Why the Rock Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  “I bet. Yesterday was rough for a lot of people.” Lacey turned away and turned back. “If Susan does call in, ask her if she knows of any huts. She’s been out here something like forty years. She’ll know, if anyone does.”

  There were five sets of reporters crowded around Orrin’s main gate, but the guys on duty opened up promptly and waved her in past a staccato chorus of clicking cameras and shouted questions. Well inside, she stopped and called one of the men over. “Nobody’s tried to breach the defences?”

  “Nope.” He shrugged. “A guy offered me a hundred bucks for an on-air quote.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “Hell, no.” He spat off to the side. “My job’s worth a lot more than that. Your boss is up in the office, keeping an eye on the cameras.”

  “Thanks.” She put the truck in the staff parking and headed indoors to check in with Wayne.

  The first thing he did after she’d shut the door behind her was point to a new iPad in a bracket by the light switch. “See that? No more surprises.” The small screen showed the top half of the staircase and the hallway immediately outside the office door.

  “Cool. What else has changed around here in the past eighteen hours?”

  “More reporters, and one slipped over the fence near the south gate in the dark. The guys there didn’t take a shot or even a swing at him. They followed protocol and called me down. Ike told me afterward that you gave them all a barn-burner of a speech about holding their fire. Looks like it stuck.” He walked her through the list of people and vehicles checked in and out. “Doors closing after the horse is gone. Same problem at the Wyman place. We didn’t know anyone was going to be murdered there, or we’d have tightened up security sooner.”

  “I assume the RCMP has raked Chad over a hot grill about turning off those cameras,” Lacey said. “But did they also ask him if he noticed anyone unusual while he was dodging around doing errands for his ex-girlfriend?”

  “Be a rookie mistake if they didn’t,” he said. “Now, the last alibi to come in for the Monday night is Cassandra Landry Caine’s. She took a plane out of Calgary when she was supposed to and landed at Victoria airport, but she didn’t turn up at her home in Cumberland. Neighbour says it’s not unusual for her to wander off on a whim, but if she jumped in a vehicle and drove straight back here to get rid of Orrin before he could formally disinherit her son, we might never be able to prove that.”

  Lacey quickly reshuffled her logic box to add a new pairing: Bart and his mother, conspiring to keep Ben in the money? She’d seen no trace of a strange woman on the ranch all week, so likely Cassandra — if it was her on the garage video — hadn’t hung around after that one night. But Bart’s legs were back in the picture, and that disappointed her. She liked him too much to willingly believe him capable of attacking her, much less of conspiring to kill his father.

  “Has Bart Caine headed down for his morning workout yet?”

  “Not that I noticed.” Wayne flicked on the archive monitor and scrolled backward through the last hour’s images. “Nope. Hasn’t left his house, unless he climbed down the bluff.”

  “Okay. I’m going to risk a direct approach.” Lacey pulled out her phone and called Andy. She set it on speaker. “Say,” she said after the usual greetings. “Remember that two-weeks deal we had?”

  “Sure,” said Andy, sounding sleepy.

  “Well, I’d like a photo of both Bart and Ben’s bare legs, from their shorts down. Will you trust me to tell you why later?”

  “Really?” Andy yawned. “Okay, whatever.”

  They heard some rustling around, and Andy’s voice calling the twins’ names, and then footsteps. Ben’s voice said “What for?” and Andy replied, “Maybe she’s just into legs.” A moment later the text came: a photo clearly taken in Andy’s white kitchen with the morning sunlight filtering in through the surrounding evergreens. Bart’s sweatpants were pooled around his ankles, and the bottoms of Ben’s denim cut-offs were just visible at the top. She could tell Ben’s legs because of their deeper tan and the bulge of his calves. Funny what a person noticed in daily climbing and running sessions. But neither set of limbs had any two-day-old bruises or scrapes.

  “How’s that?” Andy asked.

  “Perfect, thanks.” Lacey hung up and told Wayne, “The only way to be sure they couldn’t jerk me around by sending the same undamaged legs twice was to get them both in the same frame in real time.”

