Bitter Truth

by CJ Lyons

  Deena was fifteen years older than Lucy but somehow always managed to appear younger with her long, dark hair, ballerina-straight carriage, and the way her face was always in motion, expressing emotion and interest in everything. But not now. Now her face revealed every moment of her fifty-five years, her shoulders slumped with fatigue and worry. Lucy dropped her pack to the porch floor and rushed to her friend, pulling her into a hug.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Deena finally said as they separated. She shed no tears, yet her voice sounded as if she’d been crying. “If anyone can find him, it’s you.”

  Lucy had no idea what to say to that—after all, she wasn’t out searching for Bill, unlike Nick. “I’m so sorry—” she started.

  Deena cut her off with a wave of her shawl. “No. I’ve had enough babying and mothering and awkward platitudes from everyone else. They’re doing the best they can, and if he’s just lost in the woods, they’ll find him. But,” she eyed Lucy, “you said he called you. Three times.”

  “Yes, something about a cold case? Or an old case? Wait. Here.” Lucy grabbed her phone and replayed the voicemails for Deena.

  Deena held the phone in both her hands, cradling it. Then she played the messages a second time. “He sounds so excited. When you first told me it was about an old case, I thought it was something back in Denver. He had one go wrong recently. In fact—” She shook her head, waving off her own words as if they trespassed into a forbidden area. “I wonder if this is anything to do with…” She turned and Lucy followed her around to the side of the house.

  The cabin was built with its main door facing west, the north side backed up to the side of the mountain, so Lucy had missed its main feature until Deena led her around to the house’s southern exposure. Here the deck was open and wider, circling all the way across to the eastern wall to make the most of the stunning scenery. The windows climbed from floor to roof, revealing an open-ceilinged great room inside. “Deena, this is gorgeous.”

  “Bill’s dad built it back when he came home from the Second World War. Took him almost a decade, but he refused to propose to his girl until he had a home worthy of her. Bill was born a year after they married, but then his mom died less than a year after that—rheumatic fever. They could have been together so much longer… his dad never got over that. He was such a sad and angry man.”

  Deena leaned over the railing her gaze searching the horizon. “Bill had a love-hate relationship with both this place and his dad. He loved his work in the city, but after his dad died and we began to think about coming back here to live, when we finally did, it was like a weight was lifted. I swear you wouldn’t recognize him, Lucy. He lost ten pounds just from being outside, walking. He’s off his blood pressure meds; doesn’t need them anymore. And yet, sometimes, there’s still this shadow, like he’s looked in the mirror and sees his father looking back. Winter was bad, but once the sun came back and the snow left, he was back to his old self. But I never heard him excited, not about work, not until those messages.”

  “Was he working on anything special? Something to do with a cold case?”

  A strange half-chuckle shook Deena. “Come inside, see for yourself.”

  She opened one of the sliding doors, and they stepped inside. A river rock fireplace took up most of the wall to Lucy’s left, while to her right was a door leading to another room where the hum of a vacuum could be heard. The kitchen was in the rear of the house, as was the dining room, its Shaker-style table strewn with maps. A radio base station crowded in with candle holders and family photos on the buffet behind it. Judith and Deena’s sister were sitting there, holding cups of steaming tea and making notes on the maps as they listened to the searchers’ chatter.

  The floor was heart of pine topped with thick colorful wool rugs; the furniture simple, arranged to face the windows and the vista they displayed. Deena led Lucy to the staircase that rose between the kitchen and dining room, which opened onto a loft and another closed door to a room over the kitchen. With its two large computer monitors and whiteboards covered with sketches, the loft clearly functioned as Deena’s office—she was a graphic designer specializing in logos and branding. Now she paused outside the closed door as if she wanted to knock. But then she opened it.

