The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) (10 page)

I think back to the night at the gravel pit. Trey was with me the whole time. He wasn’t one of the four guys who allegedly perjured themselves about Jeb going north. He saw only what I saw—Merilee and Amy in Jeb’s car, leaving the pit. He told the court the same things I did. I want—I
need
—to trust Trey.

“Whatever happens, Trey, please, you can never tell anyone who her biological father is. Even if Jeb is back, even if the shit hits the fan, Quinn cannot be a part of it. I can’t let her get hurt. I owe it to her. I owe it to my sister’s memory. You can’t let an innocent child get screwed up for life because of what might happen now. Do you understand?”

“Of course I understand.
I . . .
I never wanted it to go wrong between us, you know.” He pauses. “I tried. I really tried to make it work.”

I suck in a deep breath, and I can’t answer, because I know it’s true.

“I’m going away with Quinn,” I say. “For the Thanksgiving break. I’m leaving tomorrow if I can get a flight. I jus
t . . .
I wanted to hear that you hadn’t—wouldn’t—tell anyone, that we weren’t going to come back to some hurtful revelation from schoolkids. Or worse.”

“Look, I’m sorry about the incident with Missy today. God, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. And if that was Jeb watching Quin
n . . .
it’s good you’re leaving for a while. And, Rachel.” He pauses. “If he does come anywhere near you, call 9-1-1. We’ve got your back. All of us.”

All of us.

Jeb’s words circle through my mind.

Sometimes in a small town like this, a community knows that a contract to forget can be as powerful as a promise to remember. Sometimes the secrets are lying right there, in plain sight, but everyone chooses to turn away from them, pretend it never happened, because then they won’t have to question their own lives, their own children, their own husbands and brother
s . . .

“Thanks.” I hang up. Nausea is slick and cold in my stomach. Jeb has succeeded. He’s sown doubt in my mind. He’s started rattling my cage.

Annie Pirello sat alone in her squad car, parked in deep shadow across the street from the Salonen house. Deputy Chief Constable LeFleur had assigned her to watch the house. LeFleur believed the man who’d come onto school property and followed Salonen’s niece today was a violent sexual offender who’d been recently released from prison. A man who once used to date Salonen. LeFleur believed the man might try to approach Salonen or her niece again.

It looked as though the deputy chief was right; a man in leather, on a bike, had arrived at the Salonen house shortly after ten p.m.

Annie had called it in, but she’d been told to hold her position, just watch, wait for a possible 9-1-1 dispatch. But no emergency call had come. She’d gotten out of the car and crept closer. Through the trees she’d glimpsed Salonen and the dark-haired man talking, arguing. Touching. Talking some more.

There was unfinished business between those two. Something very intimate. He’d brought news that appeared to have shocked Salonen badly.

When he left, heading north on his bike, Annie had called it in again, but she’d been ordered not to follow. No laws had been broken. They had nothing on him. Yet.

The lights upstairs in the Salonen house went out around midnight; she could just glimpse the upstairs windows through the trees from the road. Annie reached forward, fired the ignition. Her headlights came on.

She drove back to the station to clock out for the end of her shift.

CHAPTER 9

As Jeb pulled onto the old property, ectoplasmic fingers of soft, green northern light reached across the sky, grasping, withdrawing, curling, taunting, in a silent music of the cosmos. In the trees it was dark, deserted, the cabins hulking shadows along the silvery river.

Jeb parked his bike in a grove near his mother’s old log house. He removed his helmet and sucked the chill air down deep into his lungs. He could scent loam, pine resin, forest detritus, things you didn’t smell behind concrete walls and barbed wire. This was now his land, left to him by his mother when she had died six years ago, five acres among towering cedars along the Wolf River. The homestead was isolated, surrounded by nothing but wilderness for miles. Endless forest and rivers and soaring mountains and plunging valleys stretched west—all the way to the Tilqua Ice Cap and beyond. To the east lay Snowy Creek. Ski town. Tourists. This was a place in the middle. Like Jeb himself, never belonging fully to the reserve over in the next valley, nor in the ski resort.

He’d been happiest, and saddest, here.

The house was set back near the logging road for ease of access. Farther down toward the river stood an old barn where they’d kept chickens. In summer he and his mother had planted a vegetable garden near the barn, fenced off from deer. Bears had been a problem, the occasional grizzly coming down from the high alpine and breaking into the chicken coop. Sometimes a cougar or coyotes would also try. Along the river were eight small cabins that Jeb had helped build for the river-rafting business his mother had started before he was incarcerated. Jeb had helped guide the first trips.

He got off his bike and dug a flashlight out of his pannier. Slowly he walked over to the old house, thoughts turning to his mother and the dreams she’d had for this place, for him.

One of his most profound regrets—and he had many—was that she’d died not knowing it was all a lie. She’d died thinking her son was a rapist and murderer.

