The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) (27 page)

“Which means,” Jeb said very quietly, “Merilee could still be down there.” He got to his feet. “We should go. We still need to stop by the village.”

They both thanked Piper and Dracon. Jeb noticed that Rachel, once again, avoided taking Piper’s hand. While they were walking back to the truck, Piper stopped him with a gentle touch on his arm, holding him back.

Startled by the sharp electrical sensation, he glanced down into her eyes. Her intensity was suddenly strange.

“You’re reading me?” he said.

Piper smiled. “I can tell she consumes you, Jeb. You don’t need to be psychic to see that.”

“Yeah, well—” He glanced at Rachel, who was already at the top of the driveway, opening the door of the truck. “She does. Always has.” He gave a soft snort. “It’s not like I met a lot of other women in the joint, you know.”

“I want you to know why Rachel was steering clear of me inside,” Piper said. “When I met her for the first time, when I tried to interview her five years ago, I shook her hand.” Piper paused. “And I saw you in my mind. It was like a brick to the head. Stark as day. I knew it was you from the photos, from the research I was doing for the docudrama. The intensity was truly overwhelming. You were the ghost that haunted Rachel.”

“Five years ago?”

Piper nodded.

Jeb’s gaze went to Rachel, now waiting in the truck. She was watching them. His chest was suddenly tight. She hadn’t let him go. Not even after his conviction. She had held him in her mind, her heart, and her spirit.

“You’re part of her fabric, Jeb. And she’s part of yours. I just wanted you to know that.”

Jeb swallowed. Unsure.

“I believe in destiny,” Piper said. “You both need to fight for this, no matter what happens. Otherwise neither of your lives will ever be right, or whole. Trust me. I know this.”

“You and Dracon, it was the same for you?”

She smiled ruefully. “I’ll tell you the story someday. When you have more time.”

He hesitated, held her eyes. “Thank you. For everything. I truly mean that. I wouldn’t be here had it not been for you.”

“Go,” she said. “Finish it off.”

Jeb turned and marched up to the truck where Rachel was waiting.

“What did she say to you?” she asked as he climbed into the drivers’ seat.

“Nothing much.”

Rachel crooked a brow. “It was that woo-woo stuff of hers, wasn’t it?”

He keyed the ignition. “Her woo-woo stuff saved my bacon. It brought Sophia to me. It gave me Quinn. It got me here, with you. I’m not gonna sneeze at Piper Smith’s ‘woo-woo.’ ” He geared the truck, drove up the steep driveway and out onto the road that wound around Pine Cone Lake.

“It doesn’t make sense, you know,” Rachel said after they’d been driving a few minutes.

“What doesn’t?”

“Adam. You think those guys could have been protecting
him
by lying in court? I mean, he was already a cop at the time, with the RCMP in Edmonton. He’d been with the Mounties three years and was just home for the Thanksgiving break. Yet I can’t see it. Not Adam.”

“Easier to believe it was me?”

She shot him a hot glare.

They drove in silence round the lake, back toward the village, to the fire hall.

Dry leaves scattered across the road, and branches swayed in the mounting wind. A sense of something about to break whispered around them, like the storm electricity in the air.

“She’s out in the sunroom,” Rubella said with a smile as she opened the condo door to Adam. “She’s having a good day. Go on through. I’ll bring some tea out.”

“I can do the tea, Rubella,” Adam told his mother’s home-care nurse. “If you want to run some errands, I’ll be here for an hour or so.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah. Of course. Go.” Adam would rather be here than breaking news to Lily that he’d been placed on mandatory leave. He found his mother in the glassed-in sunroom off the living room. She was sitting in her wicker rocker, bent like a question mark, a fleece blanket over her lap. Her blonde hair had been worked into a braid, which Rubella had tied with a small pink ribbon. It looked absurdly girlish. His mom had been a tough top cop, never girlish.

Dementia had a way of doing that, robbing people of dignity, pride, making them helpless babies again. Not cute babies that called out to be touched and cuddled, but clumsy old babies who smelled and needed diaper changes and help being fed. Adam would rather terminate his own life than end up like this.

