Tucson, Arizona – Eighteen-year-old Matt Garrison is harboring two terrible secrets: his involvement in the drowning death of his 12-year-old cousin, and a night of drunken sex with his best friend’s mother, Crystal, whom he finds dead in a bathtub of blood. Guilt forces Matt to act on impulse and hide his involvement with Crystal.
Detective Winston Radhauser knows Matt is hiding something. But as the investigation progresses, Radhauser’s attention is focused on Matt’s father. Matt’s world closes in when his father is arrested for Crystal’s murder, and Travis breaks off their friendship.
Despite his father’s guilty plea, Matt knows his dad is innocent and only trying to protect his son. Devastated and bent on self-destruction, Matt heads for the lake where his cousin died—the only place he believes can truly free him. Are some secrets better left buried?
REDEMPTION LAKE
A Winston Radhauser Mystery, #1
Susan Clayton-Goldner
Published by Tirgearr Publishing
Author Copyright 2017 Susan Clayton-Goldner
Cover Art: EJR Digital Art (http://www.ejrdigitalart.com)
Editor: Lucy Felthouse
Proofreader: Christine McPherson
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This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, incidents are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
DEDICATION
This one is for you, David
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It takes a village to write a novel. I’d like to thank my husband, Andreas, for his support and understanding of all the hours I spent in front of my computer; my children, Bonnie and David, for always believing in my dream; my family and friends; and especially Marjorie Reynolds, Martha Miller, Jane Sutherland, Susan Domingos, and the members of my Portland Critique Group for their endless readings and encouragement. In addition, I’d like to thank Jim Frey for showing me how to write a damn good novel and, as always, Tirgearr Publishing for taking a chance on me.
Redemption Lake
By Susan Clayton-Goldner
“Man is not what he thinks he is—
he is what he hides.”
- Andre Malraux
Chapter One
Tucson, Arizona – April 1989
More than anything, eighteen-year-old Matthew Garrison needed to believe in second chances. Trying to regain his composure, he paced the deck behind his best friend’s house in Catalina, a small town in the Sonoran Desert about twelve miles north of Tucson. He needed someone to listen and tell him everything would be okay. The mauve cummerbund around his waist seemed to tighten.
The sun was setting and a sprinkling of rust, violet, and golden clouds gathered above the jagged peaks of the Catalina Mountains. A pale bruise-colored sky seeped through the Saguaros’s giant arms. He wiped his palms on his pant legs. His starched tuxedo shirt made the back of his neck itch and he turned his head from one side to the other.
Through the sliding glass door, he saw Travis’s mother standing in the middle of the kitchen, pivoting on her feet as if she were slow dancing. Crystal was a slender, curvy woman with big eyes, a small nose and full lips. She had a mass of curling blonde hair like her son. She wore her waitress uniform—a short denim skirt, red leather cowboy boots, a low-cut white blouse with a red bandanna tied round her neck. A bottle of beer swung like a pendulum between her thumb and forefinger.
He rapped on the glass, averting his gaze from the deep crevice between her full breasts.
She cocked her head as she opened the sliding glass door. Two black mascara streaks ran down her face.
“If it weren’t for your outfit, I’d think you’d been to a funeral,” he said. “Why are you so sad?”
She lowered her gaze for a moment. “Wait a minute. It’s Saturday. Didn’t your mother get married tonight at the fancy-pants Hacienda del Sol?” Picking up the edges of her skirt, she bent her knees in an exaggerated curtsy. A funny, subservient gesture that didn’t match the sorrow on her face.
“Mom tied the knot. In spite of her dipshit son.” He wondered if Crystal was sad because she hadn’t been invited to the wedding—sad because she and Matt’s mother were no longer friends.
He waited until her gaze met his. “Is Travis around?”
For a moment, she didn’t respond. “Travis and Jennifer are dancing the night away. She turns into a pumpkin at midnight. Way I figure, Travis should be rolling in around 12:20.”
Matt cuffed his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “The dance. I can’t believe I forgot. Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Reynolds.”
He turned to leave.
“I know your mother raised you to respect your elders, but I hate that Mrs. Reynolds crap.”
Her words stopped him.
She threw her head back and laughed. “Call me Crystal. And by the way, you look downright gorgeous. Like Tom Cruise, except taller.” Her gaze wandered over his tuxedo, then she lifted her hand, touched the front of his shirt and looked full into his face. “Gorgeous and tense as an Olympic sprinter before the gun goes off. I’m here for you, if you want to talk about it.”
“I need to get going.”
“Looks to me like you need a counselor.” She handed him her beer and smiled. “Call me Dr. Phil.”
It felt sort of weird to be drinking out of the same bottle as Crystal, but that didn’t keep him from swilling what beer remained in one long swallow. When he stepped inside the kitchen, the air smelled like cigarette smoke.
She gently moved him aside so she could close the sliding glass door. “What’s wrong, Mattie?”