Jeb ran his beam over the walls of the house. Shadows leered and shivered, then darted back into the safety of blackness as he moved. Clapboard had been ripped from windows, the glass long gone. The front door listed on its hinges. Water stains ran like dark tears beneath the vacant window holes. A sad, crying house.

Graffiti tags had been sprayed over the sides, aggressive angular strokes that jumped and sparred with shadows as he moved his flashlight. A failed enterprise, lying rotting in the bush—that was what his old homestead looked like. A sense of violation, grief, overwhelmed him, and remorse tasted bitter on his tongue.

Jeb clumped up the front stairs and traversed the collapsing porch, his boots heavy on old wood. He creaked open the listing door. Shadows leaped and shimmered inside. The dank smell of mold filled his nostrils. He panned his light across the floor, cobwebs lifting softly in the wake of his movements. Old newspapers, magazines, beer cans littered the floor. A circle of charred wood and ash scarred the center of what had been their living room; someone had built a fire on top of the carpet and hacked a hole into the roof for a chimney. An old mattress huddled in a far corner.

The taste in his mouth turned foul, and the rage he’d worked so hard in prison to control started to fester again, itching, scraping, clawing at him to get out, to wash over him with its familiar hot burn. Jeb closed his eyes and controlled his breathing. He drew Quinn, and Rachel, to mind. Anger could have no more place in his life. Not if he wanted to win them back. Breathing steadily again, he slowly entered the room. Small claws skittered over wood, a critter disappearing behind the mattress.

As Jeb entered the kitchen, a fetid smell slammed into him. He gagged, putting his sleeve over his mouth as he panned his beam over the kitchen floor. Dead raccoon. Used condoms. Spirit bottles. Broken bong pipe. He could almost hear the mocking laughter of teens. Heavy breathing. Humping. Images filled his mind, flickering like flames in the bonfire at the old gravel pit. The sex. The nightmare that had started that night. Nausea washed through his belly.

He stepped back outside and breathed clean air in deep. But his heart was hammering. He was fighting the rage that was trying to calcify around his heart. He would not be forced away by this. He would not be run out of town. He had a right to be here, to rebuild his home.

He wanted to think forward. Of Quinn. Freedom. Not this.

Not the way his mother had died here, believing in his guilt, shamed by the community on the fringes of which she’d lived all her life.

He couldn’t change that past. That tragedy. But he had a future to fight for. And he had to fight smart.

He moved down to the row of cabins along the water where rafting guests and fishers used to stay. More graffiti. More vandalism. The river chuckled and whispered. He turned his back on the buildings and stared out over the water.

The northern lights reflected eerily over the dark, swirling surface, catching ripples and eddies, the odd little splash. On the opposite bank black spruce speared into the ghostly green sky.

A sense of peace finally washed through him again as he listened to the water. No matter the desecration, this was where he belonged, this land, this valley, and these mountains. This forest where he never felt lost or alone. And down here by the water he could sense the spirit of his mother. Not in the defiled, derelict buildings decomposing into the forest.

Jeb could almost see her face in the patterns of light on the river—the flare of her high cheekbones, her almond-shaped eyes, her coppery-brown skin. Grace and strength. Beauty and wisdom. A passionate love of her heritage.

Things that Jeb’s father had whittled down.

Jeb’s first memories were of the Wolf River and salmon. His mother hanging orange-pink strips of flayed flesh over wooden racks to dry in the brief warm winds of a Pacific Northwest summer, her dark hair hanging in a fat braid down the center of her strong back, swatting at clouds of mosquitoes, her wolf dog watching, waiting for her to toss him a scrap.

Another memory washed through his mind, his father returning at the helm of the
Jolly Roger
, his dancing eyes the color of wild irises, his cheeks ruddy and wind-burned as he dragged in his wake a flotilla of shrieking and wheeling gulls. The briny smells of the harbor where they’d traveled down to meet him. The excitement, the industry along the docks. The noise of his boyhood when the boats came in. The worry in his mother’s eyes as they had met those boats.

Then would come the autumn hunts, just him and his dad weighed down with packs, trekking out from the trailhead into the endless wilderness in search of caribou. Moose. Whitetail deer. The crack of gunfire in a misty dawn. Blood, warm, slippery and viscous on his hands, steam rising from hot entrails as he learned to gut and to sever limbs, field dress and pack out his kill before the conservation officers got to them—because his father had never played by the book.

Those autumn kills had meant survival through the winter when blankets of snow lay quiet and heavy, before the salmon teemed up the coast again and his father could take the
Jolly Roger
back out into the ocean.

And when winter grew deep and dark, his father would start to drink again. The low Pacific Northwest clouds and the long, dark days would sink his Irish-Canadian father into a deep depression. He’d self-medicate. It would make his moods worse, and the violence would start, a cycle as predictable as the run of the salmon. The flight of the Canada geese. The return of the hummingbirds. The coming of the snows.