  “Welcome to Bill’s world of wackiness.” Deena stepped aside to let Lucy in. The room was maybe twelve by twelve with a single window covered with newspaper. No, not newspaper—newspaper clippings, haphazardly stuck on by pieces of tape, their tails flapping and shimmying in the breeze of the ceiling fan. One wall acted as a whiteboard for Bill’s notes scrawled in a rainbow of colors, arrows arcing back and forth, a time line of dates across the top, items circled with question marks and stars.

  The other two walls held more paper—thumbtacked police reports, printouts of lab results and witness statements, along with a kaleidoscope of sticky notes. In one corner was a desk with an empty area that clearly once held the radio base station that had been moved downstairs. Other than that, the room was empty. No chairs, no knickknacks, none of the official accoutrements that thirty years of law enforcement leaves behind.

  “Before he became sheriff, he spent his time hiking, exploring... He was fascinated with an old legend about a cache of hidden gold. But then, after he took the job... all this started.”

  Lucy circled the room, following a well-worn path in the carpeting that no amount of vacuuming could erase. Bill’s footsteps, pacing, stalking…what? She glanced at the dates and headlines. Deaths. Going back a decade. All local. None suspicious.

  “I don’t understand. What was he looking for?”

  Deena shrugged. “Patterns, questions. At first it was just boredom combined with wanting to familiarize himself with the department’s history. So he started talking with the old timers—not just Sheriff Langer, he’s moved to Florida, but Harriet the dispatcher, who pretty much runs things, Gus Holmstead, folks like him who have lived here forever. But then things changed. Bill became…obsessed.”

  Lucy nodded. The word fit—and felt familiar. She often plunged into cases the same way. Even Nick sometimes didn’t understand; from the outside it could look a bit manic and out of control. “He saw something. A pattern, something that made him call me.” She stopped in front of the empty desk. There was a dust pattern for other more than the radio. “Did he have a laptop?”

  “He took it with him. I don’t know if he left it at the office or had it with him in the Jeep.” Deena turned in a circle and then focused on Lucy once more, her expression anxious. “When I heard those voicemails… I haven’t heard him that excited about something in a long, long time. But, Lucy…maybe it’s not real. Maybe he saw something that wasn’t really there, something he wanted to see because he was bored and needed a challenge?” The hope that sparked her voice when they’d been outside on the deck had vanished, replaced by resignation. “I thought maybe you’d see the same thing. Tell me he wasn’t…”

  Lucy said nothing, trying to follow Bill’s mental trail. “Give me a little time.”

  Deena nodded, her shoulders sagging once more. She crept backwards out the door.

  “Deena,” Lucy called after her. She’d seen rooms like this before—including her own offices, both at the FBI and Beacon Falls, in fact.

  “Yes?”

  “I have no idea if he was right or not—and I may be wrong. But I think Bill thought, he was trying to see—” She stopped herself, not wanting to give Deena false hope. Plus, the idea was outlandish. But Deena turned to her, eyes gleaming, begging for a lifeline.

  Lucy hauled in a breath. “I think maybe he was trying, that he may have found, or thought he found… a serial killer.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The first time Bill woke, it was night. He’d been shivering, nauseated, clammy with sweat, and afraid if he ever closed his eyes again, he might not see the light of day. So he sat and tried to keep his breathing steady, concentrating on his core muscles to conserve heat. During the night, he spotted the lig
hts of planes flying low and heard the rumble of helicopters several times, but none came close.

  He remembered the climber out in Utah who’d fallen, gotten trapped by a rock, and ended up cutting off his own hand. Or was it a leg? At the time Bill had thought, What a damn fool. But now who was the fool? No one knew where he was because he’d decided to find a nice place to pick huckleberries and surprise his wife with a picnic. If he died, Deena would never forgive him.

  So he decided not to die.

  You can live three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food, his grandfather had told him during one of their hunting trips. But most important thing you need to know about survival is it’s all in the mind. You gotta be stubborn, certain you’re gonna make it out alive. You lose that will to survive, you’re a goner for sure.

  That trip, Bill had been nine. They’d visited the site where Lloyd Magruder was killed. Magruder had been beaten, hung, thrown off a cliff, then his body burned. Alive, some said, taking pride in how hard it was to kill a Magruder.

