Redemption Lake

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  “I been thinking about a sermon Bryan gave.” Travis rolled the burr between his thumb and forefinger. “He said wisdom grows out of disillusionment. We evolve from what hurts us, what happens in our own hearts as a result of that pain.” He paused, then shook his head. “I sure as heck hope that’s the truth and Travis Reynolds becomes one wise dude.” He kicked a rock toward Matt as if it were a soccer ball.

  Matt passed it back to him, waiting for an opportunity to tell Travis at least some of the truth.

  “I wonder if she even knew she was pregnant,” Travis said. “I keep thinking it might be a motive. But if she knew, why would she keep drinking? And if she didn’t know, then no one else did, either.”

  Matt wanted to tell him she’d found out about the pregnancy on Friday morning, the day before she’d died, but stopped himself.

  “Radhauser said there might be an article in tonight’s newspaper and he didn’t want me caught off-guard,” Travis said, then told him Radhauser thought the razor blade was there because Crystal or the landlord had used it to clean paint off the tile.

  Matt shuddered. Maybe his father killed Crystal and left the razor blade trying to make it look like suicide. He was a smart man, and he’d gone to great lengths to hide his affair with Crystal.

  They wandered along a deep gully cut by spring rains as it wound through the Saguaros. In a way, Matt was relieved for the silence.

  The desert was a land of thin air and illusion, where sand and perspectives shifted. Distance misled, and you could be deceived by both the closeness and the space between things. Just like with people, appearance and reality were frequently quite different.

  “You sure everything’s cool between us?” Travis finally asked. “You’re closed up tighter than a bank vault. Did I do or say something to make you mad?”

  Matt wiped his sweating hands on his pant legs. “You didn’t do anything. It was me. I did something horrible and…” He trailed off.

  Travis gave Matt a gauging look. “Do you know something about my mom’s murder?”

  Matt’s throat felt dry. He’d always told Travis the truth. Always. Until now.

  Travis kicked the dirt with the toe of his hiking boot. “I know it’s only been a week, but things have been weird between us since Crystal died.” His voice was gentle, but held something else, something that made the hairs prickle along the back of Matt’s neck.

  “I’ve been pissed off about other things,” Matt said.

  Travis shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t get you. Your parents split, but at least they didn’t disappear. And Nate’s a good guy. I’d rather have three parents than none.”

  He was right. So many things about Matt’s life had been easy. He wanted to start over. To rip everything that had gone wrong into shreds—pieces of scrap paper they could toss away. “I have to tell you some things,” Matt said. “Before you read them in the newspaper.”

  On a boulder overlooking the Tucson Valley, Travis sat and hugged his knees. “Go ahead.”

  Matt sat on the ground facing Travis, squared his shoulders and took two deep breaths. “My dad had an affair with your mother. It had been going on for about three years.”

  “No way.”

  “I know,” Matt said. “It shocked the shit out of me, too. But my father admitted it. He says they kept it secret so we wouldn’t have to choose between them and our friendship.”

  Travis stared at Matt, as if trying to see behind his eyes. Then he shook his head. “I came home from school early one day and your father was hanging a ceiling fan in our kitchen. There was something weird about the way they acted around each other. When I asked Crystal about it, she said the landlord hadn’t gotten around to hanging the fan, so your dad volunteered to help.”

  “When Dad drove her home from work on Saturday, she told him about the pregnancy and claimed he was the father.”

  “Holy shit,” Travis said. “That’s too weird, man. Too weird.” He kept shaking his head as if saying no, over and over. “Do you realize that would mean…the ashes…it was your sister, too.”

  Matt told Travis about the vasectomy, the way the neighbor had heard his dad and Crystal fighting about it in the driveway. “Your neighbor said he left around 7:00.”

  “What are you trying to say, man?”

