The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel)

by Loreth Anne White

  “Who?” I croak. “Who could you be together with?” Suddenly I recall the night the fire broke out on Jeb’s property. I phoned Brandy to look after Quinn. I remember thinking when she answered that someone was in her bed. She’s not mentioned a man in her life.

  “Shit! Shit, shit. You screwed it up. You were all supposed to be at home.” She reaches onto the dash, grabs my cell. One hand on the wheel, she dials again.

  I hear it ringing.

  I struggle to move my arms but they’re stuck fast behind me. With colossal effort I lurch my body sideways, knocking the phone out of her hand. She backhands me hard across the face, flinging me back into the seat. My head strikes the side window with a thud. My skull hums and I taste blood at the back of my nasal passage. Blood leaks over my mouth and down my chin.

  Quinn suddenly rams the back of Brandy’s seat with her feet. She’s ram, ram, ramming. Brandy’s body jerks from the impact as she redials Jeb’s number. “Shit, you little runt. Stop it.” She tries to reach into the back and strike Quinn. The truck almost goes over the side. She swears again, dropping the phone as she rights the vehicle with both hands. Desperately, I seek a way to distract her.

  “What . . . would you have . . . done if we were all home?” I gag as blood goes down my throat.

  She doesn’t answer. I imagine she might have tried to drug us all, take us somewhere where the fire might consume us, and no one would think to do a tox screen on our bodies.

  “How can you hurt Quinn?” I say her name, choking on the blood in my throat. I want Brandy to think, to snap back. She’s cracked on some psychological level. This is not the same woman I trusted with my niece. “You love Quinn, Brandy. You’ve . . .” I cough again but can’t clear the blood and spittle from my mouth and nostrils. “You’ve looked after her, you want your own kids. You don’t have to do this.”

  “I do! I . . . I have to finish. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” She reaches down for the phone, picks it up.

  Quinn kicks harder, moaning under her duct tape. I turn my head slowly. I look into her big round eyes. “It’s . . . going to be okay.” I try to make the words come clearly, but I gag and cough again. Desperation swells in my chest.

  Brandy redials. With a sick feeling I hear Jeb answer. Brandy looks panicked for a second.

  “Jeb Cullen?” she says. “I . . . I have them. I have Rachel and Quinn.” Her voice is shaky and weird now, her eyes frantic. “If . . . if you want to see them alive again, do what I say.”

  “Who is this? What are you talking about?”

  I hear his voice, loud, strident. I try to move my legs but can only shuffle my feet slightly. I’m trapped inside my body. I can’t help Quinn.

  “I’ve got them on Bear Mountain. We’ll be . . .” Her gaze jerks up as she yanks the wheel round another bend and hits the gas. Gravel and mud spit out from under the tires as we almost go into a spin. Fire is fully engaged on parts of Mount Barren. I can now see that the gondola terminal on Barren is ablaze. Smoke smells thick inside the car. Brandy looks panicked as she peers through the ash-streaked windshield. I realize she hasn’t formed a concrete plan. Her first plan failed and she doesn’t actually have a backup. I need to use this fear and insecurity I see in her.

  Suddenly she’s staring at the burning gondola station on the other mountain.

  “We’ll be at the Summit-to-Summit Gondola station. I’ll wait exactly forty-five minutes for you to get here, or they die.”

  Quinn kicks the back of Brandy’s seat with her heels again. Brandy jerks forward, curses.

  “Wait—” I hear Jeb yell. “How do I know you have them?”

  Brandy hits the brakes and the car slides sickeningly on mud. She lunges into the back, rips part of the duct tape from Quinn’s mouth. Quinn screeches in pain. I lurch my body at Brandy again. She shoves me back into the seat.

  “Say something to Jeb,” Brandy orders Quinn, holding the phone to her face.

  “J-J-Jeb, I want my m-m-mom. Brandy h-hurt Rachel . . .”

  My stomach contracts. I need to throw up. My pain for Quinn is unbearable. I have to stop this.

  Brandy yanks the phone away from Quinn. “Satisfied?”