He went through the French doors. It was pretty out here, the glassed-in alcove surrounded by clematis, the desiccated blooms still hanging like fragile ghosts on the autumn vines. Birds darted to and from a feeder hanging outside. His mother was watching them. Bird feeders were deemed bear attractants out here, but Adam didn’t have the heart to remove it. His mother loved the hummingbirds especially.

“Mom?”

She looked up. Confusion creased her brow. She was still handsome; the echoes of a beautiful, strong young woman were yet evident in the lines of her face. Sheila Copeland LeFleur was not so much old as robbed of her brain. Early onset dementia, they called it. Hereditary, they said. It had been compounded by a stroke that left one side of her face out of sync with the other. The shock of Luke’s disappearance, they said, could have precipitated things.

“Rafe,” she said, recognition suddenly lighting her eyes. “Where have you been?”

He lowered himself onto the wicker ottoman in front of her. “It’s Adam, Mom.”

The frown etched back into her brow. She started to pat her knee lightly. A nervous tick. Fear. Of not knowing things.

“I know,” he offered. “I look a lot like Dad.”

“Where is he? Rafe should be home by now. I get so worried.”

How many times could she bear the pain of being told her husband was dead, never coming back, that he’d died at age thirty-two? Almost the same age Adam was now. Each time she was told, it wounded afresh, as if she were hearing it for the first time.

“He’s out,” Adam said finally. “He’ll be back later.”

He waited until he heard the front door close behind the nurse. Then he leaned closer and said, “Mom, do you remember the Zukanov-Findlay case, the missing girls?”

Her face twisted into a range of expressions as she sent her mind scurrying down neural pathways only to find holes, missing links. Dead ends. It was like watching the face of someone whose features were being sparked by electrodes planted in the brain, and the scientist in control was randomly testing which connection activated which muscle.

The UBC Innocence Project lawyers had tried to bring his mother in to testify about the evidence log, the additional DNA found on the bloodied shirt. But she’d been deemed medically, mentally unsound. Adam had wondered at the time if she might have been trying to hide behind the illness that was progressively ravaging her brain. Or if she’d truly slipped into a forgotten place. Perhaps it was a bit of both.

He placed his hand over hers to stop the knee patting. “Mom. Sheila?”

Her eyes flickered at the use of her name.

“Do you remember, when the girls went missing, we had an argument about a small gold Saint Christopher medallion. I found the medallion in my Jeep after Luke borrowed it the night the girls vanished. I put the medallion in an envelope in my top drawer. Someone took it two days later. I thought it was Luke who’d done it. He denied it, and he and I had a huge row. You heard us. Afterward you came to me, and you told me to let things rest—do you remember that?”

She looked out the window. “When will Rafe be home?”

Frustration tightened in Adam. He blew out a long, controlled breath. There was no harm now in just shooting it from the hip. The longer he left this, the more she would forget. “Mom, that medallion, it was like the one Merilee was wearing when she went missing from the gravel pit.”

“It’s late. Rafe should be here by now.”

“The bloodied hoodie with the empty Rohypnol pack in the pocket, your officers didn’t find it in Jebbediah Cullen’s car, did they? It was Luke’s shirt, wasn’t it? It came from our house. You put it directly into evidence and logged it as having come from Cullen’s vehicle, didn’t you?”

A distant, soft smile crossed her face, and her eyes turned misty. “Adam is such a good boy, Rafe. He’s following in your footsteps. He’s a Mountie, like you are. He’s going to make a great cop someday. Luk
e . . .
” She shook her head sadly. “He’s not strong-minded like our Adam. Sometimes Luke gets in with a bad crowd, that’s all. He has no malice, though. It won’t happen again. He’s going straight into the army, where he can stay focused.” She clasped Adam’s hand tightly and leaned suddenly forward.

“You see, Rafe, I can’t allow Luke to ruin Adam’s career, his life, before it’s even started. It was Adam’s Jeep, you see, that Luke borrowed that night. It was that girl’s blood on Luke’s shirt; that’s what the lab showed in the end.”

