"The smelly part is behind him, and Crandall is now digging a hole in
the ground."
Robyn rubbed her forehead with her knuckles. "Why a hole in the
ground?"
"Just what I wanted to know. A few minutes ago I came upon this
one--and you can see we're fight up to a day or so before you two went
to the Hallelujah."
The final cartoon piece Keller had sketched during his interviews with
Detective Cmndall was chilling. The hole Crandall's caricature had dug
had consumed him, and the county courthouse, accurate in every detail
from its distinctive roofline to the central tower with the United
States and Colorado flags flying over it, was distorted. From its base
the building was being pulled, dragged in the direction of the hole.
"It's as if," Robyn said, "Crandall had dug himself into a hole and was
pulling the halls of justice down with him." Cold seized her
shoulders, and she began to pace again. "This is too creepy, Kiel. I
was here. We'd rented that condo. I was living with Ken. If he
thought anything like this, why wouldn't he have said something to me?
Anything?"
Kiel shook his head. "Didn't you agree it would be better,
professionally and ethically, to steer clear of Keller's cases when you
married?"
She thumped the pile of Keller's notebooks. "There's a big difference,
Kiel, between knowing every little thing that was going on as Keller
recorded them like this, and telling me the case was taking a dive. I
mean, look at this, Kiel. This is the county courthouse getting
dragged down into a bottomless pit! It would not have been any ethical
blunder to say to me, "Robyn, there are big problems here." I didn't
have a clue!"
"This isn't much to go on, Robyn. Maybe Keller thought there were
problems, and maybe he thought cops like Crandall would finally drag
the judicial system down. We don't know."
She breathed out and crossed her arms over her chest. "But why
wouldn't he have said something to me?"
Kiel flashed on a moment when he was experiencing himself as Keller
going down into the Hallelujah with Robyn. Keller had been thinking
that there were serious problems with the Candelaria case, and he'd
intended to tell her about them the night he died. "I have a feeling,"
Kiel said, "that Keller would have told you everything if he'd
lived."
"I suppose. But it doesn't feel right, Kiel. We should never have
made such a stupid agreement. I could have dealt with knowing what was
going on without writing about it."
"I'd bet Keller was arriving at-the same conclusion himself."
She stared at Kiel, at his bronze coloring and bright, intense blue
eyes, at the freckles that made him so stunningly attractive and as
different from Keller as he could possibly be--and deep doubts assailed
her. Doubts over things Kiel knew that only Keller should have known,
and things he said, such as, Keller had come to the same conclusion.
How did he know?
Was he only the most brilliant of Avenging Angels, to guess so often
and so well what Keller knew and wanted and thought? Or was it all a
sawy manipulation worse than Stuart Willetts had ever dreamed of, a
creepily intuitive ability to discern what she most wanted or needed to
hear?
A part of her mistrusted him so much that she wanted to run. A part of
her believed so much in his integrity and truthfulness that she doubted
herself more than she doubted him. And there was the lesson Great
grand mama Marie would say her soul had invited.
To trust herself.
If she wasn't still so afraid of the darkness, the void Keller had
left, as well as the real, profound, literal fear of being in the dark,
she could begin. For now, she had to believe, to trust that an angel
of God would not lead her into an even more terrifying darkness.
Kiel had stuck a pencil behind his ear. Now he sat back and planted
his feet up on the desk he'd been using. "Do you want to talk to
Crandall again?"
She plunked down in her own chair. "I think that would be a useless
drill. He will only say what he's already told us. And why not? Why
should he tell us anything now?"
"Come on, Robyn. You've interviewed plenty of people who have
absolutely no reason to want to tell you the truth. You just keep
hammering away until they crack, isn't that the way it goes?"
"Yes," she granted. He was quoting her now, straight out of Where
Angels Fear to Tread. Every person involved in that case had a secret,
and a hidden agenda. But she'd tried to find the truth. Hammered away
until, finally, one person cracked, and then another and another.
"The thing is, I don't want to spend weeks on end if the whole process
can be short-circuited. What if we were to go see Judge Ybarra?" The
Honorable Vincent J. Ybarra had occupied the bench in Colorado v.
Candelaria. "Maybe Keller went to him."
"There's no record of it here."
"Off the record, then. Maybe there were sidebar discussions or
in-chamber meetings with Keller that didn't show up in the record."
"It's worth a try."
Robyn nodded. "I think so." She reached for the final notebook where
Keller's distorted sketch of the courthouse being dragged into
Crandall's hole appeared. "If only he'd been a little less cryptic!"
