The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel)

by Loreth Anne White

  “It was Trey, wasn’t it?” he says more calmly. “What did he say?”

  I swallow. “He says the police have an arson and forensic identification team out there, and they’re looking at you for burning the place up.”

  His eyes narrow and a muscle pulses along his jaw.

  “You can’t let them take you in, Jeb, not even for questioning. You need to stay here.”

  He comes up to me, stands close, places his hands on my shoulders. His voice is gruff. “What else did Trey say?”

  “That they’re going to look at me as an accessory. That they saw me out there tonight.” I curse. “I touched that gas can. My fingerprints are on it.”

  “See? This is why I need to go.”

  “No, this is why you have to stay. Here, in this boathouse. They can’t touch you on my property, not without sufficient evidence and a solid warrant. They have no right.” I pause. “You were preempted, Jeb. You can no longer do this alone. You need my help. You need me.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “To give you a chance. So you can tell your story to the media before they take you in. So you can start rattling those cages and shaking something free. So that those three men who attacked you can’t hide behind masks of anonymity. Someone, something, will slip. Someone will notice, or remember some detail. And I’m going to make damn sure it’s all over the media, starting with Internet, social media, television.” My voice is shaking. I try and modulate it. “So, you need to stay here, in the boathouse, at least until the interview is over tomorrow evening.”

  A wry smile twists his sculpted lips. “I love you, you know that?”

  Cold drops like a stone through my stomach. Moth wings of panic flutter in my chest. Suddenly I need distance, fast.

  “And while you’re here,” I say coolly, ignoring his comment, “you’ll stay away from Quinn. That’s understood, right? As long as no one connects you with her, no one has any reason to bother her.”

  He holds my gaze for a long moment. The wings of panic beat harder. But he doesn’t push it. Instead, he says, “I thought you were going away with her. For the Thanksgiving break.”

  “First the interview tomorrow. I’ll see what happens after that. Meanwhile I’ve got Brandy, Quinn’s sitter, booked full-time for the break. The original plan was for Brandy to take Quinn with her to bike camp every day. Brandy is one of the camp guides. We’ll proceed as planned tomorrow. And you’ll stay inside this boathouse until the interview—I don’t want Brandy or Quinn seeing you. You can use my father’s SUV to get to the Shady Lady. I’ll bring you the keys.” I hesitate. “Jeb, will you promise me one thing?”

  He watches me, a wariness entering his eyes.

  “Don’t lie to me. Not even by omission. Promise you’ll be totally open with me about everything, even if you think I’ll find it hard to swallow.” It’s a gauntlet of sorts that I’m casting down at his feet. I want desperately to be able to trust him. Fully. I want him to show me he’s telling me the whole truth.

  But he remains silent. There is something in his eyes, something I can’t put a finger on that leaves me uneasy. Tension shimmers between us. Dark, viscous. Sexual. Dangerous in its power to consume.

  “I won’t lie to you, Rachel,” he says quietly. “I never have.” He steps forward, takes my arm, draws me close, and he whispers over my mouth, his breath like warm feathers, “Trust me, please.” His lips meet mine, but I jerk away, heart slamming. I turn and make quickly for the door.

  “Get some sleep,” I say crisply, my hand on the knob. I’m unable to meet his eyes again. “I’ll bring breakfast, supplies for the fridge in the morning.”

  I exit and run up the lawn to my house without looking back. Dawn is not far behind those peaks. I fear we don’t have much time.

  Jeb stood at the window and watched Rachel running up the garden, her hair blowing in the wind. Her limp was a little more marked. She had to be tired. His chest hurt and it had little to do with damaged ribs.

  He had not anticipated her owning the newspaper. He’d had no intention of involving her in this way. Now they were looking at her as an accessory to arson. She was being positioned with the enemy against her own hometown.

  Remorse twisted through him, along with something darker, trickier. A crackling anticipation that sparked with unease. Don’t lie to me . . . Not even by omission . . .

