Watcher in the Woods: A Rockton Novel

by Kelley Armstrong

  “Are you saying that was my fault, April?”

  She stiffens. “Of course not.”

  “No? Dad did. Mom did. Does that seem normal to you? Parents who stand beside the bedside of their comatose daughter and decide ‘She deserved that.’ Tell her so when she wakes up?”

  “They didn’t mean it. They were angry. Do you have any idea how scared they were? Mom never left your beside. Did you know that?”

  No, I didn’t. All I remember is waking up and hearing her railing at me for being stupid, for dating a boy like Blaine, for fighting back against those thugs, for walking down a dark alley, for every little thing I’d done that landed me in that bed.

  “I couldn’t live the life they wanted for me,” I say slowly. “That wasn’t rebellion. It was just . . . living. I was never going to be the daughter they wanted. I didn’t need to be. They had you.”

  “Exactly. You didn’t need to be that daughter. I did. I followed every rule. I never caused them a moment’s worry. I achieved everything they wanted. I was perfect. And they didn’t care. All that mattered was you. All they cared about was you.”

  Tears well up in her eyes, and I stare. I am transported back to that hospital bed, to hearing my mother berate me for every mistake I made, while tears rolled down her cheeks. She railed at me, and she cried, and she told me never to do anything like that again, never to scare them like that again.

  I had reached out and hugged her and told her not to worry. I’d be fine. I’d recover. I’d bounce back, like I always did. It was the first time I’d seen her cry. The first time I reached for a hug and got one. Mom had fallen against me as she sobbed. And over her shoulder, I saw April. Just standing there. Watching. And then turning and walking past Dad out the door. She left, and no one noticed.

  I’m looking at my sister, and I don’t know what to say. No, I do know. I could sympathize and commiserate . . . or I can be honest.

  “That wasn’t my experience, April,” I say softly. “To me, there were three people in our family and one interloper. One cuckoo among the warblers. You were the one they were proud of. Their success story. I was the screw-up. But, yes, I understand what you’re saying. You gave them what they wanted, and that freed me to do my own thing. If they were disappointed in me, I knew they had you. They could take comfort in you. That placed a burden on you, and I’m sorry. I honestly never saw that. I was a kid. I was so much younger than you, and I don’t think you ever realized that. To you, I was stupid and selfish and irresponsible. To me, I was the screw-up little sister you wanted nothing to do with. I could never make you laugh. Never catch your interest. Never even make you smile. No matter how hard I tried.”

  Her cheeks go bright red, and I’m not sure why. Before she can speak, Kenny calls, “Uh, Doctor Butler?”

  April ignores him and fidgets with the hem of her shirt.

  “April?” I say. “That’s you. It’s Butler here, remember?”

  “Doctor Butler?” Kenny calls again. “I, uh, spilled water on my legs and I . . . I can’t feel it.”

  We look at each other and then jump up and hurry for the supply closet.

  SEVENTEEN

  This is the first time Kenny has been awake enough to assess his condition. He’s surfaced before this, dopey from the morphine, and April wanted to assess him, but I’d said no, hold off. I wanted him to be awake enough to understand the questions . . . and awake enough to be reassured if the answers were not what we all hoped for.

  They were not.

  Kenny has no feeling in his legs. No movement either. When he starts to panic, I begin the reassurances. Surgery went well. There’s still swelling. It’s too soon to tell.

  April glowers at me. She wants me to prepare him for the worst. I will not. Anyone who has been shot in the back knows the worst scenario. Kenny might be the town carpenter, but down south, he’d been a high school math teacher. He is perfectly capable of reasoning through a problem on his own.

  When April conducts her prick tests, I am vindicated. He has sensation. Not a normal degree, but when she pokes his legs enough, he feels it.

  “So, that’s good,” he say.