  “Why are you doing this? What do you want?”

  But Brandy kills the call, retapes Quinn’s mouth with a fresh strip. She rams the truck back into gear and spins the steering wheel as she hits the gas again. A scream of rage rises in my chest. I hold it in. I must not panic. Panic kills. I need to negotiate with Brandy. I know Brandy, don’t I? Who could she be protecting?

  . . . The evidence will never be found. It’ll all die down. We can still be together. I need him. I need him . . .

  Who is him? My world spins again and I fade in and out. I struggle to pull my mind back into focus. I force myself to think of the men who lied about Jeb. Clint, Levi, Luke, Harvey. I don’t know that any of them are connected to Brandy. Then it strikes me. Adam. Luke’s brother.

  Adam with the Jeep and the ska music. Adam whose mother led the charge to convict Jeb. If Adam was involved in the rape or cover-up, he stands to lose everything if exposed now.

  Brandy told me once a while back that she’d met Adam at a support group for people who had family members with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Her mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s. She told me that she and Adam bonded over this. I try to cast my mind back. I recall the look in her eyes as she spoke about him. I remember thinking she really liked this married man, and I wondered briefly at the time if there was more to it.

  “Adam,” I say. “It’s Adam . . . you’re doing it for him.” I cough and I struggle for more energy, more words. “You were with him when I called you to look after Quinn, the night the wildfire started. What . . . did Adam do nine years ago?”

  She returns her attention to the road.

  “I love him,” she says simply. “He loves me. We’re going to be together. He . . . he balances me. I need him.”

  Balances me. Brandy is unbalanced. I know very little about mental illness, but I am aware that people can appear normal for years, then the next thing you know is they’ve killed themselves. People miss the signs. I’ve missed the signs in her.

  I love him. He loves me. We’re going to be together . . .

  My world spirals, slides again. Jeb said he loves me. I know he loves his daughter unconditionally. He will come for us. He will die for us. I don’t want him to die.

  The things we do for love . . .

  “This is not going to help Adam,” I say. “You can stop. You don’t have to hurt anyone.”

  She curses violently. “You fucked it up. I can’t stop! I can’t. I have to finish it!”

  I lurch my body at her again. She swears violently as she elbows me back. I try again. She rummages in the kit at her waist, finds the syringe. She jabs the needle deep into my leg.

  “Just shut the hell up, okay? Shut up.”

  My world goes black.

  Annie drove through the stop-start southbound traffic with Beppie Rudiger in handcuffs in the backseat behind the barricade. She kept her siren off. There were real emergencies out there that needed the road, and she was using the time to see if Beppie would talk more.

  Jeb Cullen had asked if the handcuffs were really necessary, but she was going by the book. This whole clusterfuck involved cops—LeFleur and his mother in particular—and she wanted everything squeaky clean. She was covering her ass, and she wasn’t going to take the fall for anything, no matter what Novak said.

  She’d listened to the first part of the recording Beppie made. Some of what Clint said was audible. A tech might tease the rest out. Beppie was a witness and would talk. Jeb would testify too. Backed up with the recording, they could have what they needed to nail Clint Rudiger for the murder of Merilee Zukanov and the sexual assault on Amy Findlay. The one thing Annie was superedgy about was Clint himself.
She was pretty damn sure she’d seen the shot hit him before he had wheeled over the railing. But it was dark. Even so, no one could survive a fall down that gorge. They’d find his body downriver, if at all.

  “There’s another one,” Beppie Rudiger said suddenly in back.

  “Another what?”

  “Trophy.” Beppie Rudiger rattled something against the barrier as she tried with her cuffed hands to pass it through to Annie. “I forgot about this one. This is the one that made me think about what else might be in that box of his. You must have them all. All of it. I don’t want them near me. This one was in the back of his drawer. I found it when I was looking for cutters for my bee fence.”

  Annie glanced out the corner of her eye. Her heart stalled, then started to hammer hard. Keeping one hand on the wheel, she reached for the ring Beppie Rudiger was trying to poke through the grid.

  A hexagonal turquoise stone set in silver.