  “Sharp,” he said. “Too bad you didn’t ask them where their mother is.”

  “I can do that while we’re going over the map, looking for a hut. Can you hang here and watch the gates for another hour or two?”

  Wayne nodded. “You’re earning your overtime on this one, McCrae.”

  With a laminated map of Orrin’s entire holdings rolled under her arm, Lacey skirted the main house and took the path to Bart’s cabin. All three inhabitants were clustered around the kitchen island, snacking on grapes. Andy offered coffee and a muffin, as well. Lacey accepted the coffee and laid out the map with a sugar bowl at one corner, the grapes at another, and twins’ hands at the rest. She set a grape on the approximate spot where Susan had found Tyrone.

  “I need your input. The search didn’t find traces yet, but if either of you were ever dropped off in that area, now’s the time to remember.”

  Ben shook his head. “Orrin didn’t own anything across the road back then.”

  “That’s right,” said Bart. “It all belonged to Susan Norris. As well as her home quarter out here, which she already owned, she’d inherited a huge parcel of land in what’s now Huntingdon Hills.”

  Ben took up the story. “As I recall from all Orrin’s swearing about it, she swapped that land to the province for a parcel four times the size out here, right up Highway 40 to 579. Orrin wanted it, but his best pal in the legislature got on the wrong side of the premier, and he lost out to Susan. She intended to put it all in a nature conservancy and resisted every deal Orrin offered her. He would never have turned us loose on her land while he was trying to convince her to part with it.”

  “Which she didn’t until we were teenagers,” said Bart, “and she bonded with Ben over a lost calf that he brought home for her. He convinced her that —”

  Ben said sharply, “Yeah, whatever. Orrin lied to us, and I repeated that lie to her, and she’s never going to forgive any of us.”

  Bart dashed into the living room and came back with a much-creased Ghost Wilderness map marked with several red X’s. “See, that down there is all Susan’s original land, and here’s all the drop-off locations we came up with between us and Earl.”

  “As many as Earl would admit to,” said Ben.

  “If you hadn’t chucked a paperweight at him,” Andy said, “he might have remembered more.”

  Lacey leaned over their map, transferring marks to the laminated copy. None were east of Highway 40. Could Tyrone have been dropped off west of the airstrip and crossed the main road in the dark without realizing? It seemed unlikely. A road was a lifeline to anyone lost, and Tyrone had been over that road many times this summer alone. He’d have easily gotten oriented if he’d hit the gravel anywhere down there.

  “Any hunting shacks or huts near any of these marks?” Just saying the word hut made it more real. She could almost see it in her mind’s eye, hidden among trees, a shabby little building made of poles with their bark still attached, with Orrin cursing inside and a green Rover nose-first into a nearby gully. Please let the motor not be too damaged for evidence purposes.

  Bart shook his head. “No huts that I ever saw. We had a couple of one- or two-person portable camouflage blinds we took along on hunting trips. Just big enough for a stool and a rifle. When we stayed out overnight, we slept in the back of the Rover until we didn’t all fit anymore, and after that we took tents.”

  “Maybe Earl knows of a hut?”

  Andy rolled her eyes. “Good luck asking him. I don’t think he cares if Orrin ever comes back. Except it’s
really inconvenient for him that he has no keys and no passwords. It interferes with his attempt to take complete control.”

  Bart frowned. “Last night he talked about drilling the locks on Orrin’s file cabinets. I had to convince him the remaining board members might vote against him for chair if he acts precipitously.”

  Ben sneered. “He’ll want Orrin declared dead by this time next week.”

  So Earl wasn’t willing to wait any longer to seize the reins? And just when the odds of finding Orrin were finally looking up. Interesting. Lacey swallowed the last of her coffee. “We still have to ask. I’ll come with you to keep the peace. No throwing things.”

  “I’ll try,” said Ben. “He just pisses me off, even on a good day.”

  They tracked Earl down in Orrin’s study. As they walked in, he dropped the lid of Orrin’s laptop, but not before Lacey had seen, in the mirror above the fireplace, a log-in screen with its line of red lettering that usually meant Incorrect Password. He pretended to be staring at his own laptop until they were all four lined up across the desk from him and then snarled, “What do you want?”

