A Cold Dark Place (2 page)

"Did you hear me?"

She slowly turned.

"Are you speaking to me?"

"No, I'm talking to the man in the moon"

She stared. Her heart bounced. Thump. Thump. Thump.

"Get over here"

She stepped back toward the matron.

"You forgot your purse"

Her hands were sweating now, so much so, she thought
the vinyl zippered purse would slip from her fingers. She
reached for it and acknowledged the gesture with a quick
smile.

"Oh, thanks"

Like others who had been around the matron, she faked a
smile.

The woman smiled, hers strangely genuine. "No problem.
And you have a nice day."

With that, the strawberry blonde hurried to the lockers.
Soon she'd be home, and in time destiny would come to pass.

Emily Kenyon was thrashed and she looked it. She pulled
herself from her gold Honda Accord, picked up her purse,
and walked toward the front door. She turned to view the end
of Orchard Avenue. The neighborhood of vintage homes was
safe. Unscathed. Not a single fish-scale shingle from the threestory painted lady across the street had been harmed. Not so
much as a splinter. Emily could even hear kids playing a
couple of doors down. Everything was as it had been. The
only hint that the world had turned over was the slight scent
of acrid smoke that wafted through the air. It was faint, but
enough of a reminder that across town homes and cars had
burned.

It had been two days since the tornado pounced on a section of Briar Falls Estates two miles away. It came almost
without warning and left a jagged swathe of destruction that
stole the hard work of homeowners and gardeners in ten
minutes' time. Roofs had been peeled off. Play sets and bi cycles hurled into trees. There was no making sense of whose
house had been spared and whose hadn't. Destruction reigned
on the west side of Hawes Avenue, while the east side remained pristine. Across the street from a home that had been
nearly ripped in two, a birdbath stood without a drop spilled
over its chipped stone rim.

No one died. It was true that an elderly lady who had holed
up in her bathroom was in bad shape and had been hospitalized. Emily expected that the woman, in her eighties, would
survive despite her trauma. The lady was a retired junior high
social studies teacher with a classroom assignment that indicated she was tougher than most. After all, if she could endure teenagers of the 1960s, she'd survive the tornado, too.

Emily stepped into the foyer. As she set down her purse
on an antique walnut console table, its contents shifted. Her
detective's badge holder slipped out along with a pink lipstick she wished she'd used up and could toss. But she was
thrifty and, despite the fact that it didn't really work with her
dark brown hair and eyes, she'd wear it until it was gone. She
scooted the badge and lipstick tube back inside the pouch
and called out for her daughter.

"Jenna? I'm home"

The scent of cinnamon toast and an empty glass of milk
on the counter indicated Jenna was somewhere in the house.
Emily didn't wait for a response.

"I'm going to take a shower. Then let's go out and get
something to eat"

"Okay, Mom," a voice finally came from down the hall.
"I'm on the phone. I'll talk to you when you're out. I'm hungry. Take a fast shower!"

Emily smiled. Jenna was seventeen, but still very much
her little girl. It was just the two of them now. David had left
for Seattle and become a somewhat shadowy figure since the
divorce was final. There had been a few dates with new men even a kind of serious affair with a local lawyer. Cary
McConnell was too possessive and controlling and Emily
had enough of that with her first and only-marriage. Cary
still called but she avoided him whenever she could. That
wasn't easy. Cherrystone, Washington, was a town of less
than 15,000 people. She was in the courthouse two or three
times a week. So was he.

Emily snake-hipped out of her black skirt, unbuttoned her
blouse, and let it fall to the floor. She was slender, blessed with
long legs and a figure that looked more twenty than forty,
which she was approaching on her next birthday. She twisted
the shower knob with the red H all the way to the left. The C
was moved a quarter turn. The old pipes clanked and steam
swirled. Emily liked hot water.

"Pietro's?" she called out before stepping inside the whiteand-black tiled interior. "I'm thinking pizza."

