The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) (13 page)

“Oh, Jesus,” she whispered as she caught sight of the red welts, the bruising developing. “Can you lie down?”

She helped him onto his back. When he caught her eyes again, he saw they were dark with worry. Rachel placed her hands gently on his ribs, palpated. He watched her face, the seriousness in her features. This cabin was cold without his shirt. Wind whistling and flagpole chinking outside. Water slapping against the dock. He shivered.

“I’ll get the fire going and get some warmth into here in a sec,” she said, speaking faster.

“Do you remember when we used to sneak in here, Rach?” he whispered.

She cleared her throat. “You might have some broken ribs.” She sat back. “I need to get you to the clinic. You should get proper stitches on that gash, X-rays, and your ribs taped up.”

“You do it. Tape me up.”

“Jeb—”

“Do it,” he said quietly. “Please.”

“I have basic wilderness first aid. You should get X-rays—”

“I’ve dealt with worse in prison. I’m going to be okay.”

“They beat you, in prison?”

He said nothing.

She looked sick. Abruptly she started unrolling a piece of medical tape. “How did this happen?” Her outrage was sharp, sudden.

“I went home, saw the place had been trashed, so I set up my bedroll down by the water, under a hemlock, thinking I’d start clearing things out in the morning. I was sleeping down by the river when they came.”

“
Who
came?”

“I don’t know. There were three of them in two vehicles; one truck, dark blue or black, long box. And a light-colored SUV. Maybe silver.”

“Can you lift your arm up, extend it over your head?”

He did. She felt along his rib cage. He closed his eyes, wincing as she pinpointed the pain.

“There?”

He nodded.

She ripped off a piece of tape, peeled off part of the backing, and began to stick it in a vertical line alongside the point of pain. “Did you catch the vehicle plates?”

“No.” He winced again as she plastered the strip of tape down the side of his torso. “Just the letter
D
on the truck plate.”

“And you’re sure they were men, not kids out for some kind of joyride?”

He snorted. “Damn sure.”

She peeled the backing off another strip of tape, laying this piece down parallel to the first, on either side of the key area of pain.

“They were dressed completely in black with ski masks. This was premeditated—they came expressly to trash the place, and they came for me. Somehow, they already knew I was back.”

Her hands stilled for a moment as she noticed something. “That’s a nasty scar,” she said quietly, nodding toward the puckered line just above his left nipple.

“It’s old history.”

She held his eyes.

“Prison. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Rachel’s mouth tightened as she peeled the backing from a third strip of tape, which she stuck across the other strips, stretching it tightly around half his torso.

“I saw the gasoline cans,” she said.

“Do those vehicles sound familiar to you?”

She looked away, breathed in deep. “They’re standard ski resort issue. A dime a dozen.” She got up, went to the freestanding wardrobe, an antique piece of furniture her father had bought over a decade ago in Oregon. She opened the door, took out a T-shirt and a flannel lumberjack shirt. She brought them to him and helped him ease first into the T-shirt, then the soft flannel.

“My dad’s,” she said wryly. “I never could get rid of his gear down here. Or the stuff in his office. They’ll fit.” Her fingers touched his neck as she eased his arm into the fleece shirt, and she stilled near his tattoo. Her eyes glistened. “I’m so sorry, Jeb.”

He met her gaze. But she lurched suddenly to her feet, took several paces away. She dragged her hands over her hair. “I knew they’d be out to get you, Jeb, but I can’t believe someone would do
this
—risk a massive wildfire, endangering a whole community on the other side of the valley.”

He said nothing.

She swore softly. “We should go to the police.”

“The police—you serious?”

She stared at him, realization dawning in her eyes.

“You told me Adam believed I was back,” he said.

“Oh, Jesus, you don’t think Ada
m . . .
he’s—”

“He
is
the police, Rachel. It was his brother who claimed I turned north when I know for a fact I turned south and went home that night. His mother was chief constable at the time of the investigation. It was her team of investigators that took me down. Luke’s gone now, but it still leaves Adam with something to hide.”

