“Leaving town?”
Tish nodded.
“I can drive you,” Rikke told her. “Put your things in my car.”
Tish attempted a smile. “You don’t have to do that. I can get the tire changed.”
“It will give us a chance to talk,” Rikke said. “Don’t you think we should talk, Tish?”
Tish rubbed the skin on her forearms. She was cold. “Sure, but it’s a rental car. I can’t just leave it.”
“This isn’t the big city. You can call them. They’ll send someone to get the car.”
“I have friends inside,” Tish said, glancing at the entrance to the bookstore and suddenly wishing she could see Stride’s face. “I’m sure one of them can drive me. You probably want to be alone.”
“I said I would drive you, so let’s go.”
Tish hesitated for another second. Rikke was angry about the death of her brother, but if she wanted an opportunity to vent her poison at Tish, so be it. Tish didn’t care. On some level, she deserved it.
“Sure, okay,” Tish said. “Why not?”
She retrieved her purse, turned off the lights on the Civic, and popped the trunk. She removed her suitcase and relocated it to the trunk of Rikke’s tan Impala, which was parked next to her. Rikke made no move to help. She waited until Tish had closed the trunk and then climbed inside the driver’s door and started the engine.
Tish got inside the Impala and went to put on her seat belt. The strap was broken.
“Sorry, I’ve been meaning to get that fixed,” Rikke said.
She drove out of the parking lot, leaving Tish’s stranded Civic behind them.
“Which bridge do you want me to take?” Rikke asked.
“Whichever is lower,” Tish said. “I hate heights.”
48
Stride leaned closer to Maggie and Serena across the table at the cafй. “How did Finn get home?” he asked them.
Maggie sipped from her cream-colored mug of chai tea and raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you talking about?”
“On the night Laura was killed, Finn was in the park watching her. How did he get back home to Superior?”
Serena shrugged. “By car.”
“Yes, except Rikke never let Finn drive himself,” Stride said.
“Well, Rikke swore that Finn wasn’t in the park at all, but we know he was there,” Maggie said. “So he must have had a car.”
“Or maybe Rikke picked him up,” Stride said.
As soon as he said it out loud, he realized that was what had happened.
After Amanda’s offhanded comment about mothers and daughters, Stride had found himself looking at the circumstances of Laura’s murder from an entirely new perspective. In a case with too many suspects already, he had overlooked one other person who must have been in the park that night.
“Does that really change our theory of the crime?” Serena asked. “If Rikke picked him up, that means she must have suspected all along that Finn killed Laura. So she lied to give him an alibi.”
Stride leaned back in his chair. “That’s what I thought, but it works both ways. By giving Finn an alibi, she also gives herself one.”
Maggie shook her head. “What are you saying, boss?”
“I’m saying if Rikke went to the park to pick up Finn, maybe she came upon the baseball bat lying in the field.”
“Or maybe Elvis found it,” Maggie suggested. “Maybe he was so wracked with guilt about killing Laura that he OD’d a month later.”
Stride nodded. “Yeah, I could be crazy, but Finn’s prints aren’t on the baseball bat. We’ve got prints from Peter, Dada, and Cindy, but not Finn. If he killed her, why wouldn’t his prints be on the bat? Instead, we’ve got a set of prints that we can’t identify.”
“Why would Rikke kill Laura?” Maggie asked.
“That depends on what was really going on between the two of them,” Stride told her. “Amanda said that every daughter becomes her mother sooner or later. We see it all the time in abusive relationships, right? Abuse begets abuse. Rikke admitted to us that her mother sexually molested her. The question is, did Rikke take after her mother and become an abuser herself?”
“You think that Rikke had a sexual relationship with Laura?” Maggie asked.
“I think it’s not impossible. Laura spent a lot of time there when she was struggling with her sexuality. After her breakup with Tish, maybe she was confused and vulnerable and needed someone to confide in. So she went to her favorite teacher for help. What if Rikke took advantage of her trust? We already know she got kicked out of the school district later for an affair with a student. We’ve been saying all along that Finn was insanely jealous of Laura’s relationship with Tish, but maybe we’ve got it backwards. Maybe Rikke was the one who was jealous.”
