Died to Match

by Deborah Donnelly

  “I’m afraid I can’t really follow what you’re saying,” I said neutrally. “There’s so much noise from the dancing. I’m going to go check on the others.”

  It was the best I could think of, to save her dignity later. I grabbed my coat and left. Outside in the dank, chilly night, guests from the lodge were coming and going in the parking lot, and pale bands of headlights crisscrossed against the blanketing fog. As I strode along the walkway towards the pavilion, the sound of voices dropped away abruptly, muffled by the fog and then lost in the roar of Snoqualmie Falls, which thundered and raged like an invisible beast in the gorge below.

  After a few minutes, cocooned in a strange isolation of sight and sound, I began to make out dim figures coming toward me, barely discernible in the swirling darkness. Burt was coming back, his arm around Corinne’s shoulders, and the rest of the party seemed to be following.

  Small talk suddenly seemed like too much effort. On impulse, I stepped off the walkway among the parked cars, far enough to lose the others from sight. I needed time to think. If Roger Talbot was juggling multiple affairs, maybe Mercedes had become inconvenient. But inconvenient enough to murder? Why not just set her aside, as he’d done with Valerie? Anyway, Corinne insisted that the killer had a cloak, not a topcoat.

  Their voices faded quickly, leaving only the white noise of the Falls. I went ahead to the pavilion, a small concrete platform circled by railings that hung out over the gorge. It was empty, save for a brandy snifter on one of the benches. Cold white beams from the ceiling lights fanned out through the pillars and rails, laying crosshatched shadows onto the pale walls of mist. I crossed to the far side and peered out, but of course the Falls were invisible. As I stood there, I quit brooding over Valerie’s remarks and lost myself in the crashing roar of the waterfall. It reminded me of the otter’s little waterfall at the Aquarium, back before this dreadful thing had happened—

  “Carnegie.”

  “Oh! Zack, you scared me.”

  “I’m sorry. You keep avoiding me, but I, like, really have to talk to you. I’m going crazy about this.”

  “About what, Zack?” It was utterly private here; we could have been miles from the lodge. Might as well get it over with.

  He moved toward me and I retreated. I was willing to be kind about a declaration of affection, however misjudged, but I preferred to fend off another kiss before it happened.

  “I can’t…” he stammered. “I didn’t mean…”

  I was getting chilly. “Zack, please, just say what you want to say.”

  He turned his face away for a moment and then looked full at me, a wild spark in his shadowed eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t a nerdy kid anymore, attractive but immature, easy to flirt with but easy to dismiss. Suddenly he was a man, blazing with a strange intensity.

  “Carnegie, I killed Mercedes.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I FROZE. THE WHOLE SAFE, SANE WORLD WAS SUDDENLY very far away. Zack and I were marooned on an island of stark white light, surrounded by a sea of fog and thundering darkness. My little theory about Skull evaporated on the spot. Not a party crasher, but a party guest, had lured Mercedes down that corridor. Not a black cape but a dark green one had dropped over Corinne’s head to blind her before she drowned. Robin Hood, not Death or Darth Vader, had gone home with blood on his hands.

  Zack stepped closer. The mist made silver beads on the dark wool of his sweater, and clung to his fair hair.

  “You have to listen,” he said hoarsely.

  “I am listening, really I am.” But I was also edging slowly backwards, determined to run for it when I had the chance. I kept seeing the bloody wound beneath Mercedes’ perfumed hair, and the way her slender arms had floated, limp in the water.

  My retreat was blocked by something hard and cold at my back: the steel bars of the railing. With a quick glance I saw that they stretched for three or four yards to my right along the pavilion’s edge before the opening to the pathway. The path to safety. I could slip under the lower bar, but that would take precious seconds, and very likely send me tumbling down the steep slope into the gorge. If I screamed, would anyone hear me over the roar of the Falls, or would it just panic Zack into action? He looked barely in control of himself.

  “She was… She said…” His dark blue eyes were wide and fixed, his mouth working soundlessly. I sidled along the rail, one step and then another, my eyes locked on his.

  “Go ahead, Zack. Tell me about Mercedes.”

