“I would be careful about throwing accusations of sabotage around, Mr. Claymont,” Beck said in that mock-friendly voice of his. “Not when Ms. Montclaire has provided irrefutable evidence of trespassing on her own business as well as several missing journals.”
“We sold Monty that land. Why on earth would I be sneaking around it stealing her diary like an eighth grader?”
“Well, something certainly is,” Beck said mildly. Cooper squinted at the odd phrasing of that, but Beck was still talking. “Thomas Kreuger’s contact information?”
“I—I can’t find it,” Paul said, with significantly less steam. “His employee file seems to have been...misplaced.”
“Of course it has,” Beck said. “This is how it’s going to go. I’m taking this evidence back to the station to be analyzed. When it comes back as Llcaj’s blood, I’m going to get a warrant and gather some of my guys together to come back here and search the full property.” He raised his hand against the anticipated protest. “But first, I’m going to drive up to the mill. So if there’s anything you want to say before I take Montclaire’s full statement, now is the time.”
Paul laughed bitterly. “Would it matter? Or has she got you so wrapped around her finger you’ll be here at her bidding no matter what?”
“Paul,” Dr. Joyce said, sounding upset, but Paul didn’t look at him.
After a long moment of tense silence, Beck finally spoke. “I’m sure you’ve heard the hurricane warning coming down the coast. We’re expected to get hit by the outer bands late tonight or tomorrow morning.” He looked at Park and Cooper. “If anyone wants to make it off this mountain before Sunday, I suggest you start packing now.”
He tucked the evidence bag under his uniform rain jacket and left the room through the door to the outside. The open door caught on the wind and strained at its hinges long after he’d disappeared.
There was silence in the room, then, “I need to get out of this,” Reggie snarled.
She was tugging at her shirt as she said it, but Cooper didn’t think she was talking about clothes. She had straightened a bit and now that he could see her face he realized she hadn’t been shaking with fear or sadness at all. She was furious.
“Wait,” Joyce said, holding a hand to her arm. “Beck might still be—”
But Reggie ripped out of his grip with a warning growl. “Leave me alone. All of you just leave me alone.” She stalked outside, kicking her shoes off as she went.
“Bradley, if she tries to go back to the mill...” Paul said.
“I know,” Joyce said hastily and followed her.
Cooper caught Park’s eye and at his nod slipped out after them. In the time it took Cooper to walk across the boiler room and out the door, Reggie had disappeared, and Joyce was standing in the grass, gathering up the pile of her clothes at his feet. Cooper grabbed a sock he saw, still warm, and moved to stand by Joyce, holding it out to him.
Joyce took it with a strained smile. “Thank you.”
“Is she okay?”
Joyce pulled absently at his beard in a nervous, self-soothing sort of way. “I’m afraid Reggie is having the hardest time with all of this. She and Kreuger knew each other before coming to work here. They were quite close, but had a falling out just before Kreuger took off. We all thought that’s why he left.”
Cooper kept his expression impassive. Reggie had given him the impression that she didn’t like Kreuger much and that he was always trying to hang around her. She certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about them having history. “What kind of falling out?”
“Oh.” Joyce looked guiltily back at the lodge and lowered his voice. “The missing young man. He and Kreuger didn’t get along, and I believe Reggie took Llcaj’s side.”
“Do you think Kreuger killed him?”
Joyce shook his head emphatically. “No, surely not. I mean, that would be terrible. No one here would do something like that. Paul is right, Monty is just playing some sort of game. You said yourself that shirt wasn’t there before, and Nielsen may not have our scenting ability, but I still believe he would have noticed something amiss this morning when he was checking that the generators were ready for the storm.”
Cooper nodded, but internally his head was spinning. Had Nielsen been the one who had spied on him and Park? What if he’d come back later, after they’d gone upstairs. He could even have been the one to plant it himself. But to what end?