  When April opens her mouth, he says, “Yeah, doc, I understand what I’m facing. Damage to the lumbar region. Not paralysis but nerve damage. Loss of sensation.” He manages a strained chuckle. “Thankfully, I don’t seem to have fully lost my sense of . . .” His cheeks flush. “Bladder and bowel control, I mean. That’s a start. So what’s the next step?”

  “Letting the swelling subside and seeing where we stand,” I say.

  “Seeing if I can stand, you mean.”

  I pass him a smile. “You should be able to. You just might need help.”

  “Braces,” he says. “Lots of rehabilitation. Possible permanent loss of some motor function.”

  I nod. “As soon as we see what’s what, we can transfer you down south. The council would ensure you have access to full medical care and physiotherapy.”

  “And if I don’t want that?”

  “Don’t want physio?”

  “Don’t want to leave.”

  “If Oliver Brady hadn’t shown up, you’d be gone by now, Kenny,” I say. “Your term ended. You were packed and ready to go.”

  “And if I’ve changed my mind? If I want to apply for an extension?”

  “I don’t believe this town is equipped to provide either medical care or rehabilitation,” April says. “I could not, in good conscience, advise that you stay. Nor could I support such a course of action.”

  He looks at me. “Eric said I could get an extension. My carpentry skills plus my militia training meant I qualified to stay the full five years.”

  Yes, they had discussed it . . . before that bullet meant Kenny might not be such an asset to Rockton. That’s what it came down to, as horrible as that sounded. We had no capacity to accommodate anyone with serious medical, psychological or intellectual issues.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” I say.

  * * *

  I leave April with Kenny. As soon as the initial stress of testing him—and talking to him—passes, it’s obvious she wants me gone. I could hope, like with Phil, that airing our differences would lead to a breakthrough. But life doesn’t always work like that.

  We see others through a window fogged with condensation, catching only a warped and shadowed image and presenting the same. We squint to see through that condensation, but we use our fog, too. We hide behind it. Wiping it away lets us see clearly . . . and let’s us be seen clearly.

  For better or worse. I see my sister better now than I ever have, and I understand too that the damage goes both ways. The damage our parents did. The damage we did—however inadvertently—to one another. I can also see that it might not be the kind of damage we can ever repair. We are two people who wouldn’t have had anything to do with each other if not for kinship. That isn’t hatred or even dislike. It is a simple lack of common ground. I see my sister clearly now, and I still don’t understand her, and I know she looks back at me and says the same.

  I have not ruled April out as a suspect. That is painful to admit. I realize too, that in saying that, I wipe away the condensation between myself and world, and I expose myself for what I am. A detective first. And maybe, yes, a person second.

  Nothing my sister has said clears her of the charges. She’s given me no excuses, no explanations that I can rely on. I would love—love—to think she came to Rockton for me, but that is not the April I know, not the one I have ever known, and so I cannot trust even this new image I see. I cannot pretend to miss the blur of condensation lingering at the edges.

  I spend the rest of the evening alibiing those I can. I’ve worked through the militia, dividing them into those with clear alibis and those without. The former will be given shifts guarding the clinic, and the latter will not. That’s the only distinction we make for now.

  Once the militia and patrol volunteers are covered, I move onto friends. That feels biased. Everyone is
waiting for their chance to tell me where they were. Many have excellent alibis, having been at work with others when the shots rang out.

  To begin with my friends smacks of favoritism. It’s not. These are the people I rely on, the ones I ask for help and advice on a case. As Dalton says when we pause to share updates, “Gotta know who you can trust.”

  “In Rockton? That’d be you and . . .” I look around. “You.”

  He chuckles and kisses the top of my head. Then I continue on.

  Nicole has an alibi—she was on patrol as part of the militia. So was Jen. Mathias was in the butcher shop serving two people when the shots fired. +if I need to alibi out anyone else, this is the spot, otherwise, just make a list

  It’s after eleven. Dalton is off putting out a fire. A figurative one, fortunately. But the fact that we’re hunting a killer doesn’t mean the town stops to let us investigate. While he’s busy, I’m walking Storm and joining Nicole on patrol. Or that was the plan. I’m heading into the woods with her and one of the militia guys when Isabel strides from nowhere.

