The wind had finally eased. Now Nikki faced a new dread, the complete silence. Except for the pool pump and Uncle Bill’s harsh breathing, there was nothing except the noise of her clacking teeth and whomping heart. Not even the crickets were singing.
He was holding something wrapped in a cloth pouch. Bills, she figured. Maybe some rare coins. Light filtering up from the pool pocked his face with ghoulish shadows. He looked like Jason in a slasher movie. The whole scene was like a nightmare, the pool with its blue light, the darkness closing in, Uncle Bill, squatting like an evil Buddha, drunk, fondling his secret stash.
After a few moments, he put the pouch back into the box, screwed the lid closed, dove into the pool, and returned it to some hiding place in the deep end. This time, he got out immediately and trotted to the study.
Shaking from the cold and scared to death he would spot her at any second, she watched him wrap a towel around himself. As he slid his feet into rubber sandals at the door to the study, the doorbell rang. Shocked by the sound, she let out a little yelp. He jerked, turning around to face her, scouring the bushes, looking directly at her! He took a step forward, scaring her so badly she practically screamed, but the doorbell rang again. Hesitating for a second, he finally went back into the house.
Tossing off her sweatshirt, Nikki ran for the pool. The water curled over her body as she dove. Toward the bottom, directly below the pool light, she finally felt a plastic ring in the wall, just big enough to slide the tip of her finger into. Twisting the ring back and forth, she discovered the hiding place worked just like a drawer. Chlorine stung her eyes as she reached through the milky light, pulled out the box, pushed the empty drawer closed, and shot to the surface, gulping air, trying to see through the strings of her hair.
She pulled herself out of the deep end. Holding the box, she started to run for the boat. A phone rang inside the house. Good, more to keep him busy. She got as far as the gate before she remembered. Her goddamn sweatshirt! She’d left it by the pool! Clutching the box under her arm, she ran back toward the house, staying close to the wall and away from the windows, really cold now, soaking wet. Where had she thrown it?
Through the glass, she saw Uncle Bill talking on the phone in the study, sounding happy in there, way different than when he had mumbled by the pool. With relief she realized he had no clue she was right outside, watching him. Unable to resist, Nikki went a little closer and peered in.
He held the cordless phone to his ear with one hand and the towel around his waist with the other. He was smiling, talking, saying, “How’s it going?” and “Gee, that’s great.” In that instant, Nikki felt the sweet rush of victory. She had done it, stolen it from under his nose. She was certain now she had what she had come to get.
Just as she was turning away, a change in her uncle’s expression brought her back to the glass. His face sagged, melting downward. His mouth dropped open and his eyes bulged. Like someone blinded by a bright light, he groped around as if hunting for some stable thing to keep him from falling down. He staggered, then fell against the desk.
“No! Please God, no!” he shouted over and over, first into the phone, then, pressing a hand against the mouthpiece, away from it.
She watched him stare into the receiver, then drop the phone to the ground. He collapsed onto the floor and curled up and cried like a baby. She could hear the heaving sobs.
A shadow ran in and bent toward him. Someone else was there! Well, of course someone else was there. The doorbell had rung, hadn’t it! She caught a glimpse, gasped, and slammed herself back against the cabin. A large splinter pierced the skin of her palm, but she didn’t feel it, even when blood began to flow onto the wood of the house.
Clutching her uncle’s treasure, her sweatshirt forgotten, she pressed back against the wall, paralyzed.
CHAPTER 2
THE TREES WERE tipped in new blue growth and a squall of rain scattered the gulls around Lake Tahoe. On the slopes of the Sierra, skiers would be skidding over thin patches through the late-season snow.
In the second week of May, in the city of South Lake Tahoe, mountain spring was in full swing. As the showers passed overhead and the sun spilled out from behind the clouds, Nina Reilly looked out her office window and watched an elderly man wait for the traffic light to change, shading his eyes with his hand. She rolled her chair a few feet and poured a glass of water into the fiddle-leaf fig in the corner, now so tall it scraped the ceiling of her small office.
