Wolfhunter River

by Caine, Rachel

  “It’s not your business,” I say. “Go home to Kansas City, Miranda. Let it go.”

  “I sold the house in Kansas City. I’m . . . What’s the popular phrase these days? Property surfing. Though I have to admit, I had to spend a very unpleasant evening at that local bed-and-breakfast in Norton, and I won’t be going there again. I understand there are some reasonably adequate houses for rent out at Stillhouse Lake. Maybe you can recommend the one you used to have.”

  I don’t answer. I can’t. The idea of Miranda, with millions to spend and the leisure to indulge her hate, holing up like a venomous spider within striking distance . . . it’s honestly horrifying. I know Miranda. I know she was out of control when I left her. If she’s abandoned her old life in Kansas City, all her creature comforts and enablers and sympathetic friends . . . then God only knows what she’s planning.

  “You didn’t answer me,” she says. “Is this some kind of game you’re playing, pretending to be in a relationship with her? I really hope it is, because the alternative makes me want to vomit.”

  “Let’s not do this,” I tell her. “Come on.”

  “So it’s true? You’re actually sleeping with her. She was Melvin Royal’s wife, for God’s sake. Hurt her, yes, by all means. But don’t debase yourself.”

  I don’t want to talk to Miranda about Gwen. My past is a wrecking ball. I’ve always known it was out there, rushing toward me. I just never imagined how much it would hurt when it finally hit. “I’m only going to say this once,” I tell her. “So believe that I mean every word. If you come for her, you come through me. You make even a move toward hurting those kids, and I will end you. They don’t deserve any of this. Gwen, the kids—they’re innocent. Just leave it alone. Just stop.”

  She’s silent for so long that I think I’ve actually gotten through to her. Then she says, “She’s really turned your head inside out. My God, she’s good at making otherwise-sensible men believe her, including the ones on her jury. We swore to make her pay. I thought you believed in that.” She sounds almost . . . sorry for me.

  She’s right. I’d believed every word of that at the time I’d met her. I’ve moved past it, but nothing’s changed in Miranda’s life. She’s frozen in the amber of her grief and rage, obsessed with reliving her dead child’s last moments.

  Revenge is not my life. I don’t want it to be, not anymore. Even after reading Callie’s journal . . . especially after that, because I can see myself ending up like Miranda: broken, cored hollow, filled with rage if I step off that cliff.

  I don’t mean it to hurt when I say, “I’m sorry for you, Miranda. I really am.” But from the sharp intake of breath on the other end, it does sting. Deeply. “Please stop. I’m asking you. Please. If we ever had any kind of feelings between us, please don’t do this.”

  “I’m only talking to you because we did have that,” she says. “One chance. You’re better than this. Just walk away from that woman, even if you don’t help me. Or I swear to you, the price you pay for it will be very, very high.”

  I think of Gwen, sobbing in my arms. Waking from nightmares that she can’t talk about. Defending her kids despite her own danger. And saving me too. Gwen isn’t perfect, by any stretch. But she’s a damn sight more real and alive and human than Miranda, whose malevolence is the only thing keeping her broken heart beating.

  “Okay, you can say you gave me a chance, if that makes you sleep at night,” I say. “If you’re coming at me, do your fucking worst.”

  I hang up on her. That probably drives her wild; Miranda’s used to cursing, but only when she’s the one doing it, and she’s a narcissist. She hates to be ignored. She’s lived in a padded box her whole life, handled carefully like a breakable treasure; when reality crashed in on her, she could only believe that her pain, her loss, was bigger and more urgent than anyone else’s. And that will never change.

  I felt something for her once. Not tenderness. Not love. But a shared delusion that expresses itself in violence is almost more intimate than love.

  Miranda Tidewell is back. I know she’s not going away.

  And everything I’ve built, everything I love, is about to come crashing down on top of me.

  “Sam?”

  I look up. Lanny’s standing in the doorway of the room that Gwen and I are sharing.

  She’s got her phone in her hand. Holds it up. I see there’s a call open. She hands it to me.

  I lift the phone to my ear, and Miranda’s voice says, “Did you really think it would be that easy?”