  “Walking the pup?” she says.

  “While patrolling.”

  “Excellent. I will join you.” She falls in step, and I know that means she wants to talk, so I send Nicole and her militia partner the other way.

  “So this is patrol?” Isabel says as we walk. “I’m disappointed. I should at least get to carry a gun.”

  “You should have brought yours.”

  Her brows lift. “I don’t have a gun, Casey.”

  “Just checking.”

  She chuckles at that. “I know I’m on your suspect list. You unreasonably failed to accept my alibi.”

  “You were brewing beer. Alone.”

  “I always do it alone. And the beer should provide my alibi. If I left it at that stage to go shoot Garcia, I’d have had to throw out the brew and start over. I may be capable of shooting a man, but I’d never cut into my profits like that.”

  I shake my head.

  “The question of who had a gun is the main one, isn’t it, though?” she says. “You keep those tightly regulated.”

  “We’ll know more when we get that bullet.”

  “So your sister hasn’t dug it out of the corpse yet?”

  I know better than to react. “For that, we’ll require a corpse, and we aren’t ready to write Marshal Garcia off prematurely.”

  She smiles. “Ah. Yes. Of course.” She walks a few more steps and says, “It’s actually your sister—not the case—that I wished to speak to you about. I believe she’d have an easier time in Rockton if others were aware of her condition.”

  “Condition?”

  She studies me. “May I presume your sister has never been assessed for ASD?”

  “ASD?”

  “Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

  “April?” I laugh. “She has her quirks, but no. She’s a freaking genius. Yes, people with autism can be gifted in some areas, but April was an A+ student in all areas.”

  “Autism is a spectrum. There are so-called savants, gifted in one subject, such as math or art, but others can be like your sister, intellectually unimpaired. It’s the social and affective areas where I see the signs. Has anyone ever described your sister as socially awkward?”

  I tug Storm away from a deer dung pile. “Sure. She lives for her studies, her work. She’s not a people-person so she lacks some . . . okay, most social skills.”

  “Has her demeanor been described as chilly? Unemotional? Detached?”

  “Yes, but so has mine.”

  “You’re reserved. There is an abundance of emotion there. You prefer not to show it, a stance I can understand. As women, over-expressiveness can be seen as a weakness. It seems proof we are not rational beings.”

  “But when we’re not emotional, we’re seen as cold bitches.”

  “The eternal struggle of a professional woman. You and I both deal with it by accepting ‘cold bitch’ as a sobriquet far more acceptable than ‘hysterical bitch.’ In your sister’s case, though, I believe it isn’t so much restraint as a restricted emotional range. Would I be wrong in that?”

  I walk for a few paces before saying, “No.”

  “And her sense of humor? How would you describe that?”

  “Uh, nonexistent.”

  “She doesn’t make jokes.”

  I smile at the thought. “Definitely not.”

  “Does she get them? Understand them? She didn’t seem to when I met her.”

  I remember all those times I tried so hard to amuse her. Other people would laugh. She just scrunched her brow and told me to stop being silly.

  As a child, she might not have realized why I was being “silly,” but at the age of thirty-seven, she could not fail to realize that she lacked a sense of humor. What would it be like, constantly knowing others found something funny and not understanding why? A good sense of humor is one of the traits we look for in others. Someone who doesn’t understand jokes is dull, stuffy, boring . . .

  “Did you parents ever have her assessed?” Isabel asks when I don’t respond. “Did she ever see a psychologist?”

  I shake my head. “I did. Well, a psychiatrist. My parents were concerned about my rebellious tendencies.”

  Isabel laughs. Then she sees my expression. “You’re serious? Well, apparently the therapy worked.”

  “My parents’ idea of rebellion was me refusing to follow some of a very, very long list of rules, like ‘don’t eat cookies before dinner.’ After a few meetings the psychiatrist called in my parents for a family session.”