Her secretary, Sandy Whitefeather, opened the door to the inner office and came in. Solid as Rodin’s “Balzac” and similarly massive, Sandy had several inches on Nina in every direction, and a don’t-even-think-of-messing-with-me-unless-you-want-your-ass-kicked-into-the-lake attitude Nina had given up trying to reform. On the other hand, she and Sandy had passed through good and bad times together, and Sandy was a friend. Sort of.
Sandy observed her with onyx eyes that hid a private universe in their dark depths, arms folded.
“What?” Nina asked.
“We need to talk.”
“Did the court call? Is it the Kathy Locke custody thing?”
“No. About Johnny Ellis. He needs more help from us.”
“Sandy, it doesn’t do any good to bleed all over the desk every time a client wants more than the law entitles. He strained his back. He didn’t rupture a disc or something.”
“He’s fifty-six, too old for physical labor, and he needs a rest. He’s tired.”
“We’re all tired. That’s not what the workers’ comp system was set up to fix.” Nina leaned back in her chair and felt her own fatigue pulling down on her eyelids.
“That’s because the workers didn’t set it up. He needs a couple more months off. He can scrape by on the disability money.” Sandy handed her Ellis’s file. “And he thought he might drop by this morning.”
“But there’s nothing—okay, okay. I’ll have a final look to see if I’ve missed anything.”
Sandy acknowledged this by going to the bookshelf and poking at a dusty volume of the California Codes. “Business is booming,” she said, giving the shelf full of leaning books a backhanded whap. They lined up like good soldiers and stayed in position. “Wish I could say the same for you.”
“Uh oh,” Nina said. “Here it comes.”
Seven months ago, she had been doing well. She had had a loving husband and son, and faith that the world was a good place. Then, when she was on the verge of finishing up a murder case for an untrustworthy client, her husband had been killed in an attack meant to kill her and her son, Bob, too. She couldn’t forget about it. Time might get her through the day, but it would not help her forget.
She was doing as well as she could.
“You need to move on. Find another man, maybe.”
“Sandy, I lost my husband, not my mind.”
“What’s Paul doing these days? Still in Washington? How come he hasn’t called the past few weeks?”
“I knew it. I knew you were going to bring him up.” The last thing Nina needed was to get into a discussion with Sandy about Paul van Wagoner. When she had married, Paul had been three thousand miles away in Washington. Just as well. He spread chaos wherever he went. The usual rules never applied with him, and Nina’s distinct certainties had a way of fogging in his presence.
Their relationship, hot and turbulent, had blown out like a match. When her mind tripped over the stub of it now and then, she reminded herself about all the reasons why things had turned to smoke in the first place. Funny and warm on the surface, Paul remained inscrutable to her. He did things she didn’t expect, understand, or approve of, upsetting things, violent things. How could you be close to a man you might never know? He protected himself too well from intimacy. So she didn’t need Paul in her life except professionally, as an expert investigator. She needed a long swim or a walk through the hot sand of the desert, not another man. “Can we get back to work?”
“Or a nice, meaty murder case might do the trick,” Sandy sa
id, tapping one finger to her cheek. “Keep your mind off your troubles. Of course, that won’t keep you warm at night . . . You ran away to the desert to mope again this weekend, didn’t you?”
Stung because she had done exactly that, Nina said, “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, Sandy, because it was—insolent.” She spent many weekends there now in an old trailer on a piece of land a client had tossed her once in lieu of a more conventional bonus.
But last night she had not slept much, because of something that had happened out in the desert the night before. She had stepped outside to look at the stars. The moon was floating over the jagged peaks of the Carson Range. Suddenly, somewhere in the black sky, she had heard a rumble. A plane was approaching from the south. She watched its lights as it flew directly over her head and turned, banking toward Tahoe. The plane seemed awfully low, too close to the mountains, so she had held her breath, but the plane cleared the treetops, sailing over.