Maggie took time to think about it, but then shook her head. “Even if Rikke did seduce Laura, why would she kill her?”
“If she was abusive and obsessed, who knows what she would have done when she found out Laura was running away from her?” Stride replied. “You’re talking about a brother and sister who were raised on violence and incest. We know what it did to Finn. Do you think Rikke doesn’t have demons, too?”
“Except we know that Finn is the one who’s capable of murder,” Maggie said.
Stride had a vision of a lonely North Dakota farm, glowing faintly in the center of miles of nighttime fields. It was like being on the moon, Rikke had said. His eyes grew hard.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Do we?”
Maggie opened her mouth to protest and then clamped it shut.
“Son of a bitch,” Serena gasped. “No, we don’t.”
“I want to talk to Rikke,” Stride said, standing up. “I want to get her prints to match to the murder weapon, and I want to know what was really going on in that house.” He stood up and looked around the bookstore. “Is she still here?”
Serena shook her head. “Rikke left right after Tish. I saw her go.”
“All right, let’s see if we can catch her,” Stride said.
The three of them headed for the exit. In the parking lot, Stride turned left on the sidewalk toward his Expedition, which was parked next to Maggie’s yellow Avalanche, but he stopped when Serena took hold of his shoulder.
“Wait a minute, Jonny,” she said, pointing. “That’s Tish’s car.”
Stride recognized the Civic on the far side of the parking lot and immediately spotted the odd angle of the chassis caused by the car’s flat tire. He frowned as he studied the rest of the lot. “Where’s Tish?” he asked.
Maggie jogged over to the Civic and got down on her knees to examine the tire with a penlight on her key chain. “This was cut,” she called to them. “Somebody slashed it.”
Stride looked at Serena. “Rikke.”
The Blatnik Bridge loomed ahead of them beyond the sweeping curve of the highway, its arch illuminated against the night with blurred rows of white lights. Tish grew nervous as they neared the span, anticipating the rope of fear that would twist around her insides as they made the crossing. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t; instead, she stared at the hump of steel as if it were a sea monster arching its giant back over the water. Her tension broadcast itself through the car.
“Is something wrong?” Rikke asked. Her voice was cool.
“It’s just bridges,” Tish said. “They scare me.”
The windows on both sides were wide open, ushering in a fierce breeze that rattled the frame of the car. They climbed the sharp angle toward the summit of the bridge, and the crisscross steel of the span rose ahead of them like the tracks of a roller coaster. Rikke drove slowly. Traffic soared up behind them, filling the car with headlights and then passing impatiently on their left at almost twice their speed. On either side of them, far below, industrial lights marked the edge of the land, and the blackness signaled the channel of Superior Bay. Tish wrapped her arms tightly across her chest. Her breathing was fast.
Rikke reached out a
nd rested a warm hand on Tish’s thigh, and Tish flinched.
“The view is amazing,” Rikke said. “You should look.”
“I don’t want to see it.”
Rikke slowed even further as they crept skyward. Tish felt sweat on her hands, and her left arm twitched involuntarily.
“Can’t we go faster?” she asked.
“No, I love it up here,” Rikke told her. “Sometimes I think that’s the best way to die. Just let yourself drive off the edge of a bridge.”
“Don’t talk like that, it scares me.”
The car drifted toward the right shoulder, grinding on loose gravel. Tish was conscious of the three-foot ribbon of concrete stretching along the bridge deck, which was the only barrier between the car and one hundred feet of air dropping toward the water. It was inches from her window.
“It’s hard not to think about death when you know you’re dying,” Rikke said.
“Dying?”
Rikke nodded calmly. “The doctors tell me the cancer has come back. Metastasized, they call it. That’s an ugly word. I only have a few months.”
