Ruin Falls (12 page)

“I’m lucky to have a house to go to. That hasn’t always been the case. I used to be homeless, you see. As they say, we’re only one paycheck away from—”

Perhaps he noted her tears for he seemed to forcibly wind himself down, wrapping his arms around his body and giving a shake of his head. “That doesn’t matter right now. But I hope you get back to your house soon, too.”

Liz looked up sharply, and Larry flinched. “Sometimes I say the wrong thing. My doctor says I talk too much because I’m afraid of
saying the wrong thing. If I stuff all the words in there, he says, then at least some of them will be right—”

Liz rose abruptly from her seat, and the bellhop took a step back.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice rising. “My doctor says if I say I’m sorry, then nobody should take offense—”

Liz forced her voice down. “No, no, it’s fine. I appreciate everything you’ve done.”

He paused, his back to the counter. A few people looked up from their drinks and their Wi-Fi. Liz thought about how Larry Arnold merged topics, the silkworm threads of words he wove.

He was going home, he hoped she got back to her own house.

“Mr. Arnold?” she said suddenly. “Did you hear anything the children or those men said as they were walking out to the car?”

He was trying to meet her gaze.

“About where they were going maybe?”

He began shaking his head, slowly back and forth, and Liz let her head fall. “No,” she said. “Okay. Thank you.”

“They weren’t talking.” The direct reply came with obvious effort. “I’ve never heard any group of people be so quiet in my life.”

Liz didn’t respond.

“It was too quiet,” the bellhop added. “I had to say something. I told them to have a nice trip. I love going on trips myself. I once went to—” He let out a ragged breath, cutting himself off. “And then the little girl did say something.”

Liz kept herself from moving too fast, approaching him with urgency.

“She said she was going to be glad to see trees again.”

In the bellhop’s words, Liz found her daughter, and what she said indicated that Paul and the children were headed back to Wedeskyull. Where Paul lived, worked, made his life.

Trees were Ally’s deepest association to home, the thing she loved best. For fruit-picking, climbing, and growing shade-loving plants. Ally had missed the trees as soon as they’d left.

It at least gave Liz a place to start.

Each passing mile was a relief, and Liz realized how much she also needed the Adirondacks, in all their towering glory and hidden pockets of land. The children, too; Ally wanted her trees. Please let Paul have understood that, and worked it into his thinking.

It occurred to Liz to call the police as she drove. Not Grayson, or anyone on the Junction Bridge force, who couldn’t do anything anyway. But if this was a domestic dispute, then didn’t Liz’s hometown police force have jurisdiction? Shouldn’t they at least be made aware of the trouble brewing within their mountain walls?

“Chief Lurcquer.”

“Tim,” Liz said. “It’s Liz Daniels.” After a moment she added, “Liz Burke.”

The silence over the line went on longer than any official pause. Liz took the phone away from her ear, checking to see if the call had dropped.

Finally the chief spoke. “Liz. It’s been a while.”

She was blinking through tears again, the road blurring before her. Tim Lurcquer had never been an emotional guy—did any boys in high school have feelings?—but his voice brought her back to a different time, when she could rely on other people to take care of her, and also when there wasn’t all that much to lose.

“Is everything all right?”

“No,” Liz said. “It’s not.”

She pulled onto the sloping shoulder so that she didn’t lose control of the car.

She reentered the road after finally reaching a break in her story, the jagged place she’d come to that had made her decide to return to Wedeskyull.

Tim’s voice became brisk and businesslike. He asked if she was using a headset once the engine noise gave away the fact that she was driving. Then he said, “Nothing really seems to add up here, does it?”

“No,” Liz said. Then she actually laughed. “I would say not.”

“Cops tend to be masters of understatement.”

Liz sniffed in raggedly, laughter evaporating. “I think that cart
might’ve preceded the horse. You were understated long before you became a policeman.”

Years disappeared between them, like the implosion of a building.

“Maybe I was,” Tim said. “So your husband … what? Meets an old buddy from his hometown and …”

Tim trailed off at about the same point Liz’s conjectures had. An old friend that Liz had never heard about? And why would Paul have left with him, much less taken the children with them?

