Healing Stones (7 page)

“You wouldn't have to. He's on sabbatical up at Point No Point. That has to be a God-thing.”

“I appreciate the offer, Ethan, but I can handle this.”

His silence clearly said he didn't agree.

“All right, give me his name,” I said. “If I feel like I need to, I'll call him.”

“Dr. Sullivan Crisp. He was a student of mine twenty years ago, when I taught at Vanderbilt. I thought he was going to be a theologian. He turned traitor and became a psychologist.”

I folded the handkerchief into a tight square in my lap and pushed it into my purse. “I'll wash this and get it back to you.” I pulled out a white envelope. “Here's my letter.”

I stood, and Ethan rose with me.

“Call me if you change your mind about Dr. Crisp.”

“I will.” It was a safe promise because I wouldn't reconsider. A new resolve was taking shape in the space I'd sobbed free.

I didn't go to the yacht club until the next day. Since my last night there, I'd discovered that the key must have dropped out of my jacket pocket. I was going to have to get someone to let me in, and there would be a better chance of that on a day when it wasn't freezing— outside my house or in it.

I still clung to the hope that my family would thaw, given a little time. But the passing of moments only drove Rich further into his cave and carved Christopher's disgust deeper into his face. Jayne couldn't seem to bring herself to look at me.

Rain or shine, I'd have to find Zach and put this behind me, before my entire life slipped away.

Both the sun and Ned Traynor were out when I hurried up to the yacht club gate the next morning. He was the one with the lovelorn Yorkshire terrier. His wife—a chatty lady who hung a wreath on the door of their slip for every occasion including Groundhog Day— wasn't with him, which was good. I didn't have time for a long conversation about the Yorkie's yearning to produce a litter.

“Hey, pretty lady!” Ned said. “I don't usually see you here this time of day.”

“Which is probably why I walked off without my key,” I said. “Would you mind?”

“So sorry to hear about Zach's boat.” He shook his head as he gallantly swung the gate open for me. “We'll miss him around here.”

I looked at him sharply, but he was busy shutting the gate with a flourish.

“Any idea where he's going
to live now?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

Ned turned to me, hand jingling in his pocket. “You tell him he'd better swing by and at least say good-bye. You need me to jimmy the lock on the slip?”

I told him I did have that key. I didn't add that I planned to throw it into the inlet as soon as I was done.

Hurrying down Dock C in daylight was strange. Sunset was the closest I'd come in a while to seeing light shimmer on the narrow strips of Sinclair Inlet that showed on either side of the narrow walkway, and even that had been a risk. The few times I'd come before dark were at Zach's insistence that he wanted to see me with the “critters” again.

The sea critters, he called them. He said he'd never noticed the secret life that existed under the dock until the day last June when he took the whole Costanas family for a day-long fishing trip. Before he and I were us.

I'd confided in him that Rich had lost interest in everything, including me. Even the twenty-seven-foot Regal I'd bought him with my mother's inheritance money sat on its trailer in our backyard, forgotten like the rest of him. Zach offered to try to wake him up with an outing. Rich and Christopher had indeed both been entranced with the cabin cruiser, built in 1941 and restored by Zach.

Jayne, on the other hand, barely got two slips down Dock C before she was on her belly, pulling up a pregnant kelp crab. I plopped beside her, suddenly ten years old again, peering between the planks at the anemones waving like feather dusters and the sea stars groping with their suckered feet for something to hold onto.

Then Zach was there too, as enchanted as I, and Jayne lectured him on the ecosystem he was seeing for the first time. I propped my chin on my hands and basked in a contentment I thought I'd lost completely.

I never went out on the Sound with Zach after that day. The trysts that began in September took place right there at the dock, at night, pocketed in the cabin of
The Testament.
A few times, though, Zach convinced me to come when there was still light, so he could watch me flop on my tummy and bring up sea critters for him. He touched his first silken jellyfish with my hand holding his, saw his first shrimp swim, right across our side-by-side palms. To see me that way, he said, was worth the risk of someone spotting us.