“I’m sorry,” Tish said.
“So you see, it’s a choice I have to think about. That’s what I face. A death that’s fast and free, or one that’s slow and painful. What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
Rikke’s hand tightened on Tish’s thigh. She squeezed hard, her nails cutting into skin. “I never understood what Laura saw in you. I know you were beautiful, but you never understood her like I did. I was the one she came to for comfort. I was the one who helped her understand who she was.”
“You’re hurting me.”
“Good. You deserve to be hurt.” She took her eyes off the road. “Look at you, you’re still so attractive. Me, I’ve gotten old. My body is a joke now. My breasts are ruined. My thighs are all pebbled over with cellulite. I can hardly bear to look at myself. I was beautiful then, do you remember? My students all wanted me.”
Tish sat frozen, saying nothing.
“Laura wanted me, too,” Rikke said. “Did you know that?”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, but it is,” Rikke went on. “Laura told me about your affair. She told me how she ran away from you. She came to me because needed a friend. A mother. She was so scared, so lonely. I was there for her when you weren’t. I spent hours letting her cry in my arms. We became close. And one night, when I knew she was ready for it, I showed her that I could love her in a special way.”
“Oh, my God,” Tish said. “No, you’re lying.”
Steel cables dropped from the span around them as they neared the summit. Ghosts of fog drifted around the car and reflected back in the headlights. She could hardly see the road. Overhead, the diamonds of steel looked like spiders viewed through a gauzy web.
“There was nothing evil about it,” Rikke said. “Laura never should have run away from me. Not to you.”
Rikke spun the wheel and jammed her foot on the brake, turning the nose of the car until it bumped against the concrete shoulder. The car jerked to a stop at the peak of the highway. They were at an angle, with barely two feet of rock and dirt outside the door between Tish and the long drop. Other cars buzzed by like hornets, their horns squealing.
“What are you doing?” Tish held on to herself, trembling. “Keep going, keep going!”
“It was always you, wasn’t it?” Rikke snarled. “Laura didn’t care about me. Or Finn. It was you she wanted.”
“Drive, drive!” Tish screamed. “Please!”
Rikke turned off the car.
Tish felt herself hyperventilating. She squirmed away from the car door. She couldn’t stop looking at the steel overhead and the shining rows of white lights. She felt the pull of heights again, the insane urge to leap from the car, to jump.
“Are you crazy? Go, go now, please! I’ll do anything!”
“Why did you come back here?” Rikke asked. “Was it revenge? Is that what you wanted? I tried to scare you away, and you stayed.”
Tish shook her head mutely. Panic and terror ripped through her nerve ends.
Rikke slid the keys out of the ignition and opened the driver’s door and got out, slamming it behind her. Traffic wheeled around her through the fog and night. She walked around the back of the car and came up to the open window on Tish’s side. Inside, Tish cowered near the opposite door. Rikke sucked in a lungful of the whipping breeze and peered over the barrier at the inky blackness of the channel. Then she reached her upper body in through the window, grabbed Tish’s wrist, and yanked her bodily across the car.
Tish wailed. “Don’t do this!”
“Look at me!” Rikke insisted. When Tish buried her face in her chest, Rikke grabbed Tish’s chin and wrenched it up until their eyes met. Tish’s stare was glazed with tears. She saw violence and desire fighting in Rikke’s face. “This is what you deserve for coming back to torture me. For driving Finn crazy. You killed him, do you know that? It was you. You may as well have been the one to put the bullet in his brain.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Rikke took Tish’s skull in both hands, twisted her face, and forced her mouth up, then bent down and covered her lips in a fierce kiss. “Is that so horrible? Does it scare you? Laura was afraid of me after we made love. Afraid! That was Finn’s fault. He never should have interfered, but he was jealous that I was the one she chose.”
Tish wiped her mouth. “Stop this!”