It’s okay, she thought. You’re always expecting a— Then, disaster. As the sound faded, the plane had disappeared into the mountains. Anxious, she cupped her ear, listening, and watched for a last glimpse of the plane that was miles away. Had she heard a faint change in the sound of the engine?
A flash of sunflower yellow light had burst above the long desert horizon and for an instant, the mountain seemed to have caught fire. She had known it then.
There was no sanctuary in that valley or any other. Across the mountains, death had come again.
So late last night after she had arrived home, she had kept her vigil for whoever had been in the plane, as that yellow light appeared again and again when she closed her eyes, making sleep impossible.
But sleep was often impossible lately. Each night she went through the motions, brushed her teeth, locked the doors, checked on Bob. Then she curled up under the covers and shut her eyes, as if miming all the usual activities in the usual order would magically deliver her into sweet dreams. Eventually, her eyes gave up the pretense and opened. When she did doze, she slept lightly and briefly, as if rattled out of sleep’s deeper realms by a preset alarm.
Bob was having trouble sleeping too. Several times during the past months he had appeared suddenly in the doorway to her room, eyes wide and startled, staring at something she couldn’t see. “What’s the matter?” she would ask, but he never answered, just turned around and left. She jumped up to find him in bed sound asleep only seconds later.
Mornings after these troubled nights were blurry. Today was blurry. She rubbed her eyes, which seemed to have just gone through a sandstorm. “Did you pick up a newspaper on the way in this morning?”
“Why?”
Maybe she had exaggerated what she saw. Maybe the plane had not crashed at all. Bad news could always wait. “Never mind. I’ll read it when I get home.”
They heard the outer door buzz. “I guess I’ll take my insolent rear end out and greet that client,” Sandy said.
“And watch your attitude.”
“No need, when I have you to watch it for me.”
Again the buzzer erupted. A muffled voice shouted, “Y’all inside there?”
They looked at each other.
“Oh, hell. Johnny Ellis.” Rubbing her forehead, Nina opened the file. “Maybe I can find him a good chiropractor,” she said.
Sandy nodded. “ ‘Monday, Monday,’ ” she said. “ ‘Can’t trust that day.’ ”
At six-forty-five it was already getting dark. Joggers and dinner seekers clogged Lake Tahoe Boulevard. Another Monday endured, Nina thought, tossing her briefcase into the back of the Bronco. Another successful defense of the status quo. She had crawled as many steps up as down.
Rolling down the window, she drove home to Kulow Street, trying to edit the smell of exhaust from the piney perfume of the air. Bob and Hitchcock would be waiting for her, hungry. She wondered as she drove past the Raleys’, did they have food? Nothing fresh, but they could scrounge. As long as Hitchcock had his kibble, she and Bob could open a can or two of SpaghettiOs or something.
The small wood cabin surrounded by tall firs, its warm lamp-lit windows breaking through the darkness outside, was a welcome sight. She parked in the steep driveway and had her key in the door before she realized it was ajar. She stepped back, jabbed by fear.
“Bob!” she called out loudly, acting normal, because of course he was all right. “You left the front door open again.” She threw her case into the closet by the door noisily. She would dig it out later when she settled down for the night and couldn’t sleep.
A chair lurched upstairs. She didn’t even make it into the kitchen for a sip of water before Bob, followed by Hitchcock, came running down the stairs, knocking directly into her. “Wait,” Bob said, “don’t take your jacket off. We’ve got to go over to Nikki’s.”
“Nikki’s?” Now where had she heard that name before?
“Nicole Zack. You remember?” He breathed hard with excitement.
“Oh.” The girl who invited him to a dance last fall. Bob had gone, but with his buddies, not with Nicole, and with the callous cool of a thirteen year old, hadn’t thought to say anything to her all night. Or so he’d reported. She hadn’t heard a word about Nicole Zack since.
“You two have become friends?” she went on. She reached out a hand to ruffle his hair and he shook it off lightly but definitely.
“I walk her home sometimes. She tells me things.”