Of course she really wasn't. She was thinking of the tornado and its aftermath. Twisters were rare occurrences in
Washington state. Only a handful of damaging storms had
been recorded there; the worst had been one that killed eleven
people near Walla Walla in 1952. The twister that came to
Cherrystone on Saturday had howled in the darkness and
snatched up all in its wake. Houses and cars were shredded
in a giant steel-toothed blender. A dairy near the junction of
Wayne Road and U. S. 91 had been so pulverized that a magnifying glass was needed to determine what color the barn
paint had been before the storm. The Cherrystone Granary
was flattened, which meant already scarce jobs instantly had
become even more limited. Five trucks, carefully parked in a
row after the shift change, had been tossed to their absolute
ruin. Power lines snapped like frayed jute. A semi was lifted
more than a hundred yards and slammed into a hillside.

Emily tilted her head backward; hot water beyond a temperature most could endure flowed over her body, sending the stress of the freak storm, and the worries of a long day,
down the drain. Stepping from the shower, Emily wrapped a
thick cotton towel around her body. She bent over, wrapped
a second one around her head, then flipped her hair back.
She called once more to Jenna.

"You never answered, honey. Is Pietro's all right?"

Again, silence.

Steam swirled and Emily flipped on the bathroom fan. A
moment later, she slipped on a terry robe and padded down
the hall to Jenna's room-a space that had been her own
bedroom when she was a girl. A rectangle of yellowed glue
on the door revealed the spot were she'd once put up a "NO
BOYS ALLOWED" sign to keep her little brother, Kevin, at bay.
With each step, a memory. Through a knife-slit of light in
the doorway, she could see Jenna typing out a message on
her silvery Apple iBook computer. Jenna was a little small
for her age. Her stature didn't diminish her; it only made her
stand out. Long hair like her mother's framed her delicate
heart-shaped face. Her eyes were blue, the cool color of the
Pacific. She tapped on the keyboard with frosted pink fingernails, chipped and ready for another mother/daughter manicure session in front of one of the Law and Orders on TV

Emily pushed open the door, startling Jenna, who looked
up with a frozen smile.

"Oh, Mom, I didn't hear you" She closed the chat window and swung around to face her mother.

"Are you up to no good?" Emily asked, allowing a smile
to come to her lips. Deep down, the very idea of her daughter
chatting with anyone was more than she could take. She'd
seen the way perverts worked the keyboards of personal
computers and stalked their prey-unsuspecting children in
seemingly safe and cozy homes all across America.

"Just talking with Shali," she said. "And yes, we were up
to no good. There's a nice guy who wants to meet us at the Spokane Valley Mall next weekend. He says he looks like
Justin Timberlake and Jude Law. Combined."

Emily sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing out the sateen
spread.

"He does, does he?" She knew when her daughter was
pulling her leg and she started to play along. "Maybe I could
meet him, too?"

Jenna shook her head. "Sorry, Mom, but you're too old
for him. Shali and I are probably too old for him. He seemed
to lose interest when we said we were old enough to drive."

"That's not funny"

"Sick, I know."

"You know how I worry."

"And you know that you don't have to worry about me. I
know the drill. I don't make mistakes. My mom is a cop, you
know."

"So I've heard" Emily removed the towel from her head
and shook out her hair. "I'm not going to dry this mess. Let's
get out of here and eat. I'm beat"

Jenna grinned. "Okay. Jude Timberlake can wait."

With that, Emily returned to her bedroom, where she put
on a pair of faded jeans and a cream-colored boatneck sweater.
She looked in the mirror and gave herself a once-over.

"Not bad for almost forty," she said, loud enough for Jenna
to hear, which, of course, she did. "Maybe this Jude Law lookalike of Jenna's would be interested in an old chick like me"

Jenna appeared in the doorway and put her hands on her
hips.

"You're disgusting," she said, a smile widening on her
pretty face. "Shali and I had him first"

Twenty minutes later they were sitting in a maroon and
black vinyl booth at Pietro's, the only place in Cherrystone that made pizza that didn't taste like it came from the frozenfood section of the Food Giant. Emily was grateful that Jenna
had outgrown the "cheese-only" topping option for something a little more adventurous pepperoni and black olives.
Emily ordered a beer and Jenna nursed a soda.