Adam’s heart stuttered. Sweat slicked down the groove of his spine. “Mom—
Sheila
—”

“Yes, Rafe,” she said with another girlish smile.

“You’re saying the male DNA found on the hoodie would match Luke’s profile?”

Her face crumpled. She withdrew her hand, started tapping her knee again, fast.

Adam sat back, dragged his hands through his hair. His shirt was soaked under his armpits, his mouth dust dry.

“It’s so tough being a single mother of two sons, Rafe.
I . . .
I have to protect my boys. Once Luke is in the army, it’s going to be okay. And Adam will have a clear record. I can’t have this thing touching him. I told him so, Rafe, to let it be. Because he has to make a choice. Either he goes after his own brother and mother. Or he keeps quiet. And what evidence is he going to go after his own brother with? Those boys already made a pact. Adam’s got nothing concrete on them. It’s better this way.” Her eyes went distant. “Jebbediah’s an evil boy,” she whispered. “He killed his own father. It was right. I did what a mother had to do.”

Nausea pushed up into Adam’s throat. He had to stand abruptly to prevent himself from throwing up.

“What happened to the medallion?” he said coldly.

She rubbed her temple, moistened her lips, then a flicker of brightness sparked through her eyes. “Yes,” she said. Then her face collapsed again in a wash of sadness and lost memories as she disappeared into herself once more, somewhere in the past.

Adam went to the windows, watched the birds pecking through the dead leaves. Sometimes, when parents didn’t find what they were looking for in their child, they planted seeds for what they’d like to grow there instead. They tried to create in their children the lives they themselves missed. His mother had been trying to turn him into his father.

Rachel’s words washed into his mind.
Why did you become a cop, sir? Did you once believe in the law, in justice?

“Rafe?”

He jumped, spun round.

“Is that you? Where have you been?”

“Rafe is gone, Mom. It’s me, Adam. Your son.”

“Adam?” An odd expression twisted her features. “Bring me that box from my bedroom, won’t you? The one with the seashells on the top. My windup jewelry box. It’s on my dresser.”

“What’s in the box?”

“Please, Rafe, just bring it.”

Adam went to the room, found the box, and came back. He handed it to his mother.

She opened it slowly and a little ballerina popped up from her spring on her pedestal. Music tinkled and the ballerina started to spiral in front the mirror inside. The interior of the box was lined with velvety red cloth, and it was filled with silver and gold jewelry and other trinkets. His mother suddenly seemed like a little girl again as she sifted through the contents. She removed a small, flat gold medallion from among the contents. It had a filigree edge, like golden lace. She offered it to Adam, hand shaking slightly.

His heart stopped as a blade of recognition sliced through him. He met her eyes. She was looking at him, into him.

It was Merilee Zukanov’s pendant.

A Saint Christopher traditionally worn by travelers to keep them safe. It had not kept Merilee Zukanov safe at all.

Slowly Adam reached out, took it from her. It lay flat on his palm.

“You took it?” he whispered. “From my drawer.”

Silence.

All these years he’d thought Luke had taken it. He thought Luke had erased the GPS route in his Jeep. All these years he’d hoped it had been a coincidence that the hoodie found bloodied in Jeb Cullen’s car had matched the hoodie that Luke had arrived home in during the early hours of that fateful day.

Tears filled his mother’s pale-blue eyes.

Adam stared at her.

“Are you going to make tea, Rafe? I’d love some tea with one of those ginger snaps.”

Adam went into the bathroom, pocketed the medallion, and threw up. He ran the tap water until it was ice-cold, and he rinsed his face, stopping as he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. For a split second he saw his father. Likeness lies in wait, he thought. And now that he was the same age his father was when he was killed, he could see the man in his own face.

He remembered the night they’d received the news of his dad’s death, the look on his mother’s face. He’d been eight years old. Luke had been only five. Almost the same ages that his and Lily’s boys—Tyler and Mikey—were now.