  Two more steps. A third, a fourth. Zack mirrored my movements, but unconsciously. All his conscious thought seemed bent on getting the words out before they choked him.

  “She laughed at me, so I shoved her over. I didn’t mean—”

  I flung myself toward the pathway. Zack grabbed me, locking my arms against my sides.

  “You have to listen!”

  I struggled, frantic to get away, but he was shockingly strong. I tried to stamp on his instep, as I’d learned to do, but stumbled instead. It pulled him off balance, so I hooked one foot behind his knee and turned the stumble into a fall, hoping to bring us both down and then pull free.

  Only the first part worked. We crashed to the concrete floor, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I went limp for a moment, gasping, but Zack held on.

  “Carnegie, what are you doing?” he said plaintively, his voice breaking like a teenager’s, his breath hot on my face. The words tumbled out, faster and faster. “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want you to listen. I didn’t mean to kill her. I’ve been going totally crazy ever since you told me she was dead. I just shoved her, I thought she’d fall in the water and have to go back to the party all wet and that would serve her right. The water was so shallow, I never thought she’d drown! You’ve got to believe me….”

  His face was wet, but not from the fog. Zack was crying. He disentangled himself from me and sat up, his entire body heaving with anguished sobs that tore themselves from his chest. I could have run away then, but instead I sat up and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You shoved her? That was all?” That was bad enough in itself, of course. But Mercedes’ head wound came from a deliberate attack, not a simple fall. And a shove was not a murder….

  “Yes!” he cried bitterly. “I pushed her over the railing and left her there and she drowned. Oh God, Carnegie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Help me up.” We got shakily to our feet, and I led him over to the bench and handed him a handkerchief. I carry three, from habit, but they’re usually for brides.

  “Zack, sit down. Tell me exactly what happened at the party, OK?”

  He nodded, scrubbing at his face, and drew a long uneven breath. “It was just before you and I danced together. Remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.” I spoke softly, careful of his precarious composure. “Go on.”

  “Tommy asked Mercedes to dance with me—I wish he’d quit doing that—so she did, and for a while she was, like, really friendly, and kind of sexy even. I mean, she danced real close. I thought… I thought…”

  “Just tell me what actually happened, Zack. It’s important.”

  “OK, so we danced, and then she said, let’s walk, and we went past the barrier into that shorebird corridor. You know the one?”

  “I know.”

  He gave a little laugh, with a wavering edge of hysteria to it. The smooth young man I’d found so attractive was gone, reduced to a very vulnerable youngster. “Of course you do! You found her. You found the… the…” He couldn’t say the word.

  “The two of you went past the barrier and into the corridor,” I prompted. “Then what?”

  “She sat up on the railing. She looked so pretty! And she was laughing and kind of flirting with me, hiking her skirt up and saying wild stuff. It was like she was high.”

  I could see what was coming, because I’d seen Mercedes high and happy myself, in the ladies’ room, and seen her mood alter in the blink of an eye.

  “So at first you thought she was enjoyi
ng herself with you.”

  “I thought she liked me! I was always watching her at the Sentinel, but she totally ignored me, and then here she was, smiling and saying I was handsome and stuff.” He flushed darkly at the memory. “And then I tried to kiss her and she laughed right in my face! She said I was boring, and she didn’t have to waste her time with a boring boy. She got, like, really nasty.”

  “And so you shoved her over the rail?”

  “Yeah.” He hung his head, his eyes squeezed shut and his fists clenched with the effort to undo what he believed was a murderous act. “I can’t believe I did that, but I was half-drunk and she got me so excited…. She went over backwards and I heard a splash but I didn’t stay to watch, I just got out of there and back to the party and got another drink. Then Tommy saw me, and then you know what happened after that.”

  I knew. I remembered Zack’s rigid tension on the dance floor, and how he began to relax as he talked about his website design work. “Some people think it’s boring,” he had said. Now I knew that “some people” meant Mercedes. When he kissed me, Zack was trying to recover his masculine pride. He didn’t know that the woman who had humiliated him was soon to die.