  He hadn’t told her his suspicions about Sophia’s and Peter’s deaths. Nor his concerns over Amy’s suicide, the timing of it all. It would’ve been too much for her, on top of everything else today.

  Promise you’ll be totally open with me about everything, even if you think I’ll find it hard to swallow.

  He inhaled deeply, watching her disappear round the side of the house. The boathouse windows rattled in another blast of wind, and flying debris ticked against the panes.

  Besides, they were only that, dark suspicions. Nothing proved. Yet. He was not hiding anything.

  Lily LeFleur wasn’t cut out to be a cop’s wife. She worried. All the time. She knew what could go wrong, and it ran away with her imagination. She listened to the distant sirens as she paced her living room, tapping her wrist with her fingertips in an effort to stay calm. The night sky in the northwest glowed a dull orange. The west wind was strong, branches scratching against her windows, cones bombing on the roof. She had the radio on softly, set to the local station. The boys were asleep, or she hoped they were. They were safe on this south end of the valley. Adam must be tired. He’d been on shift since early this morning, hadn’t even come home for supper. This was unusual.

  When Adam had worked undercover in Edmonton, he was gone for long stretches, weeks sometimes. When he came back, his mind was filled with rough stuff he couldn’t talk about. The other RCMP wives had said she needed to let him decompress, that she should stand back, allow him to watch mindless television, do whatever it was he needed until he came round to being in a good place again.

  But Lily was not good at standing back.

  She hated being alone, and when he returned after a job, she needed to talk, to be held, to physically comfort. It ate at her not to know what he was thinking, feeling. They used to fight about it. He’d get angry, say she was overly needy.

  It was why they’d moved back to Snowy Creek. He’d quit the Mounties and taken a top job with the local force. A more administrative job. Lily liked that. This ski town was low on crime, or at least it was a different kind of crime; things were occasionally stolen out of cars left unlocked in the skiers’ day lot. There were drugs, kids getting into trouble, drunk drivers . . . but essentially a safe village in which to raise their sons. To keep her husband home. Alive.

  Lily passed the cabinet. Then again. She checked her watch. Three a.m. Adam could be out all night helping with that fire. She went to get laundry, needing to busy her hands, fight the urge to go to the cabinet.

  She sorted through his stuff, separating light and dark. Something made her do it, put his black T-shirt to her nose. Perfume. She could detect perfume. She went stone still. She sniffed again, burying her nose deep, a sick, dark feeling bleeding through her chest, pushing up into her throat. Carefully, she laid his shirt out flat on the washer, going over it inch by inch as if it might yield some forensic clue.

  She picked out a lone, long hair, held it up to the laundry light. Coppery gold.

  Lily didn’t recall leaving the laundry and opening the cabinet, didn’t even think about it until she was on her third glass of vodka and feeling sick with the taste of it yet unable to get enough to make the hurt and anger, the humiliation and rage, the desperation, fear, and loneliness go away.

  When Adam came home she was in bed. She heard him come in. Her bedside clock glowed 4:12 a.m.

  She lay dead quiet, room spinning softly, edges of her mind blurred. He showered in the bathroom as she lay there listening to the water.
Which was worse? That he was in danger on the job or fucking some slut? Maybe he’d been sleeping with other women when he was allegedly working undercover in Edmonton, too. Maybe that was why he hadn’t ever warmed to her immediately when he came home. Tears burned in her eyes.

  He came out of the bathroom in the dark. The bed shifted as he got in. Lily wondered if he’d been washing off fire smoke or the scent of the woman he was screwing.

  He reached under the covers, touched her with his fingertips. “Lily?” he whispered.

  She squeezed her eyes tight, didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t want him to smell the drink on her breath.

  “Night,” he whispered. The bed moved as he turned away from her, rolling over onto his side.

  Annie Pirello clicked open another article. They hadn’t called her to help with the fire, at least not yet. She’d already done a double shift today. But she couldn’t sleep either, so she was sitting at her kitchen table researching anything she could find on Jebbediah Cullen. Coming from Montreal, his story was new to her.