  I know Lanny can see me flinch, and I quickly turn my back to her, and say, “You just called a child’s phone to make a point. Well, I get it. Trust that. What the hell do you want? What is your endgame here?”

  “I have all your numbers,” she says. “Would you rather I call Gina next, or are you going to come out and talk to me face-to-face?”

  She refuses to call Gwen by any name other than her old one. I swallow hard. I’m shaking; I can feel it. “Where are you?”

  “Outside in the parking lot of your motel,” she says. “I’m in a rented Buick. Definitely not my style, I know, but this isn’t Lexus rental territory.”

  Shit, shit, shit. She tracked our phones. Of course she did; we got careless about changing them. If she got our numbers, it’d be easy as hell for her to pinpoint our locations. Norton’s not that far away. And we’re sitting ducks inside this room.

  “I could have you arrested for stalking,” I say.

  “Really?” She laughs. It sounds half-crazy. “And are you going to explain what we are to each other to the police? Maybe you should also confess all the illegal things you got up to while you were with me. Stalking, as I recall, was also involved.”

  I look over my shoulder. Lanny’s still there, frowning, trying to listen. I walk over and close the door. I’m struggling just to keep it together. “Leave,” I tell Miranda.

  “No. You didn’t just screw me over, Sam, oh no. You fucked over your dead sister and my dead daughter and all those other dead girls too. That’s how low you are. And how much of a gullible coward. Come out and face me.”

  I go to the door that opens out to the parking lot. Put my hand on the knob. It’s as warm as blood, easy to turn. I make myself stop, and I crouch down still holding it, breathing hard against the impulse to go out there, break her windows, beat the holy living shit out of the car, if not the woman inside it.

  Because that’s what she wants. A confrontation. One that gives her something to use.

  “Sam?” I can barely hear her over the ringing in my ears. Christ. She knows how to push my buttons. She learned that over those years we nursed our grudges together, hand-fed them on diets of hatred and booze and still-bleeding wounds. She remembers. “The longer you wait, the worse this is going to get. Understand?”

  I stand and pull open the door. There she is, Miranda, unmistakable behind the wheel of a running blue Buick, and she’s right, the car’s too pedestrian for her even on this trip to nowhere. Her hair looks perfectly styled. Her makeup perfectly applied. I’ve seen her raw and desperate and agonized, stumbling and screaming, but this Miranda is her public face. Rich, entitled, and proud of it.

  I don’t go out. She sits in the car. We stare at each other for a long, long moment as heat shimmers up between us, and I lift the phone back to my ear and say, “I’m done.”

  I shut the door and hang up the call. I turn to put my back against the wood and slide down until I’m sitting, a human shield between her and the kids, because she’ll come for me first; she’ll have to. I don’t know what I’m expecting. Gunfire through the door, maybe. I know she’s got it in her.

  But I hear a change in the pitch of the Buick’s engine. It’s backing out.

  Then I hear it drive away.

  Lanny’s knocking on the connecting door, urgently. “Sam? Sam, are you okay?”

  I get up and open it. I hand the phone back to her. “Block that number,” I tell her. “Do the same for Connor’s phon
e, okay? I don’t want you talking to her.”

  “Who is she?” She’s eyeing me warily, and I can’t say I blame her. I probably don’t look like the same man who listened to her breakup story. “Is she—she’s not—”

  “An old girlfriend?” I finish for her, because that’s naturally where she’d go. She nods. “No. Someone . . . someone I used to work with.”

  “You sounded so angry, though.”

  “Yeah, the job didn’t end well.” Not that it’s ended at all. Miranda’s right about one thing. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to face her.

  And sooner or later, I’m going to have to tell Gwen what I’ve been holding back from her, before Miranda does it for me.

  9

  GWEN

  Everything in Wolfhunter is a short walk, even in the heat. Hector Sparks has a lush old place, probably one of the nicest in Wolfhunter. It’s a private home with a carefully tended garden bursting with flowers. Bushes trimmed to precise measurements. Trees that don’t have a leaf out of place. Since I can’t see a lawyer—even in this little burg—having the leisure to tend such a thing, he either has a brilliant full-time gardener, or a spouse with a green thumb and lots of free time. There’s a shiny—but discreet—polished brass plaque on the lawn that says HECTOR J. SPARKS, ESQ., and beneath that, even more discreetly, ATTORNEY AT LAW. This isn’t a guy who feels the need to plaster his face on a park bench or advertise on late-night television. He has to be very high priced to afford this lifestyle. And living in Wolfhunter?