Joyce looked over his shoulder suddenly at the door to the boiler room. “Vanessa’s just come down.” Cooper just had a moment to wonder what had taken her so long—hadn’t she left her office claiming she was going to the check on the generators before?—when Joyce put his hand on Cooper’s arm, interrupting his thoughts. “Please don’t mention what I told you about Reggie to Vanessa. She...would be quite angry.”
Startled, Cooper glanced in the same direction as Joyce. “Why?” He had a hard time imagining Vanessa angry. But then he would have had a hard time imagining Paul as anything but a spineless amoeba man until a few minutes ago.
Joyce looked uncomfortable and lowered his voice even further. “She...forbade Reggie from spending time with Llcaj. There were some rumors and—well, she’s very protective. For good reason,” he added hastily. “Reggie hasn’t had the easiest life and some of her choices can be, ah, childish.”
“But she is an adult. Isn’t she?” Cooper asked tightly, a little put off by Joyce’s tone.
Joyce let go of Cooper’s arm and held up his hands apologetically. “Of course. I didn’t mean she can’t make her own decisions.” He hesitated. “But Vanessa lost her family quite young, herself. I think she sees Reggie as almost a daughter.”
Joyce caught Cooper’s look of vague disapproval and sighed, a resigned sort of sound. “I know as a human it doesn’t look like the healthiest response. But this is the curse of our species I’m afraid. This need for making families and packs wherever we are. This terror of losing them. It drives us all a little over the line sometimes.”
* * *
“Well, if someone’s trying to push Paul Claymont to his breaking point, they’re certainly doing a good job,” Park said.
He and Cooper had been assigned to the Communication and Trust workshop along with four other couples, and were seated in uncomfortable plastic chairs facing each other with their knees touching in a large windowed room overlooking the falls. Behind Park, Cooper could watch it raging ceaselessly into the lake whose previously calm, black surface was now rolling and white-ridged in the restless wind. The generator had yet to kick on, and around the room Vanessa had set up fifty or so candles. If nothing else, the retreat stayed on track keeping its cult-ritual chic vibe.
“Reggie wasn’t doing so hot herself. Whatever type of triangle that was happening between her, Kreuger and Llcaj, something about seeing that shirt enraged her,” Cooper added, keeping his voice down. Vanessa was walking around the room, listening in on the couples’ working through the exercise sheets and occasionally interjecting and not showing any sign of concern.
Paul may have spent a good ten minutes collapsed in Kreuger’s chair chanting “It’s over” after the ranger had left, but thus far, Vanessa was showing a scrappy sort of determination Cooper couldn’t help being impressed by.
“Let that bastard get a warrant,” she’d been saying when Cooper and Joyce had returned to the boiler room. “What will he find, animal prints? In the woods? After this storm? The only thing we have to hide is our nature.”
“But Vee,” Paul had said. “Maybe we should consider asking for help—”
“No, the less people who know, the better. Please...” She’d turned to Park and Cooper. “I’m so sorry you were dragged into this, but I’d be appreciative if you kept what you heard here to yourselves. Just for now of course,” she’d added, voice gentle, slightly imploring.
“Of course,” Cooper had agreed imm
ediately. “What’s to say?”
Which was how they found themselves seated with half the retreat’s blissfully clueless guests, scattered about the room for privacy’s sake and seated in similar positions to Cooper and Park. On all of their laps were papers with lists of questions they were supposed to be asking each other to “stimulate honest and open conversation.” Some of them seemed silly. Favorite ice cream. First crush. Favorite song. Cooper supposed those were the warm-up pitches. Though he’d have to be pretty warm indeed to discuss First memory of loneliness. Have some middle ground, for fuck’s sake. Fortunately, the only truths he and Park were pursuing at the moment were in regards to the case.
“It’s certainly interesting timing,” Park mused. “The retreat coming under threat of attention from unaware authorities. De Luca just upstairs, an unexpected guest for the weekend.”