  She sat back, sipped her tea, listening to the faint sound of choppers up valley, the sirens, the police chatter on her radio as she read the piece on her laptop screen. It detailed the crime nine years ago. Annie noted that it was Chief Constable Sheila Copeland LeFleur who had been the top cop in charge at the time. Adam LeFleur’s mother. Luke LeFleur, her younger son, had been one of the key witnesses, along with Rachel Salonen, Clint Rudiger, Levi Banrock, Trey Somerland, and Harvey Zink. She set her mug down and clicked open another story.

  Luke LeFleur, according to this article, was killed in action during a peacekeeping deployment five years ago. It was noted in the article that Luke’s father, a Mountie working undercover in Alberta, had died a hero when he was shot by a member of the gang he’d infiltrated. Luke had been five years old at the time, Adam nine. Sheila had been left a single mother of two boys. They’d moved to Snowy Creek not long after the shooting when Sheila Copeland LeFleur accepted a job with the Snowy Creek PD. Annie rubbed her brow.

  This town was like so many other small communities, close-knit, everything interlinked. While the resort community of Snowy Creek could see up to forty thousand visitors over a busy ski weekend, the full-time resident population was closer to ten thousand. Many were transient workers from other countries, and under the age of twenty-six, which left a smaller, more tightly knit core of true locals who probably closely guarded their own interests against a constant sea of seasonal change. Nine years ago, the population had been even smaller.

  And now it looked as though Cullen was back.

  Annie got up, went to the window, drew the blinds. She was also pretty sure there was still something between Cullen and Salonen, from what she’d seen through the trees tonight. She wondered what it was, because when Salonen had come into the station earlier tonight, she’d clearly been spooked by the idea of a dark-haired stranger.

  Annie knew scared when she saw it.

  What had changed between Salonen’s visit to the station and Cullen’s visit to her house?

  CHAPTER 12

  Beppie Rudiger was out before sunup. The grizzly had returned during the night and tried to get into her beehives. She was now rigging a higher voltage electrical wire around the grove where her hives were stacked. She’d promised the girls they’d have fireweed honey to sell at the farmer’s market this fall, and so far it wasn’t coming together.

  The gray dawn sky was hazy from the distant wildfire, the air tinged with the scent of smoke. Clint would probably stay at the apartment in Snowy Creek until the worst of this was over. She spooled out the wire and came to a post. Reaching into her tool pouch, she muttered an oath. Her wire clippers were gone. She racked her brain, trying to think where she’d placed them. Or whether one of the girls had asked to borrow them. She glanced up toward the house on the far side of the field. Clint’s taxidermy shed was closer. He had cutters in there.

  She stomped in her gum boots up to the shed, which had been built under a giant cottonwood that would have to go because roots were pushing into the foundations.

  Beppie found the key under the rock, let herself in.

  The smell of pelts was thick. Mounted animal heads peered at her from the wall next to his giant walk-in freezer. The fake eyes seemed to follow her as she made her way to his work counter.

  No wonder the girls got spooked coming in here. She didn’t like it either, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t that she didn’t like hunting. She was a capable hunter herself. She could field dress an elk with the best of them. She found the clippers she needed in one of the drawers, then stilled as something near the back of the drawer caught her eye. A woman’s ring. Clint collected things, animal heads, antlers—hunt trophies. He also kept unusual trinkets he found in the woods.

  Beppie picked it up. It was silver with a hexagonal turquoise stone. She turned it between her fingers, something tugging at her that she couldn’t place. Inside were the initials CL. Disquiet rustled deeper into her. She slipped the ring into her pocket and shut the drawer carefully so it wouldn’t look like she’d disturbed anything. Clint hated anyone coming in here.

  But as she turned, she bumped over a glass jar of eyeballs. They scattered across the countertop, rolling to the edge and pinging to the floor.