  Interesting.

  I stop and check the address on my phone, and realize that I’ve missed a couple of calls—coverage in this town is shitty, dropping in and out every block or so. One is from Sam, and one is from Lanny. I listen to Lanny’s voice mail first. She’s sobbing her heart out about Dahlia, which is what I was afraid would happen; I want to call her back, go back to her, but first I switch over to Sam’s voice mail. He sounds worried about where I am. So I call.

  He answers on the first ring. “Gwen?” He sounds tense as hell.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay. About to go in to talk to Vera Crockett’s attorney.”

  “Thank God,” he says, or I think he does. It’s fast and almost a mumble. “Okay, well, I tried to call there, and the dragon lady who answers his phone wouldn’t confirm whether or not you were there. She’d only say he was in a meeting.”

  “And you’re concerned because . . . you don’t think I can look after myself?” I’m strangely touched.

  “No, I’m concerned because we’re in a town where women disappear,” he says. “And I don’t want you on that list, Gwen.”

  Now I’m charmed, and also a little annoyed. “Do you seriously think I would end up there?”

  “No.” He pulls in a deep breath and lets it out, as if struggling with what he wants to say next. “Connor’s working on stuff for you to look over. Anything you want me to do?”

  “Just watch out for them,” I say. “Thank you. I know you’ll protect the kids, whatever might come.”

  I don’t say that about many people—two others, to be exact, and in truth I only entrusted Connor and Lanny to Javier and Kezia because Sam couldn’t stay to do it. He thought my safety was just as important . . . and that’s something I need to remind myself of more.

  “They’re okay, though?” I ask when he falls silent.

  “Lanny’s got a bit of a broken heart,” he says. “Connor’s enthusiasm for researching crime is scaring me a little. They’re great, though. As they always are.” I feel my throat tighten. I have strong kids who care about others despite everything that’s been done to them. They’re watchful and guarded, but beneath that they have real empathy. It’s a gift that must have come from heaven, because I’m not arrogant enough to think it’s something they got from me.

  “Hey, Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Everything okay with you?” I ask because I can feel him holding back. I can hear the tension even when I don’t see it. “Did something happen?”

  “No,” he says, and this time he almost sounds normal. “It’s just . . . I have a bad feeling, so watch your back. Please.”

  “I will,” I tell him.

  “I’d like to leave tonight,” he says.

  “We already paid, though.”

  “I know. I just—” He makes a sound that’s all frustration, no words. “Dammit. I don’t know that going home is much of an answer either. The documentary crew isn’t going to give up.”

  Fucking Miranda. No wonder he’s edgy. “Okay. Let’s stay here tonight and decide tomorrow,” I tell him. “Sam. It’s okay. I promise.”

  He doesn’t ask how the hell I can promise, and I’m really glad because I damn sure don’t know. I tell him I love him. He says he loves me too.

  I carry that inner warmth on the walk up the broad, clean sidewalk and up the front steps onto the wraparound veranda. Bees drift lazily between the flowers, drunk on nectar, and the thick smell of hyacinth and roses mixes in a powerful cloud.

  I ring, and the door’s answered in ten seconds by a rawboned woman of middle age who seems like she’d have been more comfortable in a farmhouse on the prairie during Westward Expansion—or, to give it the real definition, Westward Invasion. She’s got long hair piled up on her head and a sharply angular face, and is wearing—of all things—a full apron, the kind that loops around her neck and goes down to her knees. It looks like a costume. Beneath that, she’s wearing a flowered dress with a high collar and long sleeves, even in the summer.

  “Yes?” she says doubtfully, looking me up and down as intently as I’m appraising her.

  “Hi, I’m here to see Mr. Sparks,” I tell her.