  “Zack, listen to me, and tell me if this is right. You pushed Mercedes over the rail, into the water, but you didn’t touch her after that?”

  “You mean help her out of the water? No.” He groaned. “Oh, God, I wish I had. You’ve got to believe me, if I’d known she was drowning—”

  “Zack, she didn’t drown.”

  He stared. “But everyone’s been saying that somebody drowned her. The police are looking for whoever did it. They’re looking for me!”

  “Listen to me. The police are looking for whoever took a rock and smashed Mercedes’ skull with it. Did you do that?”

  “No!” He looked at me in horror. “No! I didn’t… I couldn’t…”

  “Of course you couldn’t.” I sat beside him, the two of us isolated in our cave of fog and thunder. “The worst you may have done was to leave her there stunned so that someone else could come along and kill her, but we don’t even know that for sure. Mercedes could have picked herself up and had a conversation with the killer. We just don’t know. But we do know that you didn’t murder anyone, on purpose or by accident.”

  The tears began again, this time in a cathartic flood of joy and relief. I found myself smiling inanely, and crying a little as well. It was like bringing someone back from the dead. I couldn’t condone Zack’s aggressive behavior, but between the alcohol and Mercedes’ taunting, I could understand it. The main thing, to him and to me, was that he wasn’t a murderer.

  “You don’t know what it’s been like,” said Zack, sniffing. I handed him another hankie. “Ever since you told me in your office, I’ve been trying to act normal on the outside, but inside I was losing my mind. I felt like some kind of monster, and I kept imagining her lying there in the water.”

  “Shhh. Try not to think about it anymore. All you have to do now is explain to the police—”

  “No!” He sprang up from the bench. “No, I can’t! And you can’t tell them either.”

  “But Zack, we have to! The more they know about what happened that night, the better. You can tell them what time you saw her alive, and if you saw anyone else in the area.”

  He shook his head violently. “I didn’t see anybody, and I don’t know what time it was. I can’t tell them anything they don’t already know. Don’t ask me to!”

  He strode to the railing and gripped it with both hands. I followed, trying to sound calm and persuasive, and get this settled while we were still alone. No one else had come out from the lodge, and now I prayed they wouldn’t.

  “Zack, the police will understand what you did. They won’t blame you. You can tell them you didn’t even know how she was killed—”

  “But now I do know, don’t you see?”

  “That’s only because I told you! You can skip that part, just tell them you’ve decided to come forward with your story about seeing Mercedes alive.”

  “If I did that, they’d question me over and over, and I wouldn’t be able to pretend I don’t know about her getting hit with a rock.”

  I looked at his profile, young and tear-stained, and realized with dismay that in my rush to reassure Zack, I’d stolen his innocence. If he had gone straight to the police with his story, not knowing how Mercedes really died, his ignorance would have been obvious and unshakable. But now…

  “I’ll go with you,” I told him. “I’ll convince them that you didn’t know until I told you. The police are reasonable people. Lieutenant Graham will listen.”

  “Oh, right,” he said hotly. “Like you would know. Have you ever been interrogated?”

  “No, but—”

  “Well, I have. They just pound away at you till you say what they want to hear. The cops believe what they want to believe, and the prosecutors believe the cops. They’d take one look at my record and lock me up.”

  “Your record?” I asked uneasily. “What’s on your record, Zack?”

  His voice dropped to a sullen mutter, and I had to strain to hear him. “I was driving some friends, back in St. Louis. I was just driving! I thought they bought this booze, but they stole it, and beat up the liquor store guy. I was in for five months and it felt like a hundred years. Somebody like you, you can’t even imagine what it’s like in there. Especially for guys like me.”

  I didn’t have to ask what kind of guys he meant: young and good-looking, and nowhere near tough enough to make a true criminal back off. I pictured a man like Skull alone all night in a cell with this youngster, and shuddered.

  “Carnegie, please.” Zack turned to face me. “I came out to Seattle to get my act together. Nobody here knows about me being in jail. I got my web business going, and now that I know that I didn’t kill Mercedes, I really do get to start over. I’ll never touch anybody again, I swear, and I’ll never drink like that again. Please. You saved my life. Don’t take it away again, please. I’m, like, begging you.”

