me. “That I came to see my daughter?”

  My stomach turns to water. I stare at him, speechless
, brain spinning.

  “I know, Rachel. I know she’s mine.”

  “How?” I manage to croak out. “How can you know?”

  “Sophia,” he says quietly, releasing my arm. He picks up my phone, hands it back to me. “Your sister was helping me. She was the one who first approached the Innocence Project. She and Peter helped pay for the lawyers.”

  My knees give out and I slump back against the door.

  A pinecone bombs onto the metal roof of the carport as another sharp gust rushes through the conifers, shadows moving, dizzying. Swirling me down into some dark and confusing place.

  “Sophia told you?” I whisper. “When? Why?”

  He watches me in silence for several beats. “I’m sorry. I thought you might have known she was working with me. She’s believed in my innocence for at least five years now. I thought . . .” He pauses. “I thought she might have told you.”

  I feel sick. I can’t think. “So that’s why you’ve come? For Quinn?”

  He glances away, as if deciding what to tell me.

  “No,” he says, finally. And I feel it’s a lie. I feel like he means to say, “Not yet.” Nausea rides up into my throat.

  “But it’s why I had to speak to you tonight. I made a mistake going by the school today. I hadn’t intended to involve Quinn, or you. Not yet.”

  Yet.

  “But then there was the fight. I saw you go to the cops. I need to know what you’ve told them, because I need this kept secret.” He’s quiet for another beat. “For Quinn,” he says. “For my daughter. And it’s my promise to Sophia and Peter.”

  I slide my back down the length of the door and sit on the cold step, seized by a sensation that perhaps he doesn’t exist. Maybe I’ve dreamed this up, it isn’t happening. Maybe I’m still asleep in the armchair by the fire.