She paled as the gravity of his words sank in. “So you think it was one of those three guys, or even Adam, tonight?”

“They lied for a reason. They framed me to protect themselves, or someone else.”

“What about vigilantes, Jeb? There are so many people here who hate you with such violent passion. They blame you for Merilee’s mother dying of a broken heart. They say it was you who ultimately caused Amy’s suicide. What if it was enraged townsfolk? What about Merilee’s father? Or her brothers? If they know you’re here—”

“But would they
all
know so quickly?”

Rachel stared at him, a flicker of guilt in her eyes. “You think this is because I went to Adam.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She stomped over to the stove and dropped to a crouch. She yanked open the stove door and started balling up newspaper, which was stacked in a copper pot on the side. She rammed the balls into the stove, then cracked pieces of kindling over her knee. She laid the kindling over the paper. She lit the fire, watched while it caught, added some logs, then closed and latched the stove door. Orange fire flickered warm and comforting behind the glass window. She went over to the boathouse door and wedged a rolled-up towel into the gap between the door and the flooring.

“It’ll warm up soon,” she said, dusting her hands on her jeans. “You want to lie there, or sit here on the sofa where it’ll be warmer?”

He got to his feet, wincing as he moved, and he slowly lowered himself onto the sofa by the fire.

The warmth from the stove was almost instant, the atmosphere cozy. Outside, the wind howl seemed a little more distant. Trixie came over to snuffle his hand before going to curl back in front of the flames.

Rachel went to the fridge, got out two bottles of water. She handed one to him. “You want anything to eat?”

He shook his head, opened the bottle, drank deeply.

“You still don’t drink alcohol?” she said.

“No. You?”

She lowered herself into a chair to his side, and he could tell she was thinking back to the gravel pit. “Sometimes.”

“Like earlier tonight?”

She met his gaze. “Yeah. Like earlier tonight. Like when I heard from Quinn that a dark-haired man with a fish tattoo down the side of his neck followed her at school.”

“You were scared.”

“Damn right, I was.” She leaned forward, arms resting on her knees. “For almost a decade I’ve been led to believe you did this thing. It all pointed to you and no one else. When Quinn described you, of course I was afraid.”

“And now?”

She watched him in silence, warring with something inside herself. As wan and exhausted and soot-streaked as she was, she’d never looked more beautiful to him, bathed as she was in the coppery glow of flame light.

“You were attacked,” she said quietly. “Left for dead, your place torched. That much looks to be fact. This forces me to ask why. It plants doubt in my mind about those guys who testified about you driving north. And it makes me wonder how news of your return could have traveled so fast. The only way that could happen is if those guys called each other. That forces me to wonder about Adam.” She inhaled deeply.

“You’re asking me to believe that upstanding members of this community, my friends, could have been responsible for a brutal sexual assault and murder. That these fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, have been harboring a heinous secret for all these years and now they want to stop you from exposing them? How do you think that makes me feel, Jeb? It makes me fee
l . . .
” Her voice caught, and her eyes glittered in the firelight.

“If it’s the truth, it makes me responsible, too. It makes me feel that I should have believed in you, stood up for, fought for you. That I should have trusted my heart and my instincts all those years ago.” She paused, struggling. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am so sorry that we fought that night. That I said things I didn’t mean. I’m sorry about being with Trey.”

“You slept with him, didn’t you? You lost your virginity that night?”

Pain, remorse, twisted over her face, and it tugged at his heart.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “You were eighteen. We were all young. We made mistakes.”

“How can you be so goddamn generous, Jeb!” she snapped. “
We
locked you away.
We
stole years of your life.”

“You know what matters now? That you believe me.”

She surged to her feet, went to the window, stared out at the lake, arms folded tightly over her chest. “I don’t know that I do,” she said. “Everything you’ve told me makes sense, but so did everything they said back then.” She was silent for a long while, just the crackle of flames and wind outside, the slap of water against the dock. The distant thudding of helicopters fighting the wildfire.