  “All right, Zack. All right.”

  He clutched my hand. There was hope in his eyes, hope after long days and nights of despair. “You promise you won’t tell the cops? Or anyone, ever?”

  “I promise.”

  “Oh, Carnegie.”

  Zack embraced me, and this time I welcomed it. I had some qualms about keeping his secret, but they were swept away in the exhilaration of delivering him from his tormented guilt. And when he began to kiss me, well, it was a highly emotional moment. Anyone would have kissed him back. And besides, I was chilled to the bone by that time, and it felt good to get wrapped up in his arms. It was only reasonable.

  Well, all right. So it wasn’t reasonable. I really had no business standing out in the middle of a brightly lit pavilion smooching with a handsome guy some years my junior—a fact which occurred to me instantly and with compelling force when Aaron Gold tapped me on the shoulder.

  I was too flabbergasted to speak. Unhappily, Zack wasn’t.

  “Hey, Aaron, my man!” Zack greeted his friend with a nervous grin. To me, Zack was still the picture of restored innocence, but to Aaron he must have merely looked smug. “We didn’t see you coming!”

  “Obviously.” Aaron’s voice was calm enough, but he had to step close to be heard over the Falls, and in the harsh light of the pavilion I could see a vein jumping at his temple. I knew him well enough to know he was furious, and trying not to show it. “Carnegie, the party’s breaking up. I came out to tell you.”

  “Thanks.” The word caught in my throat. How could I possibly explain the scene he had just witnessed, without betraying Zack? I settled for a feeble smile. “We were just going to—”

  “Save it,” he snapped. “I can guess what you were just going to do. Good night.”

  “Will… will I see you in the morning?”

  “Oh, right, our breakfast date.” Aaron glared at Zack, then at me. “I think I’ll pass.”

  “
But—”

  But Aaron was already striding off into the fog. Instead of returning to the lodge, he headed out to the far end of the parking lot where he’d left his yellow Bug. I’d seen it there when I parked my tin can of a rental car.

  “Damn,” I groaned. “Damn, damn, dammit.”

  “Carnegie?” Zack looked blank at first, then the light dawned. “Oh, I get it. Aaron’s, like, mad about us being here together.”

  “Aaron is, like, royally pissed off,” I said. “And now he’s not going to help me figure this out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “The murder,” I told him. “Because if you didn’t kill Mercedes, then who did?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I SLEEP NAKED. EVEN AS A KID I FELT STRANGLED BY PAJAMAS, and as an adult I go without, keeping a big fuzzy robe on a chair by the bed in winter. So when Aaron knocked on my door early Saturday morning, I threw off my flannel sheets, threw on the robe, and rushed through the kitchen to let him in, grateful that he’d relented and eager to explain away, somehow, the awkwardness of the night before.

  Except it wasn’t Aaron. It was Zack, standing on my doorstep with a huge grocery bag and a carrier tray of takeout espresso cups. He was still in his cords and green sweater from the party, and clearly still riding high on the news I’d given him. Even in the half-dark of a November morning, Zack was radiant with happiness.

  “I brought you breakfast,” he announced, “since Aaron cancelled on you. I didn’t know what kind of coffee you drink, so I got, like, four different ones.”

  I should have sent him away. I knew that. But the aroma of coffee, life-giving coffee, rose up through the chilly air and addled my brain. I opened my mouth to tell him “Thanks anyway, but—” and heard myself saying, “Is one of those a double latte?”

  Zack radiated even brighter. “Yeah! Right here—oops!”

  As he proffered the tray, the grocery bag slipped from his grasp and spilled its contents at my bare feet. I rescued the coffee and backed into the kitchen, while he gathered up his treasures and piled them on the table: a half-gallon of orange juice, a cardboard supermarket box holding a dozen syrupy cinnamon rolls the size of my head, a baton of somewhat dented French bread, a big tub of cream cheese with chives, an even bigger jar of orange marmalade, and, retrieved from where it had rolled up against the stove, an entire pineapple.