I hurried over that hidden world now and let myself into Zach's slip. I wasn't prepared for what I saw.

The handsome vessel I knew was gone. In its place was a black skeleton, a lifeless tangle of ribs. The dock itself was remarkably uncharred—though not so surprising, considering Rich had been here to fight the flames. Every fire was a beast to him, he always said, a cruel, insatiable persona that had to be reckoned with. He fought never to let one take what didn't belong to it. Even the piece of white cloth hanging from a hook on the wall was unstained by smoke.

How, actually, could that be? It had to have been put there after the fire . . .

Hope quickening in my chest, I hurried to it. When I picked up my own cream silk blouse, the one I'd worn that night and obviously dropped, a sickening panic rose in my throat.

I don't know how long I stood there, clutching silk and trying to breathe. It was long enough to confront what Ethan Kaye had tried to make me see.

Zach had left. Deliberately.

Unless someone else has hung this here
, my pathetic desperation said to me.

The fire inspector or the police would have taken it as evidence. This had been left for me—by a man who knew I'd come back for it—for him.

Then where was he? And why would he leave me to deal with all this on my own?

Estes and St. Clair had to be involved. Maybe because he was a man they'd cut him a break and given him the option to leave town rather than face Ethan.

Maybe they'd forced him to go—because he'd caught their photographer red-handed and knew they'd set us up.

That was patently ridiculous. No one knew we met on Zach's boat. No one knew we met at all.

Which led me back to the photographer—and the pictures in Wyatt Estes's file folder—and Zach leaving his burned home without a word. Not even to me.

I had the sudden urge to rip a life preserver off the wall and hurl it into Sinclair Inlet. I actually might have, if someone hadn't banged on the door to the slip.

“Mr. Archer?” a voice demanded. “Port Orchard Police. Open up, sir!”

CHAPTER SIX

I
considered several options on the way to the slip's outer door— among them, hurling myself into Sinclair Inlet. In the end I opened up and said, “Can I help you, officer?”

Actually, there were two of them. One didn't look much older than Christopher and had less swagger than my son. The other one was tall and straight-backed, half-balding, and faintly familiar. I probably knew him from high school.

He flashed a badge from the inside of his nylon jacket and said, “We're looking for Zachary Archer.”

“Me too!” I said. My voice sounded high and chipper and completely ridiculous.

“Mind if I ask why?”

“We teach together at the college,” I said. “And he hasn't shown up for class so I thought I'd come—look for him.”

I felt like I was committing perjury under oath—and he knew it. He squinted at me and nodded to the square-shaped kid, whose hand hadn't left his holster since I opened the door.

“Go check it out,” the older one said.

Boy Cop nodded and hurried toward the boat carcass like an eager trick-or-treater. The other cop fixed his eyes on me.

“I'm Detective Updike,” he said. “And you are?”

“Demitria Costanas—Demi,” I said, only because I couldn't think of an alias. “The door was locked,” he said. “How did you get in?”

My tongue thickened. “This door?” I said.

He glanced back at it and then at me, eyebrows raised.

I know, buddy, there isn't any other door.
I patted my coat pocket. “I have a key,” I said. “Zach—Dr.—Mr. Archer gave me one—in case I ever—”

I let my voice trail off. Detective Updike lifted his brows again. “In case you ever what?”

“Needed to let myself in,” I said.

You know,
I wanted to cry out,
because it was so dark at my house,
in my heart, that I had to get to his light before I lost myself.

“So—you think something's happened to him?” I said.

“Do you?”

His eyes, small and iron blue, bored a hole through my forehead.

“I don't know,” I said. “It isn't like him to leave without saying anything to—anyone.”

“You know him well then,” he said.

“Yeah, well, we work together.”

He waited.

“We're friends.”