“Finn watched us make love in his bed that night. I knew he was there. But the next day, he went and told Laura what happened in Fargo. It was our secret, his and mine. He had no right to tell her. He just wanted to split us apart. To scare her away.”
Rikke’s face was black. Horror descended on it like a shadow off the bridge.
“Finn never told Laura that I did it for him. For him! I knew what our mother was doing. I had to put a stop to it, and I knew Finn would never lift a finger to protect himself. He just crawled into his little hole and let her keep coming back for more. So I was the one who had to be strong. I was the one who had to save him.”
If Dad were abusing me, could you kill him? Do you have to be insane to do it?
Tish finally understood. Laura wasn’t talking about her father. She was talking about Rikke. About her secret.
“I came back to our farm,” Rikke went on, “and I took that bat, and I beat our mother until she was nothing but mush and pulp. Finn watched me do it. He knew I didn’t have a choice. No one was ever supposed to know. But then he went and spilled his guts to Laura. I heard him. The stupid, jealous bastard! Laura should have let me explain, but she ran away. What was I supposed to think? If she had stayed, I would never have hurt her, but she left.”
Tish’s eyes were wild. “She never told me.”
“Oh, but she would have told you eventually,” Rikke said. “I don’t blame her. I don’t blame Finn, either. We could all have worked it out if it weren’t for you. You’re the one who destroyed us. Now it’s my turn.”
Rikke let the car keys dangle from her finger in front of Tish’s face.
“This is the end for both of us.”
As Tish screamed, Rikke casually flicked the keys out over the side of the bridge, where they fell in a silver flash.
49
As Stride and Serena drew closer to the glowing white arch of the Blatnik Bridge, brake lights turned red, and traffic around them ground to a dead stop. The bridge lights over their heads were bathed in fog. Ahead of them, horns blared in a singsong whine as cars trickled forward, slowly merging into a convoy over the span. He lowered the window of his truck and leaned out to study the highway, but he couldn’t make out the summit of the bridge through the white cloud.
“Is it an accident?” Serena asked.
“I don’t know. Every time the fog rolls in, people start running into each other.”
Serena peered over the edge. “Long way down.”
“One hundred and twenty feet to t
he water.”
On the opposite side of the center barrier, traffic streamed toward them out of the haze. In the westbound lane, people jostled for position and cut each other off as they merged. He didn’t like the speed or impatience of the other drivers. He reached behind his seat for an emergency flasher and slapped it magnetically to the top of his Expedition. The red light turned and shot a beam around them. He turned on his four-ways and shut off the engine.
“You want to come?” he said to Serena.
“Out on the bridge?”
“You can stay here if you want.”
“Hell, no, I’m with you.”
He opened the door and stepped out onto the bridge deck. Serena did the same on the other side of the truck. She was closer to the edge, where the dirt and gravel of the narrow shoulder bumped against the concrete barrier.
“Be careful,” he said.
“Now you tell me.”
He waved his hands to alert drivers around him and walked up the highway, following the white paint marking the two lanes. Serena veered away from the shoulder and marched beside him. They could only see a few cars at a time in the swirling fog. On their right, steel girders sloped upward toward the semicircle of the bridge arch. Lights came and went over their heads as the mist drifted in pockets. He slapped the metal frame of each car they approached, so the driver knew they were there. He didn’t want anyone bolting across the lane as they came up from behind.
Inside his pocket, his phone rang. He flipped it up. “What’s up, Mags?”
“I’m at Rikke’s house. No sign of her here.”
“Get an ATL out on the tan Impala.”
“Already done. Where are you?”
Stride shook his head. “You don’t want to know. We’re hiking up the bridge deck on the Blatnik.”
“Hiking?”
“Yeah, traffic is almost stopped. Something’s going on.”
“Watch your ass, boss. That’s a mean bridge.”
Stride hung up. He and Serena threaded their way through traffic, but the fog grew thicker as they increased their altitude over the water. Cars pushed and shoved around them as if they were trapped in an amusement park ride.
In the Dark aka The Watcher Page 33
