The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel)

by Loreth Anne White

  Laughter and men’s voices reach us from the next room.

  Kerrigan’s complexion pales. She gets smartly to her feet, walks around her desk, opens the door. “I think you should leave. Now.”

  I glare at her. Her reaction has confirmed it for me. The extension belongs to Clint Rudiger. Clint with the dragon tattoo. But Kerrigan has shut down. She stands unflinching by the door. But underneath the flint of her gaze I detect something else, a whisper of uncertainty, fear even.

  I get slowly to my feet, go to the door. “I’m not the enemy, Kerri. I just want the truth.”

  She says nothing. I leave and she shuts her door firmly behind me.

  I walk quickly out to where I’ve left Jeb in the parked truck, get in.

  “What happened?”

  I explain the photo of Clint, the dragon tattoo, Kerrigan’s reaction.

  “Jesus,” he whispers.

  I turn in the seat to face him. “April eighth was a Thursday, Jeb. Fridays are traditionally Clint’s days off—it’s why Kerrigan always works on a Friday. If he was sticking to his schedule, he had opportunity to be in Vancouver on Friday the ninth, the day my sister’s house burned down.”

  He swallows, eyes narrowing, a vein on his brow beneath the small butterfly sutures swelling.

  “Clint also fits the physical description of the man who visited Amy’s duplex after those phone calls.”

  “Fuck,” he says quietly.

  We both sit stunned for a moment.

  I recall what the West Vancouver police told me at the time of Sophia’s fire, that a lot of evidence is destroyed by the first responders to a blaze.

  “What better person,” I say, my voice hoarse, “to set a fire, to try and hide the fact it might be arson, than a firefighter? He could have taken the answering machine tape from the phone, the voice mail Amy left Sophia. He could have silenced Sophia.” Something else strikes me. “They never did find her cell phone, Jeb. And her laptop was damaged beyond retrieval.”

  “It’s all circumstantial,” Jeb says.

  “But it’s feasible.”

  “We need proof. We can’t do a damn thing without proof.”

  “Let’s go to the pit,” I say. “We can take a look at the place again, walk you through that night. Maybe being there will prompt something fresh in your own memory, like that music, the scent of dope, maybe even that newspaper ad for the firefighter’s calendar, finally prompted Amy’s.”

  As we drive north we see a dark bank of clouds building over the mountains. The wind has increased, bits of branches now blowing across the road. The first of the storm fronts is approaching.

  Thinking about Clint Rudiger, the possibilities, Jeb turned the truck off the highway, drove over the bridge, and crossed the train tracks. As the waters of the Green River churned beneath them, a strange feeling wrapped around him. He felt as though they’d just crossed some kind of threshold and were going back in time, things closing around them, past melding with present.

  He took the truck across a wide clearing that had once been used as a turning circle for vehicles ferrying basalt from the pit. This was where the two girls had gotten out of his car nine years ago. They’d run back across this clearing toward a grove of alders, while he’d turned south onto the highway and headed home. Engaging four-wheel drive, Jeb entered a narrow, rutted logging road hemmed in by forest on either side. After about a mile, the road opened suddenly into the wide gravel pit on a bench of land above the tracks. It had once been a quarry.

  They parked and got out.

  Hydro wires were near, and the air hummed with a crackling electricity. Jeb’s heart began to hammer and his skin pricked with perspiration.

  Nothing had changed. Rocks lined the high bank. Dry grass pushed through the stones in clumps. There were remains of small campfires. Broken bottles, beer cans. Kids still came here. Did the same things.

  He turned in a slow circle, his boots crunching over gravel, sun collecting against his leather jacket and black hair. An eagle soared up high, cried.

  Rachel slipped her hand into his, cool, slender, strong. He looked down into her eyes, the years suddenly spiraling, kaleidoscoping back to that moment, the night that had changed them all.

  “She tried it with me, you know. Retrograde hypnosis. In prison,” he said.

  “Sophia?”