  Immediately she pulled over onto the verge, flicked on her emergency light bar, no siren. She put the interior light on. The ring was engraved inside with the letters CL.

  Claudette Lepine.

  Annie’s blood turned cold.

  It was the ring she’d given her sister.

  Brandy was blind with adrenaline, terrified. On some level she knew she’d snapped again, like the time during the RCMP training course at Depot Division, which is why they’d kicked her ass out. It had been over a guy, too. She’d loved him. Unrequited love that put her over the edge, made her do stupid things. But that was long ago. She’d begun to think it was a one-time thing, that she was in control now. But losing Adam . . . she couldn’t. She needed him like she needed air to breathe. He was going to be with her forever.

  She glanced at Rachel in the seat beside her. She was out. Maybe she’d given her too much. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have time to think about Rachel now. Quinn was dead quiet.

  Ash-mud smeared thick across the windshield. She bent forward, straining to see through the streaks. Smoke was obliterating everything. Suddenly she made out the lights of the Thunderbird Lodge.

  With a shaking hand, she palmed her wet ball cap off her head, trying to think this through. It shouldn’t have been like this. Her only weapons were bear spray, ice ax. Ropes. Her strength and endurance. The ketamine was gone now.

  Shit.

  She’d gotten this far. There was no going back now, surely? Perspiration dampened her body. She pulled in next to the gondola terminal entrance. The fire was still raging on the Mount Barren side. Wind was fierce, smoke swirling. The gondola would shut down in wind this strong. But she was one of the patrollers who’d received the emergency evac and ropes training. She knew how to override and jam the thing.

  All she had to do was get them all into one gondola cabin and send them over into the furnace consuming the Mount Barren terminal. If they didn’t burn when they docked, they’d never get down that mountain alive, not with the way the wildfire was engaged and the wind was going. But she was scared. She’d never killed anyone. She could do it. She could. Quinn suddenly rammed her seat from behind again and started moaning like some horrible animal. Brandy started to shake violently. She was doing it for Adam. She had to make sure he hadn’t told anyone, wouldn’t confess. She reached for Rachel’s phone, dialed his number.

  It rang. Again, he didn’t pick up. Brandy started to panic. She left a message.

  Jeb swore at the traffic clogging the highway southbound. Smoke was dense. Sirens everywhere. Forty-five minutes Brandy had said.

  J-J-Jeb, I want my m-m-mom . . . Brandy h-hurt Rachel . . .

  He’d never make it in forty-five. He flicked on his hazard lights and leaned on the horn as he swerved round the line of cars. He raced down the oncoming lane, blaring his horn, hazard lights flashing. Headlights came at him head-on. He ramped up onto the opposite curb and bombed along the sidewalk, clipping a lamppost and a parked car, then he veered back into the oncoming lane once the vehicle had passed. A wailing siren approached behind him. Jeb glanced into his rearview mirror. The strobing lights of an ambulance were coming up behind him fast. It was also driving in the oncoming lane, cars were pulling over where they could. Jeb ramped back up onto the curb, and as soon as the ambulance passed, he tucked in right behind the ambulance’s rear, following it almost into town, where he cut down a side street and wound round to the base of Bear Mountain.

  The skiers’ parking lot was deserted. The dark shapes of humans were silhouetted against pulsing emergency lights as they ran through the village, evacuating things. Someone was watering down the Shady Lady Saloon with a fire hose. A giant sprinkler was watering other buildings near the base. Jeb started up the dirt road that led up Bear Mountain.

  Mud was slick under his tires. Rain came down hard, and it was gray and sludgy against his windshield. The deluge, however, was doing nothing to kill the fire raging on the Mount Barren side, where orange flames licked and leaped into the blackness. As he climbed, the lights of the village below disappeared into smoke. Higher up, he saw that the Barren fire was creeping down into the Khyber drainage. It looked like the whole town would burn if the wind didn’t change in time. Everyone was fleeing the other way, and he was going up. Into the inferno. Because everything that meant anything to him was somewhere up there in that smoke.