  But he was still dead. And even though there were monuments to the Magruder name all over the state of Idaho, it had been a Beachey who’d tracked down those three outlaws, all the way to San Francisco, and brought them to justice. That was the kind of stubborn that ran in the Beachey blood, his grandfather reminded him when they bedded down for the night. When Bill woke the next morning, his grandfather was gone, and so were their horses and all their supplies.

  At first he’d been shocked by the cruelty of the test. But by the time he’d made it back home three days later, the look of pride on both his father and grandfather more than made up for a few nights being cold and the bug bites and blisters. Beacheys never quit. That wasn’t the family motto because it didn’t need to be said out loud or embroidered on any pillow. It was just in their blood.

  The sun finally rose, and Bill was still there. His head still throbbed and his mind felt like it was smothering in a thick fog, but he fought through the muddle and assessed his situation. At the very least he had a concussion, but when he gingerly touched the cut on his head he felt a divot there like the bone had been staved in. So more than a concussion—a skull fracture. Best he stayed sitting up, hopefully keeping any swelling down.

  Moving down, he definitely had a broken cheekbone, and his eye was still swollen shut. His neck was fine, thank God. A few cracked ribs on both sides, but he could breathe okay as long as he kept it slow and steady, no deep breaths. His belly worried him—it hurt a bit on the left, but mostly up under his ribs, so maybe it was nothing. He made a makeshift sling for his broken right arm by unbuttoning his second and third shirt buttons and sliding his arm across his body and inside his shirt. It wouldn’t hold if he moved much, but just sitting there it worked fine.

  The bleeding on his leg had stopped and didn’t restart when he loosened his belt. He kept the belt there just in case—it was too much trouble to take it off anyways. The other leg, the one so twisted he got nauseated every time he looked at it… well, there just was no way he could do anything about it, so he stopped looking at it.

  The cliff faced east out over the canyon, but the narrow crevice he’d landed in, between the cliff’s southern wall and a large boulder, was shielded from the sun except for a stream of light that crept up his legs to mid-thigh. Thankfully the rocks absorbed enough heat that he didn’t think hypothermia would be an issue—but it also meant no search planes would ever spot him.

  He toyed with the idea of dragging himself farther out onto the ledge, but it fell off sharply, and he wasn’t sure how stable the terrain was. Still, he had almost psyched himself to do it when a glint of reflected sunlight caught his eye. It came from behind him to the left, deeper back into the crevice behind the boulder. A protected patch where the sun never hit directly, so there was a puddle of water left over from the rain two nights ago.

  Water. He lowered himself onto his left side and used his good arm to drag himself to the puddle. Pain shrieked through his body as his legs protested but he ignored it, focusing on the elixir of life. He needed the water to live; everything else could go to hell.

  He reached the puddle, dipped his lips to the chilled water, and lapped it into his mouth like a beast.

  When he’d drunk his fill, he sat up, leaning against the cliff wall, not even realizing that a crooked smile had twisted his lips. He had shelter, he had water, he had the Beachey mule-stubborn willfulness in his blood.

  He was going to live.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lucy had dinner with Deena and her family—a delicious meal prepared by Deena’s mother but punctuated with such uncomfortable silences that Lucy fled as soon as they finished cleaning up. Deena had given her the keys to Bill’s truck so she wouldn’t be dependent on bumming rides from Judith.

  When she arrived back at the motel, she begged off the festivities Judith and her staff were preparing to bolster the search volunteers’ morale and instead reviewed her notes on Bill’s cold cases in her room while she waited for Nick. A few of the cases were intriguing, others seemed highly unlikely, but she forwarded the info to Wash, her tech analyst back at Beacon Falls, in the hopes that he could find a pattern or lead for her to follow.

  It was almost ten o’clock when Nick finally stumbled in, sunburned, bug bit, and exhausted. He flopped on the bed, too tired to even shower, eyes half closed as he listened to what she’d found at Bill’s home.