Which was more than Nina could say for Bob these days. This was news, and not very welcome news.
“She’s in trouble. Come on!” Bob, who in the past five months had grown an equal number of inches, pulled an orange fleece jacket off the back of a chair and threw it over his head.
She stepped past him toward the kitchen. “Let me just put some dinner on and we’ll talk . . .”
“This won’t wait!” He took her by the arm. “We have to go, Mom!”
They were walking to the door, Bob half-dragging her, before she found her voice. “Wait a minute! Just quit!”
He let go of her arm.
“Don’t you go strong-arming me. Tell me why we should skip dinner and rush off to Nicole’s.”
He looked at the door, then back at her. Realizing he had no choice, he said, “Here’s what happened. She was having a rough time. Her cousin Chris just died and she felt really bad about it because they used to play together all the time when they were kids. So we were in the kitchen eating Oreos—”
“Whose kitchen?”
“At Nik’s house.”
“You are supposed to come straight home . . .”
He put up a hand. “I left you a message on your voice mail.”
Which she hadn’t checked. “Okay. Go on.”
“Anyway, her mom’s there rehearsing in the living room—”
“Rehearsing?”
“She’s trying to get into a show. She has to practice, no matter how bad she feels. So she’s, like, hardly dressed . . . when there’s this knock, pounding, really loud, Mom. So Nik’s mom says, ‘Hold your horses. I’ll be right there.’ ”
Hardly dressed? What had Nicole’s mother been rehearsing, a strip routine?
“Anyway, she put on her slacks . . .”
“Honey, wait a second. What was she wearing?”
“. . . over her leotard while they pounded away. She finally went to answer the door. Mom, it was two policemen.”
She waited while he gulped and took a deep breath.
“They came in. Her mom let them come right into the living room. They told us that some doctor was dead and they started asking Nikki a bunch of questions.”
“Not her mom? They started talking to your friend?” Nina tried to engage by letting the lawyer in her click into place, but she was distracted by hunger and the sudden realization that Bob was looking down at her from what appeared to be a great height.
“They zeroed right in on Nik. Her mom just stood there, scared. She tried to talk a few times but they shut her up so when she coul
dn’t do anything, I tried.”
That focused her attention. “What . . .” now it was her turn to gulp, “what exactly did you try?”
“I told Nik she had the right to remain silent. They were like, reading her her rights so fast she had no idea what they were saying.”
Nina pulled him in closer and smelled his fear.
“One of them gave me a dirty look but by then . . . by then it was too late. She had already said some stuff. They told her mom they were taking Nik into temporary custody and to call the juvenile hall in an hour. They took her away!”
“For what?”
“Mom, please!” He tugged her arm again, but gently. “Please, just come. They need us. The police kept saying, ‘Get it off your chest. You can tell us.’ Stuff like that.”
“Like what. Exactly.”
“You know, like, ‘Did you kill your uncle?’ Like that.”
So she was back on the wet road, stomach growling. Bob had a way of getting his way. So did Hitchcock, who had planted himself in the back seat and stuck his head out the window before they thought to take a stand. “Turn right. No, left. You almost hit the curb.”
“Where did this . . . alleged incident happen, Bob? Did her uncle live here at Tahoe?”
Bob nodded. “In a big cabin on the lake near the Truckee meadows. Close to the casinos, but not over the state line. Acres, Nikki said. And a pool, too. She talked about him sometimes. She didn’t like him much.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She called him a snob. He was mean to them. See, Nikki is broke . . .”
Oh, great, Nina thought.
“And her Uncle Bill said once that Nikki’s mom Daria was like Marilyn Monroe—”
“Not necessarily an insult.” Not to Nina, who had always thought the actress was underrated.
“Oh yeah? He said Daria was a good time had by all. And he told her Aunt Beth he didn’t want them coming over to his house.”
Uncle Bill sounded nasty, like the kind of uncle who rolls the garden hose up into a perfect circle and spends a lot of time chasing the neighborhood kids off the lawn.
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