  His heart hammered. It was a trap. Brandy wanted him. He had no idea why, or how she was tied into this thing. But he’d do anything to save his child and his woman. Anything.

  He had his proof.

  He now wanted his life. His family. He’d tasted it. What it could be like. He’d been given everything to live for.

  And die for.

  Adam always thought if the time came when he was forced to take his own life, it would be by eating his weapon. Cop-style. The honorable way. That time had come. He had the balls to come clean, but not for being arrested, facing trial. Or for sitting in a prison cell. A cop in the slammer? It never ended well.

  This was the honorable option. The only option.

  His boys wouldn’t have to grow up with the stigma of him on the inside. Lily would be free to move on, to hold up her head. But he couldn’t eat his gun, not if he wanted to look after them. He had to make it look like an accident, or Lily and Tyler and Mikey wouldn’t get the life insurance.

  As Adam sped north along the twisting highway toward the narrow bridge that spanned the aptly named Suicide Gorge, he felt an incredible sense of relief. Almost elation. All the loose ends had been tied. He’d left instructions in an envelope on the table for Lily. He’d passed the confession to Pirello, who would have given it to Mackin by now. He’d said his good-bye to Brandy. She would get over him. She was young, beautiful, had her whole life ahead of her, and it was best that Lily never found out about her.

  When he neared the bridge he began to accelerate, his wet tires screeching. He had to hit the barrier hard, and sideways, as though he were swerving in an effort to avoid the collision.

  His phone rang. Something pinged through his determination. He clenched his jaw, trying to ignore it. It rang again. Heart thudding, perspiration breaking out over his body as he neared the barrier, he suddenly slowed, snatched the phone off his seat. He checked the incoming number. Rachel? His heart jumped up into his throat as panic hit him, and reality. He slowed right down and pulled over, scrubbed his hands over his face while the call went to voice mail.

  Shit. He’d chickened. He was going to have to turn around and take another run. Unable to stop himself, Adam hit the number that would take him to his messages. One last listen.

  There were several frantic messages from Brandy telling him not to give his confession to anyone. Yet. His pulse started to race. With each message she sounded progressively more hysterical. He hit the last one, which had come from Rachel’s phone.

  “Just don’t do it, Adam. I have them. Up at the gondola. It’s going to be okay.” She
started crying. “I’m making it right for you. Don’t do anything, baby, okay? They’ll be gone soon . . .”

  The message cut off

  Quickly, Adam tried to return the call. It rang twice, then cut out. He tried again, but there was no longer a signal.

  He stared dazedly through the driving rain running down his windshield at the bridge over the canyon ahead. What in hell was Brandy doing? Why was she on Rachel’s cell? The town was being evacuated, the mountain burning. Who did she have up at the gondola? He recalled the look on her face as he’d told her that Rachel and Jeb would get there, they’d find the evidence in the mine . . . and it struck him like an ice ax.

  Adam rammed his vehicle into gear, spun a U-turn over the bridge, and floored the gas on his way back to Snowy Creek.

  As Jeb neared the Thunderbird Lodge, he saw that a building on Mount Barren was engulfed by fire. His gaze flared back to Thunderbird Lodge and he realized it must be the new gondola terminal that was burning on the other side. He’d read about the construction of the Summit-to-Summit in the papers while in prison. He pulled up next to the dark-blue beater of a truck parked outside the brightly lit terminal. It was Brandy’s. He recognized it from when she’d picked up Quinn.

  A band of tension strapped tight across his chest as Jeb grabbed the rifle and flung open the door. Ash rain streaked him with gray paste as he ran toward the building. The sky glowed orange behind thick smoke. The door to the glassed-in terminal was unlocked.

  He entered, coughing.

  The place was starkly lit with neon. Empty. He blinked away the ash grit in his eyes. “Brandy?” he called.

  No answer.

  He moved toward the line of red gondola cabins. “Brandy?” he yelled again. His voice echoed. The place was deserted.

  He spun round, heart thudding. What had Rachel told him about Brandy? Ski patroller. Mountain girl. Had worked on the mountain since she was a kid. Knew mountain operations. Great with children—wanted her own.