"You know, you don't need to order diet cola, honey."

Jenna swirled the crushed ice with a pair of reed-thin
plastic straws. "You mean I'm not fat? Yeah, I know. But I'm
hedging my bets. I've seen the future. Look at Grandma
Anna"

"Jenna! That's not nice." Emily tried to act indignant, but
Grandma Anna was her ex-husband's mother and it was true
that she had thick thighs. "Besides, your body shape is more
from my side of the family."

Jenna drew on her straws and nodded. "Thank God"

The pair sat and ate their pizza, but their mood shifted
when the conversation turned to the storm. "We are lucky.
All of us. The tornado ravaged those homes on Hawes, but
no one was killed." Emily swallowed the last of her beer, regarding the foamy residue coating the rim of the schooner. "I
don't use the word lightly, you know, but it was a bit of a
miracle, really."

"I know. Shali and I were talking about that," Jenna said.
"Now you know that Jude Law Timberlake is not real. Nice
fantasy, though"

Emily managed a faint smile. "I'll say."

Emily Kenyon was a homicide detective, not an emergency responder, but Ferry County was so small that when
the storm hit she immediately reported to work to do what
she could. She had to do something. Anything. She'd grown
up in Cherrystone and it was her town. Always would be.
The house on Orchard Avenue had been her childhood home.
Her parents, who died in a tragic car accident, had left the
family home to Emily and her brother. Since only one could live there, Emily bought out Kevin with savings and took a
small mortgage. The house, with its bay windows and highpitched roofline, was the reason she returned to Cherrystone.
Not the only reason. Her divorce from David, a surgeon with
a quick wit and an even faster fuse, was the other. The divorce
made him mad. Emily made him mad. The world was against
him. Cherrystone was about as far away as she could go for
the safety net of feeling like she belonged somewhere. Leaving a detective's position in Seattle wasn't easy, but the move
was never in doubt. It had been the right thing.

Of course, in the middle of it all was Jenna. She loved
both her parents, but felt her mother needed her more than
her father. At sixteen, the courts allowed her to schedule her
own visitation with her father. She saw him once a month,
usually in nearby Spokane. And that, she was sure, was enough.

Emily asked for a pizza box to take home the remainder
of the pie.

"We can have it for breakfast," she said.

"Only if it lasts that long."

Emily's cell phone rang, its dorky ring tone of Elvis
Costello's "Watching the Detectives" chiming from her purse.
The number on the LED was dispatch-the sheriff was calling.

"Kenyon," she said.

Her mother's hands full, Jenna picked up the flat carton
and they walked toward the door. With her free hand, she
fished some Italian ice peppermints from a bowl by the hostess lectern and offered one to her mother.

Emily shook her head, her ear pressed tightly to her flip
phone as they walked to the car.

"I see," she said. Her tone was flat, like someone checking a list for which there was no need. "All right. Okay. Got
it. I can take a drive out there tomorrow, first thing."

Emily looked irritated as she put away her phone.

"Do you know Nicholas Martin?" she asked.

"Sure. Who doesn't? He's a senior and besides, he's kind
of a freak"

Emily turned the ignition and the Accord started. She put
it into drive.

"Freak? In what way?"

"You know, one of those country kids who didn't get the
memo that the Goth look was so last millennium."

"Black clothes? White face?"

"And eyeliner, Mom, even eyeliner. But what about him?"

Emily sighed, glad she didn't have a son to deal with.

"Did you see him at school today?"

"I don't know. Although, if I did see him, I'd probably remember. He's the memorable type. What's up, Mom?"

"Probably nothing. His aunt in Illinois has called the office a couple times. She's panicking because she hasn't been
able to reach anyone from the family since the storm. The big
cell tower past Canyon Ridge was knocked out in the twister.
Sheriff wants me to drive out to their place tomorrow morning and have a look around"

"I think Nicholas has a brother, Donovan. He's younger.
Third grade?"

"Oh, now I remember. Nice family. I'm sure they're fine."

"I could IM Nicholas when I get home. He hangs out in
that Goth chat room Shali and I go to all the time."