Her use of the little boy name his mother used to call him made his eyes water. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He was both ashamed and really pissed off about the way he cried so easily. “I’m such a jerk.” His voice sounded ragged. “I can’t believe what I did.” He paused, chased away the look of shock on his mother’s face at the wedding. “I ruined the whole thing.”
“You’ve come to the right place. I’m quite experienced at ruining things.” She smiled at him then, a beautiful smile made with both her eyes and her mouth. It was a smile that came from her heart because she cared about him, and he knew it. A smile reminding him Crystal had always been an adult he could talk to.
Matt looked down at her cowboy boots and remembered the last time he’d seen Crystal and Travis together. They’d been fighting about her drinking and missing work. Travis had run out the back door and into the desert, Matt at his heels. “Sometimes I hate my life,” Travis said. “Sometimes I wish my mother was friggin’ dead.”
It had surprised Matt, because Crystal and Travis’s relationship had always amazed him. They were more like best friends than mother and son. They hung out together—at least, they used to before Travis met Jennifer.
Crystal had always accepted Travis. She never tried to change his internal landscape and make him into something he wasn’t. Not that Travis needed remaking. He’d arrived on the planet with a little bit of everything—one of those rare kids; an honor student and a jock. Travis even tried out for Tony in West Side Story. With a little help from a black wig Crystal had slicked back and styled into a duck’s ass, he got the part. Who knew the dude could sing?
“If Travis upse
t you, he didn’t mean it.”
“It’s not Travis,” she said, a slight tremble in her lower lip.
Matt didn’t know what he’d do if she started to cry. “I should get going.”
Crystal grabbed his arm and pulled him deeper into the kitchen.
“I don’t want you to be late for work,” he said.
She waitressed at The Silver Spur, a local steak house, and her slender arms were muscular from lifting trays of beer mugs. “I was supposed to work tonight, but I-I don’t know, I just had to get out of there. Gracie is covering for me.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, exposing the gold cross earrings she always wore. “So how about a full bottle this time?”
He shook his head. “We’d better not.”
With a nod, she gestured toward the kitchen table. “What’s this we shit? I intend to have another beer and it looks like you could use one. Maybe a whole case.” She headed to the refrigerator, a barely perceptible weave in her gait, grabbed two bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and glanced over at him. “You’re almost as tall as your father. And you sound like him, too.”
Matt slipped off his tuxedo jacket, draped it over the back of the chair and took a seat at the kitchen table. He unclipped his bow tie and cummerbund and stuffed them into the jacket pockets.
Crystal launched one of the beer bottles toward him, then flipped on the overhead fan. She settled, sideways, in the opposite chair. When she talked, her eyes sent out little sparks that made him feel like there was no one else in the world she’d rather be with.
“Now, what’s this about you ruining the wedding?” She eased off the cap of her beer with a bottle opener that played the Arizona fight song. When Travis won a full-ride baseball scholarship, including a stipend to cover books and incidentals, the U of A recruiter had given Crystal and Travis shirts, hats, and jackets. She never wore any of them, but she sure loved that bottle opener.
Matt stared at the toes of his rented black shoes and thought about September—Travis going to the University of Arizona while Matt headed to either Iowa or Penn. How the two of them would be in different schools for the first time in their lives. How everything kept changing way too fast.
The refrigerator hummed steadily.
“It’s okay, Matt. You can tell me.”
“When Nate and Mom said their vows—tossing around the word ‘forever’ like it actually meant something—I kept thinking about my dad and the vows he and my mother made. And then I thought about Danni and how she broke us up for no good reason.”
He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but every dark aspect of his life had risen up at the wedding, demanding to be heard. There was no forever. Not for his parents. Not for him and Danni. Not for anyone.
Crystal sighed. “What did you do?”
“I kept hearing that word ‘forever’, and realizing it was meaningless crap. I didn’t know I’d said ‘bullshit’ out loud until I saw the looks on their faces. My mom, who practically begged me to be part of the wedding, slapped me across the face and told me to leave.” His mother had never once hit him before. Stunned, Matt had touched his cheek, felt the burn of her handprint rising. He looked around for an easy way out. Short of climbing over a six-foot stucco wall, there was none. He burst into tears, ran down the center aisle and outside, through the courtyard toward his car. The heat of a hundred disbelieving stares had followed him.
There was sadness in Crystal’s eyes as she reached across the table to cover his hand with her own. Her fingernails were long, newly-manicured bright red, and her hand felt warm on top of his. “I’m sorry. I know what it feels like to put your foot in your mouth.”
Matt said nothing. He wished he had put his foot in his mouth, or at least covered it with his hand to keep that horrible word inside.
“Tell me what happened with Danielle. I thought I’d be dancing at your wedding one of these days.”
He shrugged, hesitated for a moment, then figured, what the hell. Crystal was the least judgmental person he’d ever known. “Her mother found this poem I’d written about how much I liked to touch her bare skin. She freaked out and told Danni to stop seeing me. Said she wouldn’t have some sex-craved wannabe poet ruining her daughter’s life.”