  Beppie dropped to her knees, quickly gathering up the eyes. One of the bigger ones rolled between two sloped floorboards and disappeared under the counter. She reached under, stretching her arm into the several inches of space between counter and floor. Her hand came in contact with what felt like a flat metal chest. She moved her fingers along the smooth surface until she found a handle. She dragged it out to see if the eyeball had rolled behind it. It was an old tool chest. Padlocked. About the size of a briefcase. Dust was thick under the counter, but the surface of this chest was devoid of it, as if it had been recently wiped clean, or used, or only recently shoved down under there.

  Curiosity whispered through her. Somewhere outside, a helicopter thudded up high. She tried the padlock. Definitely locked. Getting up, she went to the board on the wall above the bench where her husband hung all his keys on hooks.

  Not one of them fit the padlock.

  Beppie heard a voice calling in the wind. She looked up, heard it again. Susie. Her eldest daughter, calling for her. Hurriedly Beppie shoved the chest back under, positioning it carefully, sweat beading. Clint really hated anyone coming in here; she shouldn’t have. She put everything back in position, including the keys, and went out with the cutters.

  “Mooom!” came the voice from behind the row of trees leading up the house.

  “Down here, Susie!” she called, dusting off her pants. “Almost done with the fencing. You got breakfast ready?”

  Susie popped round the trees and grinned, her thick blonde curls tussling in the smoke-laden wind. “Yup,” she said, nodding her head brightly. “Oatmeal and the blueberries I picked near the river.” She was seven years old, her front teeth were only just missing, and her nose and cheeks were freckled. Beppie’s heart squeezed with affection.

  “I’ll finish here and be right up.”

  Jeb lay dead still.

  There was someone inside the boathouse. He was being watched. He could feel it, and it raised the fine hairs on his body. The sense of presence must have woken him. He kept his eyes closed, waited, every muscle in his body primed, ready to roll, spring.

  Seconds ticked past. He could hear that the wind had abated a little. He could sense the dull light of a Pacific Northwest dawn outside.

  Slowly he opened an eye. Shock slammed through him. But he controlled himself, controlled his breath. Opening his eyes fully, he met her stare.

  “Hey,” he said quietly.

  Quinn’s features were grave as she regarded him. She didn’t move, didn’t say a word. Her hair was a wild, wind-blown mass of soot-black curls, her nose and cheeks pin
k from the outside cold.

  It was warm in the boathouse, though, embers still glowing behind the glass in the old stove. The light outside the windows was flat, gray. Waves chuckled against the dock and slapped along the shore. He heard a train in the distance, a screeching rumble along rails on the far side of the lake. Like he remembered. He’d always loved that sound—the sense of a traveler passing through to some distant place in this great big land.

  His heart beat softly.

  Stay away from Quinn. That’s understood, right . . .

  “You got hurt,” she said finally, coming closer.

  “Not badly.”

  She reached out and tentatively touched the bandage on his brow.

  “Was it the fire?”

  His mind raced. He never wanted to lie to her. He had to protect her. These things were mutually exclusive right now. Jeb eased himself into a sitting position, sucking air in sharply as pain sparked across his torso. The beat of his blood hammered against the gash on his brow.

  “Nah,” he said. “I got away from the fire. Just tripped and fell.”

  Her eyes narrowed sharply and Jeb got a sense she didn’t believe him.

  “That’s my granddad’s shirt,” she said.

  Jeb glanced down at the lumberjack flannel and a smile pulled over his mouth. “Yeah, it is. How does it look on me?”

  She pursed her lips. “Okay.” She glanced at his leather jacket draped over the back of the chair, then her eyes went back to the bandage on his head. “Rachel had blood on her pants. Was it yours? Did she save you?”

  Jeb felt his smile deepen. The movement pulled at the edges of his wound, making his whole face hurt. His stomach hurt too, where he’d been kicked. He felt as though he’d been dragged through the bush behind a team of Clydesdales.

  “Yeah, Rachel saved me. She’s my hero.”

  Quinn studied him seriously, thinking about this. “I hit her with my backpack.”