Nothing in Keller's written notes helped to interpret his thinking on
the issue.
"He wasn't expect ting to die, Robyn. He knew what they meant, and at
the time, that was all that mattered."
Lucy chose that moment to check in with them. "Robyn, Kiel. Hi. What
are you up to?"
"Our eyeballs--in Keller's paperwork, trial transcripts, case notes.
We're almost done."
"In only two days!" Lucy exclaimed. "How very diligent of you."
It wasn't so much a matter of diligence, though: It Was true that
between midday on Wednesday and now, at midday on Friday, she and Kiel
had made their way through seven weeks of Keller's time spent
interviewing witnesses, cops, Detective Crandall, Chloe Nielsen, Spyder
Nielsen's agent Shad Petrie, even Trudi's ex, Pascal Candelaria. But
mostly their speediness had to do with Kiel's being an angel who
required no sleep, who could focus his concentration in a way mortals
could not.
And on Robyn's part, it had a lot to do with avoidance. Better to pick
up one more file than sit there looking at Kiel through her lashes
trying to figure out why he had captured her interest when Keller would
never vacate her heart. Better to comb through another volume of
courtroom transcripts than look up, and notice him noticing her and
feeling that totally inappropriate zing... the tug of distant memories,
the insistent rapping of more recent ones.
Of making love with Kiel Alighieri.
So it wasn't diligence. What it was was avoidance.
"Come have lunch with me." Lucy gave Kiel a desultory look. "Just
us... girls."
Another avoidance mechanism. "Kiel? Would you mind?"
He glanced at the ivory charm hanging around her
neck. She wondered
again whether the intricate subtle wings were supposed to be some kind
of high, heavenly voodoo amulet to protect her outside his presence.
The notion seemed too whimsical altogether. Heaven and voodoo didn't
quite go together in the same breath, but who knew?
The small charm brought her comfort in the night when her confusion
about Kiel, and what went on between them that she couldn't quite
remember, began to loom before her. She had even wondered if he was
taking deliberate swipes at her conscious mind to erase her recall.
The wings reminded her through the day that she was not in this
dangerous situation by herself.
Sometimes she needed the reminder. Sometimes her stomach pitched and
twisted with how vulnerable she was making herself doing what she was
doing here, virtually daring Keller's murderer to silence her, too. She
needed Kiel's ivory charm when she remembered that leaving sleeping
dogs to lie made much more sense than stirring them to snarl and snap
and do to her what they'd done to Keller.
And yes. She needed to go let her hair down with Lucy and forget that
she even needed the small wings. "Kiel?"
He tossed a pencil down in the open binding of court records and jerked
his bronze-haired head toward the door. "Take your time. We'll follow
up on this other stuff later this afternoon."
"Thanks." Robyn put a bookmark in the next page of Keller's
accumulated notes and stood.
Lucy had a table reserved at a private club. She walked arm in arm
with Robyn, remarking on the shame it was that a fungus of some sort
had attacked all the aspen leaves. "No gold this fall. Sort of sad,
sort of telling." "Telling?"
Lucy shrugged. "Sure. Like the old Casey striking out at bat story.
No joy in Mudville tonight." She hugged Robyn's arm to her side.
"Robyn, I can't tell you how sick I am that Keller died here, how it
pains me to think of what you've been through in the last year."
"Life goes on, though, doesn't it?" How many times would she have to
reassure herself and everyone around her of that before she knew in her
heart that life would go on?
Lucy understood that. "The world goes on. Aspen goes on. Spyder was
murdered, and then Keller died possibly murdered. But nothing is ever
the same. So, yes. The dismal fate of the aspen leaves reminds me
that things aren't what they're supposed to be. And they might never
be again, for you."
Robyn wanted to protest that dismal was too harsh, and that if she
couldn't see her way past the mined leaves this season, she would again
rebut they had arrived at the entrance to Lucy's club and turned in.
The foyer was paneled in dark mahogany. The patina must have been
acquired for well over a century. An Oriental carpet runner graced the
hardwood floor, and an enormous bouquet of exotic hothouse flowers,
birds of paradise, orchids, lilies of the valley and hybrid roses, sat
in a four-foot-high fluted crystal vase on the floor at the maitre d'
station.
The staff fawned over Lucy in as discreet a fashion as they could
manage. She greeted each of them by name, ordered vintage wine and a
cold cucumber soup for an appetizer, then turned to Robyn. "Where were
we?"
Robyn smiled, sipping at her ice water. The slice of lemon touched her
lip. "About to sink," she said, using the raw linen napkin, "into a
pity party. I may never get over losing Keller, Lucy, but I've ...