  He nodded. “Well, that’s what she called it. She took me back to that night several times. Walked me through to see if I might have missed a detail that could help. We found nothing new. She said at the time that returning here, then trying myself to re-create the events of that night, might spur something.”

  “How did Sophia do it?”

  “She’d induce the hypnotic state, then step-by-step, walk me back as if in real time to re-create a vivid picture of the past, something I could examine.” As he spoke, Jeb walked with Rachel up to a blackened circle surrounded by heavily charred logs.

  “Here,” he said, “was the bonfire. You and Trey were sitting on a sleeping bag against the slight rise over there.”

  Her hand tightened in his. His face felt hot. The sounds of that night started coming back to him. Music. Someone had a drum. Rachel and Trey laughing, jeering at him. Amy teetering toward him, silhouetted by the orange flames, her high-heeled boots digging in between the tiny stones, low-cut blouse. Amy grabbing his arm. The eerily dancing light from the fire.

  “I’m so sorry,” Rachel whispered suddenly, pulling him back to the present. “It was my fault.”

  He turned to her and took her face in both hands, looking deep into her eyes. They were liquid, wide, vulnerable, as if she had nothing left to hide. The fragility of what he held in his hands, right here, suspended between past and present, could not have been more stark to him.

  “No, Rachel,” he whispered. “We all took actions that night that held consequences.” He bent down and kissed her lips, so gently, poignantly, a wild, ferocious rushing in his heart. Rachel melted into him, against him. This was how it should have been that night. This was what he should have left with.

  Maybe it was a good thing to confront this place, the past, together like this. To come full circle. There was a lot to be said about closure. She pulled back, looked up at him. “Let’s go back to the bridge crossing, Jeb, where they claimed they saw you turn north onto the highway.”

  Jeb stopped the truck in exactly the same place he’d stopped to wait for the train before crossing onto the highway that night. He wound down the window as it had been. He could smell smoke, carrying from the Wolf River fire with the new wind direction. There was a brown haze in the western sky.

  “Think back. Walk me through it, Jeb,” she said softly.

  He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply. “I could smell smoke. Like now. But it was from the bonfire up at the pit. My car was facing the tracks, like this. I was heated. Angry. At you. At myself for having slept with Amy in the backseat. Angry at getting drunk.” He swallowed, face going hot. “We had drunken sex in my car while it was parked up at the gravel pit. I hardly even remember it. Then, when I was going to take Amy home, she saw Merilee at the pit, and offered her a ride home with us. My head was spinning. I was unfocused. I shouldn’t have been driving, but I did.”

  He sat silent for a while.

  “While the three of us were in my car, waiting here to cross onto the highway, the train came rumbling past. Loud. Screeching wheels against the tracks. Amy was in the passenger seat next to me. She was facing the back, talking to Merilee. She had a fifth of brandy; they were passing it back and forth.” Jeb glanced up into the rearview mirror. “I could see Merilee in the mirror, brushing her hair, a gold pendant glimmering in the hollow of her throat.”

  “That’s why they found her hair in your car—she was brushing it.”

  He nodded. “I guess she might have hooked out the earring they found, too, while bru
shing. The girls were giggling, saying something, but the sound of their voices was being drowned by the noise of the train. The whistle sounded. It was piercing. The water under the bridge was rushing loud. My brain felt thick.”

  He closed his eyes again and thought deeper, trying to take his mind back further, trying to force clarity into the fuzziness of his drunken memories. The scent of smoke was stirring something fundamental inside him. Suddenly he could see again the luminescence of moonlight on the frothing white surface of the river. He could feel again the steering wheel of his car clenched in his fists, the tightness in his neck and shoulders. He heard the train coming again. He could smell the booze and cigarette smoke and perfume on the girls. Sweat trickled down his spine. He could taste Amy in his mouth, her lipstick. Shame, remorse, washed through him.

  He heard the loud, long whistle of the train. Once. Twice. The screech and rumble. He could feel the vibration in his car.

