Still Waters33

by Tami Hoag

  He looked at her now, gray-green eyes steady behind the lenses of his Buddy Holly–style glasses. “Well, I didn’t kill him,” he said blandly. His gaze slid pointedly to her hand. “Did you?”

  Elizabeth set the knife down on the counter and tried to rub some of the white out of her knuckles. The fear she’d known the instant before her son had opened the door had diluted to embarrassment, as fear often does. She warded the feeling off, turning her mind away from thoughts of murder, switching it to mother mode.

  “You were supposed to be home at eleven. What have you been doing?”

  “Nothing,” he mumbled, dodging her eyes. His broadening shoulders gave a defensive shrug and he jammed his fists into the pockets of his faded jeans. He was already a couple of inches past Elizabeth’s five eight, and was in a transition period between lanky and something sturdier. She doubted any of his shirts would fit him by fall; the white cotton T-shirt he wore now looked so small on him. He shifted from one sneakered foot to the other as she waited for a better answer. “I just been hanging out, that’s all,” he said at last.

  “Where?”

  “In town.”

  “With who?”

  “No one!” he barked. He shot her a glare, eyes narrowing in resentment, mouth tightening. “What is this—the goddamn third degree? Want to set me under a spotlight and whip me with a truncheon? I wasn’t doing anything!”

  Elizabeth bit her tongue and crossed her arms over her chest to keep from walking up to him and shaking him. He was lying. Unlike his father, Trace had never been good at it. Not as a little boy who had had a habit of sneaking into the cookie jar before supper or as a teenager who had gotten himself into far worse trouble than spoiling his appetite. Whether he was a poor liar naturally or by design, Elizabeth had never been able to decide, but whatever the case, lies hung on Trace like a cheap suit. He rolled his shoulders now, uncomfortable with the fit.

  She wasn’t supposed to call him on it. That’s what the counselor in Atlanta had said. They would never build a relationship if they couldn’t lay a foundation of trust. Elizabeth had wondered more than once if the man had ever had a son who’d dabbled with drugs and been arrested for joy riding. She doubted it. Malcolm Browne, with his anemic looks and candy-striped bow ties, had always struck her as being strange as a three-dollar bill. But for what he’d soaked Brock for the sessions, she had figured he must be good, smart at least. Half of Atlanta’s bluebloods had sent their kids to him to get straightened out. Too bad Brock had kicked them out before the counselor had managed to get the kinks out of Trace. Too bad she had been so damn busy trying to fit in with Atlanta society she couldn’t keep him from turning into this surly, angry youth in the first place, she thought as guilt reached in and grabbed her by the heart.

  “You can do nothing with no one right here,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, yeah, these are such luxurious accommodations.” Trace sneered. “I just love lying around here. Watch the plaster peel. Smell the dead mice rot under the floor. It’s a regular laugh a minute.”

  Elizabeth sighed and took a step toward him, reaching out with one hand. “I know you’re bored, honey—”

  “You don’t know anything!” He suddenly exploded with all the fury of a bomb, anger rolling out of him in waves. He seemed suddenly bigger, more male, looming over her, his shoulders taut, the muscles in his bare arms standing out in sharp definition as he held his clenched fists waist-high. Behind his glasses his eyes were stormy and burning with frustration.

  Elizabeth thought for a millisecond that he might actually strike out at her physically, and the thought sent a tide of nausea surging through her. He had never raised a hand to her. As a little boy he had seldom raised his voice. But his temper had grown unpredictable with the flux of his hormones. And with the use of cocaine. She didn’t think he could be using again. He hadn’t shown any other signs and didn’t have any money. That was probably the best part of being broke; Trace couldn’t afford to get into the kind of trouble he’d gravitated toward in Atlanta.

  He reined in his burst of emotion and abruptly turned away from her, slamming a cupboard door that bounced back open mockingly. He slammed it twice more, harder and harder, with the same result. Finally he swore and kicked the door below it. “I hate this place!”