  “The police got a search warrant for the Lincoln. They didn’t find anything. But that’s because I found it first—a pair of scissors under the front seat with blood on them.” He told Travis how they were wrapped in a green washcloth, like the one he gave Detective Radhauser, about the flat tire, and how he’d hid them in the desert before they got there with the search warrant. “Someone planted them in my father’s car.”

  Travis’s eyes were wider than Matt had ever seen them before. After a few moments, he slid off the boulder, stood and paced. “You’re messin’ around with a murder case to protect your father. That woman he screwed around with was my mom. She probably meant nothing to him. But he broke her heart.” Travis’s voice cracked.

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said.

  “How could you—” Travis stopped, seemingly unable for a moment to continue. When he did, the first few words came out choked. “I should take those bloody scissors and cut off your old man’s dick before I move up to his carotid. I should—”

  “Please listen to me,” Matt interrupted. “You know how my dad loves that Lincoln. We’ve helped him wash it lots of times. You could eat off the fenders and wheel rims. I’ve never seen so much as a gum wrapper in the ashtray or a cracker crumb on the carpet. He’d never hide bloody scissors under the front seat and leave them for the police to find. I agree with you, he’s a jerk, but don’t you see, he didn’t kill Crystal.”

  “If you want the truth,” Travis said. “What I see is an arrogant man who thinks he can take what he wants, no matter how much it hurts someone else.”

  Matt’s jaw and neck muscles tightened. “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you any of this. And there’s still more.”

  “I don’t want to hear anymore. I’m done with all of you, man. I moved out of Nate and Karina’s house this morning.”

  The desert started to move underneath Matt. “Why?” he asked, his head spinning. “I thought you planned to stay until baseball camp starts.”

  “I could give you a lot of bull crap reasons, but the truth is I need to spend my time with other believers. Karina doesn’t approve of my church. She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell. I moved into an apartment with two church brothers. The church has to be the top priority in my life. And that means I have to end our friendship.”

  Matt sucked in a loud breath.

  “You know what’s weird, man? I didn’t think I could go through with it.” Travis shook his head. “But after what you just…” He stopped, started again. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Matt tried to swallow his hurt. The desert moved faster now, like a full-blown Spinning Tea Cup ride. “What about the plans you had for yourself? What about baseball and your scholarship?”

  Travis looped his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans. “I can serve God on the baseball field. And Bryan wants me to start a chapter of Narrow Way on the University of Arizona campus.”

  When Matt finally stood, a drenching wooziness washed over him. Something had begun that he felt powerless to stop. “So now I’m a loser you’re going to toss aside because I won’t join your church.”

  “You’ll never be a loser, Matt, at least not in the worldly way. But you were wearing my T-shirt, man.”

  “No…No…I wasn’t. We have lots of black T-shirts that look alike.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Matt. You were there. You were at my house the night my mother died.”

  Matt didn’t know what to say.

  “I thought we were best friends. I thought we always told each other the truth.”

  Matt hung his head. Travis was the best friend he’d ever had and he wanted to tell him everything, but if he did he’d betray the promise he�
��d made to Crystal. He’d already let her down—let her die alone in that bathtub.

  “It’s not what you think,” Matt finally said. “I came to your house to talk to you after I fucked-up my mother’s wedding.”

  “You knew I was at the dance with Jennifer.”

  “I did,” Matt said. “But I was so upset I forgot.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Travis gave him a disgusted look. “Be honest. Be a man.”

  “I screwed up, Travis.”

  “Yeah. You sure as hell did.”

  From his pants pocket, Travis pulled a pair of silver cufflinks with a raised black ‘M’ in the center and handed them to Matt.

  “Where did you find them?” The words came out as if vines had strangled them.

  Travis winced, and a tide of something sad and hopeless washed over his face. He stared at Matt for a long time. “I told Radhauser they belonged to my father. That my mother gave them to me to wear to the dance. I didn’t know how to explain them being on the floor under the chair in her bedroom.” He paused, started again. “I told Radhauser I was upset my mom had never showed them to me before, and threw the cufflinks against the wall. He believed me.”