  Jeb realized with a start that a real train was approaching. Rachel touched his thigh. “Go with it, Jeb. Keep your eyes closed. Look back into that rearview mirror in your mind.”

  He glanced up into rearview mirror of memory, his eyes still shut.

  The screeching of the train along the tracks grew deafening. He felt the wind of it. Could smell metal. The wood chips and lumber it was carrying.

  “Music,” he said suddenly, eyes still closed. “There was music coming from somewhere, drowned by the sound of the train, but I knew it was there. The girls were laughing and Amy told Merilee to look at something behind us.”

  Jeb went still. In the mirror he saw the shadows of the dark grove of alder trees on the far side of the clearing. Suddenly a light came on in the shadows. It was the interior light of a partially hidden vehicle. And in that brief moment Jeb glimpsed shapes inside the vehicle; several people. He saw the orange flare of a cigarette being lit. Then all went dark again.

  A dialogue between the girls sifted into his memory.

  It’s them.

  Do you wanna go?

  Is he there?

  I think so. They’ve got the good shit . . .

  Better than with Jeb. Hey, Jeb . . .

  Laughter. Drunken laughter.

  Words formed in his own mind. Who are you talking about? Who is behind us? I should take you home. Words he never uttered because another part of him didn’t want to know who was behind them. He just wanted the girls gone. He was happy for them to leave.

  He felt a tightening in his stomach. Doors opened. The girls got out of his car and turned into silhouettes as they ran toward the hidden vehicle in the trees, where the music was coming from. The train passed. He drove over the tracks, turned left, never looked back.

  Jeb’s eyes flared open and he spun round, stared out the back window, the memory shattering into a million mirrorlike shards at his feet. His heart was thumping. He was wet under his arms.

  “Rachel,” he said thickly. “I think there was a vehicle parked in the trees over there.”

  He got out of the truck and quickly marched over to the clump of trees. Rachel came running behind him.

  “There. It was parked right in there, partially hidden, but the interior light came on for a second, and I saw it.” He spun to face her. “Those four guys, they said in court they were sitting here, in the copse, smoking, when they saw me turn north onto the highway. I remembered the girls running to join someone behind us, but there was not one mention of a vehicle. Why not?”

  “Are you sure?”

  He raked his hand over his hair, staring at the trees, doubt whispering around the edges of his drunken memory.

  Wind gusted, rustling dead alder leaves. Several clattered down on them.

  “Close your eyes again, Jeb.” She placed her hand on his arm. “See it. Talk me through it.”

  He shut his eyes, inhaled deeply.

  “Which way was the vehicle facing?”

  He thought for a moment of the shape of the vehicle that was so briefly lit up.

  “That way.” His eyes flared open. “Rachel, it was facing that way, toward the old road leading up to the trestle bridge, to the mine.” He stilled as something hit him. “A Jeep,” he said. “It was a Jeep.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The shape of the windows.”

  The wind rustled again through the dry trees and brush. The faint scent of smoke filled their nostrils. Rachel glanced up at the sky. Jeb followed her gaze. The orange haze was moving in fast from the west, while a purple bank of clouds was building over the peaks to east. The sky was darkening.

  Thunder growled, soft and distant in the mountains.

  “Adam used to own a Jeep,” she said softly. “He had a Hawaiian sticker on the back, near the right taillight. White, with a rainbow and a hand making that ‘hang loose’ surfing sign. I saw it up at the pit earlier that night.” Rachel rubbed her hand over her brow. “Oh, God. I remember—Luke was driving the Jeep when I saw it. I never thought of it again, Jeb. I . . . I didn’t even think about whose Jeep it was, or where it went. It was irrelevant at the time.” Her eyes glittered with emotion. “I should have remembered.”

  “That’s why this technique works. It can help you see pieces you never thought fit at the time. This is not your fault. I didn’t recall a Jeep either, until now, until the smell of smoke, the sound of the train, being here with you, taking my mind back.”

  She looked away, struggling.