“What do you mean?” Cooper asked.
“That’s the biggest appeal of following a ruling pack like De Luca. That’s where we get our power from. They have the money and connections to make problems like this go away. Human cops who get too nosy, et cetera. If you want their protection from something like this, you follow their rule, and your territory becomes their territory.”
Cooper blinked. Between his revelatory impromptu session with Vanessa and the tense confrontation in the basement, he had clean forgotten about the retreat’s celebrity couple. Had lunch really been less than an hour ago? It was barely two o’clock, but the gray skies outside and candlelight in here gave the room an ambiguous, timeless feeling. Like they were all trapped in some cursed, unchanging afternoon. “Right. De Luca. Is that going to be a problem?”
Park shook his head. “There’s no reason either of them would recognize my face. But I called Eli just in case. It seemed like too big a coincidence for them to just show up like that. I needed more information. There’s a good service spot right outside Kreuger’s office, by the way. Gave me front row seats to Beck pulling out that shirt, too.” He grimaced. “If you had seen his face... I’d almost wonder if he hadn’t planted the damn thing himself.”
Cooper considered that. There had definitely been a smugness and underlying aggression to Beck that might have been his usual unpleasant personality or something darker. It was worth keeping in mind. “Why call Eli, though? Why would he know anything about it?”
Park smiled wryly. “He has a talent for...keeping in the loop. Every loop. But as far as he could tell, no one from the De Luca pack knows I’m here. Officially, De Luca and Terradas were just nearby dealing with rebel packs.”
“That’s what they said at lunch,” Cooper confirmed.
“Unofficially,” Park continued, lowering his voice, “Eli’s source says Celia De Luca has been itching to get her hands on this property for a long time. One way or another.”
Cooper absorbed that. “Which is why you think the timing’s a little too convenient. That now the Claymonts will need to join De Luca’s pack to avoid whatever trouble Beck is going to bring down on them.”
“I don’t think they’ve reached the need stage,” Park said. “But Paul certainly seemed ready to float the possibility. And we both know someone planted that shirt.”
“Popular spot,” Cooper mused. “Everyone wants a piece of it.”
“You think Paul is right and Montclaire is the saboteur?”
Cooper considered that. “Maybe. I don’t know. Montclaire or De Luca, either one doesn’t explain where the bloody shirt came from in the first place, what happened to Llcaj or where the hell Kreuger is.”
“True,” Park began, then tapped his finger against his knee twice—their signal for listeners.
Cooper jumped into the first innocuous looking question he saw on the list. “If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?” In his peripheral vision he saw Vanessa approach and pause, hovering just a couple feet away, passively supervising.
Park considered the question, then smiled a slow, secretive smile. “Greece. That cliff you mentioned yesterday sounded nice.”
Cooper snorted. “I’ll let my secret lover know you’ve taken the bait. Operation Postman Always Rings Twice is a go.” Vanessa still watched. “Okay, your turn.”
“Um.” Park looked down at his list. “What’s your biggest fear?”
Cooper stared at him, mouth ajar.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“You’re kidding. I gave you the easiest possible game show question and you hit me back with what’s your biggest fear?”
Park shifted in his seat. “Right. I’ll pick another one.”
Vanessa stepped forward. “Can we back up a moment, please? Kyle, you don’t have to answer what your fear is if you don’t want to. But I would like you to talk about why you got so angry right now.”
“I’m not angry,” Cooper denied immediately. “I was just...surprised.” And annoyed and frustrated and all the other relatives of anger one could think of beyond its immediate family.
“Surprised because you expected Andrew to pick an easy, superficial question like you did for him? Or because you expected him to already know this would be a difficult question for you?”
Now it was Vanessa’s turn to get the full force of Cooper’s bewildered stare. “Um...” he started. Stopped. Looked at Park for help. No help came. “Isn’t it a difficult question for everyone?”