  Lacey laid out the laminated map. “Tyrone’s woken up once, long enough to mention a hut. He wasn’t specific that it’s where he parted from your father, but it’s the best lead we’ve had all week. There must be hunting shacks or deer blinds or something on all this land that could be called a hut.”

  Earl didn’t give the map a second glance. “There’s nothing like that on our land. I should know. I’ve been on it for forty-five years. Decades longer than these two.” His lip curled. “They were off being surfer boys and smoking pot with their hippie mother.”

  Ben’s fist lifted. “Leave my mother out of it, or I’ll give you some hard truths about yours.”

  Andy put her hand on Ben’s arm. “Let it go. Come on, Earl, we have to try everything. Surely you see that?”

  Lacey took over. “I want you to mark on the map any place you remember Orrin dropping you off to walk home when you were a boy. I realize you already told the twins a bunch of that, but I’m an outside observer and might see a pattern that’s eluding all of you.”

  Earl glowered at the map and added a couple of markings well to the west of the ranch buildings.

  “Anything farther north?” Lacey prompted. “Up near the river, perhaps?” He glared but added one more. She measured by eyeball. “You must have covered twelve or fifteen kilometres some days. Good going!”

  He shrugged. “It was a challenge; I mastered it. Once you find a cutline or OHV trail running in the right direction, you can cover a lot of ground. My dad used to trick me by driving a really long way around to get there, but I caught on after the first time I tried to follow the same route home. After that, I navigated by the peaks and the angle of the sun.”

  Ben made a disgusted sound.

  Lacey frowned at him, “It was very brave of you, as a young boy. Your father was a hard man to live up to.”

  “He was just toughening us up. He didn’t want to leave this business to someone who would wimp out on a good opportunity.”

  “Did he ever take you east on 579 and drop you beyond Waiparous Creek?” This was the crucial question. Orrin must have because — like Tyrone this week — if Earl had come to a main road at twelve years old, he would have stayed on it rather than strike off through the bush again. Would Earl tell the truth?

  Earl shook his head. “I never was. We didn’t own any land over there then.”

  A flat lie. Interesting. Was he only hiding his embarrassment at needing rescue? Lacey could call his bluff right now, but not in front of his brothers. She picked up the map, covertly signalling to the others that they should leave. “We should take this map down to the airstrip and compare it to theirs. Bart, Ben, can you go get a truck, please?”

  Earl held up one hand. “I’m not wasting my day hovering around the SAR base, getting in the way of the professionals.”

  “You don’t need to come, if you’re sure you’ve marked everything on this map.” Nobody had moved yet. She caught Andy’s eye and jerked her chin at the door. Andy raised her eyebrows and then left, taking Bart and Ben with her. When Lacey saw them splitting up on the terrace, she spread the map on the desk again and leaned on it with both hands, pushing into Earl’s personal space. “Now you can tell me the truth.”

  His eyebrows snapped together. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Susan Norris found you east and south of her ranch house, not much more than a mile from where she found Tyrone yesterday. Where were you dropped off that time, Earl?”

  “Are you accusing me of lying?”

  “Not exactly.” Now that she’d got his undivided attention, she straightened up, giving him space. “I’m saying that I can see why a scared, exhausted boy lied to a father who would never have let him live down a failure. I didn’t blow your cover story in front of your brothers.” She’d already blown it to Sloane, but he wouldn’t find that out until long after she’d got what she needed from him. “Talk to me. Tell me the truth.”

  Earl’s hands balled into fists. He stood up, leaning forward until his summer-weight dress pants brushed the desk. Was there bruising under those dress pants? A line of lost skin? If she kicked him in the shins, would his face show pain? Any such action could expose him as her attacker, and she didn’t have backup or the right to slap handcuffs on him. Or a set of handcuffs on her belt. She met his heated gaze with her old police calm. Beneath the mask, as long as she was eyeball to eyeball with a lifelong bully who looked and sounded way too much like Dan, she stayed supremely alert for signs he would attack again.