  He took her arm. “Come. Let’s drive up that logging track to the trailhead where the trestle bridge crosses over to the mine. That’s the way the Jeep was pointing. Maybe it did go up there that night.”

  They arrived at the trailhead where the track forked. The right-hand fork led to a hiking trail along the flank of Mount Rogue and up to the glacier that fed Rogue Falls. The left fork led to the trestle bridge and mine. But it was barricaded by a row of giant boulders. This was as far as they could take a vehicle. A large yellow sign warned that the road had been decommissioned and was dangerous. BRIDGE UNSTABLE. NO ACCESS.

  Rachel and Jeb left the truck and continued on foot along what was now a small grassy track. A grouse whoop whoop whooped in the woods, the soft sound like a muted owl. A squirrel chucked a shrill warning. The air whispered with the scent of smoke and dryness. As they neared the bridge, they could hear the rushing waters of Rogue Falls, and the air grew damp and cool.

  They came to the edge of the gorge where the old trestle bridge spanned the plunging chasm and raging waterfall. Mist rose in clouds. Fine droplets began to cling to their hair. Nine years ago they would have been able to drive over this bridge to the old mine on the other side. Now crosspieces of the bridge were missing, gaping maws opening to the gorge below.

  Had the Jeep come this far and crossed over to the entrance of the old copper mine? They could see the mine entrance on the other side, a black hole in the red rock of the mountain.

  Rachel rubbed her arms. “Amy remembered the sound of rushing water.”

  “And dirt, cold, dark, damp. Piper mentioned earth, heavy above their heads.”

  She shivered. Jeb put his arm around her, drawing her close.

  “Do you think it’s possible that Merilee is down there,” she said, “at the bottom of a shaft somewhere? Because if she is, there could be evidence with her. Her body could have been fairly protected down there. She could still tell what happened.”

  He moistened his lips, staring at the black maw in the red mountain. He could almost sense a presence, something reaching, calling from that hole, from the dark bowels of the mountain. “Every contact leaves a trace,” he whispered. “Like in tracking. Wherever a person steps, whatever he touches, it will serve as silent witness against him.”

  “We could walk across, using the crosspieces,” Rachel said. “The side railings still look solid.”

  “Risky,” he said. “No idea
how rotten that wood might be. The best way would be to access the mine entrance by coming up from the north side of that gorge. We’d need equipment to get down the shafts.”

  “Equipment and expertise that Rescue One has,” Rachel said. “But I don’t see them helping us with this, Jeb. How are we going to do it?”

  He looked up at the darkening sky. The wind was blowing harder. Thunder grumbled into the distance again, louder this time, rolling into the peaks. “I don’t know. Yet. We need to go fetch Quinn. This weather is not looking good.”

  Jeb could tell Rachel felt it too, a sense of time closing in. Pressure building. The storm was almost on them.

  They hiked quickly back to the truck. Lightning flickered against the puce sky to the east. Thunder clapped. Wind gusted and raindrops began to spit from the sky.

  As they drove back down the mountain, Rachel leaned forward, turned the radio on to the local news channel.

  They were talking about the Wolf River wildfire. It was burning out of control again, and heading back toward Snowy Creek, fueled by fresh southeasterly winds. Another small fire had also been ignited by a lightning strike below the peak of Mount Barren, and it was burning on the south flank. More strikes were expected to spark many more spot fires as the storm cells moved in.

  “There’s no time to drop you at home first,” Rachel said. “We should go straight to pick up Quinn.”

  He nodded. It would mean people might see them all in the truck together. But he didn’t like the sound of fire on the south side of Barren. Things could get ugly fast.

  When they reached the highway, Jeb increased the gas. He was worried about getting his child now. Keeping them all together.

  CHAPTER 23

  Rain bombs down, fat drops hitting dry ground and rolling like mercurial marbles in the dust. I run with my jacket over my head toward the staging area for Quinn’s bike camp. Jeb has parked a small distance away in an effort to remain incognito in my vehicle. Wind gusts in strange, unpredictable eddies fueled by mountain downdrafts and valley crosswinds.