  “Mr. Sparks is not currently seeing new clients—”

  “I’m not a new client, ma’am. I’m just in town for the day, and I need to talk to him about Marlene Crockett’s daughter, Vera. Vee.”

  “Mr. Sparks does not speak with journalists without an appointment.”

  Oh, come on. “I’m not a journalist.” I hate to do it, but there are times when my dark celebrity comes in handy. “My name is Gwen Proctor. I’m the ex-wife of Melvin Royal. Perhaps you can ask him if he’d like to see me?”

  She blinks, blinks again, and without a change in expression, says, “Please wait a moment.” The door shuts again, but it is more of a gentle motion than a slam, and I do as instructed. After less than a minute, the door opens, but it’s not the housekeeper/dragon lady. It’s an older man with silver/gray hair, slightly darker on top than on the sides. He’s wearing a nicely pressed, blazingly white dress shirt, a paisley tie, and suit pants. He even has suspenders to match the tie. And all of it probably costs more than I’ve ever spent on my entire wardrobe.

  He smiles and holds out his hand. “Ms. Proctor,” he says, and raises both eyebrows. “You do prefer Ms., am I correct? I confess, I’ve read up about your . . . ah, history. I never thought we’d meet face-to-face.”

  I shake, and nod. “I’m here about Marlene and Vee Crockett.”

  The smile vanishes, and it’s his turn to nod. “Yes, please come in. It will not be a long conversation, I’m afraid.”

  The hallway smells of fresh lemon-scented polish, and the hardwood floor is spotless. There’s surprisingly colorful art on the walls, mostly of gardens, but I don’t get time to admire it as I follow Mr. Sparks down the hall and into a spacious office. This one has a gigantic red Persian rug covering most of the floor, gently holding a large antique desk and three matching leather-bound chairs. The room has a reassuring smell of furniture polish with a faint undertone of tobacco, and against my will, I breathe it in deeply. My mother used to use the same lemon-scented polish. My childhood memories are drenched in it, along with my father’s sweet pipe smoke.

  Mr. Sparks congenially offers me one of the chairs and sits behind his desk. He rocks slightly for a moment before he says, “Where are my manners? Can I offer you coffee? Iced tea? I believe Mrs. Pall has made up a cream cak
e, if you’d like some.”

  “Thank you, no, I’m fine.” I’m tempted by the cream cake.

  “Very well. Please explain how you became involved in this matter, Ms. Proctor.”

  Like any good lawyer, he’s asking me to verify what he already knows. “Her mother called me,” I say. “And I’m concerned about what’s happening here, because from what I got out of the phone call, Marlene didn’t seem frightened that her own daughter was going to kill her.”

  “You were also an earwitness, so to speak, to what happened with Vera, isn’t that the case? Detective Fairweather told me he intended to take your statement.” His accent has its roots in the Wolfhunter drawl, but it’s a little less antique. He must have gone away to school and consciously struggled with it. Southern accents can be a real barrier in some places. I look around for the degree; almost every lawyer has it framed and on the wall. And there it is, off to the right of his desk, but there’s a glare on the glass from the window. I can’t tell what school he attended.

  “Yes, and I gave a statement this morning,” I say. “I assume they’ll share it with you.”

  “Always nice to know what to look for, in case someone overlooks it. And let me ask you a pointed question: Do you think the girl committed this awful crime?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Detective Fairweather wouldn’t let me talk to her, which is too bad, because I felt like . . . like we had something of a rapport on the phone. At least, enough to get her through it alive.”

  “You likely did save her life,” Sparks says. “Our local police are not exactly highly trained. She was lucky, especially since—”

  “Since people already knew there was trouble between her and her mother?” I finish it for him, because it seems like he’s trying to imply without committing himself. “I know that.”

  “Interesting,” Sparks says. He rolls his leather chair a little forward and folds his hands together.

  I’m struck by his incredibly neat, precise desk. An in-box (or maybe an out-box) with just one folder in it. A miniature bronze of Lady Justice, complete with blindfold and scales. A small gavel with some kind of memorial plate. A desk set of penholder and leather desk protector, both looking impeccable. There’s only one pen in the container. I don’t know why, but that strikes me as eccentric, bordering on odd.