  He braced his hands against the counter and stood with his back to her, his head down, shoulders heaving as he gulped air. Inadequacy and despair swamped Elizabeth like a tidal wave. This wasn’t what she had wanted for them. Even when it had become clear that Brock was going to give her little more than the shit end of the stick in the divorce, she had pictured a better fresh start than this.

  It had sounded so good in her head. A small town in Minnesota, a business of her own, working with her old college pal Jolynn. A farmhouse for herself and Trace, a place where they could spend quiet evenings and get to know each other again. Sit on the porch and watch the sun set. Reality was proving to be just one boot in the teeth after another.

  What little strength she had left drained out of her and she gave in to the need to touch her child. He was nearly a man now, but she could still see him when he was five with his big sad eyes looking up at her from behind spectacles that seemed too grown-up for his little face. Lord, when did he get to be sixteen? she wondered desperately as she settled a hand at the small of his back. She felt no baby fat left beneath the thin fabric of his T-shirt, only muscle, and it stiffened at her touch.

  “Honey, I know things don’t look good right now,” she said softly, rubbing her hand in slow circles designed to soothe. He gave a harsh, humorless laugh and shook his head. “They’ll come around,” Elizabeth promised, not quite sure whether she was trying to convince her son or herself. “You’ll see. We just have to give it a little time, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, right.” He twisted away from her touch, that action cutting her more deeply than anything he could have said. His mouth bent into a parody of a smile and he blinked furiously at the tears in his eyes. “Like till hell freezes over. I’m going to bed.”

  He was through the swinging door before Elizabeth could draw breath to say good night. The door swung back into the kitchen, bringing with it the faint perfume of dead mouse from the dining room, and she stood there, alone again, thinking back on the night she’d told Bobby Lee she was leaving him.

  She had stood in the kitchen under the glare of the fluorescent light, the smell of bacon grease and Aqua Velva settling in a lump at the back of her throat as her nerves churned in her stomach. Trace was on her hip, chewing the head off an animal cracker, his big eyes all watery and scared—a reflection of her own expression, she was sure. She had dressed to kill in her best cowgirl outfit, thinking it might make an impression on Bobby Lee, seeing what all he was going to have to do without—jeans that clung tighter than skin on a sausage and a fitted western blouse that was exactly the color of a dandelion and had black piping and a fancy yoke and French cuffs on the sleeves, her Miss Bardette Barrel Racing buckle on a belt three sizes too big (to emphasize her tiny waist), her Tony Lama boots, freshly polished and sprayed with Amway boot shine. She knew she looked good enough to make a man howl, but that didn’t change the fact that she was just nineteen and scared as hell.

  She stood there in the middle of that kitchen and told Bobby Lee Breland she’d had it with his messing around, that she was going to take their son and leave him for good right that next minute if he didn’t do something drastic.

  The refrigerator hummed as Bobby Lee remained in the doorway, a bottle of Lone Star dangling from his fingertips, his red shirt hanging open, the tails trailing down over muscular things encased in new blue Wranglers. She would never forget how he looked—like an ad for the bad boys of the pro rodeo circuit, sandy hair falling across his forehead, green eyes hard as emeralds and boring into her, his bare chest and belly tan as leather, shiny with sweat and lined with muscle. She would never forget what he said as he pushed himself away from the door frame and walked past he
r, grabbing his dusty black Stetson from the table as he headed out.

  “Can you be gone by nine? I got me a date with Cee Cee Beaudine.”

  And he walked out the back door and left her standing there feeling like the only person left on earth.

  Just exactly the way she felt now.

  HIS ROOM WAS NO BETTER THAN THE REST OF THE HOUSE. On the second floor, it overlooked a boggy pasture full of cows. The window had to be propped open with a sawed-off length of broomstick because the old rope on the pulley system was broken, and then the mosquitoes and gnats swarmed in through a rip in the screen to congregate at the light bulb sticking out of the ceiling. The walls were cracked plaster painted the color of cantaloupe. Some other poor slob sentenced to live in this pit of a house had spent hours scratching obscenities and other vital messages into the wood floor with a piece of wire. COUGARS RULE. A.J. + G.L. JOE EATS PUSSY. FUCK TINA ODEGARD. LIFE SUCKS.