  Travis’s lie was a gift Matt shouldn’t have accepted—undeserved and much too generous. “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know. What were you doing in my mother’s bedroom?”

  “I was changing my shirt,” Matt said.

  “Why not change in my room?”

  “I’d been sleeping off my drunk in her room. She took my keys and wouldn’t let me drive.”

  Travis stared at him for a moment, as if trying to ferret out the whole truth. “That was motherly of her.”

  “I don’t know what happened to her, I swear to you. When I woke up and discovered her in the tub, I tried to help her, to check her pulse and see if she was still alive. My hands got so bloody, I freaked out and wiped them on my shirt. And then I got scared if anyone saw the blood, they’d think I hurt her.”

  Travis continued to search Matt’s face, unasked and unanswered questions suspended in the air between them like particles of dust in sunlight. “You have to believe me,” Matt said. “I loved Crystal.”

  Travis gave him a hard look. “Just drive me back to my car. I’m done talking to you.”

  “You need to let me explain.” Matt scrambled to his feet, then stood still for a moment, trying to regain his equilibrium. “It’s not what you think.” No. The truth was much worse than anything Travis could imagine.

  “I don’t trust you anymore. And if you care even a little bit about me, you’ll stop talking right now.” Travis’s voice was sharp, slicing the air like a razor.

  Matt took a few deep breaths, then headed for his Mustang, Travis a few steps behind him. Just before they got to the car, Matt stopped walking and turned to face Travis. “Please,” he said again. “You have to listen—”

  “Shut up,” Travis said. “Just shut the hell up, man.”

  Matt drove down the winding mountain road to the University Medical Center in silence. He brought his Mustang to a stop in the parking lot behind Crystal’s Escort. “I can’t believe you won’t give me a chance to explain.”

  Travis got out of the car, hesitated for a moment, then closed the Mustang’s door without saying a word.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Despite his reservations, Radhauser called Tim O’Donnell and arranged for them to meet at the Tucson Police Department in an hour.

  “Jesus Christ. It’s my day off. Can’t it wait?”

  “No,” Radhauser said.

  O’Donnell grumbled something Radhauser couldn’t understand, but when he arrived at the TPD, Tim sat with a female officer at the front desk, eating a homemade blueberry muffin.

  “We need to take a patrol car,” Radhauser said.

  O’Donnell grabbed his keys and started out the door. “What’s so urgent?” he asked as he slid into the driver’s seat, raking aside whatever notebooks and papers lay on the passenger seat like a foraging black bear. “You gonna tell me what this is all about?”

  “I need someone with me when I arrest Garrison for the murder of Crystal Reynolds.”

  O’Donnell grinned. “My favorite part. Do I get to read his rights and clamp the handcuffs on the kid?”

  “It’s not Matt. It’s his old man,” Radhauser said. “Long story. I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  Radhauser told O’Donnell about the ME’s findings, Garrison’s affair with the victim, Crystal’s pregnancy by someone else, and the argument she’d had with Garrison in her driveway. He told him about the bloody scissors, a match for the victim’s blood type, wrapped in a washcloth that belonged with the missing towels.

  “Sounds like plenty of probable cause,” Tim said. “But we both know the kid lied through his teeth. Those beer bottles had his fingerprints all over them. You think he was covering for his old man?”

  “I don’t know. Kids lie when they’re scared. But Matt didn’t kill her.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Tim snapped. “Maybe the kid hid the scissors. You said he was pretty pissed when he found out about his father’s affair with the victim.”

  “I’m sure in the same way I knew Crystal Reynolds was murdered.”

  “Okay, so you were right. But that kid ain’t no Huck Sawyer.”

  Radhauser laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You do much reading? It’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”

  “Don’t get all intellectual about it. You knew what I meant.”

  When they turned off Oracle Road onto Ina and then Paseo del Norte, O’Donnell flipped on the siren and lights.