“Seems a strange thing for two guys to do.” Tim hesitated. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but could your husband be gay?”

Another of the increasingly far-fetched scenarios Liz had already come up with, although she had immediately dismissed the possibility. Of all the things Liz was doubting—whether Paul ever really loved her, what kind of world he intended to live in—the charge between them wasn’t in question. Paul was an amorous man who demanded ardor in return.

It seemed odd to hear Tim raise the possibility; he had never been the most worldly of guys. Then again, Liz supposed she wouldn’t want to be judged by her teenage self either.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Partially because if he were, I doubt he would’ve felt the need to hide it, or do something this extreme. He probably would’ve expected me to … adjust … and we’d all be acting like one big blended family by now.”

“Okay,” Tim said. “What’s the other part?”

“What?”

“You said Paul’s assumption of tolerance was partially the reason. What’s the rest?”

The road changed, swinging left into a cradle of low, huddled mountains. She was in the foothills now, and even though they made something inside her relax and give way, the words she was about to say imposed a totally different state. Liz felt suddenly chilled, and she let down the window so the air outside could warm her.

“The rest is that I went out to that farm, Tim. My father-in-law’s place. And I saw things. It’s not just business as usual there, Paul’s boyhood home. It’s—”

Sinister
was the word that leapt to her lips, though she immediately quashed it as melodramatic and overblown. She didn’t want to be that type of woman, scared of spiders and going out alone at night. But she could still feel the unnatural give of that earth beneath her feet, the cold, steely walls of the bunker.

She reached into her pocket and touched the folds of Matthew’s note.

“There are things left unsaid there,” Liz said at last. “Reasons for Paul’s long absence—and for his coming back now—that no one would tell me.”

“I see,” Tim said, and she realized how useless what she was saying would be to any kind of investigation. “But you said your …” He cleared his throat. “… family isn’t there.”

She glanced at the clock on the dash, aware of how much time Tim was spending with her. “I can only imagine they went home. That’s where I’m going to start.”

“Seems a good bet.” His agreement brought on a renewed flush of hope. Then Tim added, “I can think of one or two things to try on my end.”

“Really? Like what?” Liz asked quickly.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up. This is a strange situation, and anything I do is going to be after-hours, old friend to old friend.”

“Thank you,” Liz said. “I really appreciate that.”

“Let me take down some information. And then give me a day, maybe two.”

“Okay,” Liz said. She rooted around for words. “Just you? I mean, we—you—couldn’t get help from the FBI?”

“The feds step in if a kidnapping crosses state lines. But fortunately, there’s no suggestion that’s what you’ve got.”

Liz was silent.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Tim said, his voice gruff. “Focus on that. You’ve got some time on your hands. I think it’ll go down easier if you remember that hard as this is, your children are with someone who loves them.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A
clogging sense of dread began to build in Liz the closer she got to home. After her children, it was the worst thing Paul could rob her of: her love of Wedeskyull. But as the road wound into the mountains, they seemed for the first time to present a barrier, six million acres of hiding spaces. Tree-studded walls enclosed her car, bearing down.

Liz found it hard to stop wrenching her hands on the wheel. She bent a fingernail back past the quick, and stared at the bead of blood that welled up.

Jill had checked the house, so Liz wasn’t expecting to open the door and find Paul poring over journal articles in his study, the kids chasing each other around inside. But she still couldn’t imagine facing the emptiness there.

It wasn’t as cool in Wedeskyull as she’d been expecting. The spongy, wet heat from Junction Bridge had seeped out, infiltrating even this mountain refuge.

The turn into her drive came up suddenly, unexpected. Liz jerked the wheel, sliding across the seat. She braked to an abrupt halt, stumbling when she emerged from the car onto a half-moon of gravel in front of the porch. Her ankle bent sideways, and she had to sit down, rubbing it and trying to catch her breath.

When hotter temperatures did come to the mountains, they tended
to stay there, unable to escape. Liz felt trembly all over with the need to cool down.