  “Wait.” He opened one eye when she finished. “You told Deena you agreed with Bill? That there’s evidence of a serial killer?”

  “I never said evidence. I said his theory had some merit.”

  Nick sat up. “A bunch of old newspaper clippings aren’t evidence of anything. Lucy, how could you be so irresponsible? To let Deena—”

  “What’s the problem? I simply gave her one more possible explanation for Bill’s disappearance.”

  “Two more, actually. Either he’s chasing after a serial killer without letting anyone know—and we both know Bill’s not stupid or reckless—or he’s fallen victim to some deranged killer.”

  “She’s already worried about him lying dead at the bottom of a ravine somewhere,” Lucy argued. “At least if he really is out there with a killer, the killer has reason to keep him alive long enough to find out what Bill knows and who he’s told. That would explain the weird text to Judy.”

  “Right. I’m sure imagining Bill in the hands of a killer will let her sleep soundly tonight.” Nick bounced to his feet and swung the curtain hard as he strode into the alcove with the sink and vanity. He washed his face, brushed his teeth—all done so loudly and with abrupt motions that she knew he was seriously pissed off.

  “You always do this,” he said after rinsing and spitting. “Your imagination works overtime finding the worst possible scenario.”

  She wanted to argue that she was usually right but knew that wasn’t really his point. “At least you can’t blame my job this time,” she sniped back.

  “I don’t blame your job—”

  “Sure you do. You and Megan both. Don’t think I don’t see it.” She turned away, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I’m just so tired.”

  Nick rejoined her on the bed and wrapped an arm around her. “Maybe you blame your job and just can’t admit it. There are other jobs out there, you know. A ton of other jobs you’d be brilliant at.”

  But would they give her what she needed? The adrenaline rush of chasing a killer, the satisfaction of saving a victim, the thrill of knowing that if only for a few moments she had the power to tip the scales of justice back into balance… Except lately it seemed those moments were getting shorter and more fleeting. Lately it felt like no one really cared about justice at all, as if it had become an outdated concept replaced by return on investment and success rates and plea bargains. Exactly why her passion for victims and pursuing their truth had gotten her kicked out of the FBI.

  Things were definitely better at Beacon Falls, but stil
l, she ended up leaving her family to work cases, always worried about them while they worried about her. Somehow they always paid the price for her doing her job.

  “So are we okay?” Nick asked after a long moment.

  “We?” His abrupt change of topic caught her off guard. Or maybe not so abrupt—they’d been tiptoeing past the issue for months. Or in Lucy’s case, a flat out dash to avoid it.

  “I mean, it’s been an eventful year. And we don’t really talk about it too much. Should we be?”

  Translation: Lucy refused to talk about what happened in January. Being kidnapped by a sadistic killer, mauled by his vicious attack dog, facing him as he threatened to kill Nick and Megan, and finally learning that he’d murdered Lucy’s mother. One night, eight months ago, yet she still relived it every day, and the memories stripped her psyche as raw as the constant pain her damaged leg brought.

  So, no. She really didn’t want to reveal her struggles to Nick. She knew he wanted—needed—to help; it was who he was. But the thought of it was overwhelming. The guilt; the sense of absolute, abysmal failure. What she’d done that night, what had happened because of her…she could never forgive herself.

  “I’m worried,” he continued. “I thought leaving the FBI, getting this new job, would be good for you. For us. But you seem to be using your new job as an excuse to never come home—you’re always on the road.”

  She waved her hand in a dismissal, the shadow she cast swooping over the wall behind Nick like an eagle diving for prey. “I go where the cases take me. I can’t just sit at a desk all day and let everyone else do the heavy lifting.”

  Like she had today. She turned her back to him, bent over to yank off her boots, then sighed in relief as she removed the splint from her left ankle. It kept the pain of walking at bay and saved her foot from constant scraping against the ground she couldn’t feel beneath it, but there was nothing like the freedom of having it off.