Crystal removed her hand from his, raised her eyebrows and nodded, a slight smile on her face. “Personally, I have a soft spot for sex-craved poets.” She lifted her beer bottle in a pretend toast.
He studied her wrist, small-boned and frail-looking. “After I screwed up the wedding, I stopped by Danni’s house to talk, and found she’d hooked up with some football player from Tucson High.” He couldn’t believe how easily the words tumbled out of him. Usually when something bothered him, he’d write a poem that helped him understand what he felt. Poems he’d only shared with Danni and Travis.
“We’ve been together four years,” he said. “I didn’t think her mother…I thought we’d always—”
Crystal patted his hand. “I know exactly where you’re coming from. Loving someone who breaks your heart hurts in ways you didn’t know you could hurt.”
“Who broke your heart?”
“My boyfriend of almost three years dumped me tonight.” She stood, walked over to the refrigerator and grabbed two more beers. When she sat again, she pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table and put it in her mouth, but couldn’t steady her hands enough to light it.
Matt struck a match and held it to the cigarette.
She drew in until it lit, then took a long draw and exhaled, the smoke rising above her in a thin white stream. She fluffed her hair with her fingertips, leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Let’s go in the living room. These oak chairs are hard on the butt, even when you’ve got as much padding as I do.” She patted the side of her slender hip.
In a different frame of mind, he would have given her the compliment she fished for and told her she looked great. But he remained silent. The beer slid, golden and cold, down his throat. He stood, pushed his chair under the table and followed her.
The night had grown cool, as the desert always did in late April, and she stoked the logs in the living room fireplace, flipped on the CD player, and they sat, side-by-side, on the sofa. She played love songs from the sixties, all of them slow.
For a while he closed his eyes and slumped back against the faded, red corduroy cushions—listening to the soft music and trying to lose himself.
When he finally opened his eyes, Crystal fixed him with a thoughtful and considering stare. “Come on. You can’t fool me. Something else is eating at you.”
Ever since he was a little boy, he’d loved being around Crystal. She was as good at reading him as his mother had been. But unlike his mother, Karina, Crystal had no rules about eating only at the table, not jumping up and down on the beds, or having a pillow fight in the living room. Crystal hadn’t cared if they wore their baseball caps through dinner or hadn’t scrubbed every bit of dirt from under their fingernails. Remembering those childhood days, he felt a sudden loosening in his chest as if she had reached out and pulled a cord from somewhere deep inside him. “Last week, my father admitted he’d been lying to me. He did have an affair. The real reason my mother moved out.” Matt ranted on about the way he’d defended his dad and chosen to live with him. About how much he’d hurt both his mom and younger sister.
Crystal listened but said nothing.
When they ran out of PBR, they started drinking bottles of Corona. And by the time he’d finished telling Crystal everything he needed to tell, he’d lost count of the number of beers he’d drunk and was crying again.
“If you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can start to love them for who they really are.” She pulled him into her arms and rubbed his back. The wildflower smell of her perfume, as familiar as his own childhood, comforted him. “If you ask me, Matthew Garrison, you’ve got the world by its balls. You got accepted to all those good schools. Danielle’s a fool not to see it.”
Crystal let him go, slipped into the kitchen, a
nd returned with more beer. She lit the candles on the coffee table.
Before he knew what happened, they were dancing to Bobby Vinton singing Blue Velvet, Crystal’s warm cheek nestled in his neck. He felt the blades of her narrow shoulders, the thin cotton fabric over her breasts, the dot of each nipple as it pressed against his chest.
“You’re a hell of a good dancer.” She threw her head back and laughed. “Much better than the last time.”
He thought about the way she’d taught him and Travis to slow dance, just in time for their sixth grade party. “I owe it all to you.” Matt laughed, too, a high-pitched, fake sound, then bent from the waist in an exaggerated bow. Though it wasn’t even 9pm, he was dizzy from the beer, had never drunk so much before, and his head swirled, temples drumming to the slow and steady beat of the music. The candles seemed to float inside his eyelids like small full moons.
She undid the top two buttons of his shirt, then removed his cufflinks and studied them for a moment, flat silver squares with a raised initial ‘M’ in the center. “Travis got the plain ones. Your mother always did have a lot of class,” she said, as she tucked them into his pocket and rolled up his sleeves. She ran her fingertips over his forearm to the small blue veins in the crook of his elbow. Then she unbuttoned the rest of his shirt, slipped it from his shoulders and dropped it onto the chair. It drifted down, draping itself over the arm of the scuffed, leather recliner like the wings of a huge white bird.
As if she pulled him by a string, he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her hard on the lips. He tasted the cigarettes and beer on her tongue, mixed with something minty like toothpaste. He dropped his hands to her waist, her body narrowing between his palms, like a slender and graceful vase. Blood pounded in his ears. This was his best friend’s mother.
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