  Trace flicked on his stereo, then flopped bellydown across his unmade bed, his gaze riveted to one particular piece of wisdom as Axl Rose screeched through the speakers about love and pain. LIFE SUCKS. There was the truth.

  He hated Still Creek. Hated the way it looked. Hated the way it smelled. Hated everything about it. He hated the Amish in their stupid hats and stupid clothes, driving their stupid horses all around. He hated the businesses and he hated the people who ran them. Stupid bunch of dickhead Norwegians, that’s all they were. They looked at him as though he were from the fucking moon, laughed behind his back at the way he talked.

  He knew what they thought. White trash, redneck southerners, that’s what they thought. Crackers with a capital C. He’d heard the whispers of gossip about his mother. They all thought she was a tramp. Just because she was pretty. Just because that son of a bitch Brock Buttwipe Stuart had divorced her.

  Back in Atlanta nobody had laughed at them. They’d lived in the penthouse of Stuart Tower. Trace had had a closet bigger than this bedroom. He’d had a wall of bookshelves and a big desk with his own computer. The Stuart name meant money and influence in Atlanta. It didn’t mean anything in Still Creek but that they were strangers.

  Anger burned and roiled in his gut and he tossed over on his back, not sure how to escape it. He felt it more and more lately, eating away at him, churning his insides. Sometimes he just wanted to explode with it, screaming and fighting. But he reined it in and stamped it down, as he’d always done with his feelings. It didn’t pay to let people see what you felt. They turned it against you more often than not. Better to show nothing.

  Like when that fat jerk Jarvis had turned him down for a job at Still Waters, Trace thought as he stretched over to the nightstand and pulled a stolen pack of Marlboros out of the drawer. He shook one out, leaning on his side as he lit it, then falling on his back again to stare at the geyser of smoke he blew up toward the ceiling. Jarvis had laughed at him, as if he thought he were a baby, and told him to go get a paper route. The anger had boiled inside him then, like scalding steam. All he’d wanted to do was punch in that ugly bulldog face until there wasn’t anything left of it but bloody mush. But he hadn’t shown it. He’d kept his chin up. He’d stared down the laughing work crew that had been leaning against the side of a rusted Chevy pickup with coffee cups in their hands. He’d walked away like a man.

  Don’t get mad, get even. That was what Carney said. Carney Fox was about the only person who hadn’t given him a hard time since he’d come to this shithole town. Don’t get mad, get even. That was his new motto. He said it aloud, testing the sound of it on his ears, then drew another deep drag on the cigarette and shot another cloud of smoke toward the fly-specked ceiling.

  He couldn’t seem to keep himself from getting mad, but he was working on it. Sometimes it scared him, the way he felt, so full of fury and rage at the injustices that had all but ruined his life. But most of the time he controlled it, the way a man should. He didn’t let it show, and that was the important thing. He sometimes wished with all his heart for a nice white line of coke to make it go away, but he was through with that stuff. It made a man weak, and if there was one thing he was never going to be again, it was weak.

  HALF A MILE TO THE NORTH, DANE STOOD ON HIS FRONT porch, nursing a beer and staring off toward the old Drewes place. Weariness ached through him and pain pinched his bum knee like a C clamp. Another storm was brewing off to the west, grumbling threats but not making good on them, just like the earlier one that had promised to wash away all the physical evidence at the murder scene, then rolled on toward Wisconsin without so much as dampening the dust.

  He tipped his bottle of Miller back and let the cold liquid slide down a throat that was raw from barking orders at his deputies and the press, and thought that thunder was appropriate tonight. It set the mood for evil.