After his dad’s death, as Jeb grew older, he’d helped his mother start the river-running business. In the fall he’d pick mushrooms; he made a small fortune in chanterelles each season. He’d do some trapping during winters, between school. And later he started guiding fly fishers to the best trout streams, secret places only he knew. Places he’d taken Rachel.

Yet another memory washed through him—his arms wrapped around Rachel as he showed her how to hold the light bamboo rod, how to cast the fly so that it flicked lightly on the surface of the water just at the edge of a deep, shadowed pool. She laughed, and he saw wonder in her big brown eyes as she cradled her first rainbow in her hand, keeping it underwater as she unhooked it and gently freed it from the cup of her hands.

She’d had tears in her eyes when she’d let it go. She’d told Jeb it was like holding, controlling, the pulse of life itself in her palms. It was a connection he’d given her and it warmed his heart.

He inhaled deeply, drawing his mind back to the present as he made his way back to his bike and untied his bedroll. His plan was to sleep for a few hours, recharge. He’d do some work around here in the morning, then tomorrow afternoon was the interview he’d arranged. He brought his gear down to the river’s edge and unrolled his mat under the gentle, nurturing boughs of a hemlock.

Jeb climbed into his down sleeping bag, and lay on his back, one arm hooked beneath his head as he listened to the water and watched the ghostly play of aurora across the sky. As he lay there, he wondered if he could ever win Rachel back. Was it even possible?

The idea had lodged like a barbed hook, muddying his purity of focus. He’d have to be careful. His desire to see his daughter, his impulse to follow his heart, had already cost him today.

He closed his eyes, drifting into a light sleep.

Jeb jerked awake.

He lay dead still, trying to discern what it was that had disturbed the rhythm of his sleep. Was it that the aurora had stopped playing across the sky? That the pattern of the river had changed? The wind had increased, a steady rushing sound like an ocean on a distant shore. A sharp westerly.

But there was something else. A cold sensation of malintent snaking through the trees, fingering toward him—he couldn’t explain it. Yet the sixth sense of a hunter told him something bad was out there, coming.

Cautiously he extricated himself from his sleeping bag and moved into a crouch on the dry bed of needles, listening intently as he peered with naked eyes into the blackness. The moon had sunk behind the peaks and the stars had moved across the sky. It was much darker than when he’d arrived. Jeb waited for the soft crunch of dead leaves that would signal a big cat’s careful approach, or the familiar cracking and breaking of brush that foretold the presence of a large ursine beast. He inhaled gently, mouth slightly open, testing the wind. He used to be able to almost taste the fetid scent of a bear or the horsiness of a moose.

That was when he heard it. Engines approaching. Very distant, layered under the swish and rush of wind through forest. The engines grew louder. More than one vehicle coming. Tension whipped through him.

There was no other development along this road. Only this place. Beyond it was mountain, then another valley, which was Indian land.

Could it be kids returning for another night of drunken vandalism?

From his blind under the heavy hemlock boughs, Jeb watched as headlights swung into the property. A truck and an SUV came bumping down the rutted track, stopping near the log house.

The truck was dark blue, maybe even black. Four doors, long box. He could make out a
D
on the plate, but nothing more. The SUV was pale. Silver? Hard to tell in darkness.

Doors opened and three men got out. The interior lights lit them up briefly, showing black clothing, dark ski masks pulled low and tight over their heads. They left engines running and headlights on bright. Moving like ninja silhouettes across the glare of the headlights, they made for the house. One carried a flashlight and a tire iron. The other two lugged gasoline cans. Every muscle in his body went wire-tight.

With fast and choreographed intent, they glugged gasoline around the house, splashing it across the porch, the steps.

Jeb drew back into the shadows, rage mushrooming inside him—they hadn’t even checked if anyone was inside.

One of the men threw a match. The whoosh and crackle was instant. Flames, orange against black, licked quickly up the walls and ate into the old rafters, bright sparks and burning chunks shooting up into the night.

Two of the men lit the ends of sticks. Carrying their fiery torches, they ran down to the old wooden cabins on the river, lighting one after the other. Fire rushed and roared, flame light dancing like molten copper over the river surface as the fruits of Jeb’s mother’s hard labor burned.

He was unprepared for the power of pure hatred that burned through his blood. Those men
knew
he was back. They’d come to send a message with gasoline and a tire iron. Or worse. And with the drought, they risked burning the whole goddamn forest.

He’d expected the establishment to turn on him. Vilify him. Try to run him out of town. But not so soon, not being preempted like this. Was this what his mistake today had cost? Had Rachel betrayed him?

He fought the urge to break cover, go after them, smash them down, rip the masks from their faces. But he was unarmed. Outnumbered. And he refused to do it this way, to be tempted back into violence by faceless cowards who crept in under the shadow of darkness and masks.