  Radhauser turned them off.

  “You’re no fun at all.”

  “You’re a good cop, but you can be a real jerk. Do you know that?”

  O’Donnell grinned. “I’m just messing with you.”

  The closer they got to the Garrison house, the smaller Radhauser’s chest became, squeezing his lungs like the time he’d had pneumonia as a boy and been placed on oxygen. He took a deep breath and tried to relax, but something still didn’t feel right. During his review of the evidence against Loren Garrison, the walls of his office had seemed to close in on him. If he’d really solved the case, then why did it seem harder and harder to breathe? Could O’Donnell be right? Should he check the Mustang for blood and take a closer look at Matt? Could the murder weapon be leading him away from the real killer?

  Radhauser leaned forward in the passenger seat, sank his face into his hands, and reviewed everything again. Garrison had motive galore—a hell of a lot to lose if his reputation got called into question. It wasn’t rare for a man to be enraged enough to kill his lover if he discovered her pregnant by someone else. But Garrison had been with Crystal earlier in the evening. Why wait four hours to do it? Radhauser felt the slow, rolling pressure of doubt building inside him. It wouldn’t let him go.

  The scissors in the Saguaro would have been a clever, but relatively easy plant if someone were trying to frame Garrison. But why not put the scissors somewhere more incriminating, like the Lincoln?

  Planting anything in Garrison’s car wouldn’t have been easy. He was meticulous about that vehicle, kept it locked when parked on campus. At home, he parked it in a secure garage. But Matt would have had access. If, like O’Donnell suggested, Matt tried to incriminate his father, why didn’t he plant the scissors in the Lincoln? The kid might be pissed off with his old man right now, but he’d chosen to live with him after the divorce. No matter how hard Radhauser tried, he couldn’t believe Matt capable of framing his own father.

  Loren Garrison had plenty of opportunity—no alibi between 7:00 and 9:30, when Nate dropped off Sedona. The ME’s estimated time of death could be off. Or Garrison could have driven back to Catalina after Sedona got home. The kid probably went straight to her room. Garrison said she doesn’t talk to him.

  Still, Radhauser wished he could be more certain, wish
ed he had that gut feeling of being right. He didn’t want to overlook some minor detail, like a loose thread in a sweater that could lead to a mass unraveling. Loren Garrison was a little too self-important, the kind of man cops liked to see brought down. But if he were innocent, Garrison would endure not only the grief of losing a woman he’d loved to a vicious murder, but the humiliation of being accused of it. Not even a pompous asshole deserved that.

  When O’Donnell pulled into the circular driveway, Radhauser was happy to see the Mustang wasn’t parked in front of the house. He knew Matt was taking Travis to Gates Pass to spread Crystal’s ashes and was relieved they hadn’t yet returned. Radhauser hated to arrest a man in front of his son.

  * * *

  Loren had showered and changed, and sat draped over his kitchen counter, drinking black coffee. Though he tried to put it out of his mind, Matt’s question kept haunting him. No matter how hard he tried to push it down, it kept rising. Who are you?

  It seemed ironic to him, after watching two police officers pull a pair of bloody scissors—presumably the weapon that had killed Crystal Reynolds—from a Saguaro cactus, that his thoughts were existential. People were born. They died. And in between those two events were pathetic and mostly-meaningless actions. Like the ones he’d taken that led to the demise of his family.

  The internal wheels had been set in motion by his son’s question, churning up things Loren hadn’t thought about in years. As he stared at the ceiling, he kept asking himself the same question—a question that seemed to mock him. What happened to the ethical man he’d intended to become?

  He leaned back against the barstool and tried to get the question out of his head. But it merely rephrased itself. Another variation. Who the hell are you? Maybe every man did this, pondered his identity alone at crisis-inducing moments. Times when your son stopped talking to you. Moments when someone you thought you knew was murdered and you feared your own son might be to blame.