“My grandfather used to talk about the banality of evil,” she said, staring out the window. “It was a phrase first used by a woman named Hannah Arendt, a German-American political theorist. She used it in her 1960s thesis, where she postulated that all great evils in history, the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premise of their government or state. She argued that they participated in evil things with the view that their actions were normal.” She paused, then turned to face him.

“I believed in the authorities back then—the cops, the lawyers, the parents, elders in this community. I trusted them. And in so doing I accepted their premise that you were guilty. I went along with them. And it makes me sick to the stomach that I—we—might have been so wrong.” She came over to him, seating herself on the coffee table in front of him. So close he could touch.

“You’re right about one thing,” she said quietly. “We do want the same things. I want to keep Quinn safe. And now I also want the truth. I want proof. However it comes. Someone tried to kill you tonight. Someone is responsible for arson. And I want to know who and why. But I’m not going to fall into the same trap this time. I’m not believing
anything
until I can prove it to my own satisfaction.” Her gaze lasered into his. “I’m going to help you, Jeb. But I’m going to do it for me. For Quinn. For Sophia and Peter. For the Zukanov family.”

“No,” he said. “You’re going to stand back. I don’t want you involved.”

She gave a snort. “I
am
involved. Look at me now, here, with you.” She took a drink from her water bottle. “You said you’ve already set up an interview with Cass Rousseau?”

“Yesterday.”

She moistened her lips, screwed the cap back on the bottle. “Cass never mentioned it. What time? Where?”

“Shady Lady Saloon. Happy hour. When everyone’s coming down from the bike park, thirsty. In full view of tourists, locals. I plan to tell her why I’m back. And I’ll name those four men to start. Shine a media spotlight on them.”

“It could be libelous if we run something like that.”

“Not if it’s handled right. It’s a fact that those four testified. Clint, Levi, Zink, and Luke. It’s public record what they said. It’s a fact my conviction has been overturned, that the judge felt I didn’t get a fair trial. It’s a fact I didn’t drive north—because I know I didn’t. Which means those who said I did lied. I’m going to say that. I’m going to make it known that someone in this town is covering up the truth, keeping Merilee’s family from closure. If there’s an innocent one or two among them, they might weaken under the public scrutiny, turn on each other to save themselves. That’s my goal—rattle their cages until something shakes loose.”

“I have veto power, you know.”

He regarded her. “And people would then wonder why you, too, want to silence me. You who also testified against me, who told the court something I’d confided to no one in my life but you.”

Her eyes flashed. Her pulse pounded in the pale column of her neck. “Jeb, I—”

He raised his hand. “I get it. Banality of evil and all. You believed them. You felt obligated to tell them what I’d done, that I had a history of violence, that my mother covered it up.”

“They pushed me.”

Silence, the past, hung heavy and solid between them.

She blew out a heavy breath and pushed a lock of hair off her brow, exposing the small plaster above her eyebrow.

“How’d you get that cut?” he said, nodding toward the small Band-Aid.

She hesitated. “Quinn hit me.”

“Why?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Rachel—”

“I said it’s nothing.”

Tension crackled between them; his urge to know more about his child was fierce. That she was having trouble with Quinn was important to him. He cared. But he could see that now was not the time to push. He had to pick his battles. And his first mission was to go after those guys who had lied in court.

“Tell me about them,” he said slowly. “Those four. I read in the papers that Luke was killed in the Congo. Anything new there?”

She shook her head. “He was on a demining mission when the area was attacked by rebels. There were no survivors. Both Adam and his mom took it hard. His mom quit the SCPD not long after. She’s now suffering from a form of dementia. Adam meanwhile quit the Mounties and moved back here with his family to take the second-in-command position when it came available.”

“Who does Adam answer to?”

“Chief Constable Rob Mackin. He’s a straight shooter, I think. I like him.”

“And Mackin in turn answers to the police board.”

She heaved out a frustrated breath. “Okay, I see where you’re going with this. Yeah, civilian police board. And on the board, along with the mayor, is Hal Banrock, Levi’s father.”