He waited some more, but I pressed my lips together. Finally, he pulled a pad and pencil out of his pocket. “His employer has reported him missing,” he said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Thursday night, a little after nine.” I groaned inwardly. It sounded like I'd been rehearsing.

“And that was where?”

“Here.”

He looked at me over the top of the pad.

“I came to talk to him,” I said. “And
then I—left.”

“And you haven't seen or heard from him since?”

I shook my head.

“Did you expect to?”

I jerked. My purse slid down my arm, and the blouse dropped to the wet space between us. I took my time picking it up. There was no hurry; I could already feel Detective Updike eyeing it as Exhibit A.

“Did that come from here?” he said.

“It was on a hook over there. But it's mine. I left it Thursday night.”

I was sure that the only reason the dock did not open and let me drop through was that I was being punished for unforgivable sin. The detective visibly came to all the correct conclusions.

“I'll need your address and phone number, Mrs. Costanas,” he said. “We may want to ask you more questions.”

There was no mistaking the emphasis on the
Mrs
. I gave him the information and ran like a vandal when he opened the door for me.

By the next morning, I was still running. I went through the house like a crazy woman that afternoon, cleaning things that had never been dirty—the screws on the door handles, the inside of the dryer. I'd torn through my Zach-fraught dreams all night, trying to find him, locating him in dumpsters and fishing nets and my own downstairs closet. When the kids had, literally, stomped off to school, I raced to Central Market for organic asparagus—all with the chased feeling that someone, something, was after me.

I couldn't come up with a plan. Tell Rich about the police, and risk the dropping of the other proverbial shoe? Don't tell him, and continue to live in nauseating terror that they were going to show up on the doorstep with an arrest warrant? Try to find Zach myself?

I always stopped there in the frenetic circle of thoughts. When I landed on Zach, on his suffering face that last night aboard
The
Testament,
the pleading in his voice even as he said, “I love you because you're the kind of woman who will go back to her husband”—when I landed there, the fact that he had left me to face this madness alone distorted it into something I didn't recognize as Zach.

I didn't know where to go from there. It stabbed at me—that there was only one person who could ever help me sort, who could distill any craziness into its inevitable saneness. That was Rich.

It had been that way from the beginning, in New York, when I was an idealistic theology student at NYU and he was a firefighter with his boots planted firmly on the asphalt.

“What's with this?” he'd say to me when I hung up after an angst-ridden phone call with my mother. “Your mother is your mother. All you owe her is your love and your respect. You don't owe her your way of life.”

Why, I asked him, hadn't I come to that conclusion myself?

“Because you need me, Babe,” he'd said.

Over and over again. Because it was true.

The road blurred like foggy glass in front of me as I drove home, a forlorn collection of vegetables in a bag beside me. The only thing that made sense was to go to Rich and lay it out: the scene with the police, the horror at myself that I'd let this happen. No matter what it cost, I needed Rich.

I always had.

I blinked back the fog and sat up in the seat. All right. I always did better with a Plan of Action, a POA, as Rich called it. Go back to the house, fix his lunch, make him listen as I told him about this latest knot. At the least he wouldn't want the trauma of my arrest for the kids. He'd know what to do.

But I felt the color drain from my face as I approached the house and let the engine slow to a whine.

A police cruiser was parked in front of our house.

There was a POA for this, the default every firefighter's wife fell into when a police official came within a hundred yards of her home. I peeled myself from the seat and somehow made my way through the garage. Rich had been burned. Christopher had wrapped his pickup around a tree. Jayne had tumbled from the stage. Once tragedy has entered a life, there is no end to the things that suddenly become possible.

I was nearly choking when I got to the great room and found Rich there. With Detective Updike and his sidekick.

The officer looked so incredibly smug, I wanted to hiss. I managed to dig up my professor voice and the determination not to humiliate my husband any further.

“Detective Updike,” I said. I nodded at Boy Cop, who still had that ridiculous hand near his service revolver as if I were going to bolt for the kitchen knives.