I've come to think I'll survive it. Be a little stronger. Find a way
to be happy on my own."
Lucy covered her hand encouragingly. "I know you will. I won't see
nearly enough of you because you'll find some new case to write about
that will take you off to some exotic locale."
Robyn laughed, interrupting. "Aspen is about as exotic as the locales
get, Lucy, I mean, think about it. For my first book I got to spend
eight stellar, fun-filled months in and out of Ryker's Island."
"Ah, New York's finest pace. But you eventually got to come to
Denver." The chilled cucumber soup arrived. Lucy picked up her spoon,
but went on. "Are you going to attend my birthday party tomorrow
evening? It will be quite the occasion."
Lucy's black-tie parties always were occasions. "I wouldn't miss it. I
talked to Jessie yesterday, since I knew you'd asked her to come."
Jessie wasn't really thrilled to be coming. Covering V.I.P birthday
parties for the TV audience wasn't what she'd prefer to be doing with
her broadcast expertise, but station management wanted it, anyway.
"She's going to bring up one of my evening gowns and shoes and
jewelry."
"Is she coming with Mike and Scott, or with her camera crew?"
"The guys." Michael Massie, of course, had grown up around Aspen.
Scott Kline, Robyn's friend on the Denver Post, was trailing along for
the hell of it. "Kiel has rented a tux."
Lucy's features hardened. "That concerns me, Robyn. Do you think it's
wise, jumping into a relationship with someone else when you haven't
really laid Keller to rest in your heart?"
Kiel. Robyn's heart thumped. "Not Kiel," she said. "Well, yes.
Kiel."
Robyn shook her head and took her time with a few spoonfuls of the
chilled soup. "Lucy, correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't I just
saying I thought I would eventually find a way to be happy on my
own?"
"It's the eventually that troubles me, Robyn. You may never get there.
You need space. Time. I'd hate to think you were being pressured out
of the time you need to... you know, get over Keller."
"I've had space and time, Lucy." Besides which, all the space and time
left her weren't going to be enough. Not to mention that Kiel, if she
believed him, was not going to be around after Keller's murder, and
Spyder Nielsen's, were avenged.
They had no future, and she had no chance of falling in love with a
real man, anyway, so long as every other thing about Kiel plucked at
her memories of Keller. But these weren't protests she could possibly
lodge aloud.
The waiter came and went, taking their order, bringing their food.
Robyn guided the conversation on to other topics--the rest of the guest
list for Lucy's birthday, the local gossip, the latest celebrity DUI's
and contretemps.
But Robyn's own thoughts scattered, fragmenting and flowing like iron
filings to a magnet, back to Kiel. When her frozen dessert had melted
and lost its exquisite swan shape before she took so much as one bite,
Lucy touched her arm.
"What, Robyn? What are you thinking?"
She snapped out of her unintended reverie, put down the spoon and
pushed the now unappetizing, drooping confection away. "Lucy, you
wouldn't believe me if I could tell you."
"Try me, Robyn."
"No, really. I... my mind is just off in some crazy mixed-up place."
"Robyn, don't be ridiculous. We came to lunch to let down our hair
and... just be," Lucy urged, sitting forward. "We haven't been friends
such a long time, but I thought we grew very close very quickl
y--like
fate. Like we were meant to meet."
She felt inexplicably crowded by Lucy's concern. A year ago Robyn had
felt that way, too. Some people presumed too quickly on acquaintances,
sticking like glue too fast, calling too soon, too often, making too
many invitations, asking and offering too much. Until this moment,
that hadn't seemed true of Lucy, but Robyn wanted her friend to
understand.
The real truth was, she needed someone who would understand when she
confessed to having fallen into bed with an Avenging Angel, but that
wasn't an option.
"I was just thinking," she said, "that everywhere I turn, I see
Keller--or maybe I just keep looking for him. It's like this trick my
mind is playing that I'll see a gesture that was Keller's or hear a
tone of voice he used, or see a light in someone's eyes like the
twinkle in Keller's eyes was. Sometimes I even feel this eerie sense
of recognition."
"With Kiel."
Robyn sucked in a breath and nodded. She'd gone too far, been too
obvious, said too much, but the milk was spilt, and Lucy, despite her
shock at this admission, was a friend. "I know. How looney tunes is
it to think Keller could be lurking in someone else's body pulling off
this elaborate twilight zone stunt?"
Lucy shook her head slowly, meeting Robyn's eyes. "I had no idea,
Robyn. How awful for you. I always thought that memory must fade.
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