Vanessa shrugged. “Some people can immediately say spiders. Or flying. Or dolls possessed by the devil, no problem. Next question.”
“Oh, well, my nickname in college was actually Bride of Chucky, so you can see why this is hard for me,” Cooper joked weakly.
“Do you think Andrew would have an easy or hard time answering this question?” Vanessa asked, then without waiting for Cooper to respond added, “Often the questions that are hardest to talk about are the ones we think our partner doesn’t already know the answer to. Do you think Andrew knows your biggest fear? Do you know his?”
Cooper looked at Park. “I...don’t know,” he said honestly, in response to all three questions.
Vanessa nodded, as if satisfied by this answer. “That’s good honesty. Let’s start there.” She touched Cooper’s shoulder lightly. “And I’m sorry again, we got interrupted earlier. I have some time after this if you’d like to continue our conversation.”
“Oh no,” Cooper said hastily, glancing at Park, whose expression had furrowed with curiosity. “No, that’s... I’m a little talked out today.”
She patted him. “I understand. Just know my door is open.” With that she nodded goodbye and wandered on to the next couple.
“What conversation?” Park said as soon as she was a good distance away.
“Nothing,” Cooper said immediately. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
It wasn’t necessarily a lie. He just hadn’t had the time to process things himself. Bringing in another person—even his favorite person, the only person he really felt like he would want to tell—felt too soon. Too raw.
Park’s expression had turned concerned. “It’s not related to the case,” Cooper assured him. “She just got me oversharing. Me.”
He watched her crouch by the feet of Jimmy and Lisa across the room, speaking soothingly. “I wonder who they were, the people in the photo.” Cooper had already filled Park in on his unsanctioned adventures in Vanessa’s office. “Her father and brother? Son? And why unforgivable?”
“Unforgivable to whom matters, too. Did she write it herself? A reminder? Or blackmail?”
Cooper frowned. “As if she hasn’t been through enough.”
Park started to smile slowly.
“What?” Cooper asked. “Why are you making that face?”
Park shook his head. “You like Vanessa?”
“Well, let’s see. I barely know her, she’s a suspect in a murder case, she chewed on my leg and dug into my head. What’s
not to like?”
“And yet despite all that, you seem comfortable around her. Protective, even,” Park said.
“Well,” Cooper protested. “That’s just because she’s—” He made a complicated gesture with his hands, trying to convey the odd appeal of her. An open attentiveness, the way she just rolled with the punches through it all, adapting, not rising to the mayhem around her. Even—or perhaps particularly—knowing she’d run with a rebel pack and come through the other side working with trauma recovery. Vanessa just felt...nice.
“I think she’s probably a good therapist or something,” he said eventually, but when he looked up Park was biting his lip hard. “What? What are you laughing about?”
Park cocked his head, listening to make sure Vanessa was still engaged far across the room. “She has an abnormally low AQ, you know.”
“How do you know that?” Cooper looked back at Vanessa with new eyes.
“It was part of my role to notice those things. If you believe in AQ science, she complements you. And that would explain why you’re drawn to her.”
“We don’t know my number,” Cooper said immediately. “And how come I’m drawn to your bossy ass, then?”
“You’re contrary and paradoxical to your core.”
Cooper looked down at his paper pointedly, scanning through the list of prompts. “What stage of building intimacy is this? Burn down previous foundation or...?”
Park laughed and trapped Cooper’s knees between his own, squeezing. “Forget it, if it makes you uncomfortable. Go back to explaining why sabotage doesn’t explain what’s happening,” he said.
Cooper stifled a sigh of relief at the reprieve. He’d rather talk murder than AQ any day. “If someone was just trying to put attention on the retreat, why hide that shirt in Kreuger’s office? Hardly a lot of foot traffic. Can’t be sure when it will be found. Pure chance Beck came by when the power was out and Paul agreed to let him look at the generators.”
Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (Big Bad Wolf) Page 18