All around her were shouts—ghostly, yet real. A singsong of voices wrested back out of the past.

Mom! I took an egg from under the mommy bird! It didn’t even break!

Look what’s growing near the swing, Mommy! Alyssum!

Liz stood up.

The gardens beckoned, but no way could she go out to them now. Being amongst fronds and waving tendrils might keep her from ever moving again. The very vitality of the gardens would prove how dead she was. Liz could imagine lying down beneath their cool cover, digging herself an earthen grave.

Instead she approached the tire swing, which hung motionless on its rope. The roots of the tree it was attached to were as thick as a man’s thighs.

Over there was the crater in the lawn where Ally had tried to display her own garden to Paul, before Liz had begun to take her daughter’s calling seriously, and dug a separate plot. And there was the abandoned nest, one of whose eggs Reid had indeed addled, prompting Paul to come up with the rule that Reid could never pinch anything alive.

Another possible trigger for Reid’s fear: when he found out the bird was dead in its shell.

I killed it?
he’d asked, weeping.

The sound of their creek, a constant, white-noise rush, began to register.

Reid spent so much time intricately damming that creek. He didn’t use his dexterous hands only to steal, he also built things. Suddenly Liz missed her son, with all his bumps and wounded spots, so white-hotly that she began to cry.

Eyes veiled by tears, she climbed the porch steps, ankle twanging as she unlocked the front door. It creaked, the noise jarring in the utterly still house. They never went in this way, choosing to use the mudroom instead. Liz entered the hall amidst a shaft of sunlight and spinning dust motes.

And then she broke into a run, ignoring her ankle as she took the stairs, flinging open the door to Reid’s bedroom.

If anybody was unable to keep from disrupting a house—leave behind small giveaways of his presence—it would be Reid. A trail of objects he’d pilfered, scattered amongst the usual boy-mess of toys and sports equipment and discarded clothing.

Liz peered in from the hall.

The room was just as tidy as she’d left it. The bedclothes drawn flat, toys arranged on their chest. The spines of the books stood upright in a neat row. Even the closet door was shut.

In Ally’s room, a bright cluster of VeggieTales sat on the floor, and only the gaping spot that belonged to Izzy revealed that somehow, entire worlds had changed.

Liz couldn’t stay another second in this sad and haunted home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

J
ill lived in a small house in town, which was why they’d had to base their business at Liz and Paul’s place in the valley. Liz drove in her best friend’s direction so unthinkingly and automatically that she was caught by surprise when she rolled up in front.

Jill came out on the stoop, her arms extended, before Liz had even opened the car door. She got out and stepped into her friend’s embrace.

“Coffee,” Jill said, as Liz cried against her. Then she murmured, “That was an asinine thing to say. But I can think of something a little better.” She turned and led Liz inside.

Jill poured two glasses of whiskey as if she were serving iced tea. “Drink,” she commanded, gesturing to Liz before knocking a couple of fingers back herself.

Liz obeyed. The whiskey heated her belly, and it struck her that the temperature outside wasn’t much cooler. It was as if something foreign and terrible had come to blanket the whole land. She scrubbed damp strands of hair back from her face.

“I know,” Jill said, watching her. “Awful, isn’t it? It feels like we’re in the jungle instead of the woods. I don’t own a single fan, and they were all sold out in town.”

Liz took another sip of her drink.

“Am I really talking about the weather?” Jill asked. “Have I mentioned the word
asinine
?”

“Jill,” Liz whispered. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—try so hard.”

Jill’s eyes filled. “I want to try, Lizzie,” she said. “I want to do something to make this all right.”

Their gazes met across the kitchen table. Then they both drank at the same time.

It was Jill’s turn to whisper in the hushed room. “I can’t, can I?”

Liz shook her head and Jill copied the move, though she didn’t seem aware of it.

“I can’t,” Jill repeated. “I should know better than anyone that I can’t do a goddamned thing to make anything all right.”

Liz looked away. A portable island was covered with rows of beribboned jars, Roots’ newest product line.