  Recalling her main objective here, she tapped the map approximately where Tyrone been found. “You couldn’t have walked more than ten or twelve kilometres to reach that spot in the thirty hours you were missing. So where were you dropped off? You might as well tell me, because there are search teams crawling all over that ground now.”

  Sulkily, he put his index finger on the map, two finger-widths farther east. “Orrin tricked me,” he said bitterly. “He told me I had to get across all of Susan Norris’s land without being spotted by her.”

  Another lie. Susan hadn’t owned all that land then, only her home quarter, which was farther north and right by the highway. If there were a hut in that vicinity, Susan or someone would know. Meanwhile, let him think he was believed, even while her old RCMP senses were tingling. He’d lied about this, and probably a lot more than this, in the past week.

  She said, “I’ll talk it over with the SAR people and see if they’ve been that far east. I don’t suppose you know what road he took to get there?”

  Earl shrugged. “I wasn’t driving yet. I didn’t pay much attention. Just that we went a long way south and then east and back north.”

  Such a vivid memory from thirty-plus years ago? Liars often added too much detail in an effort to seem convincing. She tapped the land well east of Waiparous Creek. “Through Stoney 142b? The Nakoda land block?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, it’s somewhere to start. Thanks.” She rolled up the map and left the house, texting to Wayne, Almost sure now it was Earl who attacked me. Still couldn’t have sabotaged the Rover. Not enough to lay charges either way. Then she texted Ben about where to meet. An answer came back promptly: On our way up, front of house.

  While she waited in the lee of the house, shivering and wishing she’d thought to put on a sweatshirt earlier, she texted Terry Brenner. I’m bringing down a map with a bunch of places the older Caine sons have marked off as possibles. Can you round up Corporal Markov and meet me at the map tent?

  Ben drove up in the neon green monster machine she’d been in before, with Bart beside him. She climbed up behind Bart and strapped in. As they pulled away she said, “Would your mother maybe know where there was a hut or hunting shack?”

  “She might,” Bart said. “I’ll give her a call.” He rolled up his window, cutting out the damp breeze, and pulled ou
t his phone. Lacey leaned forward between the seats to hear as much as possible. Bart put his phone in the dashboard slot, adjusted the volume, and said, “Hey, Ma, how’s island life?”

  “Just fine, honey-boy,” came a languorous drawl through the truck’s speakers, along with some guitar music in the background. “Just fine.”

  “Hey, Ma,” Ben called. “You baked already? It’s not even lunchtime.”

  “I’m down in Sooke, baby. You remember Fred?”

  “Pothead Fred?” Bart stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and crossed his eyes. “Why there?”

  “House concert with some pals from Oregon, and I haven’t left yet. How’s it all at the ranch?”

  “Have you even watched the news since you’ve been there?” Bart asked.

  “No, baby. No TV, no Wi-Fi, no electricity. Remember?”

  “Ma,” said Ben sharply. “You didn’t know Orrin and Ty have been missing all week? They found Ty yesterday, but no sign of the old bastard.”

  “Oh.” The voice lost its drawl. “Hush up there, Fred. This is important. Now, boys, tell me what’s been going on.”

  “The most important thing,” said Bart, “is that Orrin and Ty were at some hut on the east side of Highway 40 last Saturday. Old Susan Norris found Ty on her land yesterday, but he’s pretty sick. And nobody knows where this hut might be, so they can’t hunt for Orrin there.”

  “Do you really want to find him?” his mother asked.

  Meeting Lacey’s gaze in the rear-view mirror, Ben rolled his eyes. “No, but if he might be still alive, we have to try.”

  “Oh, I s’pose you do. Let me think on it.” The guitar started up softly in the background. They hadn’t gotten far when her voice came through again. “Do you know which way they headed from the ranch?”

  “North,” Ben said. “Then they went east on 579, toward Water Valley.”

  “Seems to me,” Cass said, “that Orrin took me to some hunting shack around there for a sexy weekend before we were married. Kinda like Fred’s place, or I might not have remembered.”