  “And they refused.”

  “No.” I steer around a corner. “We did a couple. Dad didn’t want to. He considered psychiatry junk science.” I glance at her. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, I am well aware of the attitude. At one time, it led to a lovely little solution called lobotomies. Because carving out part of the brain is much simpler than talking about a patient’s problems. So your parents did the family therapy, and I’m going to guess that the doctor suggested the problem might originate beyond you.”

  “She hinted at that, but she also thought I did have a real problem. I overheard her with my parents while I was in the waiting room with April. I didn’t catch much of what the therapist said, but my father was furious. He’d brought me there for help, and now she was suggesting his child should be assessed for . . .” I break off. “Oh.”

  “Autism?” she says.

  In a blink, I’m back there. April and I sitting in that room, her deep in a book, as I paced the room, bored and restless.

  I bought Casey here for help, and now you want my daughter assessed for autism? There is nothing wrong with her. She’s brilliant, accomplished . . .

  I remember how my heart swelled at those words. I wanted to run to the door and press my ear against it. My father called me brilliant. Accomplished. My therapist thought I had some kind of problem, and Dad was actually defending me.

  That’s the problem with you people, he continued. If you can’t find a problem, you make one up. I ask you to look for horses, and you go hunting unicorns. My daughter is fine. And we are done here.

  I remember April sighing and saying, “What have you done now, Casey?”

  Even she’d presumed they were talking about me.

  I look at Isabel. “It wasn’t me. The doctor was talking about April.”

  “I suspect so. I also suspect she wasn’t the only one to raise a flag. That does not mean you sister has ASD. Even if she does, she’s as high functioning as they come. Intellectually, that is. Do you have any idea how she does socially? I know she isn’t married. She said she wasn’t living with anyone or seeing anyone. Is that an unusual situation?”

  I shake my head. “She’s busy.”

  “With work. Very, very busy. It makes an excellent excuse, and I suspect it’s one you’ve given in the past yourself. I know Eric is the first man you’ve lived with. He might even be your first committed relationship since you were a teenager. B
ut that, I believe, is learned experience rather than natural inclination. As for being too busy to have a relationship, that is complete nonsense. I doubt you’ve ever been busier in your life. A good partner is an asset—moral support, help at home, easy access to sex.”

  I snort at the last.

  “Oh, that’s as important as the rest,” Isabel says. “We just don’t like to admit it. Good girls don’t care about such things.”

  “Then I was never a good girl.”

  “Nor was I. Thank God.” She pauses to skirt a spider web. “On that topic, I shouldn’t presume your sister would be interested in men. Or that she has any interest in sex at all. Is there a chance she’s asexual?”

  “I-I don’t know.”

  I assumed April was straight because she dated guys in high school, but I realize now it’s just a presumption, my mind settling on the default. Since high school, I haven’t heard her talk about dating, and I’ve learned not to ask about my sister’s life.

  “It’s not important,” Isabel says. “What matters is opening your mind to the possibility. If you or I are rude or abrasive, it’s because we wish to be. With April, it might not be a choice, and it could help you to remember that. At the very least, that might help you survive the weekend.”

  “We talked earlier. Had a bit of a blowout actually. She—”

  My arm flies up to stop Isabel as I spot a figure in the woods. It’s Artie, the guy who’d been so eager to give his alibi at the town meeting. I never did get one from him——he vanished when we insisted on two-person alibis. Now he’s hovering behind the clinic, watching the guards.

  EIGHTEEN

  I mentally race through what I know about Artie. He’s in his fourth year here, and Dalton is pissy about that. Residents get a minimum of two years, maximum five. Other than Dalton, the only persons who’s been here that long is Isabel. In her case I’m certain she’s blackmailing the council with tidbits from her bag of secrets, gathered from years as the local bar-and-brothel owner. Mathias is coming up on five years and has expressed an interest in staying. Again, the council may agree out of self-preservation—I’m sure Mathias has filled his own treasure chest of secrets.