  They had worked at Still Waters until after one. The regional BCA agent, Yeager, had still been there sniffing around like a lazy old bird dog, bemoaning the fact that the Still Waters resort was going to be the ruination of a prime turkey hunting spot, when Dane had left to check on Amy and Mrs. Regina Cranston, the woman who was going to cook and clean and maintain a grandmotherly presence in the house for the three weeks his daughter was visiting. Jarvis had been carted off to Davidson’s Funeral Home for the night. His Lincoln had been towed to Bill Waterman’s junkyard, which served as Tyler County’s impound lot. The mobile lab had packed up and taken what evidence they’d found back to the central lab in St. Paul.

  Work at the scene had ended, but the real work was just beginning. Dane figured he’d grab an hour’s sleep, then return to his office and start trying to find a killer with what information they had. He almost managed to laugh at the lunacy of that. Christ, what did he know about finding killers? Nothing more than what he’d read in textbooks. The worst thing that had ever happened in his tenure as sheriff had been Gordon Johnson knocking his wife around after imbibing too much peppermint schnapps at the VFW. And Vera had managed to knock Gordon a good one back, smacking him upside the head with a frozen ring bologna and giving him a concussion.

  They had the odd burglary in Tyler County, the occasional drunken fistfight at the Red Rooster bar. There was a class of social lowlifes who dealt pot and pills to one another. But for the most part, law and orderliness was bred into the folks of the Upper Midwest. Now this bastion of upstanding respectability had been breached, and he was the man who had to account for it.

  Dane Jantzen, local hero. Captain of the Cougar football team. Star forward of the Cougar basketball team. Only native of Still Creek ever to be seen on national television. Tricia had accused him of wanting to come back here because he would always be a hero in Still Creek; he didn’t need ambition or talent here. He could get by the rest of his life on stories of his glory days, when he had been sure-handed and fleet of foot.

  Not true. He had come back because this was home, because he needed a place that was comforting and familiar after his career, his identity, had been ripped from him. In L.A. he had been Dane Jantzen, star receiver for the Raiders. Then his knee had gone and in the blink of an eye he was a nobody. The spotlight had gone out fast enough to blind him and he had been left groping around in the dark for something, someone, some clue to who he would be now that the Number 88 jersey had been handed over to another man with great hands and delusions of immortality.

  Tricia had been more disappointed over her loss of status as a player’s wife than in Dane’s loss of mobility due to his blown knee. She had taken solace in the idea that he would go into broadcasting and eventually be a bigger star in the television booth than he had ever been on the field. When he told her he intended to move back to Minnesota, she literally laughed in his face. He’d been her ticket out of Still Creek; she had no intention of going back. She made it very clear she had married the football jersey, not the man inside it.

  So he had come home alone, a beaten hero, and slowly built a new career, built a new life, carefully keeping each component separate so that if he lost one, he would
n’t lose them all, carefully keeping himself separate from the process so as not to lose himself in it. He was satisfied with the result.

  He was a good sheriff. Whatever people’s reasons for voting for him, they had been getting their money’s worth to this point. He ran a tight county, kept crime to a minimum. Until tonight. Now he would be put to the test. Now he would have to prove that he hadn’t gotten this job on the strength of his ability to run a good crossing pattern and keep his eyes on the ball.

  He would do it, he vowed, pushing the doubts aside. He would catch this killer. He would win because winning was the one thing he had always done best. He wouldn’t tolerate a loss. Neither would the good folk of Still Creek.

  He’d done the right thing calling in the BCA. The lab boys had swarmed over the scene like ants at a picnic, dusting everything in sight for fingerprints, taking video and still pictures, making plaster casts of tire tracks, measuring blood spatters and scraping samples into plastic bags. They had vacuumed Jarvis’s Lincoln and would sift through the debris for trace evidence that might make or break the case. Their efficiency was an awesome thing to behold, Dane reflected, taking another long pull on his beer. He only wished he hadn’t beheld it in his county.